This is why Direct Response marketers despise advertising agencies and the academic theorists.
Unfortunately, Direct Response marketing varies from the ethical(Google adwords), to the slightly obtrusive(CasaleMedia banners), via the cheesy (popups), the really cheesy(multiple popups), and the downright illegal (Drive-by download, spam) - and their dirtworld equivalent.
But broadly, advertising is either "Brand" advertising, or it's "Act now" advertising. Brand advertising works in a saturated market with lots of competitionb - you are fighting for midshare in a zero-sum economy. Direct-response works best in underdeveloped or niche markets and it tends to go straight for the sale
From this, the Direct Response marketers measure reliable percentages of buyers per 1000 exposures; and then they incrementally change the ad subtly and test that as compulsively as anyone's ever debugged a perl script. It's the style that's most appropriate to small budgets without millions to blow on advertising - unfortunately, the only examples you see on TV are mind-bogglingly lame infomercials on at night...
"People buy from emotion and justify with logic" has been around since the turn of the last century among a certain segment of the marketing people.
The new bit I suppose is to try to pinpoint the triggers more exactly, to reduce those unpleasant random variables like human free will and choice and stuff. It's so much easier if "They" can just model you on a mainframe, debit your account, and ship you whatever it is you're supposed to buy from them next, I suppose. Not that this is what they think they're aiming for, but I doubt the net effect will be any different.
Privacy? You don't have any. You haven't had any since American Express and Visa started.
Actually, let me rephrase that - you haven't had any since the advent of computers used for mass storage and databases became possible.
I invite you to take a walk down to the library and peruse the Standard
Rate and Data Service directory, their website at http://www.srds.com/ and take a gander at their parent company at http://www.vnu.com/
For over 85 years, SRDS has delivered essential information to media professionals, including online and print solutions in use at 95% of U.S. advertising agencies.
They knew a lot about you even before widespread computer usaage, of course - they're just way more efficient these days.
They know your name, your address, your buying habits, your medical provider, your insurance company, your family status, your media habits, and everthing else that's worth knowing about you from a commercial point of view. If you want a list of all left-handed males in Peoria between the ages of 20-25 living at home and driving a beat-up old Pinto, they can get it for you. If you want to know what jobs, education, hobbies, media habits and travel habits the people on the list have, they can supply that too.
You have no privacy. About the only thing they don't have yet is your specific browsing habits - and they'll have that too, just as soon as this move is completed.
Check it out. You probably won't believe this until you see for yourself just how much they know about you - and it's even worse if you use a store loyalty card. WalMart makes warehousing and inventory desicions based on what they know you're going to buy the next year, quarter and month. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew what you were going to spend money on today and the rest of the week - same thing goes for a lot of other companies of course.
On the other hand, his Honour Cambpbell fired 20,000 health care workers including those selfsame therapists, reatroactively cut the pay of the remaining staff by 20% from the beginning of the year, and then had the unmitigated gall to bill both the current employees and the now-unemployed ex-staff for the "overpayment".
So not only were they out of a job, they also owed the government enough money that even after their severance pay was taken back they still owed the government.
Of course, Campbell also holds the distinction of being the only current Canadian premier with an actual felony conviction in another nation. When he was arrested for speeding at 70 MPH in Hawaii he had a blood alcohol level of 0.161 and a "professional friend" with her head in his lap, his wife didn't make a lot of waves about it, apparently - and for some strange reason the media companies owned by his close friends and political allies didn't make a lot of fuss about it either. Funny that. http://www.strategicthoughts.com/record2003/drunk. html
Of course, Campbell's the same man who didn't sell BC Rail, just leased if for 1000 years (That's right, a full millenium!) to one of his buddies - for a total lease payment of $1.
Campbell is not a good example of anything - any positive outcomes of his actions seem entirely coincidental.
Oh, and what's with the continual expansion of the state gambling operations? More gambling addicts is the last thing BC needs.
You just need to use a venue where your trouble with interpreting facial expressions and inability to filter irrelevant details from your perception field won't be an issue or will be an asset. I know several who do rather well in their chosen fields.
