At this point, things took a turn for the hilarious. Immediately he switched over to admitting it was a scam and....trying to recruit me to help! He claimed he needed a mailing address in the US, and needed someone to send out packages....claimed he would pay $500 per package of letters!
So of course, I told him I would do it but I needed the money up front...fully intending to keep the money and spend the next decade gloating over how I scammed the scammer.... he even told me he could get counterfit bills.... which got me thinking how fun it would be if this all resulted in my getting to report him to the SS.
Of course, the whole thing broke down when he wanted to talk on the phone....and I wasn't willing to give out my real phone number. I suppose he already had my address so it hardly mattered, but, I didn't want harassing calls either.
Using any real life info with scammers is a very bad idea - just because they are thousands of miles away doesn't mean they don't have friends who are a lot closer. You're pissing off people who already engage in crime, why risk it?
a great site to visit is 419eater.com - a vast world of scam baiting exists; some of the stories are very funny.
In order for Federal Law to trump state law, it has to be made in pursuance of its Constitutionally delegated powers. If Congress passes a law which they are not granted the power to do as part of their enumerated powers, then it does not trump state laws.
Except the Commerce Clause does give congress pretty broad latitude to regulate activities, even if states do not like it.
You might actually be wrong, there are limited cases where the states can manage this. Now with something like medical weed you have an outright conflict. There are cases where states are allowed to do more, for example in Oregon their definition of free speech is much wider and more inclusive than the federal definition.
However, that in no way limits the actions of the Federal government so it's no a supremacy clause issue.If the state decided to prevent the Federal government from enfacing it's laws then it would be, but that is not the case in your example.
The TSA may very well decide to comply with local laws in those States, it's simply not worth the fight. At any rate, some sort of balance must be struck in this case, because I'm beginning to think people like the IRS more than the TSA.
I doubt it - the Feds generally take a hard line when a state tries to impose limits on their actions.
In most EU legislations, databases are copyright (or Author's right) protected, even when the actual items in the database are not. So a database of historical events or facts actually can be protected.
As I understand copyright law, that is also the case in the US if the collection meets some minimum requirements - however the underlying facts aren't copyrightable; which was the issue with the TZ dB. Anyone can compile a list of sunrise times from copyrighted sources and publish it; they can't however copy the book it's in and make it available to others.
Don't worry about the "non-potential customers" that are using it, since I assume you mean they are not producing commercial video form it.
If their are legitimate educational institutions using it, offer to work out a licensing deal. They get levi copes and you get a broader user base. if it's a non-profit that truly can't afford it but is using it, consider the benefits of a donation in terms of good-will and publicity. Turn these into win-wins.
For those that you can prove are using your product to produce commercial video, go after them. They have no more right to pirate your software than someone has to pirate what they produce from it. Their customers may think twice about using them if they get embroiled in a lawsuit. Some of course, will be essentially unusable - follow your lawyers advice and pick battles that, if you win, will pay off.
Finally, consider a light version that has some features but really isn't strong enough to be used for professional work. For your pro product, consider a dongle but asses it's impact on your paying customers - will it make your software a PITA to use and chase them away?
Unfortunately MacBlurayPlayer isn't a really viable solution (yet) since it needs an Internet connection for decrypting the discs. MakeMKV with its streaming feature works but an all in one solution would be nice and I hope VLC sorts it out.
You choose the amount of information you put there.
Unless you are as paranoid as RMS, just sign up using your company email (or a throwaway one) and put the absolutely minimum amount of info.
Actually, I'd ask the company to setup a special email for your social networking accounts; you could do that by adding a special ending, company wide, to the address schema you use to make those instantly recognizable to the staff. That way, you can easily segregate real work emails from social network inspired ones, and setup special rules for sorting incoming, etc to make it manageable. While you can create rules on a regular account as well, knowing it was a social networked source email could come in handy. the real plus is, should the email get compromised you can easily nuke it without impacting your real work; plus coworkers would know any email from it was not really sent by you. In addition, they could avoid using your real name as well to add a level of privacy and make it easy to transfer the entire account to another person if needed.
Every IT org I've worked with had no issue with creating special email accounts; especially since they already do that for things like support@, sales@, etc.
Given the ubiquity of VOIP and it's relatively low cost it's even easier to setup special phone numbers as well; unlike in the old PBX days.
