It's the universal nostrum of the intellectually lazy: if you don't know what to do, then do some damage. Then you can tell yourself you are taking bold, vigorous steps, even if they happen to be in the wrong direction.
Is drug abuse to complicated an issue? Then lets have zero tolerance, at least for people who don't have the means to avoid the point at which we start applying it.
Don't know how to secure the borders? Then seize some people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time and send them out to be tortured.
Nuclear non-proliferation cutting into your brush clearing time? Start a war, which is much more interesting than intelligence gathering or diplomacy.
Most people just assume you know what you're doing. It'll probably take, oh, six or seven years for them to figure out how badly you've screwed things up, and by then it's almost not your problem any more. With luck the cleaning up your mess will be so painful people will blame your successor.
Oh, you don't need big government to poke your nose into the affairs of average citizens. They don't have the money to fight you.
It's only if you want laws to apply to the powerful that you need to have agencies like the EPA or Labor or the FDA. A Department of Sexual Morality would be, relatively speaking, cheap.
Well, I don't know a lot about the details, but it sounds like the idea is to make the wireless companies bid for the spectrum under the current conditions of sale.
I'm guessing (without reading TFA of course) that the scenario went like this. If the reserve price hadn't been met, then the carriers could say, "obviously this spectrum has no market value unless it is for creating a closed network." Then the FCC would declare the auction void and conduct a new auction under conditions more favorable to the carriers and less favorable to the public.
Is stopping that scenario evil? Well, if Google had won, they'd have to put their money where their mouth was and become a wireless carrier themselves. They were hoping the industry would rather let their customers choose the hardware they wanted to use in this spectrum rather than to invite Google in as a competitor.
So it's a win all around. Google keeps the spectrum open for its servies and for its android partners; users get more choice in hardware and services, and the current providers don't have to worry about Google doing to them what they'd planned to do to Google. It's not as lucrative for the carriers as they hoped, but that's what competition is for. They'll make at least a normal profit, but not as much more as they'd have liked, and the public gets better services.
Well, to be a contrarian, Brown may have deserved censure, but I think criticism of him is exaggerated. In some ways, his most distinctive failings were political.
True, the real issue was that FEMA wasn't ready, and he was supposed to be in charge making sure it was ready, but it's not like he's just one bad apple in the bunch. He might not have recommended enough, but the administration didn't even back him in what he had recommended.
As for his imperiousness, well, what do you expect? When the higher ups don't want to hear bad news, somebody's got to be the one who is the face of unresponsiveness to the people trying to prepare for the worst. I can't think of a single instance of a crisis this administration was even remotely prepared for, even crises of their own making.
It's gotten to the point where this almost works for them. When an administration official gets up and says something starting with "Nobody could have forseen...," nobody expects them to have foreen whatever it was, or to have listened to the people below them who were forecasting it all along. When the pressure gets too much, they just pick a patsy to throw to the wolves, but the real problem is that the whole lot of them are managing the country from the viewpoint of an alternate reality.
Then the President will sanctimoniously tell us that this stuff is "hard work", which is true. It is also why it would be good idea to govern like these problems need to be addressed by more than managing the bad news until the only thing you can do is find a scapegoat.
Look at Ted Kazynski, who had an IQ of 170 and had PhD in mathematics. The planning to avoid detection probably didn't occupy much of his intellect. They'd never have caught them if his own brother hadn't recognized the writing in his manifesto. On the other hand, the manifesto reveals a person who is deeply unhappy and can't figure out what to do about it other than to blow people up, and construct elaborate psychohistorical theories to explain why happiness is impossible.
On the other hand, there's roles for people like Richard Reid, who was probably viewed as ajoke by the higher ups. You wouldn't trust him with much, but in a sense he did ultimately prove useful.
Well,not to excuse an other government IT debacle, you can't compare this to the stock taking apps you see on Intermecs and the like.
First of all, the information on a census is more complex than counting the numbers of SKUs. It also contains sensitive personal data -- not that private industry doesn't deal with that too, but it has a thoroughly dismal record of protecting privacy. Also, while some widget might not be in the right aisle, it's not likely you'll find a bunch of stuff in a store that you didn't put there, whereas a big part of the census is finding people you didn't know where there so they can be counted.
Like defense, the census does a lot of things that private agencies may do, but with a number of twists. That's why big government IT projects are often such bad news. It'd be better to do a one or two things incrementally, for example introduce PDAs and maybe GPS to handle some parts of the job for some census takers, then add more functionality and deploy more widely with every iteration. I mean, 600 million bucks? Who in his right mind would start this project with that much money? I'd start with maybe five or ten million for a pilot, and work my way up from there.
Of course, the federal contracting system is pretty much an invitation to inflate every contract a huge boondogle, but that's a different story. No politician goes to Washington promising to do a lot of small things that after three or four years will end up amounting to real progress. They all promise to go down there and shake things up, with the result that there's always a lot of shaking going on, but surprisingly little getting accomplished.
Well, what it is, is an outrageous extrapolation of conservative legal philosophy into the realm of the absurd. It's what I call "legal literalism": the simple minded application of the law's text without regard to its intent. If we call criminal investigation "domestic warfare", then the Fourth Amendment magically disappears, right?
That said, the fourth amendment doesn't really say what people think it does. If you read it carefully, you'll see that you don't need a warrant to search somebody's home or seize their effects. It just has to be "reasonable". This isn't some loony right wing view, it's actually the view of conservative and liberal jurists back to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. You don't need a warrant to have the health department inspect the house of the loony lady with 200 cats. If you are fighting a pitched battle on US soil, you don't need a warrant to enter a house where you think the enemy might be holed up -- which is what they are trying to argue by analogy here.
What you need a warrant for is to do any of the listed things as part of a criminal investigation. Without a warrant, they are considered unreasonable in an investigation, with a few narrow exceptions. The Fourth Amendment is like badly written engineering spec; you have to know what was customary when it was written to know what it is supposed to do.
Now notice some things about wiretapping: (1) It doesn't involve seizing or depriving the individual of any of the tangible things listed; (2) it can, and usually does, take place on premises that are not owned by the subject of the surveillance, and may not involve any of his physical property. If you are a literalist pinhead, it looks like you're good to go. In fact this was not such a farfetched theory. In 1928 wiretaps were ruled as not needing any warrant in Olmstead v. United States, with Justice Brandeis delivering a famous and influential dissent criticizing the majority's literalist interpretation. Subsequently his reasoning was adopted, when Olmstead was reversed in Katz v. US, holding that the Fourth protected people, not places and things.
Still, what about domestic warfare, which is a well known exception to the warrant requirements for searching? If you can enter somebody's house in a gun battle without a warrant, can you enter it during an information battle? It is not entirely clear. If known foreign agents were keeping a safe house, you probably could enter it and search it without the Constitution requiring a warrant. So Katz nothwithstanding, can you bug the same people? Probably, at least as far as the Constitution goes.
There are bound to be borderline cases, and frankly the Constitution is not particularly well written in this area, judging from what is its apparent intent. However, it provides a mechanism to work around its shortcomings, short of amendment. The Constitutionally grants power to Congress to exercise oversight over the Executive branch, to control its budget, and to pass laws regulating how it performs its functions. It's these powers that are supposed to keep the President in check, so that he doesn't extend his power from the clear cases, through the borderline cases, on to anything he wants to do.