Oh, and you need to contact score.org and the SBA. Most small businesses aren't retail.
Which is why you outsource the bits you aren't good at to other independents. You hire an accountant, you hire a lawyer, you hire a writer, you hire a marketing consultant. Hell, if you design the software architecture, you hire codemonkeys to do the actual implementation.
Outsourcing doesn't have to be overseas. It just has to remove the non-essential demands on your time from your work day so you can concentrate on the bits where you're uniquely qualified.
Only the right wing "nut job" Christians are gonna be freaking out. That's when they take us and cut off our heads./tinfoil hat.
Not quite - it's the right-wing nutjob Christians who're gonna do this to you. Think about it - it's done "against Terrorism" - coupled with those massive database sweeps/collations discussed elsewhere, and some really long-range RFID's, and people going along with this voluntarily because it's obviously God's Will since it's the Bush Administration's idea.
Remember - the Beast will deceive people into thinking it's as Christian as anything. So the Beast is probably a metaphor for the right-wing nutjob theocracy you lot are headed towards.
...paranoid mode off...
That said, that bit in Revelations isn't that difficult. The Beast is Nero and Imperial Rome, and the Mark is the roman eagle carried in people's hearts and minds and most importantly on the coins of the realm. Which also featured the graven image of the Emperor who claimed divine status at the time. To a good early Christian, using Imperial Rome money would prolly be tantamount to 'having other gods beside' YHVH. And Nero liked that game of Christians versus lions. Which is another Beast angle of course - but the main trick here is that you couldn't engage in trade in any meaningful sense without using Roman coin. So the early Christians prolly tried to work in a cash-free manner as possible, and warnng each other agains using idolatruous coins. Which made them extremenly unpopular in Rome...
It doesn't come as a surprse to me that most Christians have never thought about it in these terms...
Mmm, yes - if you use some kind of weird definition for the words you'll certainly come up with the result you want.
I'll stick to the PoliSci definitions all the same, thank you - that way we can stop useless arguing over definitions and sematics, and start arguing about the effects and whether or not we like them.
Sound fair to you?
And only in some kind of Orwellian NewSpeak-world are the Nazis anything but right-wing; just as Stalin and company were left-wing.
Well, they were actually both dictators and the political systems they presided over did what any kind of extremism does - converged on the Authoritarian Dictatorship.
This doesn't mean that the route taken to get there was the same, even if the end result was remarkably similar - Stalin took over after a sucession war inside the Communist Party, while Hitler was voted in. Which turned out to be a distinction without a difference as far as the net effect on their respective people were concerned.
But one shouldn't overlook the fact that dictators have won real elections before - there are examples on all sides of the spectrum of people who've been voted in and then refused to leave. The interesting point here I presume whould be to compare the route taken to arrive at the dictatorship, not neccesarily what happened once they arrived there - Fascist, Commmunist, Nazi, military Junta, they all look the same to me with just a thin paint of ideology over the same framework of suppression and oppression. I don't think people were any more or less free under Noriega, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or anyone else in the whole litany of thugs who turned the state against the people it supposedly represented when the machinery of the state was turned to supression of the people for the benefit of a privilegied few.
The interesting bit about the process is how they got there - not all of them used armed force. And calling the Nazis leftists is more than a bit disingenious because it ignores their path to power through using corporate capitalism and the backing of large-scale industrial operations like AEG, BASF, Krupp and the rest of them.
My basic concern with quibbling over the definition of words is that if we start redefining one possible path to totalitarianism (Fascism and Statist Corporate Capitalism) into another (Communism/Leftism and Statist Corporate Communism) we start ignoring that the opposite of one bad outcome (Stalin) is another bad outcome (Hitler).
I don't think anyone rational want a regime resembling either one of those back in power - which is why I think this attempted redefining of common usage is a Bad Idea.
May I ask - why is it so important to you that the Nazis be defined as leftist?
Pal, you have *no* idea what you're talking about.