I grew up in the South and once had a science teacher flat out tell us that she wouldn't teach us anything that wasn't *directly* from the approved text, because she wasn't going to risk her job just so we could learn. No kidding, if you asked her a question, she would find a relevant passage from the book and just start reading. If an answer wasn't in the book, she would just ignore the question. This was back when evolution and anything else remotely controversial wasn't even mentioned in textbooks, not in the South anyway. And of course, there are no teachers unions or anything like that, so good luck if you say the wrong thing.
Unfortunately, that is still true today. I know a lot of teachers, and while most would love to allow for reasoned discussion of various viewpoints and actually have students learn the arguments on both sides of many contentious topics; the are not willing to risk their jobs and put up with the tremendous amount of grief they would get. Couple that with NCLB and the tremendous pressure to get students to pass a standardized test and is it any wonder our education system is so screwed up?
Here's why you'd want it: you'd never need to add a codec. VLC plays videos in every codec known to man, and several known only to dolphins. That, and it's a damn good music player, *and* it supports playing videos in the framebuffer in linux.
In addition, if it brings Blu-Ray to the OSX it will fill a big hole in video playback on the Mac. OSX already can read Blu-Ray disks, and MakeMKV rips them to mkvs; but this would eliminate the need and time involved in getting one's blu-ray collection playable in an OSX environment.
Soo... how much more competitive would their prices be, if they didn't spend money on these kinds of systems and marketing and customer tracking, and just accepted that there's nothing wrong with people buying what they want, when they decide they want it? Think they could undercut (or nearly undercut) Wal-mart while providing a more pleasant shopping experience (which wouldn't be hard)?
No one undercuts Wal-Mart - once they've established themselves in an area they pretty much price at the prevalent local pricing - and simply make more profit because of their logistics superiority. Start a price war and they'll happily drop prices so low that you lose money and they simply make a little less until you give up or go out of business. Just ask K-mart. There's a reason target is targeting a more upscale consumer than Wal-Mart - they have no desire to try to compete with Wal-Mart on their turf.
good point. no i don't have a girlfriend, i have a wife, an you are right that you buy the brand she says, but that wasn't really my point (the advertising obviously worked on her)
You can also tell the married men from the ones buying for girlfriends there - the married ones grab a box, may get on the cell to verify right brand and style, toe it on the belt and pay. if it's all they're buying they may even carry it out unbagged.
Single guy has loaded up his cart with beer, chips, maybe a pizza or two , furtively grabs a box and hopes it's the right one, then hides it on the belt between the beer and covers it with the chips; all the while looking around like a robber to make sure none of his buds see him buying them. I'm surprised single women have started stalking those aisle - not only can you quickly parse the married guys but the single ones are already partially housebroken to boot.
Target profiles its EXISTING customers to be able to bombard them with coupons for products these same customers already pass everyday... Can win these customers for live? YOU ALREADY GOT THEM! And now instead of them buying the products they already seen at full price, you are reducing the price for no good reason.
While Target does wind up selling some things at a discount, they're probably not simply discounting all of the things they already buy but a selected subset. If they're smart, they discount a few low margin items that are typically bought along with other, higher margin items; hoping when you come in you'll also buy those items. The coupon is designed to get you back into the store to start the buying process; with the discount the lure.
This is nothing new. I had a friend that used to manage a McDonald's when he was a college student. He had free burger or fries coupons to give out, generally as a 'we're sorry for the problem, here's a freebie to make it up to you" thing. Why burgers or fires - because virtually all customer who got a coupon wound up buying a drink and also a burger or fries (depending on the coupon) - but the drink's margin covered the freebie so it was a net money maker for them and made the customer more loyal. As a side note, he ate a lot of free burgers and fries (when not working) while putting himself through college.
This Target campaign targets existing customers into buy stuff they have to buy anyway and ignores new customers altogether... BRILLIANT. I know how effective it is, some marketeers and statisticians got payed big bugs. Mission accomplished. Any actual new customers that make up for the costs and potential lawsuits? (Oh you just wait till they get it wrong or target a woman who had an abortion, or didn't want her family to know or had a miscarriage).
Per the summary (TFA is behind NYT wall) one goal is to turn the casual shopper into a long term customer. If they walk through your door chances are they fit your customer profile - this helps keep bringing them back. In essence, they're targeting a pre-selected audience that is already disposed to shopping with Target. Mass marketing to selected demographics builds awareness an this builds loyalty.
