If they are spending 12 hrs at a desk then they ought to get their productivity up and get home to their families sooner, not string their day out by pissing about on Facebook.
How many companies have you ever worked in where the management really did have a real time appreciation of the results that people were achieving. This is a theoretical argument. It might be old fashioned / stupid to say "if they are at their desks and it looks like they are working then that is OK" but it is perfectly legitimate to say "if they are visibly not working then they are not doing what they are paid for."
If a guy was known to spend 2 hrs a day clearly just chatting at the water cooler when he had urgent work outstanding, you'd expect him to be reprimanded, yet people who are just as wasteful of time in work can do it serruptitiously (sp?) at a computer.
As yourself this. If you called in a plumber and he told you his hourly rate and said he thought it was going to be a 4 hrs job then halfway through you found him sat on his butt watching Youtube on his iphone while the clock was ticking on your dollar, and he had the nerve to tell you that "evidence has shown that this makes me more productive", you'd probably not give him a glowing reference, to say the least. Now, I wouldn't begrudge him taking the odd private call, or even dealing with other customers who called up occasionally, but only within reason.
Yet somehow when it's employees of a "big faceless corporation" the attitude that the management are daft to worry about this sort of thing seems to be the cool point of view here. Crazy.
It's also pretty galling if you're a blue collar worker "downstairs" who is very visible if you stop doing what you're 'sposed to be doing in the factory (building, testing, packaging a product) and then you go upstairs to the office and it's clear that all thise desk jockeys are giggling away at a vid of a cat standing up. Not good for motivaton, team cooperation.
Is the bandwidth really a small argument ?
I have worked in one place where Youtube at lunchtime was freely permitted but it had to be rescinded because for those people who DID want to work at lunchtime the available bandwidth had collapsed.
In the same place I use to routinely prune email to stay under an admittedly hueg disk use ceiling. And I'd do this by sorting by size and seeing which large dtuff I could throw away. And invariably 90% of my disk usage was made up of about 2% of emails with rich media attachments sent to everyone because they were amusing.
One was when a European low cost airline advertised "buy ticket early as price can only go up". Then at the 11th hr they dropped the price again to try and fill the plane, and some early buyers successfully sued them.
The offence here was to promise prices would only rise.
Another was when Amazon got clever enough to spot returning big spenders and show them higher prices than the average unidentified joe. When people spotted it ("hey, if I delete cookies the prices on Amazon go down - WTF ?") there was an outcry.
I bought a book once and found myself on the author's mailing list (for reasons unrelated to my book purchase). In less than a year I had been sent a free eBook of the same title as a taster to get me to spend money on something else. So I figured this guy is happy to hand out free eBooks. When I saw another of his books for free download as a PDF, (on a site that with hindsight may not have been authorised to offer it) I was not morally worried about downloading because the author is in the habit of giving these away and probably set this up too.
To put it more briefly, I subconsciously value his eBooks lower now (even though they are good books).
== we have to prevent the deceptive practice entirely. ==
What deceptive practice ?
Did they pretend to be microsoft ?
Who exactly was deceived. Did someone think that you can misspell a website and get there anyway ?
This is like having a phone number almost the same as the X Factor voting line and when someone calls you answer "half price pizza for one night only". Most will hang up and redial, some might fancy a pizza.
And if there was a legitimate gay porn site called hotmale.com, (there might be for all I know) whose fault is it that your kid went there by mistake ? Perhaps MS's fault for having such a daft name as "hotmail".
Did someone buy an exercise bike by accident while trying to read their mail ?
If noone owned the hot5mail domain at all, then the person would type hot5mail, get an error, and realise they had mistyped and try again.
As it is, they see an exercise machine ad and they try again.
Unless they want an exercise machine in which case he is offering a service.
Obviously if he had a website pretending to be hotmail that would be different. And if he had a website offering a competing email service, that would
I am far more bothered about the fact that I could register ford.info when the new .info domains came out and then be pretty much forced to hand it over to Ford because they are large and it causes confusion for the domain not to lead to them.
Is the problem just sour grapes because he's making money ?
