Yeah, yeah, and that Rock 'n' Roll music is gonna turn our children into Satan worshippers! Seriously, though, eBay is a problem for exactly the sort of people who get addicted to things like Dungeons & Dragons or gambling or (God forbid) Gallagher-- that is, people with problems. So eBay is just one more manifestation for an addictive personality to get its fix. So I have some sympathy for eBay addicts. Only, not too much. If Johnny5 wasn't cruising the bids for a Brad Radke rookie car in mint condition or a 1956 Elvis doll, he'd be Grand Vizier of Oltoss or throwing back Old No. 7. And at least with eBay you stand a reasonable chance of getting even a piddling return on your time investment.
It's interesting years after the fact to watch Apple try to make up for old mistakes. I remember when the argument was that it was better to pay more for the Mac because it was so much easier to use than a PC. And it was. DOS was *hard*, dammit, for people who'd never used anything like it before. But Apple lost on their bet, which was that the typical user would drive the new era, and not the "technical" user. Jobs thought that he could make a computer that would make computing accessible to everyone. Who would have thought that the computers would make a new kind of person instead? This new box makes some steps in the right direction, more powerful, not quite *as* expensive. Still, wish they would release the internals...
There are really _two_ issues here, how do you stifle trolls with accounts, and how do you stifle AC trolls? For the accounted folk, what say that anyone w/account has a post moderated down below 0 (that is 2 downgrades) has all of their responses for a particular listing stuck down at the bottom? That way they can keep their comments available (albeit in a less advantageous position) and everyone will know that flamebait is at the back of the bus with all of the bad kids? You can spit out the window, but sit away from the driver. For the anonymous ones, put 'em all at the end of the thread. Still there but hiding. As they should be.
It's more than a question of "responsibility"... if the system goes down during a mission critical operation, Microsoft is a company and you can sue them (despite their 'license agreement', that means less than nothing). Who do you sue if something, however unlikely, were to happen to your Linux box? This is the great difficulty of spreading this in institutions... that's why you have to keep your Linux box in the corner without a monitor... the CEO likes knowing that he can call someone if it breaks (even if it's worthless, like MS). Thus Redhat: someone you can call, if they want to be another MS that's their business but if you favor Linux you have to be cheering for 'em....
Engines don't write themselves. This sort of information is an accountant's dream, whether done electronically or by ledger. Wouldn't almost _any_online business love to know what Amazon is selling, and to whom?
I'm not sure if maybe I'm missing something, but Amazon spent a_lot of time and money getting those statistics together. And now they're publishing them. On the web. For free. I poked around the site and looked up some of the "groups" to which I belong, almost scarily accurate in some cases, in others not so much. In any case, I see enough things that I bought to bet that the stats are real so to speak. So what's the motivation for putting hard-won marketing data up on a publicly available site? Don't feel that Barnes and Noble has been competing well enough? Or do they just want to create equal-opportunity spam?
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Yeah, yeah, and that Rock 'n' Roll music is gonna turn our children into Satan worshippers! Seriously, though, eBay is a problem for exactly the sort of people who get addicted to things like Dungeons & Dragons or gambling or (God forbid) Gallagher-- that is, people with problems. So eBay is just one more manifestation for an addictive personality to get its fix. So I have some sympathy for eBay addicts. Only, not too much. If Johnny5 wasn't cruising the bids for a Brad Radke rookie car in mint condition or a 1956 Elvis doll, he'd be Grand Vizier of Oltoss or throwing back Old No. 7. And at least with eBay you stand a reasonable chance of getting even a piddling return on your time investment.
It's interesting years after the fact to watch Apple try to make up for old mistakes. I remember when the argument was that it was better to pay more for the Mac because it was so much easier to use than a PC. And it was. DOS was *hard*, dammit, for people who'd never used anything like it before. But Apple lost on their bet, which was that the typical user would drive the new era, and not the "technical" user. Jobs thought that he could make a computer that would make computing accessible to everyone. Who would have thought that the computers would make a new kind of person instead? This new box makes some steps in the right direction, more powerful, not quite *as* expensive. Still, wish they would release the internals...
There are really _two_ issues here, how do you stifle trolls with accounts, and how do you stifle AC trolls? For the accounted folk, what say that anyone w/account has a post moderated down below 0 (that is 2 downgrades) has all of their responses for a particular listing stuck down at the bottom? That way they can keep their comments available (albeit in a less advantageous position) and everyone will know that flamebait is at the back of the bus with all of the bad kids? You can spit out the window, but sit away from the driver. For the anonymous ones, put 'em all at the end of the thread. Still there but hiding. As they should be.
It's more than a question of "responsibility"... if the system goes down during a mission critical operation, Microsoft is a company and you can sue them (despite their 'license agreement', that means less than nothing). Who do you sue if something, however unlikely, were to happen to your Linux box? This is the great difficulty of spreading this in institutions... that's why you have to keep your Linux box in the corner without a monitor... the CEO likes knowing that he can call someone if it breaks (even if it's worthless, like MS). Thus Redhat: someone you can call, if they want to be another MS that's their business but if you favor Linux you have to be cheering for 'em....
Engines don't write themselves. This sort of information is an accountant's dream, whether done electronically or by ledger. Wouldn't almost _any_online business love to know what Amazon is selling, and to whom?
I'm not sure if maybe I'm missing something, but Amazon spent a_lot of time and money getting those statistics together. And now they're publishing them. On the web. For free. I poked around the site and looked up some of the "groups" to which I belong, almost scarily accurate in some cases, in others not so much. In any case, I see enough things that I bought to bet that the stats are real so to speak. So what's the motivation for putting hard-won marketing data up on a publicly available site? Don't feel that Barnes and Noble has been competing well enough? Or do they just want to create equal-opportunity spam?