See, the USA had _one_ such incident in _years_. If you look at the number of terrorist attacks in the USA, say, the year _before_ that, you'll notice there were exactly zero. In fact, I can't remember any
major act of terrorism there before 9/11 all the way to the Unabomber.
Just to freshen your memory, the Oklahoma City bombing was a major act of terrorism (and according to the Wikipedia article the deadliest act prior to 9/11).
Do we really need people who know how things work 'under the hood' to make smart tech decisions?
As always, this is a balance to be struck. There has to be some knowledge of how things work technically, otherwise ill-informed decisions will be made. Think about investing in a company: smart, successful investors do research and investigate how a company works in order to determine the true value of a company. Buffet only invests in companies he understands. True, he does not know every detail of the companies, but he does have to understand in how companies work and operate in order to make his own informed decisions. This is a special expertise about business that is required. The same applies to technical knowledge; there is a certain level of depth that is required to make good decisions. Someone has to be able to bring the data together and see what will work and what won't. Delegation can take place, but that is merely abstracting the problem; at some level, a technically informed decision must be made.
My point was that the external interface for automobiles interacting with the roads and other vehicles is very flexible, needing to cater to broad rules of safety. While the implementation is complex in order to achieve them, the the rules themselves are relatively simple, particularly because cars do not interact with other cars or roads with a great deal of complexity.
The layering of protocols illustrates that breaking out of existing protocols is difficult. We layer because often systems are only designed to handle one type of protocol, and when we need to add more functionality, we layer it on top of the existing protocol, instead of developing a new one. Also, sometimes this happens because security policies demand that we only use certain protocols (e.g., you might be limited to HTTP/talking-over-port-80 due to network policy).
Steering wheels and joysticks are not an external interface in terms of how the object (car or computer) interacts with the network (other computer or roads/other cars). They are out of the scope of interfaces I was describing as hard to change.
One key difference between the internet and cars is that the external interface is much more minimal for cards than the internet. Cars simply have to obey simple rules like "must be a safe mode of transportation on public roads." Computers have become tightly integrated with each other, and the protocols have been continually layered (XMLRPC over HTTP over TCP over IP), and it is hard to break out of this lock-in.
According to The Big Picture, who is a well-respected and gathers data from multiple sites, the CRA was certainly not a principal factor:
Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the CRA;
Only commercial banks and thrifts must follow CRA rules. The investment banks don't, nor did the now-bankrupt non-bank lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest that underwrote most of the subprime loans.
Mortgage brokers, who also weren't subject to federal regulation or the CRA, originated most of the subprime loans.
Re:NetApplications shows 1% share
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's pretty good for a browser still only in beta.
That's quite the understatement, considering the browser hasn't been live for even 24 hours yet!
Is it just me, or does the second review at http://www.monacome.com/2008/08/download-google-chrome-browser-review.html have a ridiculously annoying animated favicon? I'm searching Google now for a way to disable this distracting device. I am definitely not going to read the article with such an annoyance about.
I like your point about telnet. There is no doubt that the proliferation of ssh has helped security; many of rigid-hierarchy PKI supports seem to think that using telnet (HTTP) would be better than than using unsigned ssh keys (self-signed SSL certificates).
The certificate is not valid and there is no way to tell the website is legitimate.
This is not correct. If you have been to the site before, your browser should have cached the certificate. It is reasonable that if the certificate was valid before, it is valid now.
You raise a good point, but don't forget that in order to tell the user his bank account was frozen, he most likely would have had to input data. Otherwise, he would likely be wondering the bank was telling him his account was frozen without even entering his username.
ssh has worked fine for many years without requiring centralized CA system. As long as the initial connection is secured, it is difficult to break later secured communication, even if someone can sniff or hijack the connection.
I think you point out clearly the point. Ideally, every webserver should be providing SSL access, but it's certainly not necessary for every one of them to buy a certificate. Most of the time, an ssh-style system of simply accepting the first presented certificate and caching the server's public key is sufficient.
I would suggest that a browser not display the warning you are showing always, but only if the user is being prompted for data. That, or we need to make the three levels of security more clear to the end user. However, I'm not a big fan of putting more requirements on the user.
