Focus on the online presence, and the ability to ship to store to free on any item (Wal-Mart has this one nailed).
Almost nailed. They let you pay cash now too - you order online, you come into the store and pay cash, then they ship it to your house or to the store for you to pick up.
When I say "almost" the problem is that when you pay cash, they still ask for photo ID on pick-up so you have to have photo-ID (a lot of the people who don't have debit/credit cards don't have photo id either).
So far I've been able to bluff the kid manning the pick-up counter. But one day I might not, and then I'm stuck unable to pick up an order placed with a fake name nor can I get a refund either for basically the same reason. So that makes me reluctant to buy anything big-ticket that way.
When you cut support you begin to cut your own throat.
The beginning of Best Buy's end started with the end of Circuit City. Best Buy thought that they were now free of competition, so they reduced the variety of the products they stocked and focused only on high-margin stuff (for example, Monster Cable and in-house brands). They thought that their customers no longer had a choice and so they tried to stick it to us.
Now you hear them whine about being "the internet's showroom" - they think people come in to look and then go buy online instead. That's almost a complete fallacy because almost all of their products are commodities, you gain basically nothing from a hands-on experience with just about everything they sell. Even things like TV's, AVR's and speakers don't really give up much useful information from the show-room experience because performance in your own home is always different from in the show-room. You are almost always better off reading a variety of reviews than trying to make subjective judgements yourself in the store.
We also have no credible evidence of any organized tampering of the vote, either in mechanical or electronic forms. The systems may be wrong, but they are probably no worse than they have ever been, and I haven't seen any smoking gun saying that the machines were tampered with.
Well, that is kind of the point - these machines have such poor controls that tampering without leaving any evidence is supremely easy compared to paper ballot tampering of similar scale. These systems are inherently broken, like a car without brakes. You don't need to see it crash to know it shouldn't be built that way in the first place.
Your examples of physical world problems with vote tampering are inherently limited by being physical world problems.
Ron Paul's newsletters carried many racist and other bigoted screeds. Guess that's not convenient to your propaganda model.
So far, there's been nothing beyond the circumstantial evidence of those newsletters. If the guy is a bigot, then there is going to be more than one case of him letting the cat out of the bag over the last 30 or so years. If I ever see any corroborating evidence of Ron Paul being racist, then into the bigot category he goes too.
Until then, I'm willing to take him at his word that the newsletters were just something he wasn't paying enough attention to. Meanwhile there's tons of evidence of his egalitarianism, like when he talks about drug laws being an indirect form of racism.
If enough people in out democracy agree with your judgement, someone will pardon you.
That's the same argument I made for torture and all the other forms of executive misconduct we've seen since 911. Too bad the commander in chief and his cronies weren't able to live up to the same moral standard that the little guys need to.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
I think the term "manager" has been severely overloaded in the modern corporate world. I think there are at least three different types of management:
1) Budget management - bean counting and other forms of paper-pushing 2) People management - acting as a buffer between your team and the rest of the company, as well as dealing with issues internal to the team like personality conflicts, motivation, career path, etc 3) Product management - mostly technical and creative work all revolving around the life-cycle of a product from creation to end-of-life.
I think that a lot of the dysfunction in modern corporations comes from the intermingling of these distinctly different jobs under the common rubric of "management." You end up with people applying bean-counting processes to people-handling situations and the result is nearly guaranteed failure.
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases, on people from nations who will grow up to use pirated software.
A lot of the Gates Foundation's spending on medicine has served a secondary purpose of bolstering drug patents - they won't spend money on drugs from local generic manufacturers in countries that do not heel to US drug patent laws.
No wonder the scumbag stakeholders are pissed.
You seem confused as to the meaning of "stakeholder" - it is not shareholder. It is a term that refers to everyone with an interest in an outcome, not just those with money at risk, but the people who's lives are at risk too - nominally the ones being "helped."
Second, extradition is for serious crimes only. Why wasn't the request squashed as it's only related to a civil matter of copyright infringement, not a criminal offense?
It might only be civil in the UK, I don't really know. But the actual charges in the US are criminal, not civil. The MAFIAA have been steadily increasing the footprint of the criminal statutes regarding copyright infringement for decades now.
Re:Nazi's, post war America, and Ticks
on
Insects As Weapons
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Right across the channel is the town of Lyme where the first people developed a strange disorder later called "Lyme Disease." Incidentally, ticks were Trabe's favorite pet project.
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
on
Insects As Weapons
·
· Score: 2
In this regard, humans are most likely unique. When dinosaurs began dominating and changing ecosystems they didn't, as far as we know, contemplate whether or not they should try to preserve other species. They just ate and pooped, and probably wiped out some things.
