Given the number of other FTC "probes" I've seen which are ridiculous and politically-driven, I see no reason why I should lend any credence to their decision, at all. That's not to say that the FTC shouldn't perform a real investigation, but what's been done so far clearly isn't one -- and they're not even claiming it is, just a preliminary inquiry to decide if a real investigation is warranted.
And I note that you also haven't made any counter-arguments to what I originally posted... and you also apparently didn't even notice that I mentioned Shopping, etc., and even addressed the fact that there may be some difference of opinion as to exactly what constitutes abuse in those spaces. It is really an abuse for Google to return more structured, detailed results for queries that appear to be asking for particular types of data where that's relevant? Should Google really be restricted to only passively returning links to existing web sites? Does this mean that Google's other search tools, like stock quotes (which compete with Yahoo Finance, right?) or calculator, or unit conversions, which both compete with numerous on-line tools, should also be disallowed? How about airline flight searches? Or language translation searches? Or...
Perhaps. Personally, I think it's a difficult argument to make, and a rather lame one to even attempt, but I suppose it needs to be explored.
Personally, after a few months of riding 100+ miles per week, I'm beginning to really like the way my legs look in spandex:-)
Yeah, call me stupid, or vain, or whatever, but my legs are getting ripped, and I like it. My upper body's still a little on the roly-poly side, but it's slimming down, too. It'll be a year or so before I want to wear a tight spandex shirt, but I can see that day coming as well. I'll still be an old man, but...
Heh. I ride a $1000(*) road bike while wearing $300 worth of special-purpose cycling clothing. I'm not particularly wealthy, but nobody is likely to see me riding my bike to work and conclude that I'm poor. Not that I really care one way or the other what they think.
(*) Yeah, $1K is pretty low-end for a road bike. I wasn't sure how much I'd ride when I bought it, though. As it turns out, I've been averaging about 500 miles per month on it (nearly all commuting), so I figure I'll ride it until it hits 10K miles (probably spring 2014) and then buy a better one.
... and if Apple dropped their prices to reduce that margin, it would wipe out the rest of the market. This is what non-Apple users who complain about the margins don't realize: If they were cheaper they would be the only player in town.
I don't think that's true. I've owned both, and if they were the same price, I'd buy an Android phone... in fact I'd even pay a little bit more for it, because it's more flexible and a better fit for me. I have no doubt that Apple would see a resurgence in its market share if it were to lower its prices, but I strongly doubt that it would "wipe out" the rest of the market, and not only because of geeks like me. I know lots of people who've gone through the same comparison process and prefer Android.
A top of the line Android is every bit as pricey, depending on setup and/or contract.
Is that so?
I just logged onto my Verizon account, since I'm eligible for a discounted upgrade with a two-year contract extension. I clicked "upgrade", then selected "category: smartphone", then "sort by price, high to low". Here's what I got:
#1: iPhone 5 64 GB $399.99.
#2: iPhone 4S 64 GB $299.99.
#3: iPhone 5 32 GB $299.99.
#4: Samsung Galaxy S III $249.99
#5: Droid RAZR MAXX 244.99
And in virtually every way, the Galaxy SIII is a better device than the iPhone 5. Granted that it only has 32 GB of storage, rather than the 64 GB you can get in an iPhone for $150 more -- but you could buy the Galaxy SIII, spend $50 on a 64 GB micro SD card and have 96 GB of storage in your phone and $100 left in your pocket.
You definitely pay a significant amount for that Apple logo, and that's why Apple's profits margins are so high. More power to them, if they can maintain that... my point isn't that what they do is somehow wrong. My point is just that you do pay a premium for Apple hardware.
This is exactly what is being claimed Google is doing: leveraging their dominant position in the search market to gain unfair advantages in other, unrelated markets. If they really are doing this, it certainly is worthy of investigation.
What will be really interesting is if, as I strongly suspect, Google does not give its own products any extra "boost" in search results, or even in ads -- but Google's products come out on top because they're what Google's algorithms predict is of most interest to the searchers.
What then? Is that unfair dealing? Should Google be obligated to artificially lower the visibility of its own products in search?
In case it isn't clear to some how algorithms could be deciding the placement of Google's products in ads, keep in mind that all Google ad-views are a result of a real-time auction in which tens of thousands of candidate ads "compete" for the spot. Google's algorithms select the winning ad based on a combination of factors including the ad's observed effectiveness and the price the advertiser bids. So, if the Google Chrome team, for example, decides to run ads on Google and submits their ads along with a bid, and the normal algorithms are then applied to decide when to show that ad... is there any way that Google can be accused of anti-competitive use of its search dominance?
