Facebook and its apps work exactly as advertised. It is a site that's ALL ABOUT SHARING INFORMATION, and guess what, that's what it does. When you take a quiz or use an app, it tells you you're granting it access to lots of stuff. I forget the exact wording, but none of this is a surprise. It takes all of a few minutes looking through the developer docs to see that if you write an app, you get access to, well, yeah, everything.
The problem here is that some people sign up on a site that exists to share personal information, run apps that give away personal information and tell you they're doing it, and are then surprised.
Your sunk cost argument is compelling, but sunk costs is a decision concept, not a pricing one. Fixed costs are also sunk, for example. We build a multi-billion dollar processor fab, now we're going to produce CPUs. That fab is a sunk cost. You can't get it back. If you don't include it in your pricing analysis, you'll quite rapidly be out of business.
You're certainly right that a business will charge the price that maximizes profit. When your costs increase, that profit maximizing price changes. If your product cost was $31 before and the fine bumped it to $46, you're losing money selling at $45. Will you make money (or lose less) selling at $60? It depends on the demand curve. Maybe. For price-inelastic goods, yes, you'll make more. Why weren't you charging $60 before? Maybe at a price point of $55, it becomes attractive for smaller players to get into the market and you wanted to avoid that while you could. Now you can't, unless you choose to lose money. A company's marketing strategy is a lot more than cost and profit maximizing price.
Things will remain free because that's what the marginal cost drives them to.
While we all like the sound of this, it's fundamentally wrong. The marginal cost is small, not zero. Disregarding that, there are fixed costs which must be paid.
Imagine a hypothetical reporter who writes a story. It's a tiny story, so let's say it takes just $100 to pay all the costs associated with producing this story. We slap it on some website where a million people view it for free. Our cost to provide it to the million and first? Quite close to zero. Easily arguable at less than a cent, so we charge nothing. Net revenue? Zero. Net cost? $100.
If this was your business, would you produce another story? Of course not. Revenue has to come from -somewhere- to cover the $100 and make a profit, or the sensible business will just stop doing it.
Such settlement terms are par for the course if you sue them. But if you ask for a refund? Just a "Hey, this thing you sold me blew up. Can I have my money back?" incurs a lifetime of legal liability if I tell anyone about it?
May as well just sue them then, get a judgment, and be able to tell everyone about it. Or tell the world and then demand your refund (which you're still entitled to).
The notion of debt to society is fallacious. Some crimes carry a cost to the victim that is never repaid. In the minor cases, like a relative of mine whose house was burglarized, they'll never again feel quite the same level of security. Putting someone in jail for a little while won't bring that back. It is not as simple as "Go to jail for a while, and the scales are again balanced." That is all the more starkly true in the case of violent crime. There was a story in the news a while back about a teen who seriously beat an elderly couple and tried to rape the wife. Or succeeded, I don't recall. The victims don't have forever to recover and get back to a normal life. Their children and extended families suffered the wounds of having their parents victimized. How do you fix that? You don't. It will never be all good again. It's a tough notion that we can cause permanent harm and never be able to set it right, but it's true.
If you had a daughter, you would most certainly not feel like the person who was a sex offender in jail last week is not a threat anymore just because he was released yesterday.
The point of a prison sentence is deterrence. Don't do bad things or you'll go to jail. The point of a prison sentence is isolation. People who do bad things don't get to be around the rest of us, who don't want bad things done to us.
Which very quickly becomes a question of which is a better engine for innovation: private industry or government?
The profit motive, however much it offends some purists's instincts, works. Drug companies will create the drugs that make a lot of money. Why do they make a lot of money? Because a lot of people want them, implying they treat a condition that a lot of people have, and because people are willing to pay a lot of money for them, meaning they're for a condition people really want treated. Capitalism selects the problems we really care about. Government is vulnerable to special interests, lobbyists, and public demonstrations.
Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
The parasitic case that gets everyone's back up is when some guy gets a simple idea, often one that either 1,000 people already had and didn't patent because it was trivial and not patent worthy, and patents it. There is no societal benefit to giving a pot of gold to the first person to think of something when -anyone- faced with the same problem would design a substantially similar solution at a cost of next to nothing. Beneficial things that cost nearly nothing to think up will continue to be produced because they're part of doing your job or running your business.
Seconded. The problem with patents is not their exclusivity. It's not the people get to make money from their ideas. The problem is that people get exclusive rights to make money off commonplace ideas that anyone faced with the problem would think of. This should not happen. Patents are allegedly only available for novel and non-obvious inventions. The problem is that obvious inventions are being granted patents.
