Yeah, in fact I've recognised a few press releases word-for-word, as articled (new word:) in eWeek. Even so, their content ratio is fairly good as these rags go anymore, so same here, it usually gets at least somewhat read. And their product comparisons usually look like they at least installed the product (I've caught one reviewer, a journalist client of mine, not even doing that much:)
There are much worse examples, such as, um, I think it's called Storage Review... while it has relatively little "advertising", the content is nothing but thinly-disguised promos for various enterprise-class tape drives.
Another point is that advertisers are not in the business of selling stuff to consumers. They're in the business of selling advertising to vendors. Whether the ads actually induce anyone to buy anything isn't the *advertiser's* problem.
Adams' article goes on to say,
"That's one model of how online magazines work and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There's another which will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Web pages."
I have a better idea, exactly in parallel with the "free subscription" deadtree magazines. Let the *advertisers* make micropayments to the content authors, based on the number of "I loved this ad" clicks, possibly combined with the results of a "how useful was this article to you?" poll. That way both content and ads would have a motivation to improve.
This would differ from the current "pay per click" model in that, as with your example of HotWired, requires both ads and content to be something we WANT to see before anyone gets paid for it... more like TV, where the hook (content) has to be good enough to keep us before we'll see the ads at all.
Of course, so long as web advertisers and their customers (websites) get away with the current "pay per pair of eyeballs annoyed" model, there's little motivation to improve.
Naturally it's free -- why would anyone pay the $200 (yes, $200!!) they charge for a "real" annual subscription?!
But eWeek, like most magazines, isn't in the business of publishing articles. They're in the business of collecting ad revenue, on a promise to deliver the ads to a certain number of eyeballs. The article are just the lure to get you to look at the ads.
Pajo Networks runs this full back cover ad on CU, featuring a lovely woman dressed only in a tangle of network cabling... consequently CU spends a lot of time face-down on my coffee table:)
People who suffer from anxiety aren't just "risk avoiders". It's more like feeling compelled to hide under the bed because the world is big and there might be bogeymen out there.
I know someone who has such severe anxiety attacks that he's wound up in the emergency room, due to the physical side effects (asthma attacks, passing out while driving, etc.) The sad thing is that he *uses* the problem to avoid having to deal with anything that might be stressful or unpleasant. Unfortuately, that's not uncommon with anxiety and OCD sufferers.
[laughing] Same point I made above, re ComputerUser (and MicroTimes, back before it suicided). The local vendor ads are what I want to see; the content is that annoying filler between the ads.:)
But like CS, CU has become anemic. In fact, last week I wrote a letter to CU's editor, complaining about "Where have all the local advertisers gone??"
But yeah... point being most sites aren't good enough or unique enough to be worth even a token subscription amount. So what makes these same sites worth viewing for "free", if the price is having to put up with intrusive, annoying ads?
It's worse when a site quite obviously exists solely to generate pageviews for ad revenue, and breaks up what little content they have to maximize pageviews. If I only had to load one page, I wouldn't mind an ad or two, especially if it's a GOOD ad (interesting, or relevant, or at least doesn't beat me over the head). When I have to load 15 pages to see two pages worth of real content, then screw 'em, I'll block their ads, and quite possibly never visit the site again.
This isn't much different from most mainstream magazines. Look at a Good Housekeeping or Women's Day or even TVGuide, and often as not the ads outnumber the content.
[picks random edition of eWeek off the stack of unread IT rags] Even in this relatively content-heavy magazine, 26 of 58 pages are ads.
Occasionally, ads are a magazine's primary desirable content, such as ComputerUser -- *most* of why I have a subscription is because I need to see local vendors' component prices. I've even been known to complain when there aren't enough ads.:)
Almost all dog and horse magazines are essentially ad venues, with only token content. BUT -- there again, the main reason people buy these mags is to see ads relevant to their breed(s) of interest.
Here's the Big Point: when the ads are relevant to the audience's needs and interests, then ads are desirable -- and may even be regarded AS the "main content".
