Re:demographics and buying habits
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Wellll... I mean, from the link, it seems that the kids were asked, not subtly observed. Sometimes there is a serious disparity between what someone says and what someone does.
If it's become cool to say 'I don't do what other people do' (not to mention containing almost lethal levels of irony), kids might say that. And then go out and buy what their favorite star wears anyway. Maybe they don't think that's what they're doing, I'm sure there's all sorts of rationalizations in their head. But I'd like to see actual numbers showing that when pop star X stars wearing blue pants, sales of non-blue pants amongst fans actually goes up.
So yeah, that's kind of a tricky study to do, but still. Everyone claiming they're suddenly independent doesn't make me necessarily believe it.
Probably more a testament to human beings' ability (or lack thereof) to comprehend randomness. We love finding patterns in things, but sometimes stuff just happens at the same time. How often is there a bad Hurricane season? How often are there earthquakes and volcanoes? It's obviously not common for these things to coincide a lot (otherwise it'd happen every other year) but I doubt it's that rare.
That's because Wizardy 7 was brutally hard.:) The whole rattkin area practically drove me to tears. Still, one of the best RPGs I've ever played. I always thought the roaming NPCs that could beat you to the maps was pretty cool. (And then you could track them down and kill them to get it back. Handy, that.)
Have you tried Wizardry 8? Still pretty cool, although a definitely different feel from 7.
Funny thing is, I read the responses in this thread, everyone bringing up movies that would be rendered pointless or greviously changed by this DVD player. Now I'm planning on picking up Pulp Fiction and Full Metal Jacket on my way home after work. Sometimes seeing (foolish, imho) self-censorship makes you appreciate the freedoms you have all the more. Thanks RCA!
I'm surprised (or maybe I just read at too high a threshold) that no one's mentioned Phantasy Star Online. Available in various versions for the DC, PC, Xbox and GC, it's a sort of massively-multiplayer online game. You can only play in 1-4 person teams, but you can team with anyone across the country/world. (and you have a list of guild cards that you can give out to people you meet, so that you can easily meet with them again if they're cool.)
You have characters that level up and spells that do different damage against different enemies. But you also can time your moves, and know that if you hit normal->hard then take a quick step back, you can usually dodge this monster's return attack, then finish them off. Or use a big, area effect weapon to hold back the hordes while your buddy nukes them.
It's always struck me as a nice mix between an online game, an RPG and an arcade game. Just my 2 cents.
Well, I read this morning that the US is under heat about the mad cow issue because we feed our spare cow bits to other animals. (This practice is outlawed in the EU, I believe.) And then the other animals get eaten by cows, who then become sick with what the spare-bits cow had. So with only one degree of separation, it's still possible to transmit some diseases.
You assume that the only friends your friends have are you. In fact, people tend to have a few friends who don't know each other, and eventually you're likey to run into one of the 'hub' people who have a ton of friends, thus connecting you to a broad range of folks.
Not to say there's any particular _use_ in this, I just don't think you're right claiming it'll be all 1-1 connections.
Ooo, I don't know about that. Earthlink has a challenge-response system put into place that I use and that works quite well. When I started it, I put in friends' addresses, as well as a few obvious domains that I don't want bounce-backs to (amazon.com, my work, etc). It covers 95% of the cases with a few minutes work.
The rest of the time, when someone emails me, they get a little challenge and have to fill out a form and then their email address is in for life. It's caused my spam to go from 100+ messages a day (this is the stuff that gets by the built-in 'this is clearly spam' filter) to about 1 a month that manages to sneak in.
I'm sure 90% of the challenges go off into the void never to return, but if they bounce back because of a forged from-address, it's over, no more bouncing or challenging or anything. So it's probably not as dire as you think.
Actually, people are _terrible_ at coming up with random numbers. We did an experiment in a math class once where we did some analysis on random numbers that we came up with, and random numbers that were generated by flipping a coin, and every time it was obvious which was generated by humans and which one wasn't.
The main points that humans screw up is thinking odd numbers are more random, and having an aversion to 'streaks'. For example, a person will almost never put ten 'tails' in a row, but in a real set of results, it's pretty likely to show up at some point. If you know what humans are bad at, you can make it a bit harder to figure out, but not in the long run.
Yeah, but to be fair, there are a lot of complicated permutations of Fair Use. A law that set everything in stone would be almost certain to be unjust.
