You're running a difficult line here if you support this move. A bill such as this would essentially grant the government the power to regulate some things it has no business regulating.
Consider that all "porn" is moved to.xxx. Who decides what's porn and what isn't? Is a movie site for an R-rated movie relegated there? How about my 2TB archive of incredibly disturbing homemade movies I want to give away for free? According to a strict reading of the bill, the former must have an.xxx TLD while the latter can be powerrangres.com.
And once we've partitioned up the internet, what's to say that ISPs can't decide to block all access to these sites for its customers? This may not be a big deal, but what happens when we propose another bill to create a.anti-us TLD for unamerican sites and.heathen for non-christians? And by this day and age, WalMartISP will of course block domains that don't support family values...
So perhaps my tinfoil hat's showing a bit, but this doesn't seem far from some pretty serious censorship waiting to be applied "by choice".
it may have just been a better song, or appealed more to the masses.
While that makes sense to common people, that sentiment has no place in current business.
Does Kraft make "better" cheese? Or Coke "better" cola? Do these products inherently appeal to the masses? There's certainly something to be said for focus groups determining that people won't buy Full Contact Croquet, but by and large the RIAA is looking at music as a consumable that needs to be administered to the masses. Songs have little intrinsic value. If we play "My Humps" on the radio enough and put Fergie's ass on the television, people will pay for the song. The fact that it outsells [insert underrated, fantastic artist here] is a direct result of marketing strategy, and very little else.
A broader choice, and worse, the ability to listen to other bands before paying for them, reduces the cost to the consumer to deviate from the RIAA's plan. Historically, music labels have been the filter to bring the "best" musicians to the consumers. Now, we're finding better ways to do this, and this evolution threatens their revenue stream. The real threat is not pirating the deemed-popular songs, but a realization at some point that I like different things than some people and similar things to other people, and my choices may not fall into one of the four profitable genres. Once I can send my money to the people that produce music I like in return for the music, the RIAA loses out. This will happen, and sooner rather than later.
I don't think a state's entire college has voted against the popular vote recently, but you definitely have faithless electors here and there. Most often it's a mistake, and it's never made a difference.
If I recall correctly there was something that we do instinctively which is inhibited by the alcohol which causes much more danger. This is why the sober driver is less likely to survive.
This is definitely part of it. I believe the study I recall was with regard to pedestrians being hit by a car-- that drunks tended to relax and roll off the hood while sober people stood their ground and got broken in half. This is of course generalization, but the end result was that drunk people had generally less severe injuries given a speed of impact.
I would think that fatalities in accidents would have more to do with who hit whom. It seems likely that drunk people would more likely be the striking car, and in a case where one car is hit from the side, the person with the forward-acting seatbelt, airbag, and crumple zone in front of them would have a much higher survival rate.
And then there is of course the pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorcyclist hit by the drunken driver. Not much of a contest there.
despite being a trained musician, I don't hear much difference.
A-ha! So you say you can't see the emporer's clothes?
Seriously, though, I'm in agreement. As was mentioned earlier, with sufficiently high bitrate, there's not much difference. The problem is, on certain songs or during certain passages there's a huge difference. Variable bitrate formats try to compensate for this but don't always do a good job in my opinion. Unless I choose to simply encode everything in a higher bitrate, I'm reduced to tagging files on the iPod that have artifacts and re-encoding them. Does anyone know of software with a good algorithm for selecting bitrates based on the content, or at least with an interfact to allow me to listen while I encode?
As as aside, how long until we see specific encoding for the young/old/male/female demographics? My listening capacity is not exactly the same as anyone else's, and I want my compression algorithm to reflect that, dammit!
I have both engineering and cs degrees, so I come from both sides of the issue, but unfortunately, my managerial and business experience is next to nil, which is what this is really about.
IANAAE (aerospace engineer), but the give-the-nonprogrammer-a-programming-task is not unfamiliar to me. Colleagues have spent days on things that take minutes if you use the proper tools. Those of you who have written your own regex-like language to parse an XML document know what I'm talking about. The reason this happens is simple. Many of the solutions the engineers are coding will go no further than their code. Of the 10 coded apps engineers kludge together, only 1 is ever used, and therefore needs to be maintained or updated. Is it more cost effective to coordinate pseudo-code and program specs to a programmer for all 10 tasks or to have him rewrite the one we're acutally going to use?
Though this strays a bit from the topic of the article, I don't necessarily see this system as flawed. Messy, yes. Very, very messy. But not flawed.