As for lawsuits, as long as they follow laws regarding how info is collected and used, they should be pretty safe from losing them. I would venture to guess, in the US, their customer data would be considered theirs and not require consent to use.
Wal-Mart appears to take this a step further with Wal-Mart branded pre-paid VISA (or is th MC) cards - not only do they get your float, they get to build a very detailed database of buying habits at Wal-Mart and elsewhere.
Not a surprise considering that they are still charging artists for record-era "breakage" fees not only on CDs but on MP3s. Somehow, they figure that 10% of MP3s "break" and thus shouldn't count towards royalties. They love playing the "We're supporting the artists" line publicly while doing all they can to screw the artists behind the scenes.
Welcome to the world of Hollywood accounting - where no matter how much money something takes in it sell loses money. I actually had an accounting prof who specialized in that topic - it's really very fascinating, even if it is accounting. I wish I could use the same for my taxes...
Management has no business assessing risk as they are susceptible to efficiency bias. When 3 engineers tell you about a high probability of fault, you had damn well listen when it comes to mission critical. (Can we agree the shuttle is mission critical?) Managers should take their cues about fault probability from engineers, not a statistics class they took once. When it comes to mission critical, all management should be saying is "How do we mitigate this risk?".
But that is not the crux of the issue - management's role is to assess the risks presented by the engineers and determine an acceptable curse of action in the face of differing assessments. The real problem lies with the organization - from the engineers who assess the risks and presented the results to the managers who made the decision to launch. Until the systemic organizational issues are fixed these types of things will continue to occur.
>Understandable is different than acceptable -
This is why I separated the two. It's not acceptable. It's not understandable. It's incomprehensible. I cannot grok how putting 2.5 Billion in 1986 dollars up in smoke was good management, or even comprehensible in the situation we discovered after the fact.
Actually, it is both very understandable and important to understand what lead to the decision - understanding is the first step to fixing.
>That's hardly a straw man but a very real consideration in post event investigation. It's very easy to go in and say "here's where you screwed up" and very difficult to determine why they screwed up.
I think you had missed my point when you made this comment. I don't think anyone here is arguing about the value of a proper Root Cause Analysis during the post-mortem. The problem here though is far more sinister, where politic trumps reason: engineers and extremely high risk profiles not being accepted by management. In fact in most risk-averse business scenarios, the mere fact that something is so polarized/politicized is a major indicator that risk analysis needs to be revisted before proceeding.... So it's not useful to point out that hindsight is 20/20 when the issue here is clearly using foresight to mitigate extreme risk.
The real problem, IMHO, is that no one was able to clearly quantify the risk in a manner that made people understand the real risk and take the right action, which lead to the loss of the vehicle and the crew.
In a NY Times op-ed today, RIAA chief Cary H. Sherman accuses the opponents of SOPA of having engaged in shady rhetorical tactics
Fortunately, the RIAA and it's brethren always engage in reasoned, non-iflammatory rhetoric when presenting their case. After all, it's a well documented fact that every unauthorized, err illegal, d/l of material they own directly results in a terrorist organization receiving money.
This is why management has no business in risk analysis. Management needs to stick to risk *reporting* and decision making based on a proper risk assessment carried out by engineers ESPECIALLY when lives and billions in equipment are on the line.
You seem to have misunderstood what I am saying. Engineers (and many NASA managers are engineers and did the very same job that your "engineers" are now doing) produce conflicting opinions, make mistakes, and are subject to the same type of biases in their professional work as in the rest of their lives. It's not as simple "the engineers say don't go" and management said go; rather it's a set of diverse results and opinions that need to be considered when a decision is made.
You are really just saying the same thing as the parent post, except that it is somehow acceptable (or at the very least understandable!) that, managers are making poor risk assessments. It's neither acceptable nor excusable.
Understandable is different than acceptable - unless you seek to understand why a certain decision is made you can't fix the underlying problem; all you do is (maybe) change the participants in the next bad decision. the underlying organizational cause still exist and have a similar impact on decision making. Acceptable? No Understandable? Yes.
It's an awful strawman to point out that hindsight is always 20-20. Of course it is!
That's hardly a straw man but a very real consideration in post event investigation. It's very easy to go in and say "here's where you screwed up" and very difficult to determine why they screwed up. I've seen far too many investigations that conclude "human error" and never get to the probable causes of the error and so the problem is never fixed; it just happens again to another person.
No, he doesn't. He deserves to have a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion posted in reply. I'm so sick of (-1, Disagree).