I mean, Google effectively even has to pay for the advertising space given to its own products on its site. There may or may not be any transfer of money between divisions, but if Google's algorithms decide that the Chrome team's bid beats out some other advertiser's bid for a given ad spot, Google is foregoing the revenue from that other advertiser, so there is a real financial cost to the decision to display the Chrome ad. Actually, that would be true even if Google were artificially boosting the placement of its own products, rather than just using high bids (though given the ability to use the bid as a handle to tweak visibility, I can't think why anyone would feel the need to introduce a different boosting parameter into the algorithm).
Where it gets a little fuzzier is when we look at Google's decision to build specialized search engines like Maps and Shopping, which have their own specialized search competitors, and then to give the results of those engines prominent placement in the general web search page. Is that leveraging Google's general-search dominance to gain share in other markets? Or is it a logical extension to general search, to provide more useful results to general query? I think the latter, but others might disagree.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't have anything to do with ads, or search, and don't know anything about how Google decides to handle ads for its own products.)
Although there are some technologies that are less sought-out than others, there really isn't any "best" technology. There are a whole bunch of things that are in high demand, so pick something you enjoy, something which makes you want to get up and go to work in the morning, and do it!
If you enjoy it, and have even a modicum of talent, you'll be good at it. If you're good at it, someone will want to pay you to turn that skill to solving their problems.
We got consistently positive feedback on our call center, and I really think that outsourcing let us provide a better experience than if we tried to build it in house.
I just can't help but wonder, what if the company (airline) who put together the call-center you're outsourcing to, had thought the same thing as you... In some ways "it's turtles all the way down!"
They did think the same thing, which is why they started selling their services to other companies. It's just a different angle on exactly the same recognition: It's very costly to build a call center capable of handling the peaks of a single organization's support traffic, because it means you're hugely overstaffed a lot of the time. The solution is to have the call center support more organizations, with different call volume patterns. Ideally, to take on the support load of organizations with complementary volume patterns, but if you scale far enough and take on enough clients, probability will smooth it out pretty effectively.
The airline realized this and chose to smooth their call volumes and offset their costs (or even turn it into a profit center) by selling to others. The GP's company realized it, too, and chose to outsource to the airline. Same reality, same understanding, same solution -- just a different angle. One chose to build a new line of business.
While the turn-around time is impressive, it could not possibly have undergone extensive QA testing...
You mean it could not have undergone extensive QA testing by humans. Google has really excellent automated testing infrastructure, at all levels of unit, functional, integration and system tests.
get unlucky on entry and exit and you've lost 2 years of typical gains - similarly, get lucky on entry and exit and you've got an extra 10% in your pocket.
Never put in market orders. Always use limit orders, even if you set the limit such that the trade is virtually guaranteed to execute immediately.
I'm 43 (class of '87) and went to high school in Layton, Utah, USA.
There were various business-oriented computer classes, including a word processing class I took which was taught on a shared minicomputer with 3270 green screen terminals. There was also an introductory programming class, which I didn't take, and an AP Computer class, which I did take. It was a programming class, using Turbo Pascal on IBM PC XTs. As a class project we attempted to build a schedule management application for the school. We failed to produce anything usable, but learned a lot in the attempt.
I think the programming classes were uncommon in the district, though. My high school had them because we had a computer teacher who had become independently wealthy from a couple of startups in the early 80s (hardware-focused, I think) and had decided to take a few years off to teach. He was an electrical engineer, but knew a fair amount about basic programming and liked computers, so he convinced the administration to offer some programming classes.
Oh, there was also a graphic design class which used a computerized typesetting machine. I guess that would count also. I did that as well.
People read that book and I'm not sure they understand it.
Adding more people after the project is sunk won't help. That doesn't mean not hiring capable developers when something can still be done. Just make sure to hire enough this time.
That doesn't hold. I agree that Brooks primary point was that adding staff to a late project makes it later, but it's also true that even up front doubling the staff doesn't halve the time. Larger teams add significant communications and coordination overhead.
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
That depends on whether the task can be broken down into three pieces, and on the degree of communication required.
The other option (and often the more realistic one) is to extend the schedule by 50% -- still two people, now working 40 hours per week, but for, say, six weeks instead of 4.
This issue is the fundamental point of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month".
