I suppose they could do that, but then the user should be able to rate them negatively. Enough users give them a bad rating for being consistently out-of-stock, their listings will decline and sales will drop. Self-correcting, I would say.
Sellers and Amazon both have incentives to protect their reputations. Yeah, maybe some fly-by-night seller doesn't give a shit and is just trying to game the system, but then they aren't going to get positive ratings, either. If Amazon picks up on someone screwing with the pricing system and then not shipping to customers, they'd be foolish not to terminate them.
As always, the rule is "buyer beware." Does that seller have poor ratings or very few? Does the price seem unreasonably low? Does it say there are only a handful left in stock? Hmmm, choose carefully. You might want to move to another seller.
(Even if they pull the "out of stock" crap, you're still not out any money. As I said in my other reply, the only thing you're losing is time and possibly a price that was too good to be true in the first place.)
Sure, but nothing is perfect, and any sales done outside Amazon's system are not necessarily going to be reflected in real-time on Amazon's side.
Requiring the seller to honor an out-of-stock product at the stated price could easily be very onerous to the seller--what if there is no more stock to have, ever? This does happen.
The seller can either fulfill the order or cancel it with a refund. The buyer either gets the item or gets their money back, so I'm not sure where the harm is done to the buyer (other than wasting their time, I suppose.)
Amazon processes the payments and it's all done as one transaction: you say "I want to buy this item," Amazon shows you what you will be charged, you complete the transaction, done. The seller would only be able to reverse it (such as if they are out of stock), not initiate a new one or change the price after the fact.
Apart from making the requests slower, I agree with your suggestion. Allowing an infected computer to proceed without incident isn't something the FBI should've done. Getting those systems fixed ASAP--by letting the user know they were infected and how to remove it--should've been the priority.
The idea that hard work == material success is very Calvinist in origin--not a surprise that so many Americans buy into it unthinkingly. Calvinist doctrine and the Protestant work ethic are deeply-ingrained traits of our culture. It's a circular bit of logic born out of a belief in double predestination: God has elected who will go to heaven and who will go to hell; he blesses those who will go to heaven with material success; those people are successful because they worked hard and God rewarded them; therefore, they will go to heaven. This allows its adherents an airtight logic loop: people who are poor are being punished for not working hard enough, and God knew they wouldn't work hard enough to be successful, that's why they aren't among the Elect. The wealthy are so because God ordained them to be, because he knew they would work hard for it.
In this way, both the rich and poor divinely deserve their fates, which are simultaneously determined in advance and the result of free will (in your hard work/lack thereof.)
Most Americans never stop to think about it beyond the level of "hard work == success," but the theological beliefs underpinning it are pervasive.
Naturally, societies not poisoned by this Calvinist bullshit recognize that success and failure are a product of the circumstances of one's birth, upbringing, work habits, education (and access to it), healthcare (and access to it), and just plain dumb luck. How hard you work certainly plays into it, but it is not the sole factor, and often not even the most important factor. That's not an excuse to be a lazy ass, of course, but it's an acknowledgment that reality is not a black-and-white place where the good people are Christians who worked hard and got rich and the bad people are heathens who never did anything with their lives and remained poor.
I agree that they aren't wrong, but it's usually an indication that you can make them better/clearer. Again, it's a case where Word can only say "you might be able to improve this," but it certainly can't tell you how.
I was trying to draw a line between "this is what the words are" and "this is what the words mean." The latter is semantics. To date, we've not had a lot of progress in building systems that recognize the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences. There are so many basic assumptions built into our communications that we'd have to teach to a computer in order for it to understand.
There was an article (I think it was posted here) about some of Siri's shortcomings. Things like, "Where is Elvis buried?" The meaning of that sentence is obvious to most people (of a certain cultural background, that is) but it totally confused Siri: the program thought the user wanted to look up someone named "Elvis Buried."
In order to fully understand the question, it would need two separate pieces of knowledge that are not spelled out in the context of the question:
1. That there was a person colloquially known as "Elvis." 2. That people are often buried when they die.
A better-formulated question might be: "Where is Elvis Presley's grave located?" This makes it clear that the subject is a person and the desired information is the location of his grave site.
I'm not arguing that we can't built a semantic system for all of these things, just that it is a vast undertaking, and to date I do not believe there's been a lot of progress in it. I'm aware of the Cyc project, which is attempting to build a generalized expert system, but last I checked it still has a long way to go. Natural language processing, to the extent of determining the meaning of a construction of words, is still a hard problem.