One logical argument, coming right up: those deaths were entirely foreseeable and preventable. It's not like the deaths were a result of limitations of our knowledge, or an absolutely necessary sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. No, those deaths were because some idiotic bureaucrat couldn't be bothered to listen to qualified engineers. Far as I am concerned that guy should be 1) sued by the families for wrongful death and 2) tried for involuntary manslaughter.
Apparently legal action is the only thing that makes thick-headed organization-type bureaucrats wake up and take notice, cf. the insanity coming out of the public schools. No amount of logic or expertise or forewarning seems to have any effect on them.
While NASA has it's share of bureaucrats; the real problem is not that they are thick headed or unwilling to listen; rather it's a systemic organizational problem that is not unique to NASA or the government. Everything from misunderstanding the risks involved (it was safe last time so it must be safe now); how data is presented and the tendency for technical people (much of NASA's leadership are technically trained) to disagree on what the data represents leads to a poor decision (in retrospect).,/P>
It's a lot easier to say "That was wrong" after the fact than before.
I remember that after Apollo 11, it was said that the American space program had cost 8 lives. The figure comes from a Time-Life audio documentary entitled "To the Moon" that I listened to dozens of times as a kid, and I feel absolutely certain that was the number used, though I don't know what that would refer to beyond Apollo 1
Several astronauts died in non-space flight related accidents - See and Barret in a trainer aircraft crash, for example, as others to bring the total to eight. Two were not NASA astronauts - one an X15 pilot and the other in the USAF MOL program. He would have been the first African American astronaut had he not been killed in a plane crash. Unfortunately, the MOL Program is largely forgotten.
Why would we want to shield from too many competitors? Constant competitors ensures the top doesn't get stagnant and there is always a strive for a better cheaper product.
True, but businesses prefer an environment where prices stay higher due to limited competition and they don't have to spend as much to stay competitive. "Better cheaper" is what you and I as consumers want; not what businesses want, which is more revenue and higher profit margins. Anything that potentially helps achieve that is good (for them).
Except when the computers being regulated are running our power grid, much of which is Nuclear. When you think about it, that could actually get quite a bit worse than a million tons of steel at 60 mph.
Actually, nuclear is only about 20% of the US grid. The real danger to the grid is not to the plants, but to blackouts and the resulting impact on the users, not the producers, of electricity.
Now that I have your attention listen to my argument before you mod...
Regulations provide businesses with cover when sorting goes wrong. The argument goes "we did exactly what the rules required so we can't be liable for what happened;" and thus making an argument for mitigating the cost (to them) of the damages.
In addition, regulations add to the cost of doing business, helping shield companies from too many competitors by raising the barriers to entry.
The only "bad" regulation is one that makes it hard for a company to make more profits or opens them up to additional liability.
The problem with airplanes is that they don't back up very well. I don't know how smart CFIT systems are, but I doubt that they can warn you not to fly into a box canyon, where sometimes there's no way to avoid a crash.
True. That's one advantage a ship has over an airplane. OTOH, as the terrain maps improve a CFIT system ought to be able to determine when a particular flight plan will result in entering situations such as you describe and provide the pilot with adequate warning. I don't know how smart they are either, but is seems that, with accurate GPS, runway incursions and taxiway errors could be avoided as well. The problem is pilots, and other people who are highly trained to operate very complex systems, tend to trust their judgement more than the machine. The desire in control, even if the auto system is better at controlling the system, is strong.
Air New Zealand DC10 was equipped with a terrain warning system, on the black box voice recorder you could hear the "woop woop pull up a few seconds before it hit Mt Erebus. So I duess it depends on how steep the mountain is.
The reason the plane flew straight into the mountain was the navigation system had been programmed wrong.
An the visibilty was compromised by the cluds and reflections from the snow and ice.
One of the main problems is decision making is hard when your mental model of what is happening differs from what instruments and other sensors are telling you. Not trusting your mental model (often developed from years of training and experience) does not come easy; add in a situation where even a slight delay has serious impact and you can see why stuff still happens.,/P>
As someone much older, wiser, and experienced once told me if you get into a situation where your not sure what is going on, return to the last safe setup and sort things out; as he put it "Remember - you can always back the ship down because you know the water behind you is deep enough to avoid running aground."
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At this point, things took a turn for the hilarious. Immediately he switched over to admitting it was a scam and....trying to recruit me to help! He claimed he needed a mailing address in the US, and needed someone to send out packages....claimed he would pay $500 per package of letters!