Hey there mighty brontosaurus Don't you have a message for us? You thought your rule would always last There were no lessons in your past.
Fifty million years ago They walked upon the planet so They live in a museum It's the only place you'll see 'em.
Why? Since I've done it, and its common knowledge how to do it, I'm thinking thats just wrong.
Same reason the DMCA prohibits the distribution, but not creation or use, of DRM circumvention tools. You can certainly jerry-rig something, but wide-spread adoption of it is exceptionally unlikely. When only the technical elite are capable of putting something together than its value to humanity is basically nil.
Use a real GPS unit with no broadcast capabilities and you don't have that problem.
And you also won't have the benefit of having a computer able to access your location data either. Seriously, that's a non-answer. We easily have the ability to do the right thing. Giving up on doing anything sophisticated just because there are groups who want to abuse it too is basically the historical definition of luddism.
They would have to make different stops, nobody in an armani suit wants to stand within spitting distance of some down on his luck guy in grubby clothes and dishevled hair.
Personally, I think we need less technology to pinpoint where we are. Trading convenience for security and privacy and all that.....
As a privacy and security freak I disagree. The problem is not location accuracy. It is information leakage. There are all kinds of great things I can do with my own location info. The problem is all the devices that gleefully hand over my location info to 3rd parties who wish to exploit it for their own benefit.
As if the computer did this on it's own. Might as well argue that you didn't hire that hit man, he just acted based on hearing the mechanical vibrations caused by electrons going over the phone line.
Actually, I think the hit man analogy is the best one so far.
This swarm thing is like you hired a hitman, and someone else hired a hitman, and both of your hitmen decided to team-up without running it by either of you.
I'm sure they'll do the same thing the Creationists did with Evolution; admit to some very small degree that the theory is correct, but insist that theory only explains minor phenomena.
But I fully expect to have to defend my opinions to my kids. Even if they ultimately disagree with my point of view, at least I've taught them why I believe the way I do. And if I'm not able to satisfactorily explain and defend those opinions, maybe I need to reconsider them.
A while back I learned a great saying (from a religious blogger in fact). "An opinion is not just a right, it is a responsibility." In other words, people who have (or really act on) opinions without good reasons for those opinions are behaving irresponsibly.
Well, they've been crying wolf for quite some time now. Can't wait to see what slips through the net due to their negligence / power schemes; smart money would say it will be something new.
My money, smart or not, says nothing will slip through for the same reason nothing has slipped through since 911 -- there is nothing.
The way they crow whenever they "catch" some numbnut who can barely put one foot in front of another you would expect massive coverage of an actual terrorist being thwarted. But there hasn't been even one. Anybody even remotely dangerous - shoe/underware bombers - never hits domestic security anyway, always boarding the plane overseas.
I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
The best part of Warlords was when one someone "died" - they were still there as a mostly invisible ghost and could affect the trajectory of the fireball if it hit them. So if you died, you could really mess with the remaining players anytime the fireball came near your corner of the screen.
Usenet is way better than the bad old days that followed the green card lawyers. It has been mostly forgotten by their type, having moved on to crapping all over the web, and the single to noise ratio on usenet discussions has improved.
The only alternative I can thing of is a browser appliance (virtual machine), for each major service.
I've been thinking along those lines too. What I would like to see is an extension for firefox that spoofs and/or configures all of that stuff based on the URL in the current tab.
For example, if the URL includes facebook.com you get one profile and if you are browsing google.com you get another. The profile would include things like:
unique browser-agent unique cookies (of all sorts) unique bogus X-Forwarded-For http header unique adblock exception list unique set of accepted content-types etc - basically everything one can possible use to fingerprint a browser
The RequestPolicy extension is the closest I've seen to that and it is still a long ways away. But what it does is let you define a list of exceptions based on the current URL, so if you are browsing google, you can pull in stuff from googleapis.com but if you are somewhere else, googleapis.com will be blocked.
Installing ghostery is the first thing I do now when I install a browser. You'll find that you can't interact with a lot of sites, or write comments on them if their tracking software is off, which gives you a good list of sites to stay away from.
I've bee using ghostery for what feels like forever and I have run across less than 5 sites that would not function without turning ghostery off.
I can't say for the commenting part though because practically no website allows anonymous comments any more and I refuse to create an account just for a one-off comment and won't even go near facebook for regular use, much less as a global-login.
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy from the unauthorized dealer and spend a couple of bucks on a 3rd party warranty like Square Trade. You still come out way, way ahead.
Focus on the online presence, and the ability to ship to store to free on any item (Wal-Mart has this one nailed).
