"that there is little investigative journalism in the US media."
After the football game, I watched 60 Minutes for a while. Andy Rooney traded in his car for $10,000. For a lark, they tracked down where it ended up. They were curious to see if anyone would misrepresent it in any way. What did they find? Nothing of course. That's the problem with investigative journalism: most of the time, the investigation fizzles. It is much higher profit to go with guaranteed stories, like celebrity interviews. Since the celebrity wants publicity, they are willing to "spice up" the story.
Those being investigated aren't nearly as accomodating. Remember when ABC demonstrated that ABC employees could stock an expired food item on a shelf (contrary to the manager's direct orders), another ABC employee could put it in the shopping cart before the manager saw, and a third ABC employee could ring up the item and charge the other ABC employee for it! Food Lion was a bit miffed at that particular staged piece of "investigative journalism." Now, why did ABC employees do that? Because they didn't observe any actual problems. They had to stage something to justify spending all that salaried time at the Food Lion. "We checked and couldn't find any actual violations" just doesn't have the same ring to it. They even had accusing witnesses (not like a random spot check).
If you want to fix investigative journalism, fix the "there ain't no money in it problem."
I have code (a modified version of osCommerce) to run the website if you can talk a grocer into it. Have you considered substituting a printout and a pencil for the LCD screen on the cart? Or just having the grocer package everything for you? Either would be easier.
Do they have scales in the shopping carts as well?
The way the self checkout lines work at the local grocery is they weigh the bag as you put products in it. Sometimes, it will make you take the item out of the bag and rescan. Not sure if they cross reference the correct item weight with the measured weight.
"Please tell me you aren't a citizen of the United States. If you are, and you don't even know the general principles of the constitution, then you have had a shockingly bad education. The system meant to teach you has failed you and your country, and you have failed yourself for not learning the ideological foundations of your own country."
Back at you, boss. Back at you.
Anyone who can be fooled by some yahoos calling themselves "the press" to claim that the right to use a *printing* press really refers to them is clearly the result of a failed education. If I legally changed my name to "speech" would that be a get out of jail free card? It's right in the constitution! Freedom of speech!
A press is a machine used for printing materials. "Freedom of the press" is literally the freedom to print things. There is no freedom of "reporting." Reporters were not called "the press" when the constitution was written. This profession is no more constitutionally protected than Jon Stewart's.
"The heart of the difference is that Carlson et al. are practitioners of the only profession which is explicitly protected in a constitutional amendment."
A 160 year MTBF is saying something along the lines that if you have 32 drives, chances are that only one will fail within 5 years (assuming 5 years is the service life of the machine). It says *NOTHING* about the durability of the device after the five years.
I'm not disagreeing with your talk about marketing. Note that one can increase MTBF very simply: *reduce* the service life. Since drives presumably fail more often at the end of their service life, this will increase the MTBF. For example, the same drive with a service life of 4 years (rather than 5) might have a MTBF of 256 years. This would mean that if you have 64 drives, on average, one will fail in the four year period.
Anyway, the point is that MTBF has nothing to do with how long the hardware lasts. It only tells you how likely the hardware is to fail within its service lifetime. In fact, since reducing a products service life tends to increase its MTBF, it is likely that the products with the highest MTBF will have the shortest service lives. Is this misleading? Sure. However, if you are purchasing something like this, shouldn't you take the time to learn what the numbers mean?
Note: I made up all numbers except the 160 years. The others should be mathematically consistent but will only coincidentally share values with the real numbers.
"...Seagate extending their warranty coverage to something like 5 years? Maybe this is a sign that I just had bad luck with my drives..."
Actually, I would see that as indicating the opposite: they weren't getting the reliability for which they were known, so they had to extend the warranty to compensate.
"You are trying to make the argument that companies selling consumer products should not try to please consumers?"
Err...no. The point was that the Japanese division is releasing the product in Japan to best serve that market. If Japan has multiple standards for Wi-Fi, it would make *NO* sense to lock the product into a single standard and close out the others. The PDA does support Wi-Fi; it just doesn't include Wi-Fi.
A further point was that most Japanese electronics companies release in Japan well before releasing in the US. It seems that they find it easier to develop for the Japanese speaking market. Further, the Japanese market for tiny electronics is better than the American market. If it takes off in Japan, they can always release in the US. If it doesn't, there isn't much point to releasing in the US; the Japanese market is better (and less saturated with Palms and WinCE devices).
Finally, what evidence do you have that the US wants a Linux based PDA? Other than the geek factor, why is a Linux PDA better than a PalmOS PDA?
