Bullshit. Amazon told Hachette & Co "we are granting ourselves a big discount, from now on we will pay 20% less than before. Since this is nearly a monopsony, you can agree to these terms, or loose a lot more than half of your income. But hey it's your choice... (suppressed snickers)". Amazon is not playing fair at all.
How do you know what is fair? Maybe the 25% more they were paying before were unfair? The monopschmopy arguments are all bullshits because there are plenty of ways to buy books. Maybe you could even buy them directly from Hachette?
Well, I've read a few articles about that spat, and made up my mind. I suggest you read a few articles yourself, get ahold of the facts, and stop the way small kids argue ("monopschmopy").
I suppose the adult way of arguing is to call other arguments childish?
I'm sorry that I can't recognize your authority (built on reading a few articles) at face value. At least have the decency to link to some of those articles.
How can an article determine the fair value of anything anyway?
Why don't you talk to joshkaufman about that "not providing any links" business, huh? But you don't, because you have a selective perception - what you do agree with does not need verification, apparently.
Now about "childish": calling things what they are is indeed the adult way. You've been childish. And in your last post, you've also been cynical ("At least have the decency…"). Both are very bad traits. Please grow up.
I've been childish because I said monoschmopolywhatever? Perhaps you just need to get over yourself.
Btw I suppose "I have more experience than you (because I read some articles) therefore I am right" is another hallmark of grownup conversations.
Your link says Amazon used to get 30% and now they want 50% of ebook sales, same as for paperback books. They still make more money with paperback books. Where in that does it imply what a fair price is?
You can read books from other sources on your Kindle Reader. So what if Amazon has built a decent reach - why shouldn't they be paid for it? If you place an ad in the New York Times, is it unfair that it costs a lot of money because their paper reaches a certain audience?
actually the study looks at other searches which would get them in trouble with friends, neighbours and colleagues. So yes it has been researched, partly.
Thanks for the link. While it does indeed looks nice, it's not what I had in mind. This is basically isometric 2D. You're looking at a plane. Things that rise up, like pillars, are not shown. You could not see that dam the way it really looks like in my linked picture.
A good 3d GUI for DF would be challenging. Usually[1] most of the game takes place in corridors/caves that are underground, so the naive approach would have everything obfuscated by solid rock.
[1] Obvious nitpick: some players do indeed challenge themselves to build everything above ground.
If you have a equipment to down planes, it's also your duty to have the proper radar equipment to reliably see what's up there, something that those Rebels did not have. They just stole equipment out of their league, did not know how to handle it and killed 300 innocent travelers.
This is right. It has been pointed out that both the Ukrainian government and the rebels now have the capability to do this, the Ukrainian government has had it for a long time, without incident. Because under a government it is operated by soldiers who follow procedures and have access to the data about known civilian flights.
It gets a bit worse than that I believe, officially to this date the blame is still on Iran for flying an airliner according to it's flight plan and in the commercial traffic corridor.
They shot down a A300 thinking it was an F14, and they were in a heightened level of alert because they (the USS Vincennes) were in Iranian waters, chasing a small naval boat that they claimed shot at their helicopter.
As an aside, the IR655 tragedy was one of the first were data was available to separate fact from fiction.
Indeed. Heck, even someone with FlightRadar24 (an app the price of a cup of coffee) could probably deduct what plane that was. Let alone if you have advanced equipment.
As you say, they just got their hands on equipment and had little clue how to handle it. They are also fully responsible for what happened.
Yeah, and if you don't even have an internet connection, NSA is putting you on their most wanted list. Give me a break. Not doing something can't make you more suspicious.
There is no state of no data. You are known to exist, you are known for not participating in something that is common for your group. That, in combination with the thousands of other data points about you will determine whether you are of interest. That may determine whether your car gets searched during a traffic stop, or whether you're put on a no-fly list.
This is not complicated to build, it is simple to build, and the only logical way of accomplishing what the government claims that they're attempting to accomplish.
I think you're overestimating the NSA's capability to cross-reference your actions and compare them to "what people like me should typically do".
My point is, you should not change your behaviour to be a lesser target to the NSA. You'd just quickly become super paranoid. Instead you should live your live exactly the same, and if the NSA tries to make your live bad, that's the moment when you call them out on it - after all, it's the NSA that is behaving out of line. So they should change, not you.
I think you're overestimating the difficulty of the problem. The difficult part is access to the channels of information. After that, it's a matter of applying well-known algorithms while filtering and processing streams.
The only reason that I suspect that the government is still terrible at this is because they have to rely on government contractors to implement it. If they're intentionally funding startups that happen to be developing tools in the spaces they need, though, it's only a matter of a (short) time until the systems they have are settled and dependable, and they can concentrate on innovation.
