We're not suckers. You're a business. If you can make more by raising rates, you will. That's an absolute given. The only reason any business led by someone with a brain doesn't raise rates is because it will cost them money because people will leave. The FCC told you no because your proposed merger would significantly reduce consumers' options to do just that. Leave.
The irony is I, and a lot of others, are only your customer because you had an iphone exclusive. In other words, you had a deal to suppress competition. I am ditching you soon and going to Verizon now that that's over and it's about new phone time.
I may sound anti ATT, but I'm not. Just give me good service and as good a deal or better than your competition and I'll be delighted to stay your customer. Unfortunately, that's not what you've done, and not what you're trying to do. You're trying to limit my options so I have to be your customer. That alone is reason to leave.
Well, because you ticket the driver, not the car. You might be ticketing the driver for mechanical faults (lights out, etc), or legal deficiencies like expired tags. You might be pulling the car over because it's been reported stolen, or the perhaps there's a warrant out for the owner of the car and the stop is to see if the owner is driving.
The difference is huge. The percentages are similar, but the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Venus is incredibly higher than the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Mars. That pressure bit matters a lot.
Yep, you are completely wrong on this one. When you download, you make a copy on your computer. That is a violation. It has nothing to do with the MPAA or RIAA. The law says no copy without permission except for fair use, and you're copying without permission in a way that's not covered by fair use. Game over.
It is credible. Hiking's not my passion, but in mine there are "places to go" that are considered way better that what you can find in the US. If you've advanced far enough in your sport and want to push the limits ever further, you have to go to places that are dangerous. The danger you intend to face is environmental, but the countries that happen to house them also contain political dangers, as in your country hates my country.
It's completely plausible. It's also possible they're spies, but it seems like a really dumb cover story. I don't speculate which is true because without direct info I can only say both are possible.
You want to create a law in the U.S. that regulates what people in other countries do. You can't do that. You have to quit your job, move there, get elected to THEIR legislature, and change THEIR laws. Hope that helps. Please leave the country now so you can accomplish this.
And more seriously, what people SHOULD be willing to do is come out publicly and say, "Yes, I voted against the Prevent Child Porn Act of 2012 because Senator So and So and Rep Wasserface pulled a sleazy move and tacked COMPLETELY UNRELATED legislation on to it. It's regrettable that So and So and Wasserface compromised a good bill like the PCP act by tacking trash onto it. I'll happily vote for a trash free bill."
That is interesting, and would be a different case, IMO. It's not Andrea masquerading as Tony or vice versa, it's Tony AND Andrea. Much like the bit of junk mail I just shredded isn't from Joe Blow, Marketing Pesterer, Verisign, Inc., it's just from Verisign.
I have no problem with identity not meaning an individual human being. I think there are even reasonable cases for pseudonyms (this is one, obviously) or willful deception ("Hi, I'm from the CIA and I'm here to infiltrate you" doesn't go over well.). I just think it's silly to hand over the ability to pretend to be you as some form of demonstrating trust to your partner.
Stop being so cynical. I gave my GF my Facebook password because it felt good that I can trust her with it and vice versa.
It has nothing to do with cynicism, it has to do with what having authenticators means. It means you've authorized your GF to BE you on facebook, to read your friends' info, who may not have chosen to share it with her, to send messages as if they're written by you. It seems a silly thing to do to me unless you intend those things to happen.
"Sharing" finances isn't really the same thing. You still have your own unique identity. You don't go around as this indivisible mrandmrsbrainzach, you wander the financial world as your own individuals with your own financial identities which are linked in some ways. That's entirely reasonable. What you're doing is giving the future mrs a brainzach costume to wear into the bank to appear to be you.
This is actually not true. The apathetic don't vote at all. What you have to worry about are the pathetic voters. Those who care enough to go throw a ballot in the box, but do unwise or ill-informed things with them.
I totally believe that if you produce something you should be paid for your efforts, and that if someone steals that work and is caught doing it, that they should be punished in proportion to the crime.
