We got a TRS-80 when I was four or five years old. It came with a bunch of BASIC programs in the manual, and the shorter ones I'd type in myself. Anything over about a half a column I got my dad to type in for me.:^P Sadly, I didn't realize what an opportunity I had at the time - didn't actually learn to program in BASIC til 6th grade. I don't think it occurred to me at the age of 5 that I could change the programs and make them do different things, I just copied them out of the book.
If the chance of infection from the cat was being around was only 1%, that is still too high.
What if it's 0.028%? Because that's about what it is. Less than one thirtieth of a percent. I think you can find better things to protect your family from.
Thank you, this deserves to be modded up way more than it has been.
There was a similar problem a year or two ago when the media latched onto a couple kids who caught salmonella from hamster poop, and suddenly everyone was dumping their pet rodents. There are 14 million cases of salmonella a year - something like 17 of them are from pet rodents.
If you have that attitude and are truly that paranoid, then if there is a decent chance of there being a pregnant woman in your household in the next 10-15 years, DON'T GET A FUCKING CAT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Is that so hard? There are many other pets to choose from.
This connects well with the known etiology of toxoplasmosis, and is why the MD tells your pregnant wife/girlfriend/mom to stay away from cats.
Specifically, cat poop. Sorry, it may sound like nit-picking to you, but you should see the number of cats who wind up in shelters because their owner got pregnant. Pregnant women do NOT need to stay away from cats - they just need to stay away from the litter box. They shouldn't clean it, and should avoid inhaling dust from it. If your cat has something wrong with it and can't clean its bum properly, someone (who's not pregnant) should be keeping it clean for them. Only single pregnant women with no one to take care of this stuff for them might need to actually rehome their cats - and they can usually wear gloves and a surgical mask when cleaning the litterbox.
Yeah, this is the biggest problem. I am far more likely to run into a song I'm meh on, but don't quite want to delete, and give it a 1-star rating (which I have done) than to go through and rate EVERY song (which I haven't done). So it sucks that these 1-star songs will now be played more than much better songs that I just haven't gotten around to rating.
Yeah, the only thing standing between these results and real-world usefulness is statistical significance. That may keep it from making it into an academic journal, y'know.
Ruining it by prompting them to start this "throttling" business, which may not have been necessary without the copiers. Is this the only comment you've read in this whole discussion, or what?
Why should I be constrained by 3 videos at any one time? It doesn't make sense technically or ethically.
Uh, because that's what you signed up for? If you feel you have a "right" to more videos at once, you could... I dunno... buy them? Or maybe try the freaking library, they usually have pretty high borrowing limits.
Your one of those internet argue-ers who argue just for the sake of it,
Well, yeah, at the moment I'm just having fun. And I couldn't do it without you. Think about that one.
Meanwhile, Netflix is riding your misplaced sense of morals all the way to the bank.
Well, perhaps if I actually were a Netflix subscriber. I suppose I meant "the rest of us" in a general sense, since I'm not really part of "us." Perhaps I should have said "everyone else."
And you're some poor schlub renting an apartment and working in a crappy job.
Well, I am renting an apartment for at least another few months, but at the moment I'm mostly living off my husband.:) It's a pretty sweet job. My boss doesn't mind if I post to Slashdot at work!
They make money off of a business model that assumes that average people watch X DVDs per week, and so allows them to make a profit off of anyone who watches X DVDs or a bit more per week. When you rent lots of movies, they don't make a profit. Anyone who watches lots of movies causes them to lose money.
Now, the number of people who actually watch three DVDs in a day, send them back, and watch three more a couple days later, etc etc, is probably pretty darn small. Small enough that Netflix can eat the loss to remain "unlimited." However, a whole lot more people have time to *copy* 3 DVDs a day - multiplying Netflix's loss by quite a bit. So yes, they are in the business of making money off of movies, and this practice causes them to not make money. So of COURSE they are going to discourage it by whatever means they have available. Again, the means they chose are dishonest and I'm not saying they were right - but they were justified in doing *something* about it.
And yes, when you rent a movie and copy it, you are a freeloader, whether off of Netflix or the studio or whoever. You are getting more than you are legally entitled to, because you are NOT legally entitled to make a copy of a movie that does not belong to you. You are getting DVDs for free.
I've read things saying that women are more likely to feel nauseous or dizzy from 3D graphics than men - which I'm guessing is true, as it certainly happens to me. I wonder if you're also more susceptible to this as you age?
I kind of hope that's true, so it'll give them one more reason to give me more 2D games...
It entered into the discussion when most of the people who claim to have experienced the throttling are people who are only high-volume because they copy DVDs and send them back within a day.