The Nazis were backed by corporate interests and were good Fascists. The Socialist tag was just a bit of Orwellian Newspeak thrown in to confuse the common worker who thought socialism was probably a Good Idea given how the Weimar Republic had worked them over.
Classifying them as leftist is buying into their Newspeak. Like all Fascist regimes, the name tag on their politics have little or nothing to do with their actual politics - which was pretty ordinary Corporate/Statist Fascism. Now, both the extreme Right and the Extreme left converge on dictatorships, but that doesn't mean that all dictatorships are extreme left.
Your assumptions are blinding you to the effect of Corporate Fascism and right-wing rethoric though, which is the point from the PoV of the current NewSpeak propagandists. I think a little rechecking of your assumptions might be in order.
My grandfather spent three years in a Nazi camp for being in the resistance after the German Wermacht occupied Norway. He was due to be shipped to Belsen the day after Germany officially surrendered.
He was always grateful to the USA for that - and so am I for that matter, my father was born in 1948
Your support for the abomination that was the Nazi party spits on the graves of everyone who died for that liberation, everyone who fought and lived, and the ideals that war was fought for.
In short - it's beyond me how anyone can live in the USA and simultaneusly feel anything but utter revulsion for nazism and hate speech in general.
But then again, Farrakhan, David Duke, and several similar people are also beyond me. I just wonder how anyone can even attempt to justify their fascination with thuggish mass murderers.
Care to explain? Or am I to conclude that you, sir, are an unspeakable abomination on the face of the universe?
( I don't think this has anything to do with the Libertarian party as such, in case you think I'm trying to make that connection. )
Ordinary users and hobbyists don't have 10,000 0wn'd zombie boxes to do their hash-cashing computations for them.
Spammers do
And with hashcash, you've just given them an extra incentive to not stop using 0wned boxes that's been listed on a RBL - which hardly seems like what you're after in this context.
One almost universally negative aspect: Hobbyist lists, run by people who are simply passionate about their interests, would be gone from email.
That would kind of suck, huh?
I don't believe for an instant that Microsoft is interested in this because of some altruistic desire to rid the world of spam. Not their style.
Not their style at all.
If they're involved, it'll be for one reason only: Profit.
Profits from selling their (almost certainly broken) implementations. And/or a belief that it will help them expand their monopoly.
Or maybe they hope to get a cut of every "stamp" that's sold and passed through their systems.
I don't have a problem with profit, honestly earned. I rather like it, actually. That should be pretty clear from the title of this blog, if nothing else.
I have a serious problem with anyone breaking the entire email system beyond repair to attempt to wrest or extend monopoly control on something that's become this integral a part of modern society.
And I have a real problem with it when that same someone regularly breaks protocols in order to push people toward using their borked standards.
e-Postage is a bad idea under any circumstances. The cost of metering, keeping records and moving the money would far exceed the cost of providing the existing service.
According to Mr. Levine's estimates, (conservative indeed), creating the necessary infrastructure and systems could cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Maintaining it would cost unguessable billions more annually.
But not to worry. The system will never be fully deployed.
Email as a medium of communication would break down under the weight of the "solution" long before it got that far.
Isn't that a cheery thought?
That last is what scares the living hell out of the DMA. It's why they want laws that protect opt-out email (spam), and why they wanted to set things up so that they could pay ISPs to deliver UBE (spam) to their customers. But only if the ISPs got rid of the "bad spam" first. (Meaning: Not from their members.)
The Internet scares the post office and the phone companies and every government that thinks it's losing tax revenue to online activity.
It scares the traditional music industry and every other dinosaur that lives by paying slim percentages to creators based on the dinosaur's control of distribution channels.
It really scares companies that sell commoditizable goods, like software, to general markets.
That includes Microsoft.
Think about it... If you could get software that had the capabilities you wanted from the Microsoft Office Suite and more, for free, would you spend hundreds of dollars for MS Office?