While this is well and good, most implementations I've seen are not a site heirarchy as you list, but rather a replacement for the back button. Many times it's a throwback to when the back button would break most apps. One your Bell site, you might be at the Demented X page, but your crumbs show:
Store >> Computers >> Desktops >> Store >> Specials >> Store >> Laptops >> Bell Demented X
And this is actual requested behavior! I'd agree that site navigation tools are important, but the concept of "where have I been recently?" gets taken too far too often.
I've moved over $10,000 through Paypal, but they wouldn't lift a finger to help me when I was the victim of a $500 fraud.
The last straw for me was a little ($50) transaction where the buyer was using fraudulent bank data. Two months later, I got an email from paypal telling me this had happened, which was news to me. So I had the $50 removed from my account. A nuisance, and perhaps unreasonable as they had failed to verify the data; I wasn't given their banking records to check, but it was my fault when they were wrong. But the great thing was the extra interest charge for the two months I had held their money. Their two month delay, not mine. And a $10 penalty, just because. Of course, I do not buy or sell through PayPal any more.
I'm a recovering WoW player. Got out just after BWL went in.
While I agree with you about the 1-60 grind with my second and third characters, the first time I went through was a lot of fun. I actually read the quests, and discussed things with my friends. At the time I had two roommates who played as well, and we spent most of the time in a party of 3. Surprisingly enough, at level 30, there are "awesome" weapons and armor to be had. Of course, they're not raid-quality, but when you struggle to finish that quest a few levels over you to get the blue boots with the awesome stats, it's quite a good time. Working your way through SM or Uldaman the first time is fun. I was probably playing 10-14 hours a day on average.
When I hit 60 for the first time, it got weird. Suddenly, just killing stuff or finishing quests I didn't care about got me nowhere-- the entire focus of the game changes, and you really have to reason to play unless you're (A) raiding where something you need drops or (B) doing an epic quest for something you need. Now, I enjoyed the endgame immensely, but it's an entirely different game. The first time my guild did MC, we had had already done all the research. Required reading and mods, roles for particular battles. There was no surprises or quick-decision making required. Everyone knew what they had to do; if they did it, we won. If not, we lost. I can see how this can seem like work to the casual gamer, but to the devoted player, it's the pinnacle of mmorpgs. The plot falls away (I have no idea what the storyline is after perhaps the EPL quests) and it's about big teams accomplishing rediculously difficult goals.
Day to day, I could easily spend 8-10 hours playing. But I realized most of my time was doing pointless things. Running characters to 60 because we were short priests was grinding. Performing my trade or bartering for resources was just wasting time in Orgrimmar. PvP was fun for a while, but at the time it was mostly honor farming both ways. At this time, I quit, but my friend joined a pure raiding guild with a strict schedule, and stuck to it.
Much like your experience, he is able to log in four or five times a week for a few hours each time, and go striaght into a raid. The guild was well-organized and had spot reservations and waiting lists, so he usually was only on for 20 minutes before the raid started. Now, he spends perhaps 10-15 hours a week in raids, and has very little time playing that's not productive.
Stratholme is typically not done all in one run, so you usually use "SC Strat" or "UD Strat" for the scarlet and undead side. Some drop the Strat from these, but unless you're in WPL or EPL (western/eastern plaguelands), it's usually necessary.
I must have left my tinfoil hat somewhere, because this doesn't sound particularly bad.
Of course, if they were to tie my personal information to this data and use it to more aggressively market things to me or sell this data to others who may do so, I would be bothered. But this type of analysis to improve your business seems downright responsible.
Re:Grocery stores do it too.
on
Myware and Spyware
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have cards for the three major chains where I live. I haven't given a name for any of them. Every time, they give me the plastic card and a form to fill out. The form goes in the trash, and the card works fine without it.
This seems to lend credit to your "People who buy product X also buy product Y" tracking. But is a card really all that necessary? It's not like I'm running into the giant megastore to buy a candy bar. They already can get this data from each of my visits-- how important is it that they can tie subsequent visits together?
Rather than product association, I bet it has a lot to do with spending patterns. If I'm spending $300 every two weeks for a year, then skip a month, it's pretty obvious I went to another store. If there's a trend of a lot of customers jumping ship, they can compare it to recent price increases. It'd be incredibly valuable to know that high milk and bread prices drive people away more quickly than laundry detergent or meats.
Not to go back to the old anti-trust soapbox, but what's to stop a hypothetical Microsoft from "patching" windows so as not to accept any non-preformatted drives? And then charge $5/unit rather than 25c? Of course, there could be 3rd party formatters and you'd still need a way to format previously-formatted disks, but I'd guess the average user would end up paying that much more per gadget.
