For searching, you can always use Yahoo or Bing, or a few others. For replacing GMail, you can always use POP access to download your mail and keep it locally, run your own mailserver (after informing people of your new address), use your ISP's mail system, or another free email service. If you're using Google Maps for something, you could make do with Mapquest. If you're an advertiser on Google, there are lots of sites that would be happy to have you advertise on their sites instead. If you're doing SEO, you can follow Yahoo or Bing's rules at least as easily as Google's. If you had no Android phones, you'd still have iPhones. The list goes on for the vast majority of their offerings.
In all cases, Google has its dominant position not via lock-in, but by delivering services that are on par with or better than its competitors. Either that or sheer habit. But that's significantly different from, say, a Windows user's dependency on Microsoft.
Regarding your first scenario: My favorite story on that front was from my dad, who teaches math at a private high school. He handed out a midterm with multiple versions, and within a few minutes had a student raising his hand to tell him "Mike's test is different than mine!"
In that case, the Econ 101 answer is very simply "it can't be done". If the value of a service is not high enough to its users to be able to at least cover the cost of providing said service, then it's not valuable enough to do as a for-profit business. In a lot of ways, that makes sense: an efficient economy is not based on spending a lot of resources producing useless junk nobody wants.
And yes, that sucks. However, another viable option for him (if providing the service is the primary goal, rather than making money) is to go non-profit, get donations from the same sort of folks who support Amnesty International, the EFF, and other political freedom organizations, and run it as a charitable organization. That solves the problem of political dissidents not having the money to pay for his proxy.
It's not just paper politics though. Imagine this scenario: Some major political event occurs in Charleston, SC. A bunch of protesters show up - Tea Partiers, left-wingers, anarchists, the usual mix. No big deal, right?
Well, now one of the anarchists says something that could be construed as advocating the violent overthrow of the US. Now the entire crowd is considered part of the "group", and thus is subject to arrest. The police move in, go all Chicago '68 on them, and arrest them. Now comes the fun part: After a while in jail, the cops drop the charges against the protesters, thus making sure that they will not be tried and can't challenge the unconstitutional law. And then when the protesters who got beaten up by the cops sue the police department, they can claim "we were performing an arrest under this statute, and the protester was resisting" (they nearly always claim in these situations that the protester was resisting regardless of evidence), and since the officer reasonably believed that he was enforcing the law he didn't do anything wrong.
In short: exercise your right to assemble in SC, get beaten up by cops.
Does the idea of double jeopardy apply in civil law? If not, what prevents a plaintiff with very deep pockets from suing a defendant for something, losing, suing them again, losing, etc until the defendant's funds with which to defend themselves run out? Because this sounds like a pretty open-and-shut case of the RIAA doing exactly that, and the overall effect is that said defendant effectively loses even if they win.
This isn't (solely) about error handling. It's about logical testing, which can be as nasty as a technical error. For instance, replacing your real database with a fake one, then run through your business logic modules and make sure the right data is getting passed back, and that any calls you make to change that data get reflected in the right updates to the database. The same techniques can be used to find out what your code does if it tries to talk to the database and the database is out to lunch.
What you're describing is more integration testing, where you test the whole thing from front-end to lowest-level code, probably with the help of a dedicated tester / QA analyst. This is also good, but these other techniques are often handy for isolating problems quickly as well as being able to improve one piece and see immediately what effects it has on other pieces.
You totally got this wrong. The correct way to post this sort of thing is the same sort of technique as the way to avoid upgrading your chips back in the days of the SX/DX split:
"To avoid having your Windows show up as genuine when it isn't, do not add the following registry keys on bootup..."
The idea that more intrusive ads are a good thing comes ultimately from those who are trying to sell stuff via the ads. They will invariably want the most intrusive ads possible reaching as large a group of people possible. That's what they'll pay the most for, and where there's a demand for it someone will sell it.
The only way to combat ads being absolutely everywhere is for the commodity being sold to advertisers (our eyeballs) to avoid or not pay any attention to the most intrusive ads. If we don't set limits (via technological means or just training ourselves to really ignore them), then what is "really intrusive" now will become the new normal, and a new even more intrusive ad will be created for when the marketer wants to be intrusive.
This sort of thing has already been ruled on by SCOTUS, in Reno v ACLU. There's a pretty clear SCOTUS precedent, and the 11th Circuit just decided to ignore it (why it never became a major part of the arguments is beyond me).
In addition, there's an argument that the only reason that the "obscene" materials were in that jurisdiction to begin with is that the police helpfully downloaded them. That's entrapment, pure and simple.
In all seriousness, a friend of mine who's been in the business for a while goes with a refinement of W.A.G.: 1. Get a WAG from the developer. 2. Apply this formula: Real estimate = WAG * (actual time for previous features / WAG for previous features) 3. Tell the developer that his original WAG is what we're using, so he actually hits something pretty close to the real estimate.
