You really can't draw any conclusions from what they SAY, only what they DO. It would be the kiss of death for them to say anything else.
If they said they did cooperate, then anyone doing anything remotely suspect would use a different product making that cooperation useless. Meanwhile everybody worried about criminals exploiting the backdoor by impersonating the cop-ware would also switch to another product.
The only way we will know is if someone notices cop-ware installed on their system and tests the antivirus software to see if it detects it - and then goes public with the results.
Seemed like nonsensical statement not worthy of much thought - a business model that relies on people being so careless with their money that they buy insurance and then spend out of pocket instead of using does not even pass the laugh test.
And part of the first, too, since "almost" referred to the incidents occurred to a single customer and not to the general population of customers.
So your contention is that the poster did not actually intend for anyone to draw conclusions about the utility of home warranties, just wanted to rely a personal anecdote? How do you reconcile that with your claims about the second half of the post?
And before some butt-hurt heeb starts pulling out his "you disagree with Israel, you therefor are an anti-semite" card... Sir Gerald Kaufman is himself a Jew.
He may be a jew but that doesn't stop anti-semites like yourself from using his words for your own purposes. If you don't want to be accused of being an anti-semite, don't use racial slurs like "heeb."
Bigots like you aren't doing the Palestinians any favors when you use their terrible situation as a tool for your own passive-aggressive racism.
Which is the reason GP included the parenthetical statement. Most people simply don't take advantage of the system, so it's still a net profit.
I didn't realize it was an attempt to explain the mathematical impossibility, it just sounded like something too ridiculous to be true. I'm sure there are the occasional people who so much money that they pay for a home warranty and then don't use it, but there is no way the entire industry survives on that assumption.
It absolutely might. My wife being a realtor, we've had home warranties over the years and they almost always pay off
If that were true. the companies selling those home warranties would be bankrupt. It is mathematically impossible for almost all customers to get more money out of their home warranties than they put.
Among the information it contains is the number of people that would be killed if it fails - sort of a target list for bombers and saboteurs.
So basically a tabulation of the census data for the downstream towns. The kind of thing that would take a normal person a few days to approximate within an order of magnitude for all of the dams is hardly a significant risk.
If you bother going to the link, make sure you read page 2 as well.
You mean the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam reference? That is a very extreme distortion of the facts, given the agenda of the guy making the statement, I would say borderline criminal. A 30 second google and a couple of minutes of reading should give you some perspective.
Or does it cover broader details that the public had free access to prior to the September 11 attacks, such information now being withheld as "critical infrastructure information?"
Given the alarmism and push for "cyberwarefare" I'm willing to bet all that was in those files were things like the engineering specs of the dams and maybe the results of any surveys since that would be part of plans for maintenance and repair.
He's right? You have access to the US's security reports that have cleared Putin, thus showing it is mundane trade protectionism?
Actually, HPC is my field of specialty, worked in it for more than 20 years and embargoes have been a part of it ever since the beginning. They stopped being relevant with the advent of beowulf clusters when COTS hardware could be scaled up basically as big as your budget allowed. Someone will probably come along and point out that clusters aren't appropriate for all workloads, but in terms of anything "dangerous" they are good enough.
The article you cited says Apple has three different prices for music. It does not say that Apple sets them. Please cite it anywhere where Apple sets determines the price for each track.
If you can't accept that limiting the choice of prices to 3 per-determined numbers is an exercise of control over the price, then I give up. You live in a different universe from the rest of us.
You accuse Apple of 50 markup but provide no proof.
I should have nailed that one down the first time. Markup is the difference between the buying and selling costs. This is not a mystery. On a 99 cent track, apple takes 30 cents. 30/69 = 44% ok? Not quite 50% but close enough. Grocery stores, to pick an example, have markups on on the order of 12%. And they have inventory, spoilage, shipping and retail floorspace costs. Apple is miking it. The bit players like amazon and google are also milking it simply because they can, because the market so non-competitive.
Massively dominant player in a non-competitive market = monopolist in common speech. And I'm done.