You can thank Ronald Reagan for much of that sentiment: the idea that the government is incompetent at best, evil at worst. The federal income tax burden on someone making around minimum wage is not just non-existent, it's negative: the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable credit available to the poor, meaning they can get back more than they paid (and they often pay next to nothing.)
If they want to whine about something, maybe they should look at the regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the poor: gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and the like.
Americans benefit in a lot of ways from the various social programs we have. Food stamps, unemployment, Medicaid, Medicare, TANF, Social Security, etc. etc. The individual who never draws on any of these is a rare creature, indeed, perhaps even mythical. They are there in case you need them. Claims of fraud are generally exaggerated, except in Medicare, which has massive levels of fraud that somehow don't get talked about.
I've noticed that a lot of the "low tax, small government" conservatives are "pre-rich." They think they will be wealthy one day, and the thought of Uncle Sam taking a good chunk of it is horrifying to them. Never mind that if you are pulling down over a quarter million a year, you aren't going to miss a few tens of thousands. Well, maybe you'll have to settle for one Lexus instead of two?
Oddly enough, I make more money than the vast majority of people who spout such rubbish, and I never complain about paying my taxes, even though they are in the five figures per year. I value the services that the government provides to people less fortunate than me, because I value having a functional society and a government that respects and upholds the social contract. What disgusts me is our runaway defense spending--as if killing foreigners is more important than looking after our own people. It's curious how the same people who are against spending money on the poor and sick are nevertheless fine with dropping billions on boondoggle weapons systems and wars in the Middle East. Talk about fucked up priorities.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but... who gives a shit about startup times? Unless you are rebooting your system multiple times a day, how long it takes to start up is totally irrelevant. I would gladly sacrifice startup time in order to gain better application performance. Startup time strikes me as an easy-to-obtain but ultimately meaningless metric.
Few organizations are going to make that kind of investment. All they'll end up doing is running XP in a virtual machine and preserve their existing functionality.
I've used MS Word's grammar checking capabilities, and I agree that they can only be a supplement to someone who already has solid writing skills. It has prodded me to rewrite long sentences, fix subject-verb agreement, get rid of passive voice, other things of that nature. It's also caught my occasional typo and duplicate word--errors that are easy to skip over when you're re-reading your draft for the tenth time.
If someone is a poor writer in the first place, all the spelling- and grammar-checkers in the world won't fix that. They'll just paper over the more obvious defects. People should never, ever count on a software tool to fix their writing. It can only be a modestly-helpful guide, not a blunt tool to do the work for you. Natural language processing is just not very good. Even online translation tools do little more than find-and-replace words with their foreign language counterparts, then try to rearrange them into a grammar consistent with that language. You can usually get the general idea of the original text, but a human translation by someone fluent in both languages is almost always vastly superior. The bottom line is that computers are very bad at semantics, and even worse at "reading between the lines." This is not a fault of computers, either, but of software researchers and the industry as a whole.
Lay people often get the mistaken impression that because computers are now good at pattern recognition (picking out faces, analyzing voice samples into text, etc.) they are also good at figuring out the "meaning" of these things. They are not. Pattern recognition and semantics are totally different areas of research.
Well, it's funny how the Tea Party--which came pretty much out of nowhere--managed to seriously disrupt things in Washington, to the point that their own party can't control them. They held the economy hostage, deliberately hurt the US' credit rating, and have successfully kept Obama from accomplishing much of anything since taking office. Their fiscal hero, Paul Ryan, may even get his budget passed. They've also successfully dislodged numerous long-term incumbents, replacing them with more right-wing conservatives.
You can say what you want about them, but they've certainly made a big impact. (I don't like them at all, mind you.)
Of course, you could say that they were only successful because they were bankrolled by wealthy donors like the Koch brothers, and I really couldn't argue with that. But then that would point to the real problem in politics: change only happens when someone throws enough money at it. How much people "care" is totally irrelevant.
Yeah, Obama's had a frighteningly neocon foreign policy. There are things I like about him (and I'll still take him over Romney), but I'm under no illusions that he's some great American hero. He's ramped up the "war on terror" to a degree I don't think anyone expected. Sure, Republicans can't touch him on defense because of that, but making illegal drone strikes and assassinating American citizens are not what I thought I was getting when I voted for him.
I think you're dead-on about Romney. He's super rich. He has no idea what problems average Americans struggle with. He's tried his hand at the financial market, he's been a governor, so what now? A bored rich guy's gotta find a hobby. Why not be President? Ever notice how uncomfortable he looks when he has to hang around "normal" people? He has no clue how to relate to them. He doesn't understand why he has to do all this silly song-and-dance just to get a job he wants.
