How many of your friends avoid porn entirely due to their religious beliefs? Many of mine do, but I suspect you have different sorts of friends than I do.
I don't think the concept is invalid, just that you're applying it at too detailed a level, and confusing "more likely to" with "will". Perhaps someone you're friends with is 2% more likely than average to have an interest in something you like. To a human looking at the data without applying any mathematical analysis, such a weak indicator would be completely invisible. And, actually, such a weak indicator is probably useless for any kind of predictions... but it may become very useful when combined with several other weak indicators.
They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want.
Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported. I suppose the companies you're theorizing could use untargeted ads, but that's going to lead us back to what we had in the late 90s -- massive blinking banners everywhere, and lots of them, because that's what had to be done to make them sufficiently effective. I would much rather have discreet, carefully-targeted ads that may actually be interesting enough to make me want to look at them. Or maybe there's some other business model, but I don't know what it might be.
Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.
Open source hasn't taught us that at all. It has showed that Internet-enabled collaboration can do startlingly good things with spare-time efforts from people who do something else for a living, but "startlingly-good" only by comparison with what we used to expect of hobby projects. Open source efforts become really successful when people are paid full-time to work on them. But even ignoring that, no matter how good the software is, hardware of the scale needed to provide the kind of high-quality services we're accustomed to isn't free, and won't be. The public estimates I've seen say that Google has at least one million CPU cores, because that's what it takes to operate Google web search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Calendar, Drive, etc. In a video I saw the other day, one of the guys in Maps said that Google now has over 20 petabytes of map imagery, between satellite, aerial and ground-level data. This analysis puts YouTube storage growing at 76 petabytes per year, but that obviously understates the number because it ignores the redundancy needed to make sure stuff doesn't disappear when drives die.
No matter how altruistic you are, you don't buy, deploy and operate that much storage without some revenue source. You can't. Then there are servers, and bandwidth, and buildings to put them in, and people to deploy them, fix them, manage them, replace them, etc., etc., etc. It takes a lot of money to be able to do all of that.
And, actually, as a Google employee I'll tell you that the attitude within Google, from the CEO on down, is that helping to "advance the human race" is the goal. Ads and the other revenue sources are just what you have to do in order to have the resources, including not only all of that hardware and bandwidth but also tens of thousands of highly-capable engineers, needed to be able to advance the human race. If there were a way to accomplish the real goals without advertising, Google would do it -- in fact Larry and Sergey tried really hard to find any other approach early on, or so I read (I've only been working for Google for 18 months, and have never spoken with either of them). Maybe Google Fiber will be wildly successful and profitable and Google can shift from advertising to being the world's ISP, or maybe Google will become a huge device manufacturer, making phones, tables, glasses and computers, or maybe the self-driving cars will be hugely profitable, but I suspect that none of those will be able to fund the level of free services and progress that advertising does.
As Talderas pointed out, had he gone to a congressman he never would have been branded a traitor at all, and the congressman would have been able to present himself as the heroic voice of integrity, providing evidence of criminal malfeasance that Congress needs to investigate.
The IG would be a good option, yes, and I agree that taking it entirely out of the chain of command -- and out of the country! -- is not the approach an honest whistleblower would take.
Giving it to a congressman, for example, would have been an appropriate choice, assuming the private in question didn't believe running it up the chain of command would work.
You always run it up the chain of command. ALWAYS. And you document every letter you send.
Maybe. I can see a soldier not having the confidence that he and his letters won't just get buried as well. It depends on the circumstances.
However, I think his decision to give it to Wikileaks rather than to take it to some element of the government who would play a watchdog role (e.g. a congressman opposed to the war) does cast doubt on the purity of his intentions -- or at least on his judgment.
Considering the federal government's recent track record, I would counter that trusting any Congressperson to come forward and make the info public would be the real folly of judgement.
Bah. Just find one who wants to make a name for himself.