Almost nailed. They let you pay cash now too - you order online, you come into the store and pay cash, then they ship it to your house or to the store for you to pick up.
When I say "almost" the problem is that when you pay cash, they still ask for photo ID on pick-up so you have to have photo-ID (a lot of the people who don't have debit/credit cards don't have photo id either).
So far I've been able to bluff the kid manning the pick-up counter. But one day I might not, and then I'm stuck unable to pick up an order placed with a fake name nor can I get a refund either for basically the same reason. So that makes me reluctant to buy anything big-ticket that way.
When you cut support you begin to cut your own throat.
The beginning of Best Buy's end started with the end of Circuit City. Best Buy thought that they were now free of competition, so they reduced the variety of the products they stocked and focused only on high-margin stuff (for example, Monster Cable and in-house brands). They thought that their customers no longer had a choice and so they tried to stick it to us.
Now you hear them whine about being "the internet's showroom" - they think people come in to look and then go buy online instead. That's almost a complete fallacy because almost all of their products are commodities, you gain basically nothing from a hands-on experience with just about everything they sell. Even things like TV's, AVR's and speakers don't really give up much useful information from the show-room experience because performance in your own home is always different from in the show-room. You are almost always better off reading a variety of reviews than trying to make subjective judgements yourself in the store.
We also have no credible evidence of any organized tampering of the vote, either in mechanical or electronic forms. The systems may be wrong, but they are probably no worse than they have ever been, and I haven't seen any smoking gun saying that the machines were tampered with.
Well, that is kind of the point - these machines have such poor controls that tampering without leaving any evidence is supremely easy compared to paper ballot tampering of similar scale. These systems are inherently broken, like a car without brakes. You don't need to see it crash to know it shouldn't be built that way in the first place.
Your examples of physical world problems with vote tampering are inherently limited by being physical world problems.
Ron Paul's newsletters carried many racist and other bigoted screeds. Guess that's not convenient to your propaganda model.
So far, there's been nothing beyond the circumstantial evidence of those newsletters. If the guy is a bigot, then there is going to be more than one case of him letting the cat out of the bag over the last 30 or so years. If I ever see any corroborating evidence of Ron Paul being racist, then into the bigot category he goes too.
Until then, I'm willing to take him at his word that the newsletters were just something he wasn't paying enough attention to. Meanwhile there's tons of evidence of his egalitarianism, like when he talks about drug laws being an indirect form of racism.
Rand Paul != Ron Paul.
More importantly, Rand Paul !== Ron Paul.
Indeed. Rand is a douche, much more likely to go along with the bigot faction of the republican party. Ron not so much.
If enough people in out democracy agree with your judgement, someone will pardon you.
That's the same argument I made for torture and all the other forms of executive misconduct we've seen since 911. Too bad the commander in chief and his cronies weren't able to live up to the same moral standard that the little guys need to.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
I think the term "manager" has been severely overloaded in the modern corporate world. I think there are at least three different types of management:
1) Budget management - bean counting and other forms of paper-pushing
2) People management - acting as a buffer between your team and the rest of the company, as well as dealing with issues internal to the team like personality conflicts, motivation, career path, etc
3) Product management - mostly technical and creative work all revolving around the life-cycle of a product from creation to end-of-life.
I think that a lot of the dysfunction in modern corporations comes from the intermingling of these distinctly different jobs under the common rubric of "management." You end up with people applying bean-counting processes to people-handling situations and the result is nearly guaranteed failure.
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases, on people from nations who will grow up to use pirated software.
A lot of the Gates Foundation's spending on medicine has served a secondary purpose of bolstering drug patents - they won't spend money on drugs from local generic manufacturers in countries that do not heel to US drug patent laws.
No wonder the scumbag stakeholders are pissed.
You seem confused as to the meaning of "stakeholder" - it is not shareholder. It is a term that refers to everyone with an interest in an outcome, not just those with money at risk, but the people who's lives are at risk too - nominally the ones being "helped."
Second, extradition is for serious crimes only. Why wasn't the request squashed as it's only related to a civil matter of copyright infringement, not a criminal offense?
It might only be civil in the UK, I don't really know. But the actual charges in the US are criminal, not civil. The MAFIAA have been steadily increasing the footprint of the criminal statutes regarding copyright infringement for decades now.
Right across the channel is the town of Lyme where the first people developed a strange disorder later called "Lyme Disease." Incidentally, ticks were Trabe's favorite pet project.
That does not appear to be true.
In this regard, humans are most likely unique. When dinosaurs began dominating and changing ecosystems they didn't, as far as we know, contemplate whether or not they should try to preserve other species. They just ate and pooped, and probably wiped out some things.
