Yes you can. Because by offering the option to "downweight" your vote, and implying that that is the "right" way, it gives more power to those who discourteously exagerrate their vote. "Nice" people are effectively disenfranchised.
See also: dumb share traders who buy on rumors and sell when the real products arrive and aren't up to rumors specs.
Why is this a problem? If it's true, all you have to do is notice when they are stupidly selling, and buy, and notice when they are stupidly buying, and sell. Easy money.
Either that, or they aren't as irrational as you think.
i hate to be the one to bring it up, but Ubuntu 7.10 won't cost me a dime...
Neither will that nasty couch the guy down the street put out on the sidewalk. And?
(I know, I know, I'll probably get modded as flamebait because you'll think I'm saying Ubuntu is equivalent to a nasty couch. I'm not. Just saying that being free isn't everything, unless you are really seriously broke. But you can mod me as flamebait if you please, it's ok)
You should make a CAPTCHA thing where you have to play Go in order to post a comment or whatever. Now that all the distorted text things have gotten to the point that humans can't solve them anymore.
Because operating systems, unlike furniture, are subject to network effects. Without intervention, a stable equilibrium is likely to form where only one product dominates, and there are strong economic incentives to buy the dominant product (i.e. compatibility), as well as strong economic incentives for the maker of said product to attempt to amplify this situation (by making it less compatible). Which is a bad situation for everyone but the maker of said product.
Regardless of such abstract ideals as "free market", people (and the governmentst that represent them) do not have to allow this when it is not in their interest.
Most people who advocate free market...at least those who are well studied in it....realize that there are places where exceptions need to be made. I doubt there is a perfect free market anywhere in the world. Most of us like having the government provide roads and schools and the like, for instance, as well as regulate things like utilities.
That is why it is significant that a think tank that generally advocates free-market recognizes that there are places where exceptions need to be made, and this is one of them.
Ultimately, the point of a free market is to allow competition to do its thing, and it can't do so when one company is allowed to dominate to such a degree.
No one said it had to come without the OS installed. As long as the one with the OS pre-installed costs as much as buying the computer without OS and the OS alone, they should be fine.
It didn't suck. That's very true. I hated web mail before gmail, and love it now.
Also, prior to gmail, users of free web mail had to constantly delete all their old messages so they wouldn't go over their quota. Also if you didn't log in for a month you got your account cancelled. Also you couldn't use free web mail for professional purposes because it stuck an ad on your outgoing mail. Web mail also didn't allow free forwarding, pop access, or allow you to use an address at your own domain....which basically locked you in. Gmail changed all that.
And it was the first mainstream Ajax application I know of.
I agree...it was pretty damn revolutionary. At least for those who pay attention to such things.
a) what can you do to change the norm and b) what are you doing to reinforce stereotypes like these (suggestion: posting comments like the one you just did;) )?
I think your suggestion might also be appropriate for addressing a.
I mean how do you change something if it's not ok to even point it out.
I'm not even going to stop at spyware. What about murder? How far away can that be? Soon Google will start murdering people. It's just a matter of when.
Geez, you'd think the world was coming to an end....
The simple answer is that a lot of people are going to end up installing browser extensions that do the "click to run flash object" thing. And if they can't figure that out, I'm having a hard time feeling such pity if they are "squished".
I think at times we forget at times Apple is a company and they are in it to make money.
Do you forget that the rest of us are consumers, and consumers are "in it" for...well, whatever their own interests are...? If consumers don't like what Apple is doing, they can apply economic pressure to Apple to do things in a way that they prefer. The least effective way might be to quietly stop buying Apple's products, hoping that eventually Apple will figure out that they need to change their policies or they will lose more consumers.
A more effective way might be to be vocal about it, discuss it among themselves, etc. That is exactly what this article and discussion is.
So...just curious...do you encourage others to act the same way you do? Because a lot of the web would disappear if there wasn't a revenue model.
I occasionally click on ads if they pique my interest, especially at sites I frequent and enjoy. To take the point of stance of never clicking on ads (as if by principle), is akin to someone who says they never tip at a restaurant on principle. What exactly is the principle?
