What's striking is that whenever these guys are challenged they display very characteristic behavior, producing indecipherable denials that border on the insane, and insulting those who challenge them.
And your answer, courtesy of/usr/games/fortune:
"Insanity is the final defense...it's hard to get a refund when the salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon."
Even then, if Jimbo is a follower of Rand, he's done about the exact opposite of her views.
Rand would look at Wikipedia and shudder. Wikipedia is the embodiment of altruism. People helping people for reasons other than to further their own status... sickening.
Rubbish. As well to say that Rand (or any Objectivist, for that matter) would disapprove of someone volunteering to help out on the local library council. Or promoting an effort to build a new library, for that matter.
Rather, the "exact oppposite" would be if he tried to compel others to build Wikipedia against their own wishes and interests. Or seek legal sanction against those who would not build it for him. Or to manipulative the weight of others to bear against some other encyclopedia group.
And she doesn't condemn altruism, she posits that there's no such thing as 'altruism' -- people do things because those things are in their interest to do, whether pragmatic or abstract. What she condemns is the elevation of a slavery/behavior compulsion ethic deceptively mislabeled as 'altruism' to a position of unchallengeable supremacy in an individual's decision-making process.
Surely that's what's needed in academic essays: students should show that they understand the strengths and weaknesses of sources, and can handle them. Dividing sources into two sets, the completely reliable and the completely unreliable, is surely misguided.
Precisely and well-said.
It's been longer than I care to admit since I've attended university. Something that seems to have changed in the interim is a move away from a strategy of comparing/contrasting information from multiple sources to synthesize a assertion (presumably exercising the researching student's own analytical abilities in the process) and towards the heavy dependence upon single-references to support any given proposition in a research piece. This is Bad Thing, in my not-so-humble opinion, and the professor in this case probably recognizes it as such.
Unfortunately, he's throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Wikipedia as a given source is probably little better or worse than many other potential sources. As a single source, its an unreliable reference for many things. It's value improves directly with the number and quality of other sources used to support/refute/flesh out whatever the researcher is citing.
The solution is not to ban outright use of Wikipedia as a reference authority, but rather for students to recognize that research papers whose sole information intake consists of several Wikipedia articles--and no other sources--are likely of inferior quality to papers attempting to synthesize from multiple sources, and that the resulting grades given their research will probably reflect this.
Per an earlier comment, the hurdle is not operational--they can do whatever investment they want with their cash. The hurdle is regulatory--those deposits made available are not considered their assets to control, or to use for investments benefitting their own operations.
Don't believe me? Here's the appropriate language from their terms of service:
2.1 Agency Relationship. PayPal acts as a facilitator to help you accept payments from and make payments to third parties. We act as your agent based upon your direction and your requests to use our Services that require us to perform tasks on your behalf. PayPal will at all times hold your funds separate from its corporate funds, will not use your funds for its operating expenses or any other corporate purposes, and will not voluntarily make funds available to its creditors in the event of bankruptcy or for any other purpose. You acknowledge that (i) PayPal is not a bank and the Service is a payment processing service rather than a banking service, and (ii) PayPal is not acting as a trustee, fiduciary or escrow with respect to your funds, but is acting only as an agent and custodian.
Note the specific disclaimer of a fiduciary relationship with you. Upstream of that, note the separation of funds from their corporate cash flows. Specific enough?
Their revenues are primarily service-fee based. You're paying someone with that money you're transferring, right? That someone (usually a merchant or fulfillment service of some sort) is going to have to pay them (PayPal) to facilitate the transfer of money from you the customer to that someone. Probably a percentage of transaction--I'm not intimately acquainted with their fee structure. Maybe some lurker with practical experience dealing with them can comment more specifically.
Their "genius", if you can call it that, is in presenting a merchant-bank-like deposit and transfer service, without having to deal with most of the regulatory hassles associated with a traditional merchant banking service.
There are other esoteric streams in their model, I'm sure, but the "fee for service" charged to merchants provides the overwhelming lion's share of their revenue.
Grossly simplified explanation: deposits made to PayPal accounts are considered neither revenues nor corporate controlled assets, from a cash accounting perspective, and because of that cannot be used to fund investments that will return revenue to PayPal. Registered financial institutions can make such investments, at the cost of considerable government nosiness into their affairs and a much more constrained operating environment.
In the typical case PayPal is not being paid per se when monies are transmitted to it. Rather, it's acting as a very limited management agent--it has no asset claim on those monies. It does, as we all painfully know, have considerable transfer and refund control on your deposits, per their terms of service. But they can't treat them as controlled assets--it's not their money to directly profit from.
