The study may have some issues, but it is at least suggestive. It sounds like a good candidate for methodological improvement and repetition. I think it's important in the context of academic publishing today. I understand that domain-specific jargon is part of academic life, but it seems like we've been getting carried away with using unnecessarily dense language in papers because we think it sounds more 'scientific' or 'official'.
It isn't exactly new. There's a passage from an anecdote of Feynman's, where he is reading a paper as part of some kind of interdisciplinary conference:
"The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
I've read papers like this before, and even if the paper has a good point to make, it seems almost hopelessly obfuscated by the authors' need to make everything sound like a profound insight.
Projects that are licensed under BSD can switch to a more restrictive license at any time. The code already released under BSD would remain under BSD, but any new development would be under the new license. The fact that the BSD license has been revised several times and has never added any commercial constraint, and that the BSD developers have never adopted a different license for the project seem to indicate that they are comfortable with the lack of restrictions on commercial exploitation of their code. They were certainly aware that the license allowed for it.
As hard as it seems for you to believe, some people are happy to release code into the world with the knowledge that someday, someone else may profit from it. In my work, I release code that is licensed under CC-BY. If a business takes my code and incorporates it into one of their products and sells it, as long as they credit me, I have no issue with that: those are the terms of the license I chose. I'd prefer that they contribute to the code under the existing license, but I don't find it necessary to require that.
It's odd that you use scare quotes when you talk about the citizenship of babies born in the US. The 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States is quite clear on this point:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
There's not a great deal of wiggle room there, unless you propose amending the constitution again.
Yeah, but we like some of the Netflix exclusive content, too. My girlfriend watches Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, and we both dug Stranger Things.
I had a Netflix account many years ago, and I watched a bunch of streaming movies there, but after a pretty short time, it became scraping the bottom of the barrel. Also, I was constantly annoyed that my browsing pages were cluttered with so much kids' content. I remember browsing for shows and having whole pages that were entirely Dora and Caillou and Thomas and the construction guy and that mouse princess and on and on and on... with one or maybe two shows that might appeal to adults. That was a long time ago, so maybe it's better now. I complained and got an email that said they were working on it.
I pay for HBO streaming at $15 per month. I got that for Game of Thrones and originally intended cancelling during the off-months, but I discovered that there's enough content there that I enjoy that I decided not to cancel. And my girlfriend's family has Netflix, which we don't pay for. I have Amazon Prime, so I get that content, and I guess you could count a part of the Prime subscription as TV costs. Call it $5 per month, which is probably overestimating--I get a lot more value out of Prime in shipping costs than in media. We pay the cable provider for Internet, at $50 per month, but we use Internet access extensively for work and other things that aren't streaming video. So 15 + 5 + 20 = $40 per month, as an upper bound? And all but the HBO subscription are costs that we would still have even if we never watched TV.
For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.
The answer there seems unquestionably "no".
I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but it's clearly incorrect. The developers didn't choose the BSD license on accident. I mean, the BSD license was invented for the BSD OS. The fact that commercialization of software released under the BSD license is allowed is not a flaw that they somehow overlooked, it is one of the major features of the license. The BSD license is similar to the CC-BY license, which Creative Commons also did not create by mistake.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
I keep having this argument at my office. The big bosses want to invest in a programming project that will supposedly eliminate the need for human intervention in a publication process. I keep pointing out that humans still have to look at the material before publication (witness Facebook's recent experiments with algorithms as news editors). But they are so dead-set against hiring a person with benefits that they'd rather spend twice as much buying hardware and writing software that only does half the job.
If they'd hired a person, the backlog would be cleared and the process would be working smoothly. Instead, we're on the nth redesign of the GUI that is nearly unusable because the engineers are in charge of designing it.
If only that were also true within the US. Clearly, we have much to learn about how to do modern civilization. But so do many other countries with strong religious leadership: in Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive because they're women. In Pakistan, women are killed because they have dishonored the family. In the UK, conflict between Catholics and Protestants has caused extensive problems.
Health insurance is only a small part of this problem
How about religious group Hobby Lobby, who wants to allow their employees to have health insurance, with the string attached that the health insurance not cover birth control pills?