I think you are failing to factor in that the amount google makes on ads is determined by the market rate. And the market rate takes into account whether or not the clicks are real or not, since if it doesn't produce sales equal to the amount they pay for the advertising, people won't pay for it, and the price therefore adjusts downward. Google doesn't necessarily make more or less money because of false clicks, they just are paid less per click, but there are more clicks.
You say "up to the point where advertisers start jumping ship". They don't "jump ship" per se, they just pay less.
Of course it does. It is just like someone overcharging for plywood and batteries as the hurricane bears down. People need these iPods, and they need them now, and competitive products are not available. Apple execs should be put in jail for this immoral behavior.
Their numbers are even less relevant than you'd think.
They are only irrelevant if you don't know how to read them.
Companies hire iSupply to help them calculate how much a competitor's products cost, and if iSupply didn't know what they were doing, they'd be out of business by now.
It's not their fault that dumb readers make naive conclusions.
Although....mixing in fixed costs with marginal costs isn't necessarily a good way to analyze something like this. If the $58.54 is indeed a good estimation of the marginal cost (the theoretical amount it costs them to make one additional unit), it isn't irrelevant at all. It's just not a direct indicator of profit -- which you are never going to get anyway without knowing how many they are going to sell through its lifetime.
Well just as food for thought / playing the devil's advocate....what about playing the song to a stadium full of people as part of a performance? Would you expect the fact that you paid for the song to cover that as well?
If the government set vague speed limits like this, the police could give you tickets when ever they felt like it. And they don't? I doubt you have ever gotten a ticket for going 1 mile an hour over the speed limit. They also never ticket my vespa for being parked on the sidewalk in front of my house, even though it is illegal, and I'd surely get a ticket for parking on the sidewalk in other parts of san francisco where it would actually be more in people's way. Police use considerable discretion in giving tickets, and I personally think that's a good thing.
Same thing with lots of things. Do you get fired if you show up late for work by an exact number of minutes or an exact number of days? Or do they use discretion in making such descisions?
If they gave an exact number, the heavy users would just throttle their usage to just under the limit (possibly writing some software to help with this), and the problem would remain. Unless of course they lowered the limit down further and further. I'm no fan of comcast, but the way they are doing it is the only way I can think of that makes economic sense, short of simply charging users per byte.
I don't debate that religion is a part of it (I mean, that's rather obvious isn't it), just saying that evolution is hard enough for people to accept on its non-intuitiveness that it makes it even harder to convince people.
Even people who do accept evolution often have a hard time with the idea that human consciousness emotions and sense of "self" and free will and all that could be explained by evolution and various related materialistic explanations.
Natural selection argues that there are forces within nature that shift certain traits to certain ways. This is the theory in which to attack. I would argue that in general, when people use the term "evolution", they intend it as a short way of saying "the theory of evolution by natural selection as popularized by Charles Darwin".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you can. Because by offering the option to "downweight" your vote, and implying that that is the "right" way, it gives more power to those who discourteously exagerrate their vote. "Nice" people are effectively disenfranchised.
Either that, or they aren't as irrational as you think.
(I know, I know, I'll probably get modded as flamebait because you'll think I'm saying Ubuntu is equivalent to a nasty couch. I'm not. Just saying that being free isn't everything, unless you are really seriously broke. But you can mod me as flamebait if you please, it's ok)
You should make a CAPTCHA thing where you have to play Go in order to post a comment or whatever. Now that all the distorted text things have gotten to the point that humans can't solve them anymore.
Because operating systems, unlike furniture, are subject to network effects. Without intervention, a stable equilibrium is likely to form where only one product dominates, and there are strong economic incentives to buy the dominant product (i.e. compatibility), as well as strong economic incentives for the maker of said product to attempt to amplify this situation (by making it less compatible). Which is a bad situation for everyone but the maker of said product.
Regardless of such abstract ideals as "free market", people (and the governmentst that represent them) do not have to allow this when it is not in their interest.
Most people who advocate free market...at least those who are well studied in it....realize that there are places where exceptions need to be made. I doubt there is a perfect free market anywhere in the world. Most of us like having the government provide roads and schools and the like, for instance, as well as regulate things like utilities.
