Unwillingness to look things up is just a problem that a lot of people have. Perhaps you notice it more in younger programmers because people like that don't tend stick around long enough to become old programmers. I'm a young programmer, and I often find myself pointing a few older devs to API documentation (sometimes it's our own documentation, and sometimes I'm the one who wrote it in hopes that I wouldn't be getting these exact questions).
However I ended up buying an older game which was about $24 after the 40%. I went to the nearby Best Buy afterward and saw it for $19.99.
I'd guess that story pretty much explains why the prices weren't low. It was more expensive, but you ended up buying it anyway. If having a store-closing sale is going to attract people who assume that the prices they see are great deals, what's the incentive for them to actually provide such deals?
so far I don't think there is any existing evidence to show abuse.
Where's the fine line between successful strategy and abuse? It seems to be the point at which it becomes popular to hate a company.
Let's look at the sins of which Microsoft has been accused.
If I'm not mistaken, one criticism is that it's taking advantage of having huge stockpiles of money, in order to "dump" its products at low cost into markets to gain control. Well, Google's playing that same game, more successfully. They've put out a ton of software at *no* cost, in order to promote their company. That's taking advantage of a large size, at least. And it's hard to get mad at them for it, because their free products are actually good.
The other act that's coming to mind is bundling - using large share in one market to gain an advantage in another (operating systems and browsers... which don't even seem like that far a stretch from each other, imho). Is this all that different from what Google is doing when Gmail serves up Google's own advertisements? Their tremendous resources let them built a wildly popular webmail product, and which in turn increases the scale of their booming advertising business. Once again, nobody is really bothered by this, because we (seemingly) all use Gmail, willingly.
Despite the lovefest shielding their public image, Google's monopoly surely does have "victims". Even if they don't directly piss off consumers, they must have driven out more then a few competitors from the advertising market. And the ad-supported webmail market. And anything else they've touched.
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
You are under the mistaken belief that every student can learn just from listening to lectures. It is incorrect. Learning requires participation, which requires the students' attention.
And you seem to be under the mistaken belief that taking away students' phones turns them into attentive students. Participation requires willingness. Taking away the physical gadget, a source of distraction which is obvious and visible to you, may make you feel better as a teacher. Maybe you'll have a class that has a greater appearance of paying attention because they're not holding anything.
But you can't force anyone to think. And I've always felt that trying to force it too hard just contributes to the problem, because it reinforces the notion that the classroom is a battleground, on which teacher wants learning and the students don't. In that environment, where the two sides are just trying to antagonize each other, confiscation is just going to piss off your student. If the student provided the phone immediately, then what? Is she really thinking about math now? Or is she thinking about how pissed off she is that the phone is gone?
Quite frankly, most people don't change their laptop battery EVER.
Neither do I, but when I dumped a can of Dr. Pepper onto my eee last week, I was glad I could slide two switches and pull the battery out in just a couple seconds.
That's a heck of a generalization. If I remember my middle/high school days at all correctly, there's usually not much to do in class. And texting is not disruptive to others... so if you're that bored, why not do something instead of staring at the clock?
I really feel like if teachers would actually focus on education and stop worrying about discipline for discipline's sake, students might actually have a chance at being engaged in lessons.
How much of everybody's time was wasted because the teacher felt obligated to deal with texting instead of math?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You say there's a company that's making decisions based on how they can get more money? Shame on them.
In this enlightened age, our business leaders should be aware of social concerns, and looking out for their fellow man. The livelihoods of a lot of workers in our country depend on IBM, therefore IBM is obligated to make sacrifices for us!
Maybe we can fix this problem by imposing more taxes on those jerks. That'll encourage them to stay.
It wrinkles my feathers big time whenever the government claims something is "public", and yet the public has little control or voice over it.
I don't see the conspiracy here. Yes, public is a word that can mean government. Note how the economy has the public sector (government) and the private sector (business). Either you are just trolling, or you've forgotten a very basic purpose of government - it's like the operating system. It's there to mediate access to shared resources. Is "shared" a better synonym for you? That's why you can't just put up a radio transmitter in your yard. Then you wouldn't be playing nicely with others.