In my opinion, the problem is the strict hierarchical nature of the SSL certificate system. It needs to make use of existing information contained in social networks. I think some of the information Google holds could be of great use here.
Well, it makes sense that if you are swapping for letters on the other side of the alphabet, you might end up with a language for the other side of the world.
I just fell in love with the Firefox extension repagination, which allows someone to see all of the pages concatenated together. It uses some heuristics to determine how to find the next page, but it works well, even on the story's site (except the comments are repeated each time). No longer will I have to click click click through broken-up stories.
Interesting idea to go after income as opposed to profit, but I would think that people would really try to game the system by hiding how much revenue they made from a particular product, instead attributing it to something else in a bundle. It could quickly be a lot of paperwork and accounting for the USPTO to take care of.
It would be good if your idea accounted for products which are meant to be produced in high volume with little margin; by using a percentage-based system, such products would become more non-profitable more quickly. I'm not sure if there is a positive or negative, but it would be good if you analyzed such situations.
One additional problem that your proposal doesn't cover is patent trolls, who lay out many patents, unaware of the potential value of each. I tried to cover this by making the patenter price the patent himself. In your case, the patent trolls does not incur any costs, as they do not make the product themselves. Am I missing something?
I am actually quite excited about my idea; I plan to write a short paper and get it reviewed. In my opinion, it mirrors standard business idea and implementation (profit = idea * initial investment).
First, in response to your comment about my proposal, yes, it would be more likely that a large corporation would be able to invest more via their patent application and therefore get higher returns, but I propose that is acceptable. A single individual might be able to only make, say $1 million off the patent, while a larger company who invests 100 times as much initially would be able to make $100 million. However, the idea is that $1 to an individual is similar to $100 million for a corporation with $100 times the resources. Benefits are given in relative multipliers to your current finances instead of absolutes, which, I believe, from a psychological standpoint is a good way to approach things. Additionally, if a small inventor truly believes his idea is good, like in the regular market, he should have to get investment capital to build off of.
Similarly, it's like investing in the stock market. You make a multiple of what you put in, no matter which good investment idea you have. If you have more money, you can make more money as a result of your investment.
One problem with the idea you're proposing is that you are simply taxing income. Since taxes only reduce a percentage of income, there would never be a point at where you wouldn't make money off of the patent. The untaxed portion of income would get reduced over time but would remain >= 0, and as such would never become "not worth paying for the monopoly".
I was just daydreaming about how to properly price patents, and the following idea came to mind. What if the return on a patent was limited by a multiplier of how much the patenter is willing to pay for his patent? For example, let's say that patents allow for 1000x multiplier on the application cost. If a patenter is willing to pay $1,000 for the patent, they are not allowed to gain more than $1,000,000 in value from the patent. If they are willing to pay more, they get more protection; pay less, and get less monetary benefit. We might need the right bounds and limits to this, but it seems like simple approach that makes patenters properly pay for their protection based upon their perceived value.
Thoughts, comments? What I like about the idea is that it provides a pricing method for the system (I am a big fan of some sort of market for most things).
I hope you realize that by eliminating sniping, the average price of an item will increase. This is a plus if you are a seller, but negative for the buyer.
EBay does not want to encourage sniping because it keeps the prices of items lower. EBay generates profit correlated with the price of the items sold. Hence, they will not create tools to "level the playing field." I am a bid advocate of sniping, but am surprised EBay does not implement means to stop it, as it would increase their profits (at least in the short term).
I would also like to point out that this type of auction is the most efficient. According to wikipedia, EBay is a Sealed bid second price auction, and provides a baseline for comparison of efficiency against other auctions. And, as you note, according to the article, it does not maximize seller revenues. However, that is fine: we are not in the business of creating inefficient markets, but rather efficient ones.
I am not sure that your observations are correct. Possible explanations, though, are that there is only one sniper for the item, or if there are multiple snipers, the inferior one is bidding lower than the non-sniper Ebay bidder, and the higher-bidding sniper puts in his bid before the inferior bidder. Either way, the mechanics of how sniping works is fairly simple; it is simply a last-second bid. We know that EBay takes the best bid of everyone's out there. We do not have to speculate that it works some other way.
