This really stinks of some 3 letter acronym organization wanting to destabilize the infrastructure. CIA, NSA, PRC, PLA, NWO?
Why is it that so many people on/. automatically assume, without any evidence presenting itself, that anything bad is the act of some government conspiracy? Yeah, it could have been the government, but that is just one of many plausible answers. In most of the cases that aren't due to the cybervandals like Anonymous and Lulzsec, the much more likely culprit are professional criminal cracking organizations, who can make a lot of money on the data they can extract from large organizations that have huge stores of private information.
If you can give any evidence that this or another specific event was orchestrated by the government, then let's see it. Otherwise you're just adding noise. We're supposed to be geeks who care about using scientific principles to finding the truth, aren't we? Occam's razor, my friend. Believe in it.
Who is paying them too much attention? The news organizations? They've got a tight balance that they have to maintain; they have to weigh the benefits of publishing this kind of information (a more informed public) against the costs (possibly "enabling" LulzSec).
That's precious. Do you think that news organizations really work to maintain the balance of information here? Those days are long gone, if they ever really existed. Here's what gets on the news: Stories that people click on. How else do you think we got 3 weeks non-stop of Charlie Sheen updates? Because the public needs to know? Hardly.
Exactly what value does Groupon add to the economy (assuming here marketing !=economic value)
Well, your core assumption is simply crap. Marketing adds tremendous economic value. Marketing allows companies to get their product before people who otherwise wouldn't know about it. Marketing is a key driver to economic growth. If customers can't find business, business don't survive.
It seems that the point of this story is you shouldn't get into marketing plans if you don't know what you're doing. She didn't have a computer, she doesn't understand how statistics works, she didn't know what to do with expired coupons (nicely say "no" and offer some other type of discount to make them feel like they are still getting,) she admittedly didn't do anything to convert Groupon customers to regular customers.
The world is full of companies have failed because they didn't understand the market. It's not the fault of Groupon that she allowed herself to be talked into something that she clearly didn't understand. We're all adults here.
In fact, in a crony-capitalist government ruled by political expediency rather than law, there is a lot of willful turning of blind eyes to dodgy but politically or personally useful things.
I am an American, sir, and you will cease describing my country in such a demeaning way.
Took me a couple of reads to figure out who you were talking about.
Half of China probably doesn't believe it's own propaganda.
I don't believe it for a second. Look how many Americans buy the propaganda fed to them by the government and the media. "This is the greatest country in the world," most Americans will tell you, without taking a second to challenge that notion objectively. You can feed a lot of propaganda to your people in the guise of patriotism.
Nowadays laptops come with a few different radios onboard. Theres nothing stopping a clever person from adding their own radio or maybe adding jamming functionality. In this highly unlikely scenario communications and possibly more important functions can be disrupted.
And you think that the flight attendant asking him to turn his equipment off is going to foil this plan?
Xerox can copyright a shortening of the term Xerography ("dry printing").
Xerox isn't a shortening of the term Xerography, it's an entirely different word created using the same prefix.
Apple has been using the term and suffix.app since it bought NeXT.
Doesn't mean they own the trademark to the word. "App" as an abbreviation for application has been used well before Apple coined the name App Store. I remember references to the term "killer app" since the early 90s.
Microsoft copyrighted a network centric API called.Net and uses that suffix.
You don't know what.Net is, do you?
Likewise apple wins because App is a word invented like Xerox.
You seem to miss the point. The company Xerox made up that name. Apple did not make up the word app. It's a general-use term used both in and out of computers.
copyright
copyrighted
copyright
copyrighted
This is a lawsuit about Trademark, not copyright. They are very different concepts with different goals, different histories, and different legal applications.
Manuals yes, but there is almost a complete lack of context-sensitive help on modern devices. How hard would it be to have a ? button with help on using the functions of whatever interface you are using?
The trend is going that way with desktop applications too. 10 years ago, context-sensitive help with a button press or click was very common. Now, it's almost completely disappeared. Sure you can hit F1, but that almost always takes you to the table of contents of the help system (or more frequently, to the HTML manual on their website. Try using that offline.)
Bring back context-sensitive help with a clear interface to get it, and you'll see a greater number of people who can figure your "simplified" interface without tearing their hair out.
If we cannot trust the software running on our phones not to be able to do malicious things, something is seriously wrong with the software architecture on phones.