Seriously, though, I'm sure the only result will be that everyone will buy unformatted hardware, most will blindly click "yes" when asked if they want to format it thinking it's just another step in installation, and very little changes. Had they pulled this back in the days of mass floppy disk purchases when you could choose formatted for 2c more than unformatted disks and save yourself the hassel, this might have had a greater impact.
Of course a foundation makes things much esaier, but "too late"? Given time and energy, I think you can instill these things on an incredibly vast percentage of minor-aged child. Simply because people don't doesn't mean it's not possible.
Ah, all that would be well and good. But what if the computer recognized that by "last week" it might include a couple days before or after the seven day period ending on the previous Saturday, particularly if there were no claims letters sent to Bob or Robert or Rob strictly "last week". And by "current spreadsheet", you don't mean the excel document you have open, but the up-to-date sheet of claims information your company has on record. Though when you refer to the "current spreadsheet" in 5 minutes, you'll be talking about a completely different document.
Picking up context to apply to keywords in a document or "reading" a document isn't difficult. Actually applying context to natural language and making accurate decisions about them is what's useful.
And of course, I'd much prefer, "I've got the claims letter you submitted to Bob last week-- it's approved. Shall I attach the current spreadsheet and forward it to Dave? I'll let you know if there are any changes..." but that might be asking a bit much. For now.
With the Enterprise computer able to do so much, why were these lowly human controlling it?
Sure, it's nothing new. But to early adopters, a lot of new and exciting stuff has really been around for a long time. The iPod's the perfect example. Many people didn't realize you could carry around more than a CD's worth of music on one of those little portable things everyone had. With some level of market penetration, the masses come to realize what's available.
Google did the same thing with AJAX and Google maps. How long had the XML HTTPRequest been around? And now it's the bees' knees. Google's got a strong userbase (and following) of geeks, making its open-and-extendable products much better immediately. Widgets are just the next idea Google's taking hold of.
I do worry that they'll put search on the back burner once their start pages have all these bells and whistles.
10k is actually the lowest karat designation that can still be marketed as 'gold' (at least in the US-- it may differ in other countries). You're correct in that it's around 42% gold. In theory, you could have 1k gold, which would just be a lot of another metal. You just couldn't sell something as "1k gold".
Where I come from, people who do this are exalted. Those who work for their money are looked down upon, as they haven't yet "arrived" at the point where moving their accumulated money makes them more money. Extortion is wrong, but a capitalist system should penalize that and other "illegal activities" appropriately so entities can make reasonable decisions about engaging in them from a cost/benefit perspective. Morality is for communists, and look how well that worked.
Manipulation is a negative word, but when you think about what it means, it's working within the boundaries for maximum benefit, and using those benefits to change the boundaries when possible to your advantage. Nothing is more capitalist and American than that. We're all playing the same game here, why are the losers the ones who always call foul?
Oh why is there always someone who says this. NO. You are not allowed to do that because the copyright holders have not give you the right. Its illegal and you could be punished.
It may be helpful if you quote the post you're replying to. As I was reading, I first took your post to mean that I wasn't allowed to leave the room during a commercial.
I believe the point is that a teacher often does not know how much his/her students understand. Often, when one student has a question (usually regarding the subject material at hand) many others have the same questions, but are unwilling or afraid to ask. A clicker allows a teacher to more accurately gauge where the class's comprehension is on average, so if it really is a single student who doesn't understand, it can be handled by an outside tutor, but if half the class is clueless and the other half has a tenuous grasp on it, it may more useful to spend class time on it.
I often attributed this to exaggeration or showing off, but I think it's much more sinister. After a number of trips with different friends, it's apparent that people don't realize how much they've won or lost.
The common case in poker is a player sits down with $100 in chips. They hit a bad beat or a stupid play early, try to bluff it back, and lose it all. Then they rebuy for another $100. After a rebuy or two, they get some cards, hover between $100-$200 for a few hours, then cash out either "ahead" or "even", depending on when they leave. And they honestly don't remember losing the first couple hundred.
The other great case I see with table games is the player who keeps pushing small bets into Carribean Stud or some other similar jackpot game. After slowly working through $500, they hit a $300 hand and blow their "winnings" in a club. The next morning, they recall their winning night from before.
On a somewhat related note, I've long wondered how an even-odds or player-favored casino would do if they had good enough player tracking to refuse to seat players that didn't shop in their mall, eat at their restaurants, and sleep in their hotel.