As a result, management has a pretty good (although not completely perfect) idea of how long something is going to take, based on developer's WAGs.
Or alternately, it implies that the managers who benefit from this policy have a majority of shares. The major difference between democratic government and corporate governance is that in democracy it's 1 person=>1 vote, whereas in a corporation it's 1 share=>1 vote.
There are other tools in manager's toolkits to ensure managerial profit even at the expense of stockholders. Among other techniques, one approach is to backdate or retroactively change stock options, so that even if the stock goes down the options entitle the compensated executives to a big bump to their personal net worth.
For instance, if the original contract gave an executive a call option at $10 at the end of the year, and the stock drops from $14 to $8, the executive can convince the board to revise his contract to give him a call option at $6 instead, and he still profits handsomely (an immediate 25% return) when he exercises his options.
Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me (probably with the goal of making the eventual legalization seem like an inevitability rather than the results of bribery).
In other words, insider trading must be kept within Goldman Sachs... er... I mean... nothing that could allow insider trading should be sent out to the public where it can be misused. Nothing really wrong with that.
And I'd happily trade "no use of Twitter" for $150,000 bonuses.
Actually, taking out missiles before they reach us isn't all that important, because anyone with missiles that can reach the United States (a fairly short list: China, Russia, Britain, France, Canada, maybe Mexico and Cuba) knows about Mutually Assured Destruction, and isn't completely suicidal.
There is exactly one instance of missile defense working that I'm aware of, namely combating Iraqi Scud missiles back around 1993.
But the important thing to realize about this version of missile defense (and its predecessor, Star Wars) is that they don't need to work to accomplish their real purpose, which is funneling large sums of taxpayer cash to defense contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? How dependent are you on Google?
For searching, you can always use Yahoo or Bing, or a few others. For replacing GMail, you can always use POP access to download your mail and keep it locally, run your own mailserver (after informing people of your new address), use your ISP's mail system, or another free email service. If you're using Google Maps for something, you could make do with Mapquest. If you're an advertiser on Google, there are lots of sites that would be happy to have you advertise on their sites instead. If you're doing SEO, you can follow Yahoo or Bing's rules at least as easily as Google's. If you had no Android phones, you'd still have iPhones. The list goes on for the vast majority of their offerings.
In all cases, Google has its dominant position not via lock-in, but by delivering services that are on par with or better than its competitors. Either that or sheer habit. But that's significantly different from, say, a Windows user's dependency on Microsoft.
Regarding your first scenario: My favorite story on that front was from my dad, who teaches math at a private high school. He handed out a midterm with multiple versions, and within a few minutes had a student raising his hand to tell him "Mike's test is different than mine!"
In that case, the Econ 101 answer is very simply "it can't be done". If the value of a service is not high enough to its users to be able to at least cover the cost of providing said service, then it's not valuable enough to do as a for-profit business. In a lot of ways, that makes sense: an efficient economy is not based on spending a lot of resources producing useless junk nobody wants.
And yes, that sucks. However, another viable option for him (if providing the service is the primary goal, rather than making money) is to go non-profit, get donations from the same sort of folks who support Amnesty International, the EFF, and other political freedom organizations, and run it as a charitable organization. That solves the problem of political dissidents not having the money to pay for his proxy.
It's not just paper politics though. Imagine this scenario: Some major political event occurs in Charleston, SC. A bunch of protesters show up - Tea Partiers, left-wingers, anarchists, the usual mix. No big deal, right?
Well, now one of the anarchists says something that could be construed as advocating the violent overthrow of the US. Now the entire crowd is considered part of the "group", and thus is subject to arrest. The police move in, go all Chicago '68 on them, and arrest them. Now comes the fun part: After a while in jail, the cops drop the charges against the protesters, thus making sure that they will not be tried and can't challenge the unconstitutional law. And then when the protesters who got beaten up by the cops sue the police department, they can claim "we were performing an arrest under this statute, and the protester was resisting" (they nearly always claim in these situations that the protester was resisting regardless of evidence), and since the officer reasonably believed that he was enforcing the law he didn't do anything wrong.
In short: exercise your right to assemble in SC, get beaten up by cops.
Well yeah, that Lincoln guy did advocate and carry out a plan to overthrow the lawful government of South Carolina by force.
Does the idea of double jeopardy apply in civil law? If not, what prevents a plaintiff with very deep pockets from suing a defendant for something, losing, suing them again, losing, etc until the defendant's funds with which to defend themselves run out? Because this sounds like a pretty open-and-shut case of the RIAA doing exactly that, and the overall effect is that said defendant effectively loses even if they win.