LOL. I added the wrong rows. Guess I need to *do* my statistics homework. It seemed surprising to me that it came to 90%; my intuition said it should be less, but I didn't pause long enough to see where I went wrong. Thanks:-)
If it were random, as you are trying to imply, the success rate would still be at 50% regardless of how many of the samples were cats in the first place.
If the computer calls "cat!" for every video, and 90% of the videos contain cats, then the computer would be "correct" 90% of the time, just as the GP said.
I the computer randomly called cat 90% of the time and 90% of the videos contain cats, then the probability then there are four possibilities which would occur with the following probabilities:
Video: cat, Computer: cat -- 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81
Video: no cat, Computer: cat -- 0.1 * 0.9 = 0.09
Video cat, Computer: no cat -- 0.9 * 0.1 = 0.09
Video no cat, Computer: no cat -- 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01
In two of those four possibilities the computer would be "correct", and summing them shows that this would happen with probability 0.81 + 0.09 = 0.9, or 90% of the time, not 50%.
You could have a sample of 100% and you would still approach 50% success rate with random chance.
Nope, still 90%, assuming the computer randomly guesses "cat" 90% of the time. Of course if all of the videos contain cats and the computer always announces "cat", it would be right 100% of the time.
I'm typing this post instead of doing my statistics homework. Hmm. Not sure what that says.
BTW, if the work is out of print, the copyright typically devolves back to the author.
More exactly, it's pretty rare that the publisher *ever* had ownership of the copyright. The same isn't true of all creative works, but authors have done pretty well at retaining ownership of their creations.
However, that's irrelevant.
The point is that if a book is out of print and unavailable, regardless of whose decision it is to stop producing it, and if copyright law is what's preventing it from being published, then copyright law is failing. The purpose of copyright is to encourage publication, to enrich the public domain by getting stuff out there. The mechanism of copyright is to establish a way for authors to get paid so that they'll want to publish, but that's only the way we've chosen to accomplish the goal, not the goal itself.
This is particularly true when it's actually neither the author nor the publisher who has decided to stop producing it... because often out-of-print books are out-of-print not because anyone has decided they don't want them printed, but because no one is in a position to decide to print them. No publisher has a contract to print them because the author doesn't believe anyone cares about the book any more -- and perhaps the author is unreachable, or even dead, and perhaps the ownership of the book isn't clear. This is somewhat less of a problem with books than it is with films (c.f. Eldred v Ashcroft), but does happen plenty often with older books as well.
Whatever the reason, if a book is no longer actively being printed, it is in the best interests of society for it to be made available other ways. If the law says otherwise, then the law is wrong and should be fixed.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but this topic has nothing to do with my employment. I don't make decisions for Google about this and they don't make decisions for me, as evidenced by my long history of posting exactly these opinions on this topic, at least a decade before becoming employed by them.)
Not when our founding "social contract" establishes the protection of IP, we don't.
It does not.
The Constitution authorizes Congress to establish IP protections for limited times and for a specific purpose. It does not require Congress to do so, and it does not authorize Congress to establish any sort of perpetual, unlimited monopoly for any reason or no reason at all. The constitutional basis of IP law was absolutely intended -- and written -- to create exactly the social contract to which the GP referred.
Once things are in law, generally that isnt an option-- laws arent there as a suggestion.
Laws can be wrong, and our current copyright laws are wrong. They're seriously out of balance and in many ways defeat the specific goal authorized in the Constitution. It's unfortunate that SCOTUS hasn't yet been asked the right questions, but I think it's primarily an education problem. When the man on the street understands that "Who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's plays?" isn't a question of inheritance law but simply ridiculous because for anyone to own them would mean an utter failure of copyright law to achieve its intended purpose, then Congress and the courts will remember the social contract and get back to maintaining it.
Keep in mind that the imbalance and lack of understanding is a pretty recent development, as evidenced by Congress' clever solution to the question of how to handle mechanical reproduction rights in the early part of the 20th century.
The problem with adding any new language is that it requires support from all browsers to be at all useful.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Think about a near-future world in which Chrome -- and only Chrome -- has a Dart VM, and suppose that Google's dream of Dart bytecodes being an order of magnitude faster to download and running an order of magnitude faster is realized. Google will then invest in writing all of their web apps in Dart, using the generated Javascript code in browsers that don't support Dart but running Dart bytecodes wherever possible. End result: Google's web apps are an order of magnitude snappier and more responsive when running on Chrome. This will be especially valuable on mobile devices.