So of course, I told him I would do it but I needed the money up front...fully intending to keep the money and spend the next decade gloating over how I scammed the scammer.... he even told me he could get counterfit bills.... which got me thinking how fun it would be if this all resulted in my getting to report him to the SS.
Of course, the whole thing broke down when he wanted to talk on the phone....and I wasn't willing to give out my real phone number. I suppose he already had my address so it hardly mattered, but, I didn't want harassing calls either.
Using any real life info with scammers is a very bad idea - just because they are thousands of miles away doesn't mean they don't have friends who are a lot closer. You're pissing off people who already engage in crime, why risk it?
a great site to visit is 419eater.com - a vast world of scam baiting exists; some of the stories are very funny.
In order for Federal Law to trump state law, it has to be made in pursuance of its Constitutionally delegated powers. If Congress passes a law which they are not granted the power to do as part of their enumerated powers, then it does not trump state laws.
Except the Commerce Clause does give congress pretty broad latitude to regulate activities, even if states do not like it.
You might actually be wrong, there are limited cases where the states can manage this. Now with something like medical weed you have an outright conflict. There are cases where states are allowed to do more, for example in Oregon their definition of free speech is much wider and more inclusive than the federal definition.
However, that in no way limits the actions of the Federal government so it's no a supremacy clause issue.If the state decided to prevent the Federal government from enfacing it's laws then it would be, but that is not the case in your example.
The TSA may very well decide to comply with local laws in those States, it's simply not worth the fight. At any rate, some sort of balance must be struck in this case, because I'm beginning to think people like the IRS more than the TSA.
I doubt it - the Feds generally take a hard line when a state tries to impose limits on their actions.
In most EU legislations, databases are copyright (or Author's right) protected, even when the actual items in the database are not. So a database of historical events or facts actually can be protected.
As I understand copyright law, that is also the case in the US if the collection meets some minimum requirements - however the underlying facts aren't copyrightable; which was the issue with the TZ dB. Anyone can compile a list of sunrise times from copyrighted sources and publish it; they can't however copy the book it's in and make it available to others.
Don't worry about the "non-potential customers" that are using it, since I assume you mean they are not producing commercial video form it.
If their are legitimate educational institutions using it, offer to work out a licensing deal. They get levi copes and you get a broader user base. if it's a non-profit that truly can't afford it but is using it, consider the benefits of a donation in terms of good-will and publicity. Turn these into win-wins.
For those that you can prove are using your product to produce commercial video, go after them. They have no more right to pirate your software than someone has to pirate what they produce from it. Their customers may think twice about using them if they get embroiled in a lawsuit. Some of course, will be essentially unusable - follow your lawyers advice and pick battles that, if you win, will pay off.
Finally, consider a light version that has some features but really isn't strong enough to be used for professional work. For your pro product, consider a dongle but asses it's impact on your paying customers - will it make your software a PITA to use and chase them away?
That hole hasn't existed for six months.
Unfortunately MacBlurayPlayer isn't a really viable solution (yet) since it needs an Internet connection for decrypting the discs. MakeMKV with its streaming feature works but an all in one solution would be nice and I hope VLC sorts it out.
Obviously
You choose the amount of information you put there.
Unless you are as paranoid as RMS, just sign up using your company email (or a throwaway one) and put the absolutely minimum amount of info.
Actually, I'd ask the company to setup a special email for your social networking accounts; you could do that by adding a special ending, company wide, to the address schema you use to make those instantly recognizable to the staff. That way, you can easily segregate real work emails from social network inspired ones, and setup special rules for sorting incoming, etc to make it manageable. While you can create rules on a regular account as well, knowing it was a social networked source email could come in handy. the real plus is, should the email get compromised you can easily nuke it without impacting your real work; plus coworkers would know any email from it was not really sent by you. In addition, they could avoid using your real name as well to add a level of privacy and make it easy to transfer the entire account to another person if needed.
Every IT org I've worked with had no issue with creating special email accounts; especially since they already do that for things like support@, sales@, etc.
Given the ubiquity of VOIP and it's relatively low cost it's even easier to setup special phone numbers as well; unlike in the old PBX days.