This isn't (solely) about error handling. It's about logical testing, which can be as nasty as a technical error. For instance, replacing your real database with a fake one, then run through your business logic modules and make sure the right data is getting passed back, and that any calls you make to change that data get reflected in the right updates to the database. The same techniques can be used to find out what your code does if it tries to talk to the database and the database is out to lunch.
What you're describing is more integration testing, where you test the whole thing from front-end to lowest-level code, probably with the help of a dedicated tester / QA analyst. This is also good, but these other techniques are often handy for isolating problems quickly as well as being able to improve one piece and see immediately what effects it has on other pieces.
You totally got this wrong. The correct way to post this sort of thing is the same sort of technique as the way to avoid upgrading your chips back in the days of the SX/DX split:
"To avoid having your Windows show up as genuine when it isn't, do not add the following registry keys on bootup ..."
The idea that more intrusive ads are a good thing comes ultimately from those who are trying to sell stuff via the ads. They will invariably want the most intrusive ads possible reaching as large a group of people possible. That's what they'll pay the most for, and where there's a demand for it someone will sell it.
The only way to combat ads being absolutely everywhere is for the commodity being sold to advertisers (our eyeballs) to avoid or not pay any attention to the most intrusive ads. If we don't set limits (via technological means or just training ourselves to really ignore them), then what is "really intrusive" now will become the new normal, and a new even more intrusive ad will be created for when the marketer wants to be intrusive.
This sort of thing has already been ruled on by SCOTUS, in Reno v ACLU. There's a pretty clear SCOTUS precedent, and the 11th Circuit just decided to ignore it (why it never became a major part of the arguments is beyond me).
In addition, there's an argument that the only reason that the "obscene" materials were in that jurisdiction to begin with is that the police helpfully downloaded them. That's entrapment, pure and simple.
(IANAL, TINLA)
In all seriousness, a friend of mine who's been in the business for a while goes with a refinement of W.A.G.:
1. Get a WAG from the developer.
2. Apply this formula: Real estimate = WAG * (actual time for previous features / WAG for previous features)
3. Tell the developer that his original WAG is what we're using, so he actually hits something pretty close to the real estimate.
As a result, management has a pretty good (although not completely perfect) idea of how long something is going to take, based on developer's WAGs.
Or alternately, it implies that the managers who benefit from this policy have a majority of shares. The major difference between democratic government and corporate governance is that in democracy it's 1 person=>1 vote, whereas in a corporation it's 1 share=>1 vote.
Ssh!
The usual counterargument: Yeah, the results they got sucked, but if someone else had been in charge the results would have been even worse.
There are other tools in manager's toolkits to ensure managerial profit even at the expense of stockholders. Among other techniques, one approach is to backdate or retroactively change stock options, so that even if the stock goes down the options entitle the compensated executives to a big bump to their personal net worth.
For instance, if the original contract gave an executive a call option at $10 at the end of the year, and the stock drops from $14 to $8, the executive can convince the board to revise his contract to give him a call option at $6 instead, and he still profits handsomely (an immediate 25% return) when he exercises his options.
this.
Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me (probably with the goal of making the eventual legalization seem like an inevitability rather than the results of bribery).
And don't forget the important corollary (trivial to prove): 111.1111% of crud is everything.
So, if you spew more crud than your share, you'll get everything you want! At least, it seems to work that way for a lot of political figures.
Yeah, I mean it's not like they'd invent some special subpoena that doesn't require any sort of judicial oversight.
That's OK. As a safeguard, we'll give these things preset kill limits.
Anyone yelling their personally identifying info into a microphone deserves what they get.
I absolutely agree. Anyone who's willing to say their name into a microphone is clearly a complete idiot. For Channel 6 News, I'm Max Smith.
In other words, insider trading must be kept within Goldman Sachs ... er ... I mean ... nothing that could allow insider trading should be sent out to the public where it can be misused. Nothing really wrong with that.
And I'd happily trade "no use of Twitter" for $150,000 bonuses.
Because we all know Facebook and YouTube are full of impartial people who know anything about case law.
Yeah, how could you compare them to the legal skills of Ask Slashdot!
A much better name for this stuff would be "carbonite", obviously.
Actually, taking out missiles before they reach us isn't all that important, because anyone with missiles that can reach the United States (a fairly short list: China, Russia, Britain, France, Canada, maybe Mexico and Cuba) knows about Mutually Assured Destruction, and isn't completely suicidal.
There is exactly one instance of missile defense working that I'm aware of, namely combating Iraqi Scud missiles back around 1993.
But the important thing to realize about this version of missile defense (and its predecessor, Star Wars) is that they don't need to work to accomplish their real purpose, which is funneling large sums of taxpayer cash to defense contractors.