Funny thing. You're wrong about me - I've probably listened to less than fifteen minutes worth of Limbaugh in the last fifteen years, and I don't march in lockstep with anyone. It was mostly a throwaway comment about the state of the forum, rather than serious political commentary. But that's not the funny bit - the funny bit is that the mods were in such a hurry to squelch what I said that they pissed away a bunch of points modding me down rather than spending them judiciously and modding you up.
You may be wrong about me, but your post at least maintains some semblance of open discussion - yours is more or less the only counter to what I posted, as wrong as your assumptions are. But it's not currently being viewed by much of anyone, because nobody bothered to spend their points on you, preferring instead to try stifling my post. Moderators who are obviously predisposed to agree with you attempt to silence me, and wind up silencing you. Is that not deliciously funny or what?;)
It's okay - I'm going to do for you what those moderators should have done, and make your post visible for people who don't do AC posts....
Re:"...rather than adding spastically like Yahoo" (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 11:03 AM March 29th, 2004 (#8703754)
... and as usual the dittoheads will find some way to talk about Bush-bashing regardless of how irrelevant to the topic it is.
I would think that it wouldn't be slander/libel if the person providing the "information" believed it to be true, or did not know it to be false.
You can get burned for slander or libel even if you believe what you are saying is true, if you reasonably should have known it was false. If I (falsely) state that you are currently on parole for child molestation, the fact that I really honestly believe that to be true is not going to save me, not when I could have easily refuted it with some minimal effort at verification.
In other words, if you can verify the truthfulness or falsity of what you're saying by expending a bit of reasonable effort, you'll be expected to have done so when your court date rolls around - the law will not allow you to get by with saying defamatory things that you have no reasonable right to believe.
There is no real distinction between the slashdot effect and a DDOS
Other than the critical distinction of "intent", of course. Suing someone for things that fall under the heading of "shit happens" rarely leads anywhere useful.
45 bucks a month, plus equipment fees puts them at least in the same ballpark with the Digital cable and DirectTV rates
Why not switch? It's more, by a couple of bucks. For $39.99 a month, you can get DTV's Total Choice plus locals package, which includes all the channels you listed as your interests (Discovery, History, Speed, and Fox Sports Detroit). If you're too far out for locals, you can shave $3 a month off that bill. Or, if you want, you can add $3 a month and get the Total Choice Plus pack, which includes another 5 Discovery channels, among other things.
Not an employee of DTV, just a satisfied customer for six years now, ever since I started thinking like you're thinking now - except my local monster at the time was Adelphia, not Comcast;)
Have them pay for an alpha pager and move your alerts there.
Plus, if you frame the alerts in really arcane and scary-sounding language ("WARNING: CRITICAL SUBSYSTEM FAILURE! ERROR: 0xDEADBEEF"), you can use your pager to get yourself out of endlessly dull staff meetings. Your boss doesn't need to know that 0xDEADBEEF means that one of the network printers is out of paper;)
Because someday retro-80's fashions will be what the cool kids are wearing once again. It's just a matter of time, I figure. And then I'm calling my mother and sending her up to the attic for my old clothes, so that all those parachute pants and "Members Only" jackets and Izod shirts can command top dollar on eBay, as actual period garb. Remember, Youth Of Today, when that day comes, demand authenticity! Don't settle for cheap knockoffs of the classic originals!
Or could it be that they just want to listen to music?
How gauche. I take it you've never managed your boundaries? Transformed space and time? Hell, I bet you've never operated a single-aspect transformative device, let alone a multi-faceted one...
The reason your ink counter reset is because you removed the cartridge.
There's gotta be more to it that that. It has some sort of active ink-level monitoring beyond simply counting pages or whatever, because if you take the empty cartridge out and put it right back in, it charges up and immediately reports that the cart is empty - which, of course, it is. If you do the "shake, rattle, and roll" bit, it doesn't - it thinks it's full for some reason.
I know how you feel - there's an Epson Stylus printer at work that uses four separate colour cartridges and refuses to print if any of the colours is empty. So if you've run out of Cyan, you have to install a new Cyan cartridge before you can print your page of black text.
