The targeted discounts mess was big enough to get amazon to stop and probab ly big enough to keep early adopters away for a little while. The people buying movies on DVD aren't the big spenders. Amazon is looking for early adopters of technology for high margin items, not people buying movies and CD's where the margin is probably under a dollar for the retailer.
Meh. Probably not. I would be impressed if they had the data to universally correlate type of textbook purchase with future value. To me it seems likely that a new tezxtbook purchase would signal pretty clear price insensitivity of demand, and they would declare you a priority customer.
It happens all the time in those industries because they STILL red line and STILL use scare tactics to push black and latino buyers and policy seekers out of the market. there isn't even room for comparison between ACTIVE discrimination in housing markets and an automated system that computes predicted value of future purchases and assigns a shipping priority accordingly.
Comparing the two only ignores the ignoble and disgusting nature of racism in insurance and realty.
YOu know that this system isn't just: "Ok, if you suck and buy used books, we are going to bench your order just out of spite for months on end." Every time someone's order is delayed, another order gets expedited. This is how shipping preference works. It's how ocean container shipping works. If you pay big bucks for the container, you get moved in first, if you don't, you get to wait until another container shows up and you can fit inside it after someone else has paid its way. This way, more shipping containers get moved his a higher revenue.
I guarantee that this will result in net faster service.
the design of the price selection system was meant to provide lower prices to price sensitive customers and higher prices to price insensitive customers. Plenty of companies do this through self selection (top of the line gaming rig vs. budget box), but amazon got busted using a pretty unsophisitcated way of doing it. Partially boned by (as base3 said) AOL's practice of aggrigating IP addresses and the mixed nature of cookie handling, it wasn't a very good idea to begin with, anyways.
Much better to get customers to do self selection.
Creating a system to predict future revenue streams from customers then input that prediction into a shipping preference system sounds pretty novel to me.
I'll bet quite a bit. I'll wager that they've compiled data showing that 1 click users offer a much better margin than checkout shoppers and so they will probably give priority to a 1 click purchase.
Pretty sure that unless it was actually patented previously, their protection would come from prior use. Patent protection serves (in cases like these) to defend a competitive advantage based on novel tech for a while.
this is a GOOD idea, and not that far removed from the Newegg concept. Newegg spends money and charges more in order to push items out the door faster. You can pay MORE in order to get something tomorrow. Partially what allows them to do this IS an ordering system that prioritizes orders from one source over anothers. That is what allows them to fill boxes and get them to UPS faster.
In the case of Amazon.com, you are talking about getting this service without paying for it. If you buy things from Amazon that indicate that you will buy fancy stuff in the future, your order will get pushed out the door faster. If you only buy used books from allied used retailers, then you're order will get fewer CPU cycles devoted to it.
It's just interrupt priority for shipping, basically.
I think it's clever and creative. It's basically a free version of Newegg's preferential shipping scheme.
Just think that for every package that gets unfavorable treatment, there is a package that gets a better treatment. I bet you money service will improve overall.
I can understand why you would DO this, but why in God's name would you patent it? Amazon already has the black eye from attempting to give targeted prices to members (oops) and a patent black eye by flouting the USPTO's decision on one-click. What business model is being protected by patenting the mechanism to put orders on the back burner?
Sesame Street was great for a generation of children to grow up with. It's about a billion times more edifying than that garbage that gets pumped out and served to kids at high volume (and volumes).
This reminds me of Snow Crash (was it snow crash?), where companies are paid big money to edit out smoking in classic films, because it isn't appropriate anymore.
"
"Terms of service subject to change without notice." If it isn't nailed down in your contract, you have nothing to take into court."
Probably not. Certainly the TOS change part has been contested in court heavily here. As for the rest of the argument, please read my post. I don't have a comcast TOS in front of me, but I can bet it doesn't include a promise to never interfere (accidentally or otherwise) with packets.
What I can say is that a case is liable to include material external to the contract between customers and the company, company emails, advertisements, etc. this would be necessary in order to determine intent, and the scope of business that Comcast was offering and advertising.
While I think that there is virtue to being pithy, I don't think that this can be boiled down to two sentences.
