Or maybe it's an indication that you're not giving the customers what they want, since 95% of the people you have IN YOUR STORE are ignoring your product offerings.
I'll never understand the mentality of people who generate a ton of interest, fail to monetize it, and then blame it on the interested people they failed to serve.
My boss the other day told us this amazing story about how he ran an expensive ad that generated so much traffic in one day (something like 8000x normal) that it shut the website down! Except, he only sold 8 extra products. Problem with the website or successfully capturing the interests of that flood of extra people? Nope! He confidently told us all that the ad "didn't work" and was a "waste of time", as if there was just no money to be made there. Simply amazing.
Basically, the state had someone sign up for Uber, take a ride in the car as a "sting" (one of the people in the car's job title is -- and I'm not joking -- the "Sealer of Weights & Measures") and then cite the driver after seeing that he (*gasp*!) used a GPS device on his phone to measure the distance traveled.
See, I have no sympathy here. That driver really should have noticed something suspicious was up and acted accordingly the minute two people wearing powdered wigs entered his vehicle and asked for a ride.
While I'm very sympathetic to individualist responsibility arguments (most definitely in this case, so don't take this the wrong way), the problem with that type of thinking is that it tends to create an inverted pyramid of responsibility. We live in a highly specialized society, and one where most people use multiple computers multiple times a day, but have exactly zero idea how to protect it, themselves, and their data while using it.
If you take every position where a sort of "caveat emptor" argument has been used to suggest that people ought to be watching out for themselves, you see that the people on the bottom are expected to be super-paranoid experts in just about everything, and the movers and shakers have very little responsibility restraining virtually anything they do.
You know that's a great point if you pretend the "bottom 20%" is just the bottom 20% of America, but America's poorest are still "rich" compared to many areas of the world. If you do a real worldwide analysis on wealth distribution (and why the hell not? wealth has the opportunity to flow freely all over the world) the numbers get exponentially more bleak.
I'm not convinced it's the case either, but it certainly has for me, and I know many of my friends are in the same situation (and they don't even subscribe to Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, etc. because of even lower incomes). It seems pretty reasonable to me to infer from that, with a healthy dose of statistics I read every day, that album sales might very well suffer.
Unfortunately, streaming sales are going to do exactly what she suggests they're not, which is pretty likely supplant album sales. I'm an outlier in this case, but I can still see this trend happening.
I'm a Linux-running PC enthusiast, so I care more than average about actually owning my data, rather than "licensing" it from some 3rd party who can shut it off. None the less, my music purchases have ground to a halt in the last few years because most of the new music I listen to is on Pandora and, lately, Spotify. I'm in the same boat as most Americans in that I am doing a little better than living paycheck to paycheck, but a significant (and still fairly common) emergency could mean huge financial trouble for me. Last I checked this puts me in the same boat with roughly 70% of the population (because this is about what happens to your income and how much of it is eaten immediately after you get paid by routine expenses, and not how much you make necessarily, so the number is very high right now during the recession).
Rent, healthcare, gas, utilities, food, and all the basic expenses are going up. My income as a starting-out programmer is better than most people my age in this small town, but we're still just a bit more than making it. The best way we can enjoy content is to use services that cost just a little bit each month like Netflix and Pandora to give us access to a wide range of content (even if it's not always on our terms) to get the most bang for our buck.
There are a million different artists and charities that I'd like to donate to or support in some way, but for the most part I restrain myself from basically ever spending money like that, because it's just a matter of having to draw the line somewhere. If I supported every musical artist and charity and website I liked with a $5 - $10 "micropayment", I'd nickel and dime myself into needing a 6-figure salary to support my habit. Unfortunately, this seems to be pushing artists into the same territory that charities now face. We need them, and we want them, but the people with the money to support them the way they need are increasingly the people at the top hoarding all the wealth, and as we can see they're simply not going to invest it like that (because it doesn't make them personally richer).
I'm surprised this is such a difficult question to wrangle with for a self-described privacy advocate. I should say now that I'm thinking of the issue generally, and not just as specifically related to Facebook, but that's only fair since I haven't used Facebook in a number of years and I can't really comment on that feature or how it impacts a Facebook user.