I have an older Epson Stylus 860 that does the same thing - if the color cartridge is empty, you have to replace it before you can print anything, even if it's black text you want to print. And it does that even if only one of the colors in the three color cart is empty. Used to drive me up a wall until I discovered, quite by accident, that you can take the empty color cartridge out, shake it vigorously for 10-15 seconds, and then replace it. Check the status monitor, and it appears that the empty cartridge is actually full.
I have no idea how this works, but I am guessing that the little bit of residual ink is coating the sensors and fooling them into thinking it's full. Of course, you can't actually print color docs, because there's not really any color ink in there, but it's saved me from many an unnecessary trip to buy a color cart I don't really need in order to print out the text that I do.
I think WordPerfect got huge market share with lawyers back in the day, and then they all standardized on it.
Sort of. There's a couple of reasons, really. First, as you say, WP gained a large portion of the market back in the day - for a long time, word processing on a PC was WP and precious little else. Because of this early adoption, what's happened since is that many, many law firms have a sizeable investment in WP templates, and I do mean sizeable - as in many thousands or tens of thousands, in some cases. Lawyers live and die by the written word, and if you walk into any medium or large law firm, odds are that no matter what your problem is, they already have a form letter tailored to that problem. Because of this investment, there is a significant barrier to switching, as it means either converting or recreating those thousands of templates. And in such a case, the general rule is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And one other reason is the ever-amusing Rule 32;)
Link where Tommy Heath mentions it in passing. Unfortunately, the Buffalo Snooze article from way back then isn't available online, but I've seen it nonetheless. I guess you could hit the microfilm if you like;)
But even with abstracted money, merchant middlemen still exist; eBay is doing quite a good business, as is Amazon and just about every retail shop out there, etc.
But they don't exist everywhere, which they would have to under the system you're describing. You can argue that McDonald's is a middleman sitting between me and the cattle rancher, certainly, but now I would need a broker to make a transaction with McDonald's too - which, as it stands now, I don't, because we have a predetermined medium of exchange. After all, what, other than cash, do I have that the local McD's franchisee wants? And so I wind up needing a broker for what used to be the most ludicrously simple transactions. I really doubt you're going to interest too many people in what boils down to essentially bidding on a Big Mac and Coke, especially when you have no idea in advance what sorts of things you might have to pay to get it, what the magic thing you own or control is that will get you the thing you want. Would I just put out an inventory of everything I own or can provide, and then a wish list of things I want?
Yes, but this can and does often happen with money transactions as well; it's called breach of contract. And if networked bartering became an established practice, I'm sure customs and laws would evolve to consider joining barter loops tantamout to entering into a contract.
And how does that work when you really don't necessarily know in advance what you're getting or what you're paying? Suppose I make it known that I want a new lawnmower, and I sit back to see what the eventual cost to me will be. Am I to understand that when the chain comes together, I'm already locked in to it, regardless of how I feel about the cost versus the benefit to me? That I have no chance to decide that giving up my washer and dryer, along with spending a weekend shoveling snow, is too high a price for me? And if I do get the opportunity to make that final decision about cost versus benefit, won't the whole thing fall apart if I decide it's not worth it?
But value is intrinsically subjective and circumstance-specific.
That's why the only meaningful measure of value is exchange value, which allows us to create an objective valuation of disparate goods and services for purposes of exchange. Call it dollars or clamshells or rocks or whatever - the point is that having a unit of measurement for valuation allows us to objectively compare the value of goods and services that are otherwise not comparable. Now, the value to you is subjective and circumstantial, but you don't dictate the price - the market does (actually, buyers, in the aggregate, do), as long as it's a free market. And if your valuation does not comport with the objective valuation as given by the price - e.g., you think it's not worth as much as it costs - then you're free to not buy it. Or free to grab up what seems like a killer deal to you, as the case may be. But other than that, your subjective valuation is unrelated to the price, which provides an objective valuation for goods and services based on the actual transactions involving that good or service.
