What the authors of the GPL intended is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what they actually wrote.
Spoken like a true sociopath.
As for Linus' endorsement of tivoization; I've read the thread -- he's satisfied that Tivo followed the rules and contributed the code back. Yes, he writes that "tivoization is good" but that seems strictly within the context of that particular argument about tit-for-tat code especially with someone who was clearly arguing the FSF case, which Linus has repeatedly rebuffed.
In any case I remain unconvinced that Linus considered the Tivoization scenario when he selected the license, or that he really consciously desired specifically to enable it.
My read on it that his take on it is ragmatic, that it's happened, that it hasn't been "bad for the linux kernel", and that gplv3 is a worse "solution".
I can tell you one thing, if such a system were implemented there'd probably be an uptick in efficiency as now [...]
As all the SaaS they'd bought into broke completely, half the onsite software that relies on various web services and "phone-home" systems for licensing etc broke, all the B2B tools for everything from tracking/shipping packages to payroll tax tools to JIT supply chain management from their suppliers broke.
whats the difference between tivoized code and non-tivoized code
Primarily, that the (majority) of users of said code are unable to effectively exercise the rights the GPL was intended to confer upon them.
Specifically, the right to change the code. That they can copy the code to some other deivces, change it, and run it there, but not be allowed to on the original device was not the intent of the GPL, or its author.
Except, no, it costs you. The whole point of a credit card is to obtain credit.
Actually no.
To obtain credit (money), interest is charged
Again no. There are all manner of no-annual fee cards, that will not charge you any interest provided you pay off your monthly balance in full, each month.
The business model is that VISA etc still make 3% give or take from every transaction, in merchant fees, so they really don't need to charge you interest to make money... of course, if you fail to pay your bill in full, that's just gravy for them, but the interest is entirely avoidable, if you are disciplined. (And if you are able to live off cash, then using a cc occasionally for stuff you were going to buy anyway, and then paying it off right away, really, and truly costs you nothing.
You will be charged interest for credit you don't need to build a made-up score.
GPLv2 is purely about code openness and code contribution but not about FSF ideals.
Not according to the people who actually WROTE the GPLv2. You made a good point about *some* of the people who chose to use it, but that is not what the GPLv2 was written FOR.
This is about the 99.99% of people who use Tivo code, use it on a Tivo, and as a result they are denied the particular freedoms the original authors of the code it is licensed under intended for them to have.
Granted 98% of them don't care about the license or about changing the code. But the authors of the original code AND the license cared a great deal about it.
A loophole that clearly many authors wanted and have accepted as "by design".
Absolutlely not an outcome the authors of the license wanted. And I'm skeptical you can find any developers who expressly WANTED the GPL for tivoization... i mean if you want that, then use the BSD or something. There are lots of perfectly suitable licenses for that use.
What realistic scenario can you put forth where the developer actively wants to license their code under the GPL and simultaneously doesn't want people to be able to modify the code they received to run on on the equipment the code is installed on?
Seriously. Find one.
And no, Tivo itself doesn't count, they didn't author original code and actively select the GPL... they merely took the GPL code that was out there because it was out there and used it, and ran a legal end run around the authors intentions.
Not everybody who uses the GPLv2 (or any FSF license) subscribes to the FSF ideology,
There does have to be a fairly substantial overlap with FSF ideology though, otherwise you'd pick something else, like BSD.
in fact some of the most prominent ones (Linux for example) explicitly do not.
By "Linux" I assume you mean Linus? And while its clear he disagrees with the FSF on some key points, you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that he actively approves of Tivoization. At best I'd say he doesn't like the GPLv3's method of trying to prevent it. But I could be mistaken. I'm not Linus.
So don't buy a TiVo then. "Tivoization of your code" is nonsense because Tivoization doesn't have anything to do with the code, in fact you can get the code here licensed under GPLv2 and use it under those terms just as you would any GPLv2 project.
Read the preamble to the GPLv2 or the philosophy of the FSF. Tivoization is a legal end run around the philosophical purpose the license.
"Specifically, free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions."
Tivoization of GPL code preserves those 4 rights, but withholds the implicit desire of GPL users to be able to exercise those rights on the hardware the software is running on.
Tivoization is a manifestation of "what good is your right to a phone call, if we take away your ability to speak".
When the GPL2 was written no one had conceived that you might receive GPL code installed on a device, be allowed to run it, be allowed to change it, be allowed to redistribute it... but NOT be allowed to run the changed software on the original device.
