Christians who no more represent the mainstream of Christianity than the Muslim suicide bombers (who they strongly resemble) represent the mainstream of Mohammedism.
You know how a lot of right-wingers like to attack Islam because (no matter what it does) it doesn't condemn "extremists" enough?
Yeah?
I want to know the same thing about mainstream Christianity. If these people really are completely out of whack with mainstream Christians, then *why* do said mainstream Christians not condemn them and distance themselves from them? If the pope isn't mainstream Christian, I'm not sure who is.
The pretty obvious take on Christianity is that it's a lot of bogus reasoning and emotional argument. *However* that doesn't mean that it's a social parasite -- it can have positive social benefits that outweigh the drawbacks of telling people silly things about the universe. Maybe if you don't tell people that there's a big scaly guy with a pitchfork ready to screw them over if they sin, they'll get along with people better.
Maybe Christianity is another way to fix public good problems in society. Public good problems are instances where rational individuals acting in their own individual best interests wind up having everyone worse off. Government solves the problem some of the time by simply altering the point values so that games are no longer public good problems. Nobody is going to build an interstate highway system, because it does them no good. I'm not even going to build thirty feet, because it does me no good. But *everyone* wins if we have a big road system that spans the whole US.
It looks like Christianity attacks the problem by simply making the agents act in a non-rational manner. Sure, maybe it's better in the short term to steal something, and if everyone stole, society wouldn't work very well and we'd lose out. But if you think that you're going to go to hell if you steal something, then a lot of social problems just go away.
The problem is that for Christianity to be nothing more than a social symbiote, it needs to *not cause problems for society*. One of those is standing in the way of science. Science produces phenomenal benefits for society -- in the past two hundred years alone, the industrialized world has seen huge standard of living improvements and lifespan increases. It's almost without exception a bad way to try to prevent science from moving ahead. The problem is that Christianity often seems hellbent on combatting science, and that's where I start having a real problem with Christianity.
I don't think that the parent post is necessarily a troll. If you haven't been following the gaming press or reading Slashdot every day, he's not that hard to be unaware of. My mother certainly doesn't know who he is.
Jack Thompson is a lawyer who, for one reason or another, has attempted to attack violent games in the media.
It's actually getting to be very hard to obtain any accurate, netural information on him at all -- so many of the people online play video games and are scared of what they think that he might push through that almost all information is biased -- the Wikipedia article on him is definitely not particularly neutral, and the gaming press dislikes him for obvious reasons.
Combine that with the fact that the man is a political conservative and a Christian (pretty obvious from his website) and given to rather inaccurate rhetoric, and you basically wind up with every article or online writing about him becoming a flamefest.
Without ad-blocker turned off. (though Firefox is set to block ads), I still get 2-4 pop-unders per session. I wonder how many Firefox itself is blocking.
Forget popup blocking. Popup *enabling* should never have been allowed in the first place. Software like web browsers needs to assume that the remote end is always malicious. Limiting functionality a little is a lot better than trying to slap patches over broken software. There should be *no way* for a website to be able to open new windows.
I've yet to see a single site that I *want* to change the function of my left-mouse-button. If I want a new window, I'll use my middle mouse button, goddammit.
Oh, and to my knowledge, google does no direct advertising themselves. A real product doesn't need to.
Paul Graham has a lot of good insights like this -- my only exception with his logic is his rabid insistence that being bought out by another company should be your end goal (especially after he points out that this ruins the company).
I would have thought that CSI's viewership would be young and more of the mind that Jack Thompson is an idiot than old and conservative and worried about young hooligans.
/me shrugs. I guess the market researchers probably know better than I, but still.
The simple fact that any audible signal can be recorded is important, yet the record companies still seem blind that they have a viable MP3 market because most consumers (with jobs) would rather pay $1 (with Jobs) than spend 20 minutes finding a song illegally or even bothering to rip their own CDs. I have more than a few friends who've rebought albums from iTunes that they own on CD. $10, to them, is worth the time.
It comes down to this.
The record companies have identified that control of artists are slipping away from them.
There are hordes of little nasty DRM companies that will promise the moon to get a fat contract from someone like Sony. People like the earlier company that tried corrupting the error-correcting information sufficiently to keep audio CDs from working properly in a computer. When you pair a technically inept, worried, rich company with a nasty little DRM company who promises a way out, the rich company's executives will make some pretty fucking stupid decisions.