For example, how much is too much, when you're quoting for critical or academic purposes? Should we judge it by line? Word? Letter? The only thing that comes to mind is by concept, but how do you quantify that? It's a situation where human judgement is required, because we're talking about more abstract concepts.
I think it's a good sign that legislators knew when to say 'We can't put a number on this, so we'll lay down a set of guidelines and let it be judged on a case by case basis'. Better than plucking absurd 'bright lines' out of the air.
Actually, I believe what is being said is that it is perfectly legal for you to circumvent the copy controls. What is illegal is for you to then sell or distribute your tool for circumvention.
Which makes it very unlikely that most people will circumvent it, seeing as not everyone has time to crack the newest encryption scheme, it doesn't make it illegal for them to try.
Or you've been hacked in which case you won't have an access record anyway if the hacker did their job right."
Well, for point one, if someone is bored and is poking around a medical database, that's a problem. And someone using a honeytoken credit card number is never okay. It's not something you do because you're bored.
And the hacker might have compromised one system and gotten data, but the point is that you put some fake data in there as well. So then hacker says 'hooray, I've gotten the CFO's password, let me go check out some interesting numbers in their computers' and suddenly they're caught red-handed, because that login doesn't exist in reality, and the computer in question is set up to notify people immediately on a honeytoken login.
These examples are taken from the article. It's a pretty clever idea and is much more versatile than the idea of a honeypot just as a server.
Well, okay, true. But I think the spirit of the parent's post was 'why don't people consider pirating (copyright infrigement) _wrong_?'
Which goes unanswered. I think that people just want to rationalize not having to pay $50 for a game. (or they don't want to wait a year for it to hit the $10 bins.)
I suppose I'd buy the 'I want to try it out first' especially if you have a history of hardware problems with your computer or something, but the cynical side of me says that the majority of people never say 'sweet, it works, let me go buy it now'. (some do, fine, fine, that's not my point.)
Actually I think it was Mark Twain who said that any statement, repeated earnestly at least five or six times, will become funny. In fact I'm sure he said it, but I can't find the exact quote. In any case, you're right, David Letterman is certainly subscriber to this school of thought. (if it can be called such.)
I think it's kind of funny too, but I probably don't count.:)
Huh. Well, for what it's worth, not all banks are so difficult to deal with. I once tried to withdraw $40 from an ATM. The little receipt that got printed out said '$40' and my account reflected $40 less, but I only got a single $20 bill.
I called up the bank and pointed this out, and they credited my account the next day for the $20 I was missing. (this was not a local bank or credit union, btw. This was a very large banking instituion.)
If only there was an effective way of determining if the bank is nice or not _before_ you open an account...
So you're suggesting that the proper recourse when you're denied something or treated unfairly by the world is to try to ruin it for everybody?
Perhaps those unfair-to-you mods would be considered fair to other people. Even if not, it still doesn't justify being a bastard. (not that you are, necessarily, just trolls in general.)
This is like grade school level society here. If someone isn't playing fair, would you rather steal the ball and run away, or find something different to do that is actually fun for you? I guess most people would take the ball, especially if they had the wonderful mask of anonymity that the internet provides. No one to find them and beat them up and take it back.
Okay, so I've wandered from the original post and my original point. Just pontificating.
Man, the editors can't win, can they? If they include the whole text they're corporate shills. If they don't, they get blasted for not providing the text themselves because 'they should know what's going to happen to the webserver they link to'.
They had a piece of text that was clearly allowable to mirror (press releases probably aren't things people want kept secret) and they did. More people could read the story. Seems like a good thing to me.
This is informative? To insinuate that you have to play games to be a good programmer is... beyond ridiculous.
Good programmers are good thinkers. They know how to solve problems and be creative. Whether or not you spend your free time playing Quake is totally meaningless. Your skill at conquering the world in Civ III is not going to teach you how to work with people. Having a high level character in UO does not give you insight into how a computer works on a very low level. Sims don't teach you about data structures and how to think in algorithms.
The INDUSTRY would be better served by people who are good critical thinkers, and that's what learning theory teaches you how to do. Learning physics and writing thoughtful essays about political science teach you how too. It's disturbing that people can go through 16 years of education and never figure out that's what it's all about.