Point is, let's say that right now 10% of Netflix's customers are high-volume. If half of those are copiers, and they weren't copying, only 5% would be high-volume - and maybe that would be a low enough percentage that Netflix wouldn't care enough to risk the bad publicity.
I don't know the exact percentages, of course, but overall if the copiers weren't copying, they'd certainly have fewer high-volume renters - and it might never have reached a threshold where they felt the need to do something about it.
Judging from several comments here, it sounds like some people are expecting to get a lot MORE than what they paid for - they're expecting to get permanent copies of as many DVDs as they want, by getting the DVD, copying it, and sending it back the next day. I would call that "freeloading," as well as "illegal" and "ruining it for the rest of us."
I realize that some people are legitimately renting lots and lots of movies, but I have a feeling that if you took away all the "copiers", the problem wouldn't be so big that Netflix would have to stoop to massive throttling. Yes, they handled it in a dishonest manner, but just the fact that they're doing it isn't at all surprising if so many people are abusing the service.
The second group ALSO got to see the ratings from the first group. So they could see whether they were downloading a 1-star or 5-star song. And yet they still downloaded 1-stars if that's what everyone else was downloading.
I agree, there's nothing surprising about it. It's pretty obvious that this is the model the music industry depends on. But so many commenters have been getting it wrong, thinking that people were downloading highly rated songs rather than often-downloaded songs, I wanted to clarify.
No, this is more like if your company had kept paying everyone what they paid them before, but suddenly handed out a Christmas bonus (that had never existed before) to the top people. Nobody was expecting it, so they weren't competing for it. The people who got it get a morale boost, the people who didn't get it are no worse off than they were before - and maybe see it as something to work a little harder for, in case the company decides to do it again sometime. But, of course, no plans to do it again are announced, so that people don't get cut-throat competitive. But you never know when you might get something extra.
It's like when I worked for Borders bookstore. They'd have secret shoppers come in now and then, and they had a whole list of things they were looking for that you had to do. Now, of course, you were supposed to do these things with every customer, but sometimes you forgot. If you got a less than perfect shop, all that would happen was a manager would remind you of what you should have done. However, if you got a perfect score, you got a free book or CD (from a pile in the back room, not the whole store). So it was good motivation to stay on top of what was going on, but didn't demoralize people by punishing them if they weren't perfect.
Uh, perhaps I read it wrong, but it sounded to me like the "employee" was the one who had to pay the bid in order to get the job. So you bid $40 for a job that pays $45/hr, but if it turns out to only take an hour you wind up getting $5 total.
So that would be like if you had two car places that wanted to charge you $100/hr or $90/hr, and you told them that whoever would pay you $50 first gets the job - and you're not telling them what the problem is, so it might just be an oil change that they'd only make a half hour's pay on.
Yeah, I feel totally screwed over by the fact that some company is offering a neato product that I don't need and won't buy. It's the Man holding me down! Forcing me to live with the knowledge that someone, somewhere has something I don't have!
Luckily, I can rest safe in the knowledge that you, at least, possess nothing more than the necessities of life, and so you probably don't own nothing that I don't also own. *whew* That was a close one.
Actually, the article does answer question #1 - yes, the second group could see the ratings that the first group gave. That was part of the point of the experiment. The second is an interesting question, I don't think it's answered. #3, I seriously doubt it - I'm not sure group b was even aware that group A existed except that *somebody* rated these songs already. I'm not really sure why it would matter, though, whether or not group B thought group A could talk about them with each other. And #4 would be pretty trivial for them to check - just ask potential subjects, have you heard of any of these? And don't take subjects who have heard of them. Unless it was *incredibly* poorly done, I don't see why they would claim that the songs were unknown to the subjects if they didn't know it.
It's more related to the fact that articles with lots of comments tend to snowball into even MORE comments, into the hundreds. While those that only get a couple dozen tend to stay in the low numbers.
Because the mod ratings are (ostensibly) based on quality, which in this article was shown to have nothing to do with popularity. Group B did NOT download songs based on the quality ratings that Group A gave them - only based on the number of times the songs were downloaded. Popularity was totally independent of rating/quality.
Summary is misleading - gotta RTFA!!
on
How Songs Get Popular
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· Score: 2, Informative
As I've had to point out to a couple people already, the summary is misleading. It makes it sound like highly-rated songs became popular. This was not the case. Songs that were downloaded more often kept getting downloaded more often and became popular - regardless of whether or not they were highly rated!