Yes, I agree sniping does not provide benefits for the seller, because the buyers do not have to display their hands. But it is fair to the seller. Sniping benefits all buyers by keeping prices lower. For me and other snipers, sniping software prevents people from bidding "in response to" my bids. I bid what I am willing to pay when I snipe, and I am simply not showing my hand until the last second. Sniping also prevents having a shill test my bid max by driving up the price artificially. When playing poker, do you want to be the first or last person in a round bidding? I am not a poker expert, but I would certainly guess "last", because you have more information - the other persons' bids.
In any market, there is a price to be paid for showing your hand (your asking or bidding price). Sniping allows a bidder to not show his hand.
Like I said, I would like to see you actually try sniping software, instead of attacking it without using it or knowing how it works. Or, name one sniping piece software or service which acts in the "rounds" fashion you described. I doubt one exists, as it would be an inferior product to one that simply enters a last minute bid. There is no benefit to incrementally bidding using sniping software; it is better to simply let EBay perform that for you.
I believe that you are highly misinformed about how sniping works, and have never used sniping software yourself. I recommend trying a free sniping program, such as JBidWatcher, to see how it works. If you use it, you will see that there is no concept of "rounds" in sniping software. One bid is sent just before the auction ends; after that, EBay sorts everything out using its proxy system.
As others have noted, sniping is good for buyers as it keeps price inflation from "competitive" bidders kicking in. Think of sniping as everyone simply putting their bids into a hat that no one sees the inside of, and, at the end of the auction, the highest bidder is selected from the hat. It's really as simple as that.
I snipe whenever I purchase on Ebay, and for good reason: sniping reduces the cost of auction items overall by preventing bidding wars between bidders who don't post the amount their willing to pay. You should think of snipers as people trying to participate in a blind auction. In a blind auction, no one knows what other people are bidding.
Think of how much better bidding would be if no one knew what other people were bidding at all.
Ebay does not endorse or provide its own tools for sniping because it would reduce Ebay's revenue by lowering the cost of items. I am not too sure why it permits sniping, though; Ebay would likely make more money by having automatically-extended auctions.
That's a great idea, but I think it still needs to be modified a bit. As I mentioned in a different post, you still have to somehow account for a seller who withholds his feedback and "spends" his rating scamming buyers during however long feedback left for him is not shown for.
Interesting idea, but you have to make sure that you account for a seller who builds up a good rating, and then "spends" his rating in 30 days, scamming buyers, who don't see the updated ratings until up to a month too late. One could work around this by making the rating anonymous during the 30-day period, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to freshen your memory, the Oklahoma City bombing was a major act of terrorism (and according to the Wikipedia article the deadliest act prior to 9/11).
As always, this is a balance to be struck. There has to be some knowledge of how things work technically, otherwise ill-informed decisions will be made. Think about investing in a company: smart, successful investors do research and investigate how a company works in order to determine the true value of a company. Buffet only invests in companies he understands. True, he does not know every detail of the companies, but he does have to understand in how companies work and operate in order to make his own informed decisions. This is a special expertise about business that is required. The same applies to technical knowledge; there is a certain level of depth that is required to make good decisions. Someone has to be able to bring the data together and see what will work and what won't. Delegation can take place, but that is merely abstracting the problem; at some level, a technically informed decision must be made.
My point was that the external interface for automobiles interacting with the roads and other vehicles is very flexible, needing to cater to broad rules of safety. While the implementation is complex in order to achieve them, the the rules themselves are relatively simple, particularly because cars do not interact with other cars or roads with a great deal of complexity. The layering of protocols illustrates that breaking out of existing protocols is difficult. We layer because often systems are only designed to handle one type of protocol, and when we need to add more functionality, we layer it on top of the existing protocol, instead of developing a new one. Also, sometimes this happens because security policies demand that we only use certain protocols (e.g., you might be limited to HTTP/talking-over-port-80 due to network policy). Steering wheels and joysticks are not an external interface in terms of how the object (car or computer) interacts with the network (other computer or roads/other cars). They are out of the scope of interfaces I was describing as hard to change.
One key difference between the internet and cars is that the external interface is much more minimal for cards than the internet. Cars simply have to obey simple rules like "must be a safe mode of transportation on public roads." Computers have become tightly integrated with each other, and the protocols have been continually layered (XMLRPC over HTTP over TCP over IP), and it is hard to break out of this lock-in.
