That anyone would feel the need to "moderate" a discussion on a web comic is a simultaneously hilarious and horrifying illustration of the human condition.
Neither my dislike for this keloid on popular culture, nor the anguish felt by a whirlwind of fangirls hyperventilating that someone on the Internet is wrong, will amount to anything. Round the decay of our colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Either y'all lack wordplay humour, or you genuinely haven't figured out what I was saying. Yesterday I was giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, but today I'll talk in slightly more.. err.. straightforward terms.
mopower70 was making an unnecessary (or, strictly, wrong) proposition about an unnecessary preposition, because:
1) There is nothing wrong with a dangling preposition. English isn't a Romance language; and
2) The preposition is in fact necessary because "to exist" is not a transitive verb, to wit: one cannot say, "Writing has existed x years," but must say, "Writing has existed for x years."
So, it would have been a syntax error to remove the "for".
Is this sufficiently clear? The post wasn't a troll at all. It was correcting an incorrect correction.
Insurers don't price to set best practices for individuals - they price to ensure that every cohort is sufficiently profitable.
For example, it used to be the case in the UK that car insurance for young men was way more expensive than young women. In fact, women made more claims, but what really skewed things was a small proportion of extremely irresponsible young men who were involved in major and expensive incidents, skewing the "cost" of providing policies for the overall group of young men. Since the insurer didn't know if a new policyholder was one of this expensive minority, all men would suffer, but in fact it was likely that any given male policyholder was *less* likely to make a claim than a female of similar age.
Of course, we can't decide our gender, but there are lots of other attributes we can decide which may reduce our risk exposure but which for the whole group increases risk exposure. To use another household example, vets commonly recommend against yearly vaccination boosters for certain diseases - they're at best medically unnecessary and involve an extra stressful trip to a building full of sick animals, and at worst lead to specific complications. But insurers find it easier to set a blanket policy because the risk of over-vaccinating is lower than the risk of under-vaccinating. So insurance tends to encourage a lowest common denominator effect.
tl;dr Insurance doesn't encourage any sort of behaviour - the best sort of insurance is national, e.g. as the British NHS, and for anything else, you just have to see whether your practices fit with their requirements.
Except that many sellers include obvious branding in their packages or in e-mails, and everyone's cool about it. And the policy is partly just a way for eBay to try to stop people from moving outside the eBay system, obviously - although part of it is there to stop unscupulous fraudsters from offering to sell a specific listed (but often non-existent) item outside of eBay.
OK, let me be more direct: you can list something both on eBay and on your web site, but you list it for less on your web site, because you will pay less to sell the item there than on eBay. So you use eBay as a promotional tool, but prefer for customers to perform checkout on your web site, and encourage repeat customers to use your web site.
Since my credit card provider is better at challenging badly behaving vendors than Paypal/eBay is, and Paypal hate it when you chargeback, I'd also be happier buying off an independent web site.
What Chad means is that he envisions a world where people only watch shitty Youtube videos all day, and Google gets a cut from showing an obligatory advert at the start.
Quality programming is difficult to make, and distributing it efficiently (as opposed to the "fuck you and build a bigger pipe!" unicast method of distribution Youtube uses) is also a challenge. Showing crap worldwide when all you have to do is to build a streaming server, adorn it with sponsorship, and take advantage of having been early to the party... well, that's a job for the geniuses at Google to have their brainpower wasted on.
Why do people persist to offer second hand stuff cheapest on eBay and Amazon? I am not referring to the cheap Chinese sellers who flood the market with first-hand but second-rate good-enough stuff, but people who for some reason decide that the only place that you can offer older stuff is Amazon/eBay, and if you also have a web site, to charge MORE on that web site - even though it is trivial to get a payment processor who will take way less of a cut.
So is it a red herring, or a qualifier to the assertion?
Humans haven't been forming civilisations with written records for more than five thousand years, so of course none has existed for more than five thousand years. Clear enough, ya oik?
Interesting that you, like everyone here, have rushed to defend your hero, but omitted to address the question I posed which shows why his "5,000 years" argument is nonsense.