Ah, the myth of perfect security. There is no system that connects to a network that is perfectly secure. We all want open phones that will run any software we want, and we expect the OS to be able to ward off any possible attempt to compromise it. Ain't gonna happen. That's why we need firewalls, as well as software that blocks processes based on either known signatures or behavior.
Only a mathematician could believe in perfect security. Engineers, they know better.
By the time DNF comes out, we'll all be using quantum computers the size of pinky rings with direct neural and optical interfaces. Who needs a level editor when your computer can compute every possible level simultaneously?
The problem with these calculations is that people assume that making small changes in productivity turn into bottom-line gains for the company. The real question is, even though your time might be worth $1 per minute, and if we save you 3 (or 4 or 5) minutes a day, does that really turn into increased productivity and bottom line profitability? The answers on that are a bit less clear.
My company is an accounting/consulting firm, and our one product is the time of our practice staff. Constantly I'm hit with these false ROI calculations, both from vendors and from within the firm. Ultimately, for us, if it doesn't really turn into more billable time, or (for our value-based projects) real time savings to where we can grow the business without growing practice staff, these calculations turn out to be rather useless.
Unless you're willing to become x% more productive, for the same salary, and willing to take on more work without more staff, you should be very careful about making these productivity and ROI numbers. Remember, the company's goal isn't to make your job easier, or to save you 5 minutes a day. Their goal is to make more with less. It's funny how people in here complain about increased workloads without increased staff, and still want to talk about productivity gains based on a specific investment by their employer.
This then opens the door to a shell company and hosting being used by literally anyone to denigrate products. I wonder how much Pepsi would be willing to pay for a trademark-laden anti-Coke site? Or a Toyota-bashing site offered to GM? There has to be some significant money available here.
Read the article again. The important distinction is whether this is commercial competition vs idealogical or political. Clearly Pepsi or GM creating a site to denigrate their competition is a commercial competition, so the trademarks would protect against that. Criticism of a company by a group that isn't commercially competing with the company is what is protected.
You can argue about the term "groupthink" if you want, but it's basically a semantics argument. One problem with Slashdot moderating is that in certain areas, what is marked as "insightful" really isn't by any reasonable definition. Watch a conversation about anything dealing with Microsoft, and someone will put up a snarky comment about how Windows crashes all the time, or something similar, and it will get modded +5 insightful. This behavior is similar with many issues (Copyright, Privacy, etc), all of which strike a strong emotional chord with lots of/.ers.
I don't doubt there can be insightful comments concerning those subjects, and in many cases there are. Truly insightful comments tend to take a more balanced view, recognizing the complexities and realities of the situations about which they are commenting. Sadly, a great number of comments are modded up which really are nothing more than a macro-version of "Me too!", simply parroting the same old arguments. These are perfectly valid comments, but insightful they aren't.
WordPerfect lost its dominant position for one reason - their own miscalculation. In the early 90s, WordPerfect didn't think that the Windows 3.x craze would catch on, and they didn't put their development efforts fully into the Windows product. It wasn't until 1991 that they announced WordPerfect for Windows, and it was a disaster, just a GUI front end on top of their DOS engine. In late 1992, they finally came out with a decent Windows version. By then much of the world had moved on to Word. They were slow to support OLE, slow to integrate with PlanPerfect, and later with Quattro Pro, slow to see the power of an integrated office suite, slow slow slow! In addition, MS PowerPoint was orders of magnitude better than anything out there, and it worked with Word and Excel.
Sometimes in business, management makes a severe miscalculation. Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton blew it in 1989/1990. Maybe WordPerfect was better, but it was just too damn late.
Um, you completely don't understand this. Arbitration is a long-standing method of settling a dispute between parties. It is extremely common in Professional Services engagement agreements, and it is also very common in other service agreements. I'm quite sure almost every agreement you sign for internet, phone, electricity, cable TV, etc also includes arbitration language.
Arbitration is a good thing. It allows small matters to be handled quickly, less expensively, and without mucking up our already congested court system. If you read the opinion, the court indicate that AT&T's arbitration agreement is specifically written to encourage the company to act in good faith. If a customer receives an arbitration award greater than the last written settlement offer, the customer gets $7,500 + twice any lawyer's fees. Clearly, AT&T has incentive to provide a good settlement. In this case, AT&T would have offered the plaintiffs $30.22, which is what the plaintiffs were (perhaps) wrongly charged in sales tax. Any decent arbitrator would have given the plaintiffs $30.22, which is what they were their real loss. Trust me, arbitration agreements are a good thing. Our court system would be practically non-functional without them.