According to The Big Picture, who is a well-respected and gathers data from multiple sites, the CRA was certainly not a principal factor:
That's quite the understatement, considering the browser hasn't been live for even 24 hours yet!
Is it just me, or does the second review at http://www.monacome.com/2008/08/download-google-chrome-browser-review.html have a ridiculously annoying animated favicon? I'm searching Google now for a way to disable this distracting device. I am definitely not going to read the article with such an annoyance about.
I like your point about telnet. There is no doubt that the proliferation of ssh has helped security; many of rigid-hierarchy PKI supports seem to think that using telnet (HTTP) would be better than than using unsigned ssh keys (self-signed SSL certificates).
This is not correct. If you have been to the site before, your browser should have cached the certificate. It is reasonable that if the certificate was valid before, it is valid now.
You raise a good point, but don't forget that in order to tell the user his bank account was frozen, he most likely would have had to input data. Otherwise, he would likely be wondering the bank was telling him his account was frozen without even entering his username.
ssh has worked fine for many years without requiring centralized CA system. As long as the initial connection is secured, it is difficult to break later secured communication, even if someone can sniff or hijack the connection.
I think you point out clearly the point. Ideally, every webserver should be providing SSL access, but it's certainly not necessary for every one of them to buy a certificate. Most of the time, an ssh-style system of simply accepting the first presented certificate and caching the server's public key is sufficient.
I would suggest that a browser not display the warning you are showing always, but only if the user is being prompted for data. That, or we need to make the three levels of security more clear to the end user. However, I'm not a big fan of putting more requirements on the user.
In my opinion, the problem is the strict hierarchical nature of the SSL certificate system. It needs to make use of existing information contained in social networks. I think some of the information Google holds could be of great use here.
Well, it makes sense that if you are swapping for letters on the other side of the alphabet, you might end up with a language for the other side of the world.
I just fell in love with the Firefox extension repagination, which allows someone to see all of the pages concatenated together. It uses some heuristics to determine how to find the next page, but it works well, even on the story's site (except the comments are repeated each time). No longer will I have to click click click through broken-up stories.
Interesting idea to go after income as opposed to profit, but I would think that people would really try to game the system by hiding how much revenue they made from a particular product, instead attributing it to something else in a bundle. It could quickly be a lot of paperwork and accounting for the USPTO to take care of.
It would be good if your idea accounted for products which are meant to be produced in high volume with little margin; by using a percentage-based system, such products would become more non-profitable more quickly. I'm not sure if there is a positive or negative, but it would be good if you analyzed such situations.
One additional problem that your proposal doesn't cover is patent trolls, who lay out many patents, unaware of the potential value of each. I tried to cover this by making the patenter price the patent himself. In your case, the patent trolls does not incur any costs, as they do not make the product themselves. Am I missing something?
I am actually quite excited about my idea; I plan to write a short paper and get it reviewed. In my opinion, it mirrors standard business idea and implementation (profit = idea * initial investment).
First, in response to your comment about my proposal, yes, it would be more likely that a large corporation would be able to invest more via their patent application and therefore get higher returns, but I propose that is acceptable. A single individual might be able to only make, say $1 million off the patent, while a larger company who invests 100 times as much initially would be able to make $100 million. However, the idea is that $1 to an individual is similar to $100 million for a corporation with $100 times the resources. Benefits are given in relative multipliers to your current finances instead of absolutes, which, I believe, from a psychological standpoint is a good way to approach things. Additionally, if a small inventor truly believes his idea is good, like in the regular market, he should have to get investment capital to build off of.
Similarly, it's like investing in the stock market. You make a multiple of what you put in, no matter which good investment idea you have. If you have more money, you can make more money as a result of your investment.
One problem with the idea you're proposing is that you are simply taxing income. Since taxes only reduce a percentage of income, there would never be a point at where you wouldn't make money off of the patent. The untaxed portion of income would get reduced over time but would remain >= 0, and as such would never become "not worth paying for the monopoly".