Perhaps that was just speculation on the part of the submitter.
Curing cancer entails the difficult process of getting all the people who have cancer today to not have it later (short of dying). A radioprotectant will not make cancer go away. It also won't prevent new cancers, since radiation is not the only cause.
Bingo. "Some of these aftermarket batteries" are bad. Therefore you MUST use Panasonic ones, in spite of the fact that some other batteries are just fine. Do you buy that? I don't.
Your argument is fallacious, or at least short sighted. If it's not wrong to tie products in this way, every camera will ultimately require batteries made by its manufacturer. By your argument, nobody's forced to play the game, but no one can choose not to once everyone does it. Printer cartridges are just a ways farther down this path.
If you want this consumer's business, make a camera that fits my needs best, and a battery that fits my needs best, and I'll happily buy both from you. When you make a camera that can only use your brand of $COMMODITY_PRODUCT for specious reasons, it's a strike against your camera in my eyes. Maybe not as big as "takes crappy pictures", but stack a Panasonic with batttery-lock-in against something else without, and I'm buying the something else. I just don't like being played with like that. i don't like setting myself up to get taken advantage of later.
No, it is a problem because they're stifling my ability to choose what battery to use and positioning themselves as monopolist. Simple economics will show you that the ideal price point for a monopolist is higher than a competitive market. I'd rather not be screwed for no good reason. The "problem" Panasonic is claiming to solve is not their problem. If I buy an allegedly unsafe battery, why is that their problem at all? I can accept a disclaimer of warranty for some 3rd party batteries IF they have reproducible evidence of a problem, like CheapyVolts batteries burst into flames when used in Panasonic cameras. Fine. If I use CheapyVolts batteries anyway and my camera catches on fire, Panasonic can be off the hook on the warranty.
No, you don't get to dictate I can only use your batteries if you want me to buy your camera. Sorry. Try again.
Ya know, the term usually isn't one day. I don't mind so much saying "Yes, I'd like all that THIS year, too." Even an auto-renew option is fine. Just not buried in the legalese that as a practical matter, anyone who isn't hopelessly naive or completely full of crap knows nobody reads. At least nobody that's not paid to (and yes, I do, when I'm paid to).
Now that I think about it, the dead-tree magazines I subscribe to stop coming if I don't say I still want them.
That's actually a very good point. If you're the end user, just make sure you're angry with the right people. Often the IT guys aren't the ones who make the policies that annoy you so much. Often they are the ones who are failing to do their jobs if they don't enforce those policies.
The problem is that you chose to take on someone else's problem--that they can't figure out *sjrc*@otherdomain.tld is not you. You're not obliged to solve that, which is handy, since you can't.
I also have to point out that your involvement in this debacle makes your.sig a work of art. Well done.:)
...they keep saying that in $SMALL_NUM years we'll be out of IP addresses, and $SMALL_NUM years goes by without incident. The sky persistently fails to fall.
Call it the peril of poor predictions, but I'm now officially not worried because the claims have so often been false.
I know he means well, but a license agreement grants rights. Copyright law does not. "Don't violate copyright law" doesn't grant you the right to use the software at all, so you need additional language that says you CAN use the software. Oh, wait, what does use mean? Can I use it on one computer or a billion? Need to specify that.
EULAs can certainly be simplified a lot, but not to four words. You need to clearly spell out what the user IS allowed to do that goes BEYOND their rights under law.
In a word, yes, you're being excessively paranoid. To be sure, there are bits of information you don't publicize. but I don't think your name and where you work, just by themselves, meet that criteria unless you're in the CIA or something. Your social, your credit card numbers, address, home phone number, and all that, sure. Keep those to yourself. I don't understand why your name and where you work is such a great secret. I think you vastly overestimate the value of knowing the John Doe works for Regional Restaurant Chain.
It's rare that I say this in a security context, but loosen up a little.:)
Slashdot Mirror
hhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha!!!!
I'm sorry, a world full of countries that won't cooperate on most things is supposed to start because Microsoft wants them to?
Too funny.
Facebook and its apps work exactly as advertised. It is a site that's ALL ABOUT SHARING INFORMATION, and guess what, that's what it does. When you take a quiz or use an app, it tells you you're granting it access to lots of stuff. I forget the exact wording, but none of this is a surprise. It takes all of a few minutes looking through the developer docs to see that if you write an app, you get access to, well, yeah, everything.