I worked with one of Phillips' researchers who was working on watermarking and other approaches to DRM. I mentioned that a particular approach that took a huge amount of mathematical work to avoid being stripped out by MP3 seemed unlikely to last for very long, even without someone cracking the system deliberately, because psychoacoustic models are constantly getting better. He looked at me, sighed, and said, very honestly, "Yes, you can't really do DRM on an audio CD as a permanent solution -- but there are research dollars there, so that's what we work on."
Currently, if a single person can rip a CD, the audio will hit P2P. And there are so many technically ept people out there that the question of whether or not someone can rip a CD isn't even an issue -- the answer is just yes.
All these solutions are aimed at trying to prevent ripping. That's a lost cause. You can't do that. It's just too easy to rip audio at least once.
The record companies' (merely perceived or not) problem is the people *downloading* music, not the people ripping their own CDs to iPod or similar (unless they're *really* trying to sell the audio twice over -- once in digital format and once on a CD). The problem is that those people downloading music are also the people completely unaffected by attempts to eliminate ripping -- someone, somewhere, will *always* manage to rip audio. The only people getting shafted by these schemes are the legitimate customers, the ones who are trying to listen to audio on an iPod or their computer or so forth.
Any real solution (which may or may not be feasible, but it's a starting point) needs to do something in which physical modifications to a *player* are necessary in order to play the audio, or something along these lines -- anything that requires work on the part of each infringer, not on the part of a single person somewhere on the Internet, because that's a lost cause. The RIAA is pissing off a lot of people and blowing money on solutions that could *never* work in the long term, not even a little, and they're blowing any opportunity that they might have of making a workable DRM system, or of exploring ways to survive in a new world in which DRM doesn't *exist* and copying is easy.
The degree to which the RIAA member companies have been sold snake oil by security companies is amazing. You gotta feel for them.
However, that is not really the issue which Sony is attempting to defend. Sony is attempting to defend an action which essentially transfers ownership of _your_ computer to itself. And it is that which prompted the legal slap, and rightly so, for what it's worth.
It's easy to lose sight of what the issue is here -- the parent post is very much right.
It doesn't matter whether you like the RIAA, the artists, or whether you use MP3s.
The issue at hand is very simple.
Sony dumps some very low-level software on your system that alters the way the system works in some unexpected ways. The vector that this software is arriving in is not expected -- many sysadmins on corporate networks, for example, allow audio CDs (to help prevent copyright violation from people bringing in MP3s).
Sony has essentially done something to the system that the user does not expect.
This is a very classic case of going behind the user's back to do something that he is not going to want to have happen. The same thing happens with a lot of other software out there, true, but having a Gator or Bonzi Buddy from *Sony* instead of a random shady startup is a little different -- that says that this is an attempt to legitimize doing anything to a user's computer that a software vendor can get away with.
The counterclaim made by Sony when someone pointed out that they were doing something nasty surreptitiously was that "most users don't know what a rootkit even is". Yes, that may well be true. However, the problem is that something is being done to my system at a low level -- I don't know how my car works, but I trust my mechanic not to break it. When I stick an audio CD in a CD drive, I expect it to play music, not to modify the function of my kernel. The fact that the typical user does not have the knowledge necessary to understand how he is being screwed over and what to do to repair the problem is absolutely no defense against this.
Furthermore, they claimed that this was perfectly acceptable, and appear to be ready to do it again. The question is not minor -- this is the first time that I'm aware of that a mass-market company is attempting to do nasty stuff to computer users, and taking advantage of the fact that few users are able to identify what software is causing problems and what might be a bad idea to do to their system. Fortunately, there are a few technically knowledgeable and competent people out there (like the well-respected gentleman at Sysinternals) who are able to bring this up. If Sony can get away with this, it's a green light to any *other* company that sees a perceived advantage in somehow modifying your computer system to do so via any means necessary. Today, Windows boxes are the only ones affected, but what about tomorrow, when Linux and Mac OS boxes are hurt?
If Sony is not slapped down *hard* legally for this action, the floodgates of adware and spyware from major companies will have been opened.
I'm rooting very, very hard for the ambulance-chasers on this one, and it has nothing to do with the fact that this involves DRM. Software is something that Joe Average has to deal with on a daily basis, and his ignorance about how his system works or how to fix damage done to it should not be something that it's okay for every company in the world to exploit.
Sony is *not* going to listen to anything other than legal suits on this one -- if they were going to listen to common ethics, they would have done so by now.
