No. That is how many businesses measure, but it is not good business sense.
There are three types of companies.
Generic
Brands with no real value
Brands with a good reputation, worthy of trust.
A Generic company honestly should not give a crap about user satisfaction. Your goal should be to spend as little $/user as possible without resulting in lawsuits. You are selling crap and people are buying it because it is cheap. They won't care about customer satisfaction, otherwise they would have bought a brand name.
You correctly describe a no real value brand. Middle satisfaction is the goal.
But a real brand (like Apple) needs HIGH satisfaction. They want it as high as possible. This sell their product at a premium, using their reputation as the reason. They need people to say it is worth spending more for their product.
Similarly, the same thing works for a company that wishes to maintain a good reputation as being on the cutting edge. If you are a law firm, like say the one I work in, and you are trying to attract the best lawyers, it helps a TON to be known as someone with the best stuff and 'it just works.' (to copy a certain slogan). You can't do that if people go around saying nothing works and IT doesn't get back to you. You need IT to solve your problems ASAP, keeping all employees happy and not thinking "This wouldn't happen if I took that job at XXXX"
The problem is that they are trying to charge people extra for something that they are legally required to let you do.
It's kind of like saying "We are charging people extra for cable if you want to hook up your own personal DVR up to.
NO. If I bought unlimited access, they I get unlimited access and I have the right to shift content I download to anywhere I want. If you don't really want to give out unlimited access, then don't lie and claim it is unlimited access. It is called Fraud when you advertise something and don't supply it.
So many times people discuss tethering without actually describing what it means.
For those that don't know, tethering is when you tie your phone to your computer and hit it around the computer several times, until the phone brakes your computer screen.
Tethering is legal in all states, but some phone companies seem to object to it, so they contractually prevent you from doing this.
Now that I have an unlimited data plan, if I could just figure out a way to use my telephone as a modem for my computer, because hey, it's my property and fair use laws means I have the legal right to view it on any sized screen I want.
Not everyone that is happy as a pig in shit with the current system are morally bankrupt.
Some of us make full use of itunes and would be quite upset if on top of our itunes bill we have to pay more money.
Others simply DON'T listen to music. Some people are deaf you know, no reason they should be forced to pay an extra $10 for internet access. Not to mention those of us that simply don't like music in the same way that some people don't watch TV or the appaling number of people that don't read books.
True, no cuts in programs for illegal aliens.
Mainly because THERE ARE NO PROGRAMS FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS
There are also no cuts for programs designed to help 16 year olds boys have sex, programs designed to kill 80 old woman, or programs designed to provide tin foil helmets for nut jobs.
You DO realize that the season for most shows is over, right? To get new shows you need to have them MAKING new shows.
Right now, they are making new "Mental", "The Unusualas" and "Pushing Daisies"
Anything else will be a repeat.
Anytime anyone uses some kind of DRM, require them to provide the government with a copy of the key and a release date - when the copyright ends. Charge them a small yearly fee for key storage.
If they stop paying the fee (i.e. they go bankrupt and no one takes over the fee payment) or the copyright protection date ends, the keys become public property, available for free.
It's easy to create new and original ideas. A random generator can do that. What is difficult is selecting the valuable ones.
I generally view intelligence as the ability to detect and recognize patterns. If you are good at exact patterns, that is math/logic/science. If you are good at general patterns, then we are talking art/creativity/language.
Computers have ALWAYS been good at recognizing exact patterns. But they generally need a human to first detect the pattern. They have never been good at recognizing general patterns.
There is no ability to frame your opponents and send them to jail.
You also can't jump in a car and go on a killing spree.
You know the problem with Grand Theft Auto (all versions)? Even if you hook up your Guitar hero guitar, they don't provide the codes to let you try and play along with the theme song.
Wii is not and never has been a platform designed for high end graphics. Similarly it's competiots are not capable of duplicating the Wii's intense interacttion (at least not yet - they are working on a camera based system).
Stop demanding that your car have the ability to fly like a plane unless you are also willing to demand that the plane fit in your driveway. Or better yet, accept the fact that cars are cars and planes are planes.