I don't really see how the line of reasoning you have used leads you to be ok with packet shaping and not okay with interception.
As I see it, interception is a much more nefarious way to accomplish the same goals, use the bandwidth they way the ISP wants you to, through means OTHER than an agreement between customer and business.
I agree with you that this is what is going on. that doesn't mean that the intent is distinct from the of packet shaping. Arguably, if they can argue that they have the right to limit classes and content of traffic, then they can argue that they have a wide variety of means with which to do that.
I still think they are wrong, for the record, I'm just speculating on how a court case would proceed.
True, as we construe it today. But our reasoning for calling phone providers common carriers is about as situational as they come. Assuming we continue the regulatory trend, we could see regional monopolies by cable providers (along w/ the rise of Voip and the decline of landline use) that might bring rise to a similar argument made as was made re: AT&T.
you're missing his point. He's making fun of most class action outcomes being toothless in the extreme. Class action victory against company A? 5-7 years down the line, you get a voucher for 30-40 dollars if you can provide proof of purchase in triplicate, a blood sample, and a unicorn hair.
Reverse this notion and look at it from the likely payout end. It is like having to honor a rebate you didn't have to tell customers they were eligible for 7 years down the road. think how many rebates are honored with prior notice three MONTHS down the road...
Big question: Can ISP's be considered common carriers? If so, how does that limit their ability to shape traffic? does it at all?
Little question: Does the packet shaping and interdiction violate the agreement that comcast made with users? does it violate upstream agreements with other providers?
the big question isn't likely to be solved by this lawsuit. It is the question we want answered, and quickly, but any lawsuit is likely to stem from some violation of contract erms or some misrepresentation in advertising, not the existential question of Comcast's nature as a common or a private carrier.
The little question might be enlightening, but I doubt it. This policy might have been implemented after consulting the legal depatment and determining that the TOS for Comcast users was draconian and one sided enough to permit this sort of meddling. Alternately, it may have been the result of a business action distinct from legal consulation. Comcast may have been dumb enough to think that their users would be able to notice or test this phenomenon. My money is on a combination of the two notions. comcast probably cleared "packet shaping" in the abstract with legal, but failed to note this wrinkle in the method with them.
they will probably argue in court that they have the right to provide their definition of QOS to buyers, and this requires that they stop "illegal" traffic. They will presumably go through great pains to paint Bittorrent as illegitimate, and justify their actions on that front. They will also bring up the likely fact that residential broadband users have no uptime/QOS clause in their contracts, a fact that will become much more important than the supposed illegality of traffic.
That is where the meat will be. What sort of QOS/uptime/bandwidth promises are made internal and external to the contract. Not very fun stuff, but them's the breaks.
One of the best parts of being a sailor was, well...swearing like a sailor. But in the time that I was in, the powers that be decided that it wasn't in the best interest of the navy to have sailors acting like...well, sailors. So no carousing, smoking, swearing, etc. Swearing "wasn't professional" and it didn't reflect the best interests of the Navy. I've even seen a swear jar implemented. No joke.
And this was on a submarine. No women. Limited cases of sexual harassment.
Fuck that. You could always tell the fools in the Chief's quarters (think mid level management) by how well they hewed to these rules. If they smoked, drank and swore, they were usually good guys. If they were teetotaling pricks, then they were not to be trusted. This, more than almost any other metric, helped to determine good bosses from bad for us.
In the long run, they can't make money by hoarding tickets. If the scalpers buy the tickets and do not sell them, then they can't make that money. Now, your argument is that scalpers buy tickets at the set price, hold them (once the show is sold out) then resell them for a greater price, that's true. That's what scalpers do. My argument is that they aren't 'inflating' the price when they do that. You are buying a ticket for what you think it is worth, otherwise you wouldn't buy it.
Ahhh. you are stuck on the value added notion. But you still aren't past the idea that the WHOLE reason for scalpers to exist is the artificially low ticket prices that the venues sell at. The scalper doesn't provide more tickets or add value to the ticket but they can make sure you GET your ticket. If you are willing to pay for it, they will get it for you. Otherwise, no matter HOW willing to pay you are, you couldn't get a ticket if you weren't in line first. Just like that stockbroker, or that dealer for bonds. They buy bonds on the secondary market and resell to you at a higher price than it cost them to get it. You couldn't get that bond if you weren't at the exchange before, but now you just buy it from a dealer.