And it's precisely this power which this administration denies exists and consistently tries to evade. The President likes to talk about his "inherent powers", but this is not a term that the Constitution uses. What he means by "inherent" is beyond Congressional regulation. I don't think there are any such powers. What Congress can't do is use its regulatory powers to usurp the functions of the Executive branch. It's Congress's job to do things like define the dividing line between criminal investigation and domestic warfare.
I started MIT in 1979 and people often ask whether I knew anybody on the blackjack team. I answer not to my knowledge, although I was certainly aware that people were doing this.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think card counting wasn't exactly a closely held secret. I knew at least one guy who used to practice in one of the lounges, and was happy to explain various counting systems, some of which were easy enough for somebody who was not interested in spending hours on end memory training to master. Consequently practically everybody in my dorm knew about card counting and for the average MIT student knowing that it can be done is practically as good as telling him how to do it. I'd guess that there were probably a lot of freelancers.
The guy I'm talking about was almost definitely a freelancer. He used to play with his girlfriend, whose job it was to distract the manager by displaying her large breasts in a low cut dress.
People ask whether I did any card counting, and certainly with my friend's very cogent demonstrations of various systems I probably could have. However, it turns out casinos are my idea of Hell on Earth. I hate the noise, I hate the miasma of crookedness that hangs around them, but mostly I hate the company of stupid people blissed out on overstimulation and greed. I'm not saying everyone who goes there is stupid, but at any given time there are throngs of people in a casino who under no circumstances should be let into a house of gambling without being relieved of their credit cards.
The thing about this card counting guy was that he was weird, by MIT standards. What made him weird was that he really loved money. Plenty of people gloated about how much money they were going to make when the graduated, but really the money was just a way of keeping score on whose engineering balls were the biggest. This guy had zero interest in engineering, but he was taking one of the most difficult engineering courses MIT had to offer. He had no intention of ever practicing as an engineer, he had a plan to parlay his hard to get degree into serious amounts of money. He was a good enough guy, but like I said, weird.
So, I think there are a lot of people who could probably do this, and I'm sure some people tried it for the hack value, but you'd have to seriously like money, more than the average MIT student of my day, to do it systematically.
Still, in the atmosphere of mythologizing that's gone on since the book was published, I bet there's more than a couple people who can creatively reimagine themselves as the real star of the story.
, the constitution is nothing more then a piece of paper with ideals of the men of the time.
Actually, for better or worse, our Constitution has become more and more like Britain's.
What a constitution is, is a consensus of how things are supposed to work. A written constitution was a 19thc bourgeois innovation; writing it down as the fundamental law made it like a contract. But ultimately the thing that really holds everything together is a powerful consensus that things are supposed to work a certain way. This consensus gets woven into the very fabric of society, not just attitudes and traditions, but legal precedents as well, to the point where it seems a lot more objective than it really is.
Do we really think that the framers intended Congress to be able to extend copyrights indefinitely, when they said they were for "limimted" terms? Or thought that business methods should be patented? Or that corporations should be legal persons with political rights? For that matter, there's nothing stopping Presidential electors from voting for whomever they please; it's happened a few times, but if it ever swayed an election it would be a Constitutional crisis, even though in plain language there's nothing that says an elector can't change his mind.
Suppose a couple of electors get together and decide to sell their votes to the losing party in a Presidential election. There is a Constitutional crisis and military units are choosing up sides. If you are an officer sworn to uphold the Constitution which one are you loyal to? The one on paper that says the President is elected by electors, or the one that says the people rule?
Hooters founder Robert Brooks has started a new business: providing Internet services.
Jack-In Broadband [sm] will provide broadband installation and support services, with a twist. All installations will be performed by female technicians wearing brightly colored plastic miniskirts and crop-tops. On-line tech support will also be provided by "Jack-In Girls", via real time two way video link.
Women's rights groups are criticizing the planned service. "This is demeaning to women in technology," said Maria Testicolo-Lattine, the Florida director for the National Organization for Women. "Not only are they being valued for their bodies over their skills, they are being paid only minimum wage."
A corporate spokesman for the company confirmed that the technicians would only be paid minimum wage, and would have to buy their own uniforms, tools and vehicle, however he denied that they were being exploited. "These girls will make plenty of dough, through gratuities and, uh, little side services they provide our customers." The spokesman asked that his name be withheld. [Ed. -- editorial policy does not allow for corporate PR officers to be quoted anonymously. The spokesman quoted was Anthony Testicolo, from the company's Miami office.]
The service is slated to begin in the Clearwater, Florida market, expanding to eight metropolitan areas in the southern US over the next two years. There are no plans to market the installation service in the north, due to the impracticality of the technicians' uniforms in that climate, although negotiations are under way to offer the on-line support services through cooperative agreements with several national ISPs.
1. A principle or body of principles presented for acceptance or belief, as by a religious, political, scientific, or philosophic group; dogma.
2. A rule or principle of law, especially when established by precedent.
3. A statement of official government policy, especially in foreign affairs and military strategy.
4. Archaic. Something taught; a teaching.
So while "By definition, wartime posters are naturally propagandistic", that is only so if we accept the archaic definition of "doctrine". And in any case, writers of dictionary entries are fallible, as are, ahem, Wikipedia contributors.
In any case, you don't get any debate points waving dictionary entries around unless you show some understanding of the issues being discussed.
Except "loose lips sink ships" is not propaganda; it's just pithy advice.
Telling people Sadaam killed babies so he could loot their hospital incubators was propaganda. It would not have been if it were true, but in fact it was a story fabricated by the Kuwaitis and knowingly propagated by the first Bush administration to whip up support for the invasion of Kuwait. And before people get their noses bent out of shape, I supported the first Gulf war and still do. That doesn't mean I have to endorse the government lying to me.
With respect to psychological warfare, this is something any US officer, sworn to uphold the Constitution, must question. The Constitution puts the military under the control of the civilian government, but the subtle point here is that it does it in the way that the military is not an agent of the government, it is an agent of the Constitution and the people it protects. This is what makes the US military different from, say, the North Korean military, which is a creature of the party, and ultimately the Dear Leader. It is not the role of the military to put one over on the American people for their own good.
We can draw a parallel with keeping secrets, or even tactical bluffing. In a democracy's military, these are necessary evils. You have to ask this question: are the American people uniformed, or misinformed, in a substantive way? It makes very little difference in the lives of Americans whether a ship convoy is steaming east or west, but it makes a great deal of difference if it does so to provoke a war under false pretenses. That's the key: are we undermining the sovereignty of the voter?
There is simply no point to democracy if government officials have unlimited power to feed the public with lies, and to force the cooperation of civil servants and the military. The people can't rule themselves if they are making political decisions based on phony stories being fed to them, even indirectly.
It's not that trying to sway public opinion in foreign countries with psy-ops isn't often advantageous, even if it does give Americans a distorted view of the situation. People don't make wrong decisions when those decisions have nothing to recommend them. What makes it wrong is that you can't have the advantages of being a democracy without ceding some of the advantages that totalitarian states enjoy. The question is whether you believe the advantages of freedom outweigh the inconveniences.
If people were really ignorant of grammar, then they wouldn't be able to do more than the verbal equivalent of pointing at things and grunting.
What people are ignorant of is standard usage. These rules exist to provide writers with guidelines by means of which they can make their meaning clear the greatest number of readers.
Still, it is a silly charade to pretend that you do not understand phrases like "somewhat unique" and "totally unique", just because you want to prove somebody is ignorant. Because the word "unique" tends to provoke pointless argument, I prefer the the word "distinctive" in my formal writing. In general "distinctive" is a much better word in most circumstances, because it carries a lower semantic burden. That something is distinctive means it can be picked out from other objects in some broader class.