How about religious group Salvation Army, who wants to allow their employees to have spousal benefits, with the string attached that those employees not be gay?
How about religious schools such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who employ people with the string attached that they not get divorced (but only if they're women)?
These few examples are but a drop in the bucket. True, they're not "religions", they're only organizations run by religious people. But they all claim to be exempt from the law because of religion. Also, you can find as many and more examples of religions doing the same. Religions attach strings to their money because they feel it is their moral duty (in the most generous interpretation). Do not pretend that they're just helping people; they're helping the deserving people, and they get to decide which ones are deserving. Also, do not read this as a defense of government as the highest good; there are plenty of problems there, as well.
I have never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inevitably turn into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances from the Beatles. I tried variations on these methods on several stations. The last straw was when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour and Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.
Interesting. If that's the case, then maybe it's of some use. But I do get sick of watching the movie year after year and answering quiz questions about whether or not it's okay to extort sex from my students in exchange for grades.
You're either causing a problem or ignoring it, and making a token gesture at the same time to cover your ego.
This really bugs me. At my university, we have to watch a lame video every year about how to not sexually harass our co-workers and students. It's a complete waste of time for everyone: those of us who don't go around sexually harassing people don't need to watch a video to behave like respectful and responsible human beings, and those who do go around sexually harassing people aren't going to suddenly realize the error of their ways because of an HR video.
So the whole exercise exists for the sole reason that when a Title IX investigation happens, the university can check off a box on a form that says that the university "trained" the offender against sexual harassment, and the university therefore has no liability. It does absolutely nothing to address issues of sexual harassment in the university. It's just the university cultivating an appearance of addressing the problem while calling 'not it' whenever something bad happens.
When Jamia Wilson read this report, she noticed she was surrounded by Apple products. She thought about "how much money I've invested in an organization [that] doesn't believe in investing in people like me."
Simply put, Apple's gender divide, both within the company and onstage in San Francisco, does not represent the company's consumer base. And incremental progress still yields pathetic results — the numbers don't lie.
Maybe it's true that Apple's top echelons don't represent its consumer base proportionally in sex and color. All the same, as the most profitable business in the world, that doesn't seem to be a real problem for them. And, clearly, with Apple shipping the #1 smartphone and #1 tablet, and the currently popular Macbooks, consumers aren't actually all that concerned with the dearth of women on stage at Apple events. So it seems like this problem is being manufactured for our consumption by people whose job it is to do so, people like Jamia Wilson, executive director of Women, Action & Media.
What I really want to hear is not that this is a problem, but why it is a problem. What are the consequences of lack of diversity at the top of the corporate structure? Why does this matter? How would it help, say, black women if there were more black women in positions of authority at Apple?
I don't know how people continue to bank with a place that has repeatedly been shown to do everything they can to screw their customers
I bank with Wells Fargo because they bought the bank I was going to before, and it's a little bit of a pain in the ass to change banks. I don't pay any fees for my various accounts there. I also don't keep very much money there, because their interest rates are comparable with other national banks: 0.01% APY on a savings account, 0.05% on a CD. You can trivially do better than that with on-line options.
But, basically, inertia. I haven't had sufficient motivation to switch.
In a more recent story, SpaceX is being sued by Spacecom (owner of the AMOS-6 satellite that was lost). I have a hard time believing they could win such a suit, but that depends on what caused the "anomaly".
It's possible that they have to sue in order to activate their insurance. Sometimes that's how you get your settlement.
I don't see what the DUI limit has to do with recreational drinking without driving.
For some reason, when someone is arrested for drunken bad behavior, the news media reports things like 'so-and-so had a blood alcohol level of.10, which is over the legal limit for driving' even when the person wasn't actually driving. Why does the magic number.08 matter in contexts apart from driving? I mean, obviously that BAL was too high for the person who got arrested, but there's no rule against drinking a lot.