I've never gotten the impression he wants to be President because he truly cares about this country and its people. For all McCain's faults, I never doubted his motives--he clearly cares about this country, even if his actual policy ideas are no good. Romney just comes off as bored and aloof. Being President is just something for him to do, not something he's truly energized about or something he brings real policy ideas to.
He seems intent on spending his whole campaign attacking Obama rather than putting forth his own ideas. He has no vision.
The one really bad thing I learned about MA (on Slashdot, no less) is that health insurance coverage is obscenely expensive--potentially over $1000 a month for a family of four. Even with the higher income levels in MA, that sounds unaffordable to all but the wealthiest residents.
What the moon is made of is not a Constitutional question, so it's beside the point. I guess you can't make your case without using ridiculous examples, huh?
Deciding what is and is not Constitutional is, by definition, interpreting the Constitution, since the Constitution is short and vague and doesn't directly answer most questions before the Court. The Court has to read between the lines and balance against precedent to decide what may or may not be Constitutional. It's not like the Constitution says, "an individual mandate for health insurance is fine for Congress to require." Nor does it say, "women have the right to an abortion." It shouldn't say those things--it was written as a basic guideline that is simply too vague to have a clear answer to every question.
If it was obvious what is Constitutional and what isn't simply from reading the text, we wouldn't need SCOTUS at all. At a minimum, such questions wouldn't be so contentious since it would be "obvious" what the Constitution means.
Who decides what is Constitutional? The Supreme Court. By definition, if they say something is Constitutional, then it is. (They can also change their minds later--such is the nature of our system.)
Frankly, I'll take the judgment of 9 men and women who have dedicated their lives to the study and interpretation of the Constitution and our laws over any random idiot on Slashdot. SCOTUS is far from perfect--there are any number of cases that bear that out--but it's always hilarious the way bystanders (such as Slashdot posters) suddenly become Constitutional scholars whenever there's a Supreme Court decision they disagree with.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose they could do that, but then the user should be able to rate them negatively. Enough users give them a bad rating for being consistently out-of-stock, their listings will decline and sales will drop. Self-correcting, I would say.
Sellers and Amazon both have incentives to protect their reputations. Yeah, maybe some fly-by-night seller doesn't give a shit and is just trying to game the system, but then they aren't going to get positive ratings, either. If Amazon picks up on someone screwing with the pricing system and then not shipping to customers, they'd be foolish not to terminate them.
As always, the rule is "buyer beware." Does that seller have poor ratings or very few? Does the price seem unreasonably low? Does it say there are only a handful left in stock? Hmmm, choose carefully. You might want to move to another seller.
(Even if they pull the "out of stock" crap, you're still not out any money. As I said in my other reply, the only thing you're losing is time and possibly a price that was too good to be true in the first place.)
Sure, but nothing is perfect, and any sales done outside Amazon's system are not necessarily going to be reflected in real-time on Amazon's side.
Requiring the seller to honor an out-of-stock product at the stated price could easily be very onerous to the seller--what if there is no more stock to have, ever? This does happen.
The seller can either fulfill the order or cancel it with a refund. The buyer either gets the item or gets their money back, so I'm not sure where the harm is done to the buyer (other than wasting their time, I suppose.)
Amazon processes the payments and it's all done as one transaction: you say "I want to buy this item," Amazon shows you what you will be charged, you complete the transaction, done. The seller would only be able to reverse it (such as if they are out of stock), not initiate a new one or change the price after the fact.
There has to be a way to set a minimum price, otherwise this system is too dangerous for any seller to want to use.
Apart from making the requests slower, I agree with your suggestion. Allowing an infected computer to proceed without incident isn't something the FBI should've done. Getting those systems fixed ASAP--by letting the user know they were infected and how to remove it--should've been the priority.
The idea that hard work == material success is very Calvinist in origin--not a surprise that so many Americans buy into it unthinkingly. Calvinist doctrine and the Protestant work ethic are deeply-ingrained traits of our culture. It's a circular bit of logic born out of a belief in double predestination: God has elected who will go to heaven and who will go to hell; he blesses those who will go to heaven with material success; those people are successful because they worked hard and God rewarded them; therefore, they will go to heaven. This allows its adherents an airtight logic loop: people who are poor are being punished for not working hard enough, and God knew they wouldn't work hard enough to be successful, that's why they aren't among the Elect. The wealthy are so because God ordained them to be, because he knew they would work hard for it.
In this way, both the rich and poor divinely deserve their fates, which are simultaneously determined in advance and the result of free will (in your hard work/lack thereof.)