He was getting the patent for proving what was at best rumor. After all, there are people in Nigeria that think raping a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note to self, perhaps we should start a rumor that to complete the process, one must cut off one's own balls and eat them after raping the virgin.)
Space fountains beat elevators every which way. Easy to make too. Just put a cylcotron at the bottom and magnetically bend the particles up, then put a cap at the top of the fountain to return the flow. Magnetic charge stabilizes the pnemautic tubes and powers the gyroscopes, not to mention pushing payloads up.
You missed the part where Apple said they would NOT give the discount to existing people EVEN when their contract expired.
I.E. You have a current Iphone your contract is expiring tomorrow and you still don't get the new one at a discount. You have to pay the full price. The only way to get the discount is if you did NOT already have an AT&T account. They basically are taking their existing customers and saying screw you. It's kind of like if Chrysler said "Hey, we are going to give people that trade in a Toyota a car for 50% off, but if you trade it a Chrysler, we are giving you book value only).
But DOES it make it worse for the students? Like I said earlier, doing things like offering smaller classes, even if it is just by a little bit is making it better for the student. It is in fact hard to say that they are making things worse.
But they did not do things that made it worse for students. They did things that made it better.
Now, there is a good argument that their improvements have had an excessive affect on their ratings because they ONLY improved the things the ratings affect. It's kind of like hearing that figuring out that your teacher only glances at the middle of your paper, so spending 3 hours on the first page, 3 hours on the last page and 1 hour on the middle 5 pages. Not the best way to write a good paper, but at least you did work at it.
Most of what they do I would not call 'cheating the system'. At best it is 'gaming the system'.
For example, to go up in the salary number, they RAISED THE SALARY. How is that cheating? Yeah, they had to raise tuition to do it, but it is not cheating.
Similarly, to get a better class size numbers, they horror of horrors, lowered the maximum number of students in several classes (countering this by enlarging the classes that were already large).
Now, I would not call the badmouthing of other schools to be a good thing, but it is hardly 'cheating'.
People don't decide "Hey, I want to buy a used game."
Instead people say "Hey, I want to buy a CHEAP game, and don't care if it is not the newest thing out there."
So if you are a game company wanting to get into the 'cheap, not recently released game' market, it is easy. Simply cut your prices for the stuff you brought out last year by 30% and for two years by 50%.
You are not going to be cutting into your 'new releases' money, and you will be giving the people what they want.
They have to understand that 'eating the loss', while it may make sense from a short term financial perspective does nto make sense for a longer term perspective. There are superior methods out there to verify credit card information, we don't need to use the same method that was used 50 years ago.
I would suggest finding another Domain that they own and first asking them if you could buy that one.
That will give you a high end price. Tell them no thank you. Wait a day and say you also like the real one. Then offer to buy it at 1/2 the price they gave for the first one.
I disagree that with the claim that laws can't be simplified. There are really only three types of crimes: Bloody, monetary, and control. We could replace the confusing crap of various specific rules with 'guideliness' and rule that all 'non-guideline' based stuff immediately gets kicked up to appeal to verify.
Example of a simple law. Any claim of taking money/item of value without the legal right to it is entitled to triple reimbursement plus imprisonment time. Followed by an auto-inflation adjusting chart for amount stolen vs. Time in prison, with a set of factors to increase, such as "fully accidental theft = no time and just double reimbrusement", "Negligenct but not accidental theft = 1/2 time", "Taken from charity = time *2) "Taken as revenge = 1/3 time", "Taken in anger without revenge = double time". Things like that. This in effect creates one set of rules for both non-violent break and entree and say embezzlement. It would make things fairer.
No, debating the question does not require massive amounts of knowledge. The only people that require that amount of knoweldge is those that wish to argue about it that level of knowledge.
One can easily hold an informed opinion about something without understanding it in depth. It just changes the level of detail that we discuss.
Here, lets suppose we are arguing about about something very specific, so that I can illustrate what I mean.
We are arguing about whether or not a painting is an original Piccaso. You are a chemsit and do a compelx chemical analysis of it, proving beyond a doubt that it is real.
I know nothing about chemistry. But I do know that three days ago I paid a chemist to do a superb job creating fake paints and that I painted it myself
So my question to you is which one of us can't hold an opinion or argue about it?