Well, let's experiment. You get a doomsday device, annihilate the sun, instantly destroying all trace. If we were still affected by gravity, the time it takes it find out about the sun disappearing should be about 8 minutes, right? But! If we instantly started whizzing off into space, it should take longer than 8 minutes for the lack of light to reach us, because we'd be further from the sun.
There we go. So why can't this actually be done? (not destroying the sun, but the same basic experiment.) Maybe we can't get the distances and precision that we need to be able to tell if the lack of the sun-type-object made any difference.
Mad scientists, where are you?
(Is there something I'm missing, btw? Wouldn't this work? In theory.)
Not to stray too far from the topic, but are you totally insane?
"IM is easier than chatting in any physical space - real or virtual.:)"
So poorly spelt, hastily typed text drained of all inflection and expression is _better_ than chatting in a physical space? I can't count the number of misunderstandings I've had with people that would never have happened if they could've at least heard my voice, or seen my expression. And no, smileys are not a substitute.
Not to mention that it's far quicker to speak than it is to type for most people.
If there were a virtual space that even picked up a tenth of what face-to-face communication expresses, it'd be tremendously useful. (Depending on which tenth, I suppose.)
Sad thing is, I didn't realize it _wasn't_ 'use google to find a date' until I read your posting.
I always thought google was good, but I was surprised to find it's good enough to work if I put in '22, SWF, cute, intelligent'. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
I've found that you generally shouldn't trust the conclusions of reviewers (unless they're personally known to you.) Many many things in this world are subjective, and just because it's a downside for someone doesn't mean you won't like it.
For example, if a reviewer of a dvd says 'filled with mindless violence and no plot' and gives it 1 star, that's no reason you should avoid it. Maybe you like mindless violence. Maybe plots bore you.
So, I guess trust reviews as far as they mention relatively objective things. Unless the review appears to have been written by a raving fan or a hate-filled lunatic, take out the factual bits and see if you like them.
And ignore things like *Top 100 Reviewers*. Why should that even matter? Quantity is not quality.
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Wellll... I mean, from the link, it seems that the kids were asked, not subtly observed. Sometimes there is a serious disparity between what someone says and what someone does.
If it's become cool to say 'I don't do what other people do' (not to mention containing almost lethal levels of irony), kids might say that. And then go out and buy what their favorite star wears anyway. Maybe they don't think that's what they're doing, I'm sure there's all sorts of rationalizations in their head. But I'd like to see actual numbers showing that when pop star X stars wearing blue pants, sales of non-blue pants amongst fans actually goes up.
So yeah, that's kind of a tricky study to do, but still. Everyone claiming they're suddenly independent doesn't make me necessarily believe it.
Probably more a testament to human beings' ability (or lack thereof) to comprehend randomness. We love finding patterns in things, but sometimes stuff just happens at the same time. How often is there a bad Hurricane season? How often are there earthquakes and volcanoes? It's obviously not common for these things to coincide a lot (otherwise it'd happen every other year) but I doubt it's that rare.
That's because Wizardy 7 was brutally hard. :) The whole rattkin area practically drove me to tears. Still, one of the best RPGs I've ever played. I always thought the roaming NPCs that could beat you to the maps was pretty cool. (And then you could track them down and kill them to get it back. Handy, that.)
Have you tried Wizardry 8? Still pretty cool, although a definitely different feel from 7.
Funny thing is, I read the responses in this thread, everyone bringing up movies that would be rendered pointless or greviously changed by this DVD player. Now I'm planning on picking up Pulp Fiction and Full Metal Jacket on my way home after work. Sometimes seeing (foolish, imho) self-censorship makes you appreciate the freedoms you have all the more. Thanks RCA!
Actually I'd prefer a book on Purely Fictional Data Structures. You know, like Hobbit Hair Queues and Keebler Elf B-Trees.
Sorry, I'll stop now.
I'm surprised (or maybe I just read at too high a threshold) that no one's mentioned Phantasy Star Online. Available in various versions for the DC, PC, Xbox and GC, it's a sort of massively-multiplayer online game. You can only play in 1-4 person teams, but you can team with anyone across the country/world. (and you have a list of guild cards that you can give out to people you meet, so that you can easily meet with them again if they're cool.)
You have characters that level up and spells that do different damage against different enemies. But you also can time your moves, and know that if you hit normal->hard then take a quick step back, you can usually dodge this monster's return attack, then finish them off. Or use a big, area effect weapon to hold back the hordes while your buddy nukes them.