1) 1% (min.) cashback plus up to 56 days interest-free is comparable to what large outlets pay in merchant fees; 2) Anyway, I rarely get a discount for not paying by credit card; 3) In the EU, at least, where card usage is more common, cash handling fees may be significant; 4) There is no unform fixed fee per credit card transaction here - it depends on your bank, volume, specific negotiations for larger stores, etc. - for small stores, I'll ask what they prefer; 5) For nontrivial items, the card provider is jointly liable in law with the seller for satisfactory service performance/quality of goods. How smoothly this guarantee is applied depends on the quality of your bank, but for me, it's meant that I've never had a seller successfully defraud me.
Self-righteousness is wanting to a sue a cab company(!!) because you were waiting around for an hour in a big city for a single cab, claiming it's not your problem that you behaved helplessly, wagging your finger at the person furthest from your communication, then waving an irrelevant disability card for good measure.
This thread had well illustrated the worst excesses of entitlement attitude of the American middle-class chair warmer. Thank you for reminding me why America's now living off printed money and Chinese loans. Even if my argument doesn't convince you, maybe evidence will: Uber simply wasn't doing very well in Boston, and the attitude displayed in this thread has caused America to fall on the world economic stage.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of timing attack was discussed three years ago on the Mozilla blog.
Could someone elaborate on exactly what hasn't been fixed for the Mozilla-based browsers? Dunno about the rest.
Ah, someone's awake this weekend - excellent :).
That anyone would feel the need to "moderate" a discussion on a web comic is a simultaneously hilarious and horrifying illustration of the human condition.
Neither my dislike for this keloid on popular culture, nor the anguish felt by a whirlwind of fangirls hyperventilating that someone on the Internet is wrong, will amount to anything. Round the decay of our colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Either y'all lack wordplay humour, or you genuinely haven't figured out what I was saying. Yesterday I was giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, but today I'll talk in slightly more.. err.. straightforward terms.
mopower70 was making an unnecessary (or, strictly, wrong) proposition about an unnecessary preposition, because:
1) There is nothing wrong with a dangling preposition. English isn't a Romance language; and
2) The preposition is in fact necessary because "to exist" is not a transitive verb, to wit: one cannot say, "Writing has existed x years," but must say, "Writing has existed for x years."
So, it would have been a syntax error to remove the "for".
Is this sufficiently clear? The post wasn't a troll at all. It was correcting an incorrect correction.
Insurers don't price to set best practices for individuals - they price to ensure that every cohort is sufficiently profitable.
For example, it used to be the case in the UK that car insurance for young men was way more expensive than young women. In fact, women made more claims, but what really skewed things was a small proportion of extremely irresponsible young men who were involved in major and expensive incidents, skewing the "cost" of providing policies for the overall group of young men. Since the insurer didn't know if a new policyholder was one of this expensive minority, all men would suffer, but in fact it was likely that any given male policyholder was *less* likely to make a claim than a female of similar age.
Of course, we can't decide our gender, but there are lots of other attributes we can decide which may reduce our risk exposure but which for the whole group increases risk exposure. To use another household example, vets commonly recommend against yearly vaccination boosters for certain diseases - they're at best medically unnecessary and involve an extra stressful trip to a building full of sick animals, and at worst lead to specific complications. But insurers find it easier to set a blanket policy because the risk of over-vaccinating is lower than the risk of under-vaccinating. So insurance tends to encourage a lowest common denominator effect.
tl;dr Insurance doesn't encourage any sort of behaviour - the best sort of insurance is national, e.g. as the British NHS, and for anything else, you just have to see whether your practices fit with their requirements.
If only geeks has as much tolerance of religion as they expect for xkcd.
xkcd is a horrible blight on human culture and I am surely entitled to criticise it at least as forcefully as I am exposed to it.
More offensively, it suggested that the preposition was "unnecessary", i.e. that "exist" is transitive.
+5 for a mistaken correction, and (0, Troll) for me for pointing out that the correction was wrong: xkcd fanboys are almost perfectly delusional.
Except that many sellers include obvious branding in their packages or in e-mails, and everyone's cool about it. And the policy is partly just a way for eBay to try to stop people from moving outside the eBay system, obviously - although part of it is there to stop unscupulous fraudsters from offering to sell a specific listed (but often non-existent) item outside of eBay.