The concern in -- well, probably all of these cases is that while, yes, a human can perform the function described, a computer can provide it much faster, in many more situations, and can process and store the results in a much more far-reaching manner than is normally possible. With respect to the blurred German street view, yes, anyone near their neighborhood can drive by, which if they live in a big town is a pool of maybe 1000 people they sort of have a connection with (living nearby) and even though they're strangers feel somewhat more comfortable with. That's a big difference from the entire population of 7 billion people on Earth being able to log onto their computer at any given moment and scope out your house.
It seems to me like your reasoning could be applied equally validly to someone objecting to deep packet inspection or the like. "Well, couldn't someone just stand over your shoulder and see what you're doing online?" Well, yeah, but that's someone you know and someone you can monitor (accountability!), and they can't simultaneously do that for millions of other users, remembering and executing every action with perfect clarity, and compiling the results for any number of parties (intended or not) that have purposes you would never explicitly authorize if given the chance.
And that's the real problem in every one of these cases -- you never get that chance.
Should be § and it looks like you have §. If your CMS is PHP, the htmlentities() function has had a flag to prevent "double escaping" (as above) since 5.2.3. HTH :)
Passing this law will give New York the honor of being the first state in the country to require public access to research generated from taxpayer dollars.
This is quite a dubious honor, since it merely makes them the first state to realize that they've been massively screwing over the investors (the taxpayers) since the dawn of tax-funded research time.
This is precisely correct. 'Bipartisan' became a useful buzzword for politicians once the polling data began showing that the public largely views Washington as a group of inept, whiny children bickering on the playground instead of being the stewards of the public they were supposedly elected to be. Bipartisan just means that the Republican party and Democratic party agree on something, and the truth of the matter is the two parties aren't that different on a great number of issues (war, stance on Israel, military funding, kickbacks to big business constituency, etc., etc.) and are simultaneously WAY out of line with the public.
A friend of mine who is a DirecTV subscriber told me this morning about an equally childish and petulant part of this dispute. Apparently Viacom was broadcasting a banner across the bottom of its channel on DirecTV during the Daily Show (probably its most popular show) railing against DirecTV. Worse still, DirecTV's response was to put yet another banner on top of that trying to counter what Viacom was apparently arguing.
Imagine, two corporations arguing with each other passive-aggressively in the middle of their own broadcast in front of their own customers. After this, I wonder if DirecTV will ever push Viacom on the swingset again.
Building a multibillion dollar paramilitary organization under the federal govt then whining that it's "hijacked by bureaucrats" is like tipping someone to park your car then crying that it's been "hijacked by valets".
Are... you kidding? Those people all fly on chartered planes (not least of which is Air Force One) with private security all at our tax expense. Do you think they EVER have to deal with the TSA? That's only for us low-lifes.
I've seriously done the exact same thing. When I had Facebook, I always preferred to delete my birthday about two weeks prior to make sure that particular "bell" didn't ring. I rarely got any birthday messages at all. (Usually whomever I was dating would say something and I'd get a few follow-ups after that post from confused people saying, "Oh, it's your birthday? I'm so sorry! Why wasn't I notified?")
I'd never done anything quite to this level (repeated "birthdays"), but I have set my birthday to a fake date once and laughed at all the people who posted.
In fact, they may now be pushed to go to much more questionable pharmacy operations since Google will no longer point them to those who had been certified.
You mean denying access to legal options causes people to look more into illegal alternatives? I refuse to believe this.
US Government Invents New Kind of Legal Trolling: More Shakedowns Expected in Near Future
Of course, as usual, this comports with our Sacred Values -- presumption of guilt (guilty until proven innocent), due process (if you're making a lot of money, you're due to be processed through some expensive trial), the First Amendment freedom of expressing views the government likes, and all that.
Re: [free to play a waste of time]
Or maybe it's an indication that you're not giving the customers what they want, since 95% of the people you have IN YOUR STORE are ignoring your product offerings.