YES. Scalpers take that extra money that you pay them, but you have to pay them for them to take it. This isn't the case of something best distributing money to all possible bands, this is the case of bands needing to fix their supply problems and TM needing to fix its ticket problems.
If TM raised prices to the scalper level, they would get ROASTED publicly for it, jsut like you are doing now. So they don't. They pick a price that they are comfortable with, for the given number of venues that they have, and they sell the tickets. But since that number is probably going to be below the number of people who want to see a band, the price will want to rise. If the price was ALLOWED to rise, then the number of tickets demanded would drop off until it hit equilibrium. If the price is held low in order to make band members and ticketmaster not look like d-bags, then there will be a shortage. Where there is an artificially induced shortage, a black market usually springs up. that black market is those scalpers. The ONLY sure fire way to get rid of that black market is to remove its reason for existing.
I can see why you are miffed about scalping. It appears as if those ticket prices are inflated beyong what is 'fair', but that anger isn't going to DO anything. Matching tickets to ID's isn't going to DO anything. Making captchas for ticket sales isn't going to DO anything. The thing you have to accept is that what will do something is letting the price o tickets float. That will probably mean that ticket prices come up to something close to the scalped level.
Look at it this way. You buy a ticket. Later, after the show is sold out, you decide you don't want to go. None of your friends want to go, so you decide to ebay the ticket. What price would you expect to get? Is it fair that you can ebay this ticket? how, precisely, are you screwing over the person buying the ticket? Would you set a buy now price at the price you bought the ticket?
Slashdot Mirror
LOTS.
The targeted discounts mess was big enough to get amazon to stop and probab ly big enough to keep early adopters away for a little while. The people buying movies on DVD aren't the big spenders. Amazon is looking for early adopters of technology for high margin items, not people buying movies and CD's where the margin is probably under a dollar for the retailer.
The one click patent, probably not so much.
Meh. Probably not. I would be impressed if they had the data to universally correlate type of textbook purchase with future value. To me it seems likely that a new tezxtbook purchase would signal pretty clear price insensitivity of demand, and they would declare you a priority customer.
It happens all the time in those industries because they STILL red line and STILL use scare tactics to push black and latino buyers and policy seekers out of the market. there isn't even room for comparison between ACTIVE discrimination in housing markets and an automated system that computes predicted value of future purchases and assigns a shipping priority accordingly.
Comparing the two only ignores the ignoble and disgusting nature of racism in insurance and realty.
YOu know that this system isn't just: "Ok, if you suck and buy used books, we are going to bench your order just out of spite for months on end." Every time someone's order is delayed, another order gets expedited. This is how shipping preference works. It's how ocean container shipping works. If you pay big bucks for the container, you get moved in first, if you don't, you get to wait until another container shows up and you can fit inside it after someone else has paid its way. This way, more shipping containers get moved his a higher revenue.
I guarantee that this will result in net faster service.
the design of the price selection system was meant to provide lower prices to price sensitive customers and higher prices to price insensitive customers. Plenty of companies do this through self selection (top of the line gaming rig vs. budget box), but amazon got busted using a pretty unsophisitcated way of doing it. Partially boned by (as base3 said) AOL's practice of aggrigating IP addresses and the mixed nature of cookie handling, it wasn't a very good idea to begin with, anyways.
Much better to get customers to do self selection.
Creating a system to predict future revenue streams from customers then input that prediction into a shipping preference system sounds pretty novel to me.
I'll bet quite a bit. I'll wager that they've compiled data showing that 1 click users offer a much better margin than checkout shoppers and so they will probably give priority to a 1 click purchase.
Pretty sure that unless it was actually patented previously, their protection would come from prior use. Patent protection serves (in cases like these) to defend a competitive advantage based on novel tech for a while.