The accusation isn't that patients' privacy was violated. The issue is that there should have been an Institutional Review Board that reviewed the researchers' protocols and plans for interacting with subjects and handling samples to ensure that subjects were treated ethically and safely (among other things). And there was, at least for some parts of the research, but not for all of it. According to them, the part that didn't go through review was lab work that didn't involve any interaction with the subjects. So while these safety and ethics issues are very important with medical research, at the moment there's no indication of a major problem with Theranos' approach. They'll likely need to perform another IRB review, making sure to include every part of the research, and making sure it's super thorough. As long as their method works, I would hope that a new IRB review would satisfy regulators.
There's another Earth out there. For real, this time.
Uh-huh. For real.
FTFS:
-it may not be too hot nor too cold
-maybe liquid water could exist at the surface
-much about the planet is still unknown
-astronomers have some ideas about its size and distance from its parent star
-scientists are working off computer models
-there's no picture available for this planet as of yet.
Sounds like a dead certainty that we've found another Earth.
The trouble is, according to the way you quoted the summary, you apparently abandoned the sentence after the word 'drop' and jumped to the conclusion that the authors can't compute simple percentages. If you actually read to the end of the sentence, you see
GV completed no seed-stage deals in the first half of this year, down from 10 such deals last year. That represented a 77% drop from the number of deals it did in 2014.
Which, given a little thought, tells you that they've completed no deals in 2016; 10 deals in 2015; and 45 deals in 2014. The word 'that' at the start of the second sentence could be considered to be a reference to an unclear antecedent: does 'that' refer to 'down from 10 such deals' or does it refer to '10 such deals last year'? Given that the former interpretation makes the summary nonsense, by the principal of charity, the best way to interpret the summary is that '10 deals last year represented a 77% drop from the number of deals in 2014.'
I criticized his hoary old shitpost in another thread, and he actually addressed my complaints and modernized it. In recognition of this effort, I upgrade my score to 6/10. Hey, it's a passing grade. D is for diploma.
The "effort" was mostly in dragging this old chestnut out of mothballs. I mean, the least he could have done was ditched the crap about token ring, ext2, and Windows 2000. I give it 2/10 with one point for nostalgia and one for inexplicably having this copypasta (born before the word 'copypasta' even existed) lying around to post in the first place.
they don't even keep records of its use! Nobody could ever tell when, where and how often it has been used.
That's a convenience feature. Makes it super fast and easy to respond to a records subpoena when you just don't keep any records. "I don't recall" is such a difficult statement to disprove.
Well, no, but I can add it to the list of businesses and industries that I am accused of shilling for.
Actually, I suspect that well-made knockoffs of luxury goods are probably a pretty good deal for consumers who feel like they need to be seen with stuff like expensive handbags. The counterfeit goods that I'm more concerned with are things like flash drives that are smaller than they claim, or game pieces that don't match the original sets, or batteries that don't function as specified, or cosmetics made of whatever similar-sounding chemicals the manufacturer happened to have a tank full of.
But, then, maybe I'm actually a shill for the high-end cosmetics industry. On Slashdot.
I've had the experience on Amazon of buying a product that I was already familiar with from purchasing in a bricks-and-mortar store. I was buying another one as a gift. It was presented on Amazon as being genuine merchandise from the original manufacturer. When it arrived, it was a cheap plastic knockoff that, while functional, was obviously manufactured using different and less material for cost savings and had been through an inferior QA process, so there were a number of pieces that had manufacturing defects. This was not a case of the factory just running more production than the product owner requested. The cost was pretty close to what I had paid in the store, so it wasn't like I was getting a great deal.
If I had been aware that I was buying a knockoff, I could have taken that into consideration. If I was buying this thing for careless children, a knockoff would have been fine. But these dishonest sellers are portraying their products as the real thing, which can damage the reputation of the original company and of legitimate sellers (who get placed into a pool on Amazon when they advertise that they are selling the same product), leads to dissatisfied buyers and poor product reviews, and causes a hassle when the buyer has to go through the process of returning the item as counterfeit.
In another example, there's a seller on Amazon who manufactures and sells a certain kind of high-quality cotton bed sheets. They're having problems with bad product reviews because unscrupulous sellers piggyback on their product description and then ship people crappy polyester sheets. They had great reviews for their first few months of business, and apparently the scammers saw this and decided to get in on it, and the product reviews started plummeting. Also, the scammers become the default sellers of the product because they undercut the legitimate seller on price. This is a relatively small business that's being stunted by junk peddlers, and Amazon is willing to do very little about it. It's up to the consumer to parse the product page and make sure they're picking the correct seller.