If he had a link saying "did you mean 'hotmail' ? click here" then would that make it any better ?
This (to me) is like putting a furniture shop in the alley before the alley with the Starbucks in. Some people looking for Starbucks turn down the wrong alley by mistake, and most realised their error but a small few see the furniture shop and end up buying a sofa. If we all know that they'd never have gone down the alley if they had not been looking for Starbucks, does that give Starbucks the right to close down the furniture shop ? It's not like they lost any real business.
I can't see the issue here if the guy is not competing.
If the gripe is "the person wasn't looking for exercise machines when he landed on that hot5mail website" then that would be true of most advertsing in history pre-adwords. We just try to catch passing eyeballs the best we can, be it on a bus shelter, the side of a taxicab, whatever.
This guy went out and bought a piece of real estate to hang his banners on and people pass by (albeit by accident) and see his ads. Just like the alley in the analogy above.
I say good luck to him. Microsoft can always make him an offer for the alley.
Suppose I archive content which is subsequently the subject of a takedown notice. Is the archive copy subject to the takedown notices too ?
Whose job is it to know where else the site may be archived ?
- I can't be expected to know who archived my site.
- The takedown issuer can't know for sure.
And although when there is just one archiver (the British Library) it might be easy, who says there couldn't be many ?
Is it appropriate to preserve a libellous publication for posterity when the courts have decreed that it should be unpublished ?
Is there a legal distinction between "archived so you could go and look at it in the library" and "archived so you can find it on the web" ?
Come to that, does a takedown of a website imply that the Google cache has to be wiped too ?
This seems like a minefield.
Can college law students choose this area as a major these days ? Seems like a growth area to me...
"Somebody tries a shoe bomb, but is caught by existing methods"
As I recall, Richard Reid was not "caught by existing methods" but was in the process of (stupidly) igniting his bomb in the cabin rather than the toilet when he was apprehended.
So he was in fact not "caught" at all, in the "keeping everyone safe" meaning of the word.
Relying on all bombers being idiots was never going to be a good long term policy. Not after the level of planning shown on 9/11.
They need to get some creatives together to brainstorm attack methods, THEN see if their systems would withstand such attack attempts. I predicted 2 component liquid bombs would come soon after 9/11 but I'm not someone they are likely to listen to and anyway who am I supposed to tell ?
For example, how big a swallowed detonator is required to ignite the stomach of a suicide bomber who has been swallowing many small pouches of semtex ?
Our security services simply have no imagination, that's the problem.
You seem to forget that however likely it is for your friends to take your techie recommendations, the majority of consumers don't have a techie like you to ask.
Yet those who do have a techie mate tend to trust the techie's advice on things that the techie really only has an OPINION on and no true expertise. And many techies like to offer advice outside their area of true knowledge.
Was this some 20% project that persuaded the boss to let them go live ? Or just tunnel vision about keeping up with twitter and facebook ?
Either way, very surprising given google's (supposed) talent.
So how are they going to be disincentivised from doing something sloppy like this again ?
I'm not sure a class action is the right way to go but something major (read "expensive") should happen to give them (and anyone else) pause before doing it again.
It is pretty standard for hardback edition to come out first.
This forces people to choose between a price (maybe even a format) to suit them, and the desire to have it now.
Though it can be pretty annoying to be forced to buy an overpriced, oversized hardback just to get it when you want it, it's how the industry has worked for a long time and anyone is free to choose not to buy it.
About the only time when this would be seriously worrying is if the book was named on the national school curriculum and the publisher delayed the paperback until after term start.
If eBooks are cheaper than paper then I'd expect publishers to do exactly the same (ie launch them later). And it's a business decision. They may actually be wrong (overall sales may suffer) but they're free to do it.
If eBooks cost the same, then I'd be more surprised.
There's no difference between believing paperbacks will cannibalise hardbacks, and believing eBooks will cannibalise paper (and DVD's will cannibalise theatres, DVD rentals will cannibalise DVD sales etc).
The one small flaw in it all is that you are deliberately and explicitly choosing not to give customers what they want in an attempt to extract more money. In any other industry, someone might break ranks and just serve the customer. But if I am publishing a new book by author xx, there is noone else competing with me to publish that actual book.
