Do you seriously expect me to believe that business DON'T use analysis to decide what to do?
They analyze like crazy, but when you get down to actually trying to charge a customer for something...it is so incredibly hard to quantify quality that you fall back on the most basic measurements: quantity.
That all business decisions are random
Uh, Actually, almost all marketing decisions are about random events and probability. (I think that is why marketers have to take math classes). You generally only analyze a small set of metrics before making a business decision...for example, you check population stats and traffic information, then decide to put a Seven Eleven on the corner hoping people will drop in at random times.
My rule of thumb...if there is anything even remotely reputable about the site (ie it is owned by a public corporation) or it is a community site, then the unsubscribe link is legit. Also, if there it is something you signed up for, the unsubscribe probably works.
The last unsubscribe link I hit while in ie brought me into popup hell. The spammer got something from X10 for the spam. I now unsubscribe using Lynx.
To an extent it is not a matter of them "allowing" you to combine TV and computers. If enough people do it, then they will create their own market. That means every geek has a moral imperative to do cool stuff with their Linux boxes...so the rest of the world will want to follow.
I agree 100% TV is lame. You should be able to project whatever image you want on what ever display device you have available. My personal hope had been that computer companies would infiltrate the TV market and start producing more display devices for projecting computer/tv images onto walls...etc..
The way to break the MPAA is for a different industry to come and provide the public with something better/more versatile than TV.
But since the cars are older, the insurace on them is _much_ lower, so things roughly equal out.
Not really. The only reason a poor person might pay less for insurance is that they have less coverage. I opted out of collision insurance. I pay substantially less in insurance than others, but, if I am in a wreck that is not another person's fault... I will no longer have a car.
Property taxes are progressive. You pay less property tax on an '84 Buick than a '02 Rolls.
Re:What about the poor? Taxes hit them harder
on
Every Road a Toll Road
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I realized I should have said more. Poor people tend to own later model cars, and can't afford proper maintenance. This means that the poor end up paying more fuel taxes per mile driven than the rich-who have brand new cars at the peak of their performance.
Poor people would like to own economy cars...but they cannot afford new cars. So they get old, inefficent gas guzzlers. Most economy cars, like the Geo Metro, are not built to last. They shave off $100 bucks on the new purchase price by using crappy parts.
Poor people want to buy small used cars with high gas mileage and low maintenance. This type of car simply does not exist. So we end up with the poor owning gas guzzlers and paying a regressive tax on fuel. This is the problem of being in a secondary market.
Just about every single one. Most people would stop feeding their children before they stop filling up the tank of their pickup. In large cities it may be different.
Have you ever noticed the large number of SUVs that are crashed at the side of the road after snow and ice storms? Yes, SUVs make it so you feel real safe driving fast in the snow...but they give you absolutely no extra stopping power. The large size of the SUV simply increase the chances that you will kill innocent people as you spin out of control.
My front wheel drive may not accelerate as well in the snow, but it makes it less likely that I will get in an accident or kill someone else. Of course, with all the idiot SUVs driving 65 on ice, I know there is a really good chance one will kill me.
In the US, we pay for roads with taxes on fuel. This is advantageous in that it encourages economy as well as correlates with the amount of driving a person does. Heavier vehicles generally do more damage than smaller vehicles...so there generally is a direct correlation between fuel consumption and road use.
As for the every road is a toll road concept. This currently exists in trucking. Truck drivers fill out logs showing which states they cross. (You notice how trucks always have to stop at ports of entry). State troopers audit these logs and the trucking companies pay taxes according to the miles driven in each state.
Basically, the current system gives us everything we need. The only problem I see is, if in the future, we introduce electric or alternate fuel vehicles that could avoid fuel taxes.
Computers make it really easy to copy things. That means that it is really easy to copy a scam, and perform it over and over again. So, even if 98% of people are honest, that 2% can copy their act will account for 20% of the traffic.
The problem with companies like eBay and PayPal is that as soon as someone figures out the right angle for the scam, they will replicate it several hundred fold.
I've noticed this same trend with CPC advertising, telephone fraud, and other online scams. As soon as someone uncovers even the most insignificant hole in a process, the scammers will hit the whole several thousand times. Scammers may be less than a percent of the customer base, but create most of the noise.
PS: Of the $50 I spent on eBay, $10 went to scam artists.