Slashdot Mirror
The study may have some issues, but it is at least suggestive. It sounds like a good candidate for methodological improvement and repetition. I think it's important in the context of academic publishing today. I understand that domain-specific jargon is part of academic life, but it seems like we've been getting carried away with using unnecessarily dense language in papers because we think it sounds more 'scientific' or 'official'.
It isn't exactly new. There's a passage from an anecdote of Feynman's, where he is reading a paper as part of some kind of interdisciplinary conference:
I've read papers like this before, and even if the paper has a good point to make, it seems almost hopelessly obfuscated by the authors' need to make everything sound like a profound insight.
Projects that are licensed under BSD can switch to a more restrictive license at any time. The code already released under BSD would remain under BSD, but any new development would be under the new license. The fact that the BSD license has been revised several times and has never added any commercial constraint, and that the BSD developers have never adopted a different license for the project seem to indicate that they are comfortable with the lack of restrictions on commercial exploitation of their code. They were certainly aware that the license allowed for it.
As hard as it seems for you to believe, some people are happy to release code into the world with the knowledge that someday, someone else may profit from it. In my work, I release code that is licensed under CC-BY. If a business takes my code and incorporates it into one of their products and sells it, as long as they credit me, I have no issue with that: those are the terms of the license I chose. I'd prefer that they contribute to the code under the existing license, but I don't find it necessary to require that.
It's odd that you use scare quotes when you talk about the citizenship of babies born in the US. The 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States is quite clear on this point:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
There's not a great deal of wiggle room there, unless you propose amending the constitution again.
Yeah, but we like some of the Netflix exclusive content, too. My girlfriend watches Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, and we both dug Stranger Things.
I had a Netflix account many years ago, and I watched a bunch of streaming movies there, but after a pretty short time, it became scraping the bottom of the barrel. Also, I was constantly annoyed that my browsing pages were cluttered with so much kids' content. I remember browsing for shows and having whole pages that were entirely Dora and Caillou and Thomas and the construction guy and that mouse princess and on and on and on... with one or maybe two shows that might appeal to adults. That was a long time ago, so maybe it's better now. I complained and got an email that said they were working on it.
I pay for HBO streaming at $15 per month. I got that for Game of Thrones and originally intended cancelling during the off-months, but I discovered that there's enough content there that I enjoy that I decided not to cancel. And my girlfriend's family has Netflix, which we don't pay for. I have Amazon Prime, so I get that content, and I guess you could count a part of the Prime subscription as TV costs. Call it $5 per month, which is probably overestimating--I get a lot more value out of Prime in shipping costs than in media. We pay the cable provider for Internet, at $50 per month, but we use Internet access extensively for work and other things that aren't streaming video. So 15 + 5 + 20 = $40 per month, as an upper bound? And all but the HBO subscription are costs that we would still have even if we never watched TV.
For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.
The answer there seems unquestionably "no".
I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but it's clearly incorrect. The developers didn't choose the BSD license on accident. I mean, the BSD license was invented for the BSD OS. The fact that commercialization of software released under the BSD license is allowed is not a flaw that they somehow overlooked, it is one of the major features of the license. The BSD license is similar to the CC-BY license, which Creative Commons also did not create by mistake.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
I keep having this argument at my office. The big bosses want to invest in a programming project that will supposedly eliminate the need for human intervention in a publication process. I keep pointing out that humans still have to look at the material before publication (witness Facebook's recent experiments with algorithms as news editors). But they are so dead-set against hiring a person with benefits that they'd rather spend twice as much buying hardware and writing software that only does half the job.
If they'd hired a person, the backlog would be cleared and the process would be working smoothly. Instead, we're on the nth redesign of the GUI that is nearly unusable because the engineers are in charge of designing it.
