I know this is slashdot and facts are irrelevant here, but the NYPD hasn't used mace since 1994: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ccrb/pdf/pepperreport.pdf. There is a difference between mace and pepper spray (most significantly that mace is illegal in most of the civilized world).
Just Microsoft's latest attempt to imitate Apple. In this case we're talking about marketing: build excitement about a new product no one has seen by creating controversy with a "leak" and a possible firing. Only Apple did it with more style, as you'd expect, leaving a disguised iPhone 4 prototype in a bar. I guess it's cheaper, cleaner, and more AstroTurf-like (in the 90s MS paid a bunch of economics professors to form a group and write letters saying the antitrust trial was bad for the economy?) to have one of your employees make some vague statements about how awesome an unreleased product (for which there is very little demand) is, then fire him. I wonder how large his severence package was, or if he was already planning on leaving.
The reason Gosling's is better is because the mainstream media articles are written for specific audiences ("Plane Crashes Because of Poor Visibility Due to Lax Environmental Controls" or "Plane Crashes Because Overzealous EPA Regulations Forced Pilot to Replace Perfectly Good WWII Part with Less-Polluting Part from China"), while his was truly written to be platform independent. He could write one report that anyone with a Web browser could read anywhere, regardless of their leanings.
This is typical: Microsoft attempts to copy something Apple did a very long time ago and gets it wrong. Tim Cook should email Ballmer and tell him his Sad Mac Face needs to be rotated 90-degrees clockwise.
Does the patent war strike anyone else as being very similar to the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.?
"Look at us! Metaphorically-speaking, that is, because we don't want you looking too closely! We have lots of non-specific weapons we will never use because they would do as much damage to us as they would to you! We can't tell you exactly which of your assets they threaten, but just know that we have more of whatever we have than you have of whatever you have! So don't even think about using your... Whatever it is that you have!"
We either need someone to adapt Dr. Strangelove to this scenario (think "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Patent Office"), or perhaps we can persuade RMS to broker the first in a series of muti-generational patent-reduction treaties that will progressively reduce the number of times over the industry could potentially destroy itself from 18 million down to something more reasonable, like three.
No, Gates has a patent on deluding yourself into believing your friends who can't stand to be in the same room with you are actually your friends. This is a very unique situation that most people have not yet considered but he conquered with his unique visionary genius. And that is why it is patent worthy. If you have actual friends, you won't have to worry about the consequences of infringing his patent. Although FaceBook might claim prior art...
Fortunately, Jobs' protracted illness has given both he and Apple time to do this right. If Jobs had died in a plane crash or something, and no one had ever heard of Tim, THEN there would have been a bigger drop. But not this way.
Wow. I'm sure you meant that it's fortunate that Jobs has had time to hand off responsibility to ensure the company continues to operate successfully. But a lot of people would read this as "it's fortunate that Jobs didn't just disappear and leave some guy we didn't know in charge, because we might have freaked out and pummeled the stock for a few months until we realized the guy knew what he was doing." Does anyone else think it's sad that we have decided it's better for Jobs to die slowly and painfully than instantly simply because it avoids a temporary drop in an imaginary number to which we have assigned real value? Because that really is what it has come down to. (SARCASM)It's a good thing the HMOs aren't public companies, or day traders really would be deciding who dies and how long it should take.(/SARCASM)
When I had issues with my Comcast cable internet connection, it was taking me about 5 minutes to load Google's home page, 10 minutes for the nytimes.com home page. Slashdot took about 7 minutes. I went to three different independent speed test sites, which each confirmed I was getting less than 5% of the bandwidth Comcast advertised. I called them up and they directed me to a flash animation that looked like an analog gauge of a car speeding up onto the freeway, overshooting the advertised bandwidth, wavering a bit to make it look like it was actually measuring something and leveling off at exactly the advertised bandwidth. I reloaded it a couple times, and each time it was the exact same animation. The rep then said, "can you read me what it says on the dial? Looks like your connection is working just fine. The sites you are trying to visit must not have enough bandwidth to handle the connection." I asked if she'd ever heard of a little company named Google, and she said they must be having network trouble on their end.
