This reminds me of the Unix fortune that literally changed my professional life:
The more crap you put up with, the more crap you get.
I was fired two months after taking that message to heart (no surprise there). One month after that, I was working for another company at 20% higher base salary, plus about 15% annual bonuses.
This is why we all need to say what we mean, and mean what we say. Otherwise we lose our credibility. Whether Berger didn't really mean Windows 8 with keyboard and mouse is "bad," or he did mean it and is now recanting under pressure, looks bad either way. He's not only harmed his own reputation, but his employer's as well.
This is why I call the birth control pill the greatest boon to mankind since the smallpox vaccine. Indeed, I would say more: it's the greatest boon to mankind since agriculture itself. Agriculture allows civilization but dictates rapid population growth; birth control counter-acts the rapid population growth and resulting resource shortages and general squalor.
Freed from the need for workers, manufacturing can take place anywhere. Like, say, the place with the lowest local taxation and weakest safety regulations.
Or in whatever location minimizes logistical costs of moving the raw material and finished product.
It's not that consumers are apt to confuse the book with the whiskey. It's that Jack Daniel's failure to respond would be taken as evidence by a future trademark court that they don't care who uses their logo or for what purpose.
Since we have to pass through a checkpoint to move about or out of the country, show our papers to get a job, and we're constantly under surveillance, from where I'm standing it looks like they already *have* incarcerated us all.
... there are five essentials for victory: (1)
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He
will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
(3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout
all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take
the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and
is not interfered with by the sovereign.
You could put it that way. If someone is dumb enough to overpay for merchandise, then I'm fine with that. If a retailer is dumb enough to overcharge for merchandise, I am also fine with the buyers flocking elsewhere and starving the retailer of revenue.
Of course, the problem with dynamic pricing is it relies on the ignorance of the user.
It also works when the seller has a monopoly or an effective monopoly. Airlines, for example, try to dominate certain routes, partly so they have pricing power over those routes.
There is a rather big difference between protesting and legislating against something with which one disagrees, and shooting people with whom one disagrees. You seem to be suggesting that anyone who disapproves of technology (read, disagrees with you) is evil.
Who, other than the retailers, care if there is a "flash crash?" Presumably if they lose enough money on flash crashes they will stop with the algorithmic pricing.
Likewise, if I find algorithmic pricing makes prices unattractively high, I'll shop somewhere else. There has to be someone out there selling a product similar to what I want, without the algorithmic gouging.
In short, I think this is one case where we can trust the market to operate correctly.
I would add that the title of this Slashdot article bears no reference to the crummy International Business Times article. At no point in TFA is anyone quoted as saying "we're dealing with malware the wrong way." That's just a Slashdot editor passing off his own conclusions as those of the article.
Sometimes decades of peer-reviewed research is wrong. Not very often, I admit, but it is exactly to find such occasions that people do science in the first place. I don't think we should discourage researchers from reporting unorthodox findings.
Instead of making veiled accusations when someone announces an unexpected finding, the correct response is to take a careful look at it. If accusations of fraud or ineptitude are warranted, peer review will make that clear.
Of course, I wholeheartedly agree that researchers should check their work and subject it to peer review before they call a press conference. I still remember the "cold fusion" fiasco. Like cold fusion, this result is nothing until it's passed thorough review.
TFS seems to be taking the position that a 300-word article that generates a lot of traffic is better than a 1000-word article that generates less traffic. Arguably true for the publisher, but less so for the reader.
One thing I've noticed about blogs and Web news in general is the tendency toward short articles that can be written in an hour or less. Such articles are usually unsatisfying and fairly uninformative.
Making online news sources be more like that won't advance the legitimate role of the media, which is to inform the public.
Why do all these programming books have to be so fat?
Because this one has pictures!
Seriously, a key feature of the Head First series is to use lots of pictures, graphics, humor, even games to take the pain out of reading the book.
I've come to respect that they actually try to teach you something instead of just flinging 200 pages of dry text at you and letting you try to digest that. Making a subject approachable is not the same as "dumbing it down", and a real master can do the former without doing the latter.
Note: I do not assert that Head First Python does or does not manage the balancing act between making accessible and dumbing down; I only claim that one should dismiss a book on the basis that it has pictures.
Part of what the resolution says is that the Human Rights Council "...[a]ffirms that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online..." (emphasis added)
This is pretty much opposite the legal situation in the U.S. at least, where the government can demand access to your ISP's logs and the courts pretty much go along with it, but they still need a warrant to put you under physical surveillance.