It was a loophole that was implicitly intended by the GPLv2, but not made explicit. The GPLv3 attempts to close the loophole.
And as an aside, the AGPL3 is mean to meant to close another loophole that wasn't originally conceived of... developers would use GPL code, and distribute only access to the code running remotely rather than copies of the code itself, thereby exempting them from the need to share the source.
What good would that do? Their bank doesn't know if the customer's credit card is valid.
By their "bank" I mean their merchant processing account. And they absolutely can validate the card, and/or contact the customers bank themselves if necessary.
This is the proper documented process. Look it up.
Bank calls the customer to advise them of the need to communicate, gives the customer a ticket number, and simply asks the customer them back.
The customer must call the bank back at a "trusted number" they have for the bank -- not a number the person calling them gives them, but the one on the back of the card the customer is carrying, or the one on their bank statements, etc.
If "GPLv2 only" is silly, then you might want to alert all the Linux kernel developers.
Your kidding right? Alert them of what? Something they all already know?
As the kernel has no centralized copyright authority; the license is stuck where it is regardless of what anyone contributing to it wants or doesn't want.
Linus has been quoted saying he doesn't care for GPLv3 himself, and has no plans to change the kernel over; which is fine...(especialyl as its would be a fuckton of work -- due to each contributor to the kernel ever all having to either agree to the change or have their contribution pulled out and recoded from scratch). However it doesn't really answer the question of whether Linus actually objects to "GPLv2 or later" -- since it doesn't put any additional constraints on him; or anyone else contributing to the kernel -- the only upshot is that someone somewhere downstream might at some point create a gplv3+ distro based on the kernel. I'm really not sure Linus cares about that; if he doesn't care about Tivoization, what does he care if RMS and the FSF put together a pure gplv3 distro?
To me, at least, the choice of GPLv2 for the kernel instead of GPLv2 or later seems like, an oversight at best, that really can't be fixed now. After all, the kernel was one of the earlier works to use the GPL; it was still pretty new at the time. And Linus was not making a statement about Tivoization or GPLv3 or anything else when he didn't include the "or later" clause.
I pay for everything cash, so I have a low credit score. How the fuck does that work?
Sure, you might be independantly wealthy and just buy everything with cash... or maybe you live day to day off the money you make turning in aluminum cans. In other words, your score is low because they can't tell you from hobo.
I paid for my car cash, I pay my rent cash, I pay the cable company cash. I have over $30k in the bank and I have monthly paychecks.
None of which is reported to a credit scoring agency.
So I should have a much higher credit rating than someone who is constantly paying with credit cards in my opinion.
You are probably more credit worthy, and probably deserve a higher score, but you aren't playing the game to get one.
I wouldn't even mind so much, except that when renting a house they do a background check, and they expect to find a credit history, which I don't have.
So get one. Apply for a card, buy some stuff you were planning to buy anyway, pay it off... costs you NOTHING. And you get a higher score on the credit rating game, for when you need it.
Party A expressed their opinion about this scenario when they chose the license. GPL v2 Only means they don't want to prevent it.
Selecting GPLv2 or later ALSO allows for downstream Tivoization of your code. So choosing "GPLv2 only" OR "GPLv2 or later" makes no difference to Tivoization.
The only difference between "GPLv2 only" or "GPLv2 or later" is the or later can be mixed with GPLv3 or later, while GPLv2 only.
So the ONLY statement anyone picking "GPLv2 only" is making, is that they don't want their code mixed with GPLv3 which honestly... is pretty silly.
Tons of issues, mostly with very lacking library support, tooling.
Agreed -- not that I know about about Erlang in particular, but library availability, maturity, (and cost) while not a reflection of the language design itself are HUGE factors in whether or not a given project is practical in that language.
In one case, I had a guy tell me online "hire me as an Erlang consultant and then I will help you".
Pretty sure you can find an example of THAT guy in ANY community.
We rewrote this 9 months of Erlang development in 3 weeks (!) using one senior Java developer.
That can mean a lot of things really. For example, a rewrite hot off the tail of the original project benefits from the fact that all the requirements, data model, information flow, features etc are actually pinned down. You jump straight to the implementation phase, and can do it all in one programming iteration -- no meetings, no feature creep, no discovery of unspecified requirements, no backtracking...
Essentially its the perfect project, a good developer is effectively handed a complete and accurate spec.