Don't you think other sites would have to at least consider using Dart to get the same effect for their Chrome users? Chrome is big enough to make it worthwhile for many sites, especially since compilation to Javascript means they still only have to maintain one codebase, and they can even make the conversion incrementally. And of course, if Chrome users are getting a huge speedup from Dart-enabled sites, it's going to make sense for the other browsers to implement it as well (and Google will be happy to help them to so).
I don't know if Dart is going to be successful, but (a) it really doesn't have to be supported by all browsers to be useful (as long as compilation to Javascript is reliable) and (b) there's a very plausible, incremental, path forward to a Dart-only web.
...theirs seems like the right approach. It is certainly a better one than Dart.
It has completely different goals from Dart. It's not "better", it's just trying to solve a different problem.
Dart's ultimate goal is to replace Javascript with something faster. Google's V8 Javascript engine has shown the industry that Javascript can be a lot faster than most of us expected was possible, and it has pushed the competitors to make theirs faster as well, but the Dart developers believe that code written in a language that is as purely dynamic as Javascript simply can't be optimized to the same degree as that written in a language which allows the run-time to make more assumptions about what the code is going to do. Along the way, Dart also tries to make the code easier to read and write (and succeeds), and to provide more structure to help IDEs, but that's not the primary goal. One source of confusion is that Dart can be compiled to Javascript, but that's a compatibility hack. The goal is to have all browsers natively running Dart code in highly-optimized Dart engines, making the code an order of magnitude faster (in theory).
Typescript, on the other hand, appears to be all about making Javascript easier to read and write, including allowing you to tell your IDE about the structure of your code so it can help you more. But the run-time doesn't benefit from the annotations, so from a performance perspective it's still just Javascript.
Dart is about making the web a computing platform capable of rivaling native applications in terms of performance, power and usability, while bettering native applications in terms of ease of deployment and management. Typescript is about making it easier to do the things web applications already do. Both have laudable goals, but they're different goals.
Society's interests surely outweigh any business's, no?
Which is exactly why businesses must be allowed to fail. In the short term it might be more painful for society, but in the long run society benefits from businessmen knowing that they will bear the consequences of their decisions.
But that is anti-competitive. It's not a matter anymore of who produced more, or how efficiently. In fact those who bet on what would be a normal, competitive free-market price might not actually have done very well.
It is a matter of who BET on what the futures would do, and who came out on top. But it's that ANTICIPATED FUTURE VALUE that was bet on (which is why they're called "futures" in the first place).
Again: that's gambling. And I don't mean "taking risks", I mean actual gambling.
Not for the farmers.
The whole point of futures and derivatives is to transfer risk from those who can't bear it to those who want it. Farmers need stability; they need to be able to cover their costs and make a profit in good years and bad, and they need to know before they plant that they're going to be able to get a reasonable price for their crops. Futures allow them to offload their risk. It's not cost-free... on average they'll make less money than if they sold at market prices, but it's a good deal for them.
On the other side, the speculators who buy the futures are in a position to accept risk in exchange for potential gain. They can bear the losses they take when prices decline, and they want to profit from what they make when prices rise. Over the long run, if they price the futures accurately, they'll also earn the premium that the farmers effectively pay to buy stability.
When all of this is done by people who know what they're doing, it's not gambling at all. The farmers know what they're getting: reduced risk for reduced profits. The speculators, meanwhile, are "gambling" the way a casino "gambles"... they may win or lose on a given hand, but the percentages are tilted in their favor over the long run.
Not only does this arrangement make sense for both sides, it actually provides the market with stability and tends to smooth out price fluctuations over time.
Futures are a Good Thing. Period.
Most derivatives serve the same purposes in their respective markets. Granted that some instruments are so insanely complex and so far removed from the underlying business that they truly are gambles -- or even swindles -- but that's not the case with the ones that stick around decade after decade.
With the endgame being <insert scary music here> to show you an ad you find interesting... or perhaps no ad at all if the "stalking" determines that you're not really interested in anything right now.
Yeah, doesn't sound much like "stalking" to me... stalking is a predatory activity that ends in attacking the prey.
Mind you, I have no objection to tools that enable you to inform such advertisers that you don't want to be tracked, but the overblown rhetoric really doesn't help your case.
I'd actually like to see another flag, analogous to "do not track" which is "do not advertise". That seems like a more equitable solution to the whole issue than ad-block. Then web site owners could decide whether to show you content without ads or no content. Similarly, I won't be surprised if some sites decide to honor DNT by loading up the page with flashy low-value ads, vs displaying discreet, targeted high-value ads. Then everyone can choose appropriate settings and the browsers and web servers can effectively do a quick negotiation.