Marking an unrated post as overrated is a nonsense, isn't it?
OK, let me be more direct: you can list something both on eBay and on your web site, but you list it for less on your web site, because you will pay less to sell the item there than on eBay. So you use eBay as a promotional tool, but prefer for customers to perform checkout on your web site, and encourage repeat customers to use your web site.
Since my credit card provider is better at challenging badly behaving vendors than Paypal/eBay is, and Paypal hate it when you chargeback, I'd also be happier buying off an independent web site.
What Chad means is that he envisions a world where people only watch shitty Youtube videos all day, and Google gets a cut from showing an obligatory advert at the start.
Quality programming is difficult to make, and distributing it efficiently (as opposed to the "fuck you and build a bigger pipe!" unicast method of distribution Youtube uses) is also a challenge. Showing crap worldwide when all you have to do is to build a streaming server, adorn it with sponsorship, and take advantage of having been early to the party... well, that's a job for the geniuses at Google to have their brainpower wasted on.
Why do people persist to offer second hand stuff cheapest on eBay and Amazon? I am not referring to the cheap Chinese sellers who flood the market with first-hand but second-rate good-enough stuff, but people who for some reason decide that the only place that you can offer older stuff is Amazon/eBay, and if you also have a web site, to charge MORE on that web site - even though it is trivial to get a payment processor who will take way less of a cut.
So... reasons, please?
I adore the way people abuse meta-moderation by marking several unmoderated posts in a row as Overrated when they don't like someone.
I can almost taste the impotent tears as they realise that it's the only time they'll ever be able to exert their influence on anything at all.
(But all the good /. posts are -1 anyway, so...)
OK, champ, you go sue those taxi drivers and champion the American Entitlement Cause, argument and evidence be damned.
So is it a red herring, or a qualifier to the assertion?
Humans haven't been forming civilisations with written records for more than five thousand years, so of course none has existed for more than five thousand years. Clear enough, ya oik?
Christ on a stick. See above.
Which civilisation involving bipeds has existed for more than 50 million years?
I think all y'all are gloriously missing the point.
The point, my dearest dilettante, is that we lack evidence that humans have even been writing for more than five thousand or so years.
To suggest therefore that humans are unlikely to so sustain a civilisation what writes is dumb, dumb, dumb.
OK, that one made me laugh. Thank you.
...unnecessary proposition...
Are you declaring some queer Yank transitive form of exist?
It appears your mediocrity is not limited to your taste in comics.
Let me put this in more explicit terms for you.
Is this enough to understand why his "5,000 years" statement is nonsensical?
Interesting that you, like everyone here, have rushed to defend your hero, but omitted to address the question I posed which shows why his "5,000 years" argument is nonsense.
I am a cabbie/dispatcher in the same way that everyone who says that Windows isn't awful is a Microsoft shill. Sigh.
1) 1% (min.) cashback plus up to 56 days interest-free is comparable to what large outlets pay in merchant fees;
2) Anyway, I rarely get a discount for not paying by credit card;
3) In the EU, at least, where card usage is more common, cash handling fees may be significant;
4) There is no unform fixed fee per credit card transaction here - it depends on your bank, volume, specific negotiations for larger stores, etc. - for small stores, I'll ask what they prefer;
5) For nontrivial items, the card provider is jointly liable in law with the seller for satisfactory service performance/quality of goods. How smoothly this guarantee is applied depends on the quality of your bank, but for me, it's meant that I've never had a seller successfully defraud me.
Self-righteousness is wanting to a sue a cab company(!!) because you were waiting around for an hour in a big city for a single cab, claiming it's not your problem that you behaved helplessly, wagging your finger at the person furthest from your communication, then waving an irrelevant disability card for good measure.
This thread had well illustrated the worst excesses of entitlement attitude of the American middle-class chair warmer. Thank you for reminding me why America's now living off printed money and Chinese loans. Even if my argument doesn't convince you, maybe evidence will: Uber simply wasn't doing very well in Boston, and the attitude displayed in this thread has caused America to fall on the world economic stage.
Now resume barking... :-)