The problem here is that some people sign up on a site that exists to share personal information, run apps that give away personal information and tell you they're doing it, and are then surprised.
Your sunk cost argument is compelling, but sunk costs is a decision concept, not a pricing one. Fixed costs are also sunk, for example. We build a multi-billion dollar processor fab, now we're going to produce CPUs. That fab is a sunk cost. You can't get it back. If you don't include it in your pricing analysis, you'll quite rapidly be out of business.
You're certainly right that a business will charge the price that maximizes profit. When your costs increase, that profit maximizing price changes. If your product cost was $31 before and the fine bumped it to $46, you're losing money selling at $45. Will you make money (or lose less) selling at $60? It depends on the demand curve. Maybe. For price-inelastic goods, yes, you'll make more. Why weren't you charging $60 before? Maybe at a price point of $55, it becomes attractive for smaller players to get into the market and you wanted to avoid that while you could. Now you can't, unless you choose to lose money. A company's marketing strategy is a lot more than cost and profit maximizing price.
While we all like the sound of this, it's fundamentally wrong. The marginal cost is small, not zero. Disregarding that, there are fixed costs which must be paid.
Imagine a hypothetical reporter who writes a story. It's a tiny story, so let's say it takes just $100 to pay all the costs associated with producing this story. We slap it on some website where a million people view it for free. Our cost to provide it to the million and first? Quite close to zero. Easily arguable at less than a cent, so we charge nothing. Net revenue? Zero. Net cost? $100.
If this was your business, would you produce another story? Of course not. Revenue has to come from -somewhere- to cover the $100 and make a profit, or the sensible business will just stop doing it.
Such settlement terms are par for the course if you sue them. But if you ask for a refund? Just a "Hey, this thing you sold me blew up. Can I have my money back?" incurs a lifetime of legal liability if I tell anyone about it?
May as well just sue them then, get a judgment, and be able to tell everyone about it. Or tell the world and then demand your refund (which you're still entitled to).
Disingenuous at best.
The notion of debt to society is fallacious. Some crimes carry a cost to the victim that is never repaid. In the minor cases, like a relative of mine whose house was burglarized, they'll never again feel quite the same level of security. Putting someone in jail for a little while won't bring that back. It is not as simple as "Go to jail for a while, and the scales are again balanced." That is all the more starkly true in the case of violent crime. There was a story in the news a while back about a teen who seriously beat an elderly couple and tried to rape the wife. Or succeeded, I don't recall. The victims don't have forever to recover and get back to a normal life. Their children and extended families suffered the wounds of having their parents victimized. How do you fix that? You don't. It will never be all good again. It's a tough notion that we can cause permanent harm and never be able to set it right, but it's true.
If you had a daughter, you would most certainly not feel like the person who was a sex offender in jail last week is not a threat anymore just because he was released yesterday.
The point of a prison sentence is deterrence. Don't do bad things or you'll go to jail. The point of a prison sentence is isolation. People who do bad things don't get to be around the rest of us, who don't want bad things done to us.
Which very quickly becomes a question of which is a better engine for innovation: private industry or government?
The profit motive, however much it offends some purists's instincts, works. Drug companies will create the drugs that make a lot of money. Why do they make a lot of money? Because a lot of people want them, implying they treat a condition that a lot of people have, and because people are willing to pay a lot of money for them, meaning they're for a condition people really want treated. Capitalism selects the problems we really care about. Government is vulnerable to special interests, lobbyists, and public demonstrations.
Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
The parasitic case that gets everyone's back up is when some guy gets a simple idea, often one that either 1,000 people already had and didn't patent because it was trivial and not patent worthy, and patents it. There is no societal benefit to giving a pot of gold to the first person to think of something when -anyone- faced with the same problem would design a substantially similar solution at a cost of next to nothing. Beneficial things that cost nearly nothing to think up will continue to be produced because they're part of doing your job or running your business.
Seconded. The problem with patents is not their exclusivity. It's not the people get to make money from their ideas. The problem is that people get exclusive rights to make money off commonplace ideas that anyone faced with the problem would think of. This should not happen. Patents are allegedly only available for novel and non-obvious inventions. The problem is that obvious inventions are being granted patents.
No "The Cloud" is somebody else's $300 million data center.
That's all. Does it make sense to outsource all your operations or some of them to "The Cloud". Maybe. And sometimes.
Perhaps that was just speculation on the part of the submitter.
Curing cancer entails the difficult process of getting all the people who have cancer today to not have it later (short of dying). A radioprotectant will not make cancer go away. It also won't prevent new cancers, since radiation is not the only cause.