But on the web, we're typically bombarded with ads we did not choose to see, that are of no interest to us, that waste our time and bandwidth, and that *interfere* with viewing the "main content".
Small wonder that just about everyone who groks ad blocking proceeds to do so.
And they'll behave like inkjets that decide your ink is state-dated and stop printing even tho the cart is still full. So now you'll hear it from your fridge: "Your margarine has expired. You must throw it away and buy a new box."
When I was a lad, the dairy truck dude read the tag we'd leave in the box on the porch, and the requested milk etc. would magically appear in the box.
With RFID, there'd be this feedback initiated as soon as a condition is detected of "no milk in the fridge", then a little advertising balloon would follow you around "reminding" you, until you gave in and stopped at the store to buy more milk.
Costco (and probably every "membership" store of any sort) keeps a complete record of everything you ever bought there -- you can still return stuff for a refund even if you don't have the receipt, because they can instantly look up your purchase history to see if you bought the item there or not.
My VISA card sends me a year-end statement that itemizes *every* time I used the card for the past year.
So those are two that I know for a fact keep my complete purchase history for at least a year. (And I can pull my Edison records online going back about three years, tho I know they have more on file since I did once order it back to the beginning of my current account.)
This isn't very much data in terms of raw bytes; for myself, I'd estimate my annual total for all such data (including not only purchases, but also my mortgage, phone, electric, etc.) is less than 10k. Given today's storage arrays, that's pretty trivial, even if there's an entry for every man, woman, and child.
Anyway, the "hidden file" theory may have escaped from an ill-fitted tinfoil hat, but there are already outfits that keep ALL your transaction data. And you may not have control over whether that is used only for non-personally-identifiable marketing (not a problem) or something more nefarious (see someone's post above about the slip-and-fall lawsuit where the store brought the guy's purchasing record into court, trying to prove he was a drunk. This was a real case, BTW.)
RFID in the hands of IBM worries me a lot less than RFID in the hands of politicians, even honest ones (given that any single politician hasn't much influence relative to the whole gov't).
I know! Let's elect IBM to congress. At least it'd be no worse.:/
I'm not so sure either of you was the least bit paranoid... upon polishing my tinfoil hat, I'm reminded of all the new laws re "thou shalt not fly, leave/enter the country, share files, or deposit $10k in the bank without gov't investigation and approval", and how much simpler life would be for said agencies if your RFID chip was immediately to hand any time they cared to see your history.
Which brought up an even more wacko thought: "Trusted" computers that require the user to have an embedded RFID chip, which in turn reports just exactly who tried to illegally download that movie...
I suspect the point of illegality will be more like anti-circumvention statutes as applied to, say, inkjet refills and their nasty little anti-refill chips that are presently protected by the DMCA and/or patents.
One could wind up licensing their underwear instead of buying it.
Particularly fascinating/disturbing was this statement:
"The RFID allows money to carry its own history," by recording information about where it has been, said Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future (Menlo Park, Calif.).
Occurs to me that the real reason for RFID in paper money isn't to prevent counterfeiting, but to kill the underground [cash] economy, by making cash every bit as traceable as using a credit card. After all, what can be traced can be taxed.
But you couldn't sue just for finding a bug. My rating system as proposed is designed to say "We claim our software is this-much reliable." It ISN'T designed to say "our software is bug-free". If points of unreliability are documented right up front, you'd have no claim, because the whole idea here is to make sure the purchaser can make an INFORMED choice with respect to which problems they're willing (or unwilling) to put up with.
Also, under my system, you could only claim liability against the vendor in proportion to their reliability claim -- so if it were rated "1", you could only claim 20% liability against them. This might be reasonably limited to the purchase price of the software -- so if you bought a $100 package rated "2", and it failed in ways that the vendor hadn't documented, you could claim up to $40 against them. If you bought a $250,000 package rated "5", and it failed in undocumented ways, the vendor would be liable up to $250,000.