You could argue that if book xxx is only in hardback then I'll buy book yyy to read on the plane instead because that IS in paperback form.
But if their business model is stupid, that's their funeral. It's the author I feel sorry for.
But they (publishers) should be competing against each other to win the author, surely.
What would bother me is if the publisher told one outlet (Amazon) what to charge and not every other outlet.
I used HR Block while in USA for 4 years. Rather variable experience.
Local office did 1st tax return. Fine
Local office did 2nd tax return, said I owed nearly $5K.
So I paid it.
Local office did 3rd tax return and said I owed $5K again. I decided to check it myself before posting it off. Spent many light nioghts acquainting myself with the tax code. Decided they were wrong.
Went to another HR Block office, who knew far more than the first. They agreed and recalculated my 3rd year. Nothing to pay.
They then helped me refile the 2nd year and eventually (nearly 5 years later) i got my $5k back.
The 2nd HR Block office were superb, in a nutshell.
The 1st HR block office were simply not qualified to do a resident alien's tax return.
Seems there is no reliable guaranteed quality with HR Block. You just have to hope it's a "good" HR Block.
The story in the headline is about Intuit but back in 2005 the same story surfaced as I recall about the HR Blocks of this world blocking the "preprinted forms" legislation.
In fact I recall that the suggestion was that millions of americans would have such simple tax returns they'd just need to sign and post it back...
The camera did exactly what it should - took a picture of a speeding car (with a stationary car also in the picture). It was the human oversight that failed - the human weak link misinterpreted which car in the picture was the speeding car.
two opposing business models: the old one, where the audience is the product and the advertisers are the customers, and the new one, where news is the product and the audience is the customer
That would make google the "old" one, right ?
I think your "old" model may be what they used to have but they have never really honestly recognised it as such.
The Londing Evening Standard, perhaps, has now !
Your "new" model (where customers pay for their newspaper) is what they have been pretending to do for years.
At the end of the day, they need to reframe the debate away from "news". News is the same wherever you get it, just a bit earlier in some places. It's basically facts. Analysis is where they add value.
So I imagine a situation where the freely accessible page says "Car bomb in Kabul" and explains what happened today, and then there is a link to a walled Seymour Hersch piece saying "How the fall of Karzai would affect the US Economy".
That is, the "news" is free, and used as bait for selling the "analysis", which is unique, high value, and expensive to produce. All the time selling highly targeted ads on the free AND walled pages. You cosy up to aggregators and google for the free news pages (which include the tasters for the analysis pages too) but use robots.txt to completely block access to the walled content. Then if google make money and you sell ads too, you toast each other and keep co-operating.
I'm not saying it's always going to work. But it makes some rational sense, selling what is actually of value. And you get what is probably the bulk of the short attention span traffic through your free site with ad revenue.
Same with other content. A national weather summary on the free pages. A zipcode targeted customised 5 day outlook on the pay site. An easy crossword on the free page, the famously difficult signature cryptic puzzle on the pay site (maybe 2 days behind, or the answers on the free site).
Regading registration, I've found myself that a free registration wall to read content is a disincentive, but registration to be able to post a comment is more worth it. Go figure...
I guess it's because by then I've read the article, invested some time in the process, and feel strongly about what I'm commenting on.
If they tell you it's private before you put your stuff there, it should be.
And the terms of service should say, quite clearly "we will not divulge to law enforcement unless compelled by a court order". Then if they breach this, you sue them.
And there should be penalties if they breach (whether deliberate or through incompetence). Based on the same "how many people COULD have downloaded your stuff" metrics that the RIAA use...
That goal makes sense. Some propellor head invents (say) some mindblowing speech and facial expression recognition software, he/she doesn't want to spend the next 5 years doing (badly) what a bigger corporation could do better
- recruitment
- billing
- marketing
etc
He/she wants to sell to someone who can already do that and then go and do more of what he/she is good at.
What's wrong with that ?
It's not just regulation that favours a large established company - it's every single bit of the day to day existence of a company.
What matters is whether the large established company is google or Murdoch...
