I agree that it can't be done right, but I think it's not just about screen size. On my mobile device I'm much more task-focused. When I'm up to something specific, I almost always ignore ads.
On a desktop I'm much more likely to be poking around or under less time pressure, so I'm much more willing to explore the tangent an ad generally represents.
Because business school also trains them to minimize costs and maximize quarterly profits. And their managers and stockholders reward them for that as well. Which inevitably leads to that behavior and a bunch of other idiotic ones. Because as you demonstrate with the bit about fixed costs, a lot of these numbers are fictions. Sometimes convenient fictions, but always fictions.
This is in contrast to the Lean approach where one minimizes waste and maximizes value delivered to the end user. In Lean thinking, staff aren't a cost to be shed ASAP, they're an asset, one you invest in.
That doesn't strike me as particularly paradoxical. Hate-crimes laws recognize existing substantial bias against particular minority groups with an eye toward reducing the bias. Most laws recoginize an existing problem and have the aim of reducing it.
But we happen to have hate-crime laws protecting specific groups because of the history of violence directed against them. If this is more common, I'm sure a law banning that will eventually appear.
I'm saying your question is nonsensical. The crime is "inciting racial hatred". It's a crime because there's a longstanding problem with racial hatred which people would like to stop.
Similarly, inciting a riot is a crime because that was a significant problem at some point. Imagine you find somebody convicted of inciting a riot and then ask me "well, what if he didn't incite?" or "what if it wasn't a riot he was inciting?" I'd have the same response to your question above: a) then it wouldn't be a crime, and b) you're missing the point.
It seems very weird. One rents something when one can't afford to buy it. Domain names cost very little, so they should just own the domain outright, especially as it's the one whose name matches the legal entity. As far as I'm concerned, any web site developer that doesn't insist that the client own the domain name in a case like this is at best negligent.
But it's also the kind of thing a shady operator would do to take advantage of naive clients.
Sure, but it makes it an understandable mistake on the part of Rackspace. And if the company gave Rackspace some documentation that the poster was buying the name on behalf of Learning Together, then the transfer may have been proper.
More importantly, though, it puts the poster in a different light. He concealed material facts in his summary, and on the face of it trying to hold on to a client's domain is shady. It makes me wonder what else he's hidden.
Whoa. That puts a different light on things. The poster, who does web development, bought a domain name learning-together.ca which was used by his client Learning Together Inc. Rackspace transferred control of the domain name from the poster to Learning Together, Inc. It seems very weird indeed that the poster is trying to keep control of that domain.
Yes, exactly. On a couple of occasions a sternly worded letter from a lawyer has worked wonders for me.
My favorite was when a company who owed me for months of contract work suddenly got a case of we-can't-afford-to-pay. My lawyer wrote a letter explaining that under California law, wages had to be paid before anything else, and encouraged them to contact the very energetic state agency in charge of enforcing that if they were unclear. It was a masterpiece of subtle menace, and I got a wire transfer for the whole amount two days later. Total cost to me: a few hundred bucks. A decade later, he's still my lawyer.
You're saying that if we take the "racial" out of inciting racial hatred then it would no longer be the crime of inciting racial hatred? Sure, ok.
Inciting racial hatred in the UK is something they've had a problem with, something that causes harm to the fabric of society. So they made it illegal. Seems reasonable to me.
That's a) ignoring the main point, which is that why someone does something matters, and b) wrong.
It's wrong because you could intend to beat somebody up because they're black but accidentally kill them. That would be voluntary manslaughter. And also a hate crime.
Inciting violence against a minority group can do a lot more than make them sad. It can intimidate people. It can force them to leave town or prevent them from voting. Oh, and it can trigger physical violence, which... gets people trampled and killed.
felony murder - accidental killing in the course of a felony,
voluntary manslaughter - accidentally killing somebody while trying to harm them or intentionally killing them when provoked, and
involuntary manslaughter - accidentally killing somebody without intent to harm (e.g., negligent homicide)
The difference for all of these is exactly "the reason you did it". The legal term is mens rea.
Hate crimes get an additional penalty because there's additional harm. It's an action against not just the person physically injured, but all the people of the sort of person hated. Slashdot-specific analogy: If a jock beats up another jock, it's just a fight. But if a jock beats up a nerd because he's a nerd then that will tend to intimidate not just the person he beat up, but all nerds.