If only that were also true within the US. Clearly, we have much to learn about how to do modern civilization. But so do many other countries with strong religious leadership: in Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive because they're women. In Pakistan, women are killed because they have dishonored the family. In the UK, conflict between Catholics and Protestants has caused extensive problems.
Health insurance is only a small part of this problem
How about religious group Hobby Lobby, who wants to allow their employees to have health insurance, with the string attached that the health insurance not cover birth control pills?
How about religious group Salvation Army, who wants to allow their employees to have spousal benefits, with the string attached that those employees not be gay?
How about religious schools such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who employ people with the string attached that they not get divorced (but only if they're women)?
These few examples are but a drop in the bucket. True, they're not "religions", they're only organizations run by religious people. But they all claim to be exempt from the law because of religion. Also, you can find as many and more examples of religions doing the same. Religions attach strings to their money because they feel it is their moral duty (in the most generous interpretation). Do not pretend that they're just helping people; they're helping the deserving people, and they get to decide which ones are deserving. Also, do not read this as a defense of government as the highest good; there are plenty of problems there, as well.
I have never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inevitably turn into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances from the Beatles. I tried variations on these methods on several stations. The last straw was when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour and Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.
Interesting. If that's the case, then maybe it's of some use. But I do get sick of watching the movie year after year and answering quiz questions about whether or not it's okay to extort sex from my students in exchange for grades.
This really bugs me. At my university, we have to watch a lame video every year about how to not sexually harass our co-workers and students. It's a complete waste of time for everyone: those of us who don't go around sexually harassing people don't need to watch a video to behave like respectful and responsible human beings, and those who do go around sexually harassing people aren't going to suddenly realize the error of their ways because of an HR video.
So the whole exercise exists for the sole reason that when a Title IX investigation happens, the university can check off a box on a form that says that the university "trained" the offender against sexual harassment, and the university therefore has no liability. It does absolutely nothing to address issues of sexual harassment in the university. It's just the university cultivating an appearance of addressing the problem while calling 'not it' whenever something bad happens.
Maybe it's true that Apple's top echelons don't represent its consumer base proportionally in sex and color. All the same, as the most profitable business in the world, that doesn't seem to be a real problem for them. And, clearly, with Apple shipping the #1 smartphone and #1 tablet, and the currently popular Macbooks, consumers aren't actually all that concerned with the dearth of women on stage at Apple events. So it seems like this problem is being manufactured for our consumption by people whose job it is to do so, people like Jamia Wilson, executive director of Women, Action & Media.
What I really want to hear is not that this is a problem, but why it is a problem. What are the consequences of lack of diversity at the top of the corporate structure? Why does this matter? How would it help, say, black women if there were more black women in positions of authority at Apple?
I don't know how people continue to bank with a place that has repeatedly been shown to do everything they can to screw their customers
I bank with Wells Fargo because they bought the bank I was going to before, and it's a little bit of a pain in the ass to change banks. I don't pay any fees for my various accounts there. I also don't keep very much money there, because their interest rates are comparable with other national banks: 0.01% APY on a savings account, 0.05% on a CD. You can trivially do better than that with on-line options.
But, basically, inertia. I haven't had sufficient motivation to switch.
In a more recent story, SpaceX is being sued by Spacecom (owner of the AMOS-6 satellite that was lost). I have a hard time believing they could win such a suit, but that depends on what caused the "anomaly".
It's possible that they have to sue in order to activate their insurance. Sometimes that's how you get your settlement.
I don't see what the DUI limit has to do with recreational drinking without driving.
For some reason, when someone is arrested for drunken bad behavior, the news media reports things like 'so-and-so had a blood alcohol level of .10, which is over the legal limit for driving' even when the person wasn't actually driving. Why does the magic number .08 matter in contexts apart from driving? I mean, obviously that BAL was too high for the person who got arrested, but there's no rule against drinking a lot.
The accusation isn't that patients' privacy was violated. The issue is that there should have been an Institutional Review Board that reviewed the researchers' protocols and plans for interacting with subjects and handling samples to ensure that subjects were treated ethically and safely (among other things). And there was, at least for some parts of the research, but not for all of it. According to them, the part that didn't go through review was lab work that didn't involve any interaction with the subjects. So while these safety and ethics issues are very important with medical research, at the moment there's no indication of a major problem with Theranos' approach. They'll likely need to perform another IRB review, making sure to include every part of the research, and making sure it's super thorough. As long as their method works, I would hope that a new IRB review would satisfy regulators.
