The best advise I ever got on phone conversations: Do hold whatever it is you have to say until the phone is down and you have checked that the connection is cut.
I would never put my trust into a mute button. Keeping your thoughts to yourself a couple minutes can't possibly that hard.
A system like that would be very quickly discontinued in any corporation that would actually be using it. Because most of the people whose behaviour is obnoxious are those in leadership positions. It usually gets worse the further you get up the chain, until it stops with the top management where the curve often (but not always) takes a dive (i.e. they actual top dogs often don't behave obnoxious).
The reason is that "obnoxious" is a very subjective definition. Much of what we consider obnoxious is displays of power (interrupting people) that are used intentionally or more often subconscious by those who deem themselves more powerful and need to state it without saying it outright. In other words, managers. The higher you get up the food chain, the thinner the air gets and the more fierce the competition. Until the very top, which usually behaves very differently because they don't have competition anymore. If they're actually the top - the C*Os of a largely independent company behave very differently from the C*Os of a company that's a part of a larger corporation.
Yes, I've dealt with all levels of management. I could witness their behaviour because I was in a special position that put me outside the chain of command (even the CEO couldn't give me orders nor fire me, but neither could I to him or anyone else). If you are interested at all in psychology and social sciences, watching leadership of various levels interact with each other and those of different levels in the hierarchy is extremely fascinating. And one of the things you learn is that a lot of behaviour is context-dependent - whether or not we consider it acceptable depends a lot on who does it to whom in what setting.
but the most immediate consequence for people living in Europe in the time was fewer legions pointing swords at them demanding tribute.
Actually, the most immediate consequence for people living within the Roman Empire was marauding hordes of barbarians burning down your village.
The "dark ages" aren't called that because sunspots made things dim for a couple hundred years. The amount of knowledge and skills lost was unbelievable. For several hundred years, old roman roads, despite not being maintained anymore and becoming more and more broken, were the best roads in all of Europe, because nobody knew how to make something like that. We're not talking pyramids here, we're talking about roads.
The world was a much different place back then. Knowledge as we know it was an unfamiliar concept. Knowledge was guarded and uncommon. Few people knew much about anything outside their own profession. Books were rare and valuable. If the US would be entirely destroyed by, say, a sudden eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, most of the knowledge would be preserved because copies of it exist in other places.
That's a relatively new thing. Less than a thousand years ago, any catastrophy that wipes out a civilization or any fall of an empire usually took most if not all of its knowledge down with it.
I believe you're referring to section 47, which as you point out is entirely optional for member states and says things such as:
You need a refresher on european politics. Here's how it works:
Government A wants to do evil things to its citizens. It goes ahead and tries, and gets a bloody nose (mass protests, law thrown out by highest court for being unconstitutional, whatever). Don't for a second think they give up. Next step is secret backroom talks and then a law passed on the EU level. A couple years later, they come back with the original idea on the national level, now claiming that even though they really, really don't want to, unfortunately the evil EU is forcing them to implement this new law...
And details like "may" are routinely forgotten about. That's just there because some countries said "we're not really interested in this right now" in the secret backroom dealings. It allows those governments who want this to move ahead, and those who'd rather do some other oppressing first to work on their own schedule.
Most companies have no risk management, and no clear picture of the risks their business faces.
The result of "intuitive" risk-non-management is that the usual human flaws have full impact. Basically, aside from a narrow middle ground, all risks are wrongly estimated.
The problem is that the most popular artists get a disproportinate amount of money. And the less popular get next to nothing. Not a lot less because they are less popular, but leftovers, if at all.
The problem with the GEMA model is that payouts are based on popularity. Meaning that the artists with the top spots in the charts get quite a lot, and the smaller, less popular, independent artists get practically nothing.
There is a criminal case ongoing against GEMA in order to determine exactly that.
GEMA is a special entity with special rights, designed long before digital distribution was even there, much less common. The law moves slowly. Pretty much everyone agrees that the GEMA rights badly need some updating.