Slashdot Mirror
You're running a difficult line here if you support this move. A bill such as this would essentially grant the government the power to regulate some things it has no business regulating. Consider that all "porn" is moved to .xxx. Who decides what's porn and what isn't? Is a movie site for an R-rated movie relegated there? How about my 2TB archive of incredibly disturbing homemade movies I want to give away for free? According to a strict reading of the bill, the former must have an .xxx TLD while the latter can be powerrangres.com.
And once we've partitioned up the internet, what's to say that ISPs can't decide to block all access to these sites for its customers? This may not be a big deal, but what happens when we propose another bill to create a .anti-us TLD for unamerican sites and .heathen for non-christians? And by this day and age, WalMartISP will of course block domains that don't support family values...
So perhaps my tinfoil hat's showing a bit, but this doesn't seem far from some pretty serious censorship waiting to be applied "by choice".
While that makes sense to common people, that sentiment has no place in current business.
Does Kraft make "better" cheese? Or Coke "better" cola? Do these products inherently appeal to the masses? There's certainly something to be said for focus groups determining that people won't buy Full Contact Croquet, but by and large the RIAA is looking at music as a consumable that needs to be administered to the masses. Songs have little intrinsic value. If we play "My Humps" on the radio enough and put Fergie's ass on the television, people will pay for the song. The fact that it outsells [insert underrated, fantastic artist here] is a direct result of marketing strategy, and very little else.
A broader choice, and worse, the ability to listen to other bands before paying for them, reduces the cost to the consumer to deviate from the RIAA's plan. Historically, music labels have been the filter to bring the "best" musicians to the consumers. Now, we're finding better ways to do this, and this evolution threatens their revenue stream. The real threat is not pirating the deemed-popular songs, but a realization at some point that I like different things than some people and similar things to other people, and my choices may not fall into one of the four profitable genres. Once I can send my money to the people that produce music I like in return for the music, the RIAA loses out. This will happen, and sooner rather than later.
I don't think a state's entire college has voted against the popular vote recently, but you definitely have faithless electors here and there. Most often it's a mistake, and it's never made a difference.
This is definitely part of it. I believe the study I recall was with regard to pedestrians being hit by a car-- that drunks tended to relax and roll off the hood while sober people stood their ground and got broken in half. This is of course generalization, but the end result was that drunk people had generally less severe injuries given a speed of impact.
I would think that fatalities in accidents would have more to do with who hit whom. It seems likely that drunk people would more likely be the striking car, and in a case where one car is hit from the side, the person with the forward-acting seatbelt, airbag, and crumple zone in front of them would have a much higher survival rate.
And then there is of course the pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorcyclist hit by the drunken driver. Not much of a contest there.
A-ha! So you say you can't see the emporer's clothes?
Seriously, though, I'm in agreement. As was mentioned earlier, with sufficiently high bitrate, there's not much difference. The problem is, on certain songs or during certain passages there's a huge difference. Variable bitrate formats try to compensate for this but don't always do a good job in my opinion. Unless I choose to simply encode everything in a higher bitrate, I'm reduced to tagging files on the iPod that have artifacts and re-encoding them. Does anyone know of software with a good algorithm for selecting bitrates based on the content, or at least with an interfact to allow me to listen while I encode?
As as aside, how long until we see specific encoding for the young/old/male/female demographics? My listening capacity is not exactly the same as anyone else's, and I want my compression algorithm to reflect that, dammit!
Very well put. If I only had the mod points...
Seems I only get them when "BSD vs. Linux, Round 485,546,880" is the only article.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is the case.
I have both engineering and cs degrees, so I come from both sides of the issue, but unfortunately, my managerial and business experience is next to nil, which is what this is really about.
IANAAE (aerospace engineer), but the give-the-nonprogrammer-a-programming-task is not unfamiliar to me. Colleagues have spent days on things that take minutes if you use the proper tools. Those of you who have written your own regex-like language to parse an XML document know what I'm talking about. The reason this happens is simple. Many of the solutions the engineers are coding will go no further than their code. Of the 10 coded apps engineers kludge together, only 1 is ever used, and therefore needs to be maintained or updated. Is it more cost effective to coordinate pseudo-code and program specs to a programmer for all 10 tasks or to have him rewrite the one we're acutally going to use?
Though this strays a bit from the topic of the article, I don't necessarily see this system as flawed. Messy, yes. Very, very messy. But not flawed.