Wow, I don't think you actually read that document. That opinion had absolutely nothing to do with Products or Services, and it doesn't disable class status for lawsuits. It states that an arbitration agreement that disallows class arbitration is allowable. Basically, if you sign away your right to arbitration by class action, that is valid, and you can't later invoke class-wide arbitration.
So he hates the WWW, current OSs, and apparently apple pie and Grandma. Does he have any real constructive ideas he wishes to share with us? Either he's just talking out of his ass, or TFA is an extremely light fluff piece. Yeah, you hate what's out there. Where are your ideas for something better?
Perhaps this is why Xanadu has been vaporware for what, 50 years?
You're right, Facebook is definitely on the decline. They've only added 100 million users in the last year.
Your anecdotal evidence about friends who have abandoned it is kind of irrelevant in the face of facts that show Facebook is clearly growing. Like it or not, you can't dislike it into non-existence.
MySpace's Chief Executive Officer Michael Jones has claimed that the website is "no longer a social network anymore" and that it is currently a "social entertainment destination".
Allow me to translate: "Our business model is screwed, because someone else did it much better, so we're desperately trying to rebrand ourself as something else"
It's in people's nature to never give up, keep trying to the bitter end, but this is a sinking ship that cannot be saved.
So what other liberties are you willing to give up for your perceived security? The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about search and seizure. The fact that the courts have given in to accept this type of violation doesn't change the fact that a DUI checkpoint is clearly an unreasonable search, because they don't have probable cause to stop everyone.
Every time they chip away at our rights, we step further down the road to a totalitarian society. If you can't tell I'm driving drunk by watching me drive, you have no business stopping me and requiring me to take a test.
Seriously, I'm getting very tired of people complaining about an article with the "idle" tag. If you don't like this type of story, just exclude idle. If you can't figure it out, you don't belong here, and if you can figure it out and just like to bitch, please STFU.
Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
This really stinks of some 3 letter acronym organization wanting to destabilize the infrastructure. CIA, NSA, PRC, PLA, NWO?
Why is it that so many people on /. automatically assume, without any evidence presenting itself, that anything bad is the act of some government conspiracy? Yeah, it could have been the government, but that is just one of many plausible answers. In most of the cases that aren't due to the cybervandals like Anonymous and Lulzsec, the much more likely culprit are professional criminal cracking organizations, who can make a lot of money on the data they can extract from large organizations that have huge stores of private information.
If you can give any evidence that this or another specific event was orchestrated by the government, then let's see it. Otherwise you're just adding noise. We're supposed to be geeks who care about using scientific principles to finding the truth, aren't we? Occam's razor, my friend. Believe in it.
Who is paying them too much attention? The news organizations? They've got a tight balance that they have to maintain; they have to weigh the benefits of publishing this kind of information (a more informed public) against the costs (possibly "enabling" LulzSec).
That's precious. Do you think that news organizations really work to maintain the balance of information here? Those days are long gone, if they ever really existed. Here's what gets on the news: Stories that people click on. How else do you think we got 3 weeks non-stop of Charlie Sheen updates? Because the public needs to know? Hardly.
Exactly what value does Groupon add to the economy (assuming here marketing !=economic value)
Well, your core assumption is simply crap. Marketing adds tremendous economic value. Marketing allows companies to get their product before people who otherwise wouldn't know about it. Marketing is a key driver to economic growth. If customers can't find business, business don't survive.
It seems that the point of this story is you shouldn't get into marketing plans if you don't know what you're doing. She didn't have a computer, she doesn't understand how statistics works, she didn't know what to do with expired coupons (nicely say "no" and offer some other type of discount to make them feel like they are still getting,) she admittedly didn't do anything to convert Groupon customers to regular customers.
The world is full of companies have failed because they didn't understand the market. It's not the fault of Groupon that she allowed herself to be talked into something that she clearly didn't understand. We're all adults here.
In fact, in a crony-capitalist government ruled by political expediency rather than law, there is a lot of willful turning of blind eyes to dodgy but politically or personally useful things.
I am an American, sir, and you will cease describing my country in such a demeaning way.
Took me a couple of reads to figure out who you were talking about.
Half of China probably doesn't believe it's own propaganda.
