its_so_on

Reading carefully affords one the privilege of reading less.

It's actually just one example of my point - we don't really need to speculate on whether there's a market or if not, why not.

It's like if entrapment convinces your performance-oriented daughter who's short on cash (to make this an analogy with the artist in this article) to have sex for money as a kind of performance (same convoluted logic as the artist's in the article).

If afterwards she tries again, there's no proof there's actually a criminal market for her and her criminal soliciting skills learned for the entrapment. But she may or may not know that. One entrapment operation can ruin your daughter's life, who perhaps had literally never given a single thought to prostitution, just as you and I have never thought of armed robbery. It's like a fucked-up internship offered by the government, only instead of setting you up for life with your newfound skills, it fucks you up for life, as in the case we've just read about.

The reason I added that EDIT is because I actually hadn't read that far down yet - I was just referring to his first counterfeiting gig when I first posted the comment: inline search the article for "Kuhl’s counterfeiting career had begun a decade earlier" and read from there.

Of course you have no basis for your claim that he would have eventually found a buyer. This is a "manufactured criminal" and the police certainly got fed up with waiting for an actual market for his work to materialize. Entrapment is so insidious because when you turn a good guy, maybe there's no market for "good guy's evil works" anyway. (Who knows why, maybe he looks like an informant/plant/mole because he's a real artist and normal, genuine, good guy, who only got into 1 single crime - and no corresponding culture or connections, no other crimes, nothing - through an entrapment operation.)

Please read the article more carefully and you'll see exactly what I mean.

This is the real Facebook secret sauce in convenient flowchart form:

    What's the most evil thing we can think of doing?
     V 
    Candidate <-----<------- Think of the next-most evil thing we can do
     V                                     ^   
    Can we code that? (no) ------->------->^
     V (yes)                               ^
    Is it legal?                           ^
     V (yes/no)                            ^
    Can we get away with it? (abs. not)--->^
     V (yes/maybe/prob. not)               ^
    Keep shipping!                         ^
     V                                     ^
    Did we get in trouble for it? (no)     ^
     V (yes)                        V      ^
    Claim it was a mistake!         V      ^
     V                              V      ^
    Still in trouble? (no)-> Keep feature->^ 
     V (kind of)                    ^
    Being sued for it? (no) --->--->^
     V (yes)                        ^
    Throw money at lawsuit          ^
     V                              ^
    Did we lose? (yes/no) ----->--->^

If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real, talented artist low on his money becoming a counterfeiter: i.e. they made him do it, and he wouldn't have done it without them, and a judge released him early on probation for this reason (from the article).

But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.

The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.

It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.

[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:

"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."

>Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.

So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution?

This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.

I mean that it's unheard-of for judges to be literally bribed as this implies. This guy is posting his research digging things up - a very interesting read: if he had found anything!

But he didn't. The steps he took are worthless and don't deserve so much as a mention. This would be like me googling your username and some illegal activity, finding that I couldn't find your username on any forums dedicated to that illegal activity, "but still." Come on. The steps I took are worthless and aren't worth mentioning.

He didn't investigate it. He said, "here's what I did" which fell far short of any investigation. He had no reason to post how far he got along in his little dirt digging campaign.

This isn't a corrupt country (there is a specific list of corrupt countries, this is a pretty objective statement.) It makes 0 sense for you to post "how far you got" as you didn't get anywhere.

Let's dig into this and see what we find. What are your impressions of Apple's 2-3 year plans and prospects?

I'll respond with my thoughts.

smart. Spoiler/summary: they use a "leap smear" to keep code logic from breaking.

Instead of making code encounter the same second twice or not encounter a certain second, they smear the extra second over several hours beforehand through the central time server; by the time the leap second comes you're already sufficiently ahead/behind. (My comment: This works because the granulatiy of the time isn't that low anyway, so obviously no code can rely on it. Therefore, if code is correct without the smear it will be correct with the smear.)

This is kind of lacking.

People, this is about whether tomatoes taste bland! From the article: "But the new study, published this week in Science, found that the mutation that leads to the uniform appearance of most store-bought tomatoes..."

