At my last Silicon Valley layoff, the HR guy was part of the first wave. So he had to handle his own layoff. Over the beer that night he said that was pretty typical for his job "we're usually the first to go, when you want to cut costs."
So your view of the heartless scheming HR uberdrone may say more about you than the work market.
UPN desperately wanted it as a "flagship" prestige show, and just outbid WB when the contract was up after 5 seasons. WB offered a lot more than it had paid for S1-5, but ultimately wasn't prepared to take as big a loss on it as UPN.
How much effect the network switch had on the quality I don't know. My guess is it was very little.
That's true on one level. But the interesting part is how this market is different from normal markets, where companies can't just keep raising prices, but are instead forced by vicious competition to go the other direction.
I'm sure there is a rational explanation for that, but I seriously doubt it's ECO 101 stuff.
Your conversation can be logically reduced to this
But what if X is true
Stop seeing X as true!
Denying the existence of a problem is one of the most common ways to deal with problems. It does not have good track record, but people usually deny that as well, building a solid fortress of logic against reality.
2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.
Just because the result page looks pretty similar doesn't mean there hasn't been huge technology improvements on the server side.
You may remember search as being just as good 10 years ago. But I'm sure you'd change your mind if the tech got reverted to that stage. You are aware that Google is less than 9 years old?
3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.
Google has very serious challengers. Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing billions at that problem right now. As is Google itself. Ask is also in the game.
4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.
That may not be a solvable problem.
I'm inclined at this point to say that the situation was healthier, if more time consuming, in the days before Google. I always searched in Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista and MSN. Between these four I would find what I was looking for by page 3 or 4 of the results, and sometimes curiously serendipitous results would take me off somewhere more interesting.
Is anything stopping you from doing this now? Other than that it would suck so much more than just using Google?
It's hard to imagine how this would affect the "influx of mountain stream fresh water", other than temporarily increase it while the glacier is melting off.
The water isn't magically generated by the glacier, it comes from snow and rainfall in that area, which presumably will continue as before.
Wrong. iTunes will simply convert the protected AACs to MP3's to create the MP3 CD.
Wrong. As your link reveals, if you actually read it, iTunes will not convert protected AACs to MP3s.
The workaround described in the article is to burn your DRMed AACs to a regular CD, and then rip that CD to MP3s. That works fine, but it's a pretty manual and slow process.
Both the subscribers and the buyers of this data are paying Tivo customers. Tivo is treating both groups of customers just fine.
That they only mention one kind of customers when talking about that part of the business is not part of an evil plot. It's just how normal conversations work.
The problem with your reasoning is that stockholders are very bad at long term projection.
Assume there are two kinds of stockholders. Those who are bad at long term projections, and those who are good at it. Let both start out with equal amount of money. In the short term they do pretty much equally well. But in the long term (by definition) the second group does a lot better. Just to put some numbers to it, let's say that after 5 years, the second group has twice as much money as the first. It could be 10 or 3 years or whatever, it only changes the argument by degree.
Of course, the long term never ends. So after 10 years, the long term savvy investors have 4 times the money of their short sighted brethren. After 20 years 16 times more, and so on.
We have had stock markets now for hundreds of years. And this is why, pretty much by definition, the people sitting on all the old money is the very best at long term investing you can find. Because that's how they got that money. Sure there is always new money coming in, and it can be spent unwisely in the beginning. But it always ends up with long term term savvy investors over time.
Even if an application could be done somewhat better on the desktop than over the web, the fact that the company providing the web version doesn't have to worry about pirating can make the difference.
Why wouldn't we? When someone places a call to me from a land line or another carrier, my carrier doesn't get money from the call's originator, yet their cellular infrastructure is used. It makes more sense for customers to be billed for what they actually use, rather than blindly mimic the old POTS billing scheme.
That's exactly how it works in normal countries. What is different is that it's the caller who pays the extra charge. This is made possible because cell phones have easily recognizable area codes, so as a caller you are fully aware what kind of phone you are calling.
The fact that you can just decide to cost other people money by calling them truly is one of the weirdest things about the US to many foreigners.
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview.
Not exactly. What is illegal is to discriminate in hiring based on certain criterias such as race, gender, age etc.
This usually leads to company lawyers issuing rules forbidding employees from asking about this, on the theory that if the company doesn't know your age it couldn't possibly discriminate based on it.
But in practice, you usually need more to win such a law suit than just claiming you were asked a certain question. And it's never a legal problem to ask people any questions, as long as you offer them employment.
Finally, all this pertains to the USA. Other countries have other rules, and Google are hiring in many of them.
If occasional insults of the citizenry is the biggest problem emanating from this "VAST increase of the power of the state", I'll have to say it does not fall in the same league as Nazi Germany or Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
At my last Silicon Valley layoff, the HR guy was part of the first wave. So he had to handle his own layoff. Over the beer that night he said that was pretty typical for his job "we're usually the first to go, when you want to cut costs."
So your view of the heartless scheming HR uberdrone may say more about you than the work market.
Buffy was in no way axed by WB.
UPN desperately wanted it as a "flagship" prestige show, and just outbid WB when the contract was up after 5 seasons. WB offered a lot more than it had paid for S1-5, but ultimately wasn't prepared to take as big a loss on it as UPN.
How much effect the network switch had on the quality I don't know. My guess is it was very little.