I'm not sure about the details of the american legal system, but over here in Germany, there's this thing called the "pyramid of rights". Basically, some things are simply superseded by higher-ranking laws. For example, the constitution sets the limits on other laws, you can never interpret a law in a way that would violate the constitution. Likewise, you can never interpret (or legally agree upon) a contract that violates the law.
If the US is the same, then if you are ordered by a judge to do something the TOS forbids, you are not actually breaking the TOS, because the court order has superseded the TOS in this part.
Yeah, fanatics. Religious, political, social - doesn't matter. Once people have set their mind to something in an absolutist way, any rational argument is wasted.
I often write on/. not for the benefit of the person I reply to, but for the benefit of the other readers, who might otherwise mistake an unopposed argument as generally accepted.
I agree on that. Every bank that received bailout money should have lost its independence. Instead of free money, they should've been subject to a hostile takeover by the taxpayers. And in a perfect world, the shares would not have been given to the corrupt, incompetent government, but distributed amongst the taxpayers. After all, it was our money.
That would have been democratic control of these "too large to fail" entities.
Agreed, but what about me? I barely have two pennies to rub together, and make a small loss running my blog. I've accepted anonymous postings on my web site (and even if you use your name to post, there's no guarantee it's really you) for years. If you now come and ask me to remove all your posts, how on earth do I do that?
By updating Wordpress to the latest version which will have support for this stuff.
Even if I engineer in more logging or whatever, I can't honestly say I'll get all *your* data without either getting someone else's, or missing some of yours.
Most european data protection laws target personal data. Comments on a blog don't fall under that category. Personal data, in the legal sense, is data about you - your address, birth date, history of diseases, etc. etc.
There is some discussion still going on whether or not an IP address combined with a timestamp is "personal data", because it can theoretically be used to identify the person (ask ISP for logs).
They're not whining because of some additional coding they have to make to the site to allow people to remove their posts, they're whining because it's less information to sell to advertisers.
So they're in the same boat as the slave traders who lost their jobs when slavery was abolished? I really feel for them.
If the game where "if you make a profit, you get a bonus, if you break even, you get none", that would be fair. But Taleb's point is that this is not the case. The game is "if you make a profit, you get a bonus. If you make a horrible loss, you get no bonus".
In other words: The result for the person responsible is either +/- 0 or +(big sum) - no rational person would not take risks given that payoff matrix. Do the math. Taking risk is always the rational choice if you apply game theory. And it doesn't even matter how big the bonus and how big the risk. 10% chance of success, 0.1% chance of success - doesn't matter.
it's horrible job with brutal hours and inconceivable stress
I used to work with these people for a short time years ago, and I know people who work in that "industry" right now. Yes, it's not a nine-to-five job and yes, it can be stressful. Compared to fireworkers, soldiers or emergency-room doctors, it's a walk in the part. If you think playing games at the stock exchange is stress, you've never experienced actual stress in your life. If you think spending the day in the office is "brutal hours", you've not spend a night at the hospital, in a burning building or under enemy fire.
Slavery is perfectly acceptable in pure capitalism, as is organized crime. If you agree that some economic transactions, be it drug trade, prostitution, slavery or killing people for money is not acceptable, you have already left the grounds of pure capitalism. Everything else is just a question of degree.
Once you realize that capitalism is not a political system, but a part of the greater whole that makes up society, you also accept that this means capitalism itself is subject to the rules that society has agree upon. Like, say, no murdering people, whether for money or other reasons.
Always happy to see there are areas left where politicians are not busy selling us out to corporations.
I absolutely want to have to give explicit permission before people use my data. And yes, I want to be able to remove my data.
Does it cause some additional work? Yes, it does. I have several web-based games that will be affected by a law like this. But seriously, what it means is an additional tick box during the signup ("by signing up I agree... bla bla") and having to track who posted what and removing it when he wants to. Probably easiest solution is to add a button saying "delete all my posts" somewhere. So, all in all, an hour or two of work.