There's another Earth out there. For real, this time.
Uh-huh. For real.
FTFS:
-it may not be too hot nor too cold
-maybe liquid water could exist at the surface
-much about the planet is still unknown
-astronomers have some ideas about its size and distance from its parent star
-scientists are working off computer models
-there's no picture available for this planet as of yet.
Sounds like a dead certainty that we've found another Earth.
Which, given a little thought, tells you that they've completed no deals in 2016; 10 deals in 2015; and 45 deals in 2014. The word 'that' at the start of the second sentence could be considered to be a reference to an unclear antecedent: does 'that' refer to 'down from 10 such deals' or does it refer to '10 such deals last year'? Given that the former interpretation makes the summary nonsense, by the principal of charity, the best way to interpret the summary is that '10 deals last year represented a 77% drop from the number of deals in 2014.'
Troll, I applaud you.
I criticized his hoary old shitpost in another thread, and he actually addressed my complaints and modernized it. In recognition of this effort, I upgrade my score to 6/10. Hey, it's a passing grade. D is for diploma.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
The "effort" was mostly in dragging this old chestnut out of mothballs. I mean, the least he could have done was ditched the crap about token ring, ext2, and Windows 2000. I give it 2/10 with one point for nostalgia and one for inexplicably having this copypasta (born before the word 'copypasta' even existed) lying around to post in the first place.
I didn't look very hard, but here is the same anecdote on Slashdot in 2002: https://slashdot.org/comments....
That's a convenience feature. Makes it super fast and easy to respond to a records subpoena when you just don't keep any records. "I don't recall" is such a difficult statement to disprove.
45 deals in 2014, 10 in 2015
45-10=35
35/45=0.7777
Maybe it's actually reading comprehension that's hard? It's a story problem...
Well, no, but I can add it to the list of businesses and industries that I am accused of shilling for.
Actually, I suspect that well-made knockoffs of luxury goods are probably a pretty good deal for consumers who feel like they need to be seen with stuff like expensive handbags. The counterfeit goods that I'm more concerned with are things like flash drives that are smaller than they claim, or game pieces that don't match the original sets, or batteries that don't function as specified, or cosmetics made of whatever similar-sounding chemicals the manufacturer happened to have a tank full of.
But, then, maybe I'm actually a shill for the high-end cosmetics industry. On Slashdot.
I've had the experience on Amazon of buying a product that I was already familiar with from purchasing in a bricks-and-mortar store. I was buying another one as a gift. It was presented on Amazon as being genuine merchandise from the original manufacturer. When it arrived, it was a cheap plastic knockoff that, while functional, was obviously manufactured using different and less material for cost savings and had been through an inferior QA process, so there were a number of pieces that had manufacturing defects. This was not a case of the factory just running more production than the product owner requested. The cost was pretty close to what I had paid in the store, so it wasn't like I was getting a great deal.
If I had been aware that I was buying a knockoff, I could have taken that into consideration. If I was buying this thing for careless children, a knockoff would have been fine. But these dishonest sellers are portraying their products as the real thing, which can damage the reputation of the original company and of legitimate sellers (who get placed into a pool on Amazon when they advertise that they are selling the same product), leads to dissatisfied buyers and poor product reviews, and causes a hassle when the buyer has to go through the process of returning the item as counterfeit.
In another example, there's a seller on Amazon who manufactures and sells a certain kind of high-quality cotton bed sheets. They're having problems with bad product reviews because unscrupulous sellers piggyback on their product description and then ship people crappy polyester sheets. They had great reviews for their first few months of business, and apparently the scammers saw this and decided to get in on it, and the product reviews started plummeting. Also, the scammers become the default sellers of the product because they undercut the legitimate seller on price. This is a relatively small business that's being stunted by junk peddlers, and Amazon is willing to do very little about it. It's up to the consumer to parse the product page and make sure they're picking the correct seller.