That's true on one level. But the interesting part is how this market is different from normal markets, where companies can't just keep raising prices, but are instead forced by vicious competition to go the other direction.
I'm sure there is a rational explanation for that, but I seriously doubt it's ECO 101 stuff.
Your conversation can be logically reduced to this
But what if X is true
Stop seeing X as true!
Denying the existence of a problem is one of the most common ways to deal with problems. It does not have good track record, but people usually deny that as well, building a solid fortress of logic against reality.
Also, due to global warming, the outside air just doesn't cool as well these days.
2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.
Just because the result page looks pretty similar doesn't mean there hasn't been huge technology improvements on the server side.
You may remember search as being just as good 10 years ago. But I'm sure you'd change your mind if the tech got reverted to that stage. You are aware that Google is less than 9 years old?
3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.
Google has very serious challengers. Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing billions at that problem right now. As is Google itself. Ask is also in the game.
4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.
That may not be a solvable problem.
I'm inclined at this point to say that the situation was healthier, if more time consuming, in the days before Google. I always searched in Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista and MSN. Between these four I would find what I was looking for by page 3 or 4 of the results, and sometimes curiously serendipitous results would take me off somewhere more interesting.
Is anything stopping you from doing this now? Other than that it would suck so much more than just using Google?
Are you saying it is a pure coincidence that the eras of capitalism and scientific revolution overlap?
I claim they are very closely related, though you can argue about which one caused the other.
This is why the USS Jimmy Carter was built!
I don't think I've ever seen a story with such a high fraction of joke comments!
We won't "run out of resources". Sunlight produces all the resources we need, and the sun won't stop shining for many billion years.
It's hard to imagine how this would affect the "influx of mountain stream fresh water", other than temporarily increase it while the glacier is melting off.
The water isn't magically generated by the glacier, it comes from snow and rainfall in that area, which presumably will continue as before.
Public Enemy reported on this already, back in 1990.
The article, and the discussion here, only considers Americans. In reality, there is probably over 10 injured Iraqis for every injured American.
The inability of the average American to even consider this can be seen as the whole problem of this war in a nut shell, if you're in a grumpy mood.
An other mathematical factor is that you can amputate 600 limbs on only 150 people.
I sense that you are young, healthy, single and male?
Most people aren't.
Wrong. iTunes will simply convert the protected AACs to MP3's to create the MP3 CD.
Wrong. As your link reveals, if you actually read it, iTunes will not convert protected AACs to MP3s.
The workaround described in the article is to burn your DRMed AACs to a regular CD, and then rip that CD to MP3s. That works fine, but it's a pretty manual and slow process.
Both the subscribers and the buyers of this data are paying Tivo customers. Tivo is treating both groups of customers just fine.
That they only mention one kind of customers when talking about that part of the business is not part of an evil plot. It's just how normal conversations work.
The problem with your reasoning is that stockholders are very bad at long term projection.
Assume there are two kinds of stockholders. Those who are bad at long term projections, and those who are good at it. Let both start out with equal amount of money. In the short term they do pretty much equally well. But in the long term (by definition) the second group does a lot better. Just to put some numbers to it, let's say that after 5 years, the second group has twice as much money as the first. It could be 10 or 3 years or whatever, it only changes the argument by degree.
Of course, the long term never ends. So after 10 years, the long term savvy investors have 4 times the money of their short sighted brethren. After 20 years 16 times more, and so on.
We have had stock markets now for hundreds of years. And this is why, pretty much by definition, the people sitting on all the old money is the very best at long term investing you can find. Because that's how they got that money. Sure there is always new money coming in, and it can be spent unwisely in the beginning. But it always ends up with long term term savvy investors over time.
3. Web apps can't be pirated.
Even if an application could be done somewhat better on the desktop than over the web, the fact that the company providing the web version doesn't have to worry about pirating can make the difference.
Why wouldn't we? When someone places a call to me from a land line or another carrier, my carrier doesn't get money from the call's originator, yet their cellular infrastructure is used. It makes more sense for customers to be billed for what they actually use, rather than blindly mimic the old POTS billing scheme.
That's exactly how it works in normal countries. What is different is that it's the caller who pays the extra charge. This is made possible because cell phones have easily recognizable area codes, so as a caller you are fully aware what kind of phone you are calling.
The fact that you can just decide to cost other people money by calling them truly is one of the weirdest things about the US to many foreigners.
Having two competing novelty indexes can not stand.
They should be merged them into the iMac index!
Do you have a reference for that girl getting charged with molesting herself?
I'm pretty sure the company who sold that DRM technology to Sony came out with a nice payday from the deal.
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview.
Not exactly. What is illegal is to discriminate in hiring based on certain criterias such as race, gender, age etc.
This usually leads to company lawyers issuing rules forbidding employees from asking about this, on the theory that if the company doesn't know your age it couldn't possibly discriminate based on it.
But in practice, you usually need more to win such a law suit than just claiming you were asked a certain question. And it's never a legal problem to ask people any questions, as long as you offer them employment.
Finally, all this pertains to the USA. Other countries have other rules, and Google are hiring in many of them.
As we all know, if someone you despise thinks that 2+2=4, you are morally obliged to think it is 3 or 5.
Anything else is a betrayal of justice!
If occasional insults of the citizenry is the biggest problem emanating from this "VAST increase of the power of the state", I'll have to say it does not fall in the same league as Nazi Germany or Russia.