I grew up in the South and once had a science teacher flat out tell us that she wouldn't teach us anything that wasn't *directly* from the approved text, because she wasn't going to risk her job just so we could learn. No kidding, if you asked her a question, she would find a relevant passage from the book and just start reading. If an answer wasn't in the book, she would just ignore the question. This was back when evolution and anything else remotely controversial wasn't even mentioned in textbooks, not in the South anyway. And of course, there are no teachers unions or anything like that, so good luck if you say the wrong thing.
Unfortunately, that is still true today. I know a lot of teachers, and while most would love to allow for reasoned discussion of various viewpoints and actually have students learn the arguments on both sides of many contentious topics; the are not willing to risk their jobs and put up with the tremendous amount of grief they would get. Couple that with NCLB and the tremendous pressure to get students to pass a standardized test and is it any wonder our education system is so screwed up?
Here's why you'd want it: you'd never need to add a codec. VLC plays videos in every codec known to man, and several known only to dolphins. That, and it's a damn good music player, *and* it supports playing videos in the framebuffer in linux.
In addition, if it brings Blu-Ray to the OSX it will fill a big hole in video playback on the Mac. OSX already can read Blu-Ray disks, and MakeMKV rips them to mkvs; but this would eliminate the need and time involved in getting one's blu-ray collection playable in an OSX environment.
Soo... how much more competitive would their prices be, if they didn't spend money on these kinds of systems and marketing and customer tracking, and just accepted that there's nothing wrong with people buying what they want, when they decide they want it? Think they could undercut (or nearly undercut) Wal-mart while providing a more pleasant shopping experience (which wouldn't be hard)?
No one undercuts Wal-Mart - once they've established themselves in an area they pretty much price at the prevalent local pricing - and simply make more profit because of their logistics superiority. Start a price war and they'll happily drop prices so low that you lose money and they simply make a little less until you give up or go out of business. Just ask K-mart. There's a reason target is targeting a more upscale consumer than Wal-Mart - they have no desire to try to compete with Wal-Mart on their turf.
good point. no i don't have a girlfriend, i have a wife, an you are right that you buy the brand she says, but that wasn't really my point (the advertising obviously worked on her)
You can also tell the married men from the ones buying for girlfriends there - the married ones grab a box, may get on the cell to verify right brand and style, toe it on the belt and pay. if it's all they're buying they may even carry it out unbagged.
Single guy has loaded up his cart with beer, chips, maybe a pizza or two , furtively grabs a box and hopes it's the right one, then hides it on the belt between the beer and covers it with the chips; all the while looking around like a robber to make sure none of his buds see him buying them. I'm surprised single women have started stalking those aisle - not only can you quickly parse the married guys but the single ones are already partially housebroken to boot.
Target profiles its EXISTING customers to be able to bombard them with coupons for products these same customers already pass everyday... Can win these customers for live? YOU ALREADY GOT THEM! And now instead of them buying the products they already seen at full price, you are reducing the price for no good reason.
While Target does wind up selling some things at a discount, they're probably not simply discounting all of the things they already buy but a selected subset. If they're smart, they discount a few low margin items that are typically bought along with other, higher margin items; hoping when you come in you'll also buy those items. The coupon is designed to get you back into the store to start the buying process; with the discount the lure.
This is nothing new. I had a friend that used to manage a McDonald's when he was a college student. He had free burger or fries coupons to give out, generally as a 'we're sorry for the problem, here's a freebie to make it up to you" thing. Why burgers or fires - because virtually all customer who got a coupon wound up buying a drink and also a burger or fries (depending on the coupon) - but the drink's margin covered the freebie so it was a net money maker for them and made the customer more loyal. As a side note, he ate a lot of free burgers and fries (when not working) while putting himself through college.
This Target campaign targets existing customers into buy stuff they have to buy anyway and ignores new customers altogether... BRILLIANT. I know how effective it is, some marketeers and statisticians got payed big bugs. Mission accomplished. Any actual new customers that make up for the costs and potential lawsuits? (Oh you just wait till they get it wrong or target a woman who had an abortion, or didn't want her family to know or had a miscarriage).
Per the summary (TFA is behind NYT wall) one goal is to turn the casual shopper into a long term customer. If they walk through your door chances are they fit your customer profile - this helps keep bringing them back. In essence, they're targeting a pre-selected audience that is already disposed to shopping with Target. Mass marketing to selected demographics builds awareness an this builds loyalty.
As for lawsuits, as long as they follow laws regarding how info is collected and used, they should be pretty safe from losing them. I would venture to guess, in the US, their customer data would be considered theirs and not require consent to use.