I prefer to reserve the the word "unique" for situation where it is misleading to equate something to other members of its class for some purpose that I have identified. For example, Proxima Centauri is unique for purposes of discussing human interstellar travel, because it it the closest star to our own. It is not unique for purposes of discussing star variability. Even so we can't escape fuzzy set membership entirely; the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard's Star are very nearly as close.
The problem here is not adherence -- or lack of it -- to the rules of usage. The problem is the habit of imprecision leads to the habit of thoughtlessly using superlatives and vice versa. For example, the title does not make it clear whether two new classes of star systems, each with a single member, have been discovered, or whether two star systems of a heretofore unknown class have been discovered. It is actually the latter, which is not hard to figure out, so in the end no harm is done. But the habit of precision is a good one to cultivate.
The rules of usage are like grammar checkers. Grammar checkers can't tell you how to write what you mean, but when a grammar checker goes bananas on a sentence it's usually a sign that there is something sloppy in the construction of the sentence. Here the stacking of a superlative adverb on top of a superlative adjective is a tip off that the title could be written better.
It's not that Europe doesn't have corruption. It's just not as organized as American corruption. This may be, in part, because our legal system has managed to confuse influence peddling with free speech. There are cases, of course, we're it's hard to make the distinction, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.
Well, the answer as you obviously have guessed is that they don't. At least not on balance.
There's a philosophy in government contracting that if an ounce of medicine benefits a patient, then a quart would be thirty two times better. It's the fault of politics, with its fondness for oversimplification and grand gestures.
As a taxpayer, you're screwed. As a voter, you can at least do a little. Don't vote for the guy who is promising to run the most ethical administration ever, nor the one who is running on his superior moral character. Vote for the one who will open up the operations of government to the most scrutiny. Don't vote for the guy who promises to eliminate all the waste and fraud, vote for either (a) they guy who promises to eliminate the program or (b) the guy who promises to make the program deliver measurable results.
In short, don't expect miracles or be taken in by people who promise them.
People like Bill Gates don't have to worry about Uncle Sam sucking them dry. They have plenty of people working all the tax angles for them, and chances are Bill Gates pays less taxes as a proportion of his income than the people who take his trash away.
I cede nothing to anyone if the field of cynicism, but I think Gates turned to charity because business just wasn't fun any longer, so he decided to go out on top, before he started losing his touch. It reminds me of something Voltaire is reported to have said, which was something like, "I've only ever had one prayer, which was 'Lord, let my enemies be ridiculous.' And it was answered."
If all the Gates Foundation was doing was getting Bill a tax cut by pushing boxes of Microsoft software (which wouldn't work because Gates is not legally the same as Microsoft), I doubt Warren Buffet would have pledged his fortune to it when he passes on.
Well, I think there is a difference between beauty and prettiness, although the terms are often used interchangeably.
Facial attractiveness has been studied by anthropologists for some years now. Like other measures of physical attractiveness, factors contributing to female facial attractiveness are signs of robust physical health and fertility. Examples include clear, healthy looking skin, and physical symmetry. Physical symmetry is particularly interesting, because it is a very strong indicator of excellent physical health an nutrition.
There was a paper I read about a few years ago dealing with computer generated faces; the program started with scans of actual faces, then combined and morphed the features. The most attractive face turned out to be the one they got by finding the median of all the facial measurements. This makes sense too. It turns out to be extremely difficult to be average in every way, and this probably is also a measure of physical health and nutrition.
So I don't think prettiness is simply in the eye of the beholder, although the eye of the beholder may be trained somewhat by averaging the faces it sees every day. This is another example of how the most potent human sexual organ is the brain. I remember back in the day when you could count on Slashdot to deliver a puerile discussion of Natalie Portman every day, there was a post complaining that she "wasn't really hot." She's not. She's quite pretty; if she were walking down the street you'd notice her, but you wouldn't stare in slack mouthed amazement. But she's also a very good actor, and actors know how to mess with your brain. If she wanted you to see her as sexy, your brain would probably have a meltdown.
If we were to distinguish "prettiness" from "beauty", I think it is something that happens in the higher levels of the brain than sensory perception. Anna Nicole Smith seems hideous to you because signs of obsessive grooming, and behavioral cues suggestive of poor judgment and impulse control. These set off alarm bells that say, back off. At least they should if you are reasonably perceptive and experienced.
On the other hand, your children are beautiful to you, even if they are plain looking and badly behaved.
Prettiness is what gets our attention. Beauty is what holds it, what makes us want to be involved.
Umm, it's the large number of dial up users that, according to one way of looking at things, makes the current US broadband situation costly to the US economy.
The fundamental question is whether this is a national issue of a collection of individual issues.
Look, businesses sell their products. Or more precisely, businessmen have salesmen who sell their products. Salesmen are people who are good at sleight of hand, blurring fine distinctions and confusing issues. It's OK, because things are set up because it's their duty to do what it takes, short of fraud, to maximize sales. Everybody knows this.
Can you imagine what things would be like if companies sent engineers out to sell. Of course engineers can learn to be discreet. You can also teach a dog to walk on its hind legs, but that doesn't make it natural. Nor does it make it convincing. It's the fact that the poor animal has to struggle to do an unconvincing imitation that makes the routine amusing.
You might not even get a more balanced view from the engineer -- not unless you brought one in from off the team. There has never been an engineer worth his salt who didn't obsess about the things he could have done better, even on projects he or she is proud of.
Umm, having developed software for charities at various points in my career, I have to say that is not the case...
Oh, wait, I am a nobody. At least so far as Microsoft is concerned. It's not that I didn't make enough money to "put food on my family", it's just that I didn't make enough to matter and I never will.
However, the feeling is mutual. If I didn't have clients who need products delivered on MS platforms, I'd happily never touch a piece of MS software again. It's not that I'm ideologically against them, but Microsoft doesn't cater to people like me; we're not a profitable market for them. In fact, we're nobody as far as they're concerned.
That's OK with me; the Gap doesn't offer a line of clothing for people like me; the local Evangelical church doesn't have special Sunday services for people like me either. I'm perfectly happy for each of these organizations to provide their services and wares for people who for whatever reason think they fulfill a need. We just move in orbits that, for the most part intersect.
I think the mutual indifference thing breaks down because Microsoft wants to be everything to everybody. They want to have the one important operating system and the one important file format "standard". Since they don't intend to cater to me, the only way for that to happen is for me to have to use products that were not designed with the things I value in mind. The file format thing is a great example. What I want out of office file formats is not at all what Microsoft is prepared to give me.
This is not how a business prices things
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Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with the cost plus model for pricing is that prices aren't fixed.
One of the biggest determiners of cost is volume of sales; for the most part your costs go down as you sell more -- you share fixed costs like your factories over more units sold of course, but even your unit costs tend to go down with sales volume. Of course in special cases you may have per unit costs go up with volume, for example when you've bought all the plastic available at a certain price for your CDs...
When it comes to pricing, what keeps greed in check is supposed to be... greed. If a label is selling a CD at $15.99, it means that they think pricing it a penny higher or a penny lower will cost them net profits, either through inflating per unit costs (which trims profit on each unit sold), or cutting into volume.
At least that's the way it's supposed to work.
I think the problem with the music industry is not greed -- or at least it's not just unenlightened greed. The problem is imagination.