Slashdot Mirror
FaceBook can only out your most personal secrets if you tell it your most personal secrets.
Or if your friends tell it your most personal secrets.
Given the number of other FTC "probes" I've seen which are ridiculous and politically-driven, I see no reason why I should lend any credence to their decision, at all. That's not to say that the FTC shouldn't perform a real investigation, but what's been done so far clearly isn't one -- and they're not even claiming it is, just a preliminary inquiry to decide if a real investigation is warranted.
And I note that you also haven't made any counter-arguments to what I originally posted... and you also apparently didn't even notice that I mentioned Shopping, etc., and even addressed the fact that there may be some difference of opinion as to exactly what constitutes abuse in those spaces. It is really an abuse for Google to return more structured, detailed results for queries that appear to be asking for particular types of data where that's relevant? Should Google really be restricted to only passively returning links to existing web sites? Does this mean that Google's other search tools, like stock quotes (which compete with Yahoo Finance, right?) or calculator, or unit conversions, which both compete with numerous on-line tools, should also be disallowed? How about airline flight searches? Or language translation searches? Or...
Perhaps. Personally, I think it's a difficult argument to make, and a rather lame one to even attempt, but I suppose it needs to be explored.
Personally, after a few months of riding 100+ miles per week, I'm beginning to really like the way my legs look in spandex :-)
Yeah, call me stupid, or vain, or whatever, but my legs are getting ripped, and I like it. My upper body's still a little on the roly-poly side, but it's slimming down, too. It'll be a year or so before I want to wear a tight spandex shirt, but I can see that day coming as well. I'll still be an old man, but...
You can't afford a car?
Heh. I ride a $1000(*) road bike while wearing $300 worth of special-purpose cycling clothing. I'm not particularly wealthy, but nobody is likely to see me riding my bike to work and conclude that I'm poor. Not that I really care one way or the other what they think.
(*) Yeah, $1K is pretty low-end for a road bike. I wasn't sure how much I'd ride when I bought it, though. As it turns out, I've been averaging about 500 miles per month on it (nearly all commuting), so I figure I'll ride it until it hits 10K miles (probably spring 2014) and then buy a better one.
You didn't have any real counter-arguments, I see, and so had to vent your spleen with meaningless sarcasm. I hope it made you feel better.
... and if Apple dropped their prices to reduce that margin, it would wipe out the rest of the market. This is what non-Apple users who complain about the margins don't realize: If they were cheaper they would be the only player in town.
I don't think that's true. I've owned both, and if they were the same price, I'd buy an Android phone... in fact I'd even pay a little bit more for it, because it's more flexible and a better fit for me. I have no doubt that Apple would see a resurgence in its market share if it were to lower its prices, but I strongly doubt that it would "wipe out" the rest of the market, and not only because of geeks like me. I know lots of people who've gone through the same comparison process and prefer Android.
A top of the line Android is every bit as pricey, depending on setup and/or contract.
Is that so?
I just logged onto my Verizon account, since I'm eligible for a discounted upgrade with a two-year contract extension. I clicked "upgrade", then selected "category: smartphone", then "sort by price, high to low". Here's what I got:
And in virtually every way, the Galaxy SIII is a better device than the iPhone 5. Granted that it only has 32 GB of storage, rather than the 64 GB you can get in an iPhone for $150 more -- but you could buy the Galaxy SIII, spend $50 on a 64 GB micro SD card and have 96 GB of storage in your phone and $100 left in your pocket.
You definitely pay a significant amount for that Apple logo, and that's why Apple's profits margins are so high. More power to them, if they can maintain that... my point isn't that what they do is somehow wrong. My point is just that you do pay a premium for Apple hardware.
BS! that is not true, e.g., Google always gives prominent placement for its "Google Shopping" in ads.
I addressed that point.
This is exactly what is being claimed Google is doing: leveraging their dominant position in the search market to gain unfair advantages in other, unrelated markets. If they really are doing this, it certainly is worthy of investigation.
What will be really interesting is if, as I strongly suspect, Google does not give its own products any extra "boost" in search results, or even in ads -- but Google's products come out on top because they're what Google's algorithms predict is of most interest to the searchers.
What then? Is that unfair dealing? Should Google be obligated to artificially lower the visibility of its own products in search?
In case it isn't clear to some how algorithms could be deciding the placement of Google's products in ads, keep in mind that all Google ad-views are a result of a real-time auction in which tens of thousands of candidate ads "compete" for the spot. Google's algorithms select the winning ad based on a combination of factors including the ad's observed effectiveness and the price the advertiser bids. So, if the Google Chrome team, for example, decides to run ads on Google and submits their ads along with a bid, and the normal algorithms are then applied to decide when to show that ad... is there any way that Google can be accused of anti-competitive use of its search dominance?