I do chuckle when I read all these things about the advantages of the latest screen tech.
I have a c1999 Handspring Visor. It has an old crappy dark grey on light grey LCD screen. Guess what ? It works in bright sunlight. Guess what else ? It has a backlight so it can work in the dark (reading in bed without waking partner). Guess what else. It goes days or weeks on 2 x AAA.
I have Compact flash or smartmedia expansion, so no realistic storage limit.
eReader.com website offers me a book purchase ecosystem. (DRM is simple - I need to enter my credit card details as used to purchase the book when I first open it to read. I can freely share the book if I want but I'd have to share credit card details, which stops me uploading to a file sharing site).
And I can read PDF's (Gutenberg) and offline web content.
Can you read a book on a 3" square screen ? Hell yes.
Depends what you are brought up with - I've met people who claim they "cannot" use a Word processor with
Strange, I've generally found that the Amazon MP3 for £5 undercuts all physical CD equivalent.
It also saves me time, as it will end up on a Sonos or MP3 player anyway.
If someone showed me a pie chart of where the money goes for a CD, (showing manufacture and distribution) then a dowbnloaded album on MP3, for comparison, I could soon see whether pricing for MP3's was blatantly silly. I suspect that the truth is that the actual plastic is shockingly cheap and I'd simply end up being offended by how little teh artist gets.
You'd think the industry would be over the moon about singles sales. Selling a single on physical medium must cost as much as selling an album but the price can't be as high.
If it was me I would
- watermark each MP3 to the buyer at download time
- drop the price to about £2 per album
- use internet search to go after the massive illegal uploaders (by tracing it through to the original buyer)
- treat anything smaller as "fair use" and just get over it.
- come up with reasonable (ie very cheap) licensing for anyone who runs a business model that actually boosts their sales, and ask how we can work together.
- let the artist choose the the terms for each work, rather than impose a label-wide set of rules.
If you look at what happens when a country (eg Australia) sets out to boost sport in pursuit of a better gold medal tally at the Olympics, it makes a good parallel with innovation and tech business success.
Should we encourage grass roots sport (analogous to better education for the whole populace) or should we fund elite sporting institutes (analogous to assisting the VC funded startup with tax breaks or whatever).
I would contend that in a rapidly globalising world, USA cannot afford to sit back while their schools deteriorate and rely on the quality of privately funded higher education institutions. (Not least because these private institutions are also educating the stars of the other countries USA competes with. It's like having a US Sports institute that also trains the Russian Olympic team then wondering why there is no competitive advantage.)
For a competitive advantage, USA needs to give it's innovators an edge over their opposite numbers in other countries, that is more than just lower state taxes.
I favour pulling the grass roots lever because
- you won't find the gold medallists if they never take up the sport in the first place
- the "have nots" won't get left behind so badly if they are all educated better.
Of course, there is the argument that the US Govt doesn't care if the next google is created by an American as long as they choose to pay taxes (and employ staff) in the USA. But they'd only stay if there was a well educated employee pool.
They need to get the H1B visa numbers back up too !
Phones transmit at greater power when they are further from a mast.
Unless you are right under the mast, the field from your phone is stronger locally to you than the field from the mast.
Similarly, if you are surrounded by nearby people carrying mobile phones (as you are anywhere these days) you will probably experience less field if you stand nearer the mast.
So the crazy guy in this story needs to move nearer a mast, for his health.
Legally, if his medical claims were proven true it would not just be the guy he's suing who'd need to desist. Better surely to protect the victim with foil than try and stop ALL external sources.
I remember when I was at college, a local resident used to complain about the noise of the student disco if they went 2 mins past their 1am licensed end time. One night we left the disco lights running until 1:30 but turned off all the sound (witnessed by the appropriate authorities).
Sure enough, got a complaint. They never managed to locdge a complaint.
On the post: Confused Users Keep Racking Up Ridiculous 3G Bills, Wireless Carriers Keep Helping Them
How to roam in UK when travelling from US
On the post: Should Managers Care That Employees Are On Facebook And YouTube While At Work?