Everything is immutable is beautiful for fairy tales, but not for real-life software (trying building a DOM in a language which is 100% immutable).
Yeah, its a paradigm shift... but I'm skeptical that its really that difficult. As I said, I don't know Erlang... but I recall the first time I dipped my hand into lisp and it was like trying to make water run uphill until it just clicked and I was correctly thinking in terms of recursion and things that seemed mind bogglingly complicated to do in lisp suddenly became simple.
. You can reasonably assume that the phone number you have on file for me is valid.
For what its worth, I would never say that is a reasonable assumption. Half the time I do anything major with the bank i have to update all sorts of outdated contact information. You can rightfully argue that I should be more on top of advising them when things change -- but the bank can't reasonably assume that I've done so.
They absolutely should verify they have reached who they intended to call.
That said, you, of course, are 100% correct in that you shouldn't ever hand over your SSN to some yarbo calling you claiming to be from your bank either. So everything about what you did was correct -- the only point I'm making is that your argument that the bank should reasonably assume they've reached the right person wasn't valid. They absolutely need to validate they are speaking to the right person too.
it is up to the cashier to hold the card, read the number and call it themselves
It is up to the cashier to call THEIR OWN BANK. They are not supposed to call the number on the back of the customers card -- for reasons that should be pretty bleeding obvious.
Not any more so, than a quadriplegic is deprived of the right to practice karate.
The guy in the wheelchair may be deprived of his ability to practice karate, but its not because his fellow citizens are campaigning and voting to keep him from doing it.
selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.
How does changing something about your website to get them to spend more money not qualify as "selecting a sample of users, conduncting tests specifically to change their response"?
So what if the 'sample of users' is everyone, and the A/B test occurs over the same users in two non-overlapping timeframes? If I make the changes to my regionalized.CA website to test the impact on "Canada" before making it to the global site? Does that qualify? Because pretty much all sites do that sort of thing too.
You're definition is so loose it's useless.
That is PRECISELY my point. Getting in a huff about "experimenting on users" is absurd, because the definitions in play ARE uselessly broad. What did OKcupid or facebook do, SPECIFICALLY, that crossed a line that any other website wouldn't do to increase whatever metric they were looking at.
Because, to my view, they haven't done anything different from any other site, at all. So this all really is much ado about nothing.
No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.
Anyone who has ever: a) taken any metrics about there site a) altered their website in any way b) measured whether or not it made any difference
Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...
Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.
Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.
Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".
The only change is the addition of the number 7.
The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.
The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.
I could easily devise a cpu scoring methodology that scores CPU based on chip area / cost * clock speed / register width.
Such a score "works" in the sense that the function can be evaluated, but it wouldn't tell you anything about whether to buy an i7 vs a xeon vs a pentium 2.
The suggestion in the article is that the particular scoring methodology that was created for the show is useful for comparing compression algorithms, to the point that it may well be adopted by industry.
Therefore, the only interpretation of the hideously poor writing is that the submitter is claiming the algorithm works.
The writing was perfectly fine, your reading comprehension is what failed here.
ok... Verizon's taking a real risk with this, Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly, oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill... Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past,
Hope they can live without that, too.
You bet they can. say 3000/year? For 70-150GB per month? I pay $1500/year at least, and use maybe 15-20GB per YEAR.
So yeah, you make them twice as much $, but use 10x as much bandwidtih. That makes people like ME 5x more profitable than you are.
They'd be happy to lose you, and anyone like you.
If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug.
In reality, your connections are mostly in contract, and cant switch anyway. Plus despite your outrage, they are satisfied with their service.
I'm a very convincing and influential person.
And the guy in the mirror agrees with you, so you must be right.
I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices.
Less than a fraction of a percent of its least profitable paying customers. Your better than people who don't pay their bill, that's about it it.
Slashdot Mirror
Me: "Because work is paying for a teleworker account from another ISP."
Yikes, that's too complicated... do they even understand what you've said? :)
Keep it simple:
Them "Why do you want to cancel?"
Me: "I'm moving to Italy."
Done.
What the authors of the GPL intended is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what they actually wrote.
Spoken like a true sociopath.
As for Linus' endorsement of tivoization; I've read the thread -- he's satisfied that Tivo followed the rules and contributed the code back. Yes, he writes that "tivoization is good" but that seems strictly within the context of that particular argument about tit-for-tat code especially with someone who was clearly arguing the FSF case, which Linus has repeatedly rebuffed.