Think about this: people sashay into Starbucks every day and plunk down $3.99 on a cup of coffee. Not that has anything to do with the price of tea in China, but it means that people do have money to throw around $20-$30 bucks a week absolutely mindlessly. In that context a $15.99 music CD is one of the greatest bargains imaginable provided that you like it enough to play it quite a bit. I have CDs from a decade ago I still play quite a bit.
The problem is in the market demand end of things. People aren't plunking down $15.99 for CDs on a whim, even though they very well could. They can blame it on P2P if they like, but if they can't manage a half dozen or so impulse buys for the average consumer over the course of a year, they've got a serious marketing problem. Even in the world of widespread "piratical" downloads, people will fork over $15.99 for a CD if it contains music they really, really want to listen to. It's not enough money to deter fans from buying a physical token of ownership. It's true that houses burn down, but people lose computer data much, much more often. If music has to be free for people to listen to it, something is wrong with the content they're selling.
So we have a marketing problem, and that includes pricing, but it also includes product definition and promotion. If $15.99 is the wrong price, but $11.35 is the "right" price, they industry is either failing to promote music people want to hear, or failing to reach people who want to hear the music they are producing, or both. I suspect both. I suspect that $11.35 might be more "right" than $15.99, but only because the industry doesn't know how to find, produce and promote music that people want to hear. It's really important to keep people in the habit of buying your product, and that's where the music industry is falling down. They'll have to accept that its not as profitable a business as they imagined it to be, at least until people are back in the habit of buying.
No matter how high you set the bar, there will always be an "over the top".
Ever read Milton's essay on Machiavelli? One of the points that he makes is that it's not straightforward for an outsider to judge what is barbaric in a historical or cultural context. You might think that having an assassin poison a rival city's leader is barbaric, but there is something to said for the theory that it's less barbaric than laying siege to his city and burning it to the ground. People of a more Northern European cultural background tend to look at wars in which hundreds or thousands of bystanders are killed as unfortunate, but unavoidable facts of life. Yet we feel revulsion when somebody calculates that his way forward would be eased by the carefully planned removal of a single individual whose continued sojourn among the living presents... complications.
It's the cold bloodedness that turns us off; if the same prince lost his head and smacked his rival over the head with candlestick at a banquet, we might think it is a bad act, but not necessarily a repulsive one. It can be argued, however, that calculated murder is really no more morally repugnant than indulging in the luxury of murderous, irrational rages.
Milton's point is that every society that has ever existed is somewhat hypocritical about its moral ideals. But while "everybody does it" is not a moral excuse, Milton points out that there is a great practical difference between a person willing to do the same bad things that "everybody" does, and a person who is willing to do things that the people around him find repugnant. The difference is that latter person is utterly unrestrained by any consideration at all.
Which brings us to standards committees. We all know that there is plenty of backstabbing and double-dealing involved. "Everybody" does it, although as in the case of warfare for the Northern baron or assassination for an Italian prince, there is such a thing as immoderation when it comes to enjoying a culturally sanctioned vice. But while various forms of vote manipulation may be somewhat sanctioned, altering vote counting is "over the top". It does something beyond harming the "spirit" of the process. It harms the pretense of the process.
As inferior as pretense is to principle in a moral sense, it at least functions as a more reliable restraint on depraved behavior. ISO may not do what it is "supposed" to do, but it does something that is useful. The process is useless unless it can at least maintain the pretense of fairness. Once you start altering votes, you might as well hire goons to rough up the opposition. In fact hiring goons might be somewhat preferable, because it can be done discreetly. People will notice if the votes they bought... er, cast weren't recorded properly.
Well, good textbooks would help. Not necessarily pretty. Not necessarily easy. A good textbook is one that rewards effort. No I happen to like the CLRS algorithms book, because while it is quite difficult, if you master a topic in it you've really learned something. There are often texts that have big holes in them that are covered over with hand waving and bad prose; it costs you just as much effort to figure out that the authors don't know what they're talking about as it would to digest a serious slug of math, but the only thin you've learned is the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
In liberal arts fields, you don't deal with texts because you go straight to source materials. You don't worry that there aren't any good books about Dickens (although there are), you just read,discuss and argue about Dickens. In engineering, you're still taking stuff that's fairly basic throughout your school career. It's not that you don't start to graduate out of textbooks the way liberal arts students do, it's that you don't do it quite so quickly or completely.
In any case, bad textbooks are merely an annoyance.
As an engineer, you learn to identify requirements, study them, and balance them against others. You also learn that the relationship between requirements is often more complex than it appears. So lets say one of the requirements of an engineering education is for students to feel as happy as possible. Of course, that's very poorly stated, but requirements always are at the outset. Clearly, happiness is at the very least a "nice to have". However, when faced with with the sacrifice and challenges needed to become an engineer, something very like student happiness might be very advantageous to have. A creative student who loses interest and flunks out is not necessarily less promising than one who manages to get passable grades all the way through.
Let's say that the goal will be to design our engineering education so that students feel as much fulfillment as possible from acquiring the technical skills and expertise that are expected from an engineering degree.
Well, the literature on human happiness, while not nearly as extensive as that on human misery, seems to hold some promise. It suggests that the degree of personal fulfillment an individual experiences is a function of the quality and quantity of his social connections. This is probably while being an engineering student sucks; it's not that you don't make friends, its that being a friends is time away from being a good engineering student. Which is odd because in the real world, good engineering is seldom done in isolation.
But stuffing a person full of as much technical skill as possible, and then grading them individually, as if they were rivals, is the obvious solution. It's also a proven solution. Although it lacks something in the non-suckiness department, that's not the departments' problem. And that's probably an even bigger reason for why being an engineering student sucks. Engineers are conservative, and are reluctant to try something unproven if they have something that is good enough. When somebody creates a non-sucking engineering program, and competitive departments start losing students, then things will be different. However, it's a sure bet that most attempts to make a radically better engineering program will probably fail. Not that deters engineers; the field progresses be means of failure. But you need incentive to accept the inevitable failure, and that's what's not there.
It's a lot like doctors and residency; that system is very close to being insane. But doctors don't like improvising solutions that might be better; a good doctor is usually one who approaches a problem in a way that, in retrospect, is how most doctors would agree is the usual way to deal with a situation. Creative doctoring is either creative ways of avoiding improvisation, or it is extremely elite doctoring, or it's ju
I disagree. If the company was indeed selling the units at a loss, then that is their own stupidity.
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then having a bad product is what makes your business plan bad, not having a bad strategy.
Nobody in his right mind would buy network equipment where the vendor has demonstrated willingness to push a firmware update without customer permission -- period. Much less if they claim that this allows them to unilaterally change the license and lock the customer out of his own equipment. Granted, in the razor blade model, you have a kind of proprietary feeling about all those razors you lost money in, but you can't go fishing through people's medicine cabinets without people concluding you're dangerously off your rocker.
I can understand how it happens. There are two reasons that businesses fail. They either run out of cash, or somebody with a note or something steps in and pulls the plug (which seldom happens if the cash situation is healthy and on track). I've seen plenty of companies that had a reasonably good product with a plausible strategy, but they just had a fatal cash hiccup; either outgo that was a bit faster than anticipated, or incoming that was a little of schedule.
It's like somebody who ingests poison in a murder mystery; after a while, your recognize that tic as the first of what will eventually become agonizing death throes. The problem with a start up even trying to reposition its products that all their existing customers who bought the old story, and now are unlikely to buy from you ever again. Anybody with any sense knows its easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one, so it probably means one of two things: either they suddenly tripped over a pile of cash that's going to allow them to bootstrap a new business plan, or they've run out of cash to make the old one work. Everybody knows you don't make much money off of early adopters, but you can't use your privileged position with them to mess with their systems, but it doesn't mean you can afford to alienate them unless your original business plan is a total write-off.