You really should read the whole thing though, quoting just bits of Paul doesn't really do him justice. But epostage is a completely broken concept and untenable solution to the spam problem. Of course, you may choose to disbelieve this. In that case, the first time you get the $10,000 invoice for the cost of running a developer's list is the moment you'll realize your mistake - unless you act to head that idea off at the pass.
Just because I'm prefer a Keynesian approach to economics but think that the Libertarians have an interesting approach to taxation that ought to be explored more, I'm a socialist?
What a fascinating alternate universe you live in. Remind me to visit it sometime.
I think Rand had a fatally flawed approach to economics and human nature coloured by her experiences growing up in Russia. She has valid points in her theories, but like all ideological extremes the sum total amounts to social insanity.
And Rand didn't write very well. Her cardboard characters and misplaced trust in positivism masquerading as argumentation doesn't make for great literature. It makes for interesting debate material if you can chill it with the ad-hominem attacs, but it's still horrible literature.
Her politics and viewpoints in a modern context are much better represented by the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Foundation than by the books which fail on all counts as literature.
Now I suppose you're going to tell me that I'm a horrible person for thinking that the books aren't Holy Writ and that the philosophy should be studied in the context of current science by people who're actually more qualified than either of us to do so?
And you should really try to cut back on the surprise you're displaying that someone can be widely read in both hard sciences and the branch of psychology known as economics. Although I admit that lately I've been reading marketing material more than either of the above.
Interesting. The fact that Mrs. Rand was a total lunatic without a shred of empathy or social understanding and writing her books as a sort of policy statement about capitalism for the insane doesn't mean that she doesn't also have some valid points scattered at infrequent and rare intervals through her horribly written books that I regret having wasted days of my life actually struggling through.
Pity that people still go on about her invalid mishmash of misunderstood corporate fascism, social darwinism and her fatally flawed understanding of economic theory written 50 years before John Nash' then-radical insight into game theory as applied to economics and the advantages of cooperation strategies were validated by advances in molecular biology and evolutionary psychology.
Still, she does have a point about freedom and security.
Pity no-one thought about that before voting in the Patriot Act, eh?
Marketing can be done in an Evil or Semi-Evil way though.
The Evil way is to look at Customer A.Geek and Product_Class_Non_Geek_Appealing and try to make a geekAppeal wrapper class for the product based on detailed datamining on your personal profile.
The other way is to look at Customer A.Geek and ask "so - what do you want?", and then spend the time trying to find more instances of the A.Geek class and to not bother Customer B.Geek with your product since it's a waste of their time and your money to offer them something they don't want.
In other words, the first method depends on pushing products on people across as wide a marketing channel as possible, hoping to overcome buyer resistance and make the sale regardless.
The second method depends on narrowing your marketing channel until it only reaches the class of people who'd have an interest in your product.
Unfortunately, both kinds of marketing depends on collecting "enough" data on your customer - and you usually can't tell the difference between the end results of either process, since you're gonna wind up being offered something that appears to be useful in either case.
But the first instance requires an intense profiling of prospective customers, whereas the second depends on.. umm, an intense profiling of your existing customers to identify similarities enough to gain a narrow enough marketing channel that you exclude everyone without a pre-existing interest in your product.
The first style is Evil because it requires practicioners to profile everyone - the second instance is only semi-evil as it depends on finding people similar to the profile you already have of your exisiting customer base.
Semi-evil, 'cause you do need to profile people outside your customer group to make sure they're not in your focus.
RFID-tagging people and using behavioural profiling on everyone is probably in the Evil class.
(Sometimes, I long for the simpler days when Marketing was a foreign language)
No it is owed in the sense that the US commits to a certain level of funding for the UN as a whole, spread out among the budgets for the various UN orgianizations.
And then fails to pony up.
Bottom line? The money owed to the UN is in the form of promisory notes that the US has failed to pay. Mostly because of situations like with the WHO where certain religious groups have recoiled at the fact that the WHO supports education on things like birth control and abortion for women in the third world and have pressured Congress and Senate into stopping funding for the WHO as a whole until those education programs are cancelled. That this also interferes with things like disease prevention and control, public medical research that would end unencumbered by patents and similar benefits seem to be completely outweighted by the need to deny women in the third world education about and access to birth control and abortion.
