It's always been true for retailers with limited space. No reason to waste shelf space on more than two products that fulfill the same demand in purchasers.
Marketing studies have shown that giving customers too much choice is as bad as giving them too little choice in terms of maximizing sales. At a given price level, you want to give your customer no more than two choices for the same product.
This doesn't always work out, since Sony, for example, might require that you carry their entire line of digital cameras if you want to carry any of it -- so you might end up with Sony + Nikon + Canon all at one price level, just so you can have Sony + Fuji at another price level.
If corporate America had half the morals of a rabid weasel, we wouldn't bitch so much.
Oh, I don't know about that. Weasels are notoriously amoral, as everyone knows. So I'd have to guess from your statement that the rabidity of the weasel is what lends it morality in the first place.
As we all know, rabies is also known as hydrophobia, hence the moral value that can be ascribed to rabidity is a fear of water.
So what you are saying, in essence, is if corporate America was only half-afraid of water -- maybe timid, or even just-a-bit-cautious, around it -- we wouldn't bitch so much.
We're just tired of being bent over a barrel and told that what were getting is really an internal colon massage.
Now, now, that's a little harsh. So what if the bendor derives a lot of pleasure from the act -- if the bendee truly has his colon massaged and his prostate stimulated by the act, isn't that all that really matters to the bendee? Does it really make on whit of difference that the bendor (corporate America in your analogy) is busting a nut at the same time?
Sorry to take the piss, but the overblown metaphors are ridiculous. It's just a fact that organizations as large as HP have a built-in mechanism to deaccentuate morality (the bureaucracy serves to separate decision-makers from the negative effects of their decisions) -- never mind the fact that businesses have always been in business to make money, not to make people feel good (unless, of course, they make money from making people feel good). If you want executives at large companies to exercise morality in their decision-making, you'd have to confront them face-to-face with the impacts of their decisions, a la Michael Moore. Otherwise, you're just bitching about the problem to no avail.
While selling through Wal-Mart will probably accomplish their sales goals, the damage to their brand could easily hurt worse than the lost sales.
Dell's already lost a lot of brand reputation. This isn't going to drag them down much further.
As for using retailers other than Walmart, most B&M eletronics shops already have agreements with HP or another manufacturer. It doesn't make sense for Best Buy, for example, to add another brand to its PC section.
Also, it's important to note that Walmart is in way more markets than any B&M electronics store. Using another retailer would limit Dell's sales.
shipping fees already wipe out any savings realized by a lack of taxes and "brick & mortar" overhead on goods.
That has nothing to do with the real costs of shipping. That is entirely because of how the market operates. B&M stores and online stores (both with intelligent pricing mechanisms) will price their goods in order to be relatively equal to their competitors. Neither set of retailers will allow the other to undercut them by a large amount, so if the B&M overhead and tax costs drive up the price of goods, then online stores will make sure their S&H charges almost make up the difference.
From a consumer standpoint, sure, the savings are wiped out. From the retailer standpoint, however, the lack of taxes on online sales translates directly to higher profits. Taxing internet sales is not likely to drive prices up, since they are established by the consumer market; instead, it will reduce the profitability of online stores, increasing the ability of B&M stores to compete.
Every single thing that the Nazis did to Jews were decreed by a Pope as the appropriate thing to do.
I think you misunderstand what a Papal Decree is.
Pious XII did not decree that the actions of the Nazi state were appropriate; he chose to not interfere, which is different. Even if implicitly assenting, there was no explicit or tacit approval of Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews.
Every single Luxembourg law was a propel edict
Papal edict, you mean? Please support this, then, because I could find nothing to corroborate your claim.
The Catholic Church was far from innocent with respect to the Holocaust; however, its sins were of the ommission kind; they failed to stand up to the Nazis. They allowed the Nazis to use outdated Church material as justification for the Holocaust. It would be wise to note, however, that most Protestant Churches declared themselves in support of the Nazis far before the Catholic Church acquiesced.
If MasterCard had been a hip company like Wikia, some volunteer probably would have discovered this attack very early, and another volunteer would have written an open-source tool to find and deactivate leaked MasterCard numbers automatically, and the problem would have been solved ten years ago.