Re: Re: Re: It's about results
On the post: Should Managers Care That Employees Are On Facebook And YouTube While At Work?
Re: It's about results
If a guy was known to spend 2 hrs a day clearly just chatting at the water cooler when he had urgent work outstanding, you'd expect him to be reprimanded, yet people who are just as wasteful of time in work can do it serruptitiously (sp?) at a computer.
As yourself this. If you called in a plumber and he told you his hourly rate and said he thought it was going to be a 4 hrs job then halfway through you found him sat on his butt watching Youtube on his iphone while the clock was ticking on your dollar, and he had the nerve to tell you that "evidence has shown that this makes me more productive", you'd probably not give him a glowing reference, to say the least. Now, I wouldn't begrudge him taking the odd private call, or even dealing with other customers who called up occasionally, but only within reason.
Yet somehow when it's employees of a "big faceless corporation" the attitude that the management are daft to worry about this sort of thing seems to be the cool point of view here. Crazy.
It's also pretty galling if you're a blue collar worker "downstairs" who is very visible if you stop doing what you're 'sposed to be doing in the factory (building, testing, packaging a product) and then you go upstairs to the office and it's clear that all thise desk jockeys are giggling away at a vid of a cat standing up. Not good for motivaton, team cooperation.
Is the bandwidth really a small argument ?
I have worked in one place where Youtube at lunchtime was freely permitted but it had to be rescinded because for those people who DID want to work at lunchtime the available bandwidth had collapsed.
In the same place I use to routinely prune email to stay under an admittedly hueg disk use ceiling. And I'd do this by sorting by size and seeing which large dtuff I could throw away. And invariably 90% of my disk usage was made up of about 2% of emails with rich media attachments sent to everyone because they were amusing.
On the post: One Reason Companies Don't Do 'Free': They're Scared Of Pissing Off Those Who Bought?
I remember two particular incidents
The offence here was to promise prices would only rise.
Another was when Amazon got clever enough to spot returning big spenders and show them higher prices than the average unidentified joe. When people spotted it ("hey, if I delete cookies the prices on Amazon go down - WTF ?") there was an outcry.
I bought a book once and found myself on the author's mailing list (for reasons unrelated to my book purchase). In less than a year I had been sent a free eBook of the same title as a taster to get me to spend money on something else. So I figured this guy is happy to hand out free eBooks. When I saw another of his books for free download as a PDF, (on a site that with hindsight may not have been authorised to offer it) I was not morally worried about downloading because the author is in the habit of giving these away and probably set this up too.
To put it more briefly, I subconsciously value his eBooks lower now (even though they are good books).
On the post: Typosquatter Plays Innocent By Casting Microsoft As Big And Mean
Re: Re: What's the problem exactly ?
What deceptive practice ?
Did they pretend to be microsoft ?
Who exactly was deceived. Did someone think that you can misspell a website and get there anyway ?
This is like having a phone number almost the same as the X Factor voting line and when someone calls you answer "half price pizza for one night only". Most will hang up and redial, some might fancy a pizza.
And if there was a legitimate gay porn site called hotmale.com, (there might be for all I know) whose fault is it that your kid went there by mistake ? Perhaps MS's fault for having such a daft name as "hotmail".
On the post: Typosquatter Plays Innocent By Casting Microsoft As Big And Mean
What's the problem exactly ?
If noone owned the hot5mail domain at all, then the person would type hot5mail, get an error, and realise they had mistyped and try again.
As it is, they see an exercise machine ad and they try again.
Unless they want an exercise machine in which case he is offering a service.
Obviously if he had a website pretending to be hotmail that would be different. And if he had a website offering a competing email service, that would
I am far more bothered about the fact that I could register ford.info when the new .info domains came out and then be pretty much forced to hand it over to Ford because they are large and it causes confusion for the domain not to lead to them.
Is the problem just sour grapes because he's making money ?
If he had a link saying "did you mean 'hotmail' ? click here" then would that make it any better ?