Similar situations exist across a broad swathe of UN organizations who have already made budget and project commitments and used funds according to the promised contributions from the US, and then dicovered that the money were not forthcoming after all.
That's the sense in which the US owes money - because they said they did. Not because the UN asked.
It's per household, and is applied to finanincing public non-commercial broadcasts. Which is still Norway's single largest media provider across all traditional non-print platforms. Although some of the local right-wing nutjobs think that not-for-profit media enterprises should be outlawed on principle, and are constantly harping on the theme that the licencing fee should be removed, presumably so that the commercial drivel on the also-rans would be the only alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why Direct Response marketers despise advertising agencies and the academic theorists.
Unfortunately, Direct Response marketing varies from the ethical(Google adwords), to the slightly obtrusive(CasaleMedia banners), via the cheesy (popups), the really cheesy(multiple popups), and the downright illegal (Drive-by download, spam) - and their dirtworld equivalent.
But broadly, advertising is either "Brand" advertising, or it's "Act now" advertising. Brand advertising works in a saturated market with lots of competitionb - you are fighting for midshare in a zero-sum economy. Direct-response works best in underdeveloped or niche markets and it tends to go straight for the sale
From this, the Direct Response marketers measure reliable percentages of buyers per 1000 exposures; and then they incrementally change the ad subtly and test that as compulsively as anyone's ever debugged a perl script. It's the style that's most appropriate to small budgets without millions to blow on advertising - unfortunately, the only examples you see on TV are mind-bogglingly lame infomercials on at night...
True.
For a given value of true.
"People buy from emotion and justify with logic" has been around since the turn of the last century among a certain segment of the marketing people.
The new bit I suppose is to try to pinpoint the triggers more exactly, to reduce those unpleasant random variables like human free will and choice and stuff. It's so much easier if "They" can just model you on a mainframe, debit your account, and ship you whatever it is you're supposed to buy from them next, I suppose. Not that this is what they think they're aiming for, but I doubt the net effect will be any different.
Actually, let me rephrase that - you haven't had any since the advent of computers used for mass storage and databases became possible.
I invite you to take a walk down to the library and peruse the Standard Rate and Data Service directory, their website at http://www.srds.com/ and take a gander at their parent company at http://www.vnu.com/
They knew a lot about you even before widespread computer usaage, of course - they're just way more efficient these days.
They know your name, your address, your buying habits, your medical provider, your insurance company, your family status, your media habits, and everthing else that's worth knowing about you from a commercial point of view. If you want a list of all left-handed males in Peoria between the ages of 20-25 living at home and driving a beat-up old Pinto, they can get it for you. If you want to know what jobs, education, hobbies, media habits and travel habits the people on the list have, they can supply that too.
You have no privacy. About the only thing they don't have yet is your specific browsing habits - and they'll have that too, just as soon as this move is completed.
Check it out. You probably won't believe this until you see for yourself just how much they know about you - and it's even worse if you use a store loyalty card. WalMart makes warehousing and inventory desicions based on what they know you're going to buy the next year, quarter and month. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew what you were going to spend money on today and the rest of the week - same thing goes for a lot of other companies of course.
Isn't it fun, knowing what they got on you?
On the other hand, his Honour Cambpbell fired 20,000 health care workers including those selfsame therapists, reatroactively cut the pay of the remaining staff by 20% from the beginning of the year, and then had the unmitigated gall to bill both the current employees and the now-unemployed ex-staff for the "overpayment".
. html
So not only were they out of a job, they also owed the government enough money that even after their severance pay was taken back they still owed the government.
http://www.strategicthoughts.com/
Of course, Campbell also holds the distinction of being the only current Canadian premier with an actual felony conviction in another nation. When he was arrested for speeding at 70 MPH in Hawaii he had a blood alcohol level of 0.161 and a "professional friend" with her head in his lap, his wife didn't make a lot of waves about it, apparently - and for some strange reason the media companies owned by his close friends and political allies didn't make a lot of fuss about it either. Funny that. http://www.strategicthoughts.com/record2003/drunk
Of course, Campbell's the same man who didn't sell BC Rail, just leased if for 1000 years (That's right, a full millenium!) to one of his buddies - for a total lease payment of $1.