The whole point is that the ratings (ie, quality) of the songs had little or nothing to do with their popularity - low-rated songs became popular as often as highly-rated songs! And in different test groups (there were 10), different songs became popular, still independent of ratings.
Whoever modded this up didn't RTFA
on
How Songs Get Popular
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The point was, Group B didn't download the songs that Group A rated highly. They downloaded the ones that were downloaded the most times, regardless of how highly they were rated. Songs rated lower were just as likely to become popular as songs rated highly. And in different Group Bs (there were B.1-B.10), different songs became popular, always independent of the ratings given. There were a few songs that never did particularly badly or well, but no song was always really popular or always really unpopular, no matter the quality.
The difference is, these people weren't basing it on reviews. They could see the ratings that the control group had given the songs - but they tended to download other songs that had been downloaded many times, not ones that were highly rated.
So it's more like going to Amazon and buying based on the sales rank. Or, for that matter, buying whatever's on the "bestseller" shelf at Barnes & Noble or Borders - which I'm sure a lot of people do, too.
But the study did show that songs' popularity was independent of the ratings given by the control group (which the test group could see). So crap songs *were* as likely to get popular as good songs - once a few people listened to them, more people would listen, despite a low rating.
Which doesn't mean that everything on the radio is automatically crap, but it does mean that popularity (ie, making it onto mainstream radio) is no indication of quality, and that there likely IS as much crap as good stuff on there.
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We got a TRS-80 when I was four or five years old. It came with a bunch of BASIC programs in the manual, and the shorter ones I'd type in myself. Anything over about a half a column I got my dad to type in for me. :^P Sadly, I didn't realize what an opportunity I had at the time - didn't actually learn to program in BASIC til 6th grade. I don't think it occurred to me at the age of 5 that I could change the programs and make them do different things, I just copied them out of the book.
What if it's 0.028%? Because that's about what it is. Less than one thirtieth of a percent. I think you can find better things to protect your family from.
There was a similar problem a year or two ago when the media latched onto a couple kids who caught salmonella from hamster poop, and suddenly everyone was dumping their pet rodents. There are 14 million cases of salmonella a year - something like 17 of them are from pet rodents.
If you have that attitude and are truly that paranoid, then if there is a decent chance of there being a pregnant woman in your household in the next 10-15 years, DON'T GET A FUCKING CAT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Is that so hard? There are many other pets to choose from.
Specifically, cat poop. Sorry, it may sound like nit-picking to you, but you should see the number of cats who wind up in shelters because their owner got pregnant. Pregnant women do NOT need to stay away from cats - they just need to stay away from the litter box. They shouldn't clean it, and should avoid inhaling dust from it. If your cat has something wrong with it and can't clean its bum properly, someone (who's not pregnant) should be keeping it clean for them. Only single pregnant women with no one to take care of this stuff for them might need to actually rehome their cats - and they can usually wear gloves and a surgical mask when cleaning the litterbox.
Yeah, this is the biggest problem. I am far more likely to run into a song I'm meh on, but don't quite want to delete, and give it a 1-star rating (which I have done) than to go through and rate EVERY song (which I haven't done). So it sucks that these 1-star songs will now be played more than much better songs that I just haven't gotten around to rating.
Yeah, the only thing standing between these results and real-world usefulness is statistical significance. That may keep it from making it into an academic journal, y'know.
Why should I be constrained by 3 videos at any one time? It doesn't make sense technically or ethically.
Uh, because that's what you signed up for? If you feel you have a "right" to more videos at once, you could... I dunno... buy them? Or maybe try the freaking library, they usually have pretty high borrowing limits.
Your one of those internet argue-ers who argue just for the sake of it,
Well, yeah, at the moment I'm just having fun. And I couldn't do it without you. Think about that one.
Meanwhile, Netflix is riding your misplaced sense of morals all the way to the bank.
Well, perhaps if I actually were a Netflix subscriber. I suppose I meant "the rest of us" in a general sense, since I'm not really part of "us." Perhaps I should have said "everyone else."
And you're some poor schlub renting an apartment and working in a crappy job.
Well, I am renting an apartment for at least another few months, but at the moment I'm mostly living off my husband. :) It's a pretty sweet job. My boss doesn't mind if I post to Slashdot at work!
Now, the number of people who actually watch three DVDs in a day, send them back, and watch three more a couple days later, etc etc, is probably pretty darn small. Small enough that Netflix can eat the loss to remain "unlimited." However, a whole lot more people have time to *copy* 3 DVDs a day - multiplying Netflix's loss by quite a bit. So yes, they are in the business of making money off of movies, and this practice causes them to not make money. So of COURSE they are going to discourage it by whatever means they have available. Again, the means they chose are dishonest and I'm not saying they were right - but they were justified in doing *something* about it.