I'll never understand the mentality of people who generate a ton of interest, fail to monetize it, and then blame it on the interested people they failed to serve.
My boss the other day told us this amazing story about how he ran an expensive ad that generated so much traffic in one day (something like 8000x normal) that it shut the website down! Except, he only sold 8 extra products. Problem with the website or successfully capturing the interests of that flood of extra people? Nope! He confidently told us all that the ad "didn't work" and was a "waste of time", as if there was just no money to be made there. Simply amazing.
Uber's fault, definitely
See, I have no sympathy here. That driver really should have noticed something suspicious was up and acted accordingly the minute two people wearing powdered wigs entered his vehicle and asked for a ride.
Re: Re: Yes
While I'm very sympathetic to individualist responsibility arguments (most definitely in this case, so don't take this the wrong way), the problem with that type of thinking is that it tends to create an inverted pyramid of responsibility. We live in a highly specialized society, and one where most people use multiple computers multiple times a day, but have exactly zero idea how to protect it, themselves, and their data while using it.
If you take every position where a sort of "caveat emptor" argument has been used to suggest that people ought to be watching out for themselves, you see that the people on the bottom are expected to be super-paranoid experts in just about everything, and the movers and shakers have very little responsibility restraining virtually anything they do.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...but streaming sales will do exactly that.
You know that's a great point if you pretend the "bottom 20%" is just the bottom 20% of America, but America's poorest are still "rich" compared to many areas of the world. If you do a real worldwide analysis on wealth distribution (and why the hell not? wealth has the opportunity to flow freely all over the world) the numbers get exponentially more bleak.
Re: Re: ...but streaming sales will do exactly that.
I'm not convinced it's the case either, but it certainly has for me, and I know many of my friends are in the same situation (and they don't even subscribe to Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, etc. because of even lower incomes). It seems pretty reasonable to me to infer from that, with a healthy dose of statistics I read every day, that album sales might very well suffer.
...but streaming sales will do exactly that.
Unfortunately, streaming sales are going to do exactly what she suggests they're not, which is pretty likely supplant album sales. I'm an outlier in this case, but I can still see this trend happening.
I'm a Linux-running PC enthusiast, so I care more than average about actually owning my data, rather than "licensing" it from some 3rd party who can shut it off. None the less, my music purchases have ground to a halt in the last few years because most of the new music I listen to is on Pandora and, lately, Spotify. I'm in the same boat as most Americans in that I am doing a little better than living paycheck to paycheck, but a significant (and still fairly common) emergency could mean huge financial trouble for me. Last I checked this puts me in the same boat with roughly 70% of the population (because this is about what happens to your income and how much of it is eaten immediately after you get paid by routine expenses, and not how much you make necessarily, so the number is very high right now during the recession).
Rent, healthcare, gas, utilities, food, and all the basic expenses are going up. My income as a starting-out programmer is better than most people my age in this small town, but we're still just a bit more than making it. The best way we can enjoy content is to use services that cost just a little bit each month like Netflix and Pandora to give us access to a wide range of content (even if it's not always on our terms) to get the most bang for our buck.
There are a million different artists and charities that I'd like to donate to or support in some way, but for the most part I restrain myself from basically ever spending money like that, because it's just a matter of having to draw the line somewhere. If I supported every musical artist and charity and website I liked with a $5 - $10 "micropayment", I'd nickel and dime myself into needing a 6-figure salary to support my habit. Unfortunately, this seems to be pushing artists into the same territory that charities now face. We need them, and we want them, but the people with the money to support them the way they need are increasingly the people at the top hoarding all the wealth, and as we can see they're simply not going to invest it like that (because it doesn't make them personally richer).
Really?
I'm surprised this is such a difficult question to wrangle with for a self-described privacy advocate. I should say now that I'm thinking of the issue generally, and not just as specifically related to Facebook, but that's only fair since I haven't used Facebook in a number of years and I can't really comment on that feature or how it impacts a Facebook user.