The strength of the Chronicles of Amber was enough to make me go out and read a bunch of other Zelazy -- it didn't measure up.
The Chronicles of Amber, a ten book series (while the books are of good quality throughout, I like the first couple the most), is one of my favorite fantasy series. It mingles the the normal world with a very unique fantasy one -- no trolls or elves here. Unfortunately, few people seem to have read it.
Stephenson is great because he writes about technology in a way that doesn't shatter the illusion for anyone who knows anything about technology. Unfortunately, most writers do this, because they don't know beans about technology. Stephenson is an ex-hacker (though since he is now in the business of propagating memes, and he described this in his first book as "neurolinguistic hacking", maybe he still considers himself a hacker).
Some people seem to think that being a huge necessarily makes a company evil, or the enemy. But I don't dislike Microsoft because they are a big company. I dislike them because they do dirty tricks to hold technology back; to ensure that their goddamn awful technology succeeds over more promising technology.
I agree.
The problem is, as you grow a company (especially quickly), you run the risk of attracting deadwood. This is especially true if your company is extremely high profile and trumpeted as being the Second Coming. Deadwood costs money, and is difficult to get rid of. Now, if you stick a lot of dedicated, talented CS geeks in a room and if they're all working with each other, you can't help but churn out amazing stuff.
Problem is, when you start picking up people that *can't* produce good work, they mean that you have to drive up your prices.
Add this to the fact that execs are expected to grow a company by N% each year, even if the company is doing a good job simply maintaining its position in a saturated market that it controls, and the fact that execs are evaluated on a short-term basis (maybe up to four years) and that it's easy to get short-term boosts at the cost of long term reputation damage by Being Evil.
Wait until Google has nearly all of the search market (they're already at what, half of all searches?). Their peripheral services are neat, but I'm not sure how much money they bring in. The pressure to Be Evil keeps increasing.
It's not that I want to blame Google. Yes, I agree that right now they are Good People. However, what many of us worry about is that we know that they will experience increasing pressure to Be Evil, we know that most companies succumb to the urge sooner or later, and that tying ourselves too closely to Google (writing applications that depend on it and so forth) is asking for trouble down the road.
How about software patents? Google has an enormous stable of computer scientists. What happens when some legal group at Google submits a report that (accurately) states that Google can make a great deal of money by pursuing patent suits against other companies?
I mean, IBM gives me the warm fuzzies today too, but I'm sure not going to expect them not to try to screw me over down the road if it suits their interests.
I would think that, if you were trying to meet someone, that you'd simply want to interact with people, period. On and off the Internet -- I don't see how it would make so much difference.
As for punitive damages... they are SO infrequent in this country that you really shouldn't be too worried about them.
That's a good point (I don't know whether you're right or not, but I'm certainly willing to give you the benefit of the doubt), but consider this: (a) assuming a financial backer of sufficient size (such as a law firm willing to try some cases without initial fee, and so forth), what matters is not *frequency* of winning, but frequency times total award. And while the frequency may be very very low, the awards on some of these lawsuits, the ones that make TV, are very, very high. (b) What matters is not the rate of winning, but the perception of the people funding the lawsuits (who may be individuals) of the rate of winning. So if there are a number of TV shows about how much money someone can make through frivolous lawsuits, and someone decides to fund a lawsuit with their own money...well...
i dont think you should have to pay anyone to find someone, i mean there are other options, myspace, im, etc, i know not all dating services are bad, but they are making a profit off of you, its sad
What exactly do you think florists, restauraunts, jewelry stores, clubs, etc are doing?
There is great demand to find a spouse. Thus, there are businesses that attempt to assist you in this. I'm not sure why you find this attempt to make profit offensive. If they were selling you a false bill of goods, that might be a problem. I suspect that many dating-related services and product vendors probably overstate the effectiveness of their product, but I think that people can deal with that pretty well.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy.
They pay this because cell phones are set up to be a closed platform, so that people can't transfer ring tones onto them. If people could just copy audio to them as easily as they do with a computer, there'd be no market -- there are *masses* of excellent, free, downloadable alert sounds for computers.
The cell phone providers don't want to be *data transfer providers*, as ISPs are -- you pay us $N, you get M amount of data each month, and your software can do whatever you want. That's a competitive market, and much less money is involved.