Even though not regulated as a bank, their investment cash flows are subject to the same statutory control as anyone else's. About the best they could do would be to offer to invest it for you, return profits to you, then collect a "management" commission on the invested funds. In truth, however, that gets them perilously close to bank-dom and the associated governmental oversight, which they pretty clearly want to avoid.
In the meantime Paypal gets a nice fat interest on those funds.
Mod parent down--this is not accurate, let alone insightful. PayPal is not a registered financial institution (bank, savings/loan, credit union or any similar) and therefore unable to collect "float" interest on deposited monies.
This works two ways of course--as they are not a bank, the FDIC has less regulatory power over their daily operations than over more traditional financial institutions, hence reduced reporting requirements, transparency, sanction ability, etc. They do work with banks but are not a primary deposit institution themselves.
They've certainly got a well and truly lousy track record when it comes to funds release and management--but investment float isn't one of the drivers of this. Were it, there'd be a half-dozen regulatory institutions over them very quickly.
(And yes, I do speak from experience in the financial services industry, before the flamers start in...)
the whole idea has seen its day, and Star Trek should be buried alive...buried alive...buried alive...
Not at all; they haven't even meaningfully tapped the universe. What they have done is exhausted the "human space jockey" plotline.
All kinds of potential new stories still exist, just centered on one of the other major players. What about a Klingon centered series, for example? Or the backstory on the Vulcan/Romulan split? The origins of the Borg?
Plenty of interesting ideas--too bad no one will do anything that isn't a repeat of the previous however-many iterations of ST that have already aired.
Agreed on the Finder. I wouldn't hold my breath on a Cocoa port for Leopard, given that they just got the Quartz API's to a stable state in Tiger. I don't think they'll be able to get Cocoa-based performance near enough to the current Carbon-based one in one release. I'd love to be wrong, though.
And what idiot lists his "campus council" work in his bio once he's gotten his first job?
You're assuming he's had a real job before now....for my [limited] money, running around reviewing opinion polls for various politicos hardly qualifies as such.
"Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions, and it is perhaps the rhetoric of it all that will define the path. Web 2.0 can be the French Revolution of Technology or it can be the American Revolution of Technology. Joseph Schumpeter's winds of creative destruction are blowing especially hard in the Internet technology world today, with remarkable improvements to our daily lives. But these winds can blow too hard too often, and an even older economic law, the Law of Diminishing Returns, begins to take over. Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels."
Didn't we get rid of Jon Katz years ago? Who invited him back?
I'm old enough to remember those "earlier days". Don't recall any lawsuits, but I do recall my parents getting a couple calls to come in for a "conference" to discuss...well, a number of topics {grin}. Don't know if that qualifies as "responsible", but it certainly did qualify as "on notice" for my parents. And I would be "on notice" pretty quickly after that.
To read the article, it'd seem that the principal/district just went right down Tort Avenue, without trying to work directly with the parents. If that's the case, that's pretty sad.
Andif they did try the ol' conference route, what additional benefit will the lawsuit accomplish? Ego gratification?
Stupid thing for the kids to do in any event. Response doesn't sound very helpful though.
Draper thinks there's an opening for a startup that can deliver most of the benefits of standard Big Blue products without millions of lines of code or an army of consultants and IT managers. "I'm not sure yet what this company would look like," Draper says, "but it would not have the technology baggage of the entrenched monopolists. If it can penetrate the market cleverly like we did with Hotmail and Skype, it might not take that much funding."
What he'll invest: $3 million for a working application
And if the folks at Postgres are smart, they've just found a way to add $3MM to their foundation funds with a simple email...
Kidding aside, one thing that _would_ be interesting to see--high-quality, moderate cost OLAP analytics engines, preferably running ROLAP on top of an engine such as PostgreSQL. Maybe they're out there, but I don't see much of them (other than Mondrian). As the commercial OLAP market is structured now, it's hard for midsize companies to justify the outflow for decent analytics. No lack of demand though, just need something at the right price point...
A neighbor of mine (Yale '59) recalls 'IV' being used quite a bit to refer to the group of schools and believes it originated as a contraction of "Inter Varsity", the original agreement having nothing to do with academics, but rather with football scheduling...FWIW.
ITunes already can designate a track to be sold as "Album Only", where you have to buy the whole album playlist to get it. Technically at least, it would seem QED to just assemble an album playlist with all entries marked "Album Only"; problem solved!
Too bad the Wired people didn't ask why this wouldn't be acceptable.
A 926-word metaphor for what truly ails Microsoft: the company and its supporters spend more time defining and rationalizing why MS is great than they do making something great
You misspelled "Keep the Midwesterners out". That's what Google does best.
Y'know, I'm surprised I never see this brought up at all. Almost as if everything in the Mountain and Central time zones has a big "Dragons Be There..." drawn in on the map.
Not just the Midwest either--how many/few Google folks hail from the Southeast? Deep South?