The point that he demonstrated, rather well it seems, is that we in the west find the idea of us being subjected to the risk of malaria extremely offensive. On the other hand, how many of us are raising a protest about people in developing nations being subject to exactly the same disease?
We find the idea of intentionally subjecting anyone to the risk of malaria to be offensive. Releasing a jar of mosquitos in a crowd is a dick move, regardless of where you do it.
That being said, I fail to see why anyone would get particularly angry at this small jar of non-infected mosquitos. Seems like this was designed to make people think about how easily the disease spreads, not to particularly upset anyone about their safety.
Georgia has a mandatory annual emissions check. It's a dreadfully stupid affair. In the name of curtailing emissions, every year I have to drive to a place that does the check, and pay them (I bet somebody in the auto industry lobbied pretty hard for this) to run my car for a while and give me a piece of paper with almost exactly the same numbers on it as last year's test. Every few years, the gas cap fails the test, and I need to buy a new one that conforms to whatever regulations got put out this year. Yet another law that never should have existed.
You're absolutely right. But it gets even worse. Here's a stupid situation I could hypothetically be in soon: I drive an old car that is probably qualified to be traded in under this bill. Suppose it breaks down, and the repairs would cost $1000. The car isn't really worth that, so without this bill, I probably would have junked it. WITH this bill, since the "Cash for Clunkers" program requires the car to be in working condition, it's now to my advantage to get it repaired, trade it in for my $2500-$4000 federal money, and then it gets sent to the junkyard anyway. Building things just to destroy them - THAT is government destroying an economy.
The thing is, it's legal to breastfeed anywhere that you're legally allowed to be while not breastfeeding, and noone has the right to ask you to stop, or to ask you to leave solely on the fact that you're breastfeeding.
What about places that normally don't allow you to bring in your own food or drink (movie theaters, restaurants)?
"Who's doing it" matters to me because it says a lot about their motivation and risks. The people behind the corporate version are doing it because they think it will be a profitable business venture that people will want to buy into, and it needs investors who think it's a sound idea and are willing to stake a lot of money on that. Furthermore, I lose no money until I choose to buy the service. The people behind the government version are voters who approve of the idea based on their best intuition, and any economists who have wagered that the project will benefit the public welfare. Even if they hire the best team with all the vision and integrity in the world, if the project wasn't a good idea to start with, then the impact is negative. And regardless of what happens, I have to help pay for it. $44 billion is about $150 from each of us.
The 'economy mode' on my rather old laser printer basically does this. It just sort of prints letter outlines instead of the full letter. Ecofont's solution seems like... leaky abstraction? The print-saving settings are now embedded into a document rather than determined at print time. Sounds like a terrible idea for a problem that's already been solved.
I don't see how anything went wrong. Politicians get props for being tough on spammers (it isn't poor Congress's fault that the law is barely enforceable), and the feds profit from imposing some hefty fines on the few criminals they do catch.
That's a ludicrous comment, and it's an insult to people who try to rationally argue anything about abortion and gun rights. You know very well that the justification for having guns, especially in this case, is defense. So a more accurate representation of the conservative viewpoint, "life is sacred until you try to attack someone. THEN you're fair game."
Argue against that perspective all you like (and I'll side with you), but please, don't build an absurd straw man just so you can end a post with a clever-sounding quip.
Things like PGP and Freenet have never been able to really take off because not enough people are motivated to use them. Once people's websites start to get blocked, more people become motivated to go encrypted with their Internet usage.
The more you tighten your grip... the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
By what methodology do you judge which addictions are valid? The cure to "crack addiction" is STOP SMOKING CRACK, but saying it in capital letters doesn't make it easy.
You make a good point that not *all* addictions are true "addictions", but it's a point we already know. The question is - how to determine which are, and to what extent? It isn't helpful to try to oversimplify a potentially complex question in psychology.