Costco is again not a competitor of Wal-Mart per se; Costco competes with Sam's Club. Wal-Mart competes with places like K-Mart. There are several positions in retail (in order of pay): cashier, stock, production, sales. Notice that Wal-Mart only does the first two. Other retail organizations have different mixes:
retail chains (e.g. Wal-Mart and K-Mart): cashiers, stock
warehouse clubs (e.g. Sam's Club and Costco): fewer cashiers, more stock
Delis: cashiers, production
Boutiques/Furniture/appliance stores: sales
I suspect that you will also find that the better paying stores also have a higher margin of profit. That's why they pay for the more expensive personnel.
"The outlook on employees is also entirely different in a small business versus a large corporation."
Small businesses also view employees as an expense. Further, in my experience, a small business is far more likely to view a customer as replaceable than is a large business. Small businesses have a much greater ability to replace customers. I have worked for both local pizza shops and chains (Pizza Hut and Little Caesar's); the local shops were far more willing to tell a troublesome customer to go away.
The problem with the Berkeley study is that it unfairly targets Wal-Mart for something that is true of all chain retailers. Have you ever been to a K-Mart, an Ames (now bankrupt), or a Krogers? They too pay minimum wage and hire all part time (no benefits) workers. It's like saying McDonalds is bad because it doesn't pay as much as a four star restaurant.
Another problem with the Berkeley study is that it assumes that all Wal-Mart employees do not get health insurance through parents, spouses, or other employers. The actual results are likely to be much smaller.
I lived on my own and paid my way through college without family assistance. I was working at a job at close to the minimum wage throughout. It is not impossible.
The other thing is that Walmart's chief competition, K-Mart, Krogers, etc., are all pretty much the same as they are. Yes, they also compete with hardware stores, etc., but their main competition is the other discount stores. For that matter, how many local hardware stores pay health care benefits, etc.? Small businesses are notoriously bad about purchasing health care benefits.
The main difference that I have found between a retail chain like Walmart and better paying stores is that the employees of the retail chains don't get paid commission and don't spend all their time trying to sell you the most expensive product. Instead, they concentrate on stocking the shelves. Now, if you want to have your hand held while you purchase, you should go to a specialty store and pay their premium. Just don't tell me that I should.
"In many Asian countries, the mentality is to work as a group, rather than individually, with the individual sacrificing themselves for the group if necessary."
But that isn't what this system does. Individuals do not sacrifice themselves for the good of the group; the group sacrifices itself to build up individuals. It is more like a feudal joust. If the king enters, all his opponents withdraw, making him the defacto winner.
"How about behaving like a member of such a team, but then double-cross them later?"
But you don't have to double-cross them. They double-cross themselves. The whole point of the exercise is to give the master program a perfect score. If you just pretend to be a master, they will try to give you a perfect score. On average, a member of the team will do less well than a non-member; it's just that some members will get perfectly good scores and other members will get perfectly bad scores. If you pretend to be a member, they will help you without ever expecting you to help them.
No, there are four situations in the prisoner's dilemma:
Neither confess I confess, you don't You confess, I don't Both confess
The way that the dilemma works is that each of us is personally better off if we confess. Thus, the greedy solution is that we both confess. The point of omerta is to move us into the neither confess section. In neither confess, both are better off than both confess.
The way that this program works is that it picks one to confess and the other not to confess. This is obviously stupid for the one who does not confess. Since this is a program though, you can get the program to behave that way.
It is the rough equivalent of playing chess by controlling both sides. If you do, it is possible for black to checkmate in two moves. However, this would never happen in a real chess match, because no one would actually make the two stupid moves by white.
"The authoritative version of the data is the human-readable portion of the printed ballot, so in that sense "whatever will be reading the ballot" *does* verify that it reads the way it should.."
That doesn't guarantee that the official reader will read the ballot in the same way as the voter did. For example, the hanging chad issue was one where the voter thought the vote was going to be recorded in a certain way, but the actual vote was discarded as unreadable. "Human readable" is very vague. The main problem is that the voter knows what they want it to say and will just look for something that matches. The vote recorders are looking for a positive choice. The way to make sure that both are on the same page is to use feedback. Without that feedback, there will be confusion and discarded ballots.
"So a bit like mouse gestures are a plug-in to firefox?"
No, more like how you can purchase ExamDiff to compare two web pages line by line or character by character.
Mouse Gestures is a plug-in that one can get for FireFox for free. Acrobat's PDF printer driver is a commercial piece of software that is completely unrelated to Microsoft Word.
Slashdot Mirror
"that there is little investigative journalism in the US media."
After the football game, I watched 60 Minutes for a while. Andy Rooney traded in his car for $10,000. For a lark, they tracked down where it ended up. They were curious to see if anyone would misrepresent it in any way. What did they find? Nothing of course. That's the problem with investigative journalism: most of the time, the investigation fizzles. It is much higher profit to go with guaranteed stories, like celebrity interviews. Since the celebrity wants publicity, they are willing to "spice up" the story.