Likely there should be some additional percentage added as a penalty, but only applicable if you can demonstrate actual financial loss. Just being annoyed with the software would not count toward any additional penalty (that being far too exploitable by legal sharks). Nor should it cover "all your losses", because the buyer has to be smart enough to stop using bad software too, they can't just keep on using it and still bitch about/make claims about the losses it's causing them. (Precisely to prevent "asshole lawsuits" such as the scenario you proposed.)
IOW, it would enforce "you get what you pay for", which as some folks here have pointed out, can be a huge problem even with enterprise-level packages that fail to do what they claim, or don't work unless you buy a shitload of add-ons, or whatever. If you didn't get what you paid for -- well, you'd get your money back. But you couldn't take the vendor to the cleaners.
Note also that my system doesn't require anyone to change anything EXCEPT the current industry habit of making unsubstantiated claims about how wonderful their products are. If you want to make shitty software, go right ahead, and rate it "0" to avoid liability -- but you won't be able to *sell* it to an informed public, because there will always be vendors who have at least a little more faith in their product.
I agree there would be problems with interactive bugs -- but if you want to claim a "5" rating, you'd better be bloody sure of how your software behaves *in the presence of anyone else's bugs, even unknown bugs.*.
And that is indeed one of the big issues that software vendors can currently duck: "it's someone else's bug, not our problem". Sure, that's often the case. But you can make sure that other programs can't take yours down, by protecting its memory space or whatever else you have to do. (IANAP.)
Your example with Adobe is a good one: why should an ill-behaved plugin take down all of Photoshop and lose your work entirely? Why not have Photoshop kill the mannerless plugin without eating your file?
Sometimes a fix for bad behaviour is fairly simple: frex, contrast Word and WPDOS. Word works on the original file, leaving it open on disk the whole time. If you have a crash, the open file gets corrupted. Conversely WPDOS works on a copy of the file (leaving the original closed on disk), and when you save, doesn't kill the original until the new version is safely written to disk; hence hosed data is extremely rare, even in the presence of someone else's bugs (eg. a system crash).
That's exactly what I'm talking about in my post up above, where I suggest a self-rating system of this nature:
Software publishers could claim a reliability rating of 1 through 5, and price their product accordingly -- but the higher the rating claimed, the greater their liability if it doesn't live up to their claims for it (from minimal for "1", up to total for "5").
Under my proposed system, a rating of "0" is reserved for "no liability". Anyone could use this, but it is specifically to protect FOSS from all liability, without making any statement about its actual quality (that's where peer review would be important).
Most consumer software would self-rate at 1 or 2, be priced accordingly, and life would go on much as it does today, but consumers would be informed right up front that the product they're buying is known to have issues. "Better" consumer software might rate 3. Enterprise and mission-critical apps would rate 4 or 5.
The first time this topic went around/. (a couple years back) I had thoughts to this effect:
Let the software publishers (including private individuals) rate their own software for reliability, say on a scale of 0 to 5.
Ratings of 1 through 5 represent a sliding scale of reliability: if a publisher claims a reliability of "5", they had bloody well be able to back that up -- and will be able to price their software accordingly. But if their software fails, their liability will be 100%.
At the other end of the scale, if a publisher claims a reliability of "1", you know that they don't warrant it to be much more than "it compiled and the first screen came up", and their liability for failures is concomitantly minimal.
So -- if you're a software publisher, you can claim any rating you want, so long as you're ready to back that up with real financial liability, perhaps via insurance that is designed for exactly this purpose. And what you can charge for your software will depend on its rating.
Print the rating right on the box and in all advertising, and pretty soon the public would get the concept. Then market forces would decide to what degree we prefer "cheap" or "reliable", and for which sorts of apps.
The odd number out: giving your software a rating of "0" means "absolutely no warranty" but says nothing about your belief in its reliability. Software rated "0" may be crap or it may be great, but in any case the author is entirely free from liability, because the user knows right up front that there are NO claims about its functionality. This is specifically to protect authors of freeware and opensource programs, but could also be used by shareware (or even commercialware with little faith in itself:)
In other industries, if you brag about what your product can do, you have to back it up, within a reasonable person's expectations, or you can be found liable for the deficit. And that's all my scheme proposes to do -- get software publishers to live up to the claims they make for their products.