Hey there mighty brontosaurus
Don't you have a message for us?
You thought your rule would always last
There were no lessons in your past.
Fifty million years ago
They walked upon the planet so
They live in a museum
It's the only place you'll see 'em.
Why? Since I've done it, and its common knowledge how to do it, I'm thinking thats just wrong.
Same reason the DMCA prohibits the distribution, but not creation or use, of DRM circumvention tools. You can certainly jerry-rig something, but wide-spread adoption of it is exceptionally unlikely. When only the technical elite are capable of putting something together than its value to humanity is basically nil.
Use a real GPS unit with no broadcast capabilities and you don't have that problem.
And you also won't have the benefit of having a computer able to access your location data either. Seriously, that's a non-answer. We easily have the ability to do the right thing. Giving up on doing anything sophisticated just because there are groups who want to abuse it too is basically the historical definition of luddism.
They would have to make different stops, nobody in an armani suit wants to stand within spitting distance of some down on his luck guy in grubby clothes and dishevled hair.
Personally, I think we need less technology to pinpoint where we are. Trading convenience for security and privacy and all that.....
As a privacy and security freak I disagree. The problem is not location accuracy. It is information leakage. There are all kinds of great things I can do with my own location info. The problem is all the devices that gleefully hand over my location info to 3rd parties who wish to exploit it for their own benefit.
As if the computer did this on it's own. Might as well argue that you didn't hire that hit man, he just acted based on hearing the mechanical vibrations caused by electrons going over the phone line.
Actually, I think the hit man analogy is the best one so far.
This swarm thing is like you hired a hitman, and someone else hired a hitman, and both of your hitmen decided to team-up without running it by either of you.
I'm sure they'll do the same thing the Creationists did with Evolution; admit to some very small degree that the theory is correct, but insist that theory only explains minor phenomena.
Global micro-warming! Lol.
But I fully expect to have to defend my opinions to my kids. Even if they ultimately disagree with my point of view, at least I've taught them why I believe the way I do. And if I'm not able to satisfactorily explain and defend those opinions, maybe I need to reconsider them.
A while back I learned a great saying (from a religious blogger in fact). "An opinion is not just a right, it is a responsibility." In other words, people who have (or really act on) opinions without good reasons for those opinions are behaving irresponsibly.
Hmm you may be onto something. Funny, how doing so would be considered a violent crime while doing it to a developing child is a-ok.
That's what we do to groups who can't vote, they don't get a say in what's legal or not so they get screwed.
Well, they've been crying wolf for quite some time now. Can't wait to see what slips through the net due to their negligence / power schemes; smart money would say it will be something new.
My money, smart or not, says nothing will slip through for the same reason nothing has slipped through since 911 -- there is nothing.
The way they crow whenever they "catch" some numbnut who can barely put one foot in front of another you would expect massive coverage of an actual terrorist being thwarted. But there hasn't been even one. Anybody even remotely dangerous - shoe/underware bombers - never hits domestic security anyway, always boarding the plane overseas.
I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
The best part of Warlords was when one someone "died" - they were still there as a mostly invisible ghost and could affect the trajectory of the fireball if it hit them. So if you died, you could really mess with the remaining players anytime the fireball came near your corner of the screen.
Usenet is way better than the bad old days that followed the green card lawyers.
It has been mostly forgotten by their type, having moved on to crapping all over the web, and the single to noise ratio on usenet discussions has improved.
The only alternative I can thing of is a browser appliance (virtual machine), for each major service.
I've been thinking along those lines too. What I would like to see is an extension for firefox that spoofs and/or configures all of that stuff based on the URL in the current tab.
For example, if the URL includes facebook.com you get one profile and if you are browsing google.com you get another. The profile would include things like:
unique browser-agent
unique cookies (of all sorts)
unique bogus X-Forwarded-For http header
unique adblock exception list
unique set of accepted content-types
etc - basically everything one can possible use to fingerprint a browser
The RequestPolicy extension is the closest I've seen to that and it is still a long ways away. But what it does is let you define a list of exceptions based on the current URL, so if you are browsing google, you can pull in stuff from googleapis.com but if you are somewhere else, googleapis.com will be blocked.
Installing ghostery is the first thing I do now when I install a browser. You'll find that you can't interact with a lot of sites, or write comments on them if their tracking software is off, which gives you a good list of sites to stay away from.
I've bee using ghostery for what feels like forever and I have run across less than 5 sites that would not function without turning ghostery off.
I can't say for the commenting part though because practically no website allows anonymous comments any more and I refuse to create an account just for a one-off comment and won't even go near facebook for regular use, much less as a global-login.