I'd love to see regulation out there that requires cell providers to allow *any* device (open platforms, maybe something running Linux, whatever) to connect to their network on a flat service rate, or metered based *only* on data provided. The current system is reminicent of the Bell hardwired telephone monopoly back before Bell was made to open up their phone system to any phone devices, as long as those devices didn't disrupt the network.
The fact that SMSes are more expensive than voice data on a typical US plan, for example, is absurd. This kind of screwball valuation only happens in the presence of a seriously non-free market. The incentive should be to use the loose-latency-requirements, low-bandwidth-required SMSes.
I'm one of a tiny handful of people that just won't buy a cell phone because of the fact that cells are magic black boxes run by a monopoly -- I want to be able to write (and download) my *own* alarm clock/scheduler/voicemail/etc stuff, without paying "application-level fees" to the cell provider.
Probably a bit of a cynical attitude, but in respect to attracting women - does it really matter what job you're doing if you're pulling down a 6 figure salary?
You know...pretend, just for a moment, that *you* have a pair of breasts on your front. Now, who do *you* want to live with for the rest of your life? Yeah, your thought process probably works pretty much the same way it does now. Sure, you might like to go out with a supermodel, all else being equal, but honestly, knowing someone that's nice and that you want to spend your life with is a lot more tied into personality than whether the person is a mortician or a pop singer at the moment, you know?
Saying "doesn't have a girlfriend" is a ridiculous, long-standing criticism of geeks. There's probably some correlation, sure -- if you spend a lot of time on computers, you probably spend less time with people, and maybe as a result you don't know how to get along with people as well. But that's hardly a hard-and-fast rule. And, quite frankly, of the people that are hardest to get along with in my life, I don't believe any of them are techies.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that for Christianity to be nothing more than a social symbiote,
..."
That *should* have read "...for Christianity to be a social symbiote instead of a social parasite,
Christians who no more represent the mainstream of Christianity than the Muslim suicide bombers (who they strongly resemble) represent the mainstream of Mohammedism.
You know how a lot of right-wingers like to attack Islam because (no matter what it does) it doesn't condemn "extremists" enough?
Yeah?
I want to know the same thing about mainstream Christianity. If these people really are completely out of whack with mainstream Christians, then *why* do said mainstream Christians not condemn them and distance themselves from them? If the pope isn't mainstream Christian, I'm not sure who is.
The pretty obvious take on Christianity is that it's a lot of bogus reasoning and emotional argument. *However* that doesn't mean that it's a social parasite -- it can have positive social benefits that outweigh the drawbacks of telling people silly things about the universe. Maybe if you don't tell people that there's a big scaly guy with a pitchfork ready to screw them over if they sin, they'll get along with people better.
Maybe Christianity is another way to fix public good problems in society. Public good problems are instances where rational individuals acting in their own individual best interests wind up having everyone worse off. Government solves the problem some of the time by simply altering the point values so that games are no longer public good problems. Nobody is going to build an interstate highway system, because it does them no good. I'm not even going to build thirty feet, because it does me no good. But *everyone* wins if we have a big road system that spans the whole US.
It looks like Christianity attacks the problem by simply making the agents act in a non-rational manner. Sure, maybe it's better in the short term to steal something, and if everyone stole, society wouldn't work very well and we'd lose out. But if you think that you're going to go to hell if you steal something, then a lot of social problems just go away.
The problem is that for Christianity to be nothing more than a social symbiote, it needs to *not cause problems for society*. One of those is standing in the way of science. Science produces phenomenal benefits for society -- in the past two hundred years alone, the industrialized world has seen huge standard of living improvements and lifespan increases. It's almost without exception a bad way to try to prevent science from moving ahead. The problem is that Christianity often seems hellbent on combatting science, and that's where I start having a real problem with Christianity.
Sorry. I linked to the WP article twice instead of to Thompson's homepage. Here's the proper link.
Can anyone explain who this guy is?
I don't think that the parent post is necessarily a troll. If you haven't been following the gaming press or reading Slashdot every day, he's not that hard to be unaware of. My mother certainly doesn't know who he is.
Jack Thompson is a lawyer who, for one reason or another, has attempted to attack violent games in the media.
It's actually getting to be very hard to obtain any accurate, netural information on him at all -- so many of the people online play video games and are scared of what they think that he might push through that almost all information is biased -- the Wikipedia article on him is definitely not particularly neutral, and the gaming press dislikes him for obvious reasons.
Combine that with the fact that the man is a political conservative and a Christian (pretty obvious from his website) and given to rather inaccurate rhetoric, and you basically wind up with every article or online writing about him becoming a flamefest.