Mind you I'm just talking about drastic repositioning of the products that leave customer's future plans messed up. I'm not talking about trying to extort new business out of your customers by exploiting your access to their property. That's either extremely desperate, or extremely, sleazily stupid. I don't know anything about this company, but desperate is much more common than utterly sleazy, although sometimes they go hand in hand.
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It's the universal nostrum of the intellectually lazy: if you don't know what to do, then do some damage. Then you can tell yourself you are taking bold, vigorous steps, even if they happen to be in the wrong direction.
Is drug abuse to complicated an issue? Then lets have zero tolerance, at least for people who don't have the means to avoid the point at which we start applying it.
Don't know how to secure the borders? Then seize some people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time and send them out to be tortured.
Nuclear non-proliferation cutting into your brush clearing time? Start a war, which is much more interesting than intelligence gathering or diplomacy.
Most people just assume you know what you're doing. It'll probably take, oh, six or seven years for them to figure out how badly you've screwed things up, and by then it's almost not your problem any more. With luck the cleaning up your mess will be so painful people will blame your successor.
Oh, you don't need big government to poke your nose into the affairs of average citizens. They don't have the money to fight you.
It's only if you want laws to apply to the powerful that you need to have agencies like the EPA or Labor or the FDA. A Department of Sexual Morality would be, relatively speaking, cheap.
Well, I don't know a lot about the details, but it sounds like the idea is to make the wireless companies bid for the spectrum under the current conditions of sale.
I'm guessing (without reading TFA of course) that the scenario went like this. If the reserve price hadn't been met, then the carriers could say, "obviously this spectrum has no market value unless it is for creating a closed network." Then the FCC would declare the auction void and conduct a new auction under conditions more favorable to the carriers and less favorable to the public.
Is stopping that scenario evil? Well, if Google had won, they'd have to put their money where their mouth was and become a wireless carrier themselves. They were hoping the industry would rather let their customers choose the hardware they wanted to use in this spectrum rather than to invite Google in as a competitor.
So it's a win all around. Google keeps the spectrum open for its servies and for its android partners; users get more choice in hardware and services, and the current providers don't have to worry about Google doing to them what they'd planned to do to Google. It's not as lucrative for the carriers as they hoped, but that's what competition is for. They'll make at least a normal profit, but not as much more as they'd have liked, and the public gets better services.
Well, to be a contrarian, Brown may have deserved censure, but I think criticism of him is exaggerated. In some ways, his most distinctive failings were political.
True, the real issue was that FEMA wasn't ready, and he was supposed to be in charge making sure it was ready, but it's not like he's just one bad apple in the bunch. He might not have recommended enough, but the administration didn't even back him in what he had recommended.
As for his imperiousness, well, what do you expect? When the higher ups don't want to hear bad news, somebody's got to be the one who is the face of unresponsiveness to the people trying to prepare for the worst. I can't think of a single instance of a crisis this administration was even remotely prepared for, even crises of their own making.
It's gotten to the point where this almost works for them. When an administration official gets up and says something starting with "Nobody could have forseen...," nobody expects them to have foreen whatever it was, or to have listened to the people below them who were forecasting it all along. When the pressure gets too much, they just pick a patsy to throw to the wolves, but the real problem is that the whole lot of them are managing the country from the viewpoint of an alternate reality.
Then the President will sanctimoniously tell us that this stuff is "hard work", which is true. It is also why it would be good idea to govern like these problems need to be addressed by more than managing the bad news until the only thing you can do is find a scapegoat.
make good terrorists.
Smart, in a narrow sort of way.
Look at Ted Kazynski, who had an IQ of 170 and had PhD in mathematics. The planning to avoid detection probably didn't occupy much of his intellect. They'd never have caught them if his own brother hadn't recognized the writing in his manifesto. On the other hand, the manifesto reveals a person who is deeply unhappy and can't figure out what to do about it other than to blow people up, and construct elaborate psychohistorical theories to explain why happiness is impossible.
On the other hand, there's roles for people like Richard Reid, who was probably viewed as ajoke by the higher ups. You wouldn't trust him with much, but in a sense he did ultimately prove useful.
Well,not to excuse an other government IT debacle, you can't compare this to the stock taking apps you see on Intermecs and the like.
First of all, the information on a census is more complex than counting the numbers of SKUs. It also contains sensitive personal data -- not that private industry doesn't deal with that too, but it has a thoroughly dismal record of protecting privacy. Also, while some widget might not be in the right aisle, it's not likely you'll find a bunch of stuff in a store that you didn't put there, whereas a big part of the census is finding people you didn't know where there so they can be counted.
Like defense, the census does a lot of things that private agencies may do, but with a number of twists. That's why big government IT projects are often such bad news. It'd be better to do a one or two things incrementally, for example introduce PDAs and maybe GPS to handle some parts of the job for some census takers, then add more functionality and deploy more widely with every iteration. I mean, 600 million bucks? Who in his right mind would start this project with that much money? I'd start with maybe five or ten million for a pilot, and work my way up from there.
Of course, the federal contracting system is pretty much an invitation to inflate every contract a huge boondogle, but that's a different story. No politician goes to Washington promising to do a lot of small things that after three or four years will end up amounting to real progress. They all promise to go down there and shake things up, with the result that there's always a lot of shaking going on, but surprisingly little getting accomplished.
Well, what it is, is an outrageous extrapolation of conservative legal philosophy into the realm of the absurd. It's what I call "legal literalism": the simple minded application of the law's text without regard to its intent. If we call criminal investigation "domestic warfare", then the Fourth Amendment magically disappears, right?
That said, the fourth amendment doesn't really say what people think it does. If you read it carefully, you'll see that you don't need a warrant to search somebody's home or seize their effects. It just has to be "reasonable". This isn't some loony right wing view, it's actually the view of conservative and liberal jurists back to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. You don't need a warrant to have the health department inspect the house of the loony lady with 200 cats. If you are fighting a pitched battle on US soil, you don't need a warrant to enter a house where you think the enemy might be holed up -- which is what they are trying to argue by analogy here.
What you need a warrant for is to do any of the listed things as part of a criminal investigation. Without a warrant, they are considered unreasonable in an investigation, with a few narrow exceptions. The Fourth Amendment is like badly written engineering spec; you have to know what was customary when it was written to know what it is supposed to do.
Now notice some things about wiretapping: (1) It doesn't involve seizing or depriving the individual of any of the tangible things listed; (2) it can, and usually does, take place on premises that are not owned by the subject of the surveillance, and may not involve any of his physical property. If you are a literalist pinhead, it looks like you're good to go. In fact this was not such a farfetched theory. In 1928 wiretaps were ruled as not needing any warrant in Olmstead v. United States, with Justice Brandeis delivering a famous and influential dissent criticizing the majority's literalist interpretation. Subsequently his reasoning was adopted, when Olmstead was reversed in Katz v. US, holding that the Fourth protected people, not places and things.
Still, what about domestic warfare, which is a well known exception to the warrant requirements for searching? If you can enter somebody's house in a gun battle without a warrant, can you enter it during an information battle? It is not entirely clear. If known foreign agents were keeping a safe house, you probably could enter it and search it without the Constitution requiring a warrant. So Katz nothwithstanding, can you bug the same people? Probably, at least as far as the Constitution goes.