My friends who have music on iTunes disagree with you. They control the price.
False appeal to authority. We've already discussed this - apple gives them a very limited choice for the sale price and zero choice for the price apple charges them - 30%. Completely non-negotiable - that is the very definition of price control, apple sets the price on both ends.
Compare that to the app store - that's where Apple lets publishers control price - they can pick any price they want. Still, stuck with 30% fees, but at least on one end Apple has given up price control.
You picked the defintion. And refuse to explain a logical gap.
No, it is not a logical gap, it is you grasping at straws.
How is Apple supposed to manipulate prices when they don't set prices?
They do set the prices. They aren't like walmart buying wholsale and sellling retail - they are a middleman taking a fixed cut of 30% (which itself is ridiculous given that all they do is run a bunch of servers - that's a 50% markup for no physical stores, no physical inventory and no shipping costs, just moving bits around). A middleman that didn't have monopoly control wouldn't be able to dictate prices and would probably take a much smaller cut too.
You picked a definition that accuses Apple of price manipulation then refuse to explain how Apple has manipulated prices.
There is no accusation in that definition. You made the accusation yourself and expected me to back it up. it is a total strawman. Hell, the definition is explicitly neutral "makes possible" not "does."
An overwhelming market advantage means you have the ability to manipulate prices. Are you saying that even with an overwhelming market advantage a company can not manipulate pricing?
There were six definitions offered. And none by you. You chose part b of only one. Even then seem to intent to ignore the exclusivity qualifier of all the other ones.
So wait, you offered definitions, I picked one and now its not good enough because the other definitions said something different? Really? My point all along has been that there are multiple definitions of monopoly so of course i picked one, I picked the one that applies here. Duh!
Pleas state how Apple has made price manipulation possible.
They didn't make it possible, they have it by virtue of their overwhelming market advantage. The less competition in a market, the more price control is available to the dominant companies in that market. If only there was a widely accepted, objective measure of a market's competitiveness. HHI
So Apple has the ability to engage in monopolistic practices. Well I have the ability to be a mass murderer. That does not mean that I am one.
Really? So now you can't be a monopoly unless you abuse your monopoly position?
the fact that you can get music from other sources besides Apple destroys your argument about market competition.
How many times are you going keep going back to that ridiculous requirement of exclusivity. Perfect monopolies are so rare as to basically not exist. MS was not a perfect monopoly, standard oil was not a perfect monopoly, us steel was not a perfect monopoly, att was not a perrfect monopoly. Come on man what is wrong with you?
Yet you expect that Apple offers an owner unlimited price control that other companies and stores do not offer.
I have never said "unlimited" price control. That's your argument. How about you show how MS, US Steel, ATT, Standard Oil had unlimited price control? Huh?
You haven't made me sign a document stating that I won't kill you while you sleep... so I guess its okay if I do then?
You are really looking at it the wrong way.
The machine's programming is essentially a contract - a contract written by the casino (or their proxy the machine's manufacturer). The casino wrote the contract, he's just following it to the letter.
Granted, you can definitely engage in forms of trespass that are much worse than this, but for something like this situation, which was promptly handled, had no major ill effects, and was responded to in a way that indicates it truly was a mistake, I don't see why anyone should be up for prison time, whether as an individual or a part of a company.
But they are ignoring the costs of the clean-up. Every single user that had their system compromised like that needs to check everything from scratch to verify that the sports league software didn't compromise their systems in any other ways.
The costs of that is probably in the millions. I mean major companies who already have staff on hand to handle that sort of thing as part of their regular duties routinely claim tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in clean-up costs, multiply that by all the of the different users here and the cost is enormous....:)
I'm sorry but don't you see it is the second part of the definition and most of them have "exclusive" in it. Again using only the narrow part that agrees with
Do I need to teach you how to read a dictionary? Apparently so.
Each numbered section is a distinctly separate context. In this case (1) is market control (2) is government-granted privilege and (3) is possession unrelated to markets.