This (to me) is like putting a furniture shop in the alley before the alley with the Starbucks in. Some people looking for Starbucks turn down the wrong alley by mistake, and most realised their error but a small few see the furniture shop and end up buying a sofa. If we all know that they'd never have gone down the alley if they had not been looking for Starbucks, does that give Starbucks the right to close down the furniture shop ? It's not like they lost any real business.
I can't see the issue here if the guy is not competing.
If the gripe is "the person wasn't looking for exercise machines when he landed on that hot5mail website" then that would be true of most advertsing in history pre-adwords. We just try to catch passing eyeballs the best we can, be it on a bus shelter, the side of a taxicab, whatever.
This guy went out and bought a piece of real estate to hang his banners on and people pass by (albeit by accident) and see his ads. Just like the alley in the analogy above.
I say good luck to him. Microsoft can always make him an offer for the alley.
On the post: A Real Copyright Problem In The UK: The Difficulty Of Archiving Important Websites
Do takedowns apply to archived websites ?
Whose job is it to know where else the site may be archived ?
- I can't be expected to know who archived my site.
- The takedown issuer can't know for sure.
And although when there is just one archiver (the British Library) it might be easy, who says there couldn't be many ?
Is it appropriate to preserve a libellous publication for posterity when the courts have decreed that it should be unpublished ?
Is there a legal distinction between "archived so you could go and look at it in the library" and "archived so you can find it on the web" ?
Come to that, does a takedown of a website imply that the Google cache has to be wiped too ?
This seems like a minefield.
Can college law students choose this area as a major these days ? Seems like a growth area to me...
On the post: Is Elvis Dead? Who Knows, But His Passport Made It Through Airport Security In Amsterdam
Shoe bomber was not caught
As I recall, Richard Reid was not "caught by existing methods" but was in the process of (stupidly) igniting his bomb in the cabin rather than the toilet when he was apprehended.
So he was in fact not "caught" at all, in the "keeping everyone safe" meaning of the word.
Relying on all bombers being idiots was never going to be a good long term policy. Not after the level of planning shown on 9/11.
They need to get some creatives together to brainstorm attack methods, THEN see if their systems would withstand such attack attempts. I predicted 2 component liquid bombs would come soon after 9/11 but I'm not someone they are likely to listen to and anyway who am I supposed to tell ?
For example, how big a swallowed detonator is required to ignite the stomach of a suicide bomber who has been swallowing many small pouches of semtex ?
Our security services simply have no imagination, that's the problem.
On the post: Instead Of Suing Each Other Over Who Can Claim 'Most Reliable' Why Not Invest In Making A More Reliable Network?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Truth
Yet those who do have a techie mate tend to trust the techie's advice on things that the techie really only has an OPINION on and no true expertise. And many techies like to offer advice outside their area of true knowledge.
On the post: And, Of Course, Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Google Over Buzz
It was breathtakingly stupid
Either way, very surprising given google's (supposed) talent.
So how are they going to be disincentivised from doing something sloppy like this again ?
I'm not sure a class action is the right way to go but something major (read "expensive") should happen to give them (and anyone else) pause before doing it again.
On the post: Amazon, Macmillan Fight Over Ebook Prices; After Amazon Removes Macmillan Titles, It Caves To Higher Prices
Just like hardbacks / Paperbacks ?
This forces people to choose between a price (maybe even a format) to suit them, and the desire to have it now.
Though it can be pretty annoying to be forced to buy an overpriced, oversized hardback just to get it when you want it, it's how the industry has worked for a long time and anyone is free to choose not to buy it.
About the only time when this would be seriously worrying is if the book was named on the national school curriculum and the publisher delayed the paperback until after term start.
If eBooks are cheaper than paper then I'd expect publishers to do exactly the same (ie launch them later). And it's a business decision. They may actually be wrong (overall sales may suffer) but they're free to do it.
If eBooks cost the same, then I'd be more surprised.
There's no difference between believing paperbacks will cannibalise hardbacks, and believing eBooks will cannibalise paper (and DVD's will cannibalise theatres, DVD rentals will cannibalise DVD sales etc).
The one small flaw in it all is that you are deliberately and explicitly choosing not to give customers what they want in an attempt to extract more money. In any other industry, someone might break ranks and just serve the customer. But if I am publishing a new book by author xx, there is noone else competing with me to publish that actual book.