It's always struck me as a nice mix between an online game, an RPG and an arcade game. Just my 2 cents.
Well, I read this morning that the US is under heat about the mad cow issue because we feed our spare cow bits to other animals. (This practice is outlawed in the EU, I believe.) And then the other animals get eaten by cows, who then become sick with what the spare-bits cow had. So with only one degree of separation, it's still possible to transmit some diseases.
You assume that the only friends your friends have are you. In fact, people tend to have a few friends who don't know each other, and eventually you're likey to run into one of the 'hub' people who have a ton of friends, thus connecting you to a broad range of folks.
Not to say there's any particular _use_ in this, I just don't think you're right claiming it'll be all 1-1 connections.
Ooo, I don't know about that. Earthlink has a challenge-response system put into place that I use and that works quite well. When I started it, I put in friends' addresses, as well as a few obvious domains that I don't want bounce-backs to (amazon.com, my work, etc). It covers 95% of the cases with a few minutes work.
The rest of the time, when someone emails me, they get a little challenge and have to fill out a form and then their email address is in for life. It's caused my spam to go from 100+ messages a day (this is the stuff that gets by the built-in 'this is clearly spam' filter) to about 1 a month that manages to sneak in.
I'm sure 90% of the challenges go off into the void never to return, but if they bounce back because of a forged from-address, it's over, no more bouncing or challenging or anything. So it's probably not as dire as you think.
Actually, people are _terrible_ at coming up with random numbers. We did an experiment in a math class once where we did some analysis on random numbers that we came up with, and random numbers that were generated by flipping a coin, and every time it was obvious which was generated by humans and which one wasn't.
The main points that humans screw up is thinking odd numbers are more random, and having an aversion to 'streaks'. For example, a person will almost never put ten 'tails' in a row, but in a real set of results, it's pretty likely to show up at some point. If you know what humans are bad at, you can make it a bit harder to figure out, but not in the long run.
Sad thing is that when I read your comment I thought, 'Haha, yeah, MMOGs are pretty repetitive'.
Then I realized you weren't talking about _that_ game...
Yeah, but to be fair, there are a lot of complicated permutations of Fair Use. A law that set everything in stone would be almost certain to be unjust.
For example, how much is too much, when you're quoting for critical or academic purposes? Should we judge it by line? Word? Letter? The only thing that comes to mind is by concept, but how do you quantify that? It's a situation where human judgement is required, because we're talking about more abstract concepts.
I think it's a good sign that legislators knew when to say 'We can't put a number on this, so we'll lay down a set of guidelines and let it be judged on a case by case basis'. Better than plucking absurd 'bright lines' out of the air.
Actually, I believe what is being said is that it is perfectly legal for you to circumvent the copy controls. What is illegal is for you to then sell or distribute your tool for circumvention.
Which makes it very unlikely that most people will circumvent it, seeing as not everyone has time to crack the newest encryption scheme, it doesn't make it illegal for them to try.
"Or they were poking around bored.
Or you've been hacked in which case you won't have an access record anyway if the hacker did their job right."
Well, for point one, if someone is bored and is poking around a medical database, that's a problem. And someone using a honeytoken credit card number is never okay. It's not something you do because you're bored.
And the hacker might have compromised one system and gotten data, but the point is that you put some fake data in there as well. So then hacker says 'hooray, I've gotten the CFO's password, let me go check out some interesting numbers in their computers' and suddenly they're caught red-handed, because that login doesn't exist in reality, and the computer in question is set up to notify people immediately on a honeytoken login.
These examples are taken from the article. It's a pretty clever idea and is much more versatile than the idea of a honeypot just as a server.
Well, okay, true. But I think the spirit of the parent's post was 'why don't people consider pirating (copyright infrigement) _wrong_?'
Which goes unanswered. I think that people just want to rationalize not having to pay $50 for a game. (or they don't want to wait a year for it to hit the $10 bins.)
I suppose I'd buy the 'I want to try it out first' especially if you have a history of hardware problems with your computer or something, but the cynical side of me says that the majority of people never say 'sweet, it works, let me go buy it now'. (some do, fine, fine, that's not my point.)
Anyways.
Actually I think it was Mark Twain who said that any statement, repeated earnestly at least five or six times, will become funny. In fact I'm sure he said it, but I can't find the exact quote. In any case, you're right, David Letterman is certainly subscriber to this school of thought. (if it can be called such.)