First off, this seems very idealistic.
Second, automatic deactivation of card numbers is not necessarily a good thing. What if someone creates a list of thousands of potential credit card numbers on a website -- does Mastercard then terminate all cards on the list? This would be pretty easy to abuse for kicks.
And how does Mastercard (and Visa, etc) deal with the the additional problems of people trying to use their cards that have been automatically canceled, before they get the replacement and notification of the cancelation? What about the costs of replacing those cards, the cost of the CSRs necessary to deal with people calling in to complain?
In the long run, it may be more cost-effective all around (for the consumer, for the merchants, for the credit card companies) to just deal with fraud cases as they arise from this method.
100% security would be nice -- but not when it costs more for everyone than the alternative.
(2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do,
Cambodia's TLD is.kh; Cameroon's is.cm.
(1) Having the nicely spelled domains (flicker.com, dig.com, iphone.com, whatever have you) are now filled up with junk content and not real content. It makes the quality of the internet overall worse.
This is mitigated by the use of Google, AOL, etc as portals. As the problem gets even worser, people will increasingly turn to using search engines as portals, os the problem kind of takes care of itself in the long run.
(2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do, he steals a bunch of traffic from visitors that were really intending to visit your website but now are just directed to some ad page. You just lost a few potential customers, have someone doing some other junk business in your name, and now you have to also spend on lawyers to rectify the issue.
100% agreed.
The main problem is on the content-provider end, not on the user end.
Well in that case it was more likely that she had a kid out of wedlock and decided to not fess up to it.
Actually, it's a translation error. 'Virgin' should instead be 'young woman', and the whole miracle-of-the-virgin-birth was made up by the Church based on this false translation.
You run people out of business who are offering a fairly victimless "crime", at least compared to global thermonuclear war.
Huh? What crimes aren't relatively victimless when compared to global thermonuclear war? Even the WTC attacks and the Madrid and London bombings were relatively victimless compared to that.
Last I checked, doing talks for profit all around the world [further contributing to pollution I might add] is not really change. It's noise.
You are aware, of course, that for people to *want* to do anything, they need to know that something needs to be done, right?
That as long as people think that climate change is no big deal (or even not happening) that they'll never do anything -- and that even now, a *huge* number of people in North America dont believe in it?
Would you prefer if the majority of the information we heard about climate change was from the mouthpieces of carbon-releasing industries?
I don't have the nights to just waste away at a city meeting hoping I get a chance to address the floor *and* that my suggestions are taking into consideration.
That's probably the least effective way to make an impact. Try sending an email or a fax, it works much better. Not sure how big your municipality is, but I have found it not hard to get the one-on-one attention of my local officials -- I just need to make sure that I can truthfully say I represent the interests of a significant number of voters. Why waste your time at a city meeting when you can directly influence the people who end up making the decisions? When there is a scheduled public debate on whatever item you're concerned about, then you go to the meeting -- and with a little homework beforehand, you can make sure you'll be heard.
Or, if you feel that's too hard, why not join one of the organizations that promote mass transit?
It's also not sensitive to the removal of dendroclimatological proxies, especially the bristlecone pines of Colorado, without which it loses its Hockey Stick shape.
And yet the removal of the bristlecone pines is the main thing that keeps McIntyre & McKintick's analysis from showing the same results as Mann's. So their analysis is not sensitive to the inclusion of the pines.
The Mann Hockey Stick remains as devoid of statistical significance as it always has been.
Oh? Please explain how it is statistically insignificant? No one, not even McIntyre & Mckintick, claimed that the findings were statistically insignificant -- they just disputed the data samples and reconstructed the graph according to their own cherry-picked data. Note that even when analyzed over the 1000-year mean, instead of Mann's original 20-year mean, the hockey stick still appears, and is still statistically significant.
Would that be the same McKitrick whose research is funded by the Fraser Institute, whose main benefactors are the oil and gas industries, particlucarly ExxonMobil, who stipulated that the funds they donate are for research of climate change? FYI, The Fraser Institute has collected over $400k since its inception, and over half that has been from ExxonMobil ($120,000 in 2003-4 alone).