Having worked as a civilian employee of the US military right after graduating college I can assure everyone that there is no way Manning could have failed to realize his actions were at best illegal and at worse treasonous.
Having been a member of the US armed forces (SSgt USAFRES) I can assure everyone that Manning may well have believed that he had a duty to disclose information he thought the military was illegally concealing from the public, and there are circumstances in which he'd have been absolutely right. Every member of the armed forces is taught that they have a duty to disobey illegal orders. However, I think his decision to give it to Wikileaks rather than to take it to some element of the government who would play a watchdog role (e.g. a congressman opposed to the war) does cast doubt on the purity of his intentions -- or at least on his judgment.
It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
That depends on the information.
It is the duty of every member of the US military, regardless of rank, to disobey illegal orders. I think a strong argument can be made that any order to conceal, for example, evidence of war crimes, would be illegal.
Granted that in such cases giving the data to Wikileaks wouldn't have been the right response. Giving it to a congressman, for example, would have been an appropriate choice, assuming the private in question didn't believe running it up the chain of command would work.
Google got nothing in return for the data. No ads, no ad revenue, no fresh data, nothing, zilch.
You believe that???
Do you believe Google did get something? What? I suppose they could have deduced roughly where lots of iOS users were located based on which map tiles were requested from Google's servers, but I can't think of anything else Google could have gotten from Apple's app. Tile-level location data doesn't seem particularly useful. The app didn't show ads, so no ad revenue. So what is it that you believe Google got?
And... after reading all of that, I find myself with my question fundamentally unanswered:-)
It seems that the benefit of being a member of the Foundation is the opportunity to be known as a member of the Foundation, and to hobnob with other members.
AFAICT, Linux developers don't follow any agenda but their own -- each individual does whatever he or she wants (or is told to do by his or her employer), Linus' lieutenants accept any patches that seem both safe and useful, and Linus integrates whatever he gets from his lieutenants that seems safe and useful.
And none of them appear to pay any attention to anything the "Linux Foundation" says. So what does joining this body give HP, other than an opportunity to make some press releases?
Private Schools: Again, works if you can afford it, but they are more expensive.
Not necessarily. My son went to a private school for several years, at a cost of $3000 per year. That price included not only tuition, but books, field trips, hot breakfast, hot lunch, snacks, and up to three hours of "latch-key time" -- time the kids could stay after school, supervised, each day so that their parents could pick them up after work rather than the kids having to be home alone. The only thing it didn't include was transportation; parents had to get the kids to and from school every day.
Educationally, the place was fantastic. Maximum class size for K-4 was 12. Grades 5 and 6 were combined, with a class size of about 30, but with three teachers so student/teacher ratio was 1:10. The students at the school averaged 90%+ on the standardized tests, without "teaching to the test" at all. It's all about the quality of the teachers and administrators, and at this school they were uniformly excellent.
Because the sales tax on S&H for a $9.99 dvd is morally and ethically the same as pre-tax profits of $36.8 billion
Sure it is. What's the difference? One number is much bigger than the other, but the difference in tax amounts is similarly different... and the *aggregate* of all the S&H fees on all the DVDs is probably not so much different in scale than the Apple number. So, what's the difference?
Right now, if I leave my phone at the beach or it drops from my pocket while getting out of the car, whoever finds it has nothing more than a couple of bucks worth of credit
What if you leave your wallet at the beach, or it drops from your pocket?
For that to work you would need to ensure ALL company benefits are taxed. Imagine the beaucrazy necessary to put a value on every single thing your company provides for you directly or indirectly. Do I sense you wrong, or do you really want more invasive government oversight of your personal and business life??
The IRS already does look at all benefits with a microscope.