:)
I think it's kind of funny too, but I probably don't count.
Huh. Well, for what it's worth, not all banks are so difficult to deal with. I once tried to withdraw $40 from an ATM. The little receipt that got printed out said '$40' and my account reflected $40 less, but I only got a single $20 bill.
I called up the bank and pointed this out, and they credited my account the next day for the $20 I was missing. (this was not a local bank or credit union, btw. This was a very large banking instituion.)
If only there was an effective way of determining if the bank is nice or not _before_ you open an account...
So you're suggesting that the proper recourse when you're denied something or treated unfairly by the world is to try to ruin it for everybody?
Perhaps those unfair-to-you mods would be considered fair to other people. Even if not, it still doesn't justify being a bastard. (not that you are, necessarily, just trolls in general.)
This is like grade school level society here. If someone isn't playing fair, would you rather steal the ball and run away, or find something different to do that is actually fun for you? I guess most people would take the ball, especially if they had the wonderful mask of anonymity that the internet provides. No one to find them and beat them up and take it back.
Okay, so I've wandered from the original post and my original point. Just pontificating.
Man, the editors can't win, can they? If they include the whole text they're corporate shills. If they don't, they get blasted for not providing the text themselves because 'they should know what's going to happen to the webserver they link to'.
They had a piece of text that was clearly allowable to mirror (press releases probably aren't things people want kept secret) and they did. More people could read the story. Seems like a good thing to me.
Apple has a monopoly on Apple computers. Just like those bastards at Ford who have a monopoly on Ford brand cars.
Weren't you around when monopoly was downgraded from 'Near complete control of a market' to 'Makes a product that isn't free'?
This is informative? To insinuate that you have to play games to be a good programmer is ... beyond ridiculous.
Good programmers are good thinkers. They know how to solve problems and be creative. Whether or not you spend your free time playing Quake is totally meaningless. Your skill at conquering the world in Civ III is not going to teach you how to work with people. Having a high level character in UO does not give you insight into how a computer works on a very low level. Sims don't teach you about data structures and how to think in algorithms.
The INDUSTRY would be better served by people who are good critical thinkers, and that's what learning theory teaches you how to do. Learning physics and writing thoughtful essays about political science teach you how too. It's disturbing that people can go through 16 years of education and never figure out that's what it's all about.
Well, let's experiment. You get a doomsday device, annihilate the sun, instantly destroying all trace. If we were still affected by gravity, the time it takes it find out about the sun disappearing should be about 8 minutes, right? But! If we instantly started whizzing off into space, it should take longer than 8 minutes for the lack of light to reach us, because we'd be further from the sun.
There we go. So why can't this actually be done? (not destroying the sun, but the same basic experiment.) Maybe we can't get the distances and precision that we need to be able to tell if the lack of the sun-type-object made any difference.
Mad scientists, where are you?
(Is there something I'm missing, btw? Wouldn't this work? In theory.)
Not to stray too far from the topic, but are you totally insane?
:)"
"IM is easier than chatting in any physical space - real or virtual.
So poorly spelt, hastily typed text drained of all inflection and expression is _better_ than chatting in a physical space? I can't count the number of misunderstandings I've had with people that would never have happened if they could've at least heard my voice, or seen my expression. And no, smileys are not a substitute.
Not to mention that it's far quicker to speak than it is to type for most people.
If there were a virtual space that even picked up a tenth of what face-to-face communication expresses, it'd be tremendously useful. (Depending on which tenth, I suppose.)
Sad thing is, I didn't realize it _wasn't_ 'use google to find a date' until I read your posting.
I always thought google was good, but I was surprised to find it's good enough to work if I put in '22, SWF, cute, intelligent'. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
I've found that you generally shouldn't trust the conclusions of reviewers (unless they're personally known to you.) Many many things in this world are subjective, and just because it's a downside for someone doesn't mean you won't like it.
For example, if a reviewer of a dvd says 'filled with mindless violence and no plot' and gives it 1 star, that's no reason you should avoid it. Maybe you like mindless violence. Maybe plots bore you.
So, I guess trust reviews as far as they mention relatively objective things. Unless the review appears to have been written by a raving fan or a hate-filled lunatic, take out the factual bits and see if you like them.
And ignore things like *Top 100 Reviewers*. Why should that even matter? Quantity is not quality.
End ramble