The concern in -- well, probably all of these cases is that while, yes, a human can perform the function described, a computer can provide it much faster, in many more situations, and can process and store the results in a much more far-reaching manner than is normally possible. With respect to the blurred German street view, yes, anyone near their neighborhood can drive by, which if they live in a big town is a pool of maybe 1000 people they sort of have a connection with (living nearby) and even though they're strangers feel somewhat more comfortable with. That's a big difference from the entire population of 7 billion people on Earth being able to log onto their computer at any given moment and scope out your house.
It seems to me like your reasoning could be applied equally validly to someone objecting to deep packet inspection or the like. "Well, couldn't someone just stand over your shoulder and see what you're doing online?" Well, yeah, but that's someone you know and someone you can monitor (accountability!), and they can't simultaneously do that for millions of other users, remembering and executing every action with perfect clarity, and compiling the results for any number of parties (intended or not) that have purposes you would never explicitly authorize if given the chance.
And that's the real problem in every one of these cases -- you never get that chance.
Re: Double-escaped HTML entity
The HTML entities in my post got parsed. :P
First was &-sect; and second was &-amp;sect; (without dashes).
Double-escaped HTML entity
In article:
Should be § and it looks like you have §. If your CMS is PHP, the htmlentities() function has had a flag to prevent "double escaping" (as above) since 5.2.3. HTH :)
Some Honor
This is quite a dubious honor, since it merely makes them the first state to realize that they've been massively screwing over the investors (the taxpayers) since the dawn of tax-funded research time.
Re: [monkyyy the anarchist]
This is precisely correct. 'Bipartisan' became a useful buzzword for politicians once the polling data began showing that the public largely views Washington as a group of inept, whiny children bickering on the playground instead of being the stewards of the public they were supposedly elected to be. Bipartisan just means that the Republican party and Democratic party agree on something, and the truth of the matter is the two parties aren't that different on a great number of issues (war, stance on Israel, military funding, kickbacks to big business constituency, etc., etc.) and are simultaneously WAY out of line with the public.
Arguing during a broadcast
A friend of mine who is a DirecTV subscriber told me this morning about an equally childish and petulant part of this dispute. Apparently Viacom was broadcasting a banner across the bottom of its channel on DirecTV during the Daily Show (probably its most popular show) railing against DirecTV. Worse still, DirecTV's response was to put yet another banner on top of that trying to counter what Viacom was apparently arguing.
Imagine, two corporations arguing with each other passive-aggressively in the middle of their own broadcast in front of their own customers. After this, I wonder if DirecTV will ever push Viacom on the swingset again.
Re: Re: [Not sure who would star...]
I'd authorize the use of unreasonable force against Brendan Fraser.
Re: Subject line
Dear Mike,
I hate you.
Sincerely,
Song Stuck in Head
Analogy Time
Building a multibillion dollar paramilitary organization under the federal govt then whining that it's "hijacked by bureaucrats" is like tipping someone to park your car then crying that it's been "hijacked by valets".
"...the assault on her vagina and dignity..."
I sincerely hope that awful letter was not written by a female lawyer. That is all.
Re: So... how does Obama react when they do it to him or his kids?
Are... you kidding? Those people all fly on chartered planes (not least of which is Air Force One) with private security all at our tax expense. Do you think they EVER have to deal with the TSA? That's only for us low-lifes.
Wow
I've seriously done the exact same thing. When I had Facebook, I always preferred to delete my birthday about two weeks prior to make sure that particular "bell" didn't ring. I rarely got any birthday messages at all. (Usually whomever I was dating would say something and I'd get a few follow-ups after that post from confused people saying, "Oh, it's your birthday? I'm so sorry! Why wasn't I notified?")
I'd never done anything quite to this level (repeated "birthdays"), but I have set my birthday to a fake date once and laughed at all the people who posted.
What?!
You mean denying access to legal options causes people to look more into illegal alternatives? I refuse to believe this.
Alternate Title
US Government Invents New Kind of Legal Trolling: More Shakedowns Expected in Near Future
Of course, as usual, this comports with our Sacred Values -- presumption of guilt (guilty until proven innocent), due process (if you're making a lot of money, you're due to be processed through some expensive trial), the First Amendment freedom of expressing views the government likes, and all that.