How can you leave for another insurance company when they all do this? Additionally you say that if they dont charge enough they can't cover expenses, but both before and after this you talk about their profits and maximizing them. I suspect that profits are more of the motivating factor than expenses, but thanks for the advice on USAA...I'll look into it.
It depends on what sorts of trips people are taking. If they rack up the miles on long trips (greater than five or ten miles) less miles wouldn't correlate so strongly with less risk. However if people rack up those miles with lots of sub-ten mile trips then indeed less miles would equal less risk.
The fact that they use tickets is pretty retarded. Its supposed to be an indicator that you're more likely to get in accidents, but what if you just get dozens of speeding tickets but actually get in no accidents?
Personally my insurance is expensive because I get about 1.5 speeding tickets per year, but haven't been in a speed related accident in over a decade, and I haven't been in an at fault accident in the same period of time. I understand charging people more when they cost the company more but people getting tickets in no way actually effects them, other than to be used as an excuse to raise people's rates and fund the traffic school industry.
hahahahhahaha, so John Yoo is just a normal lawyer, even though he believes the executive can disregard FISA because it's obsolete, and that we should just spy on all phone calls, text and email between here and Afghanistan + Pakistan?
ROFLMAO. Yeah he's not painfully obviously biased at all. I mean go ask your business lawyer if the constitution doesn't prevent both of those things.
You = the pot.
I wonder what happens when you ask John Yoo about whether or not your wire tapping program is legal? Lets look at his latest opinion piece (today) in the wall street Journal:
The best way to find an al-Qaida operative is to look at all e-mail, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. This might involve the filtering of innocent traffic, just as roadblocks and airport screenings do.
Guess what he authorizes your program, and later all of his memos are critized by other lawyers, who say that he only worried about the 4th amendment, and not FISA....because guess what:
t is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States.... In FISA, President Bush and his advisers faced an obsolete law not written with live war with an international terrorist organization in mind.
Maybe they thought this guy was legit, but its not hard to see why someone would ask THIS guy (of all attorneys) about a domestic wire tapping program. And it's even less hard to see why this calls into question the assertion that "well we asked for legal advice and the advice told us it was ok" when the advice is coming form this guy.
I don't claim insight, I just have a more pessimistic outlook than you. neither one of us knows what happened I just put it out there that even though they claim ignorance it's entirely possible (by virtue of how plausible deniability works) that they were knowingly guilty. If you choose to be optimistic about that so be it, though I believe that this administrations track record of obfuscation and or lying suggests otherwise.
I'm waiting for you to invoke Cheney's defense of torture--why would be bother soliciting legal opinions if we were trying to do something wrong? I'll leave it to you to figure out why that is no defense at all (hint, it might involve who you solicit that counsel from i.e. John Yoo)
Lots of people use iTunes without buying music on it. But you make a good point about how a lot of iTunes users ARE customers.
They didn't break Pre syncing, they stopped it all together. What they are trying to prevent is this: customer with Pre syncs with iTunes, and everything works fine. Then either Apple or Palm make some change which makes this functional syncing stop working, and customer now bothers apple (phone, in person, or otherwise) about how, say, they lost a bunch of data now that syncing is borked.
Now I'd be sorta mad if I bought a bunch of music of iTunes and had it all on my phone, and suddenly this gets broken. If I'm a typical Apple customer I'm going to call them (and maybe Palm too) and start complaining and the response is going to be for each party to blame the other. And even if the customer doesn't bother Apple about it they may end up holding it against apple.
By outright blocking Pre syncing they can avoid any such problems. Syncing with iPods is officially supported which means when you have problems you are right to call Apple since everything involved is theirs and they have full control of it.
Interoperability across brands is nice, but it's painfully obvious that things are smoother due to simplicity when you don't deal with this. It's basically been Apple's policy FOREVER, for the aforementioned customer experience reasons.
Simply put, if you control all aspects of the chains (hardware software) you can MUCH more easily ensure that things operate smoothly, thereby justifying price premiums and affording yourself repeate customers who are happy.
Umm Pre customers aren't apple customers, because, well, THEY DIDN'T buy from Apple to begin with!
