You mean languages that you don't know aren't *greek* to you ;^)

Short story, some people just have bad tastes and marketing people should keep this in mind.

Summary. Results limited to repeat purchasing of consumer products. With total sales held constant, as the percentage of sales identified from these so-called harbinger-of-failure customers rises from 25% to 50%, the probability of success of that product decreases about 31%. If these customers have repeat purchase, the relative probability of success decrease even more (2 repeat purchases: success decrease 37%; 3 or more purchases: success decreases 56%).

Longer story? The paper describes their data set as follows:

The analysis defines a successful product as one that continues sales after 3 years (and a flop otherwise) based on aggregate sales. But they use data from loyalty card scans to identify groups of customers to test their hypothesis, and they limited their analysis to products that survived at least 1 year to avoid the "noise" associated with no chance to purchase products. FWIW, they do level some suspicion that the use/non-use of loyalty cards bias the data somewhat, however, the analysis was based on the following methodology...

Note they don't attempt to predict out-of-the-gate flop products (like the Zune), they merely note that it seems like some people's tastes for consumer items that are subject to repeat purchase are likely not indicative of ultimate retail success and for some reason this is unexpectedly correlated across different products. Their conclusion is that the preferences of these harbingers-of-failure customers for items are indicative of a negative preference in the greater population and that will likely limit the ultimate growth potential of a product, and stores shouldn't waste precious shelf space on such items favored by these people.

For those of you who remember the original Motorola 'Flip Phone', those things were a godsend in the day, but their battery life left much do be desired. Even with an 'extended' battery pack you couldn't get more than 8 hours of standby time -- and god forbid you actually got a call.

I had gotten a couple of small 6-volt jell cells from work (a UPS that had been in a plane crash), then I got a dead cell phone battery from the repair shop. I ripped the battery pack apart and put in a small voltage controller then ran the voltage controller to the jell cells. The whole contraption fit quite nicely into a fluke multimeter case.

Now I had a portable cell phone with 3days of standby PLUS 8 hours of talk time ... couldn't be beat until they came out with digital cell phones.

Telus at the time had 'unlimited talk time' contracts, knowing that battery life would be the limiting factor -- but not for me! I regularly went over 1500 minutes, and Telus eventually changed 'unlimited' to '1000 minutes' after I taught my hack to a couple of other hardware types.

You can NAT ip6, if you want to, and use private IP6 addresses internally. The advantage with IP6 is that you have a MUCH larger pool of non-routable addresses to choose from which means that It'll be that much harder for an attacker to guess at your internal network layout and machine addresses.

The original reason for IP4 NAT was necessity, not security. It was (and is) quite common for a house or business to get a single IP4 address for however-many machines. IP6, on the other hand, defaults to giving a normal end-user an address pool bigger than what IP4 provides to the whole planet. This means that it's WAY harder for an external hacker to guess at the address of a random machine. I got a /64 prefix for my home network. That means that I have trillions of potential address for dozens of machines. Even with thousands of machines, if I pick a set of random addresses for my machines (which is what auto-config does), it should take a well-provisioned attacker a couple of centuries to get his first hit.

If you add NAT on top of all that, then you've got a pretty good security regime.

However -- all of that being said, the main excuse given for NAT being 'secure' is that people can't get to a NATed machine from the outside world. However, between machines getting 48bit (or more) randomized addresses that change from day to day, and a simple stateful firewall, you would have the same security and then some if you moved to ipv6. -- before you even throw NAT into the configuration.,

The reason why the dotted quad format was used is that it translated into 32 bits -- which fit quite nicely into normal (long) INTs back in the '80s.

The IETF knew that this was to small for the longer term, but the efficiency argument won out. (this was back at a time when a 1Mz mainfraim with 16Megabytes of ram could be timeshared to over 100 users). They figured that by the time the 32 bit address space was saturated, that the replacement protocol with a REAL address space (IP6) would be easier on the computers of the day and there would be lots of time to get it up and running (turns out to have been over 30 years).