Think about your family photo albums for a moment. Very likely, your photo albums are precious to you, representing memories and events in such a way as to be irreplaceable. Subjectively speaking, you value them extremely highly. But now consider the other side of the coin - how much do you think someone would pay you to have them? Not much, I think - they're simply not as meaningful to someone else as they are to you. Despite the fact that you personally value the hell out of them, objectively speaking, they're not worth all that much - you simply won't find anyone to give you much in exchange for them. And that's just about the only measure of value that's of use when we're talking about exchanging goods and services - the exchange value. The thing is not worth what you or I say it is - it's worth whatever you can get
When that song first came out, the number 867-5309 was a live number in Buffalo, NY (716 area code), and there was even a Jenny that lived there. Unfortunately, that number also belonged to Jenny's dad, who was the chief of the Buffalo Police at the time;)
But thanks to modern communications technology, it's becoming more and more possible to create those instantaneous transaction chains; imagine something like eBay where people post items they're willing to trade and items they seek in exchange. Whenever the system detects a complete loop, it 'locks it in' and instructs each party to send his goods to the next. No money need be involved.
That's great if you're planning on being that middleman, the matchmaker who brokers every transaction. But for everyone else, who now requires your services when they didn't before, that system is going to suck just a little bit, not least because you've inserted yet another transaction cost into the equation - eBay doesn't do what it does for free, and I see no reason to believe that the middlemen in such a scenario will either. What winds up happening is that the broker tells me to send nine chickens to someone I've never heard of, and one to him, whereas before I could have just given the cash equivalent of nine chickens directly to the person who had the thing I wanted, and cut out the middleman entirely. The whole point to electronic markets is to reduce the cost of doing business, not increase it by creating a new class of merchant-middlemen, without whom business doesn't get done - and in those terms, barter is a huge step backwards.
Plus, the longer and more complicated those transaction chains are, the more likely it is that the whole thing will get fucked up by one person deciding to back out of the deal. If my groceries this week depend on someone halfway around the world - someone whom I've never heard of - spending two hours chopping wood - for someone else I've never heard of - but he decides he'd rather do something else to get the things he wants, I'm screwed, and screwed by someone I have absolutely no influence over. And then I get to go back to square one and try to line up yet another transaction chain that will let me eat this week.
And finally, having a universal medium of exchange makes the objective valuation of goods and services much more efficient and understandable than with a barter system. Bob can get a week's worth of groceries from the grocer by mowing the grocer's lawn for a month. I can get a week's worth of groceries by spending six hours fixing the grocer's car. Does this mean that Bob will exchange a month's worth of lawnmowing for me fixing his car? I wouldn't bet on it, personally - maybe he will, maybe he won't. Is Bob getting a better deal than I am? Am I getting a better deal than Bob? How can we rationally value the services we both provide against one another in the absence of some independent yardstick like a cash price?
No, you can't -- that's the myth that closed-source vendors push, but it doesn't work in real life. Ever tried to load a Word XP file into, say, Word 6.0? Microsoft et al deliberately change their file formats every couple of years, for the express purpose of making old software unusable.
Yes, you can. Your analogy is inapposite because this isn't an open distribution system, where the theaters might have to decode some random piece of video sent to them by some random person - they know exactly what they're getting once the system is in place, and hence they have no reason to change it later on. Once the decision is made that the central office will distribute content in WMP 9/MPEG4 format, then it really makes no difference to them what WMP 14 does five years down the line, as they neither want nor need to switch - they control both ends of the content pipeline here, and therefore don't need to worry about what the rest of the world is doing.
The barter system. Yes, it's as old as time but it still works very well.
No, actually the reason cash replaced barter is precisely because barter doesn't work very well in complex societies built on specialization and division of labor. Any time I have something you want, but you don't have anything I want, bartering quickly devolves into an absurdly complex multilateral negotiation. General_re grows corn. CaptainTux keeps hogs and would like the corn for pig feed. But general_re doesn't want hogs - he wants a new tractor. Mr. X has tractors, but he doesn't want corn or hogs - he wants a laborer to help him make tractors.