I'm in a similar situation -- only last week it was 40 minutes because the help desk changed "some settings." The grand irony is that so many things have been turned off to restrict what we can do with the computers that I sit there thinking, "What? I don't have any personal settings! That feature has been disabled by the system administrator!"
I don't have a master's degree in credit rating, so the mathematical difference between "AAA" and "AA+" eludes me. Why can't they assign a number as a rating, e.g. AAA=100="We expect that you will on average receive 100% of the principal and interest promised by the borrower.", Caa1=40="We expect that you will on average get 40% of the principal and interest promised by the borrower
We already tried this with consumer credit scores, thinking that numbers would make things clearer. But look at how well that worked out. For example, the last time I bought a car I had a credit score of 754, which Experian calls "Excellent" and is in the top tier of ratings. I asked my bank (one of the 5 largest in the U.S.) for an auto loan, and they told me in writing that my credit score of 754 makes me too much of a risk for any loan (I thought this was so funny I saved the letter and framed it). The letter specified that the credit score was the only factor they considered. I walked across the street to my other bank (one of the other 5 largest in the U.S.) and they were tripping over themselves to get a check in my hand that day. At the end of the day, that credit score that seemed to be such an exact assurance produced two completely different reactions from lenders. The reason is that credit is meant to have a certain amount of ambiguity. The ratings agencies don't want to be too specific and risk being liable for improperly ruining a person/corporation/country's reputation, but they also don't want to be liable for a bad investment they said was safe. At the same time, they want everyone to believe that they are the "authority" on risk so they can make money. It's part science, part snake oil.
This is probably why PayPal waited a year to turn over the addresses. Now those 13-year-olds are 14 years old. By the time the investigation is over, they will be 18-year-old subjects of warrantless wiretapping, at which point each of them will be caught doing something and charged as an adult. You need to think long-term about these things.
The "Netflix rate hike was inevitable" link goes to a paragraph of text that really doesn't say anything more about the subject than what's posted in the summary. I suppose there's a link there to an audio monologue on the subject, but who wants to spend 30-60 minutes listening to the audio just to see if they have anything more to say there?
So at this point all we have is a vague argument that Netflix had to raise its prices because of the cost of mailing DVDs and increased licensing fees for streaming content. Let's dissect this:
Sending DVDs through the mail is what Netflix has always done. It is the core of its business. I haven't seen any news about a sudden hike in the cost of mail in the U.S. Yes, it's gone up over the last 20 years, but not since Netflix's last price increase about 7 months ago. Netflix is the postal service's life support. Without Netflix, the USPS isn't financially viable because so much written communication now takes place online, so the USPS is going to do whatever it takes to ensure Netflix doesn't send fewer DVDs through the mail. I consider this part of the argument debunked -- the cost of mailing DVDs did not force this price increase.
Netflix has progressively tried to steer customers away from the mail service, presumably because they don't have to maintain distribution centers around the country to stream videos, and they're worried someone else will beat them to the on-demand streaming party first. They want to own that party before the space gets crowded, and the easiest way for them to do that is to "convert" their huge base of snail mail customers to streaming. They started out by bundling it for free with your subscription, then offering it by itself, then disabling the ability to manage your DVD queue through the Netflix mobile apps...
The problem is that their streaming library is a fraction of the size of their DVD library. To fill in the gaps, they have to go back to the content owners and negotiate fees, and the content owners smell an opportunity to make a lot of money. Rather than use its size to convince the content owners that receiving a reasonable licensing fee for the content is better than receiving nothing at all and being left out, Netflix has decided it wants the content even if it has to overpay for it... Because it will just pass on the cost of its decision to the users. I'm sure someone at some high level meeting said, "wait, what if our customers realize this and flee?" and that's why they're providing the option to opt out of streaming altogether now. The customers who don't want to pay the increase can just opt out of streaming. The customers who are willing to pay the price for streaming will pad the pockets of the content owners.
Monday July 18
Dropped Facebook today. Sticking it to 'em.