No, I'm honored. Thank you.
Without ad-blocker turned off. (though Firefox is set to block ads), I still get 2-4 pop-unders per session. I wonder how many Firefox itself is blocking.
Forget popup blocking. Popup *enabling* should never have been allowed in the first place. Software like web browsers needs to assume that the remote end is always malicious. Limiting functionality a little is a lot better than trying to slap patches over broken software. There should be *no way* for a website to be able to open new windows.
I've yet to see a single site that I *want* to change the function of my left-mouse-button. If I want a new window, I'll use my middle mouse button, goddammit.
Oh, and to my knowledge, google does no direct advertising themselves. A real product doesn't need to.
Paul Graham has a lot of good insights like this -- my only exception with his logic is his rabid insistence that being bought out by another company should be your end goal (especially after he points out that this ruins the company).
The amazing thing isn't that there's such a thing as a "popup blocker", but that there was ever a "popup enabler" in the first place.
Network software *always* needs to assume that the remote end is malicious. It is much better to constrain functionality than to allow abuse.
Google did one thing.
They made a good product.
In the long run, everything becomes unimportant except whether your product is good.
The other sites were trying to figure out how much they could screw over the user. This is not sustainable.
The simple fact that any audible signal can be recorded is important, yet the record companies still seem blind that they have a viable MP3 market because most consumers (with jobs) would rather pay $1 (with Jobs) than spend 20 minutes finding a song illegally or even bothering to rip their own CDs. I have more than a few friends who've rebought albums from iTunes that they own on CD. $10, to them, is worth the time.
It comes down to this.
The record companies have identified that control of artists are slipping away from them.
There are hordes of little nasty DRM companies that will promise the moon to get a fat contract from someone like Sony. People like the earlier company that tried corrupting the error-correcting information sufficiently to keep audio CDs from working properly in a computer. When you pair a technically inept, worried, rich company with a nasty little DRM company who promises a way out, the rich company's executives will make some pretty fucking stupid decisions.
I worked with one of Phillips' researchers who was working on watermarking and other approaches to DRM. I mentioned that a particular approach that took a huge amount of mathematical work to avoid being stripped out by MP3 seemed unlikely to last for very long, even without someone cracking the system deliberately, because psychoacoustic models are constantly getting better. He looked at me, sighed, and said, very honestly, "Yes, you can't really do DRM on an audio CD as a permanent solution -- but there are research dollars there, so that's what we work on."
Currently, if a single person can rip a CD, the audio will hit P2P. And there are so many technically ept people out there that the question of whether or not someone can rip a CD isn't even an issue -- the answer is just yes.
All these solutions are aimed at trying to prevent ripping. That's a lost cause. You can't do that. It's just too easy to rip audio at least once.
The record companies' (merely perceived or not) problem is the people *downloading* music, not the people ripping their own CDs to iPod or similar (unless they're *really* trying to sell the audio twice over -- once in digital format and once on a CD). The problem is that those people downloading music are also the people completely unaffected by attempts to eliminate ripping -- someone, somewhere, will *always* manage to rip audio. The only people getting shafted by these schemes are the legitimate customers, the ones who are trying to listen to audio on an iPod or their computer or so forth.
Any real solution (which may or may not be feasible, but it's a starting point) needs to do something in which physical modifications to a *player* are necessary in order to play the audio, or something along these lines -- anything that requires work on the part of each infringer, not on the part of a single person somewhere on the Internet, because that's a lost cause. The RIAA is pissing off a lot of people and blowing money on solutions that could *never* work in the long term, not even a little, and they're blowing any opportunity that they might have of making a workable DRM system, or of exploring ways to survive in a new world in which DRM doesn't *exist* and copying is easy.
The degree to which the RIAA member companies have been sold snake oil by security companies is amazing. You gotta feel for them.
However, that is not really the issue which Sony is attempting to defend. Sony is attempting to defend an action which essentially transfers ownership of _your_ computer to itself. And it is that which prompted the legal slap, and rightly so, for what it's worth.
It's easy to lose sight of what the issue is here -- the parent post is very much right.
It doesn't matter whether you like the RIAA, the artists, or whether you use MP3s.
The issue at hand is very simple.
Sony dumps some very low-level software on your system that alters the way the system works in some unexpected ways. The vector that this software is arriving in is not expected -- many sysadmins on corporate networks, for example, allow audio CDs (to help prevent copyright violation from people bringing in MP3s).