And so forth. Much easier to simply agree in advance on a medium of exchange. CaptainTux gives general_re cash in exchange for corn, general_re exchanges cash for a tractor, and Mr. X exchanges cash for the services of a tractor assembler. It's all faster and easier that way, because it can all be done in a series of one-on-one exchanges - we no longer have to convene a roundtable discussion, where every single party sits down at the same time and negotiates an arrangement that satisfies everyone.
the "Anonymous Coward" account sure seems to get spoofed a lot around here;)
You laugh, but when I first registered here - which was, you know, back in the day, before everybody and their mother knew what AC was all about - it actually took me a couple of weeks of reading to figure out that "Anonymous Coward" wasn't just another poster.
I distinctly remember thinking "Damn, this 'Anonymous Coward' guy sure has a lot of free time - he's all over everything around here..."
I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that, but I may be the only one to admit it;)
Slashdot Mirror
You're just positing a different set of hands for that money to pass through. Eventually it'll make it back to someone you approve of, I promise.
You may be wrong about me, but your post at least maintains some semblance of open discussion - yours is more or less the only counter to what I posted, as wrong as your assumptions are. But it's not currently being viewed by much of anyone, because nobody bothered to spend their points on you, preferring instead to try stifling my post. Moderators who are obviously predisposed to agree with you attempt to silence me, and wind up silencing you. Is that not deliciously funny or what? ;)
It's okay - I'm going to do for you what those moderators should have done, and make your post visible for people who don't do AC posts....
Ah, I just felt like riding the old Moderation Rollercoaster today ;)
Bad submitter! Don't you know how Slashdot works during an election season? You have to find some way to blame these spastic additions on George Bush!
You can get burned for slander or libel even if you believe what you are saying is true, if you reasonably should have known it was false. If I (falsely) state that you are currently on parole for child molestation, the fact that I really honestly believe that to be true is not going to save me, not when I could have easily refuted it with some minimal effort at verification.
In other words, if you can verify the truthfulness or falsity of what you're saying by expending a bit of reasonable effort, you'll be expected to have done so when your court date rolls around - the law will not allow you to get by with saying defamatory things that you have no reasonable right to believe.
Other than the critical distinction of "intent", of course. Suing someone for things that fall under the heading of "shit happens" rarely leads anywhere useful.
Why not switch? It's more, by a couple of bucks. For $39.99 a month, you can get DTV's Total Choice plus locals package, which includes all the channels you listed as your interests (Discovery, History, Speed, and Fox Sports Detroit). If you're too far out for locals, you can shave $3 a month off that bill. Or, if you want, you can add $3 a month and get the Total Choice Plus pack, which includes another 5 Discovery channels, among other things.
Not an employee of DTV, just a satisfied customer for six years now, ever since I started thinking like you're thinking now - except my local monster at the time was Adelphia, not Comcast ;)
Plus, if you frame the alerts in really arcane and scary-sounding language ("WARNING: CRITICAL SUBSYSTEM FAILURE! ERROR: 0xDEADBEEF"), you can use your pager to get yourself out of endlessly dull staff meetings. Your boss doesn't need to know that 0xDEADBEEF means that one of the network printers is out of paper ;)
Because someday retro-80's fashions will be what the cool kids are wearing once again. It's just a matter of time, I figure. And then I'm calling my mother and sending her up to the attic for my old clothes, so that all those parachute pants and "Members Only" jackets and Izod shirts can command top dollar on eBay, as actual period garb. Remember, Youth Of Today, when that day comes, demand authenticity! Don't settle for cheap knockoffs of the classic originals!
This is very disturbing - according to that graph, the amount of shit in the kernel has more than doubled in the last eight years...
It's the opposite of "wabbit season".
Yeah, but I have to crank the music - it's the only thing that drowns out that goddamn ringing in my ears....
How gauche. I take it you've never managed your boundaries? Transformed space and time? Hell, I bet you've never operated a single-aspect transformative device, let alone a multi-faceted one...
There's gotta be more to it that that. It has some sort of active ink-level monitoring beyond simply counting pages or whatever, because if you take the empty cartridge out and put it right back in, it charges up and immediately reports that the cart is empty - which, of course, it is. If you do the "shake, rattle, and roll" bit, it doesn't - it thinks it's full for some reason.