I don't believe it for a second. Look how many Americans buy the propaganda fed to them by the government and the media. "This is the greatest country in the world," most Americans will tell you, without taking a second to challenge that notion objectively. You can feed a lot of propaganda to your people in the guise of patriotism.
Why is anything that gets electronics embedded into it suddenly called "Smart"? It's a bunch of sensors sewn into PJs.
IBM's Watson approaches "smart". Electronics are actually pretty dumb.
Nowadays laptops come with a few different radios onboard. Theres nothing stopping a clever person from adding their own radio or maybe adding jamming functionality. In this highly unlikely scenario communications and possibly more important functions can be disrupted.
And you think that the flight attendant asking him to turn his equipment off is going to foil this plan?
Xerox can copyright a shortening of the term Xerography ("dry printing").
Xerox isn't a shortening of the term Xerography, it's an entirely different word created using the same prefix.
Apple has been using the term and suffix .app since it bought NeXT.
Doesn't mean they own the trademark to the word. "App" as an abbreviation for application has been used well before Apple coined the name App Store. I remember references to the term "killer app" since the early 90s.
Microsoft copyrighted a network centric API called .Net and uses that suffix.
You don't know what .Net is, do you?
Likewise apple wins because App is a word invented like Xerox.
You seem to miss the point. The company Xerox made up that name. Apple did not make up the word app. It's a general-use term used both in and out of computers.
copyright
copyrighted
copyright
copyrighted
This is a lawsuit about Trademark, not copyright. They are very different concepts with different goals, different histories, and different legal applications.
These things do come with manuals.
Manuals yes, but there is almost a complete lack of context-sensitive help on modern devices. How hard would it be to have a ? button with help on using the functions of whatever interface you are using?
The trend is going that way with desktop applications too. 10 years ago, context-sensitive help with a button press or click was very common. Now, it's almost completely disappeared. Sure you can hit F1, but that almost always takes you to the table of contents of the help system (or more frequently, to the HTML manual on their website. Try using that offline.)
Bring back context-sensitive help with a clear interface to get it, and you'll see a greater number of people who can figure your "simplified" interface without tearing their hair out.
If we cannot trust the software running on our phones not to be able to do malicious things, something is seriously wrong with the software architecture on phones.
Ah, the myth of perfect security. There is no system that connects to a network that is perfectly secure. We all want open phones that will run any software we want, and we expect the OS to be able to ward off any possible attempt to compromise it. Ain't gonna happen. That's why we need firewalls, as well as software that blocks processes based on either known signatures or behavior.
Only a mathematician could believe in perfect security. Engineers, they know better.
By the time DNF comes out, we'll all be using quantum computers the size of pinky rings with direct neural and optical interfaces. Who needs a level editor when your computer can compute every possible level simultaneously?
The problem with these calculations is that people assume that making small changes in productivity turn into bottom-line gains for the company. The real question is, even though your time might be worth $1 per minute, and if we save you 3 (or 4 or 5) minutes a day, does that really turn into increased productivity and bottom line profitability? The answers on that are a bit less clear.
My company is an accounting/consulting firm, and our one product is the time of our practice staff. Constantly I'm hit with these false ROI calculations, both from vendors and from within the firm. Ultimately, for us, if it doesn't really turn into more billable time, or (for our value-based projects) real time savings to where we can grow the business without growing practice staff, these calculations turn out to be rather useless.
Unless you're willing to become x% more productive, for the same salary, and willing to take on more work without more staff, you should be very careful about making these productivity and ROI numbers. Remember, the company's goal isn't to make your job easier, or to save you 5 minutes a day. Their goal is to make more with less. It's funny how people in here complain about increased workloads without increased staff, and still want to talk about productivity gains based on a specific investment by their employer.
This then opens the door to a shell company and hosting being used by literally anyone to denigrate products. I wonder how much Pepsi would be willing to pay for a trademark-laden anti-Coke site? Or a Toyota-bashing site offered to GM? There has to be some significant money available here.
Read the article again. The important distinction is whether this is commercial competition vs idealogical or political. Clearly Pepsi or GM creating a site to denigrate their competition is a commercial competition, so the trademarks would protect against that. Criticism of a company by a group that isn't commercially competing with the company is what is protected.
You can argue about the term "groupthink" if you want, but it's basically a semantics argument. One problem with Slashdot moderating is that in certain areas, what is marked as "insightful" really isn't by any reasonable definition. Watch a conversation about anything dealing with Microsoft, and someone will put up a snarky comment about how Windows crashes all the time, or something similar, and it will get modded +5 insightful. This behavior is similar with many issues (Copyright, Privacy, etc), all of which strike a strong emotional chord with lots of /.ers.