I would tag this "sudden outbreak of common sense" except that I expect this resolution will have even less impact than the typical U.N. resolution.
So what nuclear weapons do is basically force you, as a leader, to draw the line at how far you are willing to take a conflict, and who you're willing to fight against.
I live in the USA and from where I'm standing, mine is not the most powerful nation on Earth either. The most powerful country is one that doesn't have to listen to what anyone else says. I give that honor to China, based on my observation that China is completely unaccountable for its misdeeds (annexation of Tibet and currency manipulation come readily to mind).
For games, there is already a site working on getting old products open-sourced: liberatedgames.com. They don't update super often but they do seem to still be active.
If you read the Jargon file or read up on hacker lore from the '80s and '90s, IBM was the big, evil giant hackers despised for its unfair strong-arm tactics and lousy products. Microsoft stole that crown in the early '90s.
My perception of MS is actually improving.
The Netscape lawsuit actually did rein in some of their unlawful bullying. Yes, they got away with a slap on the wrist but the cost of the lawsuit convinced them to change their ways anyhow.
After the Vista debacle, Windows 7 is a better quality product than anything I've seen out of Redmond since MS-DOS 6.22.
Yes, Microsoft created the fertile environment for worms and enabled the black-hat underground for a decade. But by 2005, MS had changed its tune. Bill gates even said
"Our primary goal is to improve security and safety for all our customers -- consumers and businesses, regardless of size..."
So what I see is a company that is, too slowly, trying to learn from its mistakes.
As Microsoft loses primacy, it loses power. I wonder if it is also losing its capacity to do harm, and if a decade from now the MS-bashing will seem as quaint and misplaced as IBM-bashing does today.
Keeping something confidential does not imply wrongdoing. There are many scenarios where a perfectly legitimate government activity needs to be kept confidential.
Private citizens also need privacy. Say for example I want to build a new addition onto my house and I solicit bids from three local building contractors. I may justifiably not want to tell each of those contractors who else is being considered for the job, to make it harder for them to conspire in a price-fixing scheme. Say for example my doctor finds a benign tumor during a physical exam. I might not want my boss to know for fear of employment discrimination.
Now, apply an ounce of imagination and think about the complex plans a government might need to make, where premature public disclosure would screw things up. Take into consideration the fact that every time Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) opens his mouth, the financial markets (over)-react.
Yes, a lot of misconduct gets swept under the rug especially in the name of "national security." But to presume that the state has no legitimate reason for secrecy in anything seems quite shallow.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the Unix fortune that literally changed my professional life:
I was fired two months after taking that message to heart (no surprise there). One month after that, I was working for another company at 20% higher base salary, plus about 15% annual bonuses.
This is why we all need to say what we mean, and mean what we say. Otherwise we lose our credibility. Whether Berger didn't really mean Windows 8 with keyboard and mouse is "bad," or he did mean it and is now recanting under pressure, looks bad either way. He's not only harmed his own reputation, but his employer's as well.
This is why I call the birth control pill the greatest boon to mankind since the smallpox vaccine. Indeed, I would say more: it's the greatest boon to mankind since agriculture itself. Agriculture allows civilization but dictates rapid population growth; birth control counter-acts the rapid population growth and resulting resource shortages and general squalor.
Or in whatever location minimizes logistical costs of moving the raw material and finished product.
In my experience, "fine-upstanding-wellmannered" and "educated" are totally independent. Sometimes they coincide in a person, sometimes not.
Unfortunately, no. Failure to enforce a trademark does weaken it. I am not a lawyer but here's a Web page by someone who is: http://www.ggmark.com/protect.html#Maintenance
It's not that consumers are apt to confuse the book with the whiskey. It's that Jack Daniel's failure to respond would be taken as evidence by a future trademark court that they don't care who uses their logo or for what purpose.
Since we have to pass through a checkpoint to move about or out of the country, show our papers to get a job, and we're constantly under surveillance, from where I'm standing it looks like they already *have* incarcerated us all.
You could put it that way. If someone is dumb enough to overpay for merchandise, then I'm fine with that. If a retailer is dumb enough to overcharge for merchandise, I am also fine with the buyers flocking elsewhere and starving the retailer of revenue.
It also works when the seller has a monopoly or an effective monopoly. Airlines, for example, try to dominate certain routes, partly so they have pricing power over those routes.
There is a rather big difference between protesting and legislating against something with which one disagrees, and shooting people with whom one disagrees. You seem to be suggesting that anyone who disapproves of technology (read, disagrees with you) is evil.
And if you do have a higher willingness to pay, then I don't see the problem.