Except for the leetle problem that if you have javascript disabled, the non-flash page instantly refreshes back to the flash-only page. (If you're quick with the STOP button you can freeze it there, but if not.. round and round you go.)
Come on, folks, if you want to make something accessable, do it for everyone, not just for the "right" browser settings!
Exactly... so why not provide a CD that has all the same trial software on it? That wouldn't even require work on Dell's part, beyond slapping the files into a master for their duplicator folks, and maybe adding an installer menu. Dell's partners still get their crap distributed and Dell still gets their cut.
Or maybe some sort of basic free desktop and a runtime to demo said trial software? Oh yeah, that would require work on Dell's part. Never mind!
That's precisely why I don't sign my credit cards. And if someone demands that I do so -- they're gonna lose that sale.
Also, my name on the card and my name as a signature are different, so if something is signed so as to match the card -- I'd know right away that I didn't sign it.
I think I made a wonderful argument, if people always behaved in an ideal manner:)
But you're right -- most people cannot entirely overcome their prejudices and preconceptions, and will tend to apply whatever power they have toward reinforcing said prejudices and preconceptions. That's just human nature.
And there are a lot of poorly worded or ambiguous laws out there (I've seen some that I'm quite sure was badly-written on purpose, to allow or even encourage an exaggerated interpretation by a suitably sympathetic judge). If this weren't so, as you say SCOTUS would have little to do, and would seldom disagree among themselves.
So, yes, from a practical standpoint it's best if judges (SCOTUS or elsewhere) bring minimal personal baggage into the courtroom with them.
But the fact is, everyone has some personal baggage, and few people become judges without developing strong beliefs about the law. Given that, perhaps the most important trait a judge can have is the ability to put aside their own viewpoints.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, in fact I've recognised a few press releases word-for-word, as articled (new word :) in eWeek. Even so, their content ratio is fairly good as these rags go anymore, so same here, it usually gets at least somewhat read. And their product comparisons usually look like they at least installed the product (I've caught one reviewer, a journalist client of mine, not even doing that much :)
There are much worse examples, such as, um, I think it's called Storage Review... while it has relatively little "advertising", the content is nothing but thinly-disguised promos for various enterprise-class tape drives.
Another point is that advertisers are not in the business of selling stuff to consumers. They're in the business of selling advertising to vendors. Whether the ads actually induce anyone to buy anything isn't the *advertiser's* problem.
Adams' article goes on to say,
"That's one model of how online magazines work and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There's another which will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Web pages."
I have a better idea, exactly in parallel with the "free subscription" deadtree magazines. Let the *advertisers* make micropayments to the content authors, based on the number of "I loved this ad" clicks, possibly combined with the results of a "how useful was this article to you?" poll. That way both content and ads would have a motivation to improve.
This would differ from the current "pay per click" model in that, as with your example of HotWired, requires both ads and content to be something we WANT to see before anyone gets paid for it... more like TV, where the hook (content) has to be good enough to keep us before we'll see the ads at all.
Of course, so long as web advertisers and their customers (websites) get away with the current "pay per pair of eyeballs annoyed" model, there's little motivation to improve.
Naturally it's free -- why would anyone pay the $200 (yes, $200!!) they charge for a "real" annual subscription?!
But eWeek, like most magazines, isn't in the business of publishing articles. They're in the business of collecting ad revenue, on a promise to deliver the ads to a certain number of eyeballs. The article are just the lure to get you to look at the ads.
Pajo Networks runs this full back cover ad on CU, featuring a lovely woman dressed only in a tangle of network cabling... consequently CU spends a lot of time face-down on my coffee table :)
People who suffer from anxiety aren't just "risk avoiders". It's more like feeling compelled to hide under the bed because the world is big and there might be bogeymen out there.
