I think what Runaway was trying to say is that Android is open source, but Android-based phones are not generally a very open platform because of the carrier's Tivo'ization.

In addition to your points, it also raises the issue of what is "important." Pokemon for better or worse is a big part of our culture, as are celebrities, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld. Wikipedia's job shouldn't be to rewrite what we think we should be.... it should be to document what we are. And there shouldn't be a limit to the amount of information, only that information is as factual as we can get it. But that's just my opinion.

Umm... that was my point, or part of it. It is a people problem. The second part of my point is that companies that implement a technology solution do so because they lack the ability to manage their people.... ie. the managers are unable to correctly deal with the problem.

Think of it this way... imagine you have a company where you have "free" stationary. Anyone can go ahead and get whatever they need. 99 out of 100 employes never have an issue. But then one day 1 employee decides to steel staplers and calculators and whatever. Then the company decides to institute a plan to require everyone to fill out a request form and justify why they need 3 pens.

It's an overreaction (and not even a correct one) to what should have been a discipline issue. That's what the facebook/twitter blocking is to me. It's overkill for the wrong reasons. And all it does is make everyone else's lives more inconvenient.

I recently started working at a company that blocks certain websites. I'm not sure that blocking Facebook/Twitter does a whole lot for the company... personally I think it hurts more than it helps. The reason is that quite a few people these days have some sort of mobile that allows them to access those sites anyway. So all you've done is make it so it takes them more time to deal with it. Before, I'd check my personal mail using the company network because it was faster and more convenient, in and out, and I'm good. Now I have to deal with slower connections through the cell network. I'm not abusing the time or anything (and far within what would normally be considered a reasonable break), but it is less efficient. Heck there are smokers that take up far more time smoking than most others do with Facebook/Twitter.

So the problem you have is people who do abuse their distractions. You don't solve that by making things inconvenient for everyone with technological barriers. You solve that, as you said, as a "people problem" and warm/fire them as appropriate.

Resorting to technological barriers does two things: potentially lowers productivity/morale by making the company appear intolerant to people's emotional needs (eg. the purpose of breaks), and it makes the company seem like it doesn't know manage it's employees, allowing unproductive people to stick around (if they were unproductive before your barrier, they're going to find ways to be unproductive with your barrier), which will also lead to the productive people asking why they should be that productive.

The board members also tend to think this way. Hence my phrase "CEos and other decision makers".

I agree this is all opinion. But out of all the people I know (myself included) that have worked in startups, private companies, public companies, etc... I don't know anyone that's actually made any money off an employee stock purchase program, for example. Maybe I just have really unlucky friends. I saw this exact sort of thing happen at the last company I worked at... where the CEO's public statement was to "increase the value of the company" and all that good stuff... but it really seems like they were more focused on increasing the stock price.

I've since left the company, and my new company seems to be a lot more reasonable. So it's certainly not always true. Again, I'm merely stating that the short-term nature of stocks seems to encourage short-term success. Some leaders (CEO/Board/President/etc) can do well despite this, but many don't appear to.

Are you sure "investment" doesn't have a time limit? I mean if you wanted to start a company, and I say I'm willing to invest $1000 but only for 13 microseconds. Does that help either one of us? I understand you can say that it allows you to pool together lots of investors and minimize risk... but let's say you have a million investors willing to invest $1000 for 13 microseconds... Well now you've got $1000 to spend for 13 seconds. I'm sure I'm missing some clever financial way of thinking about things... but I just fail to see how this provides me (an investor) with any substantial benefit or you (someone theoretically wanting to provide a useful product/service to people) with anything substantially useful. This whole mechanism to me only seems to server one purpose and that's a pyramid scheme for big institutions to shuffle money around.

Yes. But my argument is that short-term windows encourage business owners to focus on short-term success... essentially driving them to failure. You could argue that's just the way it is and they shouldn't have been in business if they didn't know how to run it. But my question remains, why have a system that encourages "bad" behavior in the first place?

Ah... Nice idea. I really like this actually. It allows the people who really want to do it continue to do so at a cost, while encouraging the "correct" behavior.

Please take a step back and re-read what I said. You've argued exactly the point I was not making.

I was not arguing anything about what HFT was doing to stocks, liquidity of stocks, or any such thing. I completely accept that. What I was arguing about was the mindset any "short-term" stock system places upon the CEOs and other decision makers of companies. This is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. The technology is merely enhancing the people problem.

You're right that there needs to be a real study about it. My point was that there needs to be a study on the "people" side of the problem, not the technology. All too often, we technologists focus so much on the technology we forget about this. And it seems to be as much so (if not more so) in the finance sector.

Have you worked at a public company or one that transitioned from private to public? My general sense has been that CEOs tend to then focus on "what the investors want". It doesn't matter if the investors are people or algorithms. The fact is they've now got the "wrong" mindset for running a business.. second guessing what the "mythical investor" wants vs. paying attention to customers/employees/etc.