Campbell is not a good example of anything - any positive outcomes of his actions seem entirely coincidental.
Oh, and what's with the continual expansion of the state gambling operations? More gambling addicts is the last thing BC needs.
Yes.
You just need to use a venue where your trouble with interpreting facial expressions and inability to filter irrelevant details from your perception field won't be an issue or will be an asset. I know several who do rather well in their chosen fields.
Oh, and you need to contact score.org and the SBA. Most small businesses aren't retail.
Which is why you outsource the bits you aren't good at to other independents. You hire an accountant, you hire a lawyer, you hire a writer, you hire a marketing consultant. Hell, if you design the software architecture, you hire codemonkeys to do the actual implementation.
Outsourcing doesn't have to be overseas. It just has to remove the non-essential demands on your time from your work day so you can concentrate on the bits where you're uniquely qualified.
Erm...
Not quite - it's the right-wing nutjob Christians who're gonna do this to you. Think about it - it's done "against Terrorism" - coupled with those massive database sweeps/collations discussed elsewhere, and some really long-range RFID's, and people going along with this voluntarily because it's obviously God's Will since it's the Bush Administration's idea.
Remember - the Beast will deceive people into thinking it's as Christian as anything. So the Beast is probably a metaphor for the right-wing nutjob theocracy you lot are headed towards.
That said, that bit in Revelations isn't that difficult. The Beast is Nero and Imperial Rome, and the Mark is the roman eagle carried in people's hearts and minds and most importantly on the coins of the realm. Which also featured the graven image of the Emperor who claimed divine status at the time. To a good early Christian, using Imperial Rome money would prolly be tantamount to 'having other gods beside' YHVH. And Nero liked that game of Christians versus lions. Which is another Beast angle of course - but the main trick here is that you couldn't engage in trade in any meaningful sense without using Roman coin. So the early Christians prolly tried to work in a cash-free manner as possible, and warnng each other agains using idolatruous coins. Which made them extremenly unpopular in Rome...
It doesn't come as a surprse to me that most Christians have never thought about it in these terms...
Of course, parent comment would have been much better if I hadn't accidentally hit the "post anonymously" check box...
Mmm, yes - if you use some kind of weird definition for the words you'll certainly come up with the result you want.
I'll stick to the PoliSci definitions all the same, thank you - that way we can stop useless arguing over definitions and sematics, and start arguing about the effects and whether or not we like them.
Sound fair to you?
And only in some kind of Orwellian NewSpeak-world are the Nazis anything but right-wing; just as Stalin and company were left-wing.
Well, they were actually both dictators and the political systems they presided over did what any kind of extremism does - converged on the Authoritarian Dictatorship.
This doesn't mean that the route taken to get there was the same, even if the end result was remarkably similar - Stalin took over after a sucession war inside the Communist Party, while Hitler was voted in. Which turned out to be a distinction without a difference as far as the net effect on their respective people were concerned.
But one shouldn't overlook the fact that dictators have won real elections before - there are examples on all sides of the spectrum of people who've been voted in and then refused to leave. The interesting point here I presume whould be to compare the route taken to arrive at the dictatorship, not neccesarily what happened once they arrived there - Fascist, Commmunist, Nazi, military Junta, they all look the same to me with just a thin paint of ideology over the same framework of suppression and oppression. I don't think people were any more or less free under Noriega, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or anyone else in the whole litany of thugs who turned the state against the people it supposedly represented when the machinery of the state was turned to supression of the people for the benefit of a privilegied few.
The interesting bit about the process is how they got there - not all of them used armed force. And calling the Nazis leftists is more than a bit disingenious because it ignores their path to power through using corporate capitalism and the backing of large-scale industrial operations like AEG, BASF, Krupp and the rest of them.