I know someone who has such severe anxiety attacks that he's wound up in the emergency room, due to the physical side effects (asthma attacks, passing out while driving, etc.) The sad thing is that he *uses* the problem to avoid having to deal with anything that might be stressful or unpleasant. Unfortuately, that's not uncommon with anxiety and OCD sufferers.
Bah. You don't know what bad luck is until you've been diagnosed with Yugo syndrome!
[laughing] Same point I made above, re ComputerUser (and MicroTimes, back before it suicided). The local vendor ads are what I want to see; the content is that annoying filler between the ads. :)
But like CS, CU has become anemic. In fact, last week I wrote a letter to CU's editor, complaining about "Where have all the local advertisers gone??"
Well, you subscribed to this one... ;)
But yeah... point being most sites aren't good enough or unique enough to be worth even a token subscription amount. So what makes these same sites worth viewing for "free", if the price is having to put up with intrusive, annoying ads?
It's worse when a site quite obviously exists solely to generate pageviews for ad revenue, and breaks up what little content they have to maximize pageviews. If I only had to load one page, I wouldn't mind an ad or two, especially if it's a GOOD ad (interesting, or relevant, or at least doesn't beat me over the head). When I have to load 15 pages to see two pages worth of real content, then screw 'em, I'll block their ads, and quite possibly never visit the site again.
This isn't much different from most mainstream magazines. Look at a Good Housekeeping or Women's Day or even TVGuide, and often as not the ads outnumber the content.
:)
[picks random edition of eWeek off the stack of unread IT rags] Even in this relatively content-heavy magazine, 26 of 58 pages are ads.
Occasionally, ads are a magazine's primary desirable content, such as ComputerUser -- *most* of why I have a subscription is because I need to see local vendors' component prices. I've even been known to complain when there aren't enough ads.
Almost all dog and horse magazines are essentially ad venues, with only token content. BUT -- there again, the main reason people buy these mags is to see ads relevant to their breed(s) of interest.
Here's the Big Point: when the ads are relevant to the audience's needs and interests, then ads are desirable -- and may even be regarded AS the "main content".
But on the web, we're typically bombarded with ads we did not choose to see, that are of no interest to us, that waste our time and bandwidth, and that *interfere* with viewing the "main content".
Small wonder that just about everyone who groks ad blocking proceeds to do so.
Learn more about paranoids -- follow them around. ;)
And they'll behave like inkjets that decide your ink is state-dated and stop printing even tho the cart is still full. So now you'll hear it from your fridge: "Your margarine has expired. You must throw it away and buy a new box."
When I was a lad, the dairy truck dude read the tag we'd leave in the box on the porch, and the requested milk etc. would magically appear in the box.
With RFID, there'd be this feedback initiated as soon as a condition is detected of "no milk in the fridge", then a little advertising balloon would follow you around "reminding" you, until you gave in and stopped at the store to buy more milk.
Costco (and probably every "membership" store of any sort) keeps a complete record of everything you ever bought there -- you can still return stuff for a refund even if you don't have the receipt, because they can instantly look up your purchase history to see if you bought the item there or not.
My VISA card sends me a year-end statement that itemizes *every* time I used the card for the past year.
So those are two that I know for a fact keep my complete purchase history for at least a year. (And I can pull my Edison records online going back about three years, tho I know they have more on file since I did once order it back to the beginning of my current account.)
This isn't very much data in terms of raw bytes; for myself, I'd estimate my annual total for all such data (including not only purchases, but also my mortgage, phone, electric, etc.) is less than 10k. Given today's storage arrays, that's pretty trivial, even if there's an entry for every man, woman, and child.
Anyway, the "hidden file" theory may have escaped from an ill-fitted tinfoil hat, but there are already outfits that keep ALL your transaction data. And you may not have control over whether that is used only for non-personally-identifiable marketing (not a problem) or something more nefarious (see someone's post above about the slip-and-fall lawsuit where the store brought the guy's purchasing record into court, trying to prove he was a drunk. This was a real case, BTW.)