Very true. Where many people blow it is confusing "in proportion to the crime" with "in proportion to the retail price of the thing". If you want to say that the penalty for illegally downloading somebody's 99 cent song should be comparable to the penalty for stealing a pack of gum, I could go along with that. Yes, I know copyright violation is not stealing, let's not rehash that. When people say the penalty should be 99 cents, they're off their rocker as there is plainly zero disincentive to follow the law. In fact, there's a net incentive in the amount of 99 cents * the probability you won't get caught.
Once upon a time, I had a newborn in the hospital. Bizarrely, all the nurses acted coldly towards me. I say bizarrely, because it wasn't my first time and pretty much everyone in the hospital is nice to you when you're having a baby. I saw a note on the tag that had two terms on it EtOH and something I've since forgotten. Well, knowing a little more than nothing, I figured EtOH was ethanol, or the kind of alcohol you drink. WTF? Why was that there? I inquired, and found that it indicated the mother had been drinking during the pregnancy. The term I forgot meant she'd been abusing narcotics. Being married to the mom, I knew it wasn't true and hit the roof. Demanded it be taken off. Wanted to know where the hell they got that from. It took frustrating DAYS to sort out during which they refused to remove it, with the unhelpful, but ultimately apologetic nursing staff. You see, there was a transcription error. The transcription record said "History of alcohol and narcotic abuse." You can guess what word they dropped. "No." As in "No history of alcohol and narcotic abuse. When I made them go back and check again, they found the mistake, but by then we'd been discharged after a couple days of being treated like bad parents.
As a doctor, I really think of your medical record as mine
Interesting. As a sometime software developer and systems architect, I like to think of the systems, software or otherwise, that I've created are mine. Thankfully, law has a more rational approach and they're not. They are work for hire. Consequently, people are willing to employ me secure in the knowledge that the work they pay me to do belongs to them. Please explain why, when I pay YOU to figure out what's wrong with my body, YOUR work product is different than mine.
Nah, I disagree. Metrics are useful when you're measuring work where you can quantifiably distinguish good work from bad. Yes, yes, yes, that's a hard thing to do. Solving that problem should be one reason we pay managers well. Done properly, it's actually a hard job. Done poorly, you're just filling out TPS reports to fill a filing cabinet.
I've worked with top developers and ones who'd struggle with Hello World. You're saying there's no way we can actually measure a difference between those people. It's simply not true. If you give developer A an easy task and developer B a complex one, and B solves the problem with a defect-free solution in a month while developer A putters around with it for a year, you can't find a way to make a number that says B good, A bad?
Of course people will game the system. The thing is, if you can make your numbers better without accomplishing my REAL goal, I've set up the system wrong.
It may not be worth doing, though. Measuring costs something, both in money, productivity, and potentially demotivating your staff, who actually want to do something, not spend their time being measured. So there's two things we tend to do badly: choose the right thing to measure, and understand when it's not cost effective to measure at all.
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible. Lines of code written is a really bad metric.
I've seen the ticket one happen too many times. Someone will call because n people are having a problem, and ask if the hell desk person wants the info on the other people so they can get fixed, too. Nope. Have them call and open tickets. More tickets with simple, known solutions == more tickets closed quickly.
And yeah, the same is true of teachers. Teachers *should* be judged on their effectiveness, but the way we do it is often nonsense. Don't ask me to come up with the method, the one thing I DO know is that someone with no experience in the field (me) should not be the one divining metrics to measure them. That said, we've all been through school, and some of us have put kids through school. You know some teachers are better than others, and some are really bad. We do want to find ways to encourage all of them to be better and to get the worst to go do something else. There are also fit issues between teachers and children. The teacher you found to be great for your kid might be average or bad for mine.
I think this is true, and the worse offenders are those who think code can document itself. In all but simple cases, it can't. My pet example is that code can at best document what it does, not what it's supposed to do. If I write comments to indicate what a function/section of code/etc is supposed to do, you can check it later to see if it really does. I had a nightmarish problem with OpenBSD locking up on me that proved impossible to debug because I was following a twisty little maze of functions, none of which actually said what they were supposed to do.
Well, let me start. First off, the house is paid off by one person, sometimes two. It's built by a lot more than that. According to this, it's more like 2 man-years: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=301378. You ignore the materials costs as well, and they take time to make. You're also paying something for the property. Note how if someone razes a house, the underlying property gets a lot cheaper, but isn't free. Finally, we want a $200,000 house, but only want to spend $1,000 on the mortgage, which means you have to finance it for 30 years. Borrowing someone else's $200,000 for 30 years costs, oh, about $200,000.
