"the less online merchants know about you, the less likely they'll be able to figure out how much you're willing to pay."
And this is a very good argument indeed for online privacy. As in, Amazon should not know what I bought at BarnesAndNoble. Loss of privacy need not be about the government watching your every move. It can well be about getting ripped off more often.
Fuck price discrimination. Talk about other kinds of discrimination. Like charging higher prices for cosmetics, say, if a woman is buying. Or charging higher prices to teenage kids buying video games (cause they'll be pestering their parents and will often succeed). Or an $ethnic_minority_person walks into a bar and gets asked $100 for a beer. Legal, right?
Price discrimination and bidding should occur only for scarce items. If you have a Picasso to sell, fine. But if you're selling new mass-manufactured goods, price should only be a function of quantity bought. Anything else means the seller is not to be trusted. And don't talk to me about used cars - this is precisely the reason car salesmen are the butt of cruel jokes - because you can't trust them.
"I don't think anyone would bitch if a site offered them a price 10% less than most people simply because they are a frequent customer."
It's like saying "no-one would bitch about stolen elections if it was their party that stole them". It's sadly true - not many people bitch that way.
Well, I for one would bitch about getting a lower price, because it would indicate that at other times I'm probably getting higher prices, and so ultimately I cannot trust the vendor.
And you really expect software to be able to make such substitutions, Kylie to Shakira? That requires compiling sum total of current (as in, this year) culture into a form that the translation mechanism can then pick individual references from. If you know how to do it, you'll be richer than Bill Gates by next year.
Well, translation memory is only as good as the translator whose work is being reused, for one thing. For another, it only works well within the same narrow semantic area, and for highly formulaic sources, such we weather reports, technical manuals or software. For legalese I would hesitate to use TM, because a subtle difference in phrasing can make a huge difference in court.
" Both representations activate. So it's not so clear that representations in the brain are context dependant."
Nah. Both might activate initially, but context is wider than just the neighboring words in the sentence. Context includes the whole text, the historical period, culture, source of the text, etc. In a modern city context the "river" representation doesn't really register.
And anyway, context disambiguates senses, but disambiguation need not be complete. When we understand speech we extrapolate and make guesses all the time.
Actually, movie subtitles make a very poor source for statistical analysis, because of space and time limitations. An actor utters 30 words in the time most people can read maybe 12, and that's about the ratio of actual dialogue to subtitles. And if these 12 words don't fit on screen, you have to make do with ten or eight.
You know what machine translation will never do? (For small-to-medium values of "never".) It won't easily compensate for errors in source text, like the one you've just made. Statistical approach won't help a computer when the text as-written is not the intended sense. Human translators do such compensation all the time.
Project Gutenberg has plenty of translations into English, but not other target languages, it seems. And given the nature of copyright, do you want modern machine translation to read like 19th century prose?
You know how socialism began? One of the first early movements in 19th century came from the rich, bored kids of burgoisie, who one day realized that plenty of kinds under twelve years of age were working on mines, and they decided to do something about it. Marx was part of that, though he was - a bit like Emerson - more of a thinker than doer. Anyway, they succeeded and a law was passed in England that prohibited childre nunder twelve from being employed (not sure about the extent of that law, i.e. if it only applied to mine work or any employment).
The kicker is, before the law was passed, there was a huge outcry from the "business community". The Economist, which aready existed at that time, published an article where they calculated that without the toil of under-12 kids the whole frigging economy would surely collapse. The way they saw it, there was no to ways about it. It was going to be but economic doom if kids inder 12 could not work anymore.
Think of that whenever business today hollers about mininum wage.
Shareholders? Fuck them. Sorry, they do absolutely nothing except move money. They bring exactly zero value to the system. Accumulation of wealth is not creating wealth.
"Maybe not, but a rock is worth infinitely less than the silicon microchips that can be made from it."
Only until you factor in all the other resources that went into making that chip. Yeah, we have an abundance of sand. Pity we don't have an equal abundance of potable water, clean air and renewable sources of energy.
"Wealth is limited by virtue of us living on a planet of limited resource that's hard to leave. Happiness and ideas do not suffer from such limitations." First things first. Define terms and state assumptions. What do you think 'wealth' is?"