RFID in the hands of IBM worries me a lot less than RFID in the hands of politicians, even honest ones (given that any single politician hasn't much influence relative to the whole gov't).
:/
I know! Let's elect IBM to congress. At least it'd be no worse.
I'm not so sure either of you was the least bit paranoid... upon polishing my tinfoil hat, I'm reminded of all the new laws re "thou shalt not fly, leave/enter the country, share files, or deposit $10k in the bank without gov't investigation and approval", and how much simpler life would be for said agencies if your RFID chip was immediately to hand any time they cared to see your history.
Which brought up an even more wacko thought: "Trusted" computers that require the user to have an embedded RFID chip, which in turn reports just exactly who tried to illegally download that movie...
I suspect the point of illegality will be more like anti-circumvention statutes as applied to, say, inkjet refills and their nasty little anti-refill chips that are presently protected by the DMCA and/or patents.
One could wind up licensing their underwear instead of buying it.
Particularly fascinating/disturbing was this statement:
"The RFID allows money to carry its own history," by recording information about where it has been, said Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future (Menlo Park, Calif.).
Occurs to me that the real reason for RFID in paper money isn't to prevent counterfeiting, but to kill the underground [cash] economy, by making cash every bit as traceable as using a credit card. After all, what can be traced can be taxed.
But you couldn't sue just for finding a bug. My rating system as proposed is designed to say "We claim our software is this-much reliable." It ISN'T designed to say "our software is bug-free". If points of unreliability are documented right up front, you'd have no claim, because the whole idea here is to make sure the purchaser can make an INFORMED choice with respect to which problems they're willing (or unwilling) to put up with.
Also, under my system, you could only claim liability against the vendor in proportion to their reliability claim -- so if it were rated "1", you could only claim 20% liability against them. This might be reasonably limited to the purchase price of the software -- so if you bought a $100 package rated "2", and it failed in ways that the vendor hadn't documented, you could claim up to $40 against them. If you bought a $250,000 package rated "5", and it failed in undocumented ways, the vendor would be liable up to $250,000.
Likely there should be some additional percentage added as a penalty, but only applicable if you can demonstrate actual financial loss. Just being annoyed with the software would not count toward any additional penalty (that being far too exploitable by legal sharks). Nor should it cover "all your losses", because the buyer has to be smart enough to stop using bad software too, they can't just keep on using it and still bitch about/make claims about the losses it's causing them. (Precisely to prevent "asshole lawsuits" such as the scenario you proposed.)
IOW, it would enforce "you get what you pay for", which as some folks here have pointed out, can be a huge problem even with enterprise-level packages that fail to do what they claim, or don't work unless you buy a shitload of add-ons, or whatever. If you didn't get what you paid for -- well, you'd get your money back. But you couldn't take the vendor to the cleaners.
Note also that my system doesn't require anyone to change anything EXCEPT the current industry habit of making unsubstantiated claims about how wonderful their products are. If you want to make shitty software, go right ahead, and rate it "0" to avoid liability -- but you won't be able to *sell* it to an informed public, because there will always be vendors who have at least a little more faith in their product.
I agree there would be problems with interactive bugs -- but if you want to claim a "5" rating, you'd better be bloody sure of how your software behaves *in the presence of anyone else's bugs, even unknown bugs.*.
And that is indeed one of the big issues that software vendors can currently duck: "it's someone else's bug, not our problem". Sure, that's often the case. But you can make sure that other programs can't take yours down, by protecting its memory space or whatever else you have to do. (IANAP.)
Your example with Adobe is a good one: why should an ill-behaved plugin take down all of Photoshop and lose your work entirely? Why not have Photoshop kill the mannerless plugin without eating your file?
Sometimes a fix for bad behaviour is fairly simple: frex, contrast Word and WPDOS. Word works on the original file, leaving it open on disk the whole time. If you have a crash, the open file gets corrupted. Conversely WPDOS works on a copy of the file (leaving the original closed on disk), and when you save, doesn't kill the original until the new version is safely written to disk; hence hosed data is extremely rare, even in the presence of someone else's bugs (eg. a system crash).