And yes, when you rent a movie and copy it, you are a freeloader, whether off of Netflix or the studio or whoever. You are getting more than you are legally entitled to, because you are NOT legally entitled to make a copy of a movie that does not belong to you. You are getting DVDs for free.
I kind of hope that's true, so it'll give them one more reason to give me more 2D games...
Point is, let's say that right now 10% of Netflix's customers are high-volume. If half of those are copiers, and they weren't copying, only 5% would be high-volume - and maybe that would be a low enough percentage that Netflix wouldn't care enough to risk the bad publicity.
I don't know the exact percentages, of course, but overall if the copiers weren't copying, they'd certainly have fewer high-volume renters - and it might never have reached a threshold where they felt the need to do something about it.
Judging from several comments here, it sounds like some people are expecting to get a lot MORE than what they paid for - they're expecting to get permanent copies of as many DVDs as they want, by getting the DVD, copying it, and sending it back the next day. I would call that "freeloading," as well as "illegal" and "ruining it for the rest of us."
I realize that some people are legitimately renting lots and lots of movies, but I have a feeling that if you took away all the "copiers", the problem wouldn't be so big that Netflix would have to stoop to massive throttling. Yes, they handled it in a dishonest manner, but just the fact that they're doing it isn't at all surprising if so many people are abusing the service.
You need to be modded "-1 Has Stick In Ass."
I agree, there's nothing surprising about it. It's pretty obvious that this is the model the music industry depends on. But so many commenters have been getting it wrong, thinking that people were downloading highly rated songs rather than often-downloaded songs, I wanted to clarify.
It's like when I worked for Borders bookstore. They'd have secret shoppers come in now and then, and they had a whole list of things they were looking for that you had to do. Now, of course, you were supposed to do these things with every customer, but sometimes you forgot. If you got a less than perfect shop, all that would happen was a manager would remind you of what you should have done. However, if you got a perfect score, you got a free book or CD (from a pile in the back room, not the whole store). So it was good motivation to stay on top of what was going on, but didn't demoralize people by punishing them if they weren't perfect.
So that would be like if you had two car places that wanted to charge you $100/hr or $90/hr, and you told them that whoever would pay you $50 first gets the job - and you're not telling them what the problem is, so it might just be an oil change that they'd only make a half hour's pay on.
Luckily, I can rest safe in the knowledge that you, at least, possess nothing more than the necessities of life, and so you probably don't own nothing that I don't also own. *whew* That was a close one.
Actually, the article does answer question #1 - yes, the second group could see the ratings that the first group gave. That was part of the point of the experiment. The second is an interesting question, I don't think it's answered. #3, I seriously doubt it - I'm not sure group b was even aware that group A existed except that *somebody* rated these songs already. I'm not really sure why it would matter, though, whether or not group B thought group A could talk about them with each other. And #4 would be pretty trivial for them to check - just ask potential subjects, have you heard of any of these? And don't take subjects who have heard of them. Unless it was *incredibly* poorly done, I don't see why they would claim that the songs were unknown to the subjects if they didn't know it.
They did not download songs that were highly rated. They downloaded songs that had already been downloaded more, regardless of the ratings.
The end.
Because the mod ratings are (ostensibly) based on quality, which in this article was shown to have nothing to do with popularity. Group B did NOT download songs based on the quality ratings that Group A gave them - only based on the number of times the songs were downloaded. Popularity was totally independent of rating/quality.
The whole point is that the ratings (ie, quality) of the songs had little or nothing to do with their popularity - low-rated songs became popular as often as highly-rated songs! And in different test groups (there were 10), different songs became popular, still independent of ratings.
The point was, Group B didn't download the songs that Group A rated highly. They downloaded the ones that were downloaded the most times, regardless of how highly they were rated. Songs rated lower were just as likely to become popular as songs rated highly. And in different Group Bs (there were B.1-B.10), different songs became popular, always independent of the ratings given. There were a few songs that never did particularly badly or well, but no song was always really popular or always really unpopular, no matter the quality.
So it's more like going to Amazon and buying based on the sales rank. Or, for that matter, buying whatever's on the "bestseller" shelf at Barnes & Noble or Borders - which I'm sure a lot of people do, too.
Which doesn't mean that everything on the radio is automatically crap, but it does mean that popularity (ie, making it onto mainstream radio) is no indication of quality, and that there likely IS as much crap as good stuff on there.
I'm using Firefox on OS X 10.3.9, and it keeps trying to download "retrieve.cgi" and never manages to get to the actual PDF...