There are bound to be borderline cases, and frankly the Constitution is not particularly well written in this area, judging from what is its apparent intent. However, it provides a mechanism to work around its shortcomings, short of amendment. The Constitutionally grants power to Congress to exercise oversight over the Executive branch, to control its budget, and to pass laws regulating how it performs its functions. It's these powers that are supposed to keep the President in check, so that he doesn't extend his power from the clear cases, through the borderline cases, on to anything he wants to do.
And it's precisely this power which this administration denies exists and consistently tries to evade. The President likes to talk about his "inherent powers", but this is not a term that the Constitution uses. What he means by "inherent" is beyond Congressional regulation. I don't think there are any such powers. What Congress can't do is use its regulatory powers to usurp the functions of the Executive branch. It's Congress's job to do things like define the dividing line between criminal investigation and domestic warfare.
I started MIT in 1979 and people often ask whether I knew anybody on the blackjack team. I answer not to my knowledge, although I was certainly aware that people were doing this.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think card counting wasn't exactly a closely held secret. I knew at least one guy who used to practice in one of the lounges, and was happy to explain various counting systems, some of which were easy enough for somebody who was not interested in spending hours on end memory training to master. Consequently practically everybody in my dorm knew about card counting and for the average MIT student knowing that it can be done is practically as good as telling him how to do it. I'd guess that there were probably a lot of freelancers.
The guy I'm talking about was almost definitely a freelancer. He used to play with his girlfriend, whose job it was to distract the manager by displaying her large breasts in a low cut dress.
People ask whether I did any card counting, and certainly with my friend's very cogent demonstrations of various systems I probably could have. However, it turns out casinos are my idea of Hell on Earth. I hate the noise, I hate the miasma of crookedness that hangs around them, but mostly I hate the company of stupid people blissed out on overstimulation and greed. I'm not saying everyone who goes there is stupid, but at any given time there are throngs of people in a casino who under no circumstances should be let into a house of gambling without being relieved of their credit cards.
The thing about this card counting guy was that he was weird, by MIT standards. What made him weird was that he really loved money. Plenty of people gloated about how much money they were going to make when the graduated, but really the money was just a way of keeping score on whose engineering balls were the biggest. This guy had zero interest in engineering, but he was taking one of the most difficult engineering courses MIT had to offer. He had no intention of ever practicing as an engineer, he had a plan to parlay his hard to get degree into serious amounts of money. He was a good enough guy, but like I said, weird.
So, I think there are a lot of people who could probably do this, and I'm sure some people tried it for the hack value, but you'd have to seriously like money, more than the average MIT student of my day, to do it systematically.
Still, in the atmosphere of mythologizing that's gone on since the book was published, I bet there's more than a couple people who can creatively reimagine themselves as the real star of the story.
Actually, for better or worse, our Constitution has become more and more like Britain's.
What a constitution is, is a consensus of how things are supposed to work. A written constitution was a 19thc bourgeois innovation; writing it down as the fundamental law made it like a contract. But ultimately the thing that really holds everything together is a powerful consensus that things are supposed to work a certain way. This consensus gets woven into the very fabric of society, not just attitudes and traditions, but legal precedents as well, to the point where it seems a lot more objective than it really is.
Do we really think that the framers intended Congress to be able to extend copyrights indefinitely, when they said they were for "limimted" terms? Or thought that business methods should be patented? Or that corporations should be legal persons with political rights? For that matter, there's nothing stopping Presidential electors from voting for whomever they please; it's happened a few times, but if it ever swayed an election it would be a Constitutional crisis, even though in plain language there's nothing that says an elector can't change his mind.
Suppose a couple of electors get together and decide to sell their votes to the losing party in a Presidential election. There is a Constitutional crisis and military units are choosing up sides. If you are an officer sworn to uphold the Constitution which one are you loyal to? The one on paper that says the President is elected by electors, or the one that says the people rule?
doctrine (dk'trn) pronunciation
n.
1. A principle or body of principles presented for acceptance or belief, as by a religious, political, scientific, or philosophic group; dogma.
2. A rule or principle of law, especially when established by precedent.
3. A statement of official government policy, especially in foreign affairs and military strategy.
4. Archaic. Something taught; a teaching.
So while "By definition, wartime posters are naturally propagandistic", that is only so if we accept the archaic definition of "doctrine". And in any case, writers of dictionary entries are fallible, as are, ahem, Wikipedia contributors.
In any case, you don't get any debate points waving dictionary entries around unless you show some understanding of the issues being discussed.
Except "loose lips sink ships" is not propaganda; it's just pithy advice.
Telling people Sadaam killed babies so he could loot their hospital incubators was propaganda. It would not have been if it were true, but in fact it was a story fabricated by the Kuwaitis and knowingly propagated by the first Bush administration to whip up support for the invasion of Kuwait. And before people get their noses bent out of shape, I supported the first Gulf war and still do. That doesn't mean I have to endorse the government lying to me.
With respect to psychological warfare, this is something any US officer, sworn to uphold the Constitution, must question. The Constitution puts the military under the control of the civilian government, but the subtle point here is that it does it in the way that the military is not an agent of the government, it is an agent of the Constitution and the people it protects. This is what makes the US military different from, say, the North Korean military, which is a creature of the party, and ultimately the Dear Leader. It is not the role of the military to put one over on the American people for their own good.
We can draw a parallel with keeping secrets, or even tactical bluffing. In a democracy's military, these are necessary evils. You have to ask this question: are the American people uniformed, or misinformed, in a substantive way? It makes very little difference in the lives of Americans whether a ship convoy is steaming east or west, but it makes a great deal of difference if it does so to provoke a war under false pretenses. That's the key: are we undermining the sovereignty of the voter?
There is simply no point to democracy if government officials have unlimited power to feed the public with lies, and to force the cooperation of civil servants and the military. The people can't rule themselves if they are making political decisions based on phony stories being fed to them, even indirectly.
It's not that trying to sway public opinion in foreign countries with psy-ops isn't often advantageous, even if it does give Americans a distorted view of the situation. People don't make wrong decisions when those decisions have nothing to recommend them. What makes it wrong is that you can't have the advantages of being a democracy without ceding some of the advantages that totalitarian states enjoy. The question is whether you believe the advantages of freedom outweigh the inconveniences.
If people were really ignorant of grammar, then they wouldn't be able to do more than the verbal equivalent of pointing at things and grunting.
What people are ignorant of is standard usage. These rules exist to provide writers with guidelines by means of which they can make their meaning clear the greatest number of readers.
Still, it is a silly charade to pretend that you do not understand phrases like "somewhat unique" and "totally unique", just because you want to prove somebody is ignorant. Because the word "unique" tends to provoke pointless argument, I prefer the the word "distinctive" in my formal writing. In general "distinctive" is a much better word in most circumstances, because it carries a lower semantic burden. That something is distinctive means it can be picked out from other objects in some broader class.
I prefer to reserve the the word "unique" for situation where it is misleading to equate something to other members of its class for some purpose that I have identified. For example, Proxima Centauri is unique for purposes of discussing human interstellar travel, because it it the closest star to our own. It is not unique for purposes of discussing star variability. Even so we can't escape fuzzy set membership entirely; the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard's Star are very nearly as close.