$32.32 for 600 pages is $0.053 per page.
I have an older Epson Stylus 860 that does the same thing - if the color cartridge is empty, you have to replace it before you can print anything, even if it's black text you want to print. And it does that even if only one of the colors in the three color cart is empty. Used to drive me up a wall until I discovered, quite by accident, that you can take the empty color cartridge out, shake it vigorously for 10-15 seconds, and then replace it. Check the status monitor, and it appears that the empty cartridge is actually full.
I have no idea how this works, but I am guessing that the little bit of residual ink is coating the sensors and fooling them into thinking it's full. Of course, you can't actually print color docs, because there's not really any color ink in there, but it's saved me from many an unnecessary trip to buy a color cart I don't really need in order to print out the text that I do.
Sort of. There's a couple of reasons, really. First, as you say, WP gained a large portion of the market back in the day - for a long time, word processing on a PC was WP and precious little else. Because of this early adoption, what's happened since is that many, many law firms have a sizeable investment in WP templates, and I do mean sizeable - as in many thousands or tens of thousands, in some cases. Lawyers live and die by the written word, and if you walk into any medium or large law firm, odds are that no matter what your problem is, they already have a form letter tailored to that problem. Because of this investment, there is a significant barrier to switching, as it means either converting or recreating those thousands of templates. And in such a case, the general rule is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And one other reason is the ever-amusing Rule 32 ;)
The Four-Color Map theorem.
Kepler's Sphere-Packing problem.
Fermat's Last Theorem.
And now this.
Brilliant.
Link where Tommy Heath mentions it in passing. Unfortunately, the Buffalo Snooze article from way back then isn't available online, but I've seen it nonetheless. I guess you could hit the microfilm if you like ;)
But they don't exist everywhere, which they would have to under the system you're describing. You can argue that McDonald's is a middleman sitting between me and the cattle rancher, certainly, but now I would need a broker to make a transaction with McDonald's too - which, as it stands now, I don't, because we have a predetermined medium of exchange. After all, what, other than cash, do I have that the local McD's franchisee wants? And so I wind up needing a broker for what used to be the most ludicrously simple transactions. I really doubt you're going to interest too many people in what boils down to essentially bidding on a Big Mac and Coke, especially when you have no idea in advance what sorts of things you might have to pay to get it, what the magic thing you own or control is that will get you the thing you want. Would I just put out an inventory of everything I own or can provide, and then a wish list of things I want?
Yes, but this can and does often happen with money transactions as well; it's called breach of contract. And if networked bartering became an established practice, I'm sure customs and laws would evolve to consider joining barter loops tantamout to entering into a contract.
And how does that work when you really don't necessarily know in advance what you're getting or what you're paying? Suppose I make it known that I want a new lawnmower, and I sit back to see what the eventual cost to me will be. Am I to understand that when the chain comes together, I'm already locked in to it, regardless of how I feel about the cost versus the benefit to me? That I have no chance to decide that giving up my washer and dryer, along with spending a weekend shoveling snow, is too high a price for me? And if I do get the opportunity to make that final decision about cost versus benefit, won't the whole thing fall apart if I decide it's not worth it?
But value is intrinsically subjective and circumstance-specific.
That's why the only meaningful measure of value is exchange value, which allows us to create an objective valuation of disparate goods and services for purposes of exchange. Call it dollars or clamshells or rocks or whatever - the point is that having a unit of measurement for valuation allows us to objectively compare the value of goods and services that are otherwise not comparable. Now, the value to you is subjective and circumstantial, but you don't dictate the price - the market does (actually, buyers, in the aggregate, do), as long as it's a free market. And if your valuation does not comport with the objective valuation as given by the price - e.g., you think it's not worth as much as it costs - then you're free to not buy it. Or free to grab up what seems like a killer deal to you, as the case may be. But other than that, your subjective valuation is unrelated to the price, which provides an objective valuation for goods and services based on the actual transactions involving that good or service.