Those being investigated aren't nearly as accomodating. Remember when ABC demonstrated that ABC employees could stock an expired food item on a shelf (contrary to the manager's direct orders), another ABC employee could put it in the shopping cart before the manager saw, and a third ABC employee could ring up the item and charge the other ABC employee for it! Food Lion was a bit miffed at that particular staged piece of "investigative journalism." Now, why did ABC employees do that? Because they didn't observe any actual problems. They had to stage something to justify spending all that salaried time at the Food Lion. "We checked and couldn't find any actual violations" just doesn't have the same ring to it. They even had accusing witnesses (not like a random spot check).
If you want to fix investigative journalism, fix the "there ain't no money in it problem."
"have they patented the 'look and feel' - which cannot be patented (to the best of my knowledge)?"
What's a design patent do then?
Note: I don't know the answer. I just assumed from the name that design patents cover look and feel kind of stuff.
I have code (a modified version of osCommerce) to run the website if you can talk a grocer into it. Have you considered substituting a printout and a pencil for the LCD screen on the cart? Or just having the grocer package everything for you? Either would be easier.
Do they have scales in the shopping carts as well?
The way the self checkout lines work at the local grocery is they weigh the bag as you put products in it. Sometimes, it will make you take the item out of the bag and rescan. Not sure if they cross reference the correct item weight with the measured weight.
"Please tell me you aren't a citizen of the United States. If you are, and you don't even know the general principles of the constitution, then you have had a shockingly bad education. The system meant to teach you has failed you and your country, and you have failed yourself for not learning the ideological foundations of your own country."
Back at you, boss. Back at you.
Anyone who can be fooled by some yahoos calling themselves "the press" to claim that the right to use a *printing* press really refers to them is clearly the result of a failed education. If I legally changed my name to "speech" would that be a get out of jail free card? It's right in the constitution! Freedom of speech!
"freedom of the press"
A press is a machine used for printing materials. "Freedom of the press" is literally the freedom to print things. There is no freedom of "reporting." Reporters were not called "the press" when the constitution was written. This profession is no more constitutionally protected than Jon Stewart's.
"How is this man -- who has never worked outside of comedy -- going to critique actual journalists, and get taken seriously?"
By pointing out that his comedy show has more credibility than their "news" show? At least, that's how he *did* it.
"The heart of the difference is that Carlson et al. are practitioners of the only profession which is explicitly protected in a constitutional amendment."
Really? Which one (amendment and profession)?
"I lean to the right, and I've been repeating both of those to countless people over the last few months."
And you notice something? No one's putting you on Crossfire.
"It's kinda sleazy to expect people to take you seriously one moment"
When does Jon Stewart ever expect people to take him seriously?
"Uh... What have I misconceived, exactly?"
A 160 year MTBF is saying something along the lines that if you have 32 drives, chances are that only one will fail within 5 years (assuming 5 years is the service life of the machine). It says *NOTHING* about the durability of the device after the five years.
I'm not disagreeing with your talk about marketing. Note that one can increase MTBF very simply: *reduce* the service life. Since drives presumably fail more often at the end of their service life, this will increase the MTBF. For example, the same drive with a service life of 4 years (rather than 5) might have a MTBF of 256 years. This would mean that if you have 64 drives, on average, one will fail in the four year period.
Anyway, the point is that MTBF has nothing to do with how long the hardware lasts. It only tells you how likely the hardware is to fail within its service lifetime. In fact, since reducing a products service life tends to increase its MTBF, it is likely that the products with the highest MTBF will have the shortest service lives. Is this misleading? Sure. However, if you are purchasing something like this, shouldn't you take the time to learn what the numbers mean?
Note: I made up all numbers except the 160 years. The others should be mathematically consistent but will only coincidentally share values with the real numbers.
"...Seagate extending their warranty coverage to something like 5 years? Maybe this is a sign that I just had bad luck with my drives..."
Actually, I would see that as indicating the opposite: they weren't getting the reliability for which they were known, so they had to extend the warranty to compensate.
"You are trying to make the argument that companies selling consumer products should not try to please consumers?"
Err...no. The point was that the Japanese division is releasing the product in Japan to best serve that market. If Japan has multiple standards for Wi-Fi, it would make *NO* sense to lock the product into a single standard and close out the others. The PDA does support Wi-Fi; it just doesn't include Wi-Fi.
A further point was that most Japanese electronics companies release in Japan well before releasing in the US. It seems that they find it easier to develop for the Japanese speaking market. Further, the Japanese market for tiny electronics is better than the American market. If it takes off in Japan, they can always release in the US. If it doesn't, there isn't much point to releasing in the US; the Japanese market is better (and less saturated with Palms and WinCE devices).
Finally, what evidence do you have that the US wants a Linux based PDA? Other than the geek factor, why is a Linux PDA better than a PalmOS PDA?
