There's a lot of precedent on this. I think the term for a telco in this context is a "clear channel" provider or something like that. Basically, they do not provide any sort of editorial or policing on their traffic. If you pay your bill and there's no legal reason to block a given call, you can make the call.
I don't know how CraigsList is edited, but if there is any staff dedicating any time whatsoever--even seconds per month--to editing community messages, then they move from being "clear channel" providers to "publishers" or some such, and they are responsible for content.
Expecting your date to put out because you bought her a nice dinner is OK
Nah, actually, it's not. In fact, it's kind of sad. If all it takes is a dinner--even a nice dinner--then why would she put out for you? Your employer gave you the money to spend on it, and they got that money from their customers. The chefs cooked it and the wait staff served it. You're just a cog; a replaceable middleman in the transaction. And apparently, not a very exciting one if the reason you think you're getting laid is because you have a little scratch to spend.
And now, looking at my logic, I'm thinking that it's not at least one case, it's only one case. Once the sample size is greater than the number of wins required in a row, the line flattens. For N coin tosses, the chances of winning T tosses in a row will always be 1/2^T, regardless of the size of N as long as N>T.
And N>T is such an obvious assumption that I feel that my previous post, which I thought was insightful at the time, is not really all that great. Sorry for adding to the noise.
The length of a "lucky run" is independent of the size of the data set.
Not entirely true. If the data set is 10 events (i.e. coin tosses), it's impossible for someone to have a lucky run of 20 events. If the data set is 50 events, 20 events, while improbable (I'm not sure how to calculate it, but it's at least 1/2^20) is certainly possible. 1/2^20 is greater than zero, so the likelihood for a given run does change with the size of the data set. Not significantly, but it does change.
I was going to suggest that it's 30/2^20, as there are 30 chances to start a 20-win run in a fifty-event data set, but that's clearly wrong because if that were true, a large enough data set would guarantee a 20-win run, which just isn't correct when considering independent random variables.
Overall, your comment is correct and insightful, but there is at least one case where the size of the data set does matter.
Yay! Good job blaming the victim!! Maybe they should make it so that if anyone identifies themselves as being anything but straight, male, white and christian they can be banned!
There are two problems here. One is the harassment from idiots, and MS should indeed take a strong stance on that behavior. The other is that instead of doing what they should and punishing those who are doing the harassment, they are banning the people who are being harassed.
It's pretty clear what the reasoning is: their target market is maladjusted tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings. If they banned all of the people who were acting out, they'd lose a lot more money than if they ban the people who the jerks are going after.
If they don't want people to post anything personal in their profiles, they should eliminate the profiles. If they don't want people to have the letters 'G-A-Y' in their names, they should auto-create names when people create accounts. This sort of activity is a travesty, and blaming the victim is, to put it mildly, is un-evolved thinking.
I absolutely agree. I sort of meant for that to be an implication in my use of "pre-empt". To wit, while they are a dominant player, they are not a monopoly, meaning that they are not the only option for search or advertising, or any of the other services they offer.
They are indeed the dominant player, but that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. If they were the "only" solution for anything they do, we could have a different conversation, but they're not.
So my use of "pre-empt" was intended to imply that if they started breaking up the company into individual units that provide the different services that they offer--search, advertising, email, cloud infrastructure, etc--and offered those services to each other at the same rates that they offer them to other consumers and corporations, then nobody could ever claim that they are a monopoly.
I think the main reason they would never do that, though, is not because they couldn't compete--I'm sure they could--but because it would make it harder for them to have a privacy policy that would allow them to gather the sort of analytics data among all their services and still have anyone willing to sign off on it. Basically, if you use Gmail and Gdocs, you know they're sharing data. But if those were two separate companies and they were both using Ganalytics, and Ganalytics was cross-sharing the application use data, that would be a little hard to swallow.