In any case I remain unconvinced that Linus considered the Tivoization scenario when he selected the license, or that he really consciously desired specifically to enable it.
My read on it that his take on it is ragmatic, that it's happened, that it hasn't been "bad for the linux kernel", and that gplv3 is a worse "solution".
I can tell you one thing, if such a system were implemented there'd probably be an uptick in efficiency as now [...]
As all the SaaS they'd bought into broke completely, half the onsite software that relies on various web services and "phone-home" systems for licensing etc broke, all the B2B tools for everything from tracking/shipping packages to payroll tax tools to JIT supply chain management from their suppliers broke.
Yeah, there would be a real productivity bump. :)
whats the difference between tivoized code and non-tivoized code
Primarily, that the (majority) of users of said code are unable to effectively exercise the rights the GPL was intended to confer upon them.
Specifically, the right to change the code. That they can copy the code to some other deivces, change it, and run it there, but not be allowed to on the original device was not the intent of the GPL, or its author.
Except, no, it costs you. The whole point of a credit card is to obtain credit.
Actually no.
To obtain credit (money), interest is charged
Again no. There are all manner of no-annual fee cards, that will not charge you any interest provided you pay off your monthly balance in full, each month.
The business model is that VISA etc still make 3% give or take from every transaction, in merchant fees, so they really don't need to charge you interest to make money... of course, if you fail to pay your bill in full, that's just gravy for them, but the interest is entirely avoidable, if you are disciplined. (And if you are able to live off cash, then using a cc occasionally for stuff you were going to buy anyway, and then paying it off right away, really, and truly costs you nothing.
You will be charged interest for credit you don't need to build a made-up score.
Not if you use the strategy above.
GPLv2 is purely about code openness and code contribution but not about FSF ideals.
Not according to the people who actually WROTE the GPLv2. You made a good point about *some* of the people who chose to use it, but that is not what the GPLv2 was written FOR.
Ok, that's a good point.
Wrong, I don't need a Tivo to use their code.
That is beside the point. This isn't about *you*.
This is about the 99.99% of people who use Tivo code, use it on a Tivo, and as a result they are denied the particular freedoms the original authors of the code it is licensed under intended for them to have.
Granted 98% of them don't care about the license or about changing the code. But the authors of the original code AND the license cared a great deal about it.
A loophole that clearly many authors wanted and have accepted as "by design".
Absolutlely not an outcome the authors of the license wanted. And I'm skeptical you can find any developers who expressly WANTED the GPL for tivoization... i mean if you want that, then use the BSD or something. There are lots of perfectly suitable licenses for that use.
What realistic scenario can you put forth where the developer actively wants to license their code under the GPL and simultaneously doesn't want people to be able to modify the code they received to run on on the equipment the code is installed on?
Seriously. Find one.
And no, Tivo itself doesn't count, they didn't author original code and actively select the GPL... they merely took the GPL code that was out there because it was out there and used it, and ran a legal end run around the authors intentions.
Not everybody who uses the GPLv2 (or any FSF license) subscribes to the FSF ideology,
There does have to be a fairly substantial overlap with FSF ideology though, otherwise you'd pick something else, like BSD.
in fact some of the most prominent ones (Linux for example) explicitly do not.
By "Linux" I assume you mean Linus? And while its clear he disagrees with the FSF on some key points, you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that he actively approves of Tivoization. At best I'd say he doesn't like the GPLv3's method of trying to prevent it. But I could be mistaken. I'm not Linus.
Not at all - by including an "or later" clause you also open your code to being re-licensed under GPLv666
Maybe. It'll still be available under GPLv2 though.
So don't buy a TiVo then. "Tivoization of your code" is nonsense because Tivoization doesn't have anything to do with the code, in fact you can get the code here licensed under GPLv2 and use it under those terms just as you would any GPLv2 project.
Read the preamble to the GPLv2 or the philosophy of the FSF. Tivoization is a legal end run around the philosophical purpose the license.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
"Specifically, free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions."
Tivoization of GPL code preserves those 4 rights, but withholds the implicit desire of GPL users to be able to exercise those rights on the hardware the software is running on.
Tivoization is a manifestation of "what good is your right to a phone call, if we take away your ability to speak".
When the GPL2 was written no one had conceived that you might receive GPL code installed on a device, be allowed to run it, be allowed to change it, be allowed to redistribute it... but NOT be allowed to run the changed software on the original device.