That's exactly what I'm talking about in my post up above, where I suggest a self-rating system of this nature:
Software publishers could claim a reliability rating of 1 through 5, and price their product accordingly -- but the higher the rating claimed, the greater their liability if it doesn't live up to their claims for it (from minimal for "1", up to total for "5").
Under my proposed system, a rating of "0" is reserved for "no liability". Anyone could use this, but it is specifically to protect FOSS from all liability, without making any statement about its actual quality (that's where peer review would be important).
Most consumer software would self-rate at 1 or 2, be priced accordingly, and life would go on much as it does today, but consumers would be informed right up front that the product they're buying is known to have issues. "Better" consumer software might rate 3. Enterprise and mission-critical apps would rate 4 or 5.
The first time this topic went around /. (a couple years back) I had thoughts to this effect:
:)
Let the software publishers (including private individuals) rate their own software for reliability, say on a scale of 0 to 5.
Ratings of 1 through 5 represent a sliding scale of reliability: if a publisher claims a reliability of "5", they had bloody well be able to back that up -- and will be able to price their software accordingly. But if their software fails, their liability will be 100%.
At the other end of the scale, if a publisher claims a reliability of "1", you know that they don't warrant it to be much more than "it compiled and the first screen came up", and their liability for failures is concomitantly minimal.
So -- if you're a software publisher, you can claim any rating you want, so long as you're ready to back that up with real financial liability, perhaps via insurance that is designed for exactly this purpose. And what you can charge for your software will depend on its rating.
Print the rating right on the box and in all advertising, and pretty soon the public would get the concept. Then market forces would decide to what degree we prefer "cheap" or "reliable", and for which sorts of apps.
The odd number out: giving your software a rating of "0" means "absolutely no warranty" but says nothing about your belief in its reliability. Software rated "0" may be crap or it may be great, but in any case the author is entirely free from liability, because the user knows right up front that there are NO claims about its functionality. This is specifically to protect authors of freeware and opensource programs, but could also be used by shareware (or even commercialware with little faith in itself
In other industries, if you brag about what your product can do, you have to back it up, within a reasonable person's expectations, or you can be found liable for the deficit. And that's all my scheme proposes to do -- get software publishers to live up to the claims they make for their products.
Except for the leetle problem that if you have javascript disabled, the non-flash page instantly refreshes back to the flash-only page. (If you're quick with the STOP button you can freeze it there, but if not.. round and round you go.)
Come on, folks, if you want to make something accessable, do it for everyone, not just for the "right" browser settings!
Exactly... so why not provide a CD that has all the same trial software on it? That wouldn't even require work on Dell's part, beyond slapping the files into a master for their duplicator folks, and maybe adding an installer menu. Dell's partners still get their crap distributed and Dell still gets their cut.
Or maybe some sort of basic free desktop and a runtime to demo said trial software? Oh yeah, that would require work on Dell's part. Never mind!
That's precisely why I don't sign my credit cards. And if someone demands that I do so -- they're gonna lose that sale.
Also, my name on the card and my name as a signature are different, so if something is signed so as to match the card -- I'd know right away that I didn't sign it.
I think I made a wonderful argument, if people always behaved in an ideal manner :)
But you're right -- most people cannot entirely overcome their prejudices and preconceptions, and will tend to apply whatever power they have toward reinforcing said prejudices and preconceptions. That's just human nature.
And there are a lot of poorly worded or ambiguous laws out there (I've seen some that I'm quite sure was badly-written on purpose, to allow or even encourage an exaggerated interpretation by a suitably sympathetic judge). If this weren't so, as you say SCOTUS would have little to do, and would seldom disagree among themselves.
So, yes, from a practical standpoint it's best if judges (SCOTUS or elsewhere) bring minimal personal baggage into the courtroom with them.
But the fact is, everyone has some personal baggage, and few people become judges without
developing strong beliefs about the law. Given that, perhaps the most important trait a judge can have is the ability to put aside their own viewpoints.