Wouldn't it be funny, though, if Google pre-empted this whole conversation by spinning off their advertising business into its own separate company, and then allowing other companies (i.e. MS and Yahoo) to bid on providing ads for the ad space on Google's site.
They could bill the Adsense for resources using the model that they have in the AppEngine service, and using historical Adsense revenue information, set a standard for how much they should be receiving from other ad systems.
Other ad vendors should be careful what they ask for. It may be that, with the volume of activity on Google's pages, they end up making Google much, much richer.
Those are good, but I actually like the connotations of "kick-start", which implies a lack of good battery technology at this time. That's what kick-starting is for, y'know?
I'm clearly not a lawyer, but I actually thought that in a lot of cases, where there was not clearance, news organizations were not allowed to report on the identity of a minor who had been arrested for something. Unless the parents cleared it or unless they were being tried as an adult, I thought they were protected.
Never having done anything to land me in court except for a minor traffic offense when I was 19, I don't know the details for sure, but it seems to me that if they claim to seal a minor's record when they turn 18, it doesn't do a huge amount of good if everything was covered in the news...
Hah! 1,180,000 is nothing! Try 7,390,000 for my full first, middle initial and last name in quotes. Suddenly I feel far less special than I ever have...
Unless your name is really unusual and/or the town in question is teeny-tiny, most recruiters would first consider that it's a coincidence and, if they felt it necessary, they'd check further with regards to it, and probably communicate with you on the process.
These days, most big organizations require a background check anyway, and if the person in the blog had been convicted, that would show up in the record. Of course, if they weren't convicted, or if they were a minor at the time, the blogger might have to remove their post, as there may be legal repercussions for posting potentially libelous commentary and/or information about a minor which may be protected.
Too true. Funny how those arguments ignore the other possibility: charging based on usage rather than on what the data is used for. If I'm pushing 60 GB a month for video conferencing, I should be paying the same amount as someone who's pushing 60 GB in email or 60 GB in p2p linux distros, not more, not less because it's video.
For crying out loud, it's ones and zeroes! OK, deep breath...
It's also said that George Washington lost every battle, but clearly won the American revolution.
On the flip side, freako right-wingers have been known to defend our status at the end of the Vietnam war by exclaiming, "How can you say we lost? We did not lose a single battle!"
Your (and Sun Tzu's) points are right on. The GP is either a troll, a kid, or just does not have very good perspective on these issues.
Let's try one more tack on this: Google isn't axing anyone's rights; they're simply giving you software whose functionality may not be acceptable to you. You're not forced to use anything that they produce.
If they had a government-enforced monopoly on mapping software, then yes, I would think that the gov't should limit their rights, but even in that case, some well-meaning bureaucrat might think that an auto-update agent is a good thing, considering how much software needs to be updated these days to avoid bugs and security issues.
I'm as liberal as they come, but I actually think it's a little reactionary to bring in the government at this point. People should do two things:
Not use the software
Tell Google why they're not using the software.
That's worked in the past; I'm sure it'll work again in the future, until and unless Google turns into another Microsoft. By my reckoning, that has not yet happened.
I actually think your wording would be better and more honest. Add to that something saying that by using the service you are agreeing not to use information that may be available to you regarding other users' activities for nefarious purposes would be good. Naive, maybe, but better than what I see here.
Over the years, I've named my machines Jazz, Blues, Fusion, HipHop, Rockabilly, and my new iPod touch is named Reggae.
At one place I worked, we named our servers after AI characters from movies. I knew I finally had some clout when I got to choose the names for a handful of new ones we got in. I named them Rachel, Zora, Pris, Leon, Roy and Deckard, that group, of course, being a sub-theme (one of my fave movies) within the theme.
Slashdot Mirror
Grrr. Thanks. I'm clearly getting old.
There's a lot of precedent on this. I think the term for a telco in this context is a "clear channel" provider or something like that. Basically, they do not provide any sort of editorial or policing on their traffic. If you pay your bill and there's no legal reason to block a given call, you can make the call.