I'll bet a week's salary that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Your idea of 'good' or 'bad' ideas doesn't really factor in to what patents are or aren't supposed to protect. They protect novel ideas.
this is a GOOD idea, and not that far removed from the Newegg concept. Newegg spends money and charges more in order to push items out the door faster. You can pay MORE in order to get something tomorrow. Partially what allows them to do this IS an ordering system that prioritizes orders from one source over anothers. That is what allows them to fill boxes and get them to UPS faster.
In the case of Amazon.com, you are talking about getting this service without paying for it. If you buy things from Amazon that indicate that you will buy fancy stuff in the future, your order will get pushed out the door faster. If you only buy used books from allied used retailers, then you're order will get fewer CPU cycles devoted to it.
It's just interrupt priority for shipping, basically.
I'm pretty sure people would have forgotten about this had Amazon not seeked to patent it.
I think it's clever and creative. It's basically a free version of Newegg's preferential shipping scheme.
Just think that for every package that gets unfavorable treatment, there is a package that gets a better treatment. I bet you money service will improve overall.
I can understand why you would DO this, but why in God's name would you patent it? Amazon already has the black eye from attempting to give targeted prices to members (oops) and a patent black eye by flouting the USPTO's decision on one-click. What business model is being protected by patenting the mechanism to put orders on the back burner?
I totally forgot about that one. Of course, if we are counting illicit references, look no further than "The Sword in the Stone."
Sesame Street was great for a generation of children to grow up with. It's about a billion times more edifying than that garbage that gets pumped out and served to kids at high volume (and volumes).
This reminds me of Snow Crash (was it snow crash?), where companies are paid big money to edit out smoking in classic films, because it isn't appropriate anymore.
Assholes.
" "Terms of service subject to change without notice." If it isn't nailed down in your contract, you have nothing to take into court."
Probably not. Certainly the TOS change part has been contested in court heavily here. As for the rest of the argument, please read my post. I don't have a comcast TOS in front of me, but I can bet it doesn't include a promise to never interfere (accidentally or otherwise) with packets.
What I can say is that a case is liable to include material external to the contract between customers and the company, company emails, advertisements, etc. this would be necessary in order to determine intent, and the scope of business that Comcast was offering and advertising.
While I think that there is virtue to being pithy, I don't think that this can be boiled down to two sentences.
I don't really see how the line of reasoning you have used leads you to be ok with packet shaping and not okay with interception.
As I see it, interception is a much more nefarious way to accomplish the same goals, use the bandwidth they way the ISP wants you to, through means OTHER than an agreement between customer and business.
and I'm NOT ok with that.
I agree with you that this is what is going on. that doesn't mean that the intent is distinct from the of packet shaping. Arguably, if they can argue that they have the right to limit classes and content of traffic, then they can argue that they have a wide variety of means with which to do that.
I still think they are wrong, for the record, I'm just speculating on how a court case would proceed.
True, as we construe it today. But our reasoning for calling phone providers common carriers is about as situational as they come. Assuming we continue the regulatory trend, we could see regional monopolies by cable providers (along w/ the rise of Voip and the decline of landline use) that might bring rise to a similar argument made as was made re: AT&T.
you're missing his point. He's making fun of most class action outcomes being toothless in the extreme. Class action victory against company A? 5-7 years down the line, you get a voucher for 30-40 dollars if you can provide proof of purchase in triplicate, a blood sample, and a unicorn hair.
Reverse this notion and look at it from the likely payout end. It is like having to honor a rebate you didn't have to tell customers they were eligible for 7 years down the road. think how many rebates are honored with prior notice three MONTHS down the road...
Big question: Can ISP's be considered common carriers? If so, how does that limit their ability to shape traffic? does it at all?
Little question: Does the packet shaping and interdiction violate the agreement that comcast made with users? does it violate upstream agreements with other providers?
the big question isn't likely to be solved by this lawsuit. It is the question we want answered, and quickly, but any lawsuit is likely to stem from some violation of contract erms or some misrepresentation in advertising, not the existential question of Comcast's nature as a common or a private carrier.