Wal-Mart appears to take this a step further with Wal-Mart branded pre-paid VISA (or is th MC) cards - not only do they get your float, they get to build a very detailed database of buying habits at Wal-Mart and elsewhere.
One of the few benefits of having a cold is the pleasure of passing it on to cow-orkers, don't take that away from me.
Craig Shergold is that you?
Not a surprise considering that they are still charging artists for record-era "breakage" fees not only on CDs but on MP3s. Somehow, they figure that 10% of MP3s "break" and thus shouldn't count towards royalties. They love playing the "We're supporting the artists" line publicly while doing all they can to screw the artists behind the scenes.
Welcome to the world of Hollywood accounting - where no matter how much money something takes in it sell loses money. I actually had an accounting prof who specialized in that topic - it's really very fascinating, even if it is accounting. I wish I could use the same for my taxes...
Management has no business assessing risk as they are susceptible to efficiency bias. When 3 engineers tell you about a high probability of fault, you had damn well listen when it comes to mission critical. (Can we agree the shuttle is mission critical?) Managers should take their cues about fault probability from engineers, not a statistics class they took once. When it comes to mission critical, all management should be saying is "How do we mitigate this risk?".
But that is not the crux of the issue - management's role is to assess the risks presented by the engineers and determine an acceptable curse of action in the face of differing assessments. The real problem lies with the organization - from the engineers who assess the risks and presented the results to the managers who made the decision to launch. Until the systemic organizational issues are fixed these types of things will continue to occur.
>Understandable is different than acceptable -
This is why I separated the two. It's not acceptable. It's not understandable. It's incomprehensible. I cannot grok how putting 2.5 Billion in 1986 dollars up in smoke was good management, or even comprehensible in the situation we discovered after the fact.
Actually, it is both very understandable and important to understand what lead to the decision - understanding is the first step to fixing.
>That's hardly a straw man but a very real consideration in post event investigation. It's very easy to go in and say "here's where you screwed up" and very difficult to determine why they screwed up.
I think you had missed my point when you made this comment. I don't think anyone here is arguing about the value of a proper Root Cause Analysis during the post-mortem. The problem here though is far more sinister, where politic trumps reason: engineers and extremely high risk profiles not being accepted by management. In fact in most risk-averse business scenarios, the mere fact that something is so polarized/politicized is a major indicator that risk analysis needs to be revisted before proceeding.... So it's not useful to point out that hindsight is 20/20 when the issue here is clearly using foresight to mitigate extreme risk.
The real problem, IMHO, is that no one was able to clearly quantify the risk in a manner that made people understand the real risk and take the right action, which lead to the loss of the vehicle and the crew.
In a NY Times op-ed today, RIAA chief Cary H. Sherman accuses the opponents of SOPA of having engaged in shady rhetorical tactics
Fortunately, the RIAA and it's brethren always engage in reasoned, non-iflammatory rhetoric when presenting their case. After all, it's a well documented fact that every unauthorized, err illegal, d/l of material they own directly results in a terrorist organization receiving money.
This is why management has no business in risk analysis. Management needs to stick to risk *reporting* and decision making based on a proper risk assessment carried out by engineers ESPECIALLY when lives and billions in equipment are on the line.
You seem to have misunderstood what I am saying. Engineers (and many NASA managers are engineers and did the very same job that your "engineers" are now doing) produce conflicting opinions, make mistakes, and are subject to the same type of biases in their professional work as in the rest of their lives. It's not as simple "the engineers say don't go" and management said go; rather it's a set of diverse results and opinions that need to be considered when a decision is made.
You are really just saying the same thing as the parent post, except that it is somehow acceptable (or at the very least understandable!) that, managers are making poor risk assessments. It's neither acceptable nor excusable.
Understandable is different than acceptable - unless you seek to understand why a certain decision is made you can't fix the underlying problem; all you do is (maybe) change the participants in the next bad decision. the underlying organizational cause still exist and have a similar impact on decision making. Acceptable? No Understandable? Yes.
It's an awful strawman to point out that hindsight is always 20-20. Of course it is!
That's hardly a straw man but a very real consideration in post event investigation. It's very easy to go in and say "here's where you screwed up" and very difficult to determine why they screwed up. I've seen far too many investigations that conclude "human error" and never get to the probable causes of the error and so the problem is never fixed; it just happens again to another person.
You deserve to be modded down.