I don't know how CraigsList is edited, but if there is any staff dedicating any time whatsoever--even seconds per month--to editing community messages, then they move from being "clear channel" providers to "publishers" or some such, and they are responsible for content.
One more 'm', and that would have been funny.
Expecting your date to put out because you bought her a nice dinner is OK
Nah, actually, it's not. In fact, it's kind of sad. If all it takes is a dinner--even a nice dinner--then why would she put out for you? Your employer gave you the money to spend on it, and they got that money from their customers. The chefs cooked it and the wait staff served it. You're just a cog; a replaceable middleman in the transaction. And apparently, not a very exciting one if the reason you think you're getting laid is because you have a little scratch to spend.
And now, looking at my logic, I'm thinking that it's not at least one case, it's only one case. Once the sample size is greater than the number of wins required in a row, the line flattens. For N coin tosses, the chances of winning T tosses in a row will always be 1/2^T, regardless of the size of N as long as N>T.
And N>T is such an obvious assumption that I feel that my previous post, which I thought was insightful at the time, is not really all that great. Sorry for adding to the noise.
The length of a "lucky run" is independent of the size of the data set.
Not entirely true. If the data set is 10 events (i.e. coin tosses), it's impossible for someone to have a lucky run of 20 events. If the data set is 50 events, 20 events, while improbable (I'm not sure how to calculate it, but it's at least 1/2^20) is certainly possible. 1/2^20 is greater than zero, so the likelihood for a given run does change with the size of the data set. Not significantly, but it does change.
I was going to suggest that it's 30/2^20, as there are 30 chances to start a 20-win run in a fifty-event data set, but that's clearly wrong because if that were true, a large enough data set would guarantee a 20-win run, which just isn't correct when considering independent random variables.
Overall, your comment is correct and insightful, but there is at least one case where the size of the data set does matter.
Exactly. Or failing that, let nobody be themselves rather than discriminating arbitrarily. I mean, really, haven't we learned these lessons yet?
Probably not, but it means that you are staight or bi
...or closeted.
Yay! Good job blaming the victim!! Maybe they should make it so that if anyone identifies themselves as being anything but straight, male, white and christian they can be banned!
There are two problems here. One is the harassment from idiots, and MS should indeed take a strong stance on that behavior. The other is that instead of doing what they should and punishing those who are doing the harassment, they are banning the people who are being harassed.
It's pretty clear what the reasoning is: their target market is maladjusted tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings. If they banned all of the people who were acting out, they'd lose a lot more money than if they ban the people who the jerks are going after.
If they don't want people to post anything personal in their profiles, they should eliminate the profiles. If they don't want people to have the letters 'G-A-Y' in their names, they should auto-create names when people create accounts. This sort of activity is a travesty, and blaming the victim is, to put it mildly, is un-evolved thinking.
AP = Associated Press, the biggest, baddest news syndicate out there.
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
I absolutely agree. I sort of meant for that to be an implication in my use of "pre-empt". To wit, while they are a dominant player, they are not a monopoly, meaning that they are not the only option for search or advertising, or any of the other services they offer.
They are indeed the dominant player, but that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. If they were the "only" solution for anything they do, we could have a different conversation, but they're not.
So my use of "pre-empt" was intended to imply that if they started breaking up the company into individual units that provide the different services that they offer--search, advertising, email, cloud infrastructure, etc--and offered those services to each other at the same rates that they offer them to other consumers and corporations, then nobody could ever claim that they are a monopoly.
I think the main reason they would never do that, though, is not because they couldn't compete--I'm sure they could--but because it would make it harder for them to have a privacy policy that would allow them to gather the sort of analytics data among all their services and still have anyone willing to sign off on it. Basically, if you use Gmail and Gdocs, you know they're sharing data. But if those were two separate companies and they were both using Ganalytics, and Ganalytics was cross-sharing the application use data, that would be a little hard to swallow.