Are you talking about revenue neutrality for 1 and 2? That's irrelevant to the question of wasted time vs productive time. It's also irrelevant to knock-on effects (e.g., people traveling after rush hour who still encounter jams).
For point 3, if you're talking about a fuel tax, that doesn't maximize efficiency; load stays just as peaky. You need per-hour and per-route road pricing to shift demand to alternate times.
And regarding 4, allocating resources to economic need, you're talking like we aren't already spending billions on a highly complex system. It's just that the billions spent are in terms of lost economic productivity due to wasted time and fuel, rather than direct tax collected.
Not necessarily. For any change, there are short-term issues and long-term issues.
E.g., watch people complaining about how Apple is reversing the scrolling direction with the latest version of MacOS. Generally people grumble for a few minutes and then are perfectly fine with it. If you ask them at minute 3 whether it's a bad idea, they'll say yes. Ask them at week 3 and they'll say no.
He could just be saying that this is one of those things that people will be ok with when they get used to it.
That doesn't follow. That the Dutch ride more than almost any other country does not mean they're anywhere near the limit of the benefits that can be achieved by more ridership.
Four differences with a cash penalty for peak use:
1) The cash can be used for something else (e.g., road improvement), while time spent sitting in a jam is pure waste. 2) The penalty can be imposed directly upon the people actually driving in rush hour, without knock-on effects for others. 3) Pricing can be adjusted to maximize road flow. Traffic jams reduce throughput. 4) Cash biases use toward greatest economic need, rather than greatest willingness to waste time.
There's definitely a big difference, which is why I think the "any risk" standard you suggest is too extreme.
"Knowingly" is a good start. But there's a problem with that, too; it discourages knowing, or activities that lead to knowing, like investigation or research. A lot of the corporate criminals who caused the economic crash we're suffering from got away with it because they had plausible deniability. They just didn't know! And we happily ignored that they could have known, and probably should have known, and that they rigged things so that they wouldn't know.
We need corporate cultures that encourage investigation and honest reporting, but a standard of "knowingly" works against that.
This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.
It is a cheaper "fix".
That is an incredibly important point. You could fix the email problem, but you can't fix people refusing to know. Almost everybody responsible for crashing our economy escaped accountability, and many of them claimed that they were blameless because they didn't know what was going on, after setting up companies in such a way that they were guaranteed to not know what was going on.
It's an endemic problem in corporate America, and we need to find a way to fix it.
Safety/security costs more up front, but costs less in the long term.
Not necessarily true. If you blindly make producers liable for all risk, and pile on top of that a substantial regulatory framework, you could create costs well above benefits.
I have a friend that makes jam. It's good jam. If she were to sell it at the farmer's market, people would happily buy it. And the sorts of people who buy jam at the farmer's market know what they're getting into. If by some fluke one of the jars doesn't seal properly, they'll deal with it. But in your world, she'd be exposing herself to substantial legal liability, plus the need to comply with a bureaucratic system that proves she has taken all possible steps to mitigate risk. Equipment, procedures, documentation, keeping up with regulations, filing reports. She wouldn't do that just to sell a few jars of jam.
For software, it's even worse. Regulating software creation uniformly is like regulating the creation of things made out of atoms: the variety is too wide to talk about it sensibly. The whole point of writing software is to do new things, which guarantees many risks won't be well understood. And software processes are moving to very fast cycles, where the goal isn't to completely prevent errors, it's to keep any impact very small. Regulation-induced ritual can wreck that.
Customers should generally be able to choose what level of risk they're accepting except where the risks are catastrophic and hard to understand (e.g., flying on a commercial airline). Without that freedom, we won't get small jam producers, we won't get companies that do bungee jumping or skydiving, and we won't get a great deal of the innovative software we now get.
That's the obvious solution to some, but it's not a terribly good one. If people were perfectly rational and had infinite thinking and observational capacity, your solution would work fine. But for the half-evolved monkeys that we are, it's much more efficient to solve some of the problems via non-market means. E.g., banning manufacture of pointlessly wasteful bulbs, or having government-run home retrofit programs.
Slashdot Mirror
And by "into the wild", they mean they're now letting it run on other people's sites.
The really sad part is how far Microsoft has fallen. They can't even do FUD well anymore.