For example, last year the IRS went after Google for the meals Google gives its employees. Google was able to successfully argue that on its large campuses since it would cost employees at least 30 minutes each way to travel to where they could buy lunch off-campus, that there was sufficient business value to justify not taxing that as income, based on the additional work they can get out of many of the employees. However, smaller campuses (like the Boulder office, where I work) can't make the same argument. Result: I pay income tax on my company-provided lunches. (Google makes it square by paying me extra to offset the tax, grossed up).
Any sort of significant benefit companies give their employees is fair game for the IRS, and they look at it hard to see whether or not it should be considered income.
I've been working with smart card tech for almost 20 years now. I've seen the breaks and countermeasures, and am fully aware that the technology can be broken given enough effort. That's why good security designers arrange to limit the damage possible, to a value which is less than that which can be obtained by breaking it -- and we have pretty good estimates of break cost. Off-device countermeasures are critical, too, such as the risk engines already implemented by all of the credit card issuers. ID-related data should be authenticated with off-device keys, similar to the way the authentication data in passports is already secured.
Obviously nothing is perfect, which is why the security engineers who design this stuff spread the risk. But that risk spreading doesn't mean you can't put everything in one device. In fact, it really doesn't even help to have a wallet full of separate cards, because they're all in one place. And having all of your credit cards in your phone is vastly more secure than having them all in your wallet, because your wallet has no locks and the cards in it have their whole frigging card numbers printed right on their face. It's hard to get much worse security than that (because, fundamentally, credit cards are horribly insecure -- the identifier and the authenticator are the same value? Really?)
You can certainly feel free to avoid putting everything in your phone if you like. But the vast majority of people who are willing to trust the security designers will not be disappointed in the results. Not that there won't be occasional problems, there are problems with anything, but they will be less common than the ID and payment fraud we have today.
Bottom line: It will be better security, not worse. I challenge you to find a serious security researcher who knows anything about the technology and disagrees.
At least in the present world, cash is sub-optimal. Not only is it less convenient, but you miss out on a lot of potential kickbacks.
For example, I have an AMEX card that pays me 6% cash back on grocery store purchases. Given that I have four teenagers and an insane monthly grocery bill, that's real money, to the tune of about $800 per year I get back. I get 3% back on gas, which pays me another $150 annually. I get 3% back on Amazon.com purchases using my Amazon card. I get 1% back on everything else, and I route everything possible through cards... electric bill, car payment, travel expenses (that's especially nice for company travel), etc. My Discover card gives 5% back on a different category each quarter. It takes a little work to maximize the return on that one, but it's worth it (for me, anyway, my wife finds keeping track of which card to use to be too complicated).
Yeah, all of this money comes from the merchants (except I know the grocery stores aren't paying me all of that 6%, that's more than their profit margin), which means it all ultimately comes from me in the form of higher prices. But the fact is that the prices are the same whether I pay cash or use credit and get the kickbacks. Which means that you who pay cash and I who use credit foot the bill equally -- but I get the benefit and you don't.
I expect that this will all eventually collapse, because it clearly represents some unnecessary inefficiencies that will get squeezed out of the system. But in the meantime, I'm quite happy to take advantage of it.
In addition, I find that using credit makes it easier to track my expenses and manage my budget, and even provides some elasticity which can be very useful at times. For example, a while ago I had some big monthly medical expenses ($5K per month) which had to be paid out of pocket and were later reimbursed by my insurance company; I could have dipped into savings to cover them, but by using credit and taking advantage of flexibility offered by the hospital (a short grace period plus my choice of when the card would get billed), I was able to arrange things so I got the reimbursement a few weeks before I actually had to pay the bill -- oh, and I got 1% cash back on that bill, too.
Cash works. But credit works better (as long as you don't overspend and end up in debt).
Slashdot Mirror
How many of your friends avoid porn entirely due to their religious beliefs? Many of mine do, but I suspect you have different sorts of friends than I do.