Wouldn't it be funny, though, if Google pre-empted this whole conversation by spinning off their advertising business into its own separate company, and then allowing other companies (i.e. MS and Yahoo) to bid on providing ads for the ad space on Google's site.
They could bill the Adsense for resources using the model that they have in the AppEngine service, and using historical Adsense revenue information, set a standard for how much they should be receiving from other ad systems.
Other ad vendors should be careful what they ask for. It may be that, with the volume of activity on Google's pages, they end up making Google much, much richer.
Those are good, but I actually like the connotations of "kick-start", which implies a lack of good battery technology at this time. That's what kick-starting is for, y'know?
I'm clearly not a lawyer, but I actually thought that in a lot of cases, where there was not clearance, news organizations were not allowed to report on the identity of a minor who had been arrested for something. Unless the parents cleared it or unless they were being tried as an adult, I thought they were protected.
Never having done anything to land me in court except for a minor traffic offense when I was 19, I don't know the details for sure, but it seems to me that if they claim to seal a minor's record when they turn 18, it doesn't do a huge amount of good if everything was covered in the news...
Hah! 1,180,000 is nothing! Try 7,390,000 for my full first, middle initial and last name in quotes. Suddenly I feel far less special than I ever have...
Unless your name is really unusual and/or the town in question is teeny-tiny, most recruiters would first consider that it's a coincidence and, if they felt it necessary, they'd check further with regards to it, and probably communicate with you on the process.
These days, most big organizations require a background check anyway, and if the person in the blog had been convicted, that would show up in the record. Of course, if they weren't convicted, or if they were a minor at the time, the blogger might have to remove their post, as there may be legal repercussions for posting potentially libelous commentary and/or information about a minor which may be protected.
For the record, I like my apple tv. I just can't wait for them to add a browser so I can access Hulu with it...
On the flip side, when I wrote mine, I added...
26. I sometimes don't know when to stop.
Too true. Funny how those arguments ignore the other possibility: charging based on usage rather than on what the data is used for. If I'm pushing 60 GB a month for video conferencing, I should be paying the same amount as someone who's pushing 60 GB in email or 60 GB in p2p linux distros, not more, not less because it's video.
For crying out loud, it's ones and zeroes! OK, deep breath...
It's also said that George Washington lost every battle, but clearly won the American revolution.
On the flip side, freako right-wingers have been known to defend our status at the end of the Vietnam war by exclaiming, "How can you say we lost? We did not lose a single battle!"
Your (and Sun Tzu's) points are right on. The GP is either a troll, a kid, or just does not have very good perspective on these issues.
If they had a government-enforced monopoly on mapping software, then yes, I would think that the gov't should limit their rights, but even in that case, some well-meaning bureaucrat might think that an auto-update agent is a good thing, considering how much software needs to be updated these days to avoid bugs and security issues.
I'm as liberal as they come, but I actually think it's a little reactionary to bring in the government at this point. People should do two things:
That's worked in the past; I'm sure it'll work again in the future, until and unless Google turns into another Microsoft. By my reckoning, that has not yet happened.
I actually think your wording would be better and more honest. Add to that something saying that by using the service you are agreeing not to use information that may be available to you regarding other users' activities for nefarious purposes would be good. Naive, maybe, but better than what I see here.
Or maybe it could have been, "Have it smaller." I wonder if we'll ever know.
Over the years, I've named my machines Jazz, Blues, Fusion, HipHop, Rockabilly, and my new iPod touch is named Reggae.
At one place I worked, we named our servers after AI characters from movies. I knew I finally had some clout when I got to choose the names for a handful of new ones we got in. I named them Rachel, Zora, Pris, Leon, Roy and Deckard, that group, of course, being a sub-theme (one of my fave movies) within the theme.
Except that Windows 95 really DID come out in 1995. August 24, 1995, to be exact.
Me wrong? That's unpossible!