It already exists:
http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Headaches-Discomfort/dp/B004X4L1UC/
A friend who gets headaches loves these.
I love this. They charge a premium for 3D that half of everybody hates. Now they'd like to charge another premium for 3D that will suck a bit less.
I look forward to the next article bleating about the mysterious decline in box office attendance. What could it possibly be?
I agree that it can't be done right, but I think it's not just about screen size. On my mobile device I'm much more task-focused. When I'm up to something specific, I almost always ignore ads.
On a desktop I'm much more likely to be poking around or under less time pressure, so I'm much more willing to explore the tangent an ad generally represents.
Because business school also trains them to minimize costs and maximize quarterly profits. And their managers and stockholders reward them for that as well. Which inevitably leads to that behavior and a bunch of other idiotic ones. Because as you demonstrate with the bit about fixed costs, a lot of these numbers are fictions. Sometimes convenient fictions, but always fictions.
This is in contrast to the Lean approach where one minimizes waste and maximizes value delivered to the end user. In Lean thinking, staff aren't a cost to be shed ASAP, they're an asset, one you invest in.
That doesn't strike me as particularly paradoxical. Hate-crimes laws recognize existing substantial bias against particular minority groups with an eye toward reducing the bias. Most laws recoginize an existing problem and have the aim of reducing it.
As far as I can see, what I wrote is true.
But we happen to have hate-crime laws protecting specific groups because of the history of violence directed against them. If this is more common, I'm sure a law banning that will eventually appear.
I'm saying your question is nonsensical. The crime is "inciting racial hatred". It's a crime because there's a longstanding problem with racial hatred which people would like to stop.
Similarly, inciting a riot is a crime because that was a significant problem at some point. Imagine you find somebody convicted of inciting a riot and then ask me "well, what if he didn't incite?" or "what if it wasn't a riot he was inciting?" I'd have the same response to your question above: a) then it wouldn't be a crime, and b) you're missing the point.
It seems very weird. One rents something when one can't afford to buy it. Domain names cost very little, so they should just own the domain outright, especially as it's the one whose name matches the legal entity. As far as I'm concerned, any web site developer that doesn't insist that the client own the domain name in a case like this is at best negligent.
But it's also the kind of thing a shady operator would do to take advantage of naive clients.
Sure, but it makes it an understandable mistake on the part of Rackspace. And if the company gave Rackspace some documentation that the poster was buying the name on behalf of Learning Together, then the transfer may have been proper.
More importantly, though, it puts the poster in a different light. He concealed material facts in his summary, and on the face of it trying to hold on to a client's domain is shady. It makes me wonder what else he's hidden.
Whoa. That puts a different light on things. The poster, who does web development, bought a domain name learning-together.ca which was used by his client Learning Together Inc. Rackspace transferred control of the domain name from the poster to Learning Together, Inc. It seems very weird indeed that the poster is trying to keep control of that domain.
Yes, exactly. On a couple of occasions a sternly worded letter from a lawyer has worked wonders for me.
My favorite was when a company who owed me for months of contract work suddenly got a case of we-can't-afford-to-pay. My lawyer wrote a letter explaining that under California law, wages had to be paid before anything else, and encouraged them to contact the very energetic state agency in charge of enforcing that if they were unclear. It was a masterpiece of subtle menace, and I got a wire transfer for the whole amount two days later. Total cost to me: a few hundred bucks. A decade later, he's still my lawyer.
You're saying that if we take the "racial" out of inciting racial hatred then it would no longer be the crime of inciting racial hatred? Sure, ok.
Inciting racial hatred in the UK is something they've had a problem with, something that causes harm to the fabric of society. So they made it illegal. Seems reasonable to me.
That's a) ignoring the main point, which is that why someone does something matters, and b) wrong.
It's wrong because you could intend to beat somebody up because they're black but accidentally kill them. That would be voluntary manslaughter. And also a hate crime.
Inciting violence against a minority group can do a lot more than make them sad. It can intimidate people. It can force them to leave town or prevent them from voting. Oh, and it can trigger physical violence, which... gets people trampled and killed.
You haven't really thought this through. Even for non-hate crimes, consider:
The difference for all of these is exactly "the reason you did it". The legal term is mens rea .