Store >> Computers >> Desktops >> Store >> Specials >> Store >> Laptops >> Bell Demented X
And this is actual requested behavior! I'd agree that site navigation tools are important, but the concept of "where have I been recently?" gets taken too far too often.
Really, there's no reason to assume they know about the war at all.
The last straw for me was a little ($50) transaction where the buyer was using fraudulent bank data. Two months later, I got an email from paypal telling me this had happened, which was news to me. So I had the $50 removed from my account. A nuisance, and perhaps unreasonable as they had failed to verify the data; I wasn't given their banking records to check, but it was my fault when they were wrong. But the great thing was the extra interest charge for the two months I had held their money. Their two month delay, not mine. And a $10 penalty, just because. Of course, I do not buy or sell through PayPal any more.
I'm a recovering WoW player. Got out just after BWL went in.
While I agree with you about the 1-60 grind with my second and third characters, the first time I went through was a lot of fun. I actually read the quests, and discussed things with my friends. At the time I had two roommates who played as well, and we spent most of the time in a party of 3. Surprisingly enough, at level 30, there are "awesome" weapons and armor to be had. Of course, they're not raid-quality, but when you struggle to finish that quest a few levels over you to get the blue boots with the awesome stats, it's quite a good time. Working your way through SM or Uldaman the first time is fun. I was probably playing 10-14 hours a day on average.
When I hit 60 for the first time, it got weird. Suddenly, just killing stuff or finishing quests I didn't care about got me nowhere-- the entire focus of the game changes, and you really have to reason to play unless you're (A) raiding where something you need drops or (B) doing an epic quest for something you need. Now, I enjoyed the endgame immensely, but it's an entirely different game. The first time my guild did MC, we had had already done all the research. Required reading and mods, roles for particular battles. There was no surprises or quick-decision making required. Everyone knew what they had to do; if they did it, we won. If not, we lost. I can see how this can seem like work to the casual gamer, but to the devoted player, it's the pinnacle of mmorpgs. The plot falls away (I have no idea what the storyline is after perhaps the EPL quests) and it's about big teams accomplishing rediculously difficult goals.
Day to day, I could easily spend 8-10 hours playing. But I realized most of my time was doing pointless things. Running characters to 60 because we were short priests was grinding. Performing my trade or bartering for resources was just wasting time in Orgrimmar. PvP was fun for a while, but at the time it was mostly honor farming both ways. At this time, I quit, but my friend joined a pure raiding guild with a strict schedule, and stuck to it.
Much like your experience, he is able to log in four or five times a week for a few hours each time, and go striaght into a raid. The guild was well-organized and had spot reservations and waiting lists, so he usually was only on for 20 minutes before the raid started. Now, he spends perhaps 10-15 hours a week in raids, and has very little time playing that's not productive.
Stratholme is typically not done all in one run, so you usually use "SC Strat" or "UD Strat" for the scarlet and undead side. Some drop the Strat from these, but unless you're in WPL or EPL (western/eastern plaguelands), it's usually necessary.
I must have left my tinfoil hat somewhere, because this doesn't sound particularly bad.
Of course, if they were to tie my personal information to this data and use it to more aggressively market things to me or sell this data to others who may do so, I would be bothered. But this type of analysis to improve your business seems downright responsible.
I have cards for the three major chains where I live. I haven't given a name for any of them. Every time, they give me the plastic card and a form to fill out. The form goes in the trash, and the card works fine without it.
This seems to lend credit to your "People who buy product X also buy product Y" tracking. But is a card really all that necessary? It's not like I'm running into the giant megastore to buy a candy bar. They already can get this data from each of my visits-- how important is it that they can tie subsequent visits together?
Rather than product association, I bet it has a lot to do with spending patterns. If I'm spending $300 every two weeks for a year, then skip a month, it's pretty obvious I went to another store. If there's a trend of a lot of customers jumping ship, they can compare it to recent price increases. It'd be incredibly valuable to know that high milk and bread prices drive people away more quickly than laundry detergent or meats.
I believe you and I are brothers.
Not to go back to the old anti-trust soapbox, but what's to stop a hypothetical Microsoft from "patching" windows so as not to accept any non-preformatted drives? And then charge $5/unit rather than 25c? Of course, there could be 3rd party formatters and you'd still need a way to format previously-formatted disks, but I'd guess the average user would end up paying that much more per gadget.
Seriously, though, I'm sure the only result will be that everyone will buy unformatted hardware, most will blindly click "yes" when asked if they want to format it thinking it's just another step in installation, and very little changes. Had they pulled this back in the days of mass floppy disk purchases when you could choose formatted for 2c more than unformatted disks and save yourself the hassel, this might have had a greater impact.