It was a loophole that was implicitly intended by the GPLv2, but not made explicit. The GPLv3 attempts to close the loophole.
And as an aside, the AGPL3 is mean to meant to close another loophole that wasn't originally conceived of... developers would use GPL code, and distribute only access to the code running remotely rather than copies of the code itself, thereby exempting them from the need to share the source.
What good would that do? Their bank doesn't know if the customer's credit card is valid.
By their "bank" I mean their merchant processing account. And they absolutely can validate the card, and/or contact the customers bank themselves if necessary.
This is the proper documented process. Look it up.
The poster I was responding to got it right.
Bank calls the customer to advise them of the need to communicate, gives the customer a ticket number, and simply asks the customer them back.
The customer must call the bank back at a "trusted number" they have for the bank -- not a number the person calling them gives them, but the one on the back of the card the customer is carrying, or the one on their bank statements, etc.
If "GPLv2 only" is silly, then you might want to alert all the Linux kernel developers.
Your kidding right? Alert them of what? Something they all already know?
As the kernel has no centralized copyright authority; the license is stuck where it is regardless of what anyone contributing to it wants or doesn't want.
Linus has been quoted saying he doesn't care for GPLv3 himself, and has no plans to change the kernel over; which is fine...(especialyl as its would be a fuckton of work -- due to each contributor to the kernel ever all having to either agree to the change or have their contribution pulled out and recoded from scratch). However it doesn't really answer the question of whether Linus actually objects to "GPLv2 or later" -- since it doesn't put any additional constraints on him; or anyone else contributing to the kernel -- the only upshot is that someone somewhere downstream might at some point create a gplv3+ distro based on the kernel. I'm really not sure Linus cares about that; if he doesn't care about Tivoization, what does he care if RMS and the FSF put together a pure gplv3 distro?
To me, at least, the choice of GPLv2 for the kernel instead of GPLv2 or later seems like, an oversight at best, that really can't be fixed now. After all, the kernel was one of the earlier works to use the GPL; it was still pretty new at the time. And Linus was not making a statement about Tivoization or GPLv3 or anything else when he didn't include the "or later" clause.
I pay for everything cash, so I have a low credit score. How the fuck does that work?
Sure, you might be independantly wealthy and just buy everything with cash... or maybe you live day to day off the money you make turning in aluminum cans. In other words, your score is low because they can't tell you from hobo.
I paid for my car cash, I pay my rent cash, I pay the cable company cash.
I have over $30k in the bank and I have monthly paychecks.
None of which is reported to a credit scoring agency.
So I should have a much higher credit rating than someone who is constantly paying with credit cards in my opinion.
You are probably more credit worthy, and probably deserve a higher score, but you aren't playing the game to get one.
I wouldn't even mind so much, except that when renting a house they do a background check, and they expect to find a credit history, which I don't have.
So get one. Apply for a card, buy some stuff you were planning to buy anyway, pay it off... costs you NOTHING. And you get a higher score on the credit rating game, for when you need it.
Party A expressed their opinion about this scenario when they chose the license. GPL v2 Only means they don't want to prevent it.
Selecting GPLv2 or later ALSO allows for downstream Tivoization of your code. So choosing "GPLv2 only" OR "GPLv2 or later" makes no difference to Tivoization.
The only difference between "GPLv2 only" or "GPLv2 or later" is the or later can be mixed with GPLv3 or later, while GPLv2 only.
So the ONLY statement anyone picking "GPLv2 only" is making, is that they don't want their code mixed with GPLv3 which honestly... is pretty silly.
Tons of issues, mostly with very lacking library support, tooling.
Agreed -- not that I know about about Erlang in particular, but library availability, maturity, (and cost) while not a reflection of the language design itself are HUGE factors in whether or not a given project is practical in that language.
In one case, I had a guy tell me online "hire me as an Erlang consultant and then I will help you".
Pretty sure you can find an example of THAT guy in ANY community.
We rewrote this 9 months of Erlang development in 3 weeks (!) using one senior Java developer.
That can mean a lot of things really. For example, a rewrite hot off the tail of the original project benefits from the fact that all the requirements, data model, information flow, features etc are actually pinned down. You jump straight to the implementation phase, and can do it all in one programming iteration -- no meetings, no feature creep, no discovery of unspecified requirements, no backtracking...
Essentially its the perfect project, a good developer is effectively handed a complete and accurate spec.