Sony has essentially done something to the system that the user does not expect.
This is a very classic case of going behind the user's back to do something that he is not going to want to have happen. The same thing happens with a lot of other software out there, true, but having a Gator or Bonzi Buddy from *Sony* instead of a random shady startup is a little different -- that says that this is an attempt to legitimize doing anything to a user's computer that a software vendor can get away with.
The counterclaim made by Sony when someone pointed out that they were doing something nasty surreptitiously was that "most users don't know what a rootkit even is". Yes, that may well be true. However, the problem is that something is being done to my system at a low level -- I don't know how my car works, but I trust my mechanic not to break it. When I stick an audio CD in a CD drive, I expect it to play music, not to modify the function of my kernel. The fact that the typical user does not have the knowledge necessary to understand how he is being screwed over and what to do to repair the problem is absolutely no defense against this.
Furthermore, they claimed that this was perfectly acceptable, and appear to be ready to do it again. The question is not minor -- this is the first time that I'm aware of that a mass-market company is attempting to do nasty stuff to computer users, and taking advantage of the fact that few users are able to identify what software is causing problems and what might be a bad idea to do to their system. Fortunately, there are a few technically knowledgeable and competent people out there (like the well-respected gentleman at Sysinternals) who are able to bring this up. If Sony can get away with this, it's a green light to any *other* company that sees a perceived advantage in somehow modifying your computer system to do so via any means necessary. Today, Windows boxes are the only ones affected, but what about tomorrow, when Linux and Mac OS boxes are hurt?
If Sony is not slapped down *hard* legally for this action, the floodgates of adware and spyware from major companies will have been opened.
I'm rooting very, very hard for the ambulance-chasers on this one, and it has nothing to do with the fact that this involves DRM. Software is something that Joe Average has to deal with on a daily basis, and his ignorance about how his system works or how to fix damage done to it should not be something that it's okay for every company in the world to exploit.
Sony is *not* going to listen to anything other than legal suits on this one -- if they were going to listen to common ethics, they would have done so by now.
The one I work at they are pretty strict on this to the point of not allowing certain editors.
You view this as a *good* thing? That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard of.
"Yeah, you're going to be using vi instead of emacs on this project. Because I like vi."
Gah.
I've heard only "geek" used in a positive light.
I think that the meaning of the two words has been transposed, in another ripple in the ever-changing river of English.
The strength of the Chronicles of Amber was enough to make me go out and read a bunch of other Zelazy -- it didn't measure up.
The Chronicles of Amber, a ten book series (while the books are of good quality throughout, I like the first couple the most), is one of my favorite fantasy series. It mingles the the normal world with a very unique fantasy one -- no trolls or elves here. Unfortunately, few people seem to have read it.
Stephenson is great because he writes about technology in a way that doesn't shatter the illusion for anyone who knows anything about technology. Unfortunately, most writers do this, because they don't know beans about technology. Stephenson is an ex-hacker (though since he is now in the business of propagating memes, and he described this in his first book as "neurolinguistic hacking", maybe he still considers himself a hacker).
Some people seem to think that being a huge necessarily makes a company evil, or the enemy. But I don't dislike Microsoft because they are a big company. I dislike them because they do dirty tricks to hold technology back; to ensure that their goddamn awful technology succeeds over more promising technology.
I agree.
The problem is, as you grow a company (especially quickly), you run the risk of attracting deadwood. This is especially true if your company is extremely high profile and trumpeted as being the Second Coming. Deadwood costs money, and is difficult to get rid of. Now, if you stick a lot of dedicated, talented CS geeks in a room and if they're all working with each other, you can't help but churn out amazing stuff.
Problem is, when you start picking up people that *can't* produce good work, they mean that you have to drive up your prices.
Add this to the fact that execs are expected to grow a company by N% each year, even if the company is doing a good job simply maintaining its position in a saturated market that it controls, and the fact that execs are evaluated on a short-term basis (maybe up to four years) and that it's easy to get short-term boosts at the cost of long term reputation damage by Being Evil.
Wait until Google has nearly all of the search market (they're already at what, half of all searches?). Their peripheral services are neat, but I'm not sure how much money they bring in. The pressure to Be Evil keeps increasing.
It's not that I want to blame Google. Yes, I agree that right now they are Good People. However, what many of us worry about is that we know that they will experience increasing pressure to Be Evil, we know that most companies succumb to the urge sooner or later, and that tying ourselves too closely to Google (writing applications that depend on it and so forth) is asking for trouble down the road.