What they didn't plan for was that the 'Net would be effectively in the control of business majors and bean counters and that IP6 adoption would be at the whim of financial considerations and a 'you first' attitude. Now IP6 adoption is waiting for a 'killer app' that is on an IP6-only server ... or for Google to announce that they'll give preferential listing to sites that are IP6 capable.

I'm all those folks collecting baseball cards, comic books and antique collectibles would have something to say about this attitude. Also, wasn't this similar to the rationale used to suppress labeling requirements for irradiated strawberries and GM foods (e.g., they were superior to their counterparts and otherwise nutritionally the same)?

Sometimes people just want what they want and feel deceived if they get something else (even if it is "superior" in some way).

So after all this complaining about how counterfeit food and medicine from china is morally repugnant, we decide to turn the tables...

At least we are attempting to save the rhinos, I guess, but seems to me that it's a slippery slope to agree that flooding a market with counterfeit goods is actually a good idea...

I imagine if the drug made the mouse more insane (i.e., struggling more against the impossible). Conversely, I imagine if the drug made the mouse smart enough to know it was impossible, it would appear depressed.

Reminds me of a scene in the Bruce Lee film Enter The Dragon where he realizes he finds himself in a trap and just sits down and waits to make his move.

I assume you mean just in the last few years.

The previous administrations headed by Chirac and Sarkozy weren't really known for being "welcoming" to immigrants... According to OECD statistics, during that time, France recorded one of the lowest rates of immigration among top European countries, and the number of naturalizations fell precipitously (~50%) due to more stringent language skills and culture testing requirements. I believe the average time for naturalization is still hovering about 15 years in France (which no doubt is biased by the fact if you are born in France, you can apply for naturalization at 18). In most other countries, time for naturalization (if allowed by visa) is generally around 5-10 years...

Of course once you become a citizen, it may indeed have an egalitarian nature, but I've heard that prior to naturalization status, it isn't quite as egalitarian as one might expect...

Oh yeah and sadly I *did* listen to it quite a bit. When the Darkside of the moon album dropped from Billboard's list of top albums back in 1988, the person in the dorm room next to me played a 24 hour/day, 7 day/week vigil on his stereo system until the housing department finally had him shut it down for keeping people up at night (esp time and money)...

Although I still have the album myself, I haven't listened to it since '88 because of this incident (and I freely admit to destroying several cassette tapes of Darkside during that 7 day/week vigil/torture)...

AFAIK, that comes from a set of interviews recorded by Roger Waters to create background voice ambiance for the album (and was enshrined in the final mastering) was actually made by Jerry Driscoll.

The full quote was apparently, "There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun." I'm guessing Jerry made that statement to illustrate the mistake that Pink Floyd made, but I could be wrong...

The company that paid you *decided* you were not an employee and gave you a 1099 (presumably after requesting you fill out a W-9 form).
The company could have decided you were an employee, gave you a W-4 and a W-2 at the end of the year.

The company could have done it wrong. It is not up to them, nor is it up to you. The final decision is made by the employment department of the state in which you did the work and it depends on many factors (including if you were restricted in any way to work for only that company and not a competitor at the same time).

Although it technically might be easily apply for permanent residency, depending on your situation, the only realistic chance you have is if you have some "in" like an H-1B.

Depending on your personal situation, it is generally *much* easier to obtain permanent residency if you hold an H-1B visa. The generic option for most people is to get married to a US citizen or enter the green-card lottery (aka the diversity visa program). For example, if you are married already, or if you happen to be coming from a country that sources a large number US immigrants (say india or china), or don't happen to be world class at anything in demand, an H-1B is likely to be the only realistic option to get permanent residency status in your lifetime (other than maybe to have an anchor baby and wait until your kid turns 21 and can sponsor you for permanent residency).