No, he doesn't. He deserves to have a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion posted in reply. I'm so sick of (-1, Disagree).
One logical argument, coming right up: those deaths were entirely foreseeable and preventable. It's not like the deaths were a result of limitations of our knowledge, or an absolutely necessary sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. No, those deaths were because some idiotic bureaucrat couldn't be bothered to listen to qualified engineers. Far as I am concerned that guy should be 1) sued by the families for wrongful death and 2) tried for involuntary manslaughter. Apparently legal action is the only thing that makes thick-headed organization-type bureaucrats wake up and take notice, cf. the insanity coming out of the public schools. No amount of logic or expertise or forewarning seems to have any effect on them.
While NASA has it's share of bureaucrats; the real problem is not that they are thick headed or unwilling to listen; rather it's a systemic organizational problem that is not unique to NASA or the government. Everything from misunderstanding the risks involved (it was safe last time so it must be safe now); how data is presented and the tendency for technical people (much of NASA's leadership are technically trained) to disagree on what the data represents leads to a poor decision (in retrospect).,/P>
It's a lot easier to say "That was wrong" after the fact than before.
I remember that after Apollo 11, it was said that the American space program had cost 8 lives. The figure comes from a Time-Life audio documentary entitled "To the Moon" that I listened to dozens of times as a kid, and I feel absolutely certain that was the number used, though I don't know what that would refer to beyond Apollo 1
Several astronauts died in non-space flight related accidents - See and Barret in a trainer aircraft crash, for example, as others to bring the total to eight. Two were not NASA astronauts - one an X15 pilot and the other in the USAF MOL program. He would have been the first African American astronaut had he not been killed in a plane crash. Unfortunately, the MOL Program is largely forgotten.
Why would we want to shield from too many competitors? Constant competitors ensures the top doesn't get stagnant and there is always a strive for a better cheaper product.
True, but businesses prefer an environment where prices stay higher due to limited competition and they don't have to spend as much to stay competitive. "Better cheaper" is what you and I as consumers want; not what businesses want, which is more revenue and higher profit margins. Anything that potentially helps achieve that is good (for them).
Except when the computers being regulated are running our power grid, much of which is Nuclear. When you think about it, that could actually get quite a bit worse than a million tons of steel at 60 mph.
Actually, nuclear is only about 20% of the US grid. The real danger to the grid is not to the plants, but to blackouts and the resulting impact on the users, not the producers, of electricity.
Now that I have your attention listen to my argument before you mod...
Regulations provide businesses with cover when sorting goes wrong. The argument goes "we did exactly what the rules required so we can't be liable for what happened;" and thus making an argument for mitigating the cost (to them) of the damages.
In addition, regulations add to the cost of doing business, helping shield companies from too many competitors by raising the barriers to entry.
The only "bad" regulation is one that makes it hard for a company to make more profits or opens them up to additional liability.
The problem with airplanes is that they don't back up very well. I don't know how smart CFIT systems are, but I doubt that they can warn you not to fly into a box canyon, where sometimes there's no way to avoid a crash.
True. That's one advantage a ship has over an airplane. OTOH, as the terrain maps improve a CFIT system ought to be able to determine when a particular flight plan will result in entering situations such as you describe and provide the pilot with adequate warning. I don't know how smart they are either, but is seems that, with accurate GPS, runway incursions and taxiway errors could be avoided as well. The problem is pilots, and other people who are highly trained to operate very complex systems, tend to trust their judgement more than the machine. The desire in control, even if the auto system is better at controlling the system, is strong.
Air New Zealand DC10 was equipped with a terrain warning system, on the black box voice recorder you could hear the "woop woop pull up a few seconds before it hit Mt Erebus. So I duess it depends on how steep the mountain is.
The reason the plane flew straight into the mountain was the navigation system had been programmed wrong. An the visibilty was compromised by the cluds and reflections from the snow and ice.
One of the main problems is decision making is hard when your mental model of what is happening differs from what instruments and other sensors are telling you. Not trusting your mental model (often developed from years of training and experience) does not come easy; add in a situation where even a slight delay has serious impact and you can see why stuff still happens.,/P>
As someone much older, wiser, and experienced once told me if you get into a situation where your not sure what is going on, return to the last safe setup and sort things out; as he put it "Remember - you can always back the ship down because you know the water behind you is deep enough to avoid running aground."
CFIT is nowhere near the leading cause of fatal accidents in general aviation.
true. It's selling doctors twin - Beeches.