The problem here is not adherence -- or lack of it -- to the rules of usage. The problem is the habit of imprecision leads to the habit of thoughtlessly using superlatives and vice versa. For example, the title does not make it clear whether two new classes of star systems, each with a single member, have been discovered, or whether two star systems of a heretofore unknown class have been discovered. It is actually the latter, which is not hard to figure out, so in the end no harm is done. But the habit of precision is a good one to cultivate.
The rules of usage are like grammar checkers. Grammar checkers can't tell you how to write what you mean, but when a grammar checker goes bananas on a sentence it's usually a sign that there is something sloppy in the construction of the sentence. Here the stacking of a superlative adverb on top of a superlative adjective is a tip off that the title could be written better.
It's not that Europe doesn't have corruption. It's just not as organized as American corruption. This may be, in part, because our legal system has managed to confuse influence peddling with free speech. There are cases, of course, we're it's hard to make the distinction, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.
Well, the answer as you obviously have guessed is that they don't. At least not on balance.
There's a philosophy in government contracting that if an ounce of medicine benefits a patient, then a quart would be thirty two times better. It's the fault of politics, with its fondness for oversimplification and grand gestures.
As a taxpayer, you're screwed. As a voter, you can at least do a little. Don't vote for the guy who is promising to run the most ethical administration ever, nor the one who is running on his superior moral character. Vote for the one who will open up the operations of government to the most scrutiny. Don't vote for the guy who promises to eliminate all the waste and fraud, vote for either (a) they guy who promises to eliminate the program or (b) the guy who promises to make the program deliver measurable results.
In short, don't expect miracles or be taken in by people who promise them.
I dunno, the financial sector could use a few laughs these days...
People like Bill Gates don't have to worry about Uncle Sam sucking them dry. They have plenty of people working all the tax angles for them, and chances are Bill Gates pays less taxes as a proportion of his income than the people who take his trash away.
I cede nothing to anyone if the field of cynicism, but I think Gates turned to charity because business just wasn't fun any longer, so he decided to go out on top, before he started losing his touch. It reminds me of something Voltaire is reported to have said, which was something like, "I've only ever had one prayer, which was 'Lord, let my enemies be ridiculous.' And it was answered."
If all the Gates Foundation was doing was getting Bill a tax cut by pushing boxes of Microsoft software (which wouldn't work because Gates is not legally the same as Microsoft), I doubt Warren Buffet would have pledged his fortune to it when he passes on.
Well, I think there is a difference between beauty and prettiness, although the terms are often used interchangeably.
Facial attractiveness has been studied by anthropologists for some years now. Like other measures of physical attractiveness, factors contributing to female facial attractiveness are signs of robust physical health and fertility. Examples include clear, healthy looking skin, and physical symmetry. Physical symmetry is particularly interesting, because it is a very strong indicator of excellent physical health an nutrition.
There was a paper I read about a few years ago dealing with computer generated faces; the program started with scans of actual faces, then combined and morphed the features. The most attractive face turned out to be the one they got by finding the median of all the facial measurements. This makes sense too. It turns out to be extremely difficult to be average in every way, and this probably is also a measure of physical health and nutrition.
So I don't think prettiness is simply in the eye of the beholder, although the eye of the beholder may be trained somewhat by averaging the faces it sees every day. This is another example of how the most potent human sexual organ is the brain. I remember back in the day when you could count on Slashdot to deliver a puerile discussion of Natalie Portman every day, there was a post complaining that she "wasn't really hot." She's not. She's quite pretty; if she were walking down the street you'd notice her, but you wouldn't stare in slack mouthed amazement. But she's also a very good actor, and actors know how to mess with your brain. If she wanted you to see her as sexy, your brain would probably have a meltdown.
If we were to distinguish "prettiness" from "beauty", I think it is something that happens in the higher levels of the brain than sensory perception. Anna Nicole Smith seems hideous to you because signs of obsessive grooming, and behavioral cues suggestive of poor judgment and impulse control. These set off alarm bells that say, back off. At least they should if you are reasonably perceptive and experienced.
On the other hand, your children are beautiful to you, even if they are plain looking and badly behaved.
Prettiness is what gets our attention. Beauty is what holds it, what makes us want to be involved.
Umm, it's the large number of dial up users that, according to one way of looking at things, makes the current US broadband situation costly to the US economy.
The fundamental question is whether this is a national issue of a collection of individual issues.
Why is that unbelievable?
Look, businesses sell their products. Or more precisely, businessmen have salesmen who sell their products. Salesmen are people who are good at sleight of hand, blurring fine distinctions and confusing issues. It's OK, because things are set up because it's their duty to do what it takes, short of fraud, to maximize sales. Everybody knows this.
Can you imagine what things would be like if companies sent engineers out to sell. Of course engineers can learn to be discreet. You can also teach a dog to walk on its hind legs, but that doesn't make it natural. Nor does it make it convincing. It's the fact that the poor animal has to struggle to do an unconvincing imitation that makes the routine amusing.
You might not even get a more balanced view from the engineer -- not unless you brought one in from off the team. There has never been an engineer worth his salt who didn't obsess about the things he could have done better, even on projects he or she is proud of.
In the end, it's always caveat emptor.
Umm, having developed software for charities at various points in my career, I have to say that is not the case...
Oh, wait, I am a nobody. At least so far as Microsoft is concerned. It's not that I didn't make enough money to "put food on my family", it's just that I didn't make enough to matter and I never will.
However, the feeling is mutual. If I didn't have clients who need products delivered on MS platforms, I'd happily never touch a piece of MS software again. It's not that I'm ideologically against them, but Microsoft doesn't cater to people like me; we're not a profitable market for them. In fact, we're nobody as far as they're concerned.
That's OK with me; the Gap doesn't offer a line of clothing for people like me; the local Evangelical church doesn't have special Sunday services for people like me either. I'm perfectly happy for each of these organizations to provide their services and wares for people who for whatever reason think they fulfill a need. We just move in orbits that, for the most part intersect.
I think the mutual indifference thing breaks down because Microsoft wants to be everything to everybody. They want to have the one important operating system and the one important file format "standard". Since they don't intend to cater to me, the only way for that to happen is for me to have to use products that were not designed with the things I value in mind. The file format thing is a great example. What I want out of office file formats is not at all what Microsoft is prepared to give me.
The problem with the cost plus model for pricing is that prices aren't fixed.
... greed. If a label is selling a CD at $15.99, it means that they think pricing it a penny higher or a penny lower will cost them net profits, either through inflating per unit costs (which trims profit on each unit sold), or cutting into volume.
One of the biggest determiners of cost is volume of sales; for the most part your costs go down as you sell more -- you share fixed costs like your factories over more units sold of course, but even your unit costs tend to go down with sales volume. Of course in special cases you may have per unit costs go up with volume, for example when you've bought all the plastic available at a certain price for your CDs...
When it comes to pricing, what keeps greed in check is supposed to be
At least that's the way it's supposed to work.
I think the problem with the music industry is not greed -- or at least it's not just unenlightened greed. The problem is imagination.
Think about this: people sashay into Starbucks every day and plunk down $3.99 on a cup of coffee. Not that has anything to do with the price of tea in China, but it means that people do have money to throw around $20-$30 bucks a week absolutely mindlessly. In that context a $15.99 music CD is one of the greatest bargains imaginable provided that you like it enough to play it quite a bit. I have CDs from a decade ago I still play quite a bit.