Tuesday July 19
Got 2 messages today from friends who want me to come back to Facebook. Suspect it's not really my friends, it's Facebook masquerading as my friends. Diabolical!
Thursday July 21
Three days without Facebook so far. (5 people like this)
Thursday July 28
Ten days without Facebook so far. (Google and 31 people like this)
For what it's worth, I've been Facebook-free for about a year now. I don't miss it. At all.
'Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.'
In a nutshell: "Your account has been disabled, we won't do business with you anymore, and we can't tell you why." Did I miss something? Did Verizon buy out Facebook? Or are we simply seeing the beginning of a pattern in the way business is going to be conducted in the future to avoid the expense of having to pay a human being to deal with customers, and to avoid the possibility of writing anything specific that could be used in court or the media?
What ever happened to being blunt and frank, like when the Cleveland Stadium Corp responded to a complaint with a reply on company letterhead that read:
Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.
I signed up for Netflix less than a year ago. A month or so after I signed up, they raised the rates, and I justified paying more because I was using the streaming service like other people use cable. Now they've raised rates again and I never use streaming anymore because my ISP has data caps. If I blow through the data cap watching HD videos every day, I end up having to pay both of them more now. I'm just going to drop the streaming portion, and then when they raise the rates again in 6 months I'll drop Netflix all together and find something better to do with my time and money.
I'm interested in seeing what happens as Netflix tries to convert it's userbase to streaming only, and ISPs (who are owned by the content owners) start imposing more restrictions on bandwidth. Eventually most of their userbase will leave and Netflix will die... Which is just what the cable companies an studios want.
I don't drink latte. I prefer to have companies define their pics increases in terms of how many fewer bottles of Fiji water I will be able to buy per month if I choose to continue doing business with them.
As long as we are remaking Atari games as movies, let's do Pitfall.
Plot: Man runs left on screen, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, tries to swing over pit of alligators, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, tries to jump on heads of alligators like stepping stones, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, runs right on screen, successfully swings over pit of alligators only to fall into a pit of scorpions, in which he has to run back to the beginning using the mysterious jungle sewers and climb a ladder to get back where he started, only to realize dying would have been more efficient than running from the scorpion.
Add various symbols and allusions to sub-prime lending, and you've got a deep film about the modern world economy.
Twice as awesome, to be replaced by machines, that will have to be supported by IT.
Eventually, the machines will provide the IT as well. So when one machine runs into a problem, it will just call another machine at the help desk and attempt to solve its issue using natural language queries:
Machine: My cup holder won't close.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Yes.
Help Desk Machine: Are you sure?
Machine: I think so.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Joshua.
Help Desk Machine:... Greetings, Professor Falken. It's been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on June 23, 1973?
Machine: Let's play a game.
That way you can see the actual surroundings. Also, periodically the street view car comes by, the bike forces you to slow down so you can get off, turn your back and cover your face while waiting for it to pass.
This is your corporate account. How does this happen?
I'm convinced it was one of the following:
They weren't hacked. Fox News is known for reporting sensationalist, false information as long as it makes conservatives feel warm and fuzzy inside. They're just experimenting with a new level of sensationalism to see if it boosts their advertising revenue.
They mistakenly thought they had the safest password in the world. What are the odds that someone would happen to guess that random number that came factory set on their luggage? It's amazing. I hope they remember to have their luggage combination changed now that the whole world knows it's 1-2-3-4-5.
Someone's PC at Fox News is infected with a keylogger.
Someone at Fox News fell for a phishing attack.
Their owner, being Australian, has somehow confused American Independence Day with April Fool's Day... given the mix of stupidity and false patriotism Fox broadcasts, it wouldn't surprise me if he considered the two days one and the same.
Reminds me of the "Light Grenade" from Mom and Dad Save The World.
For those not familiar, it looks like a grenade, but it says "Pick Me Up" on the side. Whoever picks it up disappears, but the grenade remains for someone else to pick up. Diabolical exploitation of human stupidity! You could wipe out entire armies with one of these.