So, FB with your billions of revenue, stop whining.
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
The satisfaction of seing a spammer ruined would be worth several hours of my time for me. Sure it is pure and evil revenge. However, doing to them the only thing that makes them stop is... well, the only road you can take to eventually make them stop.
Blocking their domain seems like the low-cost solution. Until you realize that you need to block not only their domain, but hundreds of others as well. Increasing the risk of spamming by making them pay, on the other hand, has effects beyond the one you sued or took out of business.
I still wish we'd all band together and simply get a dozen or so of the highest profile spammers killed. Everyone who's annoyed by spam paying just 10 cents would get us more than enough money to hire a couple top-notch hitmen. I'm quite sure that after this, the only spammers who'd still dare doing that business are the organized criminals. That's not a good thing, but then at least the grey area would have been clearly removed and we might finally get some actual government action on the problem. Plus we'd have eliminated at least half of the spam.
You're painting with broad, inaccurate, and needlessly offensive brush strokes there, buddy. Software exists to Get Shit Done, so change is not intrinsically good. If a new version of my web browser helps me to Get More Shit Done Faster, then I'll download it immediately. If a new version of my web browser instead destabilizes a tiny part of my life without improving my Get Shit Done Benchmark, then why should I adopt it at all?
Amen.
For all I care, they can shove all of the interface changes for the past two years where the sun don't shine. Most I try to ignore, some I actively undo (which total and utter idiot came up with hiding the http:/// in the address bar? Do you never copy&paste URLs from there, you nutcase?) and I can not think of a single one that I liked.
But boring stuff like better HTML5 or CSS3 support - that doesn't give you headlines, and it isn't sexy, and probably not as much fun to code, but it actually improves this browser thing that you may have heard about, this "web page display" function that's included in Firefox, and that some people actually - imagine that - use.
Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.
What was wrong with the old one? You know, major and minor numbers, increase the major number only on significant, major changes? Add a third number for bugfixes and cosmetic updates?
They've thrown out a perfectly good numbering scheme because some dofus in marketing has read a psychology book too many and convinced himself that "bigger == better" will convince the minds of more consumers.
I understand that this annoys some people.
No, you don't. This doesn't annoy people, it actively pushes them to change the default browser that they've been using for a decade. You are losing your most loyal users. I hope you remembered to list that under "detriments", and you have something more valuable under "benefits", though I can't imagine what that would be.
As little as a year ago, I'd be telling anyone who uses anything else that I'd recommend Firefox. Today, I shut up unless they use IE, in which case I tell them to use any other browser of their choice.
There used to be a time when version numbers actually meant something.
Then marketing took over and discovered numbers as a means of advertisement.
Now, they've lost their meaning. Mozilla is aware of the fact that they'll be releasing versions with double-digit version numbers shortly, yes?
Maybe the ordinary consumer is fooled by a "bigger is better" thing, but even I don't think so. Seriously, go the logical step and dump the version numbers altogether, show a build number somewhere in the "About" dialog for bug reporting purposes, and otherwise consider it a constantly evolving product.
Would it not make sense to weed out students with some kind of test that doesn't involve a 6-9 months of time and $20k+ in expense?
No, it doesn't. First, the expense isn't 20k - we're talking about german university system here, not US-buy-me-a-degree system. Second, ability to learn the stuff presented is more important than what you already bring. Math was a good example for me: The professor literally started at the very beginning, with natural numbers, addition, etc. and built up everything that I had learnt in 13 years of school - in the first week.
Anything relying on prior knowledge would've essentially tested the first week of subject matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The best advise I ever got on phone conversations: Do hold whatever it is you have to say until the phone is down and you have checked that the connection is cut.
I would never put my trust into a mute button. Keeping your thoughts to yourself a couple minutes can't possibly that hard.
A system like that would be very quickly discontinued in any corporation that would actually be using it. Because most of the people whose behaviour is obnoxious are those in leadership positions. It usually gets worse the further you get up the chain, until it stops with the top management where the curve often (but not always) takes a dive (i.e. they actual top dogs often don't behave obnoxious).