My basic concern with quibbling over the definition of words is that if we start redefining one possible path to totalitarianism (Fascism and Statist Corporate Capitalism) into another (Communism/Leftism and Statist Corporate Communism) we start ignoring that the opposite of one bad outcome (Stalin) is another bad outcome (Hitler).
I don't think anyone rational want a regime resembling either one of those back in power - which is why I think this attempted redefining of common usage is a Bad Idea.
May I ask - why is it so important to you that the Nazis be defined as leftist?
Pal, you have *no* idea what you're talking about.
The Nazis were backed by corporate interests and were good Fascists. The Socialist tag was just a bit of Orwellian Newspeak thrown in to confuse the common worker who thought socialism was probably a Good Idea given how the Weimar Republic had worked them over.
Classifying them as leftist is buying into their Newspeak. Like all Fascist regimes, the name tag on their politics have little or nothing to do with their actual politics - which was pretty ordinary Corporate/Statist Fascism. Now, both the extreme Right and the Extreme left converge on dictatorships, but that doesn't mean that all dictatorships are extreme left.
Your assumptions are blinding you to the effect of Corporate Fascism and right-wing rethoric though, which is the point from the PoV of the current NewSpeak propagandists. I think a little rechecking of your assumptions might be in order.
My grandfather spent three years in a Nazi camp for being in the resistance after the German Wermacht occupied Norway. He was due to be shipped to Belsen the day after Germany officially surrendered.
He was always grateful to the USA for that - and so am I for that matter, my father was born in 1948
Your support for the abomination that was the Nazi party spits on the graves of everyone who died for that liberation, everyone who fought and lived, and the ideals that war was fought for.
In short - it's beyond me how anyone can live in the USA and simultaneusly feel anything but utter revulsion for nazism and hate speech in general.
But then again, Farrakhan, David Duke, and several similar people are also beyond me. I just wonder how anyone can even attempt to justify their fascination with thuggish mass murderers.
Care to explain? Or am I to conclude that you, sir, are an unspeakable abomination on the face of the universe?
( I don't think this has anything to do with the Libertarian party as such, in case you think I'm trying to make that connection. )
Of course, the joke would have been a lot more fun if I'd remembered to include that I'm from Norway...
What the hey!?!
What did we do now?
We're innocent I tell you, Innocent!
Oh - I forgot. The RIAA don't do innocence. Except when it's them spamming of course. It's not spam if it's them.
No, I didn't RTFA, I'm just knee-jerking. Why?
Interesting concept, but still a broken idea.
I'll refer you to my complete posting up-page, but:
http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf/
Ordinary users and hobbyists don't have 10,000 0wn'd zombie boxes to do their hash-cashing computations for them.
Spammers do
And with hashcash, you've just given them an extra incentive to not stop using 0wned boxes that's been listed on a RBL - which hardly seems like what you're after in this context.
Sender Pays, ePostage, or whatever other name you want to put on it is a completely broken idea.
This comment and analysis by John Levine http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf/ will show you exactly why, in excruciating detail.
If you want to see some more commentary and analysis on why it's bad for all of us, you should look up Paul Myers at http://www.talkbiz.net/ramblings/comments.php?id=1 8_0_1_0_C
If you can't be bothered, the most pertinent quotes are:
You really should read the whole thing though, quoting just bits of Paul doesn't really do him justice. But epostage is a completely broken concept and untenable solution to the spam problem. Of course, you may choose to disbelieve this.
In that case, the first time you get the $10,000 invoice for the cost of running a developer's list is the moment you'll realize your mistake - unless you act to head that idea off at the pass.
Err, none of the above.
Just because I'm prefer a Keynesian approach to economics but think that the Libertarians have an interesting approach to taxation that ought to be explored more, I'm a socialist?
What a fascinating alternate universe you live in. Remind me to visit it sometime.
I think Rand had a fatally flawed approach to economics and human nature coloured by her experiences growing up in Russia. She has valid points in her theories, but like all ideological extremes the sum total amounts to social insanity.