Within each numbered section there are multiple related definitions. So, in this case section (1) has two different definitions that deal with market control - exclusive control or just a very strong influence.
Capiche?
Please state how Apple has engaged in price manipulation.
From your citation - "makes possible" does not mean "engages in." Asking me to prove that Apple has broken the law is ridiculous. Their ability to do so is what matters - markets with low competitiveness enable more price manipulation. Highly competitive markets do not. If only there was a widely accepted, objective measure of a market's competitiveness. HHI
Does Folger's (Proctor and Gamble) have the right to set the price of coffee at Walmart.
The difference is that P&G gets paid the same amount regardless of what Walmart sells their coffee for.
If highest marketshare is the sole criteria of monopoly
Never said that. I said overwhelming market advantage.
From my perspective the biggest problem with chat is the requirement for a chat server. As long as everybody depends on some intermediary that intermediary has incentive to "wall in" users for monetization or just "customer acquisition." There are all kinds of other problems with centralized chat like the ability to keep records of who is talking to who. Even if the content of the messages is encrypted, the flow of messages is not.
I think there a couple of obscure setups like bitchat and bitmessage that seem to address those issues, but clients are not widely available.
exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.
Using only part of the definition and omitting the most important part of exclusivity is trying to redefine it.
I'm sorry, but you are not parsing that correctly. See the OR in there? The "exclusive" modifier only applies to the part before the OR. I know you desperately want to use that literalist interpretation of "mono" to mean exactly one, but that's not what the definition you cited says.
Without exclusive control, how would Apple or anyone manipulate the price?
Come on man. Every single example of monopolies that I have already cited did not have exclusive control, only dominant. It is not a binary function. Here's the way it works in the real world - the less competitive a market, the more control the dominant sellers have over pricing. HHI
I have friends who are in bands that have music on iTunes and they set prices.
That is a technical truth that obscures the meaningful truth.. At best your friends have the ability to choose from three different price points that Apple permits to them.
iTunes Plus songs are available at one of three price points. In the U.S. the pricing is 0.69 USD, 0.99 USD, or 1.29 USD each. https://support.apple.com/kb/ht1711
It felt right in that libertarian black-and-white only worked for me in my teens and 20s. Since then I've come to realize there are a lot more shades of grey.
, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.
So, given that definition, how do you prove it? What if there was some objective measure that was generally considered indicative of a non-competitive market? HHI
Second of all, how is there any equivalence when the two things being compared are not even in the same category. The RIAA are exclusive owners while Apple is a non-exclusive reseller
The RIAA's cartel status has always been with respect to distribution channels. Itunes is just another distribution channel. The two are completely comparable. RIAA had a monopoly (not a perfect monopoly, just a monopoly) on physical distribution and Apple had the same for digital distribution.
Um no. There is a legal and precise definition of monopoly.
Since we aren't lawyers, that isn't particularly useful. Seriously, I've said from the start that your literalism wasn't helpful and to retreat further into legalistic definitions is even worse. You have indeed cited case law, my argument from the start has never been about case law.
So far you've already denied that the RIAA is a monopoly, which destroyed your entire argument since my very first post made the equivalence between RIAA and Apple domination of the markets.
Standard Oil and MS could set whatever price they wanted.
Of course you realize that was not true, right? Neither company could set WHATEVER price they wanted. If they could have done that, then the prices they charged would have been substantially higher. With Standard Oil having only 70% of the market it is pretty clear that they were not setting WHATEVER price they wanted.
So that's a meaningless definition. Perhaps you would care to try again - remember something quantifiable than can be applied as a straight-forward yes/no test. Since you deny that the term "monopoly" is one that does not apply to shades of grey - even for layman's use - then black-and-white tests are your only option. HHI
Slashdot Mirror
You really can't draw any conclusions from what they SAY, only what they DO. It would be the kiss of death for them to say anything else.
If they said they did cooperate, then anyone doing anything remotely suspect would use a different product making that cooperation useless. Meanwhile everybody worried about criminals exploiting the backdoor by impersonating the cop-ware would also switch to another product.