I was just daydreaming about how to properly price patents, and the following idea came to mind. What if the return on a patent was limited by a multiplier of how much the patenter is willing to pay for his patent? For example, let's say that patents allow for 1000x multiplier on the application cost. If a patenter is willing to pay $1,000 for the patent, they are not allowed to gain more than $1,000,000 in value from the patent. If they are willing to pay more, they get more protection; pay less, and get less monetary benefit. We might need the right bounds and limits to this, but it seems like simple approach that makes patenters properly pay for their protection based upon their perceived value.
Thoughts, comments? What I like about the idea is that it provides a pricing method for the system (I am a big fan of some sort of market for most things).
I hope you realize that by eliminating sniping, the average price of an item will increase. This is a plus if you are a seller, but negative for the buyer.
EBay does not want to encourage sniping because it keeps the prices of items lower. EBay generates profit correlated with the price of the items sold. Hence, they will not create tools to "level the playing field." I am a bid advocate of sniping, but am surprised EBay does not implement means to stop it, as it would increase their profits (at least in the short term).
I would also like to point out that this type of auction is the most efficient. According to wikipedia, EBay is a Sealed bid second price auction, and provides a baseline for comparison of efficiency against other auctions. And, as you note, according to the article, it does not maximize seller revenues. However, that is fine: we are not in the business of creating inefficient markets, but rather efficient ones.
I am not sure that your observations are correct. Possible explanations, though, are that there is only one sniper for the item, or if there are multiple snipers, the inferior one is bidding lower than the non-sniper Ebay bidder, and the higher-bidding sniper puts in his bid before the inferior bidder. Either way, the mechanics of how sniping works is fairly simple; it is simply a last-second bid. We know that EBay takes the best bid of everyone's out there. We do not have to speculate that it works some other way.
Yes, I agree sniping does not provide benefits for the seller, because the buyers do not have to display their hands. But it is fair to the seller. Sniping benefits all buyers by keeping prices lower. For me and other snipers, sniping software prevents people from bidding "in response to" my bids. I bid what I am willing to pay when I snipe, and I am simply not showing my hand until the last second. Sniping also prevents having a shill test my bid max by driving up the price artificially. When playing poker, do you want to be the first or last person in a round bidding? I am not a poker expert, but I would certainly guess "last", because you have more information - the other persons' bids.
In any market, there is a price to be paid for showing your hand (your asking or bidding price). Sniping allows a bidder to not show his hand.
Like I said, I would like to see you actually try sniping software, instead of attacking it without using it or knowing how it works. Or, name one sniping piece software or service which acts in the "rounds" fashion you described. I doubt one exists, as it would be an inferior product to one that simply enters a last minute bid. There is no benefit to incrementally bidding using sniping software; it is better to simply let EBay perform that for you.
I believe that you are highly misinformed about how sniping works, and have never used sniping software yourself. I recommend trying a free sniping program, such as JBidWatcher, to see how it works. If you use it, you will see that there is no concept of "rounds" in sniping software. One bid is sent just before the auction ends; after that, EBay sorts everything out using its proxy system.
As others have noted, sniping is good for buyers as it keeps price inflation from "competitive" bidders kicking in. Think of sniping as everyone simply putting their bids into a hat that no one sees the inside of, and, at the end of the auction, the highest bidder is selected from the hat. It's really as simple as that.
I snipe whenever I purchase on Ebay, and for good reason: sniping reduces the cost of auction items overall by preventing bidding wars between bidders who don't post the amount their willing to pay. You should think of snipers as people trying to participate in a blind auction. In a blind auction, no one knows what other people are bidding. Think of how much better bidding would be if no one knew what other people were bidding at all.
Ebay does not endorse or provide its own tools for sniping because it would reduce Ebay's revenue by lowering the cost of items. I am not too sure why it permits sniping, though; Ebay would likely make more money by having automatically-extended auctions.
That's a great idea, but I think it still needs to be modified a bit. As I mentioned in a different post, you still have to somehow account for a seller who withholds his feedback and "spends" his rating scamming buyers during however long feedback left for him is not shown for.
Interesting idea, but you have to make sure that you account for a seller who builds up a good rating, and then "spends" his rating in 30 days, scamming buyers, who don't see the updated ratings until up to a month too late. One could work around this by making the rating anonymous during the 30-day period, though.