To your other point, that we should evaluate what we're actually working for, I couldn't agree more. We mostly buy big houses to impress other people with big houses, and nice cars because we don't want to be embarrassed in front of people with nice cars. In economic downturns, I'd much rather cut my hours back to 37/week than see millions unemployed. Practical? Probably not, but maybe we should be looking for solutions that aren't 40+ hours a week or zero.
The problem with these is that as soon as they have any value at all, there will be a thriving market in having someone else earn the badge for you. I don't have any problem with distance education or self-teaching at all. It even works really well IF the person is actually motivated to learn the subject, but if they're just doing it to check off some HR drone's boxes, it's not going to work.
The really neat thing about brain teasers or puzzles or the bizarre questions you sometimes encounter like "How many pigeons are there is Manhattan" is that they are a very good way to judge someone's unstructured problem solving ability. How someone approaches this kind of a problem is a good proxy for their ability to debug hard technical issues or their problem solving ability in general.
This is really not true. My response to questions like that improved dramatically when I read an article that explained questions way out of left field like that are intended to test your problem solving ability, so do your best to estimate an answer and explain your thought process. Reading that article didn't make me better at debugging hard technical issues, but made me dramatically better at handling off-the-wall interview questions nimbly. You're not measuring what you think you're measuring.
I know people really use this legal theory, but it's utter nonsense. When you do something on a US web site, do you bother with whether it complies with Chinese law? Cuban? Afghani? Should you? Of course not. The mere fact of plugging a network cable into something should not make it subject to the laws of every jurisdiction on the planet.
His product fits my definition of freemium. You can get a letter free, or a better letter for more. I don't think it has to be micro-transaction based.
That said, his conclusions don't fly without knowing how many paying customers and non-paying customers he had. So he got 20 questions from paying questions and "hundreds" from non-paying. Well, if he had 5-50 times as many non-paying customers, that's completely unsurprising.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I'm a customer, so this would impact me.
We're not suckers. You're a business. If you can make more by raising rates, you will. That's an absolute given. The only reason any business led by someone with a brain doesn't raise rates is because it will cost them money because people will leave. The FCC told you no because your proposed merger would significantly reduce consumers' options to do just that. Leave.
The irony is I, and a lot of others, are only your customer because you had an iphone exclusive. In other words, you had a deal to suppress competition. I am ditching you soon and going to Verizon now that that's over and it's about new phone time.
I may sound anti ATT, but I'm not. Just give me good service and as good a deal or better than your competition and I'll be delighted to stay your customer. Unfortunately, that's not what you've done, and not what you're trying to do. You're trying to limit my options so I have to be your customer. That alone is reason to leave.
Well, because you ticket the driver, not the car. You might be ticketing the driver for mechanical faults (lights out, etc), or legal deficiencies like expired tags. You might be pulling the car over because it's been reported stolen, or the perhaps there's a warrant out for the owner of the car and the stop is to see if the owner is driving.
Lots of valid reasons.
The difference is huge. The percentages are similar, but the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Venus is incredibly higher than the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Mars. That pressure bit matters a lot.
The Sun is responsible for the heating. The atmosphere is responsible for keeping the heat in. Which is called....the greenhouse effect!
It's also why Venus is hotter than a much closer Mercury, and why Venus doesn't have a hot and cold side in spite of rotating rather slowly.
Yep, you are completely wrong on this one. When you download, you make a copy on your computer. That is a violation. It has nothing to do with the MPAA or RIAA. The law says no copy without permission except for fair use, and you're copying without permission in a way that's not covered by fair use. Game over.
It is credible. Hiking's not my passion, but in mine there are "places to go" that are considered way better that what you can find in the US. If you've advanced far enough in your sport and want to push the limits ever further, you have to go to places that are dangerous. The danger you intend to face is environmental, but the countries that happen to house them also contain political dangers, as in your country hates my country.
It's completely plausible. It's also possible they're spies, but it seems like a really dumb cover story. I don't speculate which is true because without direct info I can only say both are possible.