It's not like the CE's from the U of I(llinois) are slouches. Or Purdue. Or Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice,....
And no, I'm not an alumn of any of the above. But it does seem pretty self-limiting to require a Stanford, Berkeley or MIT sheepskin as proof of brains.
If Donofrio, IBM's Grand Poo-Bah of Innovation and Technology, is really espousing this as the company line, innovators everywhere can now breath easier in knowing that their largest potential worldwide competitor, one with near-bottomless personnel and cash resources, will no longer be racing them to realize innovative ideas and technologies from the shadowy ether of "just how exactly does {x} work?".
The basic research space is [mostly] all yours now. Enjoy!
Slashdot Mirror
And your answer, courtesy of
"Insanity is the final defense...it's hard to get a refund when the salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon."
Rather, the "exact oppposite" would be if he tried to compel others to build Wikipedia against their own wishes and interests. Or seek legal sanction against those who would not build it for him. Or to manipulative the weight of others to bear against some other encyclopedia group.
And she doesn't condemn altruism, she posits that there's no such thing as 'altruism' -- people do things because those things are in their interest to do, whether pragmatic or abstract. What she condemns is the elevation of a slavery/behavior compulsion ethic deceptively mislabeled as 'altruism' to a position of unchallengeable supremacy in an individual's decision-making process.
It's been longer than I care to admit since I've attended university. Something that seems to have changed in the interim is a move away from a strategy of comparing/contrasting information from multiple sources to synthesize a assertion (presumably exercising the researching student's own analytical abilities in the process) and towards the heavy dependence upon single-references to support any given proposition in a research piece. This is Bad Thing, in my not-so-humble opinion, and the professor in this case probably recognizes it as such.
Unfortunately, he's throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Wikipedia as a given source is probably little better or worse than many other potential sources. As a single source, its an unreliable reference for many things. It's value improves directly with the number and quality of other sources used to support/refute/flesh out whatever the researcher is citing.
The solution is not to ban outright use of Wikipedia as a reference authority, but rather for students to recognize that research papers whose sole information intake consists of several Wikipedia articles--and no other sources--are likely of inferior quality to papers attempting to synthesize from multiple sources, and that the resulting grades given their research will probably reflect this.
Don't believe me? Here's the appropriate language from their terms of service:
Note the specific disclaimer of a fiduciary relationship with you. Upstream of that, note the separation of funds from their corporate cash flows. Specific enough?
Their revenues are primarily service-fee based. You're paying someone with that money you're transferring, right? That someone (usually a merchant or fulfillment service of some sort) is going to have to pay them (PayPal) to facilitate the transfer of money from you the customer to that someone. Probably a percentage of transaction--I'm not intimately acquainted with their fee structure. Maybe some lurker with practical experience dealing with them can comment more specifically.
Their "genius", if you can call it that, is in presenting a merchant-bank-like deposit and transfer service, without having to deal with most of the regulatory hassles associated with a traditional merchant banking service.
There are other esoteric streams in their model, I'm sure, but the "fee for service" charged to merchants provides the overwhelming lion's share of their revenue.
Grossly simplified explanation: deposits made to PayPal accounts are considered neither revenues nor corporate controlled assets, from a cash accounting perspective, and because of that cannot be used to fund investments that will return revenue to PayPal. Registered financial institutions can make such investments, at the cost of considerable government nosiness into their affairs and a much more constrained operating environment.
In the typical case PayPal is not being paid per se when monies are transmitted to it. Rather, it's acting as a very limited management agent--it has no asset claim on those monies. It does, as we all painfully know, have considerable transfer and refund control on your deposits, per their terms of service. But they can't treat them as controlled assets--it's not their money to directly profit from.
Even though not regulated as a bank, their investment cash flows are subject to the same statutory control as anyone else's. About the best they could do would be to offer to invest it for you, return profits to you, then collect a "management" commission on the invested funds. In truth, however, that gets them perilously close to bank-dom and the associated governmental oversight, which they pretty clearly want to avoid.
Mod parent down--this is not accurate, let alone insightful. PayPal is not a registered financial institution (bank, savings/loan, credit union or any similar) and therefore unable to collect "float" interest on deposited monies.
This works two ways of course--as they are not a bank, the FDIC has less regulatory power over their daily operations than over more traditional financial institutions, hence reduced reporting requirements, transparency, sanction ability, etc. They do work with banks but are not a primary deposit institution themselves.
They've certainly got a well and truly lousy track record when it comes to funds release and management--but investment float isn't one of the drivers of this. Were it, there'd be a half-dozen regulatory institutions over them very quickly.
(And yes, I do speak from experience in the financial services industry, before the flamers start in...)
new iMasters? This is Slashdot. We've been sucking on the Apple for donkey years.