Think about your family photo albums for a moment. Very likely, your photo albums are precious to you, representing memories and events in such a way as to be irreplaceable. Subjectively speaking, you value them extremely highly. But now consider the other side of the coin - how much do you think someone would pay you to have them? Not much, I think - they're simply not as meaningful to someone else as they are to you. Despite the fact that you personally value the hell out of them, objectively speaking, they're not worth all that much - you simply won't find anyone to give you much in exchange for them. And that's just about the only measure of value that's of use when we're talking about exchanging goods and services - the exchange value. The thing is not worth what you or I say it is - it's worth whatever you can get
When that song first came out, the number 867-5309 was a live number in Buffalo, NY (716 area code), and there was even a Jenny that lived there. Unfortunately, that number also belonged to Jenny's dad, who was the chief of the Buffalo Police at the time ;)
That's great if you're planning on being that middleman, the matchmaker who brokers every transaction. But for everyone else, who now requires your services when they didn't before, that system is going to suck just a little bit, not least because you've inserted yet another transaction cost into the equation - eBay doesn't do what it does for free, and I see no reason to believe that the middlemen in such a scenario will either. What winds up happening is that the broker tells me to send nine chickens to someone I've never heard of, and one to him, whereas before I could have just given the cash equivalent of nine chickens directly to the person who had the thing I wanted, and cut out the middleman entirely. The whole point to electronic markets is to reduce the cost of doing business, not increase it by creating a new class of merchant-middlemen, without whom business doesn't get done - and in those terms, barter is a huge step backwards.
Plus, the longer and more complicated those transaction chains are, the more likely it is that the whole thing will get fucked up by one person deciding to back out of the deal. If my groceries this week depend on someone halfway around the world - someone whom I've never heard of - spending two hours chopping wood - for someone else I've never heard of - but he decides he'd rather do something else to get the things he wants, I'm screwed, and screwed by someone I have absolutely no influence over. And then I get to go back to square one and try to line up yet another transaction chain that will let me eat this week.
And finally, having a universal medium of exchange makes the objective valuation of goods and services much more efficient and understandable than with a barter system. Bob can get a week's worth of groceries from the grocer by mowing the grocer's lawn for a month. I can get a week's worth of groceries by spending six hours fixing the grocer's car. Does this mean that Bob will exchange a month's worth of lawnmowing for me fixing his car? I wouldn't bet on it, personally - maybe he will, maybe he won't. Is Bob getting a better deal than I am? Am I getting a better deal than Bob? How can we rationally value the services we both provide against one another in the absence of some independent yardstick like a cash price?
Yes, you can. Your analogy is inapposite because this isn't an open distribution system, where the theaters might have to decode some random piece of video sent to them by some random person - they know exactly what they're getting once the system is in place, and hence they have no reason to change it later on. Once the decision is made that the central office will distribute content in WMP 9/MPEG4 format, then it really makes no difference to them what WMP 14 does five years down the line, as they neither want nor need to switch - they control both ends of the content pipeline here, and therefore don't need to worry about what the rest of the world is doing.
No, actually the reason cash replaced barter is precisely because barter doesn't work very well in complex societies built on specialization and division of labor. Any time I have something you want, but you don't have anything I want, bartering quickly devolves into an absurdly complex multilateral negotiation. General_re grows corn. CaptainTux keeps hogs and would like the corn for pig feed. But general_re doesn't want hogs - he wants a new tractor. Mr. X has tractors, but he doesn't want corn or hogs - he wants a laborer to help him make tractors.
And so forth. Much easier to simply agree in advance on a medium of exchange. CaptainTux gives general_re cash in exchange for corn, general_re exchanges cash for a tractor, and Mr. X exchanges cash for the services of a tractor assembler. It's all faster and easier that way, because it can all be done in a series of one-on-one exchanges - we no longer have to convene a roundtable discussion, where every single party sits down at the same time and negotiates an arrangement that satisfies everyone.
You laugh, but when I first registered here - which was, you know, back in the day, before everybody and their mother knew what AC was all about - it actually took me a couple of weeks of reading to figure out that "Anonymous Coward" wasn't just another poster.
I distinctly remember thinking "Damn, this 'Anonymous Coward' guy sure has a lot of free time - he's all over everything around here..."
I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that, but I may be the only one to admit it ;)