I mean, Google effectively even has to pay for the advertising space given to its own products on its site. There may or may not be any transfer of money between divisions, but if Google's algorithms decide that the Chrome team's bid beats out some other advertiser's bid for a given ad spot, Google is foregoing the revenue from that other advertiser, so there is a real financial cost to the decision to display the Chrome ad. Actually, that would be true even if Google were artificially boosting the placement of its own products, rather than just using high bids (though given the ability to use the bid as a handle to tweak visibility, I can't think why anyone would feel the need to introduce a different boosting parameter into the algorithm).
Where it gets a little fuzzier is when we look at Google's decision to build specialized search engines like Maps and Shopping, which have their own specialized search competitors, and then to give the results of those engines prominent placement in the general web search page. Is that leveraging Google's general-search dominance to gain share in other markets? Or is it a logical extension to general search, to provide more useful results to general query? I think the latter, but others might disagree.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't have anything to do with ads, or search, and don't know anything about how Google decides to handle ads for its own products.)
This!
Although there are some technologies that are less sought-out than others, there really isn't any "best" technology. There are a whole bunch of things that are in high demand, so pick something you enjoy, something which makes you want to get up and go to work in the morning, and do it!
If you enjoy it, and have even a modicum of talent, you'll be good at it. If you're good at it, someone will want to pay you to turn that skill to solving their problems.
I just can't help but wonder, what if the company (airline) who put together the call-center you're outsourcing to, had thought the same thing as you... In some ways "it's turtles all the way down!"
They did think the same thing, which is why they started selling their services to other companies. It's just a different angle on exactly the same recognition: It's very costly to build a call center capable of handling the peaks of a single organization's support traffic, because it means you're hugely overstaffed a lot of the time. The solution is to have the call center support more organizations, with different call volume patterns. Ideally, to take on the support load of organizations with complementary volume patterns, but if you scale far enough and take on enough clients, probability will smooth it out pretty effectively.
The airline realized this and chose to smooth their call volumes and offset their costs (or even turn it into a profit center) by selling to others. The GP's company realized it, too, and chose to outsource to the airline. Same reality, same understanding, same solution -- just a different angle. One chose to build a new line of business.
While the turn-around time is impressive, it could not possibly have undergone extensive QA testing...
You mean it could not have undergone extensive QA testing by humans. Google has really excellent automated testing infrastructure, at all levels of unit, functional, integration and system tests.
get unlucky on entry and exit and you've lost 2 years of typical gains - similarly, get lucky on entry and exit and you've got an extra 10% in your pocket.
Never put in market orders. Always use limit orders, even if you set the limit such that the trade is virtually guaranteed to execute immediately.
I'm 43 (class of '87) and went to high school in Layton, Utah, USA.
There were various business-oriented computer classes, including a word processing class I took which was taught on a shared minicomputer with 3270 green screen terminals. There was also an introductory programming class, which I didn't take, and an AP Computer class, which I did take. It was a programming class, using Turbo Pascal on IBM PC XTs. As a class project we attempted to build a schedule management application for the school. We failed to produce anything usable, but learned a lot in the attempt.
I think the programming classes were uncommon in the district, though. My high school had them because we had a computer teacher who had become independently wealthy from a couple of startups in the early 80s (hardware-focused, I think) and had decided to take a few years off to teach. He was an electrical engineer, but knew a fair amount about basic programming and liked computers, so he convinced the administration to offer some programming classes.
Oh, there was also a graphic design class which used a computerized typesetting machine. I guess that would count also. I did that as well.
People read that book and I'm not sure they understand it. Adding more people after the project is sunk won't help. That doesn't mean not hiring capable developers when something can still be done. Just make sure to hire enough this time.
That doesn't hold. I agree that Brooks primary point was that adding staff to a late project makes it later, but it's also true that even up front doubling the staff doesn't halve the time. Larger teams add significant communications and coordination overhead.
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
That depends on whether the task can be broken down into three pieces, and on the degree of communication required.
The other option (and often the more realistic one) is to extend the schedule by 50% -- still two people, now working 40 hours per week, but for, say, six weeks instead of 4.
This issue is the fundamental point of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month".