Everything is immutable is beautiful for fairy tales, but not for real-life software (trying building a DOM in a language which is 100% immutable).
Yeah, its a paradigm shift... but I'm skeptical that its really that difficult. As I said, I don't know Erlang ... but I recall the first time I dipped my hand into lisp and it was like trying to make water run uphill until it just clicked and I was correctly thinking in terms of recursion and things that seemed mind bogglingly complicated to do in lisp suddenly became simple.
. You can reasonably assume that the phone number you have on file for me is valid.
For what its worth, I would never say that is a reasonable assumption. Half the time I do anything major with the bank i have to update all sorts of outdated contact information. You can rightfully argue that I should be more on top of advising them when things change -- but the bank can't reasonably assume that I've done so.
They absolutely should verify they have reached who they intended to call.
That said, you, of course, are 100% correct in that you shouldn't ever hand over your SSN to some yarbo calling you claiming to be from your bank either. So everything about what you did was correct -- the only point I'm making is that your argument that the bank should reasonably assume they've reached the right person wasn't valid. They absolutely need to validate they are speaking to the right person too.
it is up to the cashier to hold the card, read the number and call it themselves
It is up to the cashier to call THEIR OWN BANK.
They are not supposed to call the number on the back of the customers card -- for reasons that should be pretty bleeding obvious.
Nobody is campaigning to keep the homosexuals unable to marry
Uh, yes, lots of people are campaigning for exactly that. Entire organizations exist for that sole purpose.
they are unable to do so already.
And people are campaigning to keep it that way.
Not because they have no right â" only because they have no ability.
I honestly can't parse this. Of course they have the "ability" to marry; they ONLY obstacle is policy, change the policy and they can get married.
Contrast with: No amount of policy change is going to help a paralyzed person do karate.
Not any more so, than a quadriplegic is deprived of the right to practice karate.
The guy in the wheelchair may be deprived of his ability to practice karate, but its not because his fellow citizens are campaigning and voting to keep him from doing it.
That's a pretty significant difference.
No he failed to comprehend that people have found that particular method of calculating ratio of compression over time is proving to be *useful*.
selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.
How does changing something about your website to get them to spend more money not qualify as "selecting a sample of users, conduncting tests specifically to change their response"?
So what if the 'sample of users' is everyone, and the A/B test occurs over the same users in two non-overlapping timeframes? If I make the changes to my regionalized .CA website to test the impact on "Canada" before making it to the global site? Does that qualify? Because pretty much all sites do that sort of thing too.
You're definition is so loose it's useless.
That is PRECISELY my point. Getting in a huff about "experimenting on users" is absurd, because the definitions in play ARE uselessly broad. What did OKcupid or facebook do, SPECIFICALLY, that crossed a line that any other website wouldn't do to increase whatever metric they were looking at.
Because, to my view, they haven't done anything different from any other site, at all. So this all really is much ado about nothing.
No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.
Anyone who has ever:
a) taken any metrics about there site
a) altered their website in any way
b) measured whether or not it made any difference
Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...
Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.
Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.
Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".
The only change is the addition of the number 7.
The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.
The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.
Claiming that a score "works" has no meaning,
I could easily devise a cpu scoring methodology that scores CPU based on chip area / cost * clock speed / register width.
Such a score "works" in the sense that the function can be evaluated, but it wouldn't tell you anything about whether to buy an i7 vs a xeon vs a pentium 2.
The suggestion in the article is that the particular scoring methodology that was created for the show is useful for comparing compression algorithms, to the point that it may well be adopted by industry.
Therefore, the only interpretation of the hideously poor writing is that the submitter is claiming the algorithm works.
The writing was perfectly fine, your reading comprehension is what failed here.
I use about 70 to 150 GB per month.
ok... Verizon's taking a real risk with this, Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly, oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill... Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past,
Hope they can live without that, too.
You bet they can. say 3000/year? For 70-150GB per month? I pay $1500/year at least, and use maybe 15-20GB per YEAR.
So yeah, you make them twice as much $, but use 10x as much bandwidtih. That makes people like ME 5x more profitable than you are.
They'd be happy to lose you, and anyone like you.
If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug.
In reality, your connections are mostly in contract, and cant switch anyway. Plus despite your outrage, they are satisfied with their service.
I'm a very convincing and influential person.
And the guy in the mirror agrees with you, so you must be right.
I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices.
Less than a fraction of a percent of its least profitable paying customers. Your better than people who don't pay their bill, that's about it it.