The truth is that your detailed chemical analysis is just EVIDENCE. It is NOT WHAT WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT. I don't need to know anything at all about it, beyond the simple statement that "It can be faked, for about $153,375" I can TRUST my own expert to refute your statement, even without understanding it.
Now, the EXPERTS do need to be capable of both understanding what each other say, and also to proove/simplify stuff down for the layman. But when one guy can say "You are wrong, and here's the proof, I myself did X", then that is sufficient.
Similarly, You don't need to be a scientist to prove that we did not fake the footage of men walking on the moon. All you need is Mr. Armstrong to stand up and say "I DID IT.".
Same for your rather complex arguments. You don't need to have an in depth knowledge of all the minutae, if you have trustworthy experts to back you up.
A real, GOOD debater can make an argument appropriate for a scientist, one appropriate for an intelligent lawyer that is not a scientist, one appropriate for a college graduate, one appropriate for a High School graduate, one appropriate for a 15 year old kid.
When crafting the argument for a scientist, you are going to have to consult a scientist (unless you are already one.)
But I don't need to understand astronomy to argue about whether or not we need to watch out for comets/meteors/astroids that could hit the Planet Earth. All I need to know is that one of them hit Jupiter and made a big mess.
I am using a rather standard definition of a soul. You wish to argue that defintion. Fine. Then I restate my question as "What qualifies as a human being."
Any idiot can object to a definition and try to get into the details. Doing so is only appropriate if the definition is key to the argument. I could object to your use of the word "proven", but doing so does not actually affect the argument.
I return to my original point. YOUR attempt to bring irrelevant details into the discussion made the issue complex, but it does not need to be so. As long as one is NOT attempting to confuse people, then the details only matter to the people that understand the details. The big question continues to be SIMPLE.
I simplify, but basically he is saying that anything worth arguing about gets too complex for the layman to argue about.
No. Wrong.
The things we argue about tend to be very very simple. It is the application to the real world that gets very very complex.
Take abortion for example. The real question is "When do we get a soul?"
The standard arguments make it more complex. You only need to get that complex if you are trying to deal with the real world and counter examples. But the heart of the matter is a simple question, that anyone can hold an opinion on, and can try to prove or dis-prove.
Another great example is say the rule of the law vs a case by case situation. Do we care about the minutia of legal proceedings more than the right/wrongness of the actual actions. Yes, you can get very very specific about whether or not the fact that a man was convicted on an illegal wire tap, should he go free, or variably, a man convicted but later another man proven to have done the crime. But we really are arguing about a basic concept, not the evidence that people cook up to support their viewpoints.
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Sure, it is not a direct contradiction, but do they like it or hate it?
There are three types of companies.
Generic
Brands with no real value
Brands with a good reputation, worthy of trust.
A Generic company honestly should not give a crap about user satisfaction. Your goal should be to spend as little $/user as possible without resulting in lawsuits. You are selling crap and people are buying it because it is cheap. They won't care about customer satisfaction, otherwise they would have bought a brand name.
You correctly describe a no real value brand. Middle satisfaction is the goal.
But a real brand (like Apple) needs HIGH satisfaction. They want it as high as possible. This sell their product at a premium, using their reputation as the reason. They need people to say it is worth spending more for their product.
Similarly, the same thing works for a company that wishes to maintain a good reputation as being on the cutting edge. If you are a law firm, like say the one I work in, and you are trying to attract the best lawyers, it helps a TON to be known as someone with the best stuff and 'it just works.' (to copy a certain slogan). You can't do that if people go around saying nothing works and IT doesn't get back to you. You need IT to solve your problems ASAP, keeping all employees happy and not thinking "This wouldn't happen if I took that job at XXXX"
NO. If I bought unlimited access, they I get unlimited access and I have the right to shift content I download to anywhere I want. If you don't really want to give out unlimited access, then don't lie and claim it is unlimited access. It is called Fraud when you advertise something and don't supply it.
For those that don't know, tethering is when you tie your phone to your computer and hit it around the computer several times, until the phone brakes your computer screen.