And Rand didn't write very well. Her cardboard characters and misplaced trust in positivism masquerading as argumentation doesn't make for great literature. It makes for interesting debate material if you can chill it with the ad-hominem attacs, but it's still horrible literature.
Her politics and viewpoints in a modern context are much better represented by the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Foundation than by the books which fail on all counts as literature.
Now I suppose you're going to tell me that I'm a horrible person for thinking that the books aren't Holy Writ and that the philosophy should be studied in the context of current science by people who're actually more qualified than either of us to do so?
And you should really try to cut back on the surprise you're displaying that someone can be widely read in both hard sciences and the branch of psychology known as economics. Although I admit that lately I've been reading marketing material more than either of the above.
Interesting. The fact that Mrs. Rand was a total lunatic without a shred of empathy or social understanding and writing her books as a sort of policy statement about capitalism for the insane doesn't mean that she doesn't also have some valid points scattered at infrequent and rare intervals through her horribly written books that I regret having wasted days of my life actually struggling through.
Pity that people still go on about her invalid mishmash of misunderstood corporate fascism, social darwinism and her fatally flawed understanding of economic theory written 50 years before John Nash' then-radical insight into game theory as applied to economics and the advantages of cooperation strategies were validated by advances in molecular biology and evolutionary psychology.
Still, she does have a point about freedom and security.
Pity no-one thought about that before voting in the Patriot Act, eh?
Marketing can be done in an Evil or Semi-Evil way though.
The Evil way is to look at Customer A.Geek and Product_Class_Non_Geek_Appealing and try to make a geekAppeal wrapper class for the product based on detailed datamining on your personal profile.
The other way is to look at Customer A.Geek and ask "so - what do you want?", and then spend the time trying to find more instances of the A.Geek class and to not bother Customer B.Geek with your product since it's a waste of their time and your money to offer them something they don't want.
In other words, the first method depends on pushing products on people across as wide a marketing channel as possible, hoping to overcome buyer resistance and make the sale regardless.
The second method depends on narrowing your marketing channel until it only reaches the class of people who'd have an interest in your product.
Unfortunately, both kinds of marketing depends on collecting "enough" data on your customer - and you usually can't tell the difference between the end results of either process, since you're gonna wind up being offered something that appears to be useful in either case.
But the first instance requires an intense profiling of prospective customers, whereas the second depends on .. umm, an intense profiling of your existing customers to identify similarities enough to gain a narrow enough marketing channel that you exclude everyone without a pre-existing interest in your product.
The first style is Evil because it requires practicioners to profile everyone - the second instance is only semi-evil as it depends on finding people similar to the profile you already have of your exisiting customer base.
Semi-evil, 'cause you do need to profile people outside your customer group to make sure they're not in your focus.
RFID-tagging people and using behavioural profiling on everyone is probably in the Evil class.
(Sometimes, I long for the simpler days when Marketing was a foreign language)
And then fails to pony up.
Bottom line? The money owed to the UN is in the form of promisory notes that the US has failed to pay. Mostly because of situations like with the WHO where certain religious groups have recoiled at the fact that the WHO supports education on things like birth control and abortion for women in the third world and have pressured Congress and Senate into stopping funding for the WHO as a whole until those education programs are cancelled. That this also interferes with things like disease prevention and control, public medical research that would end unencumbered by patents and similar benefits seem to be completely outweighted by the need to deny women in the third world education about and access to birth control and abortion.
Similar situations exist across a broad swathe of UN organizations who have already made budget and project commitments and used funds according to the promised contributions from the US, and then dicovered that the money were not forthcoming after all.
That's the sense in which the US owes money - because they said they did. Not because the UN asked.
It's per household, and is applied to finanincing public non-commercial broadcasts. Which is still Norway's single largest media provider across all traditional non-print platforms. Although some of the local right-wing nutjobs think that not-for-profit media enterprises should be outlawed on principle, and are constantly harping on the theme that the licencing fee should be removed, presumably so that the commercial drivel on the also-rans would be the only alternative.