Please note, I've never claimed anything I said was anything other than my own opinions. I've also been careful to put "wrong" in quotes to highlight that I'm referring to my own values for a business. It's a perfectly valid business model to aim for short term gains with the sole intention of selling the company. That's just not my personal value for a business.

I'm not sure your analogy quite fits. It's more like depositing a dollar in the bank, then turning around and withdrawing it out a second later, just so you can capture that second worth of interest.

Your second paragraph turns it around, because with a loan, the bank is investing in you, not the other way around... so in the stock market analogy, you're the corporation. Just try asking a bank for a $50k loan for 15 seconds and see what they say. There's not a lot of value in it for them, is there?

The problem with studies like that, and much of the analysis of the stock market, is that it's all done on the numbers. The researchers may be absolutely correct in their study. However, what the current state of the stock market does do is encourage the "wrong" state of mind for many businesses. It's my belief that going public ruins more companies than it helps for exactly this reason (this would be a human study not a numbers study). People start making decisions based on what they thing the investors want that quarter. And to me, that's the surest way to kill a business, as you've now taken away from your focus on your customers and your employees. So while HFT may increase liquidity and all that good stuff, it's doing so at the cost of the long term health of the company. (Not all businesses fall into this of course, but it appears to be more common than not).

I may not be a serious day trader, but as an (albiet modest) investor, I want a company that thinks long term. And it's my understanding the stock market was originally created for investment purposes. What sort of "investment" is it to put money into company for a second or even a day or a week? I actually think the time window for making trades should be more like one a month or even a quarter or maybe twice a year. With a longer period between trades, I understand people may feel uneasy about the commitment, but I think that's exactly what it should mean to "invest." However, if it's a big enough deal to people, then perhaps you could also have a (shorter) window for backing out (with perhaps a small penalty).

Keep in mind that Apple's rules are there largely to deal with software. Yes people are trying to figure out ways to sell other things like books and so forth, and Apple needs to figure out how to make that work. But Farnsworth made a number of great points about the trust level that consumers can expect. Take shareware authors for example... I'm always wary about purchasing random software from places out on the net... even if I find some decent reviews and such on the site, I'm never quite sure how "real" the product is. The Apple's App store, I don't have that problem anymore. Yes, some apps may be crap, but I have a certain level of legitimacy that I'll get something that's even half-way reasonable (and not a complete scam) by purchasing from the App store.

In addition, as a software developer, I look at Apple's 30% take, and I'm perfectly glad to take it. Yes it's true, you can get credit card processing at 1-2%. But any sites that support more for software distribution, shopping carts, etc. can easily take anywhere from 1-10%. In addition if I want to package my product or even get it into a store at some point, I think I can easily surpass this 30% in addition to a whole lot of hassle I have to deal with. In short, I'm happy to give Apple 30% to take on the ENTIRE publishing and distribution of my product, in addition to giving me instant world-wide exposure. They even deal with the software licensing hassles (even if your options as a developer are quite limited, it works in many cases and is quite fair to both the developer and end-user). If you don't want that, fine, you can keep selling your stuff on your own website and just not buy into the Apple eco-system. But you should recognize the eco-system has it's advantages... and yes it gets those advantages by enforcing certain rules. Also from what I've been hearing the reason many shareware authors have loved the App store because they've gotten quite a bit more sales from it.

Don't forget that cellular has fairly limited capacity... it's designed for a lot of re-use, making the assumption that people are continually moving. So in a time of emergency when no one's moving and everyone's calling everyone, you're going to get a small fraction of the people through compared to the wired lines. I don't know what the numbers are, but I thought the capacity of each cell tower was fairly low (like on the order of 100 per tower, possibly less).

The first inclination we have is that all these users have really bad passwords. However, you're missing one key piece of data and that is what was the real hack rate? How many accounts were hacked/month, and was there any correlation between hacked accounts and password strength?

If the correlation is low, then what it really tells us is that our standard "best practices" may not really be the "best" because maybe they're unnecessarily complicated.

We don't have that data, so we really can't say much other than this is what people do.

Given the fact that the account info was stolen, I think it's justifiable that people understand the level of importance of this sort of account (ie not really important at all)

In Apple's case, though, apps are DRMed apps are also jailed. As the melikamp pointed out, that ensures the apps authenticity. The jailing however is also the primary security model for the iPhone. I agree that the API is complex enough that perhaps someone will find a way to exploit a hole somewhere eventually. However the iPhone usage model is really different from that of a desktop. If a hole is discovered, Apple fixes it and users update their phones.

I'm not talking about "unofficial" users here.. the ones who jailbreak or purchase a non-standard iPhone that Apple doesn't support or whatever.

The fact is it's been 4 years now since the first iPhone... and if there was an API hole somewhere, no one's found it (you can be sure the jailbreak & Cydia crowd would be all over that exploit). And on top of it, the OS is regularly updated. So practically speaking the problem of viruses doesn't exist. And if it did, an outbreak would likely be quite limited compared to what can exist on a PC.