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Spending plenty of time with porn on the Internet sounds like a fantastic way to prevent that.
Unwillingness to look things up is just a problem that a lot of people have. Perhaps you notice it more in younger programmers because people like that don't tend stick around long enough to become old programmers. I'm a young programmer, and I often find myself pointing a few older devs to API documentation (sometimes it's our own documentation, and sometimes I'm the one who wrote it in hopes that I wouldn't be getting these exact questions).
Apple has apparently decided that "App" is a new word meaning software on a cell phone, but that doesn't make it true for the rest of the world.
I'd guess that story pretty much explains why the prices weren't low. It was more expensive, but you ended up buying it anyway. If having a store-closing sale is going to attract people who assume that the prices they see are great deals, what's the incentive for them to actually provide such deals?
Where's the fine line between successful strategy and abuse? It seems to be the point at which it becomes popular to hate a company.
Let's look at the sins of which Microsoft has been accused.
If I'm not mistaken, one criticism is that it's taking advantage of having huge stockpiles of money, in order to "dump" its products at low cost into markets to gain control. Well, Google's playing that same game, more successfully. They've put out a ton of software at *no* cost, in order to promote their company. That's taking advantage of a large size, at least. And it's hard to get mad at them for it, because their free products are actually good.
The other act that's coming to mind is bundling - using large share in one market to gain an advantage in another (operating systems and browsers... which don't even seem like that far a stretch from each other, imho). Is this all that different from what Google is doing when Gmail serves up Google's own advertisements? Their tremendous resources let them built a wildly popular webmail product, and which in turn increases the scale of their booming advertising business. Once again, nobody is really bothered by this, because we (seemingly) all use Gmail, willingly.
Despite the lovefest shielding their public image, Google's monopoly surely does have "victims". Even if they don't directly piss off consumers, they must have driven out more then a few competitors from the advertising market. And the ad-supported webmail market. And anything else they've touched.
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
And you seem to be under the mistaken belief that taking away students' phones turns them into attentive students. Participation requires willingness. Taking away the physical gadget, a source of distraction which is obvious and visible to you, may make you feel better as a teacher. Maybe you'll have a class that has a greater appearance of paying attention because they're not holding anything.
But you can't force anyone to think. And I've always felt that trying to force it too hard just contributes to the problem, because it reinforces the notion that the classroom is a battleground, on which teacher wants learning and the students don't. In that environment, where the two sides are just trying to antagonize each other, confiscation is just going to piss off your student. If the student provided the phone immediately, then what? Is she really thinking about math now? Or is she thinking about how pissed off she is that the phone is gone?
Neither do I, but when I dumped a can of Dr. Pepper onto my eee last week, I was glad I could slide two switches and pull the battery out in just a couple seconds.
That's a heck of a generalization. If I remember my middle/high school days at all correctly, there's usually not much to do in class. And texting is not disruptive to others... so if you're that bored, why not do something instead of staring at the clock?
I really feel like if teachers would actually focus on education and stop worrying about discipline for discipline's sake, students might actually have a chance at being engaged in lessons.
How much of everybody's time was wasted because the teacher felt obligated to deal with texting instead of math?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You say there's a company that's making decisions based on how they can get more money? Shame on them.
In this enlightened age, our business leaders should be aware of social concerns, and looking out for their fellow man. The livelihoods of a lot of workers in our country depend on IBM, therefore IBM is obligated to make sacrifices for us!
Maybe we can fix this problem by imposing more taxes on those jerks. That'll encourage them to stay.
I don't see the conspiracy here. Yes, public is a word that can mean government. Note how the economy has the public sector (government) and the private sector (business). Either you are just trolling, or you've forgotten a very basic purpose of government - it's like the operating system. It's there to mediate access to shared resources. Is "shared" a better synonym for you? That's why you can't just put up a radio transmitter in your yard. Then you wouldn't be playing nicely with others.