The reason is that "obnoxious" is a very subjective definition. Much of what we consider obnoxious is displays of power (interrupting people) that are used intentionally or more often subconscious by those who deem themselves more powerful and need to state it without saying it outright. In other words, managers.
The higher you get up the food chain, the thinner the air gets and the more fierce the competition. Until the very top, which usually behaves very differently because they don't have competition anymore. If they're actually the top - the C*Os of a largely independent company behave very differently from the C*Os of a company that's a part of a larger corporation.
Yes, I've dealt with all levels of management. I could witness their behaviour because I was in a special position that put me outside the chain of command (even the CEO couldn't give me orders nor fire me, but neither could I to him or anyone else).
If you are interested at all in psychology and social sciences, watching leadership of various levels interact with each other and those of different levels in the hierarchy is extremely fascinating. And one of the things you learn is that a lot of behaviour is context-dependent - whether or not we consider it acceptable depends a lot on who does it to whom in what setting.
but the most immediate consequence for people living in Europe in the time was fewer legions pointing swords at them demanding tribute.
Actually, the most immediate consequence for people living within the Roman Empire was marauding hordes of barbarians burning down your village.
The "dark ages" aren't called that because sunspots made things dim for a couple hundred years. The amount of knowledge and skills lost was unbelievable. For several hundred years, old roman roads, despite not being maintained anymore and becoming more and more broken, were the best roads in all of Europe, because nobody knew how to make something like that. We're not talking pyramids here, we're talking about roads.
The world was a much different place back then. Knowledge as we know it was an unfamiliar concept. Knowledge was guarded and uncommon. Few people knew much about anything outside their own profession. Books were rare and valuable. If the US would be entirely destroyed by, say, a sudden eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, most of the knowledge would be preserved because copies of it exist in other places.
That's a relatively new thing. Less than a thousand years ago, any catastrophy that wipes out a civilization or any fall of an empire usually took most if not all of its knowledge down with it.
I believe you're referring to section 47, which as you point out is entirely optional for member states and says things such as:
You need a refresher on european politics. Here's how it works:
Government A wants to do evil things to its citizens. It goes ahead and tries, and gets a bloody nose (mass protests, law thrown out by highest court for being unconstitutional, whatever). Don't for a second think they give up. Next step is secret backroom talks and then a law passed on the EU level. A couple years later, they come back with the original idea on the national level, now claiming that even though they really, really don't want to, unfortunately the evil EU is forcing them to implement this new law...
And details like "may" are routinely forgotten about. That's just there because some countries said "we're not really interested in this right now" in the secret backroom dealings. It allows those governments who want this to move ahead, and those who'd rather do some other oppressing first to work on their own schedule.
Most companies have no risk management, and no clear picture of the risks their business faces.
The result of "intuitive" risk-non-management is that the usual human flaws have full impact. Basically, aside from a narrow middle ground, all risks are wrongly estimated.
Then it's high time you learn more about Bill Gates. Because the more you learn, the better Balmer looks - and that's a real challenge.
Opt-out is cashing in on the users who are lazy or don't get it.
Like spam, any solution short of opt-in won't solve anything.
No need to get fancy.
Simply include two rules that can not possibly be matched both, and you can be sure 100% of your users are in violation of the ToS.
Or, simply state that the site is not allowed to be accessed, directly or indirectly, by any human being. That should also have you covered.
Yes, I should've made that more clear.
The problem is that the most popular artists get a disproportinate amount of money. And the less popular get next to nothing. Not a lot less because they are less popular, but leftovers, if at all.
Yes, money goes to the artists.
The problem with the GEMA model is that payouts are based on popularity. Meaning that the artists with the top spots in the charts get quite a lot, and the smaller, less popular, independent artists get practically nothing.
There is a criminal case ongoing against GEMA in order to determine exactly that.