Hate crimes get an additional penalty because there's additional harm. It's an action against not just the person physically injured, but all the people of the sort of person hated. Slashdot-specific analogy: If a jock beats up another jock, it's just a fight. But if a jock beats up a nerd because he's a nerd then that will tend to intimidate not just the person he beat up, but all nerds.
Sorry, not totally following you here.
Are you talking about revenue neutrality for 1 and 2? That's irrelevant to the question of wasted time vs productive time. It's also irrelevant to knock-on effects (e.g., people traveling after rush hour who still encounter jams).
For point 3, if you're talking about a fuel tax, that doesn't maximize efficiency; load stays just as peaky. You need per-hour and per-route road pricing to shift demand to alternate times.
And regarding 4, allocating resources to economic need, you're talking like we aren't already spending billions on a highly complex system. It's just that the billions spent are in terms of lost economic productivity due to wasted time and fuel, rather than direct tax collected.
Not necessarily. For any change, there are short-term issues and long-term issues.
E.g., watch people complaining about how Apple is reversing the scrolling direction with the latest version of MacOS. Generally people grumble for a few minutes and then are perfectly fine with it. If you ask them at minute 3 whether it's a bad idea, they'll say yes. Ask them at week 3 and they'll say no.
He could just be saying that this is one of those things that people will be ok with when they get used to it.
That doesn't follow. That the Dutch ride more than almost any other country does not mean they're anywhere near the limit of the benefits that can be achieved by more ridership.
Four differences with a cash penalty for peak use:
1) The cash can be used for something else (e.g., road improvement), while time spent sitting in a jam is pure waste.
2) The penalty can be imposed directly upon the people actually driving in rush hour, without knock-on effects for others.
3) Pricing can be adjusted to maximize road flow. Traffic jams reduce throughput.
4) Cash biases use toward greatest economic need, rather than greatest willingness to waste time.
There's definitely a big difference, which is why I think the "any risk" standard you suggest is too extreme.
"Knowingly" is a good start. But there's a problem with that, too; it discourages knowing, or activities that lead to knowing, like investigation or research. A lot of the corporate criminals who caused the economic crash we're suffering from got away with it because they had plausible deniability. They just didn't know! And we happily ignored that they could have known, and probably should have known, and that they rigged things so that they wouldn't know.
We need corporate cultures that encourage investigation and honest reporting, but a standard of "knowingly" works against that.
This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.
It is a cheaper "fix".
That is an incredibly important point. You could fix the email problem, but you can't fix people refusing to know. Almost everybody responsible for crashing our economy escaped accountability, and many of them claimed that they were blameless because they didn't know what was going on, after setting up companies in such a way that they were guaranteed to not know what was going on.
It's an endemic problem in corporate America, and we need to find a way to fix it.
Safety/security costs more up front, but costs less in the long term.
Not necessarily true. If you blindly make producers liable for all risk, and pile on top of that a substantial regulatory framework, you could create costs well above benefits.
I have a friend that makes jam. It's good jam. If she were to sell it at the farmer's market, people would happily buy it. And the sorts of people who buy jam at the farmer's market know what they're getting into. If by some fluke one of the jars doesn't seal properly, they'll deal with it. But in your world, she'd be exposing herself to substantial legal liability, plus the need to comply with a bureaucratic system that proves she has taken all possible steps to mitigate risk. Equipment, procedures, documentation, keeping up with regulations, filing reports. She wouldn't do that just to sell a few jars of jam.
For software, it's even worse. Regulating software creation uniformly is like regulating the creation of things made out of atoms: the variety is too wide to talk about it sensibly. The whole point of writing software is to do new things, which guarantees many risks won't be well understood. And software processes are moving to very fast cycles, where the goal isn't to completely prevent errors, it's to keep any impact very small. Regulation-induced ritual can wreck that.
Customers should generally be able to choose what level of risk they're accepting except where the risks are catastrophic and hard to understand (e.g., flying on a commercial airline). Without that freedom, we won't get small jam producers, we won't get companies that do bungee jumping or skydiving, and we won't get a great deal of the innovative software we now get.
That's the obvious solution to some, but it's not a terribly good one. If people were perfectly rational and had infinite thinking and observational capacity, your solution would work fine. But for the half-evolved monkeys that we are, it's much more efficient to solve some of the problems via non-market means. E.g., banning manufacture of pointlessly wasteful bulbs, or having government-run home retrofit programs.