The little question might be enlightening, but I doubt it. This policy might have been implemented after consulting the legal depatment and determining that the TOS for Comcast users was draconian and one sided enough to permit this sort of meddling. Alternately, it may have been the result of a business action distinct from legal consulation. Comcast may have been dumb enough to think that their users would be able to notice or test this phenomenon. My money is on a combination of the two notions. comcast probably cleared "packet shaping" in the abstract with legal, but failed to note this wrinkle in the method with them.
they will probably argue in court that they have the right to provide their definition of QOS to buyers, and this requires that they stop "illegal" traffic. They will presumably go through great pains to paint Bittorrent as illegitimate, and justify their actions on that front. They will also bring up the likely fact that residential broadband users have no uptime/QOS clause in their contracts, a fact that will become much more important than the supposed illegality of traffic.
That is where the meat will be. What sort of QOS/uptime/bandwidth promises are made internal and external to the contract. Not very fun stuff, but them's the breaks.
One of the best parts of being a sailor was, well...swearing like a sailor. But in the time that I was in, the powers that be decided that it wasn't in the best interest of the navy to have sailors acting like...well, sailors. So no carousing, smoking, swearing, etc. Swearing "wasn't professional" and it didn't reflect the best interests of the Navy. I've even seen a swear jar implemented. No joke.
And this was on a submarine. No women. Limited cases of sexual harassment.
Fuck that. You could always tell the fools in the Chief's quarters (think mid level management) by how well they hewed to these rules. If they smoked, drank and swore, they were usually good guys. If they were teetotaling pricks, then they were not to be trusted. This, more than almost any other metric, helped to determine good bosses from bad for us.
Win.
:(
you are probably absolutely right. this does seem like a style guide fatality to me.
In the long run, they can't make money by hoarding tickets. If the scalpers buy the tickets and do not sell them, then they can't make that money. Now, your argument is that scalpers buy tickets at the set price, hold them (once the show is sold out) then resell them for a greater price, that's true. That's what scalpers do. My argument is that they aren't 'inflating' the price when they do that. You are buying a ticket for what you think it is worth, otherwise you wouldn't buy it.
Ahhh. you are stuck on the value added notion. But you still aren't past the idea that the WHOLE reason for scalpers to exist is the artificially low ticket prices that the venues sell at. The scalper doesn't provide more tickets or add value to the ticket but they can make sure you GET your ticket. If you are willing to pay for it, they will get it for you. Otherwise, no matter HOW willing to pay you are, you couldn't get a ticket if you weren't in line first. Just like that stockbroker, or that dealer for bonds. They buy bonds on the secondary market and resell to you at a higher price than it cost them to get it. You couldn't get that bond if you weren't at the exchange before, but now you just buy it from a dealer.
YES. Scalpers take that extra money that you pay them, but you have to pay them for them to take it. This isn't the case of something best distributing money to all possible bands, this is the case of bands needing to fix their supply problems and TM needing to fix its ticket problems.
If TM raised prices to the scalper level, they would get ROASTED publicly for it, jsut like you are doing now. So they don't. They pick a price that they are comfortable with, for the given number of venues that they have, and they sell the tickets. But since that number is probably going to be below the number of people who want to see a band, the price will want to rise. If the price was ALLOWED to rise, then the number of tickets demanded would drop off until it hit equilibrium. If the price is held low in order to make band members and ticketmaster not look like d-bags, then there will be a shortage. Where there is an artificially induced shortage, a black market usually springs up. that black market is those scalpers. The ONLY sure fire way to get rid of that black market is to remove its reason for existing.
I can see why you are miffed about scalping. It appears as if those ticket prices are inflated beyong what is 'fair', but that anger isn't going to DO anything. Matching tickets to ID's isn't going to DO anything. Making captchas for ticket sales isn't going to DO anything. The thing you have to accept is that what will do something is letting the price o tickets float. That will probably mean that ticket prices come up to something close to the scalped level.
Look at it this way. You buy a ticket. Later, after the show is sold out, you decide you don't want to go. None of your friends want to go, so you decide to ebay the ticket. What price would you expect to get? Is it fair that you can ebay this ticket? how, precisely, are you screwing over the person buying the ticket? Would you set a buy now price at the price you bought the ticket?