This is BS, and you know it. Sure you can define wealth in five hundred ways before breakfast. But when IBM and its shareholders talk about wealth, you know there's only one definition they care about.
Eiher you have this dollar, or I do. We cannot both have it. That's the only kind of wealth corporations and shareholders deal in.
And your wellbeing and general level of personal happiness is contingent on your country being a "player" in "global economy"? You realize of course that there is little to no relationship between a country's GDP and the population's average perception of "being satisfied with one's life"?
Beautiful. Now show me how it "works for us" in the specific aspect of generating more jobs. How about making corporate tax breaks contingent on keeping or creating jobs? But no, that would be **communism**.
"Laying off 10~13K employee's will no doubt save a lot as well."
IBM saves, everybody else loses. And I mean everybody, not just those laid off.
"Lets say these are the averages: 10K people, 30K salary, 36K salary with benefits How much does IBM save? 360 Million a year."
Right. And now taxpayers lose because the government has to pay 10K people unemployment benefits. Businesses lose, because 10K people now have little to no purchasing power. Communities lose because where there is a large number of unemployed people, there is more crime, people get mugged, raped and killed more, and property value goes way down. If the governmment in question provides any universal healthcare, like some civilized countries do, costs of healthcare go way up and quality and availability services diminish.
But IBM has saved 360 million, which is what, probably less than three year's pay for the CEO?
"Their entire culture is based on the hive mentality."
OJ. Janet Jackson. Michael Jackson. Star Wars. Monica Lewinsky. Hugh fucking Grant. Thousands of people screaming, pushing and stepping all over each other so that they can touch the president. Fox fucking News.
Idiot bastards. Strange their country was set up by such bloody brilliant people.
Slashdot Mirror
"the less online merchants know about you, the less likely they'll be able to figure out how much you're willing to pay."
And this is a very good argument indeed for online privacy. As in, Amazon should not know what I bought at BarnesAndNoble. Loss of privacy need not be about the government watching your every move. It can well be about getting ripped off more often.
"That's what price discrimination is"
Fuck price discrimination. Talk about other kinds of discrimination. Like charging higher prices for cosmetics, say, if a woman is buying. Or charging higher prices to teenage kids buying video games (cause they'll be pestering their parents and will often succeed). Or an $ethnic_minority_person walks into a bar and gets asked $100 for a beer. Legal, right?
Price discrimination and bidding should occur only for scarce items. If you have a Picasso to sell, fine. But if you're selling new mass-manufactured goods, price should only be a function of quantity bought. Anything else means the seller is not to be trusted. And don't talk to me about used cars - this is precisely the reason car salesmen are the butt of cruel jokes - because you can't trust them.
"I don't think anyone would bitch if a site offered them a price 10% less than most people simply because they are a frequent customer."
It's like saying "no-one would bitch about stolen elections if it was their party that stole them". It's sadly true - not many people bitch that way.
Well, I for one would bitch about getting a lower price, because it would indicate that at other times I'm probably getting higher prices, and so ultimately I cannot trust the vendor.
And you really expect software to be able to make such substitutions, Kylie to Shakira? That requires compiling sum total of current (as in, this year) culture into a form that the translation mechanism can then pick individual references from. If you know how to do it, you'll be richer than Bill Gates by next year.
Well, translation memory is only as good as the translator whose work is being reused, for one thing. For another, it only works well within the same narrow semantic area, and for highly formulaic sources, such we weather reports, technical manuals or software. For legalese I would hesitate to use TM, because a subtle difference in phrasing can make a huge difference in court.
Yeah, and if people agreed never to click certain key sequences on the keyboards, Windows would never BSOD. You being funny, right?
" Both representations activate. So it's not so clear that representations in the brain are context dependant."
Nah. Both might activate initially, but context is wider than just the neighboring words in the sentence. Context includes the whole text, the historical period, culture, source of the text, etc. In a modern city context the "river" representation doesn't really register.
And anyway, context disambiguates senses, but disambiguation need not be complete. When we understand speech we extrapolate and make guesses all the time.
Actually, movie subtitles make a very poor source for statistical analysis, because of space and time limitations. An actor utters 30 words in the time most people can read maybe 12, and that's about the ratio of actual dialogue to subtitles. And if these 12 words don't fit on screen, you have to make do with ten or eight.