You want to create a law in the U.S. that regulates what people in other countries do. You can't do that. You have to quit your job, move there, get elected to THEIR legislature, and change THEIR laws. Hope that helps. Please leave the country now so you can accomplish this.
And more seriously, what people SHOULD be willing to do is come out publicly and say, "Yes, I voted against the Prevent Child Porn Act of 2012 because Senator So and So and Rep Wasserface pulled a sleazy move and tacked COMPLETELY UNRELATED legislation on to it. It's regrettable that So and So and Wasserface compromised a good bill like the PCP act by tacking trash onto it. I'll happily vote for a trash free bill."
That is interesting, and would be a different case, IMO. It's not Andrea masquerading as Tony or vice versa, it's Tony AND Andrea. Much like the bit of junk mail I just shredded isn't from Joe Blow, Marketing Pesterer, Verisign, Inc., it's just from Verisign.
I have no problem with identity not meaning an individual human being. I think there are even reasonable cases for pseudonyms (this is one, obviously) or willful deception ("Hi, I'm from the CIA and I'm here to infiltrate you" doesn't go over well.). I just think it's silly to hand over the ability to pretend to be you as some form of demonstrating trust to your partner.
It has nothing to do with cynicism, it has to do with what having authenticators means. It means you've authorized your GF to BE you on facebook, to read your friends' info, who may not have chosen to share it with her, to send messages as if they're written by you. It seems a silly thing to do to me unless you intend those things to happen.
"Sharing" finances isn't really the same thing. You still have your own unique identity. You don't go around as this indivisible mrandmrsbrainzach, you wander the financial world as your own individuals with your own financial identities which are linked in some ways. That's entirely reasonable. What you're doing is giving the future mrs a brainzach costume to wear into the bank to appear to be you.
This is actually not true. The apathetic don't vote at all. What you have to worry about are the pathetic voters. Those who care enough to go throw a ballot in the box, but do unwise or ill-informed things with them.
Very true. Where many people blow it is confusing "in proportion to the crime" with "in proportion to the retail price of the thing". If you want to say that the penalty for illegally downloading somebody's 99 cent song should be comparable to the penalty for stealing a pack of gum, I could go along with that. Yes, I know copyright violation is not stealing, let's not rehash that. When people say the penalty should be 99 cents, they're off their rocker as there is plainly zero disincentive to follow the law. In fact, there's a net incentive in the amount of 99 cents * the probability you won't get caught.
Once upon a time, I had a newborn in the hospital. Bizarrely, all the nurses acted coldly towards me. I say bizarrely, because it wasn't my first time and pretty much everyone in the hospital is nice to you when you're having a baby. I saw a note on the tag that had two terms on it EtOH and something I've since forgotten. Well, knowing a little more than nothing, I figured EtOH was ethanol, or the kind of alcohol you drink. WTF? Why was that there? I inquired, and found that it indicated the mother had been drinking during the pregnancy. The term I forgot meant she'd been abusing narcotics. Being married to the mom, I knew it wasn't true and hit the roof. Demanded it be taken off. Wanted to know where the hell they got that from. It took frustrating DAYS to sort out during which they refused to remove it, with the unhelpful, but ultimately apologetic nursing staff. You see, there was a transcription error. The transcription record said "History of alcohol and narcotic abuse." You can guess what word they dropped. "No." As in "No history of alcohol and narcotic abuse. When I made them go back and check again, they found the mistake, but by then we'd been discharged after a couple days of being treated like bad parents.
Sounds like the former to me, too. I don't want medical providers sugar coating or outright lying to me. Give it to me straight, doc.
Interesting. As a sometime software developer and systems architect, I like to think of the systems, software or otherwise, that I've created are mine. Thankfully, law has a more rational approach and they're not. They are work for hire. Consequently, people are willing to employ me secure in the knowledge that the work they pay me to do belongs to them. Please explain why, when I pay YOU to figure out what's wrong with my body, YOUR work product is different than mine.
Nah, I disagree. Metrics are useful when you're measuring work where you can quantifiably distinguish good work from bad. Yes, yes, yes, that's a hard thing to do. Solving that problem should be one reason we pay managers well. Done properly, it's actually a hard job. Done poorly, you're just filling out TPS reports to fill a filing cabinet.