How about software patents? Google has an enormous stable of computer scientists. What happens when some legal group at Google submits a report that (accurately) states that Google can make a great deal of money by pursuing patent suits against other companies?
I mean, IBM gives me the warm fuzzies today too, but I'm sure not going to expect them not to try to screw me over down the road if it suits their interests.
Don't look for love on the internet.
I would think that, if you were trying to meet someone, that you'd simply want to interact with people, period. On and off the Internet -- I don't see how it would make so much difference.
Love the website. :-)
And, yes, I did check to see whether it worked nicely in links...
As for punitive damages... they are SO infrequent in this country that you really shouldn't be too worried about them.
That's a good point (I don't know whether you're right or not, but I'm certainly willing to give you the benefit of the doubt), but consider this: (a) assuming a financial backer of sufficient size (such as a law firm willing to try some cases without initial fee, and so forth), what matters is not *frequency* of winning, but frequency times total award. And while the frequency may be very very low, the awards on some of these lawsuits, the ones that make TV, are very, very high. (b) What matters is not the rate of winning, but the perception of the people funding the lawsuits (who may be individuals) of the rate of winning. So if there are a number of TV shows about how much money someone can make through frivolous lawsuits, and someone decides to fund a lawsuit with their own money...well...
This was not a frivolous case!
Yes, actually, it was.
But instead of posting all the counterpoints that undermine your claims, I'm going to respect the grandparent's post and not shoot you down.
This money goes straight in the state's pockets, not to the plaintif's.
That is a fucking awesome idea. I have no idea why we don't do that. Can you drop a couple names of countries that do this?
i dont think you should have to pay anyone to find someone, i mean there are other options, myspace, im, etc, i know not all dating services are bad, but they are making a profit off of you, its sad
What exactly do you think florists, restauraunts, jewelry stores, clubs, etc are doing?
There is great demand to find a spouse. Thus, there are businesses that attempt to assist you in this. I'm not sure why you find this attempt to make profit offensive. If they were selling you a false bill of goods, that might be a problem. I suspect that many dating-related services and product vendors probably overstate the effectiveness of their product, but I think that people can deal with that pretty well.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy.
They pay this because cell phones are set up to be a closed platform, so that people can't transfer ring tones onto them. If people could just copy audio to them as easily as they do with a computer, there'd be no market -- there are *masses* of excellent, free, downloadable alert sounds for computers.
The cell phone providers don't want to be *data transfer providers*, as ISPs are -- you pay us $N, you get M amount of data each month, and your software can do whatever you want. That's a competitive market, and much less money is involved.
I'd love to see regulation out there that requires cell providers to allow *any* device (open platforms, maybe something running Linux, whatever) to connect to their network on a flat service rate, or metered based *only* on data provided. The current system is reminicent of the Bell hardwired telephone monopoly back before Bell was made to open up their phone system to any phone devices, as long as those devices didn't disrupt the network.
The fact that SMSes are more expensive than voice data on a typical US plan, for example, is absurd. This kind of screwball valuation only happens in the presence of a seriously non-free market. The incentive should be to use the loose-latency-requirements, low-bandwidth-required SMSes.
I'm one of a tiny handful of people that just won't buy a cell phone because of the fact that cells are magic black boxes run by a monopoly -- I want to be able to write (and download) my *own* alarm clock/scheduler/voicemail/etc stuff, without paying "application-level fees" to the cell provider.
Probably a bit of a cynical attitude, but in respect to attracting women - does it really matter what job you're doing if you're pulling down a 6 figure salary?
You know...pretend, just for a moment, that *you* have a pair of breasts on your front. Now, who do *you* want to live with for the rest of your life? Yeah, your thought process probably works pretty much the same way it does now. Sure, you might like to go out with a supermodel, all else being equal, but honestly, knowing someone that's nice and that you want to spend your life with is a lot more tied into personality than whether the person is a mortician or a pop singer at the moment, you know?
Saying "doesn't have a girlfriend" is a ridiculous, long-standing criticism of geeks. There's probably some correlation, sure -- if you spend a lot of time on computers, you probably spend less time with people, and maybe as a result you don't know how to get along with people as well. But that's hardly a hard-and-fast rule. And, quite frankly, of the people that are hardest to get along with in my life, I don't believe any of them are techies.