Who, other than the retailers, care if there is a "flash crash?" Presumably if they lose enough money on flash crashes they will stop with the algorithmic pricing.
Likewise, if I find algorithmic pricing makes prices unattractively high, I'll shop somewhere else. There has to be someone out there selling a product similar to what I want, without the algorithmic gouging.
In short, I think this is one case where we can trust the market to operate correctly.
I would add that the title of this Slashdot article bears no reference to the crummy International Business Times article. At no point in TFA is anyone quoted as saying "we're dealing with malware the wrong way." That's just a Slashdot editor passing off his own conclusions as those of the article.
Sometimes decades of peer-reviewed research is wrong. Not very often, I admit, but it is exactly to find such occasions that people do science in the first place. I don't think we should discourage researchers from reporting unorthodox findings.
Instead of making veiled accusations when someone announces an unexpected finding, the correct response is to take a careful look at it. If accusations of fraud or ineptitude are warranted, peer review will make that clear.
Of course, I wholeheartedly agree that researchers should check their work and subject it to peer review before they call a press conference. I still remember the "cold fusion" fiasco. Like cold fusion, this result is nothing until it's passed thorough review.
Comparing a man-made nuclear bomb to a gamma-ray burst seems kind of like comparing one pixel on your monitor to the Sun.
TFS seems to be taking the position that a 300-word article that generates a lot of traffic is better than a 1000-word article that generates less traffic. Arguably true for the publisher, but less so for the reader.
One thing I've noticed about blogs and Web news in general is the tendency toward short articles that can be written in an hour or less. Such articles are usually unsatisfying and fairly uninformative.
Making online news sources be more like that won't advance the legitimate role of the media, which is to inform the public.
Because this one has pictures!
Seriously, a key feature of the Head First series is to use lots of pictures, graphics, humor, even games to take the pain out of reading the book.
I've come to respect that they actually try to teach you something instead of just flinging 200 pages of dry text at you and letting you try to digest that. Making a subject approachable is not the same as "dumbing it down", and a real master can do the former without doing the latter.
Note: I do not assert that Head First Python does or does not manage the balancing act between making accessible and dumbing down; I only claim that one should dismiss a book on the basis that it has pictures.
Part of what the resolution says is that the Human Rights Council "...[a]ffirms that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online..." (emphasis added)
This is pretty much opposite the legal situation in the U.S. at least, where the government can demand access to your ISP's logs and the courts pretty much go along with it, but they still need a warrant to put you under physical surveillance.
I would tag this "sudden outbreak of common sense" except that I expect this resolution will have even less impact than the typical U.N. resolution.
Tell that to John F. Kennedy's ghost. He came damned close to pressing the button.
The United States is not the richest country on Earth by the most important measure. It's #6.
I live in the USA and from where I'm standing, mine is not the most powerful nation on Earth either. The most powerful country is one that doesn't have to listen to what anyone else says. I give that honor to China, based on my observation that China is completely unaccountable for its misdeeds (annexation of Tibet and currency manipulation come readily to mind).
For games, there is already a site working on getting old products open-sourced: liberatedgames.com. They don't update super often but they do seem to still be active.
If you read the Jargon file or read up on hacker lore from the '80s and '90s, IBM was the big, evil giant hackers despised for its unfair strong-arm tactics and lousy products. Microsoft stole that crown in the early '90s.
My perception of MS is actually improving.
So what I see is a company that is, too slowly, trying to learn from its mistakes.
As Microsoft loses primacy, it loses power. I wonder if it is also losing its capacity to do harm, and if a decade from now the MS-bashing will seem as quaint and misplaced as IBM-bashing does today.
I don't know whether to be appalled that most of the MBA class didn't get it, or delighted that one student in the MBA class did.
How big is your class? :-P
Keeping something confidential does not imply wrongdoing. There are many scenarios where a perfectly legitimate government activity needs to be kept confidential.
Private citizens also need privacy. Say for example I want to build a new addition onto my house and I solicit bids from three local building contractors. I may justifiably not want to tell each of those contractors who else is being considered for the job, to make it harder for them to conspire in a price-fixing scheme. Say for example my doctor finds a benign tumor during a physical exam. I might not want my boss to know for fear of employment discrimination.
Now, apply an ounce of imagination and think about the complex plans a government might need to make, where premature public disclosure would screw things up. Take into consideration the fact that every time Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) opens his mouth, the financial markets (over)-react.
Yes, a lot of misconduct gets swept under the rug especially in the name of "national security." But to presume that the state has no legitimate reason for secrecy in anything seems quite shallow.