I don't doubt there can be insightful comments concerning those subjects, and in many cases there are. Truly insightful comments tend to take a more balanced view, recognizing the complexities and realities of the situations about which they are commenting. Sadly, a great number of comments are modded up which really are nothing more than a macro-version of "Me too!", simply parroting the same old arguments. These are perfectly valid comments, but insightful they aren't.
WordPerfect lost its dominant position for one reason - their own miscalculation. In the early 90s, WordPerfect didn't think that the Windows 3.x craze would catch on, and they didn't put their development efforts fully into the Windows product. It wasn't until 1991 that they announced WordPerfect for Windows, and it was a disaster, just a GUI front end on top of their DOS engine. In late 1992, they finally came out with a decent Windows version. By then much of the world had moved on to Word. They were slow to support OLE, slow to integrate with PlanPerfect, and later with Quattro Pro, slow to see the power of an integrated office suite, slow slow slow! In addition, MS PowerPoint was orders of magnitude better than anything out there, and it worked with Word and Excel.
Sometimes in business, management makes a severe miscalculation. Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton blew it in 1989/1990. Maybe WordPerfect was better, but it was just too damn late.
...hence Apple's new initiative, the Human CentiPad.
"Why won't it read?"
Um, you completely don't understand this. Arbitration is a long-standing method of settling a dispute between parties. It is extremely common in Professional Services engagement agreements, and it is also very common in other service agreements. I'm quite sure almost every agreement you sign for internet, phone, electricity, cable TV, etc also includes arbitration language.
Arbitration is a good thing. It allows small matters to be handled quickly, less expensively, and without mucking up our already congested court system. If you read the opinion, the court indicate that AT&T's arbitration agreement is specifically written to encourage the company to act in good faith. If a customer receives an arbitration award greater than the last written settlement offer, the customer gets $7,500 + twice any lawyer's fees. Clearly, AT&T has incentive to provide a good settlement. In this case, AT&T would have offered the plaintiffs $30.22, which is what the plaintiffs were (perhaps) wrongly charged in sales tax. Any decent arbitrator would have given the plaintiffs $30.22, which is what they were their real loss. Trust me, arbitration agreements are a good thing. Our court system would be practically non-functional without them.
Wow, I don't think you actually read that document. That opinion had absolutely nothing to do with Products or Services, and it doesn't disable class status for lawsuits. It states that an arbitration agreement that disallows class arbitration is allowable. Basically, if you sign away your right to arbitration by class action, that is valid, and you can't later invoke class-wide arbitration.
Lots of misinformation around here sometimes.
So he hates the WWW, current OSs, and apparently apple pie and Grandma. Does he have any real constructive ideas he wishes to share with us? Either he's just talking out of his ass, or TFA is an extremely light fluff piece. Yeah, you hate what's out there. Where are your ideas for something better?
Perhaps this is why Xanadu has been vaporware for what, 50 years?
Because nobody else did it yet. I'm trying to get off your lawn, but it's just too damn big.
You're right, Facebook is definitely on the decline. They've only added 100 million users in the last year.
Your anecdotal evidence about friends who have abandoned it is kind of irrelevant in the face of facts that show Facebook is clearly growing. Like it or not, you can't dislike it into non-existence.
MySpace's Chief Executive Officer Michael Jones has claimed that the website is "no longer a social network anymore" and that it is currently a "social entertainment destination".
Allow me to translate: "Our business model is screwed, because someone else did it much better, so we're desperately trying to rebrand ourself as something else"
It's in people's nature to never give up, keep trying to the bitter end, but this is a sinking ship that cannot be saved.
So what other liberties are you willing to give up for your perceived security? The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear about search and seizure. The fact that the courts have given in to accept this type of violation doesn't change the fact that a DUI checkpoint is clearly an unreasonable search, because they don't have probable cause to stop everyone.
Every time they chip away at our rights, we step further down the road to a totalitarian society. If you can't tell I'm driving drunk by watching me drive, you have no business stopping me and requiring me to take a test.
Seriously, I'm getting very tired of people complaining about an article with the "idle" tag. If you don't like this type of story, just exclude idle. If you can't figure it out, you don't belong here, and if you can figure it out and just like to bitch, please STFU. Thank you.