I've worked with top developers and ones who'd struggle with Hello World. You're saying there's no way we can actually measure a difference between those people. It's simply not true. If you give developer A an easy task and developer B a complex one, and B solves the problem with a defect-free solution in a month while developer A putters around with it for a year, you can't find a way to make a number that says B good, A bad?
Of course people will game the system. The thing is, if you can make your numbers better without accomplishing my REAL goal, I've set up the system wrong.
It may not be worth doing, though. Measuring costs something, both in money, productivity, and potentially demotivating your staff, who actually want to do something, not spend their time being measured. So there's two things we tend to do badly: choose the right thing to measure, and understand when it's not cost effective to measure at all.
Metrics aren't bad in themselves, but bad metrics are terrible. Lines of code written is a really bad metric.
I've seen the ticket one happen too many times. Someone will call because n people are having a problem, and ask if the hell desk person wants the info on the other people so they can get fixed, too. Nope. Have them call and open tickets. More tickets with simple, known solutions == more tickets closed quickly.
And yeah, the same is true of teachers. Teachers *should* be judged on their effectiveness, but the way we do it is often nonsense. Don't ask me to come up with the method, the one thing I DO know is that someone with no experience in the field (me) should not be the one divining metrics to measure them. That said, we've all been through school, and some of us have put kids through school. You know some teachers are better than others, and some are really bad. We do want to find ways to encourage all of them to be better and to get the worst to go do something else. There are also fit issues between teachers and children. The teacher you found to be great for your kid might be average or bad for mine.
I think this is true, and the worse offenders are those who think code can document itself. In all but simple cases, it can't. My pet example is that code can at best document what it does, not what it's supposed to do. If I write comments to indicate what a function/section of code/etc is supposed to do, you can check it later to see if it really does. I had a nightmarish problem with OpenBSD locking up on me that proved impossible to debug because I was following a twisty little maze of functions, none of which actually said what they were supposed to do.
Well, let me start. First off, the house is paid off by one person, sometimes two. It's built by a lot more than that. According to this, it's more like 2 man-years: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=301378. You ignore the materials costs as well, and they take time to make. You're also paying something for the property. Note how if someone razes a house, the underlying property gets a lot cheaper, but isn't free. Finally, we want a $200,000 house, but only want to spend $1,000 on the mortgage, which means you have to finance it for 30 years. Borrowing someone else's $200,000 for 30 years costs, oh, about $200,000.
To your other point, that we should evaluate what we're actually working for, I couldn't agree more. We mostly buy big houses to impress other people with big houses, and nice cars because we don't want to be embarrassed in front of people with nice cars. In economic downturns, I'd much rather cut my hours back to 37/week than see millions unemployed. Practical? Probably not, but maybe we should be looking for solutions that aren't 40+ hours a week or zero.
The problem with these is that as soon as they have any value at all, there will be a thriving market in having someone else earn the badge for you. I don't have any problem with distance education or self-teaching at all. It even works really well IF the person is actually motivated to learn the subject, but if they're just doing it to check off some HR drone's boxes, it's not going to work.
Speaking as one, no, I don't find DUI checkpoint reasonable at all. I consider it a search without cause.
Kind of interesting, but not at all virtual reality. It's a simple data visualization.
This is really not true. My response to questions like that improved dramatically when I read an article that explained questions way out of left field like that are intended to test your problem solving ability, so do your best to estimate an answer and explain your thought process. Reading that article didn't make me better at debugging hard technical issues, but made me dramatically better at handling off-the-wall interview questions nimbly. You're not measuring what you think you're measuring.
I know people really use this legal theory, but it's utter nonsense. When you do something on a US web site, do you bother with whether it complies with Chinese law? Cuban? Afghani? Should you? Of course not. The mere fact of plugging a network cable into something should not make it subject to the laws of every jurisdiction on the planet.
His product fits my definition of freemium. You can get a letter free, or a better letter for more. I don't think it has to be micro-transaction based.
That said, his conclusions don't fly without knowing how many paying customers and non-paying customers he had. So he got 20 questions from paying questions and "hundreds" from non-paying. Well, if he had 5-50 times as many non-paying customers, that's completely unsurprising.