I must admit, I support efforts to limit visual pollution. There is a point at which billboards and signs begin to seriously detract from the quality of life in an area.
The only thing I find interesting in this case is that a city tried to use the visual pollution laws to censor the building owner.
There are laws to deal with visual pollution from political campaigns. You have to take down all of your election posters, etc.. This case simply highlights how the powers that be can try to manipulate any law to silence opposition.
Quite frankly, if I wrote a media player, I would include a robust database that recorded play history. I would actually make the database a big feature...you could browse through it, run stats, and delete it if you please.
The deal is, Microsoft puts all of this crap on our 100GB hard drives that we can never figure out what it does. They also never give you decent controls over the inner workings of the machines. It's sad to think that Microsoft might be storing information that could come up in a lawsuit against me. The real kicker is that they haven't provided a decent way for me to view this information.
Microsoft doesn't care if you watch porn...well, unless it is that fake skit between Bill Gates and Janet Reno...and, maybe if you are watching that, you are sick enough to be removed from the planet anyway...
Have you ever notice how high the taxes are on employment? Of course, employees are a liability. If I were an employer, I would fire my entire IT staff, hire back new one's at half the rate...just so I could cut that damn tax bill.
The way taxes work, is a country should tax the things they want to discourage. The US government puts its highest taxes on employment. That means it doesn't want people employed.
Non-profits and charities can be really weird. They often have a very strange sense of right and wrong or be into just strange mystical stuff.
Point being...The politics can suck in any organization. The disease I see at non-profits is usually a self appointed whatever gets so caught into themselves for their charity work that they destroy the work environment.
The quality of work is better on average than private companies, but it is not a panacea.
Unless the person chose programming because they are incapable of dealing with people. When a lead programmer became the head of the department, I rejoiced. Yet he was so completely incapable of dealing with people, he simply ignored us for two years.
He would hire people. Let them sit for two months, and they would quit out of frustration.
The TechRepublic article was interesting. 1.4% of hires coming from the internet...and that figure is probabably dropping.
It also highlights the main reason why engineering and techies end up losers and business weanies generally succeed. As a tech, you get stuffed into a cubicle for several years, working like a dog to finish projects. When you are through, you have no contacts, and zero assets from your work.
The big question is whether or not, in 50 years from now, we will still have a music industry dominated by super stars or, if we will return to the days when everyone made music for the sake of music.
Go back 200 years, you would find that people were out there signing, jamming together and making music. The rock superstar era was just a flash in evolution created by monopolies that formed around artificial monopolies and the limited publishing technology of the day.
If you leave today's technology to its own devices, you will end up with millions of people pumping out and combining together "music programs" to make their own custom music.
The superstars of tomorrow will be the companies that provide the MIDI devices (or whatever) that help people make their own music.
Uh, are you certain that the Republican party is more inline with the recording industry than the Democrats? I actually think the reverse would be true. Republicans tend to have more free market thinkers and libertarians. Also, the moral majority dislikes the music they hear from the recording industry, and would revel in its misery.
Judging from the people who showed up in the Lincoln bedroom during Clinton's administration, it also appears that democrats have more connections with the recording industry and Hollywood elite. From what I know of the two parties, I would say the democrats are more likely to pass laws favoring RIAA than the republicans.
Of course, everything is on a case by case basis. It is far better to get involved and find out what your own leaders think, rather than playing the lemming game of following the party over the closest available cliff.
Makes since to me that the corrupt industrial military complex of the west would be working on underhanded means to increase the work week without employee consent. Fits in perfectly with what I was taught in school.
I guess, I will now read the article after commenting on the title.
Spam can be defined as any peice of email that your really don't want to get.
E-mail is the easiest way to develop push program, and I generally let end users track different events on the their accounts with email. Such systems generate a ton of email. They generally let the end user control which events get reported. Regardless, I find heavily used systems generating 10,000+ auto generated emails a day.
It is very easy to mix this push programming up with marketing spam. It only takes one admin to confuse the end user controlled push program with marketing spam to mess up an entire block of end users.
We are never going to be able to completely protect our users from spam, it is much better to develop clients that help the end user cope with vasts amounts of email.
Slashdot Mirror
That all business decisions are random
Uh, Actually, almost all marketing decisions are about random events and probability. (I think that is why marketers have to take math classes). You generally only analyze a small set of metrics before making a business decision...for example, you check population stats and traffic information, then decide to put a Seven Eleven on the corner hoping people will drop in at random times.