And the same Stephen McIntyre who holds no advanced degree and has never been published in an ISI peer-reviewed journal?
So they hid it behind spaghetti and made it fuzzy like they did in the IPCC 4th Assessment. Would I be close?
No, you wouldn't be close. Further research and sampling will (surprise, surprise) cause people to update their data sets to reflect the further research. The hockey stick model still fits, though possibly not as dramatically as Mann's original model.
Shall we see who is the biggest abuser of censorship? Step right up.
Oh, give it a rest. Instead of blaming 'censorship', why don't you blame the weakness of your sources and the fact that your arguments have been debunked multiple times before?
Do you really think the MAFIAA and US government would tolerate such disrespect? They want to be able to charge against the will of the artist and publisher and may already have it.
That link is total FUD. Any artist (or copyright owner) can still enter into direct contract with any broadcaster, with a royalty fee of zero (if they like) and then SoundExchange cannot, and will not, collect royalty fees for that music. Thi does get bogged down a bit given how many internet radio broadcasts there are, but that would easily be solved by internet radio stations forming a non-profit with the rights to enter royalty contracts for them.
That's ridiculous. You'd have no way of targeting your research (i.e., figure out what data to collect) without having a hypothesis to test. It's partly semantics, but "looking for evidence in support of" is not the same as "trying to prove" despite how it may be reported sometimes by the Beeb or other networks.
I think you're missing the fact that Deocrats use the gun control issue as a wedge issue as well... vote for us for every gangster will be packing heat! And never mind these porkbarrel corporate handouts...
sorry, the claim of it being 'attack-proof' is just PR spin from DHS. The ConEd site about the project, and all the other info I've found on it, don't mention proof against terrorism as a primary part of the project. It's designed to carry a heavy load in a low volume of space, and to resist current faults (surges). It does have redundant substations, but that's to resist faults as much as terror attacks.
DHS always tries to justify public expenditure by playing the terror card, but in reality, the blackout of 2003 (or whatever year it was) has far more to do with Hydra than any terror threat.
That said, in today's environment, doesn't it seem a bit moronic to name your project after a mythical monster slain by a mythical hero from the Middle East? Isn't that just asking for people to see the US as the bad guys?
And, of interest possibly only to me:
for that there shold be such a serpent with seven heads, I think it unpossible, and no more to bee beleeved and credited than that Castor and Pollux were conceived in an egge
-Topsell
I never knew Ralph Wiggum masqueraded as a 17th century English naturalist.
I'm not fully sure how gun control fell into the Democratic bucket in the first place.
As a straw man of the neocons in the NRA and the Republican Party. Gun control is a wedge issue used to create a false dichotomy between the Republicans and Democrats.
Corporate-allied Republican interests: The Democrats want to take your guns away! And kill babies! And force you to not go to church!
Mainstream Americans: Uh-oh, better vote Republican! Republicans: Gee, thanks for getting us elected! Corporate interests: No problem, now about those tax breaks and environmental law rollbacks we discussed...
Wedge issues like gun control are the reason that the white rural middle-class and poor consistently vote against their economic self-interest in state and national elections. It's identified with the Democratic Party because that makes the issue useful to the special interests that control the Republican party. Note that this works both ways, and the Republicans aren't the only part using wedge issues to divide the electorate...
I think that governments have every right to put cameras out in public places if they so choose.
Governments don't have rights. Period. What you mean, I think, is that *we* have a right to monitor what others are doing in public spaces (even if we delegate that authority to a police force).
But getting an arrest and a conviction can prevent future crimes by the same person.
If getting criminals off the streets is your motivation for public cameras, then we've got a problem. Here in the US, 'getting the criminals off the streets' has a lot of problems, not least of which is the cost of keeping someone incarcerated. We, as a country, simply cannot afford to use incarceration to prevent crime. It costs upwards of $40,000 to keep an inmate in prison for a year, never mind the costs of prosecution etc. Who is going to pay for that? We can't afford the government benefits and programs we enjoy now; how much worse if we double or triple the burden of prisoner care?