...umm... new here.
You must be
(and, yes, I'm a Mac user...since the days when QuickDraw was considered state-of-the-art, so I've probably had a hand in this...sorry.)
...the iCheat
Not at all; they haven't even meaningfully tapped the universe. What they have done is exhausted the "human space jockey" plotline.
All kinds of potential new stories still exist, just centered on one of the other major players. What about a Klingon centered series, for example? Or the backstory on the Vulcan/Romulan split? The origins of the Borg?
Plenty of interesting ideas--too bad no one will do anything that isn't a repeat of the previous however-many iterations of ST that have already aired.
Agreed on the Finder. I wouldn't hold my breath on a Cocoa port for Leopard, given that they just got the Quartz API's to a stable state in Tiger. I don't think they'll be able to get Cocoa-based performance near enough to the current Carbon-based one in one release. I'd love to be wrong, though.
You're assuming he's had a real job before now....for my [limited] money, running around reviewing opinion polls for various politicos hardly qualifies as such.
Didn't we get rid of Jon Katz years ago? Who invited him back?
I'm old enough to remember those "earlier days". Don't recall any lawsuits, but I do recall my parents getting a couple calls to come in for a "conference" to discuss...well, a number of topics {grin}. Don't know if that qualifies as "responsible", but it certainly did qualify as "on notice" for my parents. And I would be "on notice" pretty quickly after that.
To read the article, it'd seem that the principal/district just went right down Tort Avenue, without trying to work directly with the parents. If that's the case, that's pretty sad.
Andif they did try the ol' conference route, what additional benefit will the lawsuit accomplish? Ego gratification?
Stupid thing for the kids to do in any event. Response doesn't sound very helpful though.
Draper thinks there's an opening for a startup that can deliver most of the benefits of standard Big Blue products without millions of lines of code or an army of consultants and IT managers. "I'm not sure yet what this company would look like," Draper says, "but it would not have the technology baggage of the entrenched monopolists. If it can penetrate the market cleverly like we did with Hotmail and Skype, it might not take that much funding."
What he'll invest: $3 million for a working application
And if the folks at Postgres are smart, they've just found a way to add $3MM to their foundation funds with a simple email...
Kidding aside, one thing that _would_ be interesting to see--high-quality, moderate cost OLAP analytics engines, preferably running ROLAP on top of an engine such as PostgreSQL. Maybe they're out there, but I don't see much of them (other than Mondrian). As the commercial OLAP market is structured now, it's hard for midsize companies to justify the outflow for decent analytics. No lack of demand though, just need something at the right price point...
A neighbor of mine (Yale '59) recalls 'IV' being used quite a bit to refer to the group of schools and believes it originated as a contraction of "Inter Varsity", the original agreement having nothing to do with academics, but rather with football scheduling...FWIW.
ITunes already can designate a track to be sold as "Album Only", where you have to buy the whole album playlist to get it. Technically at least, it would seem QED to just assemble an album playlist with all entries marked "Album Only"; problem solved!
Too bad the Wired people didn't ask why this wouldn't be acceptable.
True. The DeLorean might have a problem gaining traction while driving down the Columbia River channel, though...
D'oh! Caffeine hasn't hit yet...make that 1.7 gigawatts. Made the decision even easier, I'm sure.
Nearest hydroplant...is probably .5 mile or so up-river from them.
Yes, I'd agree having 1.7 sustained non-fossil-fuel dependent megawatts on the local grid probably made the decision easier for them.
I prefer this explanation
Being a drunk does not render moot one's opinions on the evils of excessive drinking.
{loooooooonnnnnnng post snipped}
A 926-word metaphor for what truly ails Microsoft: the company and its supporters spend more time defining and rationalizing why MS is great than they do making something great
FWIW, yes, Dvorak is an idiot...
You misspelled "Keep the Midwesterners out". That's what Google does best.
....
Y'know, I'm surprised I never see this brought up at all. Almost as if everything in the Mountain and Central time zones has a big "Dragons Be There..." drawn in on the map.
Not just the Midwest either--how many/few Google folks hail from the Southeast? Deep South?
It's not like the CE's from the U of I(llinois) are slouches. Or Purdue. Or Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice,
And no, I'm not an alumn of any of the above. But it does seem pretty self-limiting to require a Stanford, Berkeley or MIT sheepskin as proof of brains.
If Donofrio, IBM's Grand Poo-Bah of Innovation and Technology, is really espousing this as the company line, innovators everywhere can now breath easier in knowing that their largest potential worldwide competitor, one with near-bottomless personnel and cash resources, will no longer be racing them to realize innovative ideas and technologies from the shadowy ether of "just how exactly does {x} work?".
The basic research space is [mostly] all yours now. Enjoy!
Sad for IBM, though.