Anyway, the big issue is that Apple focuses relentlessly on customer experience, which is what allows them to charge the premiums that they do. Everyone is well aware that you can get similar products for less, but what you can't get for less is the customer service and support that Apple generally provides (yes there are cases of poor customer service or support but the generality is that they are excellent in this area (especially for basically everyone that I know)). Apple blocked out Pre so that no one holds it against Apple when there is some problem with syncing your Pre to iTunes. After all Apple has zero control over what Palm does with the Pre and how they make it act, so that obviously creates tons of potential for interoperability problems. Apple is specifically in the business of trying to minimize problems and make the experience for their customers as pain free as possible.
It's pretty amazing that after so many years this obvious truth about the way Apple operates is overlooked by so many people. Especially since it represents a quite profitable way to operate, as customers who have positive experiences are willing to pay more for them, and are likely to be repeat customers.
Maybe it's simply that people haven't had personal (or close to personal) experiences with this in order to make it obvious, though I'd think that anyone that visited an Apple store would notice that unlike almost any other store a LARGE group of the people are there for support, and they're treated very well.
They did this so that Pre owners dont show up in Apple stores (or on the phone) complaining about how syncing isn't working right (or even worse how it borked some data they had). The thing about most Apple customers is that they are willing to pay price premiums in exchange for support. Generally speaking (based on my own experiences as well as the vast majority of people I know that own Apple hardware) they take care of their customers and provide excellent support (caveat: as with all generalities there are plenty of exceptions), and they don't want people who use iTunes to hold it against them that they have problems with syncing some non-apple, non-supported hardware.
Simply put, if you can't sync your Pre to iTunes then you can't have problems syncing the two and you can't be mad at apple for the problems that you don't have.
No, it's about Apple getting people bothering them about the problems they might have syncing their Pre to iTunes. Apple haters don't seem to understand just how much customer support Apple provides and how this drives their insane focus on customer experience. They absolutely do not want someone coming in with some unsupported hardware complaining about how iTunes won't sync right and holding it against Apple in the future. This is especially the case when you're dealing with Apple hardware, which their customers paid a premium for and expect a high level of service and support.
I've said it before, but the reason that Apple doesn't like to let other products "interoperate" with their products is that Apple customers expect customer support from Apple, and Apple really doesn't want to be bothered by the Pre owner who is having problems syncing with iTunes.
That and it helps them destroy competitors, but if you've ever been to an Apple store you can easily see just how many people bother Apple about their problems (and rightly so considering the price premiums they probably paid).
Yes there is something wrong, the pure selfishness involved in it. It's called compassion and it's something the individualistic enlightenment mentality has lost.
Firstly the guy I responded to was speaking about "the program"
Secondly, do you understand plausible deniability? It's when you know that Z is illegal, but you come up with a PLAUSIBLE way of framing it so that you can then say "I thought Z was legal" when someone finds out what you did and says that you were wrong for it.
The way these people did this typically was to have somebody tell them that it was ok, as in "yes your program is legal" "yes it's ok to torture people" "yes we think they have WMD's"...etc
It would work like this in a practical though ridiculous example (assume that the legality of killing people is unknown). I want to kill Joe, but I think that killing is probably wrong. The thing is that I REALLY want to kill Joe, so I find an accomplice, particularly a lawyer. I have my accomplice tell me that killing is in fact ok. I kill Joe. Now, someone comes to me and says "killing is wrong" and I say "well I thought it was legal, see I even took the time to ask a lawyer and he told me it was ok."
Now you might want to give the administration the benefit of the doubt, but their track record suggests you'd be quite foolish indeed to do so.
You're right I don't know that they were malicious, but it's not exactly inconsistent with their track record. Attempting to call it ignorance is being quite optimistic. I guess it's possible that they were ignorant at so many things, but that's hardly likely.
After all these are the same guys that tried to pull the exact same moves regarding torture by using the infamous John Yoo.
Finally, the ENTIRE point of plausible deniability IS THAT IT'S PLAUSIBLE.
Two obvious problems: firstly that companies only measure one form of feedback, how much money they make. Secondly that people do not always spend money to represent their self interests. There are all sorts of other factors.
To make up a simple example, I abhore the fast food industry for the quality of "food" they sell, however you can catch me there from time to time because someone I'm with really wants to go there. Now that company sees this extra revenue and thinks that they must be doing something right, when in fact they're STILL doing everything wrong.