LOL. I added the wrong rows. Guess I need to *do* my statistics homework. It seemed surprising to me that it came to 90%; my intuition said it should be less, but I didn't pause long enough to see where I went wrong. Thanks :-)
If it were random, as you are trying to imply, the success rate would still be at 50% regardless of how many of the samples were cats in the first place.
If the computer calls "cat!" for every video, and 90% of the videos contain cats, then the computer would be "correct" 90% of the time, just as the GP said.
I the computer randomly called cat 90% of the time and 90% of the videos contain cats, then the probability then there are four possibilities which would occur with the following probabilities:
Video: cat, Computer: cat -- 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81
Video: no cat, Computer: cat -- 0.1 * 0.9 = 0.09
Video cat, Computer: no cat -- 0.9 * 0.1 = 0.09
Video no cat, Computer: no cat -- 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01
In two of those four possibilities the computer would be "correct", and summing them shows that this would happen with probability 0.81 + 0.09 = 0.9, or 90% of the time, not 50%.
You could have a sample of 100% and you would still approach 50% success rate with random chance.
Nope, still 90%, assuming the computer randomly guesses "cat" 90% of the time. Of course if all of the videos contain cats and the computer always announces "cat", it would be right 100% of the time.
I'm typing this post instead of doing my statistics homework. Hmm. Not sure what that says.
BTW, if the work is out of print, the copyright typically devolves back to the author.
More exactly, it's pretty rare that the publisher *ever* had ownership of the copyright. The same isn't true of all creative works, but authors have done pretty well at retaining ownership of their creations.
However, that's irrelevant.
The point is that if a book is out of print and unavailable, regardless of whose decision it is to stop producing it, and if copyright law is what's preventing it from being published, then copyright law is failing. The purpose of copyright is to encourage publication, to enrich the public domain by getting stuff out there. The mechanism of copyright is to establish a way for authors to get paid so that they'll want to publish, but that's only the way we've chosen to accomplish the goal, not the goal itself.
This is particularly true when it's actually neither the author nor the publisher who has decided to stop producing it... because often out-of-print books are out-of-print not because anyone has decided they don't want them printed, but because no one is in a position to decide to print them. No publisher has a contract to print them because the author doesn't believe anyone cares about the book any more -- and perhaps the author is unreachable, or even dead, and perhaps the ownership of the book isn't clear. This is somewhat less of a problem with books than it is with films (c.f. Eldred v Ashcroft), but does happen plenty often with older books as well.
Whatever the reason, if a book is no longer actively being printed, it is in the best interests of society for it to be made available other ways. If the law says otherwise, then the law is wrong and should be fixed.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but this topic has nothing to do with my employment. I don't make decisions for Google about this and they don't make decisions for me, as evidenced by my long history of posting exactly these opinions on this topic, at least a decade before becoming employed by them.)
Not when our founding "social contract" establishes the protection of IP, we don't.
It does not.
The Constitution authorizes Congress to establish IP protections for limited times and for a specific purpose. It does not require Congress to do so, and it does not authorize Congress to establish any sort of perpetual, unlimited monopoly for any reason or no reason at all. The constitutional basis of IP law was absolutely intended -- and written -- to create exactly the social contract to which the GP referred.
Once things are in law, generally that isnt an option-- laws arent there as a suggestion.
Laws can be wrong, and our current copyright laws are wrong. They're seriously out of balance and in many ways defeat the specific goal authorized in the Constitution. It's unfortunate that SCOTUS hasn't yet been asked the right questions, but I think it's primarily an education problem. When the man on the street understands that "Who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's plays?" isn't a question of inheritance law but simply ridiculous because for anyone to own them would mean an utter failure of copyright law to achieve its intended purpose, then Congress and the courts will remember the social contract and get back to maintaining it.
Keep in mind that the imbalance and lack of understanding is a pretty recent development, as evidenced by Congress' clever solution to the question of how to handle mechanical reproduction rights in the early part of the 20th century.
The problem with adding any new language is that it requires support from all browsers to be at all useful.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Think about a near-future world in which Chrome -- and only Chrome -- has a Dart VM, and suppose that Google's dream of Dart bytecodes being an order of magnitude faster to download and running an order of magnitude faster is realized. Google will then invest in writing all of their web apps in Dart, using the generated Javascript code in browsers that don't support Dart but running Dart bytecodes wherever possible. End result: Google's web apps are an order of magnitude snappier and more responsive when running on Chrome. This will be especially valuable on mobile devices.