Costco is again not a competitor of Wal-Mart per se; Costco competes with Sam's Club. Wal-Mart competes with places like K-Mart. There are several positions in retail (in order of pay): cashier, stock, production, sales. Notice that Wal-Mart only does the first two. Other retail organizations have different mixes:
retail chains (e.g. Wal-Mart and K-Mart): cashiers, stock
warehouse clubs (e.g. Sam's Club and Costco): fewer cashiers, more stock
Delis: cashiers, production
Boutiques/Furniture/appliance stores: sales
I suspect that you will also find that the better paying stores also have a higher margin of profit. That's why they pay for the more expensive personnel.
"The outlook on employees is also entirely different in a small business versus a large corporation."
Small businesses also view employees as an expense. Further, in my experience, a small business is far more likely to view a customer as replaceable than is a large business. Small businesses have a much greater ability to replace customers. I have worked for both local pizza shops and chains (Pizza Hut and Little Caesar's); the local shops were far more willing to tell a troublesome customer to go away.
Not 99% of the population: 20%. Further, no one is claiming that CD sales will drop by 20%. Even 5% or 10% would be plenty.
The problem with the Berkeley study is that it unfairly targets Wal-Mart for something that is true of all chain retailers. Have you ever been to a K-Mart, an Ames (now bankrupt), or a Krogers? They too pay minimum wage and hire all part time (no benefits) workers. It's like saying McDonalds is bad because it doesn't pay as much as a four star restaurant.
Another problem with the Berkeley study is that it assumes that all Wal-Mart employees do not get health insurance through parents, spouses, or other employers. The actual results are likely to be much smaller.
I lived on my own and paid my way through college without family assistance. I was working at a job at close to the minimum wage throughout. It is not impossible.
The other thing is that Walmart's chief competition, K-Mart, Krogers, etc., are all pretty much the same as they are. Yes, they also compete with hardware stores, etc., but their main competition is the other discount stores. For that matter, how many local hardware stores pay health care benefits, etc.? Small businesses are notoriously bad about purchasing health care benefits.
The main difference that I have found between a retail chain like Walmart and better paying stores is that the employees of the retail chains don't get paid commission and don't spend all their time trying to sell you the most expensive product. Instead, they concentrate on stocking the shelves. Now, if you want to have your hand held while you purchase, you should go to a specialty store and pay their premium. Just don't tell me that I should.
"In many Asian countries, the mentality is to work as a group, rather than individually, with the individual sacrificing themselves for the group if necessary."
But that isn't what this system does. Individuals do not sacrifice themselves for the good of the group; the group sacrifices itself to build up individuals. It is more like a feudal joust. If the king enters, all his opponents withdraw, making him the defacto winner.
"How about behaving like a member of such a team, but then double-cross them later?"
But you don't have to double-cross them. They double-cross themselves. The whole point of the exercise is to give the master program a perfect score. If you just pretend to be a master, they will try to give you a perfect score. On average, a member of the team will do less well than a non-member; it's just that some members will get perfectly good scores and other members will get perfectly bad scores. If you pretend to be a member, they will help you without ever expecting you to help them.
No, there are four situations in the prisoner's dilemma:
Neither confess
I confess, you don't
You confess, I don't
Both confess
The way that the dilemma works is that each of us is personally better off if we confess. Thus, the greedy solution is that we both confess. The point of omerta is to move us into the neither confess section. In neither confess, both are better off than both confess.
The way that this program works is that it picks one to confess and the other not to confess. This is obviously stupid for the one who does not confess. Since this is a program though, you can get the program to behave that way.
It is the rough equivalent of playing chess by controlling both sides. If you do, it is possible for black to checkmate in two moves. However, this would never happen in a real chess match, because no one would actually make the two stupid moves by white.
"The authoritative version of the data is the human-readable portion of the printed ballot, so in that sense "whatever will be reading the ballot" *does* verify that it reads the way it should.."
That doesn't guarantee that the official reader will read the ballot in the same way as the voter did. For example, the hanging chad issue was one where the voter thought the vote was going to be recorded in a certain way, but the actual vote was discarded as unreadable. "Human readable" is very vague. The main problem is that the voter knows what they want it to say and will just look for something that matches. The vote recorders are looking for a positive choice. The way to make sure that both are on the same page is to use feedback. Without that feedback, there will be confusion and discarded ballots.
"Vote Kerry in 2004! Get your civil rights back!"
Is Kerry opposed to this? Remember that Bush was the one who was opposed to a separate office of Homeland Security. Kerry was for it prior to Bush.
"So a bit like mouse gestures are a plug-in to firefox?"
No, more like how you can purchase ExamDiff to compare two web pages line by line or character by character.
Mouse Gestures is a plug-in that one can get for FireFox for free. Acrobat's PDF printer driver is a commercial piece of software that is completely unrelated to Microsoft Word.