Did you drop out of a womb? Do you breath air? Did you have an email account accessible by the Internet? Sounds like you opted in to me. Spam!!!!!
My rule of thumb...if there is anything even remotely reputable about the site (ie it is owned by a public corporation) or it is a community site, then the unsubscribe link is legit. Also, if there it is something you signed up for, the unsubscribe probably works.
The last unsubscribe link I hit while in ie brought me into popup hell. The spammer got something from X10 for the spam. I now unsubscribe using Lynx.
Will they allow PC-HTDV cards ?
To an extent it is not a matter of them "allowing" you to combine TV and computers. If enough people do it, then they will create their own market. That means every geek has a moral imperative to do cool stuff with their Linux boxes...so the rest of the world will want to follow.
I agree 100% TV is lame. You should be able to project whatever image you want on what ever display device you have available. My personal hope had been that computer companies would infiltrate the TV market and start producing more display devices for projecting computer/tv images onto walls...etc..
The way to break the MPAA is for a different industry to come and provide the public with something better/more versatile than TV.
But since the cars are older, the insurace on them is _much_ lower, so things roughly equal out.
Not really. The only reason a poor person might pay less for insurance is that they have less coverage. I opted out of collision insurance. I pay substantially less in insurance than others, but, if I am in a wreck that is not another person's fault... I will no longer have a car.
Property taxes are progressive. You pay less property tax on an '84 Buick than a '02 Rolls.
I realized I should have said more. Poor people tend to own later model cars, and can't afford proper maintenance. This means that the poor end up paying more fuel taxes per mile driven than the rich-who have brand new cars at the peak of their performance.
Poor people would like to own economy cars...but they cannot afford new cars. So they get old, inefficent gas guzzlers. Most economy cars, like the Geo Metro, are not built to last. They shave off $100 bucks on the new purchase price by using crappy parts.
Poor people want to buy small used cars with high gas mileage and low maintenance. This type of car simply does not exist. So we end up with the poor owning gas guzzlers and paying a regressive tax on fuel. This is the problem of being in a secondary market.
How many truly poor people do you know own cars?
Just about every single one. Most people would stop feeding their children before they stop filling up the tank of their pickup. In large cities it may be different.
Have you ever noticed the large number of SUVs that are crashed at the side of the road after snow and ice storms? Yes, SUVs make it so you feel real safe driving fast in the snow...but they give you absolutely no extra stopping power. The large size of the SUV simply increase the chances that you will kill innocent people as you spin out of control.
My front wheel drive may not accelerate as well in the snow, but it makes it less likely that I will get in an accident or kill someone else. Of course, with all the idiot SUVs driving 65 on ice, I know there is a really good chance one will kill me.
In the US, we pay for roads with taxes on fuel. This is advantageous in that it encourages economy as well as correlates with the amount of driving a person does. Heavier vehicles generally do more damage than smaller vehicles...so there generally is a direct correlation between fuel consumption and road use.
As for the every road is a toll road concept. This currently exists in trucking. Truck drivers fill out logs showing which states they cross. (You notice how trucks always have to stop at ports of entry). State troopers audit these logs and the trucking companies pay taxes according to the miles driven in each state.
Basically, the current system gives us everything we need. The only problem I see is, if in the future, we introduce electric or alternate fuel vehicles that could avoid fuel taxes.
prove those copyrights were not used to monopolize and stifle the distribution of digital music
I appear to be missing something. Isn't a copyright by definition a monopoly on the work?
A non-monopolistic copyright sounds a bit oxymoronish to me.
Computers make it really easy to copy things. That means that it is really easy to copy a scam, and perform it over and over again. So, even if 98% of people are honest, that 2% can copy their act will account for 20% of the traffic.
The problem with companies like eBay and PayPal is that as soon as someone figures out the right angle for the scam, they will replicate it several hundred fold.
I've noticed this same trend with CPC advertising, telephone fraud, and other online scams. As soon as someone uncovers even the most insignificant hole in a process, the scammers will hit the whole several thousand times. Scammers may be less than a percent of the customer base, but create most of the noise.
PS: Of the $50 I spent on eBay, $10 went to scam artists.
I must admit, I support efforts to limit visual pollution. There is a point at which billboards and signs begin to seriously detract from the quality of life in an area.