We find the idea of intentionally subjecting anyone to the risk of malaria to be offensive. Releasing a jar of mosquitos in a crowd is a dick move, regardless of where you do it.
That being said, I fail to see why anyone would get particularly angry at this small jar of non-infected mosquitos. Seems like this was designed to make people think about how easily the disease spreads, not to particularly upset anyone about their safety.
Unfortunately. So is lynching black people.
Georgia has a mandatory annual emissions check. It's a dreadfully stupid affair. In the name of curtailing emissions, every year I have to drive to a place that does the check, and pay them (I bet somebody in the auto industry lobbied pretty hard for this) to run my car for a while and give me a piece of paper with almost exactly the same numbers on it as last year's test. Every few years, the gas cap fails the test, and I need to buy a new one that conforms to whatever regulations got put out this year. Yet another law that never should have existed.
You're absolutely right. But it gets even worse. Here's a stupid situation I could hypothetically be in soon: I drive an old car that is probably qualified to be traded in under this bill. Suppose it breaks down, and the repairs would cost $1000. The car isn't really worth that, so without this bill, I probably would have junked it. WITH this bill, since the "Cash for Clunkers" program requires the car to be in working condition, it's now to my advantage to get it repaired, trade it in for my $2500-$4000 federal money, and then it gets sent to the junkyard anyway. Building things just to destroy them - THAT is government destroying an economy.
ONLY 30 days in jail? For saying bad words. In what way is that remotely acceptable?
Can we calculate how many jobs are lost as the indirect result of pulling $30 billion out of the economy via taxation?
I can't see that happening. No matter how much improvement they make to IE, they can't bring back the trust they lost due to security problems.
Maybe they should add some new feature, make some random changes to the UI, release it under a different name, and pretend it's a new product.
What about places that normally don't allow you to bring in your own food or drink (movie theaters, restaurants)?
"Who's doing it" matters to me because it says a lot about their motivation and risks. The people behind the corporate version are doing it because they think it will be a profitable business venture that people will want to buy into, and it needs investors who think it's a sound idea and are willing to stake a lot of money on that. Furthermore, I lose no money until I choose to buy the service. The people behind the government version are voters who approve of the idea based on their best intuition, and any economists who have wagered that the project will benefit the public welfare. Even if they hire the best team with all the vision and integrity in the world, if the project wasn't a good idea to start with, then the impact is negative. And regardless of what happens, I have to help pay for it. $44 billion is about $150 from each of us.
The 'economy mode' on my rather old laser printer basically does this. It just sort of prints letter outlines instead of the full letter. Ecofont's solution seems like... leaky abstraction? The print-saving settings are now embedded into a document rather than determined at print time. Sounds like a terrible idea for a problem that's already been solved.
I don't see how anything went wrong. Politicians get props for being tough on spammers (it isn't poor Congress's fault that the law is barely enforceable), and the feds profit from imposing some hefty fines on the few criminals they do catch.
I believe these statements are also relevant:
Weird... It's like you tried to read the article... but then just read a random paragraph from the middle and stopped.
That's a ludicrous comment, and it's an insult to people who try to rationally argue anything about abortion and gun rights. You know very well that the justification for having guns, especially in this case, is defense. So a more accurate representation of the conservative viewpoint, "life is sacred until you try to attack someone. THEN you're fair game."
Argue against that perspective all you like (and I'll side with you), but please, don't build an absurd straw man just so you can end a post with a clever-sounding quip.
Things like PGP and Freenet have never been able to really take off because not enough people are motivated to use them. Once people's websites start to get blocked, more people become motivated to go encrypted with their Internet usage.
The more you tighten your grip... the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
By what methodology do you judge which addictions are valid? The cure to "crack addiction" is STOP SMOKING CRACK, but saying it in capital letters doesn't make it easy.
You make a good point that not *all* addictions are true "addictions", but it's a point we already know. The question is - how to determine which are, and to what extent? It isn't helpful to try to oversimplify a potentially complex question in psychology.