Add in that the market has much more than a profit-or-die mentality but a increase profits at all costs even when we already make profits (aka a lack of a "enough is enough" mentality) and it's easy to see how things can get out of hand.
This is NOT a case of "Good for Pandora" at all. Pandora is being a sore loser and changing their stance to "well if we have to pay lots, why dont they", when they know full well that NEITHER should be paying as they both serve the same promotional purposes (as in exposing people to artists they werent familiar with).
What this move is really about is harming the radio industry which benefits Pandora financially (by driving listeners to them) and is purely a case of greed and lack of principles.
It's shameful how they fought and lost and now join the side of the very people they opposed, and to use the guise of fairness to do so.
while it might be more fair for radio to pay more fees, it's really Pandora being a crybaby. I hardly believe that they would have been advocating that radio pay no fees at all had record lables agreed to let Pandora pay no fees.
The reason radio stations have the system they have is because they argue that they are effectively a big promotional tool (which they are) for artists, and I fail to see (as the ARS article points out) how this would change now that Pandora has to pay fees.
Pandora, even though they sorta lost to the record companies, should be advocating for the radio industry the same thing it advocated (and lost) for itself.
While I understand that the radio is their competition and it's in their best interest (financially) for the radio to have to pay more they're still bastards for jumping into bed with the music industry.
Why does anyone get payed by the radio stations? `ZOMG they're making money off of my IP` and the artist is benefiting by getting the exposure. But that's not enough, because you know who cares if your music gets out and makes people feel good? It's waaay more important to make sure that no radio station can make a buck (off of selling advertising) by playing my songs!/Ridiculous. Play music because you love it, and figure out some way to make money besides OWNING your music, and being a greedy bastard. "Hey guys I made some awesome art, but you can't experience it without paying me first" is the most ridiculous sentiment ever.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you leave for another insurance company when they all do this? Additionally you say that if they dont charge enough they can't cover expenses, but both before and after this you talk about their profits and maximizing them. I suspect that profits are more of the motivating factor than expenses, but thanks for the advice on USAA...I'll look into it.
It depends on what sorts of trips people are taking. If they rack up the miles on long trips (greater than five or ten miles) less miles wouldn't correlate so strongly with less risk. However if people rack up those miles with lots of sub-ten mile trips then indeed less miles would equal less risk.
Then your miles won't be reduced but for people that drive for reasons other than necessity will probably cut back to save money.
The fact that they use tickets is pretty retarded. Its supposed to be an indicator that you're more likely to get in accidents, but what if you just get dozens of speeding tickets but actually get in no accidents?
Personally my insurance is expensive because I get about 1.5 speeding tickets per year, but haven't been in a speed related accident in over a decade, and I haven't been in an at fault accident in the same period of time. I understand charging people more when they cost the company more but people getting tickets in no way actually effects them, other than to be used as an excuse to raise people's rates and fund the traffic school industry.
Except that now they aren't going to ask you, they'd monitor you.
hahahahhahaha, so John Yoo is just a normal lawyer, even though he believes the executive can disregard FISA because it's obsolete, and that we should just spy on all phone calls, text and email between here and Afghanistan + Pakistan? ROFLMAO. Yeah he's not painfully obviously biased at all. I mean go ask your business lawyer if the constitution doesn't prevent both of those things. You = the pot.
Google agrees with you.
7000 users? WOW, thats terrifically small :(
I wonder what happens when you ask John Yoo about whether or not your wire tapping program is legal? Lets look at his latest opinion piece (today) in the wall street Journal:
... In FISA, President Bush and his advisers faced an obsolete law not written with live war with an international terrorist organization in mind.
:)
The best way to find an al-Qaida operative is to look at all e-mail, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. This might involve the filtering of innocent traffic, just as roadblocks and airport screenings do.
Guess what he authorizes your program, and later all of his memos are critized by other lawyers, who say that he only worried about the 4th amendment, and not FISA....because guess what:
t is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States.
Maybe they thought this guy was legit, but its not hard to see why someone would ask THIS guy (of all attorneys) about a domestic wire tapping program. And it's even less hard to see why this calls into question the assertion that "well we asked for legal advice and the advice told us it was ok" when the advice is coming form this guy.
but maybe I'm just biased !