The only way we will know is if someone notices cop-ware installed on their system and tests the antivirus software to see if it detects it - and then goes public with the results.
Did you miss the second half of a 2-line post?
Seemed like nonsensical statement not worthy of much thought - a business model that relies on people being so careless with their money that they buy insurance and then spend out of pocket instead of using does not even pass the laugh test.
And part of the first, too, since "almost" referred to the incidents occurred to a single customer and not to the general population of customers.
So your contention is that the poster did not actually intend for anyone to draw conclusions about the utility of home warranties, just wanted to rely a personal anecdote? How do you reconcile that with your claims about the second half of the post?
And before some butt-hurt heeb starts pulling out his "you disagree with Israel, you therefor are an anti-semite" card...
Sir Gerald Kaufman is himself a Jew.
He may be a jew but that doesn't stop anti-semites like yourself from using his words for your own purposes. If you don't want to be accused of being an anti-semite, don't use racial slurs like "heeb."
Bigots like you aren't doing the Palestinians any favors when you use their terrible situation as a tool for your own passive-aggressive racism.
Which is the reason GP included the parenthetical statement. Most people simply don't take advantage of the system, so it's still a net profit.
I didn't realize it was an attempt to explain the mathematical impossibility, it just sounded like something too ridiculous to be true. I'm sure there are the occasional people who so much money that they pay for a home warranty and then don't use it, but there is no way the entire industry survives on that assumption.
It absolutely might. My wife being a realtor, we've had home warranties over the years and they almost always pay off
If that were true. the companies selling those home warranties would be bankrupt. It is mathematically impossible for almost all customers to get more money out of their home warranties than they put.
Among the information it contains is the number of people that would be killed if it fails - sort of a target list for bombers and saboteurs.
So basically a tabulation of the census data for the downstream towns. The kind of thing that would take a normal person a few days to approximate within an order of magnitude for all of the dams is hardly a significant risk.
If you bother going to the link, make sure you read page 2 as well.
You mean the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam reference? That is a very extreme distortion of the facts, given the agenda of the guy making the statement, I would say borderline criminal. A 30 second google and a couple of minutes of reading should give you some perspective.
Or does it cover broader details that the public had free access to prior to the September 11 attacks, such information now being withheld as "critical infrastructure information?"
Given the alarmism and push for "cyberwarefare" I'm willing to bet all that was in those files were things like the engineering specs of the dams and maybe the results of any surveys since that would be part of plans for maintenance and repair.
He's right? You have access to the US's security reports that have cleared Putin, thus showing it is mundane trade protectionism?
Actually, HPC is my field of specialty, worked in it for more than 20 years and embargoes have been a part of it ever since the beginning. They stopped being relevant with the advent of beowulf clusters when COTS hardware could be scaled up basically as big as your budget allowed. Someone will probably come along and point out that clusters aren't appropriate for all workloads, but in terms of anything "dangerous" they are good enough.
What's a matter Putin? You poutin'?
But seriously, he is right. I just had to do the meme because the situation was a perfect set up.
The article you cited says Apple has three different prices for music. It does not say that Apple sets them. Please cite it anywhere where Apple sets determines the price for each track.
If you can't accept that limiting the choice of prices to 3 per-determined numbers is an exercise of control over the price, then I give up. You live in a different universe from the rest of us.
You accuse Apple of 50 markup but provide no proof.
I should have nailed that one down the first time. Markup is the difference between the buying and selling costs. This is not a mystery. On a 99 cent track, apple takes 30 cents. 30/69 = 44% ok? Not quite 50% but close enough. Grocery stores, to pick an example, have markups on on the order of 12%. And they have inventory, spoilage, shipping and retail floorspace costs. Apple is miking it. The bit players like amazon and google are also milking it simply because they can, because the market so non-competitive.
Massively dominant player in a non-competitive market = monopolist in common speech. And I'm done.
My friends who have music on iTunes disagree with you. They control the price.