'Getting criminals off the streets' is a term used to make people think that politicians are actually doing something to prevent crime when a new prison is built, or when cops are added to the force. In truth, in the long run, the only things that will reduce the crime rate are education and economic equalization. But, heaven forbid such a liberal attitude hold sway, despite the economically suicidal policy of increased enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always been true for retailers with limited space. No reason to waste shelf space on more than two products that fulfill the same demand in purchasers.
Marketing studies have shown that giving customers too much choice is as bad as giving them too little choice in terms of maximizing sales. At a given price level, you want to give your customer no more than two choices for the same product.
This doesn't always work out, since Sony, for example, might require that you carry their entire line of digital cameras if you want to carry any of it -- so you might end up with Sony + Nikon + Canon all at one price level, just so you can have Sony + Fuji at another price level.
As we all know, rabies is also known as hydrophobia, hence the moral value that can be ascribed to rabidity is a fear of water.
So what you are saying, in essence, is if corporate America was only half-afraid of water -- maybe timid, or even just-a-bit-cautious, around it -- we wouldn't bitch so much.
Now, now, that's a little harsh. So what if the bendor derives a lot of pleasure from the act -- if the bendee truly has his colon massaged and his prostate stimulated by the act, isn't that all that really matters to the bendee? Does it really make on whit of difference that the bendor (corporate America in your analogy) is busting a nut at the same time?
Sorry to take the piss, but the overblown metaphors are ridiculous. It's just a fact that organizations as large as HP have a built-in mechanism to deaccentuate morality (the bureaucracy serves to separate decision-makers from the negative effects of their decisions) -- never mind the fact that businesses have always been in business to make money, not to make people feel good (unless, of course, they make money from making people feel good). If you want executives at large companies to exercise morality in their decision-making, you'd have to confront them face-to-face with the impacts of their decisions, a la Michael Moore. Otherwise, you're just bitching about the problem to no avail.
As for using retailers other than Walmart, most B&M eletronics shops already have agreements with HP or another manufacturer. It doesn't make sense for Best Buy, for example, to add another brand to its PC section.
Also, it's important to note that Walmart is in way more markets than any B&M electronics store. Using another retailer would limit Dell's sales.
From a consumer standpoint, sure, the savings are wiped out. From the retailer standpoint, however, the lack of taxes on online sales translates directly to higher profits. Taxing internet sales is not likely to drive prices up, since they are established by the consumer market; instead, it will reduce the profitability of online stores, increasing the ability of B&M stores to compete.
In Soviet Russia, the death of Korean old people welcoming Beowolf clusters of Linux-running overlords confirms Netcraft?
Pious XII did not decree that the actions of the Nazi state were appropriate; he chose to not interfere, which is different. Even if implicitly assenting, there was no explicit or tacit approval of Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews.
Papal edict, you mean? Please support this, then, because I could find nothing to corroborate your claim.
The Catholic Church was far from innocent with respect to the Holocaust; however, its sins were of the ommission kind; they failed to stand up to the Nazis. They allowed the Nazis to use outdated Church material as justification for the Holocaust. It would be wise to note, however, that most Protestant Churches declared themselves in support of the Nazis far before the Catholic Church acquiesced.
Second, automatic deactivation of card numbers is not necessarily a good thing. What if someone creates a list of thousands of potential credit card numbers on a website -- does Mastercard then terminate all cards on the list? This would be pretty easy to abuse for kicks.
And how does Mastercard (and Visa, etc) deal with the the additional problems of people trying to use their cards that have been automatically canceled, before they get the replacement and notification of the cancelation? What about the costs of replacing those cards, the cost of the CSRs necessary to deal with people calling in to complain?
In the long run, it may be more cost-effective all around (for the consumer, for the merchants, for the credit card companies) to just deal with fraud cases as they arise from this method.
100% security would be nice -- but not when it costs more for everyone than the alternative.
This is mitigated by the use of Google, AOL, etc as portals. As the problem gets even worser, people will increasingly turn to using search engines as portals, os the problem kind of takes care of itself in the long run.
100% agreed.
The main problem is on the content-provider end, not on the user end.
I think maybe they should rethink the name of the material ("Dynema SB61")when/if it goes into production.