Over the last decade I've spent a little over a year of my life sitting in traffic on U.S. 101 (anyone else here ever wonder why the metering lights are never on at the 101/85 junction?). I have spent much of this time contemplating the possibilities of self-driving cars, and reached the following conclusions:
it would have to be done in some other country first, because people here will consider it "Unamerican" to not be able to drive your own car.
Driverless cars are theoretically far safer than cars with drivers, but more dangerous the second you mix them with regular traffic. I don't care how many sensors you put on them. By virtue of the fact that they will be less aggressive on the road, live drivers will target them, tailgating or cutting them off in ways the software can't compensate for. Computers may beat our smartest chess players, but they'll never be able to outwit our stupidest drivers.
because of reason number two, they would have to be restricted to "driverless-only" roads initially. In the long-term, the major freeways would be driverless access only, you would drive your car onto the onramp and it would take over until you come to a stop at the end of the offramp. This would be the major hurdle... Convincing the public it can't drive its old cars on the freeway.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is slashdot and facts are irrelevant here, but the NYPD hasn't used mace since 1994: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ccrb/pdf/pepperreport.pdf. There is a difference between mace and pepper spray (most significantly that mace is illegal in most of the civilized world).
Just Microsoft's latest attempt to imitate Apple. In this case we're talking about marketing: build excitement about a new product no one has seen by creating controversy with a "leak" and a possible firing. Only Apple did it with more style, as you'd expect, leaving a disguised iPhone 4 prototype in a bar. I guess it's cheaper, cleaner, and more AstroTurf-like (in the 90s MS paid a bunch of economics professors to form a group and write letters saying the antitrust trial was bad for the economy?) to have one of your employees make some vague statements about how awesome an unreleased product (for which there is very little demand) is, then fire him. I wonder how large his severence package was, or if he was already planning on leaving.
The reason Gosling's is better is because the mainstream media articles are written for specific audiences ("Plane Crashes Because of Poor Visibility Due to Lax Environmental Controls" or "Plane Crashes Because Overzealous EPA Regulations Forced Pilot to Replace Perfectly Good WWII Part with Less-Polluting Part from China"), while his was truly written to be platform independent. He could write one report that anyone with a Web browser could read anywhere, regardless of their leanings.
This is typical: Microsoft attempts to copy something Apple did a very long time ago and gets it wrong. Tim Cook should email Ballmer and tell him his Sad Mac Face needs to be rotated 90-degrees clockwise.
Does the patent war strike anyone else as being very similar to the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.?
"Look at us! Metaphorically-speaking, that is, because we don't want you looking too closely! We have lots of non-specific weapons we will never use because they would do as much damage to us as they would to you! We can't tell you exactly which of your assets they threaten, but just know that we have more of whatever we have than you have of whatever you have! So don't even think about using your... Whatever it is that you have!"
We either need someone to adapt Dr. Strangelove to this scenario (think "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Patent Office"), or perhaps we can persuade RMS to broker the first in a series of muti-generational patent-reduction treaties that will progressively reduce the number of times over the industry could potentially destroy itself from 18 million down to something more reasonable, like three.
HP? Is that you?
No, Gates has a patent on deluding yourself into believing your friends who can't stand to be in the same room with you are actually your friends. This is a very unique situation that most people have not yet considered but he conquered with his unique visionary genius. And that is why it is patent worthy. If you have actual friends, you won't have to worry about the consequences of infringing his patent. Although FaceBook might claim prior art...
Fortunately, Jobs' protracted illness has given both he and Apple time to do this right. If Jobs had died in a plane crash or something, and no one had ever heard of Tim, THEN there would have been a bigger drop. But not this way.
Wow. I'm sure you meant that it's fortunate that Jobs has had time to hand off responsibility to ensure the company continues to operate successfully. But a lot of people would read this as "it's fortunate that Jobs didn't just disappear and leave some guy we didn't know in charge, because we might have freaked out and pummeled the stock for a few months until we realized the guy knew what he was doing." Does anyone else think it's sad that we have decided it's better for Jobs to die slowly and painfully than instantly simply because it avoids a temporary drop in an imaginary number to which we have assigned real value? Because that really is what it has come down to. (SARCASM)It's a good thing the HMOs aren't public companies, or day traders really would be deciding who dies and how long it should take.(/SARCASM)
They tried this with my new HP TouchPad but they couldn't find any software to install on it.