Tethering is legal in all states, but some phone companies seem to object to it, so they contractually prevent you from doing this.
Now that I have an unlimited data plan, if I could just figure out a way to use my telephone as a modem for my computer, because hey, it's my property and fair use laws means I have the legal right to view it on any sized screen I want.
Not everyone that is happy as a pig in shit with the current system are morally bankrupt. Some of us make full use of itunes and would be quite upset if on top of our itunes bill we have to pay more money. Others simply DON'T listen to music. Some people are deaf you know, no reason they should be forced to pay an extra $10 for internet access. Not to mention those of us that simply don't like music in the same way that some people don't watch TV or the appaling number of people that don't read books.
True, no cuts in programs for illegal aliens. Mainly because THERE ARE NO PROGRAMS FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS There are also no cuts for programs designed to help 16 year olds boys have sex, programs designed to kill 80 old woman, or programs designed to provide tin foil helmets for nut jobs.
You DO realize that the season for most shows is over, right? To get new shows you need to have them MAKING new shows. Right now, they are making new "Mental", "The Unusualas" and "Pushing Daisies" Anything else will be a repeat.
You mean like NBC did with Hulu? Or Apple did with Ipod?
Anytime anyone uses some kind of DRM, require them to provide the government with a copy of the key and a release date - when the copyright ends. Charge them a small yearly fee for key storage. If they stop paying the fee (i.e. they go bankrupt and no one takes over the fee payment) or the copyright protection date ends, the keys become public property, available for free.
I generally view intelligence as the ability to detect and recognize patterns. If you are good at exact patterns, that is math/logic/science. If you are good at general patterns, then we are talking art/creativity/language.
Computers have ALWAYS been good at recognizing exact patterns. But they generally need a human to first detect the pattern. They have never been good at recognizing general patterns.
Wii is not and never has been a platform designed for high end graphics. Similarly it's competiots are not capable of duplicating the Wii's intense interacttion (at least not yet - they are working on a camera based system).
Stop demanding that your car have the ability to fly like a plane unless you are also willing to demand that the plane fit in your driveway. Or better yet, accept the fact that cars are cars and planes are planes.
He was getting the patent for proving what was at best rumor. After all, there are people in Nigeria that think raping a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note to self, perhaps we should start a rumor that to complete the process, one must cut off one's own balls and eat them after raping the virgin.)
Refinanced. If you just refinance twice, this kind of crap can happen to you.
Space fountains beat elevators every which way. Easy to make too. Just put a cylcotron at the bottom and magnetically bend the particles up, then put a cap at the top of the fountain to return the flow. Magnetic charge stabilizes the pnemautic tubes and powers the gyroscopes, not to mention pushing payloads up.
You missed the part where Apple said they would NOT give the discount to existing people EVEN when their contract expired.
I.E. You have a current Iphone your contract is expiring tomorrow and you still don't get the new one at a discount. You have to pay the full price. The only way to get the discount is if you did NOT already have an AT&T account. They basically are taking their existing customers and saying screw you. It's kind of like if Chrysler said "Hey, we are going to give people that trade in a Toyota a car for 50% off, but if you trade it a Chrysler, we are giving you book value only).
But DOES it make it worse for the students? Like I said earlier, doing things like offering smaller classes, even if it is just by a little bit is making it better for the student. It is in fact hard to say that they are making things worse.
But they did not do things that made it worse for students. They did things that made it better. Now, there is a good argument that their improvements have had an excessive affect on their ratings because they ONLY improved the things the ratings affect. It's kind of like hearing that figuring out that your teacher only glances at the middle of your paper, so spending 3 hours on the first page, 3 hours on the last page and 1 hour on the middle 5 pages. Not the best way to write a good paper, but at least you did work at it.
For example, to go up in the salary number, they RAISED THE SALARY. How is that cheating? Yeah, they had to raise tuition to do it, but it is not cheating.
Similarly, to get a better class size numbers, they horror of horrors, lowered the maximum number of students in several classes (countering this by enlarging the classes that were already large).
Now, I would not call the badmouthing of other schools to be a good thing, but it is hardly 'cheating'.