The only thing I find interesting in this case is that a city tried to use the visual pollution laws to censor the building owner.
There are laws to deal with visual pollution from political campaigns. You have to take down all of your election posters, etc.. This case simply highlights how the powers that be can try to manipulate any law to silence opposition.
Quite frankly, if I wrote a media player, I would include a robust database that recorded play history. I would actually make the database a big feature...you could browse through it, run stats, and delete it if you please.
The deal is, Microsoft puts all of this crap on our 100GB hard drives that we can never figure out what it does. They also never give you decent controls over the inner workings of the machines. It's sad to think that Microsoft might be storing information that could come up in a lawsuit against me. The real kicker is that they haven't provided a decent way for me to view this information.
I guess I should stop watching pornography now
Microsoft doesn't care if you watch porn...well, unless it is that fake skit between Bill Gates and Janet Reno...and, maybe if you are watching that, you are sick enough to be removed from the planet anyway...
Have you ever notice how high the taxes are on employment? Of course, employees are a liability. If I were an employer, I would fire my entire IT staff, hire back new one's at half the rate...just so I could cut that damn tax bill.
The way taxes work, is a country should tax the things they want to discourage. The US government puts its highest taxes on employment. That means it doesn't want people employed.
Non-profits and charities can be really weird. They often have a very strange sense of right and wrong or be into just strange mystical stuff.
Point being...The politics can suck in any organization. The disease I see at non-profits is usually a self appointed whatever gets so caught into themselves for their charity work that they destroy the work environment.
The quality of work is better on average than private companies, but it is not a panacea.
Unless the person chose programming because they are incapable of dealing with people. When a lead programmer became the head of the department, I rejoiced. Yet he was so completely incapable of dealing with people, he simply ignored us for two years.
He would hire people. Let them sit for two months, and they would quit out of frustration.
The TechRepublic article was interesting. 1.4% of hires coming from the internet...and that figure is probabably dropping.
It also highlights the main reason why engineering and techies end up losers and business weanies generally succeed. As a tech, you get stuffed into a cubicle for several years, working like a dog to finish projects. When you are through, you have no contacts, and zero assets from your work.
We are all just amino acids, broiling away in some primordial soup while our products and companies evolve.
I can see the vision, but it is not as exciting as the self image of being a cowboy programmer roaming the wild web looking for adventure.
The big question is whether or not, in 50 years from now, we will still have a music industry dominated by super stars or, if we will return to the days when everyone made music for the sake of music.
Go back 200 years, you would find that people were out there signing, jamming together and making music. The rock superstar era was just a flash in evolution created by monopolies that formed around artificial monopolies and the limited publishing technology of the day.
If you leave today's technology to its own devices, you will end up with millions of people pumping out and combining together "music programs" to make their own custom music.
The superstars of tomorrow will be the companies that provide the MIDI devices (or whatever) that help people make their own music.
Uh, are you certain that the Republican party is more inline with the recording industry than the Democrats? I actually think the reverse would be true. Republicans tend to have more free market thinkers and libertarians. Also, the moral majority dislikes the music they hear from the recording industry, and would revel in its misery.
Judging from the people who showed up in the Lincoln bedroom during Clinton's administration, it also appears that democrats have more connections with the recording industry and Hollywood elite. From what I know of the two parties, I would say the democrats are more likely to pass laws favoring RIAA than the republicans.
Of course, everything is on a case by case basis. It is far better to get involved and find out what your own leaders think, rather than playing the lemming game of following the party over the closest available cliff.
Makes since to me that the corrupt industrial military complex of the west would be working on underhanded means to increase the work week without employee consent. Fits in perfectly with what I was taught in school.
I guess, I will now read the article after commenting on the title.
Anyone know where I can download the "Georgia Legislator" skins so I can take out the anger in an Unreal Tournament?
Spam can be defined as any peice of email that your really don't want to get.
E-mail is the easiest way to develop push program, and I generally let end users track different events on the their accounts with email. Such systems generate a ton of email. They generally let the end user control which events get reported. Regardless, I find heavily used systems generating 10,000+ auto generated emails a day.
It is very easy to mix this push programming up with marketing spam. It only takes one admin to confuse the end user controlled push program with marketing spam to mess up an entire block of end users.
We are never going to be able to completely protect our users from spam, it is much better to develop clients that help the end user cope with vasts amounts of email.