The problem is in the market demand end of things. People aren't plunking down $15.99 for CDs on a whim, even though they very well could. They can blame it on P2P if they like, but if they can't manage a half dozen or so impulse buys for the average consumer over the course of a year, they've got a serious marketing problem. Even in the world of widespread "piratical" downloads, people will fork over $15.99 for a CD if it contains music they really, really want to listen to. It's not enough money to deter fans from buying a physical token of ownership. It's true that houses burn down, but people lose computer data much, much more often. If music has to be free for people to listen to it, something is wrong with the content they're selling.
So we have a marketing problem, and that includes pricing, but it also includes product definition and promotion. If $15.99 is the wrong price, but $11.35 is the "right" price, they industry is either failing to promote music people want to hear, or failing to reach people who want to hear the music they are producing, or both. I suspect both. I suspect that $11.35 might be more "right" than $15.99, but only because the industry doesn't know how to find, produce and promote music that people want to hear. It's really important to keep people in the habit of buying your product, and that's where the music industry is falling down. They'll have to accept that its not as profitable a business as they imagined it to be, at least until people are back in the habit of buying.
No matter how high you set the bar, there will always be an "over the top".
... complications.
Ever read Milton's essay on Machiavelli? One of the points that he makes is that it's not straightforward for an outsider to judge what is barbaric in a historical or cultural context. You might think that having an assassin poison a rival city's leader is barbaric, but there is something to said for the theory that it's less barbaric than laying siege to his city and burning it to the ground. People of a more Northern European cultural background tend to look at wars in which hundreds or thousands of bystanders are killed as unfortunate, but unavoidable facts of life. Yet we feel revulsion when somebody calculates that his way forward would be eased by the carefully planned removal of a single individual whose continued sojourn among the living presents
It's the cold bloodedness that turns us off; if the same prince lost his head and smacked his rival over the head with candlestick at a banquet, we might think it is a bad act, but not necessarily a repulsive one. It can be argued, however, that calculated murder is really no more morally repugnant than indulging in the luxury of murderous, irrational rages.
Milton's point is that every society that has ever existed is somewhat hypocritical about its moral ideals. But while "everybody does it" is not a moral excuse, Milton points out that there is a great practical difference between a person willing to do the same bad things that "everybody" does, and a person who is willing to do things that the people around him find repugnant. The difference is that latter person is utterly unrestrained by any consideration at all.
Which brings us to standards committees. We all know that there is plenty of backstabbing and double-dealing involved. "Everybody" does it, although as in the case of warfare for the Northern baron or assassination for an Italian prince, there is such a thing as immoderation when it comes to enjoying a culturally sanctioned vice. But while various forms of vote manipulation may be somewhat sanctioned, altering vote counting is "over the top". It does something beyond harming the "spirit" of the process. It harms the pretense of the process.
As inferior as pretense is to principle in a moral sense, it at least functions as a more reliable restraint on depraved behavior. ISO may not do what it is "supposed" to do, but it does something that is useful. The process is useless unless it can at least maintain the pretense of fairness. Once you start altering votes, you might as well hire goons to rough up the opposition. In fact hiring goons might be somewhat preferable, because it can be done discreetly. People will notice if the votes they bought... er, cast weren't recorded properly.
Well, good textbooks would help. Not necessarily pretty. Not necessarily easy. A good textbook is one that rewards effort. No I happen to like the CLRS algorithms book, because while it is quite difficult, if you master a topic in it you've really learned something. There are often texts that have big holes in them that are covered over with hand waving and bad prose; it costs you just as much effort to figure out that the authors don't know what they're talking about as it would to digest a serious slug of math, but the only thin you've learned is the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
In liberal arts fields, you don't deal with texts because you go straight to source materials. You don't worry that there aren't any good books about Dickens (although there are), you just read,discuss and argue about Dickens. In engineering, you're still taking stuff that's fairly basic throughout your school career. It's not that you don't start to graduate out of textbooks the way liberal arts students do, it's that you don't do it quite so quickly or completely.
In any case, bad textbooks are merely an annoyance.
As an engineer, you learn to identify requirements, study them, and balance them against others. You also learn that the relationship between requirements is often more complex than it appears. So lets say one of the requirements of an engineering education is for students to feel as happy as possible. Of course, that's very poorly stated, but requirements always are at the outset. Clearly, happiness is at the very least a "nice to have". However, when faced with with the sacrifice and challenges needed to become an engineer, something very like student happiness might be very advantageous to have. A creative student who loses interest and flunks out is not necessarily less promising than one who manages to get passable grades all the way through.
Let's say that the goal will be to design our engineering education so that students feel as much fulfillment as possible from acquiring the technical skills and expertise that are expected from an engineering degree.
Well, the literature on human happiness, while not nearly as extensive as that on human misery, seems to hold some promise. It suggests that the degree of personal fulfillment an individual experiences is a function of the quality and quantity of his social connections. This is probably while being an engineering student sucks; it's not that you don't make friends, its that being a friends is time away from being a good engineering student. Which is odd because in the real world, good engineering is seldom done in isolation.
But stuffing a person full of as much technical skill as possible, and then grading them individually, as if they were rivals, is the obvious solution. It's also a proven solution. Although it lacks something in the non-suckiness department, that's not the departments' problem. And that's probably an even bigger reason for why being an engineering student sucks. Engineers are conservative, and are reluctant to try something unproven if they have something that is good enough. When somebody creates a non-sucking engineering program, and competitive departments start losing students, then things will be different. However, it's a sure bet that most attempts to make a radically better engineering program will probably fail. Not that deters engineers; the field progresses be means of failure. But you need incentive to accept the inevitable failure, and that's what's not there.
It's a lot like doctors and residency; that system is very close to being insane. But doctors don't like improvising solutions that might be better; a good doctor is usually one who approaches a problem in a way that, in retrospect, is how most doctors would agree is the usual way to deal with a situation. Creative doctoring is either creative ways of avoiding improvisation, or it is extremely elite doctoring, or it's ju
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then having a bad product is what makes your business plan bad, not having a bad strategy.
Nobody in his right mind would buy network equipment where the vendor has demonstrated willingness to push a firmware update without customer permission -- period. Much less if they claim that this allows them to unilaterally change the license and lock the customer out of his own equipment. Granted, in the razor blade model, you have a kind of proprietary feeling about all those razors you lost money in, but you can't go fishing through people's medicine cabinets without people concluding you're dangerously off your rocker.
I can understand how it happens. There are two reasons that businesses fail. They either run out of cash, or somebody with a note or something steps in and pulls the plug (which seldom happens if the cash situation is healthy and on track). I've seen plenty of companies that had a reasonably good product with a plausible strategy, but they just had a fatal cash hiccup; either outgo that was a bit faster than anticipated, or incoming that was a little of schedule.
It's like somebody who ingests poison in a murder mystery; after a while, your recognize that tic as the first of what will eventually become agonizing death throes. The problem with a start up even trying to reposition its products that all their existing customers who bought the old story, and now are unlikely to buy from you ever again. Anybody with any sense knows its easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one, so it probably means one of two things: either they suddenly tripped over a pile of cash that's going to allow them to bootstrap a new business plan, or they've run out of cash to make the old one work. Everybody knows you don't make much money off of early adopters, but you can't use your privileged position with them to mess with their systems, but it doesn't mean you can afford to alienate them unless your original business plan is a total write-off.
Mind you I'm just talking about drastic repositioning of the products that leave customer's future plans messed up. I'm not talking about trying to extort new business out of your customers by exploiting your access to their property. That's either extremely desperate, or extremely, sleazily stupid. I don't know anything about this company, but desperate is much more common than utterly sleazy, although sometimes they go hand in hand.