Most Americans never stop to think about it beyond the level of "hard work == success," but the theological beliefs underpinning it are pervasive.
Naturally, societies not poisoned by this Calvinist bullshit recognize that success and failure are a product of the circumstances of one's birth, upbringing, work habits, education (and access to it), healthcare (and access to it), and just plain dumb luck. How hard you work certainly plays into it, but it is not the sole factor, and often not even the most important factor. That's not an excuse to be a lazy ass, of course, but it's an acknowledgment that reality is not a black-and-white place where the good people are Christians who worked hard and got rich and the bad people are heathens who never did anything with their lives and remained poor.
I agree that they aren't wrong, but it's usually an indication that you can make them better/clearer. Again, it's a case where Word can only say "you might be able to improve this," but it certainly can't tell you how.
I was trying to draw a line between "this is what the words are" and "this is what the words mean." The latter is semantics. To date, we've not had a lot of progress in building systems that recognize the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences. There are so many basic assumptions built into our communications that we'd have to teach to a computer in order for it to understand.
There was an article (I think it was posted here) about some of Siri's shortcomings. Things like, "Where is Elvis buried?" The meaning of that sentence is obvious to most people (of a certain cultural background, that is) but it totally confused Siri: the program thought the user wanted to look up someone named "Elvis Buried."
In order to fully understand the question, it would need two separate pieces of knowledge that are not spelled out in the context of the question:
1. That there was a person colloquially known as "Elvis."
2. That people are often buried when they die.
A better-formulated question might be: "Where is Elvis Presley's grave located?" This makes it clear that the subject is a person and the desired information is the location of his grave site.
I'm not arguing that we can't built a semantic system for all of these things, just that it is a vast undertaking, and to date I do not believe there's been a lot of progress in it. I'm aware of the Cyc project, which is attempting to build a generalized expert system, but last I checked it still has a long way to go. Natural language processing, to the extent of determining the meaning of a construction of words, is still a hard problem.
You can thank Ronald Reagan for much of that sentiment: the idea that the government is incompetent at best, evil at worst. The federal income tax burden on someone making around minimum wage is not just non-existent, it's negative: the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable credit available to the poor, meaning they can get back more than they paid (and they often pay next to nothing.)
If they want to whine about something, maybe they should look at the regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the poor: gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and the like.
Americans benefit in a lot of ways from the various social programs we have. Food stamps, unemployment, Medicaid, Medicare, TANF, Social Security, etc. etc. The individual who never draws on any of these is a rare creature, indeed, perhaps even mythical. They are there in case you need them. Claims of fraud are generally exaggerated, except in Medicare, which has massive levels of fraud that somehow don't get talked about.
I've noticed that a lot of the "low tax, small government" conservatives are "pre-rich." They think they will be wealthy one day, and the thought of Uncle Sam taking a good chunk of it is horrifying to them. Never mind that if you are pulling down over a quarter million a year, you aren't going to miss a few tens of thousands. Well, maybe you'll have to settle for one Lexus instead of two?
Oddly enough, I make more money than the vast majority of people who spout such rubbish, and I never complain about paying my taxes, even though they are in the five figures per year. I value the services that the government provides to people less fortunate than me, because I value having a functional society and a government that respects and upholds the social contract. What disgusts me is our runaway defense spending--as if killing foreigners is more important than looking after our own people. It's curious how the same people who are against spending money on the poor and sick are nevertheless fine with dropping billions on boondoggle weapons systems and wars in the Middle East. Talk about fucked up priorities.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but... who gives a shit about startup times? Unless you are rebooting your system multiple times a day, how long it takes to start up is totally irrelevant. I would gladly sacrifice startup time in order to gain better application performance. Startup time strikes me as an easy-to-obtain but ultimately meaningless metric.
Few organizations are going to make that kind of investment. All they'll end up doing is running XP in a virtual machine and preserve their existing functionality.
I've used MS Word's grammar checking capabilities, and I agree that they can only be a supplement to someone who already has solid writing skills. It has prodded me to rewrite long sentences, fix subject-verb agreement, get rid of passive voice, other things of that nature. It's also caught my occasional typo and duplicate word--errors that are easy to skip over when you're re-reading your draft for the tenth time.