I, for one, would rather not have my bulletproof vest sound like it's a cross of high explosives and bowel cleansing kits.
Parthenogenesis can only result in female offspring... so Jesus was a woman?
Good to know.
That as long as people think that climate change is no big deal (or even not happening) that they'll never do anything -- and that even now, a *huge* number of people in North America dont believe in it?
Would you prefer if the majority of the information we heard about climate change was from the mouthpieces of carbon-releasing industries?
That's probably the least effective way to make an impact. Try sending an email or a fax, it works much better. Not sure how big your municipality is, but I have found it not hard to get the one-on-one attention of my local officials -- I just need to make sure that I can truthfully say I represent the interests of a significant number of voters. Why waste your time at a city meeting when you can directly influence the people who end up making the decisions? When there is a scheduled public debate on whatever item you're concerned about, then you go to the meeting -- and with a little homework beforehand, you can make sure you'll be heard.
Or, if you feel that's too hard, why not join one of the organizations that promote mass transit?
Oh? Please explain how it is statistically insignificant? No one, not even McIntyre & Mckintick, claimed that the findings were statistically insignificant -- they just disputed the data samples and reconstructed the graph according to their own cherry-picked data. Note that even when analyzed over the 1000-year mean, instead of Mann's original 20-year mean, the hockey stick still appears, and is still statistically significant.
And the same Stephen McIntyre who holds no advanced degree and has never been published in an ISI peer-reviewed journal?
No, you wouldn't be close. Further research and sampling will (surprise, surprise) cause people to update their data sets to reflect the further research. The hockey stick model still fits, though possibly not as dramatically as Mann's original model.
Oh, give it a rest. Instead of blaming 'censorship', why don't you blame the weakness of your sources and the fact that your arguments have been debunked multiple times before?
That's ridiculous. You'd have no way of targeting your research (i.e., figure out what data to collect) without having a hypothesis to test. It's partly semantics, but "looking for evidence in support of" is not the same as "trying to prove" despite how it may be reported sometimes by the Beeb or other networks.
Did you perhaps mean time and effort?
I think you're missing the fact that Deocrats use the gun control issue as a wedge issue as well... vote for us for every gangster will be packing heat! And never mind these porkbarrel corporate handouts...
DHS always tries to justify public expenditure by playing the terror card, but in reality, the blackout of 2003 (or whatever year it was) has far more to do with Hydra than any terror threat.
That said, in today's environment, doesn't it seem a bit moronic to name your project after a mythical monster slain by a mythical hero from the Middle East? Isn't that just asking for people to see the US as the bad guys?
And, of interest possibly only to me:-Topsell
I never knew Ralph Wiggum masqueraded as a 17th century English naturalist.
Corporate-allied Republican interests: The Democrats want to take your guns away! And kill babies! And force you to not go to church!
Mainstream Americans: Uh-oh, better vote Republican!
Republicans: Gee, thanks for getting us elected!
Corporate interests: No problem, now about those tax breaks and environmental law rollbacks we discussed...
Wedge issues like gun control are the reason that the white rural middle-class and poor consistently vote against their economic self-interest in state and national elections. It's identified with the Democratic Party because that makes the issue useful to the special interests that control the Republican party. Note that this works both ways, and the Republicans aren't the only part using wedge issues to divide the electorate...
If getting criminals off the streets is your motivation for public cameras, then we've got a problem. Here in the US, 'getting the criminals off the streets' has a lot of problems, not least of which is the cost of keeping someone incarcerated. We, as a country, simply cannot afford to use incarceration to prevent crime. It costs upwards of $40,000 to keep an inmate in prison for a year, never mind the costs of prosecution etc. Who is going to pay for that? We can't afford the government benefits and programs we enjoy now; how much worse if we double or triple the burden of prisoner care?
'Getting criminals off the streets' is a term used to make people think that politicians are actually doing something to prevent crime when a new prison is built, or when cops are added to the force. In truth, in the long run, the only things that will reduce the crime rate are education and economic equalization. But, heaven forbid such a liberal attitude hold sway, despite the economically suicidal policy of increased enforcement.