I don't think the concept is invalid, just that you're applying it at too detailed a level, and confusing "more likely to" with "will". Perhaps someone you're friends with is 2% more likely than average to have an interest in something you like. To a human looking at the data without applying any mathematical analysis, such a weak indicator would be completely invisible. And, actually, such a weak indicator is probably useless for any kind of predictions... but it may become very useful when combined with several other weak indicators.
They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want.
Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported. I suppose the companies you're theorizing could use untargeted ads, but that's going to lead us back to what we had in the late 90s -- massive blinking banners everywhere, and lots of them, because that's what had to be done to make them sufficiently effective. I would much rather have discreet, carefully-targeted ads that may actually be interesting enough to make me want to look at them. Or maybe there's some other business model, but I don't know what it might be.
Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.
Open source hasn't taught us that at all. It has showed that Internet-enabled collaboration can do startlingly good things with spare-time efforts from people who do something else for a living, but "startlingly-good" only by comparison with what we used to expect of hobby projects. Open source efforts become really successful when people are paid full-time to work on them. But even ignoring that, no matter how good the software is, hardware of the scale needed to provide the kind of high-quality services we're accustomed to isn't free, and won't be. The public estimates I've seen say that Google has at least one million CPU cores, because that's what it takes to operate Google web search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Calendar, Drive, etc. In a video I saw the other day, one of the guys in Maps said that Google now has over 20 petabytes of map imagery, between satellite, aerial and ground-level data. This analysis puts YouTube storage growing at 76 petabytes per year, but that obviously understates the number because it ignores the redundancy needed to make sure stuff doesn't disappear when drives die.
No matter how altruistic you are, you don't buy, deploy and operate that much storage without some revenue source. You can't. Then there are servers, and bandwidth, and buildings to put them in, and people to deploy them, fix them, manage them, replace them, etc., etc., etc. It takes a lot of money to be able to do all of that.
And, actually, as a Google employee I'll tell you that the attitude within Google, from the CEO on down, is that helping to "advance the human race" is the goal. Ads and the other revenue sources are just what you have to do in order to have the resources, including not only all of that hardware and bandwidth but also tens of thousands of highly-capable engineers, needed to be able to advance the human race. If there were a way to accomplish the real goals without advertising, Google would do it -- in fact Larry and Sergey tried really hard to find any other approach early on, or so I read (I've only been working for Google for 18 months, and have never spoken with either of them). Maybe Google Fiber will be wildly successful and profitable and Google can shift from advertising to being the world's ISP, or maybe Google will become a huge device manufacturer, making phones, tables, glasses and computers, or maybe the self-driving cars will be hugely profitable, but I suspect that none of those will be able to fund the level of free services and progress that advertising does.
As Talderas pointed out, had he gone to a congressman he never would have been branded a traitor at all, and the congressman would have been able to present himself as the heroic voice of integrity, providing evidence of criminal malfeasance that Congress needs to investigate.
The IG would be a good option, yes, and I agree that taking it entirely out of the chain of command -- and out of the country! -- is not the approach an honest whistleblower would take.
You always run it up the chain of command. ALWAYS. And you document every letter you send.
Maybe. I can see a soldier not having the confidence that he and his letters won't just get buried as well. It depends on the circumstances.
However, I think his decision to give it to Wikileaks rather than to take it to some element of the government who would play a watchdog role (e.g. a congressman opposed to the war) does cast doubt on the purity of his intentions -- or at least on his judgment.
Considering the federal government's recent track record, I would counter that trusting any Congressperson to come forward and make the info public would be the real folly of judgement.
Bah. Just find one who wants to make a name for himself.
Having worked as a civilian employee of the US military right after graduating college I can assure everyone that there is no way Manning could have failed to realize his actions were at best illegal and at worse treasonous.
Having been a member of the US armed forces (SSgt USAFRES) I can assure everyone that Manning may well have believed that he had a duty to disclose information he thought the military was illegally concealing from the public, and there are circumstances in which he'd have been absolutely right. Every member of the armed forces is taught that they have a duty to disobey illegal orders. However, I think his decision to give it to Wikileaks rather than to take it to some element of the government who would play a watchdog role (e.g. a congressman opposed to the war) does cast doubt on the purity of his intentions -- or at least on his judgment.