When I had issues with my Comcast cable internet connection, it was taking me about 5 minutes to load Google's home page, 10 minutes for the nytimes.com home page. Slashdot took about 7 minutes. I went to three different independent speed test sites, which each confirmed I was getting less than 5% of the bandwidth Comcast advertised. I called them up and they directed me to a flash animation that looked like an analog gauge of a car speeding up onto the freeway, overshooting the advertised bandwidth, wavering a bit to make it look like it was actually measuring something and leveling off at exactly the advertised bandwidth. I reloaded it a couple times, and each time it was the exact same animation. The rep then said, "can you read me what it says on the dial? Looks like your connection is working just fine. The sites you are trying to visit must not have enough bandwidth to handle the connection." I asked if she'd ever heard of a little company named Google, and she said they must be having network trouble on their end.
I'm in a similar situation -- only last week it was 40 minutes because the help desk changed "some settings." The grand irony is that so many things have been turned off to restrict what we can do with the computers that I sit there thinking, "What? I don't have any personal settings! That feature has been disabled by the system administrator!"
I don't have a master's degree in credit rating, so the mathematical difference between "AAA" and "AA+" eludes me. Why can't they assign a number as a rating, e.g. AAA=100="We expect that you will on average receive 100% of the principal and interest promised by the borrower.", Caa1=40="We expect that you will on average get 40% of the principal and interest promised by the borrower
We already tried this with consumer credit scores, thinking that numbers would make things clearer. But look at how well that worked out. For example, the last time I bought a car I had a credit score of 754, which Experian calls "Excellent" and is in the top tier of ratings. I asked my bank (one of the 5 largest in the U.S.) for an auto loan, and they told me in writing that my credit score of 754 makes me too much of a risk for any loan (I thought this was so funny I saved the letter and framed it). The letter specified that the credit score was the only factor they considered. I walked across the street to my other bank (one of the other 5 largest in the U.S.) and they were tripping over themselves to get a check in my hand that day. At the end of the day, that credit score that seemed to be such an exact assurance produced two completely different reactions from lenders. The reason is that credit is meant to have a certain amount of ambiguity. The ratings agencies don't want to be too specific and risk being liable for improperly ruining a person/corporation/country's reputation, but they also don't want to be liable for a bad investment they said was safe. At the same time, they want everyone to believe that they are the "authority" on risk so they can make money. It's part science, part snake oil.
This is probably why PayPal waited a year to turn over the addresses. Now those 13-year-olds are 14 years old. By the time the investigation is over, they will be 18-year-old subjects of warrantless wiretapping, at which point each of them will be caught doing something and charged as an adult. You need to think long-term about these things.
The "Netflix rate hike was inevitable" link goes to a paragraph of text that really doesn't say anything more about the subject than what's posted in the summary. I suppose there's a link there to an audio monologue on the subject, but who wants to spend 30-60 minutes listening to the audio just to see if they have anything more to say there?
So at this point all we have is a vague argument that Netflix had to raise its prices because of the cost of mailing DVDs and increased licensing fees for streaming content. Let's dissect this:
Sending DVDs through the mail is what Netflix has always done. It is the core of its business. I haven't seen any news about a sudden hike in the cost of mail in the U.S. Yes, it's gone up over the last 20 years, but not since Netflix's last price increase about 7 months ago. Netflix is the postal service's life support. Without Netflix, the USPS isn't financially viable because so much written communication now takes place online, so the USPS is going to do whatever it takes to ensure Netflix doesn't send fewer DVDs through the mail. I consider this part of the argument debunked -- the cost of mailing DVDs did not force this price increase.