Instead people say "Hey, I want to buy a CHEAP game, and don't care if it is not the newest thing out there."
So if you are a game company wanting to get into the 'cheap, not recently released game' market, it is easy. Simply cut your prices for the stuff you brought out last year by 30% and for two years by 50%.
You are not going to be cutting into your 'new releases' money, and you will be giving the people what they want.
They have to understand that 'eating the loss', while it may make sense from a short term financial perspective does nto make sense for a longer term perspective. There are superior methods out there to verify credit card information, we don't need to use the same method that was used 50 years ago.
I would suggest finding another Domain that they own and first asking them if you could buy that one. That will give you a high end price. Tell them no thank you. Wait a day and say you also like the real one. Then offer to buy it at 1/2 the price they gave for the first one.
I disagree that with the claim that laws can't be simplified. There are really only three types of crimes: Bloody, monetary, and control. We could replace the confusing crap of various specific rules with 'guideliness' and rule that all 'non-guideline' based stuff immediately gets kicked up to appeal to verify. Example of a simple law. Any claim of taking money/item of value without the legal right to it is entitled to triple reimbursement plus imprisonment time. Followed by an auto-inflation adjusting chart for amount stolen vs. Time in prison, with a set of factors to increase, such as "fully accidental theft = no time and just double reimbrusement", "Negligenct but not accidental theft = 1/2 time", "Taken from charity = time *2) "Taken as revenge = 1/3 time", "Taken in anger without revenge = double time". Things like that. This in effect creates one set of rules for both non-violent break and entree and say embezzlement. It would make things fairer.
Here, lets suppose we are arguing about about something very specific, so that I can illustrate what I mean. We are arguing about whether or not a painting is an original Piccaso. You are a chemsit and do a compelx chemical analysis of it, proving beyond a doubt that it is real. I know nothing about chemistry. But I do know that three days ago I paid a chemist to do a superb job creating fake paints and that I painted it myself
So my question to you is which one of us can't hold an opinion or argue about it?
The truth is that your detailed chemical analysis is just EVIDENCE. It is NOT WHAT WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT. I don't need to know anything at all about it, beyond the simple statement that "It can be faked, for about $153,375" I can TRUST my own expert to refute your statement, even without understanding it.
Now, the EXPERTS do need to be capable of both understanding what each other say, and also to proove/simplify stuff down for the layman. But when one guy can say "You are wrong, and here's the proof, I myself did X", then that is sufficient.
Similarly, You don't need to be a scientist to prove that we did not fake the footage of men walking on the moon. All you need is Mr. Armstrong to stand up and say "I DID IT.".
Same for your rather complex arguments. You don't need to have an in depth knowledge of all the minutae, if you have trustworthy experts to back you up.
A real, GOOD debater can make an argument appropriate for a scientist, one appropriate for an intelligent lawyer that is not a scientist, one appropriate for a college graduate, one appropriate for a High School graduate, one appropriate for a 15 year old kid.
When crafting the argument for a scientist, you are going to have to consult a scientist (unless you are already one.)
But I don't need to understand astronomy to argue about whether or not we need to watch out for comets/meteors/astroids that could hit the Planet Earth. All I need to know is that one of them hit Jupiter and made a big mess.
I return to my original point. YOUR attempt to bring irrelevant details into the discussion made the issue complex, but it does not need to be so. As long as one is NOT attempting to confuse people, then the details only matter to the people that understand the details. The big question continues to be SIMPLE.
No. Wrong.
The things we argue about tend to be very very simple. It is the application to the real world that gets very very complex.
Take abortion for example. The real question is "When do we get a soul?"
The standard arguments make it more complex. You only need to get that complex if you are trying to deal with the real world and counter examples. But the heart of the matter is a simple question, that anyone can hold an opinion on, and can try to prove or dis-prove.
Another great example is say the rule of the law vs a case by case situation. Do we care about the minutia of legal proceedings more than the right/wrongness of the actual actions. Yes, you can get very very specific about whether or not the fact that a man was convicted on an illegal wire tap, should he go free, or variably, a man convicted but later another man proven to have done the crime. But we really are arguing about a basic concept, not the evidence that people cook up to support their viewpoints.