Bingo. "Some of these aftermarket batteries" are bad. Therefore you MUST use Panasonic ones, in spite of the fact that some other batteries are just fine. Do you buy that? I don't.
Your argument is fallacious, or at least short sighted. If it's not wrong to tie products in this way, every camera will ultimately require batteries made by its manufacturer. By your argument, nobody's forced to play the game, but no one can choose not to once everyone does it. Printer cartridges are just a ways farther down this path.
If you want this consumer's business, make a camera that fits my needs best, and a battery that fits my needs best, and I'll happily buy both from you. When you make a camera that can only use your brand of $COMMODITY_PRODUCT for specious reasons, it's a strike against your camera in my eyes. Maybe not as big as "takes crappy pictures", but stack a Panasonic with batttery-lock-in against something else without, and I'm buying the something else. I just don't like being played with like that. i don't like setting myself up to get taken advantage of later.
No, it is a problem because they're stifling my ability to choose what battery to use and positioning themselves as monopolist. Simple economics will show you that the ideal price point for a monopolist is higher than a competitive market. I'd rather not be screwed for no good reason. The "problem" Panasonic is claiming to solve is not their problem. If I buy an allegedly unsafe battery, why is that their problem at all? I can accept a disclaimer of warranty for some 3rd party batteries IF they have reproducible evidence of a problem, like CheapyVolts batteries burst into flames when used in Panasonic cameras. Fine. If I use CheapyVolts batteries anyway and my camera catches on fire, Panasonic can be off the hook on the warranty.
No, you don't get to dictate I can only use your batteries if you want me to buy your camera. Sorry. Try again.
It's rare I see a post that should be Score: 6. Well done.
Ya know, the term usually isn't one day. I don't mind so much saying "Yes, I'd like all that THIS year, too." Even an auto-renew option is fine. Just not buried in the legalese that as a practical matter, anyone who isn't hopelessly naive or completely full of crap knows nobody reads. At least nobody that's not paid to (and yes, I do, when I'm paid to).
Now that I think about it, the dead-tree magazines I subscribe to stop coming if I don't say I still want them.
That's actually a very good point. If you're the end user, just make sure you're angry with the right people. Often the IT guys aren't the ones who make the policies that annoy you so much. Often they are the ones who are failing to do their jobs if they don't enforce those policies.
Your analysis of geopolitical events would be more plausible if you spelled Korea korrectly.
The problem is that you chose to take on someone else's problem--that they can't figure out *sjrc*@otherdomain.tld is not you. You're not obliged to solve that, which is handy, since you can't.
I also have to point out that your involvement in this debacle makes your .sig a work of art. Well done. :)
...they keep saying that in $SMALL_NUM years we'll be out of IP addresses, and $SMALL_NUM years goes by without incident. The sky persistently fails to fall.
Call it the peril of poor predictions, but I'm now officially not worried because the claims have so often been false.
Can we say disingenuous?
Intellectual Property is a broad term that's come into being to describe old ideas. Patents and copyright aren't new at all.
That said, the base idea sounds like not allowing abuses of the system, which is fine by me.
Yeah, but do you know anyone who sued after signing a contract that stipulated arbitration would be used to resolve any disputes?
I do. The lawsuit was thrown out because they'd signed a contract agreeing to arbitration to resolve any disputes.
IANAL, but perhaps you should talk to one. I believe anything you intend or represent to be your signature legally IS your signature.
find me one federal agency that never tried to expand their power exponentially, often in the name of "the public good".
The IRS. At least, they don't claim it's for the public good. :P
I know he means well, but a license agreement grants rights. Copyright law does not. "Don't violate copyright law" doesn't grant you the right to use the software at all, so you need additional language that says you CAN use the software. Oh, wait, what does use mean? Can I use it on one computer or a billion? Need to specify that.
EULAs can certainly be simplified a lot, but not to four words. You need to clearly spell out what the user IS allowed to do that goes BEYOND their rights under law.
In a word, yes, you're being excessively paranoid. To be sure, there are bits of information you don't publicize. but I don't think your name and where you work, just by themselves, meet that criteria unless you're in the CIA or something. Your social, your credit card numbers, address, home phone number, and all that, sure. Keep those to yourself. I don't understand why your name and where you work is such a great secret. I think you vastly overestimate the value of knowing the John Doe works for Regional Restaurant Chain.
It's rare that I say this in a security context, but loosen up a little. :)