GEMA is a special entity with special rights, designed long before digital distribution was even there, much less common. The law moves slowly. Pretty much everyone agrees that the GEMA rights badly need some updating.
I'm fairly certain a court order supersedes a contract. Simple as that.
If it wouldn't, I'll launch a startup before the sun sets that issues contracts stating you may not go to jail or pay a court fine, ever.
I'm not sure about the details of the american legal system, but over here in Germany, there's this thing called the "pyramid of rights". Basically, some things are simply superseded by higher-ranking laws. For example, the constitution sets the limits on other laws, you can never interpret a law in a way that would violate the constitution. Likewise, you can never interpret (or legally agree upon) a contract that violates the law.
If the US is the same, then if you are ordered by a judge to do something the TOS forbids, you are not actually breaking the TOS, because the court order has superseded the TOS in this part.
Yeah, fanatics. Religious, political, social - doesn't matter. Once people have set their mind to something in an absolutist way, any rational argument is wasted.
I often write on /. not for the benefit of the person I reply to, but for the benefit of the other readers, who might otherwise mistake an unopposed argument as generally accepted.
I agree on that. Every bank that received bailout money should have lost its independence. Instead of free money, they should've been subject to a hostile takeover by the taxpayers. And in a perfect world, the shares would not have been given to the corrupt, incompetent government, but distributed amongst the taxpayers. After all, it was our money.
That would have been democratic control of these "too large to fail" entities.
Agreed, but what about me? I barely have two pennies to rub together, and make a small loss running my blog. I've accepted anonymous postings on my web site (and even if you use your name to post, there's no guarantee it's really you) for years. If you now come and ask me to remove all your posts, how on earth do I do that?
By updating Wordpress to the latest version which will have support for this stuff.
Even if I engineer in more logging or whatever, I can't honestly say I'll get all *your* data without either getting someone else's, or missing some of yours.
Most european data protection laws target personal data. Comments on a blog don't fall under that category. Personal data, in the legal sense, is data about you - your address, birth date, history of diseases, etc. etc.
There is some discussion still going on whether or not an IP address combined with a timestamp is "personal data", because it can theoretically be used to identify the person (ask ISP for logs).
They're not whining because of some additional coding they have to make to the site to allow people to remove their posts, they're whining because it's less information to sell to advertisers.
So they're in the same boat as the slave traders who lost their jobs when slavery was abolished? I really feel for them.
disincentive is not getting a bonus.
If the game where "if you make a profit, you get a bonus, if you break even, you get none", that would be fair. But Taleb's point is that this is not the case. The game is "if you make a profit, you get a bonus. If you make a horrible loss, you get no bonus".
In other words: The result for the person responsible is either +/- 0 or +(big sum) - no rational person would not take risks given that payoff matrix. Do the math. Taking risk is always the rational choice if you apply game theory. And it doesn't even matter how big the bonus and how big the risk. 10% chance of success, 0.1% chance of success - doesn't matter.
it's horrible job with brutal hours and inconceivable stress
I used to work with these people for a short time years ago, and I know people who work in that "industry" right now. Yes, it's not a nine-to-five job and yes, it can be stressful. Compared to fireworkers, soldiers or emergency-room doctors, it's a walk in the part. If you think playing games at the stock exchange is stress, you've never experienced actual stress in your life. If you think spending the day in the office is "brutal hours", you've not spend a night at the hospital, in a burning building or under enemy fire.
A "pure" capitalist system is also pure evil.
Slavery is perfectly acceptable in pure capitalism, as is organized crime. If you agree that some economic transactions, be it drug trade, prostitution, slavery or killing people for money is not acceptable, you have already left the grounds of pure capitalism. Everything else is just a question of degree.
Once you realize that capitalism is not a political system, but a part of the greater whole that makes up society, you also accept that this means capitalism itself is subject to the rules that society has agree upon. Like, say, no murdering people, whether for money or other reasons.
Always happy to see there are areas left where politicians are not busy selling us out to corporations.