False appeal to authority. We've already discussed this - apple gives them a very limited choice for the sale price and zero choice for the price apple charges them - 30%. Completely non-negotiable - that is the very definition of price control, apple sets the price on both ends.
Compare that to the app store - that's where Apple lets publishers control price - they can pick any price they want. Still, stuck with 30% fees, but at least on one end Apple has given up price control.
You picked the defintion. And refuse to explain a logical gap.
No, it is not a logical gap, it is you grasping at straws.
How is Apple supposed to manipulate prices when they don't set prices?
They do set the prices. They aren't like walmart buying wholsale and sellling retail - they are a middleman taking a fixed cut of 30% (which itself is ridiculous given that all they do is run a bunch of servers - that's a 50% markup for no physical stores, no physical inventory and no shipping costs, just moving bits around). A middleman that didn't have monopoly control wouldn't be able to dictate prices and would probably take a much smaller cut too.
You picked a definition that accuses Apple of price manipulation then refuse to explain how Apple has manipulated prices.
There is no accusation in that definition. You made the accusation yourself and expected me to back it up. it is a total strawman. Hell, the definition is explicitly neutral "makes possible" not "does."
An overwhelming market advantage means you have the ability to manipulate prices. Are you saying that even with an overwhelming market advantage a company can not manipulate pricing?
There were six definitions offered. And none by you. You chose part b of only one. Even then seem to intent to ignore the exclusivity qualifier of all the other ones.
So wait, you offered definitions, I picked one and now its not good enough because the other definitions said something different? Really?
My point all along has been that there are multiple definitions of monopoly so of course i picked one, I picked the one that applies here. Duh!
Pleas state how Apple has made price manipulation possible.
They didn't make it possible, they have it by virtue of their overwhelming market advantage. The less competition in a market, the more price control is available to the dominant companies in that market. If only there was a widely accepted, objective measure of a market's competitiveness. HHI
So Apple has the ability to engage in monopolistic practices. Well I have the ability to be a mass murderer. That does not mean that I am one.
Really? So now you can't be a monopoly unless you abuse your monopoly position?
the fact that you can get music from other sources besides Apple destroys your argument about market competition.
How many times are you going keep going back to that ridiculous requirement of exclusivity. Perfect monopolies are so rare as to basically not exist. MS was not a perfect monopoly, standard oil was not a perfect monopoly, us steel was not a perfect monopoly, att was not a perrfect monopoly. Come on man what is wrong with you?
Yet you expect that Apple offers an owner unlimited price control that other companies and stores do not offer.
I have never said "unlimited" price control. That's your argument. How about you show how MS, US Steel, ATT, Standard Oil had unlimited price control? Huh?
You haven't made me sign a document stating that I won't kill you while you sleep ... so I guess its okay if I do then?
You are really looking at it the wrong way.
The machine's programming is essentially a contract - a contract written by the casino (or their proxy the machine's manufacturer). The casino wrote the contract, he's just following it to the letter.
Granted, you can definitely engage in forms of trespass that are much worse than this, but for something like this situation, which was promptly handled, had no major ill effects, and was responded to in a way that indicates it truly was a mistake, I don't see why anyone should be up for prison time, whether as an individual or a part of a company.
But they are ignoring the costs of the clean-up. Every single user that had their system compromised like that needs to check everything from scratch to verify that the sports league software didn't compromise their systems in any other ways.
The costs of that is probably in the millions. I mean major companies who already have staff on hand to handle that sort of thing as part of their regular duties routinely claim tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in clean-up costs, multiply that by all the of the different users here and the cost is enormous.... :)
I'm sorry but don't you see it is the second part of the definition and most of them have "exclusive" in it. Again using only the narrow part that agrees with
Do I need to teach you how to read a dictionary?
Apparently so.
Each numbered section is a distinctly separate context.
In this case (1) is market control (2) is government-granted privilege and (3) is possession unrelated to markets.
Within each numbered section there are multiple related definitions.