Of course a foundation makes things much esaier, but "too late"? Given time and energy, I think you can instill these things on an incredibly vast percentage of minor-aged child. Simply because people don't doesn't mean it's not possible.
Ah, all that would be well and good. But what if the computer recognized that by "last week" it might include a couple days before or after the seven day period ending on the previous Saturday, particularly if there were no claims letters sent to Bob or Robert or Rob strictly "last week". And by "current spreadsheet", you don't mean the excel document you have open, but the up-to-date sheet of claims information your company has on record. Though when you refer to the "current spreadsheet" in 5 minutes, you'll be talking about a completely different document.
Picking up context to apply to keywords in a document or "reading" a document isn't difficult. Actually applying context to natural language and making accurate decisions about them is what's useful.
And of course, I'd much prefer, "I've got the claims letter you submitted to Bob last week-- it's approved. Shall I attach the current spreadsheet and forward it to Dave? I'll let you know if there are any changes..." but that might be asking a bit much. For now.
With the Enterprise computer able to do so much, why were these lowly human controlling it?
Sure, it's nothing new. But to early adopters, a lot of new and exciting stuff has really been around for a long time. The iPod's the perfect example. Many people didn't realize you could carry around more than a CD's worth of music on one of those little portable things everyone had. With some level of market penetration, the masses come to realize what's available.
Google did the same thing with AJAX and Google maps. How long had the XML HTTPRequest been around? And now it's the bees' knees. Google's got a strong userbase (and following) of geeks, making its open-and-extendable products much better immediately. Widgets are just the next idea Google's taking hold of.
I do worry that they'll put search on the back burner once their start pages have all these bells and whistles.
First, I can stick in a sic where I want--I was trying to avoid people from correcting my intentional misuse.
On Slashdot, you cannot stop people from correcting your misuses. Intentional or not.
So how does that prove 10k gold doesn't exist?
Some nit-nitpicking:
10k is actually the lowest karat designation that can still be marketed as 'gold' (at least in the US-- it may differ in other countries). You're correct in that it's around 42% gold. In theory, you could have 1k gold, which would just be a lot of another metal. You just couldn't sell something as "1k gold".
...manipulation of the capitalist system
Where I come from, people who do this are exalted. Those who work for their money are looked down upon, as they haven't yet "arrived" at the point where moving their accumulated money makes them more money. Extortion is wrong, but a capitalist system should penalize that and other "illegal activities" appropriately so entities can make reasonable decisions about engaging in them from a cost/benefit perspective. Morality is for communists, and look how well that worked.
Manipulation is a negative word, but when you think about what it means, it's working within the boundaries for maximum benefit, and using those benefits to change the boundaries when possible to your advantage. Nothing is more capitalist and American than that. We're all playing the same game here, why are the losers the ones who always call foul?
Oh why is there always someone who says this. NO. You are not allowed to do that because the copyright holders have not give you the right. Its illegal and you could be punished.
It may be helpful if you quote the post you're replying to. As I was reading, I first took your post to mean that I wasn't allowed to leave the room during a commercial.
I believe the point is that a teacher often does not know how much his/her students understand. Often, when one student has a question (usually regarding the subject material at hand) many others have the same questions, but are unwilling or afraid to ask. A clicker allows a teacher to more accurately gauge where the class's comprehension is on average, so if it really is a single student who doesn't understand, it can be handled by an outside tutor, but if half the class is clueless and the other half has a tenuous grasp on it, it may more useful to spend class time on it.
I often attributed this to exaggeration or showing off, but I think it's much more sinister. After a number of trips with different friends, it's apparent that people don't realize how much they've won or lost.
The common case in poker is a player sits down with $100 in chips. They hit a bad beat or a stupid play early, try to bluff it back, and lose it all. Then they rebuy for another $100. After a rebuy or two, they get some cards, hover between $100-$200 for a few hours, then cash out either "ahead" or "even", depending on when they leave. And they honestly don't remember losing the first couple hundred.
The other great case I see with table games is the player who keeps pushing small bets into Carribean Stud or some other similar jackpot game. After slowly working through $500, they hit a $300 hand and blow their "winnings" in a club. The next morning, they recall their winning night from before.
On a somewhat related note, I've long wondered how an even-odds or player-favored casino would do if they had good enough player tracking to refuse to seat players that didn't shop in their mall, eat at their restaurants, and sleep in their hotel.