If someone is a poor writer in the first place, all the spelling- and grammar-checkers in the world won't fix that. They'll just paper over the more obvious defects. People should never, ever count on a software tool to fix their writing. It can only be a modestly-helpful guide, not a blunt tool to do the work for you. Natural language processing is just not very good. Even online translation tools do little more than find-and-replace words with their foreign language counterparts, then try to rearrange them into a grammar consistent with that language. You can usually get the general idea of the original text, but a human translation by someone fluent in both languages is almost always vastly superior. The bottom line is that computers are very bad at semantics, and even worse at "reading between the lines." This is not a fault of computers, either, but of software researchers and the industry as a whole.
Lay people often get the mistaken impression that because computers are now good at pattern recognition (picking out faces, analyzing voice samples into text, etc.) they are also good at figuring out the "meaning" of these things. They are not. Pattern recognition and semantics are totally different areas of research.
What are you, some kind of cradle-to-grave nanny-state Commie socialist? :-p
Really?
Well, it's funny how the Tea Party--which came pretty much out of nowhere--managed to seriously disrupt things in Washington, to the point that their own party can't control them. They held the economy hostage, deliberately hurt the US' credit rating, and have successfully kept Obama from accomplishing much of anything since taking office. Their fiscal hero, Paul Ryan, may even get his budget passed. They've also successfully dislodged numerous long-term incumbents, replacing them with more right-wing conservatives.
You can say what you want about them, but they've certainly made a big impact. (I don't like them at all, mind you.)
Of course, you could say that they were only successful because they were bankrolled by wealthy donors like the Koch brothers, and I really couldn't argue with that. But then that would point to the real problem in politics: change only happens when someone throws enough money at it. How much people "care" is totally irrelevant.
Where does it say that?
Yeah, Obama's had a frighteningly neocon foreign policy. There are things I like about him (and I'll still take him over Romney), but I'm under no illusions that he's some great American hero. He's ramped up the "war on terror" to a degree I don't think anyone expected. Sure, Republicans can't touch him on defense because of that, but making illegal drone strikes and assassinating American citizens are not what I thought I was getting when I voted for him.
I think you're dead-on about Romney. He's super rich. He has no idea what problems average Americans struggle with. He's tried his hand at the financial market, he's been a governor, so what now? A bored rich guy's gotta find a hobby. Why not be President? Ever notice how uncomfortable he looks when he has to hang around "normal" people? He has no clue how to relate to them. He doesn't understand why he has to do all this silly song-and-dance just to get a job he wants.
I've never gotten the impression he wants to be President because he truly cares about this country and its people. For all McCain's faults, I never doubted his motives--he clearly cares about this country, even if his actual policy ideas are no good. Romney just comes off as bored and aloof. Being President is just something for him to do, not something he's truly energized about or something he brings real policy ideas to.
He seems intent on spending his whole campaign attacking Obama rather than putting forth his own ideas. He has no vision.
You can't be for real. Income taxes are explicitly authorized by the 16th Amendment, and nowhere does it say they apply only to corporations.
And the Congress' power to tax is pretty broad. Deal with it.
The one really bad thing I learned about MA (on Slashdot, no less) is that health insurance coverage is obscenely expensive--potentially over $1000 a month for a family of four. Even with the higher income levels in MA, that sounds unaffordable to all but the wealthiest residents.
What the moon is made of is not a Constitutional question, so it's beside the point. I guess you can't make your case without using ridiculous examples, huh?
Deciding what is and is not Constitutional is, by definition, interpreting the Constitution, since the Constitution is short and vague and doesn't directly answer most questions before the Court. The Court has to read between the lines and balance against precedent to decide what may or may not be Constitutional. It's not like the Constitution says, "an individual mandate for health insurance is fine for Congress to require." Nor does it say, "women have the right to an abortion." It shouldn't say those things--it was written as a basic guideline that is simply too vague to have a clear answer to every question.
If it was obvious what is Constitutional and what isn't simply from reading the text, we wouldn't need SCOTUS at all. At a minimum, such questions wouldn't be so contentious since it would be "obvious" what the Constitution means.
Just because they aren't a representative sample doesn't mean they didn't come from the general population. Those are different distinctions.
Who decides what is Constitutional? The Supreme Court. By definition, if they say something is Constitutional, then it is. (They can also change their minds later--such is the nature of our system.)
Frankly, I'll take the judgment of 9 men and women who have dedicated their lives to the study and interpretation of the Constitution and our laws over any random idiot on Slashdot. SCOTUS is far from perfect--there are any number of cases that bear that out--but it's always hilarious the way bystanders (such as Slashdot posters) suddenly become Constitutional scholars whenever there's a Supreme Court decision they disagree with.
There is certainly a law of diminishing returns on mass murder, isn't there?
Around here, it can be difficult to tell.
Are you mentally challenged?