It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
That depends on the information.
It is the duty of every member of the US military, regardless of rank, to disobey illegal orders. I think a strong argument can be made that any order to conceal, for example, evidence of war crimes, would be illegal.
Granted that in such cases giving the data to Wikileaks wouldn't have been the right response. Giving it to a congressman, for example, would have been an appropriate choice, assuming the private in question didn't believe running it up the chain of command would work.
Only if you had your fingers stuck in your ears.
I'm pretty sure Google got money from Apple...probably a per-device payment.
Based on what?
This has all been very thoroughly hashed out in other threads.
Google got nothing in return for the data. No ads, no ad revenue, no fresh data, nothing, zilch.
You believe that???
Do you believe Google did get something? What? I suppose they could have deduced roughly where lots of iOS users were located based on which map tiles were requested from Google's servers, but I can't think of anything else Google could have gotten from Apple's app. Tile-level location data doesn't seem particularly useful. The app didn't show ads, so no ad revenue. So what is it that you believe Google got?
Google _could_ have given me turn by turn navigation in their version but they chose not to.
Google has never had a maps app on iOS. It's always been an Apple app.
And... after reading all of that, I find myself with my question fundamentally unanswered :-)
It seems that the benefit of being a member of the Foundation is the opportunity to be known as a member of the Foundation, and to hobnob with other members.
Many of the core kernel developers, including Linus himself, are employees of the Linux Foundation.
Yes but do they actually tell him what to do? And does he listen?
AFAICT, Linux developers don't follow any agenda but their own -- each individual does whatever he or she wants (or is told to do by his or her employer), Linus' lieutenants accept any patches that seem both safe and useful, and Linus integrates whatever he gets from his lieutenants that seems safe and useful.
And none of them appear to pay any attention to anything the "Linux Foundation" says. So what does joining this body give HP, other than an opportunity to make some press releases?
Private Schools: Again, works if you can afford it, but they are more expensive.
Not necessarily. My son went to a private school for several years, at a cost of $3000 per year. That price included not only tuition, but books, field trips, hot breakfast, hot lunch, snacks, and up to three hours of "latch-key time" -- time the kids could stay after school, supervised, each day so that their parents could pick them up after work rather than the kids having to be home alone. The only thing it didn't include was transportation; parents had to get the kids to and from school every day.
Educationally, the place was fantastic. Maximum class size for K-4 was 12. Grades 5 and 6 were combined, with a class size of about 30, but with three teachers so student/teacher ratio was 1:10. The students at the school averaged 90%+ on the standardized tests, without "teaching to the test" at all. It's all about the quality of the teachers and administrators, and at this school they were uniformly excellent.
Perhaps. But people got along with just one wallet for a long time.
Because the sales tax on S&H for a $9.99 dvd is morally and ethically the same as pre-tax profits of $36.8 billion
Sure it is. What's the difference? One number is much bigger than the other, but the difference in tax amounts is similarly different... and the *aggregate* of all the S&H fees on all the DVDs is probably not so much different in scale than the Apple number. So, what's the difference?
Right now, if I leave my phone at the beach or it drops from my pocket while getting out of the car, whoever finds it has nothing more than a couple of bucks worth of credit
What if you leave your wallet at the beach, or it drops from your pocket?
For that to work you would need to ensure ALL company benefits are taxed. Imagine the beaucrazy necessary to put a value on every single thing your company provides for you directly or indirectly. Do I sense you wrong, or do you really want more invasive government oversight of your personal and business life??
The IRS already does look at all benefits with a microscope.