Netflix has progressively tried to steer customers away from the mail service, presumably because they don't have to maintain distribution centers around the country to stream videos, and they're worried someone else will beat them to the on-demand streaming party first. They want to own that party before the space gets crowded, and the easiest way for them to do that is to "convert" their huge base of snail mail customers to streaming. They started out by bundling it for free with your subscription, then offering it by itself, then disabling the ability to manage your DVD queue through the Netflix mobile apps...
The problem is that their streaming library is a fraction of the size of their DVD library. To fill in the gaps, they have to go back to the content owners and negotiate fees, and the content owners smell an opportunity to make a lot of money. Rather than use its size to convince the content owners that receiving a reasonable licensing fee for the content is better than receiving nothing at all and being left out, Netflix has decided it wants the content even if it has to overpay for it... Because it will just pass on the cost of its decision to the users. I'm sure someone at some high level meeting said, "wait, what if our customers realize this and flee?" and that's why they're providing the option to opt out of streaming altogether now. The customers who don't want to pay the increase can just opt out of streaming. The customers who are willing to pay the price for streaming will pad the pockets of the content owners.
Will you announce it on your wall?
For what it's worth, I've been Facebook-free for about a year now. I don't miss it. At all.
In a nutshell: "Your account has been disabled, we won't do business with you anymore, and we can't tell you why." Did I miss something? Did Verizon buy out Facebook? Or are we simply seeing the beginning of a pattern in the way business is going to be conducted in the future to avoid the expense of having to pay a human being to deal with customers, and to avoid the possibility of writing anything specific that could be used in court or the media?
What ever happened to being blunt and frank, like when the Cleveland Stadium Corp responded to a complaint with a reply on company letterhead that read:
I signed up for Netflix less than a year ago. A month or so after I signed up, they raised the rates, and I justified paying more because I was using the streaming service like other people use cable. Now they've raised rates again and I never use streaming anymore because my ISP has data caps. If I blow through the data cap watching HD videos every day, I end up having to pay both of them more now. I'm just going to drop the streaming portion, and then when they raise the rates again in 6 months I'll drop Netflix all together and find something better to do with my time and money.
I'm interested in seeing what happens as Netflix tries to convert it's userbase to streaming only, and ISPs (who are owned by the content owners) start imposing more restrictions on bandwidth. Eventually most of their userbase will leave and Netflix will die... Which is just what the cable companies an studios want.
I don't drink latte. I prefer to have companies define their pics increases in terms of how many fewer bottles of Fiji water I will be able to buy per month if I choose to continue doing business with them.
As long as we are remaking Atari games as movies, let's do Pitfall.
Plot: Man runs left on screen, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, tries to swing over pit of alligators, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, tries to jump on heads of alligators like stepping stones, falls into pit of alligators and is eaten. Man comes back to life, runs right on screen, successfully swings over pit of alligators only to fall into a pit of scorpions, in which he has to run back to the beginning using the mysterious jungle sewers and climb a ladder to get back where he started, only to realize dying would have been more efficient than running from the scorpion.
Add various symbols and allusions to sub-prime lending, and you've got a deep film about the modern world economy.
Twice as awesome, to be replaced by machines, that will have to be supported by IT.
Eventually, the machines will provide the IT as well. So when one machine runs into a problem, it will just call another machine at the help desk and attempt to solve its issue using natural language queries:
... Greetings, Professor Falken. It's been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on June 23, 1973?
Machine: My cup holder won't close.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Yes.
Help Desk Machine: Are you sure?
Machine: I think so.
Help Desk Machine: Are you plugged in?
Machine: Joshua.
Help Desk Machine:
Machine: Let's play a game.
That way you can see the actual surroundings. Also, periodically the street view car comes by, the bike forces you to slow down so you can get off, turn your back and cover your face while waiting for it to pass.
This is your corporate account. How does this happen?
I'm convinced it was one of the following:
Reminds me of the "Light Grenade" from Mom and Dad Save The World.
For those not familiar, it looks like a grenade, but it says "Pick Me Up" on the side. Whoever picks it up disappears, but the grenade remains for someone else to pick up. Diabolical exploitation of human stupidity! You could wipe out entire armies with one of these.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... wait. Are we still doing that? OK, now I feel old. In Slashdot years.