"Viola!"
You know what machine translation will never do? (For small-to-medium values of "never".) It won't easily compensate for errors in source text, like the one you've just made. Statistical approach won't help a computer when the text as-written is not the intended sense. Human translators do such compensation all the time.
"...a simple script could be created..."
You've never worked on localizing a non-trivial application, have you?
Project Gutenberg has plenty of translations into English, but not other target languages, it seems. And given the nature of copyright, do you want modern machine translation to read like 19th century prose?
Do you also have a personal, emotional relationship to Coke or Pepsi or your Nikes? Just curious.
self-correction: "bourgeoisie". I knew it all along, of course :)
You know how socialism began? One of the first early movements in 19th century came from the rich, bored kids of burgoisie, who one day realized that plenty of kinds under twelve years of age were working on mines, and they decided to do something about it. Marx was part of that, though he was - a bit like Emerson - more of a thinker than doer. Anyway, they succeeded and a law was passed in England that prohibited childre nunder twelve from being employed (not sure about the extent of that law, i.e. if it only applied to mine work or any employment).
The kicker is, before the law was passed, there was a huge outcry from the "business community". The Economist, which aready existed at that time, published an article where they calculated that without the toil of under-12 kids the whole frigging economy would surely collapse. The way they saw it, there was no to ways about it. It was going to be but economic doom if kids inder 12 could not work anymore.
Think of that whenever business today hollers about mininum wage.
Shareholders? Fuck them. Sorry, they do absolutely nothing except move money. They bring exactly zero value to the system. Accumulation of wealth is not creating wealth.
I don't know. Windows security is one thing. But would you slap Ray Tomlinson for every piece of spam you receive?
So in other words you're saying IBM shareholders calculate their wealth by how good the paid sex was? Or are you just out of arguments?
"Maybe not, but a rock is worth infinitely less than the silicon microchips that can be made from it."
Only until you factor in all the other resources that went into making that chip. Yeah, we have an abundance of sand. Pity we don't have an equal abundance of potable water, clean air and renewable sources of energy.
"Wealth is limited by virtue of us living on a planet of limited resource that's hard to leave. Happiness and ideas do not suffer from such limitations." First things first. Define terms and state assumptions. What do you think 'wealth' is?"
This is BS, and you know it. Sure you can define wealth in five hundred ways before breakfast. But when IBM and its shareholders talk about wealth, you know there's only one definition they care about.
Eiher you have this dollar, or I do. We cannot both have it. That's the only kind of wealth corporations and shareholders deal in.
" I live in a country where one can become a millionaire without having to worry about hitting the 90% tax bracket."
Wake me up when the percentage of millionaires in your country exceeds the percentage of those living below poverty line.
And your wellbeing and general level of personal happiness is contingent on your country being a "player" in "global economy"? You realize of course that there is little to no relationship between a country's GDP and the population's average perception of "being satisfied with one's life"?
Beautiful. Now show me how it "works for us" in the specific aspect of generating more jobs. How about making corporate tax breaks contingent on keeping or creating jobs? But no, that would be **communism**.
", we only need to look back at the 1990s and the Balkans" ...bombed to hell and back by the US.
"Laying off 10~13K employee's will no doubt save a lot as well."
IBM saves, everybody else loses. And I mean everybody, not just those laid off.
"Lets say these are the averages:
10K people, 30K salary, 36K salary with benefits
How much does IBM save? 360 Million a year."
Right. And now taxpayers lose because the government has to pay 10K people unemployment benefits. Businesses lose, because 10K people now have little to no purchasing power. Communities lose because where there is a large number of unemployed people, there is more crime, people get mugged, raped and killed more, and property value goes way down. If the governmment in question provides any universal healthcare, like some civilized countries do, costs of healthcare go way up and quality and availability services diminish.
But IBM has saved 360 million, which is what, probably less than three year's pay for the CEO?
"Their entire culture is based on the hive mentality."
OJ. Janet Jackson. Michael Jackson. Star Wars. Monica Lewinsky. Hugh fucking Grant. Thousands of people screaming, pushing and stepping all over each other so that they can touch the president. Fox fucking News.
Idiot bastards. Strange their country was set up by such bloody brilliant people.
No. Refuse to do business with China. It worked for South Africa, remember?