For example, last year the IRS went after Google for the meals Google gives its employees. Google was able to successfully argue that on its large campuses since it would cost employees at least 30 minutes each way to travel to where they could buy lunch off-campus, that there was sufficient business value to justify not taxing that as income, based on the additional work they can get out of many of the employees. However, smaller campuses (like the Boulder office, where I work) can't make the same argument. Result: I pay income tax on my company-provided lunches. (Google makes it square by paying me extra to offset the tax, grossed up).
Any sort of significant benefit companies give their employees is fair game for the IRS, and they look at it hard to see whether or not it should be considered income.
I've been working with smart card tech for almost 20 years now. I've seen the breaks and countermeasures, and am fully aware that the technology can be broken given enough effort. That's why good security designers arrange to limit the damage possible, to a value which is less than that which can be obtained by breaking it -- and we have pretty good estimates of break cost. Off-device countermeasures are critical, too, such as the risk engines already implemented by all of the credit card issuers. ID-related data should be authenticated with off-device keys, similar to the way the authentication data in passports is already secured.
Obviously nothing is perfect, which is why the security engineers who design this stuff spread the risk. But that risk spreading doesn't mean you can't put everything in one device. In fact, it really doesn't even help to have a wallet full of separate cards, because they're all in one place. And having all of your credit cards in your phone is vastly more secure than having them all in your wallet, because your wallet has no locks and the cards in it have their whole frigging card numbers printed right on their face. It's hard to get much worse security than that (because, fundamentally, credit cards are horribly insecure -- the identifier and the authenticator are the same value? Really?)
You can certainly feel free to avoid putting everything in your phone if you like. But the vast majority of people who are willing to trust the security designers will not be disappointed in the results. Not that there won't be occasional problems, there are problems with anything, but they will be less common than the ID and payment fraud we have today.
Bottom line: It will be better security, not worse. I challenge you to find a serious security researcher who knows anything about the technology and disagrees.
Never lost your wallet? Same thing. It's a pain, but hardly the end of the world.
You don't have employees? Or you just don't pay them for doing all the aforementioned tasks?
And don't forget the cost of "shrinkage".
Cash works fine.
At least in the present world, cash is sub-optimal. Not only is it less convenient, but you miss out on a lot of potential kickbacks.
For example, I have an AMEX card that pays me 6% cash back on grocery store purchases. Given that I have four teenagers and an insane monthly grocery bill, that's real money, to the tune of about $800 per year I get back. I get 3% back on gas, which pays me another $150 annually. I get 3% back on Amazon.com purchases using my Amazon card. I get 1% back on everything else, and I route everything possible through cards... electric bill, car payment, travel expenses (that's especially nice for company travel), etc. My Discover card gives 5% back on a different category each quarter. It takes a little work to maximize the return on that one, but it's worth it (for me, anyway, my wife finds keeping track of which card to use to be too complicated).
Yeah, all of this money comes from the merchants (except I know the grocery stores aren't paying me all of that 6%, that's more than their profit margin), which means it all ultimately comes from me in the form of higher prices. But the fact is that the prices are the same whether I pay cash or use credit and get the kickbacks. Which means that you who pay cash and I who use credit foot the bill equally -- but I get the benefit and you don't.
I expect that this will all eventually collapse, because it clearly represents some unnecessary inefficiencies that will get squeezed out of the system. But in the meantime, I'm quite happy to take advantage of it.
In addition, I find that using credit makes it easier to track my expenses and manage my budget, and even provides some elasticity which can be very useful at times. For example, a while ago I had some big monthly medical expenses ($5K per month) which had to be paid out of pocket and were later reimbursed by my insurance company; I could have dipped into savings to cover them, but by using credit and taking advantage of flexibility offered by the hospital (a short grace period plus my choice of when the card would get billed), I was able to arrange things so I got the reimbursement a few weeks before I actually had to pay the bill -- oh, and I got 1% cash back on that bill, too.
Cash works. But credit works better (as long as you don't overspend and end up in debt).