You could argue that if book xxx is only in hardback then I'll buy book yyy to read on the plane instead because that IS in paperback form.
But if their business model is stupid, that's their funeral. It's the author I feel sorry for.
But they (publishers) should be competing against each other to win the author, surely.
What would bother me is if the publisher told one outlet (Amazon) what to charge and not every other outlet.
On the post: Intuit Lobbying The Government To Make It More Difficult To File Your Tax Returns
Re: No more Turbo Tax
Local office did 1st tax return. Fine
Local office did 2nd tax return, said I owed nearly $5K.
So I paid it.
Local office did 3rd tax return and said I owed $5K again. I decided to check it myself before posting it off. Spent many light nioghts acquainting myself with the tax code. Decided they were wrong.
Went to another HR Block office, who knew far more than the first. They agreed and recalculated my 3rd year. Nothing to pay.
They then helped me refile the 2nd year and eventually (nearly 5 years later) i got my $5k back.
The 2nd HR Block office were superb, in a nutshell.
The 1st HR block office were simply not qualified to do a resident alien's tax return.
Seems there is no reliable guaranteed quality with HR Block. You just have to hope it's a "good" HR Block.
The story in the headline is about Intuit but back in 2005 the same story surfaced as I recall about the HR Blocks of this world blocking the "preprinted forms" legislation.
In fact I recall that the suggestion was that millions of americans would have such simple tax returns they'd just need to sign and post it back...
On the post: Parked Car Gets Multiple Speed Camera Tickets
Re: Re: Missing data
The camera did exactly what it should - took a picture of a speeding car (with a stationary car also in the picture). It was the human oversight that failed - the human weak link misinterpreted which car in the picture was the speeding car.
On the post: Flexible Or Paradoxical? Why The NY Times' Plan Is Inherently Self-Limiting
Old vs New - And where dio you actually add value
two opposing business models: the old one, where the audience is the product and the advertisers are the customers, and the new one, where news is the product and the audience is the customer
That would make google the "old" one, right ?
I think your "old" model may be what they used to have but they have never really honestly recognised it as such.
The Londing Evening Standard, perhaps, has now !
Your "new" model (where customers pay for their newspaper) is what they have been pretending to do for years.
At the end of the day, they need to reframe the debate away from "news". News is the same wherever you get it, just a bit earlier in some places. It's basically facts. Analysis is where they add value.
So I imagine a situation where the freely accessible page says "Car bomb in Kabul" and explains what happened today, and then there is a link to a walled Seymour Hersch piece saying "How the fall of Karzai would affect the US Economy".
That is, the "news" is free, and used as bait for selling the "analysis", which is unique, high value, and expensive to produce. All the time selling highly targeted ads on the free AND walled pages. You cosy up to aggregators and google for the free news pages (which include the tasters for the analysis pages too) but use robots.txt to completely block access to the walled content. Then if google make money and you sell ads too, you toast each other and keep co-operating.
I'm not saying it's always going to work. But it makes some rational sense, selling what is actually of value. And you get what is probably the bulk of the short attention span traffic through your free site with ad revenue.
Same with other content. A national weather summary on the free pages. A zipcode targeted customised 5 day outlook on the pay site. An easy crossword on the free page, the famously difficult signature cryptic puzzle on the pay site (maybe 2 days behind, or the answers on the free site).
Regading registration, I've found myself that a free registration wall to read content is a disincentive, but registration to be able to post a comment is more worth it. Go figure...
I guess it's because by then I've read the article, invested some time in the process, and feel strongly about what I'm commenting on.
On the post: Do You Have Any Legal Right To Privacy For Information Stored Online?
Depends on terms of service
And the terms of service should say, quite clearly "we will not divulge to law enforcement unless compelled by a court order". Then if they breach this, you sue them.
And there should be penalties if they breach (whether deliberate or through incompetence). Based on the same "how many people COULD have downloaded your stuff" metrics that the RIAA use...
On the post: Will A Fear Of Going Public End The Innovation Boom?