I absolutely want to have to give explicit permission before people use my data. And yes, I want to be able to remove my data.
Does it cause some additional work? Yes, it does. I have several web-based games that will be affected by a law like this. But seriously, what it means is an additional tick box during the signup ("by signing up I agree... bla bla") and having to track who posted what and removing it when he wants to. Probably easiest solution is to add a button saying "delete all my posts" somewhere.
So, all in all, an hour or two of work.
So, FB with your billions of revenue, stop whining.
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
The satisfaction of seing a spammer ruined would be worth several hours of my time for me. Sure it is pure and evil revenge. However, doing to them the only thing that makes them stop is... well, the only road you can take to eventually make them stop.
Blocking their domain seems like the low-cost solution. Until you realize that you need to block not only their domain, but hundreds of others as well. Increasing the risk of spamming by making them pay, on the other hand, has effects beyond the one you sued or took out of business.
I still wish we'd all band together and simply get a dozen or so of the highest profile spammers killed. Everyone who's annoyed by spam paying just 10 cents would get us more than enough money to hire a couple top-notch hitmen. I'm quite sure that after this, the only spammers who'd still dare doing that business are the organized criminals. That's not a good thing, but then at least the grey area would have been clearly removed and we might finally get some actual government action on the problem.
Plus we'd have eliminated at least half of the spam.
You're painting with broad, inaccurate, and needlessly offensive brush strokes there, buddy. Software exists to Get Shit Done, so change is not intrinsically good. If a new version of my web browser helps me to Get More Shit Done Faster, then I'll download it immediately. If a new version of my web browser instead destabilizes a tiny part of my life without improving my Get Shit Done Benchmark, then why should I adopt it at all?
Amen.
For all I care, they can shove all of the interface changes for the past two years where the sun don't shine. Most I try to ignore, some I actively undo (which total and utter idiot came up with hiding the http:/// in the address bar? Do you never copy&paste URLs from there, you nutcase?) and I can not think of a single one that I liked.
But boring stuff like better HTML5 or CSS3 support - that doesn't give you headlines, and it isn't sexy, and probably not as much fun to code, but it actually improves this browser thing that you may have heard about, this "web page display" function that's included in Firefox, and that some people actually - imagine that - use.
Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.
What was wrong with the old one? You know, major and minor numbers, increase the major number only on significant, major changes? Add a third number for bugfixes and cosmetic updates?
They've thrown out a perfectly good numbering scheme because some dofus in marketing has read a psychology book too many and convinced himself that "bigger == better" will convince the minds of more consumers.
I understand that this annoys some people.
No, you don't. This doesn't annoy people, it actively pushes them to change the default browser that they've been using for a decade. You are losing your most loyal users. I hope you remembered to list that under "detriments", and you have something more valuable under "benefits", though I can't imagine what that would be.
As little as a year ago, I'd be telling anyone who uses anything else that I'd recommend Firefox. Today, I shut up unless they use IE, in which case I tell them to use any other browser of their choice.
There used to be a time when version numbers actually meant something.
Then marketing took over and discovered numbers as a means of advertisement.
Now, they've lost their meaning. Mozilla is aware of the fact that they'll be releasing versions with double-digit version numbers shortly, yes?
Maybe the ordinary consumer is fooled by a "bigger is better" thing, but even I don't think so. Seriously, go the logical step and dump the version numbers altogether, show a build number somewhere in the "About" dialog for bug reporting purposes, and otherwise consider it a constantly evolving product.
Would it not make sense to weed out students with some kind of test that doesn't involve a 6-9 months of time and $20k+ in expense?
No, it doesn't.
First, the expense isn't 20k - we're talking about german university system here, not US-buy-me-a-degree system.
Second, ability to learn the stuff presented is more important than what you already bring. Math was a good example for me: The professor literally started at the very beginning, with natural numbers, addition, etc. and built up everything that I had learnt in 13 years of school - in the first week.
Anything relying on prior knowledge would've essentially tested the first week of subject matter.