>it's the NSA that is behaving out of line. So they should change, not you.
This is also silly. That's like people who walk into speeding traffic because they have the right-of-way. You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave.
> You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave.
Well, in contrast to you, I plan to enjoy my life instead of wasting it by worrying about some possible bad actor spying on me, which is what I'm must read is how you spend your life.
Sure, fight the NSA by engaging a little bit politically, and buying the right things. But apart from that, don't worry so much, man.
I'm not worried (edit: about anything immediate), I'm not failing to partake in anything that I ever would, and I don't live any differently than I ever have. You're projecting something onto me, and that's not a great way to have a productive discussion.
Well, it was ambiguous to say the least, with all those "you"'s in it. If it was meant as an analogy, maybe you should have written it like this:
> This is also silly. That's like people who walk into speeding traffic because they have the right-of-way. They won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from their grave.
>>Well, in contrast to you, I plan to enjoy my life instead of wasting it by worrying about some possible bad actor spying on me, which is what I'm must read is how you spend your life.
Let me guess: you are a straight white dude with a comfortable income.
Tangential, but I think it's high time for someone to raise awareness about the discrimination of white straight males by all those social justice warriors everywhere. Seriously, no matter what we do or say, we're overprivileged and the source of all evil. sigh
> I think you're overestimating the NSA's capability to cross-reference your actions
They don't need to do any cross referencing. Your parents, cousins, friends, former colleagues and classmates, etc, will sell you for a "like" in a hearth bit.
> and compare them to "what people like me should typically do".
Ditto. I hate every time people in my acquaintance network email me with "since you cannot be found like everybody else, I'm sending you this thing that you probably don't care about in the first place. After all we are still friends, right?"
The article failed to mention that the previous $199 ipod touch hasn't had a camera, but now it does.
Apple mentioned in a previous keynote that that $199 price point is kind of a magical barrier. If you can lower your price to <200, lots of people consider it that previously have not thought about buying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfgyQcyDthw#t=425 (jump to 7:05)
So what they tried to communicate, badly, was: a product that is already a best-seller now also includes a camera. So now it has the potential to upend another category after music, communication and gaming: photography.
Also, Steve Jobs was probably even more driven, perfectionist and hurtfully direct than Phil. But Steve was just growing up in a different era, and cleverly realized that when a lot of people are looking, you should try to keep the illusion of being kinda nice.
Phil is not hated by everybody. Me, I thought Fez was kinda neat. I don't care about his demeanor, great art survives all that.
Amazon can't make folks do anything. So they have to concentrate on what makes money. They can sell features to developers as ways to make more money, thus making their phone more desirable. Those are the creative folks anyway. So Amazon enables them, and makes a buck too.
Of course, if you buy an iPhone in Europe, and you want to use it any significant manner, you're getting spied on by US agencies as well:
- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.
- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use
- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers
- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.
In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.
- GSM/CDMA: location and communications peers can be tracked neatly, over time, forever, in a manner that can be used to easily determine social interactions even based on proximity. Data very frequently extracted from your carrier for 'outsourced billing' purposes to Mossad/NSA via http://amdocs.com/
These are cases of making trade-offs for capability, not outright malware. And why limit it to the iPhone? Do you honestly believe Google is capturing less information?
Whereas if you buy an Android phone in Europe, you know for certain that your data and behavior are being examined by Google, and are available to US agencies.
> NSLs exist, and is there any reason to believe they're not enforceable for non-US data?
Given the pains the NSA took (no matter how tortured the logic got), to keep trying to claim they weren't spying on Americans [except when they talked to non-Americans, or talked to someone when outside the US, or when an otherwise American communication got routed outside the US, or they accidentally included American data in a sweep "targeted" at non-American data, etc.]... I think we have plenty of evidence that the opposite is true.
Assuming the data is available in the US (so no other country can get in the way), it's easier to demand non-US data than it is to demand US data. Don't forget: part of the detestable legal rationalizations behind this surveillance is that non-US people have no Fourth Amendment rights - eliminating many classes of potential or actual legal barriers.
So how do you come up with the TripExpert score? Do you read every review, map it manually to a number, then get the average? Or is it more like Rotten Tomatoes where each review only gets a shot at a thumps up or thumps down, and then you average those?
Btw: Slight coding error: On city pages, hotel names are overlaid over the preview icon, which makes them very hard to read on Safari 5.1.
We have an algorithm that looks at a large number of factors (number of reviews, each reviewer's unique denotation system, number of hotels in a destination, sentiment, etc) and calculates the number.