Re: Goal
- recruitment
- billing
- marketing
etc
He/she wants to sell to someone who can already do that and then go and do more of what he/she is good at.
What's wrong with that ?
It's not just regulation that favours a large established company - it's every single bit of the day to day existence of a company.
What matters is whether the large established company is google or Murdoch...
On the post: The Killer Feature I Would Design Into An Apple Tablet
Bleeding edge of tech
I have a c1999 Handspring Visor. It has an old crappy dark grey on light grey LCD screen. Guess what ? It works in bright sunlight. Guess what else ? It has a backlight so it can work in the dark (reading in bed without waking partner). Guess what else. It goes days or weeks on 2 x AAA.
I have Compact flash or smartmedia expansion, so no realistic storage limit.
eReader.com website offers me a book purchase ecosystem. (DRM is simple - I need to enter my credit card details as used to purchase the book when I first open it to read. I can freely share the book if I want but I'd have to share credit card details, which stops me uploading to a file sharing site).
And I can read PDF's (Gutenberg) and offline web content.
Can you read a book on a 3" square screen ? Hell yes.
Depends what you are brought up with - I've met people who claim they "cannot" use a Word processor with
On the post: Growth Of Music Digital Sales Is Slowing Down
Re: Lower cost = More buyers
It also saves me time, as it will end up on a Sonos or MP3 player anyway.
If someone showed me a pie chart of where the money goes for a CD, (showing manufacture and distribution) then a dowbnloaded album on MP3, for comparison, I could soon see whether pricing for MP3's was blatantly silly. I suspect that the truth is that the actual plastic is shockingly cheap and I'd simply end up being offended by how little teh artist gets.
You'd think the industry would be over the moon about singles sales. Selling a single on physical medium must cost as much as selling an album but the price can't be as high.
If it was me I would
- watermark each MP3 to the buyer at download time
- drop the price to about £2 per album
- use internet search to go after the massive illegal uploaders (by tracing it through to the original buyer)
- treat anything smaller as "fair use" and just get over it.
- come up with reasonable (ie very cheap) licensing for anyone who runs a business model that actually boosts their sales, and ask how we can work together.
- let the artist choose the the terms for each work, rather than impose a label-wide set of rules.
On the post: Can The US Continue To Innovate At A Necessary Rate Without Causing Complete Social Upheaval?
Parallels with sport
Should we encourage grass roots sport (analogous to better education for the whole populace) or should we fund elite sporting institutes (analogous to assisting the VC funded startup with tax breaks or whatever).
I would contend that in a rapidly globalising world, USA cannot afford to sit back while their schools deteriorate and rely on the quality of privately funded higher education institutions. (Not least because these private institutions are also educating the stars of the other countries USA competes with. It's like having a US Sports institute that also trains the Russian Olympic team then wondering why there is no competitive advantage.)
For a competitive advantage, USA needs to give it's innovators an edge over their opposite numbers in other countries, that is more than just lower state taxes.
I favour pulling the grass roots lever because
- you won't find the gold medallists if they never take up the sport in the first place
- the "have nots" won't get left behind so badly if they are all educated better.
Of course, there is the argument that the US Govt doesn't care if the next google is created by an American as long as they choose to pay taxes (and employ staff) in the USA. But they'd only stay if there was a well educated employee pool.
They need to get the H1B visa numbers back up too !
On the post: Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off WiFi And Cell Phone
Safer nearer a mast
Unless you are right under the mast, the field from your phone is stronger locally to you than the field from the mast.
Similarly, if you are surrounded by nearby people carrying mobile phones (as you are anywhere these days) you will probably experience less field if you stand nearer the mast.
So the crazy guy in this story needs to move nearer a mast, for his health.
Legally, if his medical claims were proven true it would not just be the guy he's suing who'd need to desist. Better surely to protect the victim with foil than try and stop ALL external sources.
I remember when I was at college, a local resident used to complain about the noise of the student disco if they went 2 mins past their 1am licensed end time. One night we left the disco lights running until 1:30 but turned off all the sound (witnessed by the appropriate authorities).
Sure enough, got a complaint. They never managed to locdge a complaint.
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