That is why it is significant that a think tank that generally advocates free-market recognizes that there are places where exceptions need to be made, and this is one of them.
Ultimately, the point of a free market is to allow competition to do its thing, and it can't do so when one company is allowed to dominate to such a degree.
No one said it had to come without the OS installed. As long as the one with the OS pre-installed costs as much as buying the computer without OS and the OS alone, they should be fine.
Also, prior to gmail, users of free web mail had to constantly delete all their old messages so they wouldn't go over their quota. Also if you didn't log in for a month you got your account cancelled. Also you couldn't use free web mail for professional purposes because it stuck an ad on your outgoing mail. Web mail also didn't allow free forwarding, pop access, or allow you to use an address at your own domain....which basically locked you in. Gmail changed all that.
And it was the first mainstream Ajax application I know of.
I agree...it was pretty damn revolutionary. At least for those who pay attention to such things.
And what about discrimination against people with low IQ's? No one talks about that.
I mean how do you change something if it's not ok to even point it out.
I'm not even going to stop at spyware. What about murder? How far away can that be? Soon Google will start murdering people. It's just a matter of when.
Geez, you'd think the world was coming to an end....
The simple answer is that a lot of people are going to end up installing browser extensions that do the "click to run flash object" thing. And if they can't figure that out, I'm having a hard time feeling such pity if they are "squished".
A more effective way might be to be vocal about it, discuss it among themselves, etc. That is exactly what this article and discussion is.
So...just curious...do you encourage others to act the same way you do? Because a lot of the web would disappear if there wasn't a revenue model.
I occasionally click on ads if they pique my interest, especially at sites I frequent and enjoy. To take the point of stance of never clicking on ads (as if by principle), is akin to someone who says they never tip at a restaurant on principle. What exactly is the principle?
I think you are failing to factor in that the amount google makes on ads is determined by the market rate. And the market rate takes into account whether or not the clicks are real or not, since if it doesn't produce sales equal to the amount they pay for the advertising, people won't pay for it, and the price therefore adjusts downward. Google doesn't necessarily make more or less money because of false clicks, they just are paid less per click, but there are more clicks.
You say "up to the point where advertisers start jumping ship". They don't "jump ship" per se, they just pay less.
Of course it does. It is just like someone overcharging for plywood and batteries as the hurricane bears down. People need these iPods, and they need them now, and competitive products are not available. Apple execs should be put in jail for this immoral behavior.
Companies hire iSupply to help them calculate how much a competitor's products cost, and if iSupply didn't know what they were doing, they'd be out of business by now.
It's not their fault that dumb readers make naive conclusions.
Although....mixing in fixed costs with marginal costs isn't necessarily a good way to analyze something like this. If the $58.54 is indeed a good estimation of the marginal cost (the theoretical amount it costs them to make one additional unit), it isn't irrelevant at all. It's just not a direct indicator of profit -- which you are never going to get anyway without knowing how many they are going to sell through its lifetime.
Can't you just check in at slashdot here and there? If you post a number, I suppose I can try to remember, but geez....
Well just as food for thought / playing the devil's advocate....what about playing the song to a stadium full of people as part of a performance? Would you expect the fact that you paid for the song to cover that as well?
Same thing with lots of things. Do you get fired if you show up late for work by an exact number of minutes or an exact number of days? Or do they use discretion in making such descisions?
If they gave an exact number, the heavy users would just throttle their usage to just under the limit (possibly writing some software to help with this), and the problem would remain. Unless of course they lowered the limit down further and further. I'm no fan of comcast, but the way they are doing it is the only way I can think of that makes economic sense, short of simply charging users per byte.
I don't debate that religion is a part of it (I mean, that's rather obvious isn't it), just saying that evolution is hard enough for people to accept on its non-intuitiveness that it makes it even harder to convince people.
Even people who do accept evolution often have a hard time with the idea that human consciousness emotions and sense of "self" and free will and all that could be explained by evolution and various related materialistic explanations.
Which I would furthur argue is, itself, fact.