So, in this case section (1) has two different definitions that deal with market control - exclusive control or just a very strong influence.
Capiche?
Please state how Apple has engaged in price manipulation.
From your citation - "makes possible" does not mean "engages in." Asking me to prove that Apple has broken the law is ridiculous. Their ability to do so is what matters - markets with low competitiveness enable more price manipulation. Highly competitive markets do not. If only there was a widely accepted, objective measure of a market's competitiveness. HHI
Does Folger's (Proctor and Gamble) have the right to set the price of coffee at Walmart.
The difference is that P&G gets paid the same amount regardless of what Walmart sells their coffee for.
If highest marketshare is the sole criteria of monopoly
Never said that. I said overwhelming market advantage.
From my perspective the biggest problem with chat is the requirement for a chat server. As long as everybody depends on some intermediary that intermediary has incentive to "wall in" users for monetization or just "customer acquisition." There are all kinds of other problems with centralized chat like the ability to keep records of who is talking to who. Even if the content of the messages is encrypted, the flow of messages is not.
I think there a couple of obscure setups like bitchat and bitmessage that seem to address those issues, but clients are not widely available.
First of all the whole definition is:
exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.
Using only part of the definition and omitting the most important part of exclusivity is trying to redefine it.
I'm sorry, but you are not parsing that correctly. See the OR in there? The "exclusive" modifier only applies to the part before the OR. I know you desperately want to use that literalist interpretation of "mono" to mean exactly one, but that's not what the definition you cited says.
Without exclusive control, how would Apple or anyone manipulate the price?
Come on man. Every single example of monopolies that I have already cited did not have exclusive control, only dominant. It is not a binary function. Here's the way it works in the real world - the less competitive a market, the more control the dominant sellers have over pricing. HHI
I have friends who are in bands that have music on iTunes and they set prices.
That is a technical truth that obscures the meaningful truth.. At best your friends have the ability to choose from three different price points that Apple permits to them.
iTunes Plus songs are available at one of three price points. In the U.S. the pricing is 0.69 USD, 0.99 USD, or 1.29 USD each.
https://support.apple.com/kb/ht1711
It felt right in that libertarian black-and-white only worked for me in my teens and 20s. Since then I've come to realize there are a lot more shades of grey.
, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.
So, given that definition, how do you prove it? What if there was some objective measure that was generally considered indicative of a non-competitive market? HHI
Second of all, how is there any equivalence when the two things being compared are not even in the same category. The RIAA are exclusive owners while Apple is a non-exclusive reseller
The RIAA's cartel status has always been with respect to distribution channels. Itunes is just another distribution channel. The two are completely comparable. RIAA had a monopoly (not a perfect monopoly, just a monopoly) on physical distribution and Apple had the same for digital distribution.
Haha, I guess I am a victim of Poe's Law.
So, go do drugs, I honestly don't care, and believe you have that right. But you are not getting a dime from me without pissing in a cup.
So go eat tasty food, I honestly don't care, and believe you have that right. But you aren't getting a dime from me if you have a BMI over 24%.
Um no. There is a legal and precise definition of monopoly.
Since we aren't lawyers, that isn't particularly useful. Seriously, I've said from the start that your literalism wasn't helpful and to retreat further into legalistic definitions is even worse. You have indeed cited case law, my argument from the start has never been about case law.
So far you've already denied that the RIAA is a monopoly, which destroyed your entire argument since my very first post made the equivalence between RIAA and Apple domination of the markets.
Please define "control."
Standard Oil and MS could set whatever price they wanted.
Of course you realize that was not true, right? Neither company could set WHATEVER price they wanted. If they could have done that, then the prices they charged would have been substantially higher. With Standard Oil having only 70% of the market it is pretty clear that they were not setting WHATEVER price they wanted.
So that's a meaningless definition. Perhaps you would care to try again - remember something quantifiable than can be applied as a straight-forward yes/no test. Since you deny that the term "monopoly" is one that does not apply to shades of grey - even for layman's use - then black-and-white tests are your only option. HHI