Don't you think other sites would have to at least consider using Dart to get the same effect for their Chrome users? Chrome is big enough to make it worthwhile for many sites, especially since compilation to Javascript means they still only have to maintain one codebase, and they can even make the conversion incrementally. And of course, if Chrome users are getting a huge speedup from Dart-enabled sites, it's going to make sense for the other browsers to implement it as well (and Google will be happy to help them to so).
I don't know if Dart is going to be successful, but (a) it really doesn't have to be supported by all browsers to be useful (as long as compilation to Javascript is reliable) and (b) there's a very plausible, incremental, path forward to a Dart-only web.
...theirs seems like the right approach. It is certainly a better one than Dart.
It has completely different goals from Dart. It's not "better", it's just trying to solve a different problem.
Dart's ultimate goal is to replace Javascript with something faster. Google's V8 Javascript engine has shown the industry that Javascript can be a lot faster than most of us expected was possible, and it has pushed the competitors to make theirs faster as well, but the Dart developers believe that code written in a language that is as purely dynamic as Javascript simply can't be optimized to the same degree as that written in a language which allows the run-time to make more assumptions about what the code is going to do. Along the way, Dart also tries to make the code easier to read and write (and succeeds), and to provide more structure to help IDEs, but that's not the primary goal. One source of confusion is that Dart can be compiled to Javascript, but that's a compatibility hack. The goal is to have all browsers natively running Dart code in highly-optimized Dart engines, making the code an order of magnitude faster (in theory).
Typescript, on the other hand, appears to be all about making Javascript easier to read and write, including allowing you to tell your IDE about the structure of your code so it can help you more. But the run-time doesn't benefit from the annotations, so from a performance perspective it's still just Javascript.
Dart is about making the web a computing platform capable of rivaling native applications in terms of performance, power and usability, while bettering native applications in terms of ease of deployment and management. Typescript is about making it easier to do the things web applications already do. Both have laudable goals, but they're different goals.
Society's interests surely outweigh any business's, no?
Which is exactly why businesses must be allowed to fail. In the short term it might be more painful for society, but in the long run society benefits from businessmen knowing that they will bear the consequences of their decisions.
But that is anti-competitive. It's not a matter anymore of who produced more, or how efficiently. In fact those who bet on what would be a normal, competitive free-market price might not actually have done very well.
It is a matter of who BET on what the futures would do, and who came out on top. But it's that ANTICIPATED FUTURE VALUE that was bet on (which is why they're called "futures" in the first place).
Again: that's gambling. And I don't mean "taking risks", I mean actual gambling.
Not for the farmers.
The whole point of futures and derivatives is to transfer risk from those who can't bear it to those who want it. Farmers need stability; they need to be able to cover their costs and make a profit in good years and bad, and they need to know before they plant that they're going to be able to get a reasonable price for their crops. Futures allow them to offload their risk. It's not cost-free... on average they'll make less money than if they sold at market prices, but it's a good deal for them.
On the other side, the speculators who buy the futures are in a position to accept risk in exchange for potential gain. They can bear the losses they take when prices decline, and they want to profit from what they make when prices rise. Over the long run, if they price the futures accurately, they'll also earn the premium that the farmers effectively pay to buy stability.
When all of this is done by people who know what they're doing, it's not gambling at all. The farmers know what they're getting: reduced risk for reduced profits. The speculators, meanwhile, are "gambling" the way a casino "gambles"... they may win or lose on a given hand, but the percentages are tilted in their favor over the long run.
Not only does this arrangement make sense for both sides, it actually provides the market with stability and tends to smooth out price fluctuations over time.
Futures are a Good Thing. Period.
Most derivatives serve the same purposes in their respective markets. Granted that some instruments are so insanely complex and so far removed from the underlying business that they truly are gambles -- or even swindles -- but that's not the case with the ones that stick around decade after decade.
With the endgame being <insert scary music here> to show you an ad you find interesting... or perhaps no ad at all if the "stalking" determines that you're not really interested in anything right now.
Yeah, doesn't sound much like "stalking" to me... stalking is a predatory activity that ends in attacking the prey.
Mind you, I have no objection to tools that enable you to inform such advertisers that you don't want to be tracked, but the overblown rhetoric really doesn't help your case.
I'd actually like to see another flag, analogous to "do not track" which is "do not advertise". That seems like a more equitable solution to the whole issue than ad-block. Then web site owners could decide whether to show you content without ads or no content. Similarly, I won't be surprised if some sites decide to honor DNT by loading up the page with flashy low-value ads, vs displaying discreet, targeted high-value ads. Then everyone can choose appropriate settings and the browsers and web servers can effectively do a quick negotiation.