I don't claim insight, I just have a more pessimistic outlook than you. neither one of us knows what happened I just put it out there that even though they claim ignorance it's entirely possible (by virtue of how plausible deniability works) that they were knowingly guilty. If you choose to be optimistic about that so be it, though I believe that this administrations track record of obfuscation and or lying suggests otherwise.
I'm waiting for you to invoke Cheney's defense of torture--why would be bother soliciting legal opinions if we were trying to do something wrong? I'll leave it to you to figure out why that is no defense at all (hint, it might involve who you solicit that counsel from i.e. John Yoo)
Lots of people use iTunes without buying music on it. But you make a good point about how a lot of iTunes users ARE customers.
:(
They didn't break Pre syncing, they stopped it all together. What they are trying to prevent is this: customer with Pre syncs with iTunes, and everything works fine. Then either Apple or Palm make some change which makes this functional syncing stop working, and customer now bothers apple (phone, in person, or otherwise) about how, say, they lost a bunch of data now that syncing is borked.
Now I'd be sorta mad if I bought a bunch of music of iTunes and had it all on my phone, and suddenly this gets broken. If I'm a typical Apple customer I'm going to call them (and maybe Palm too) and start complaining and the response is going to be for each party to blame the other. And even if the customer doesn't bother Apple about it they may end up holding it against apple.
By outright blocking Pre syncing they can avoid any such problems. Syncing with iPods is officially supported which means when you have problems you are right to call Apple since everything involved is theirs and they have full control of it.
Interoperability across brands is nice, but it's painfully obvious that things are smoother due to simplicity when you don't deal with this. It's basically been Apple's policy FOREVER, for the aforementioned customer experience reasons.
Simply put, if you control all aspects of the chains (hardware software) you can MUCH more easily ensure that things operate smoothly, thereby justifying price premiums and affording yourself repeate customers who are happy.
Sorry that you don't like the way that it works
Umm Pre customers aren't apple customers, because, well, THEY DIDN'T buy from Apple to begin with!
Anyway, the big issue is that Apple focuses relentlessly on customer experience, which is what allows them to charge the premiums that they do. Everyone is well aware that you can get similar products for less, but what you can't get for less is the customer service and support that Apple generally provides (yes there are cases of poor customer service or support but the generality is that they are excellent in this area (especially for basically everyone that I know)). Apple blocked out Pre so that no one holds it against Apple when there is some problem with syncing your Pre to iTunes. After all Apple has zero control over what Palm does with the Pre and how they make it act, so that obviously creates tons of potential for interoperability problems. Apple is specifically in the business of trying to minimize problems and make the experience for their customers as pain free as possible.
It's pretty amazing that after so many years this obvious truth about the way Apple operates is overlooked by so many people. Especially since it represents a quite profitable way to operate, as customers who have positive experiences are willing to pay more for them, and are likely to be repeat customers.
Maybe it's simply that people haven't had personal (or close to personal) experiences with this in order to make it obvious, though I'd think that anyone that visited an Apple store would notice that unlike almost any other store a LARGE group of the people are there for support, and they're treated very well.
They did this so that Pre owners dont show up in Apple stores (or on the phone) complaining about how syncing isn't working right (or even worse how it borked some data they had). The thing about most Apple customers is that they are willing to pay price premiums in exchange for support. Generally speaking (based on my own experiences as well as the vast majority of people I know that own Apple hardware) they take care of their customers and provide excellent support (caveat: as with all generalities there are plenty of exceptions), and they don't want people who use iTunes to hold it against them that they have problems with syncing some non-apple, non-supported hardware. Simply put, if you can't sync your Pre to iTunes then you can't have problems syncing the two and you can't be mad at apple for the problems that you don't have.
No, it's about Apple getting people bothering them about the problems they might have syncing their Pre to iTunes. Apple haters don't seem to understand just how much customer support Apple provides and how this drives their insane focus on customer experience. They absolutely do not want someone coming in with some unsupported hardware complaining about how iTunes won't sync right and holding it against Apple in the future. This is especially the case when you're dealing with Apple hardware, which their customers paid a premium for and expect a high level of service and support.