If you don't get it, Science, like Nature, is extremely prestigious (for a general science journal) - Nobel territory. :)

ha - this was published in Science. This is serious business. You could win a McNobel in Tomatorie.

No, I'm a fanboi. I want Apple to keep giving me something to be a fanboi to - I am looking ahead 2-3 years and their strategy is not doing it.

Please think a little more abstractly. The iPhone is less and less a well-differentiated premium offering versus its competition.

Maybe I need to spell it out for you, but if Apple allows Chrome it has to allow Firefox. Any and every argument that would apply to one applies to the other.

This time it's different. This time it's failing by deciding to act as much as a beige undifferentiated manufacturer as possible. If you like I can send you a complete analysis.

I'm telling you what happens if Apple allows Firefox to dominate the iOS ecosystem. It's easier to target, it's easier to get right as a single app on an android device, and it crushes Apple's ecosystem and differnetiation. They've fucked up letting chrome in and they need to remove it to set things right. It's that simple.

more specifically, Apple is Apple for shutting down apps that usurp their markets. But don't worry - Apple won't be Apple for much longer, and it has given up on all premium differentiation by being idiots.

they very much do care. If the only button anyone clicked on the home screen was "Firefox" and then did everything from there forever, pretty soon people would realize they don't really need an iPhone and would buy a far-less premium device.

This is exactly what will happen in Apple allows Chrome. They should remove it from the app store. It's against their policies and just like flash in mobile safari (firefox on ios is exactly like flash in mobile safari): All the arguments about not being "as native" are just as true, and Apple no longer has a Safari community across its devices to corral around and for developers to target.

Tim Cook is running Apple into the ground by removing Apple's user experience differentiation. He is creating beige boxes. Samsung can do that. Asus can do that. He needs to take a look at what the fuck Apple even is.

Ever think to link to a file (e.g. excel spreadsheet) for a forum, like you can for an image with imgur?

other than Dropbox public url's the services that exiist have so many images with the word "Download" in the resulting link, all of which look exactly like a UX element, that you have to click about half of them or play Sherlock Holmes to uncover the real download link. It's like a scratch-off lottery.

If you don't host your data in several alternative dimensions so that the same events wouldn't transpire in all of them - why not assume you'll encounter the occasional outage?

Be that as it may, I don't want to succeed and have my friends and family think of me as a hustler - an $80k job as a programmer beats that. Being CEO is, and ought to be, far more respectable. We should be happy that it's as "easy" as it is for the guy who only has $500 to his name and invests it in drugs to sell, gets customers and builds his capital until he's balling. I have some "respect" for that business. We're lucky ours doesn't depend on being illegal, or even ripping anyone off - we should try to hold on to that respect and build it. If nothing else, so that other people will consider this path more seriously, and so we can be taken more seriously as compared with other business people who didn't build up from scratch.

I agree with all this, but isn't there a better word than hustler?

(Which normally has quite negative fraudulent connotations that we're not tapping into here.)

I just wanted to say thank you for the title change - this is far more clear and informative and makes my earlier comment moot.

Actually it also made me click through to the paper, which also has this title. This is much better.

I know - and I don't either. But we need to be consistent in how we talk about companies that have a revenue stream they create at a systemic cost to everyone: this is (from the companies') perspective, "building value."

We're talking about the revenues the company creates for itself. (See my other comment.) I think the order of magnitude is right for the amount for-profit troll companies and troll legal divisions at bigger companies doing elective litigation book as resulting revenue. The systemic cost could be higher.

All right: how much of the quoted sum do you think the (for-profit) patent troll companies book as revenue? I think the order of magnitude is right. (Remember that traditional comapnies can also play the game and book some of the settlements etc as revenue - i.e. elective litigation.)

Give me your guess, if you think that the article quotes the systemic cost and not the part that is booked as revenue.

when a company claims to have "created $50m of value" they mean that that's what they're producing is "worth" as valuated by their customers. For lean companies like those featured here, their cost doesn't enter the picture.