I've said it before, but the reason that Apple doesn't like to let other products "interoperate" with their products is that Apple customers expect customer support from Apple, and Apple really doesn't want to be bothered by the Pre owner who is having problems syncing with iTunes. That and it helps them destroy competitors, but if you've ever been to an Apple store you can easily see just how many people bother Apple about their problems (and rightly so considering the price premiums they probably paid).
I agree, it's not stupid but SELFISH.
Me, Me, Me. Have some compassion
The moral argument is that you're being extremely selfish.
Yes there is something wrong, the pure selfishness involved in it. It's called compassion and it's something the individualistic enlightenment mentality has lost.
Firstly the guy I responded to was speaking about "the program" Secondly, do you understand plausible deniability? It's when you know that Z is illegal, but you come up with a PLAUSIBLE way of framing it so that you can then say "I thought Z was legal" when someone finds out what you did and says that you were wrong for it. The way these people did this typically was to have somebody tell them that it was ok, as in "yes your program is legal" "yes it's ok to torture people" "yes we think they have WMD's"...etc It would work like this in a practical though ridiculous example (assume that the legality of killing people is unknown). I want to kill Joe, but I think that killing is probably wrong. The thing is that I REALLY want to kill Joe, so I find an accomplice, particularly a lawyer. I have my accomplice tell me that killing is in fact ok. I kill Joe. Now, someone comes to me and says "killing is wrong" and I say "well I thought it was legal, see I even took the time to ask a lawyer and he told me it was ok." Now you might want to give the administration the benefit of the doubt, but their track record suggests you'd be quite foolish indeed to do so.
You're right I don't know that they were malicious, but it's not exactly inconsistent with their track record. Attempting to call it ignorance is being quite optimistic. I guess it's possible that they were ignorant at so many things, but that's hardly likely. After all these are the same guys that tried to pull the exact same moves regarding torture by using the infamous John Yoo. Finally, the ENTIRE point of plausible deniability IS THAT IT'S PLAUSIBLE.
Two obvious problems: firstly that companies only measure one form of feedback, how much money they make. Secondly that people do not always spend money to represent their self interests. There are all sorts of other factors. To make up a simple example, I abhore the fast food industry for the quality of "food" they sell, however you can catch me there from time to time because someone I'm with really wants to go there. Now that company sees this extra revenue and thinks that they must be doing something right, when in fact they're STILL doing everything wrong. Add in that the market has much more than a profit-or-die mentality but a increase profits at all costs even when we already make profits (aka a lack of a "enough is enough" mentality) and it's easy to see how things can get out of hand.
This is NOT a case of "Good for Pandora" at all. Pandora is being a sore loser and changing their stance to "well if we have to pay lots, why dont they", when they know full well that NEITHER should be paying as they both serve the same promotional purposes (as in exposing people to artists they werent familiar with). What this move is really about is harming the radio industry which benefits Pandora financially (by driving listeners to them) and is purely a case of greed and lack of principles. It's shameful how they fought and lost and now join the side of the very people they opposed, and to use the guise of fairness to do so.
while it might be more fair for radio to pay more fees, it's really Pandora being a crybaby. I hardly believe that they would have been advocating that radio pay no fees at all had record lables agreed to let Pandora pay no fees. The reason radio stations have the system they have is because they argue that they are effectively a big promotional tool (which they are) for artists, and I fail to see (as the ARS article points out) how this would change now that Pandora has to pay fees. Pandora, even though they sorta lost to the record companies, should be advocating for the radio industry the same thing it advocated (and lost) for itself. While I understand that the radio is their competition and it's in their best interest (financially) for the radio to have to pay more they're still bastards for jumping into bed with the music industry.
Why does anyone get payed by the radio stations? `ZOMG they're making money off of my IP` and the artist is benefiting by getting the exposure. But that's not enough, because you know who cares if your music gets out and makes people feel good? It's waaay more important to make sure that no radio station can make a buck (off of selling advertising) by playing my songs! /Ridiculous. Play music because you love it, and figure out some way to make money besides OWNING your music, and being a greedy bastard. "Hey guys I made some awesome art, but you can't experience it without paying me first" is the most ridiculous sentiment ever.