Sinan Unur 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (57) comment rss

  • On the post: Starbucks Finally Realizies That Free WiFi Is The Way To Go

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2010 @ 08:37am

    Re: Starbucks coffee is horrible...

    I find it interesting that you are willing to admit to having tasted used motor oil to be able compare to Starbuck's coffee.

  • On the post: Starbucks Finally Realizies That Free WiFi Is The Way To Go

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2010 @ 08:32am

    Re: Re: Each purchase gets you 30 minutes Wi-Fi

    Consumers still value it, enabling you to charge more than you would others be able to.


    That was supposed to be enabling you to charge more than you would otherwise be able to.

  • On the post: Starbucks Finally Realizies That Free WiFi Is The Way To Go

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2010 @ 08:31am

    Re: Each purchase gets you 30 minutes Wi-Fi

    by todd, Jun 14th, 2010 @ 10:20pm



    How about each purchase has a serial number. You get 30 minutes for each purchase. As long as you buy things the wifi is free. Seems fair?



    Fair's got absolutely zilch to do with it. Once the equipment is installed, the marginal cost of an extra unit of Wi-Fi service is zero. Therefore, the optimal hourly price of Wi-Fi in the store is also zero.

    Consumers still value it, enabling you to charge more than you would others be able to.

    As for music, musicians may want to pay coffee shops for playing their music if coffee shops agree to tell customers whose music is being broadcast.

  • On the post: Dear Rupert: Before Putting Up A Paywall, It Helps To Have Your Staff Check The HTML

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 14 Jun, 2010 @ 03:52am

    Re: Someone forgot a colon after the http

    First, the `http//&hellip was my attempt to type http//…. I forgot the ; at the end, illustrating the perils of lack of proof-reading.

    More to the point, however, why would a staff-member be checking the links? Before deploying a web site like that, you must first try a test version. One of the tests you must do is to have spider go through the site and make sure all your paylinks work. None of this, entering story URLs or checking their validity is a job for a human.

  • On the post: Dear Rupert: Before Putting Up A Paywall, It Helps To Have Your Staff Check The HTML

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 14 Jun, 2010 @ 03:48am

    Someone forgot a colon after the http

    The outer http:// is added by the browser. Whoever wrote the URL seems to have done it by hand and written http//&hellip which turns the full URL into a relative path starting in the http sub-directory in the current directory.

    I cannot understand how and why they would be typing full URLs by hand. Obviously, the http://www.thetimes.co.uk/ part is a constant.

  • On the post: Turkish President Uses Twitter To Complain About His Own Gov't's Censorship Of Google

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2010 @ 02:05pm

    Turkish President on Twitter

    You can find his tweets at http://twitter.com/cbabdullahgul

    He said:

    "Türkiye'nin Youtube'u yasaklayan, Google'a erişimi engelleyen ülke kategorisinde olmasını tasvip etmem. Bu konuda yasal yollar bulunmalı."


    My translation:

    I do not approve of Turkey being in the same category as other countries banning Youtube and preventing access to Google. Regarding this, legal avenues must be found.


    The roots of these issues go back to the mid 90s when a whole bunch of new broadcast regulations were written. I have a little inside knowledge of the process, and it wasn't pretty. The current government, despite whatever other faults it might have, does not have a lot to do with how you can get a court order banning web sites for "anti-Turkish" content.

    Censorship in Turkey was not born yesterday.

  • On the post: Hollywood Seeks To Kill Off 3D Golden Goose With Much Higher Prices

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2010 @ 06:26pm

    I wish I got a dollar

    every time some high powered executive failed to grasp the downward sloping demand curve and what availability of close substitutes does to the demand curve for a specific product.

    Keep in mind that the only substitute for seeing 3D movies is not a 3D setup at home.

  • On the post: Syphilis (Or Was It Facebook?) Blamed For People Not Understanding That Correlation Does Not Mean Causation

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 25 Mar, 2010 @ 07:50am

    Not the first time, not the last time

    It is sad that a lot more people take this sort of thing seriously when the claim is that the economic and technological progress since the industrial revolution is causing an increase in cancer etc.

  • On the post: Intuit Lobbying The Government To Make It More Difficult To File Your Tax Returns

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 25 Jan, 2010 @ 04:58pm

    Tax season is frustrating for an entirely different reason

    So, everyone, thank Intuit for making tax season that much more frustrating.

    That is nonsense. Please just advocate simplification of the tax code(s).

    So long as the rules are complicated, there will be no shortage of people trying to make a buck taking advantage of that.

    Simple problem with receiving a pre-filled tax form: How do you fix an error? I bet it will be more difficult than fixing an erroneous or even disputed charge on a credit card.

  • On the post: Should Data Collected For Academic Research Get Intellectual Property Protection?

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 20 Jan, 2010 @ 09:47am

    What does the Coase Theorem have to do with this?

    The Coase theorem states that, in the absence of transactions costs (e.g. (and possibly i.e.) lawyers), the assignment of property rights (so long as they are well defined) does not matter in terms of the market leading to an efficient level of provision of the good which is the source of the externality.

    Except for those intrinsically motivated to investigate some issue, the goal of academics is to get published and get cited. The more frequently cited you are, the better your chances at getting published at better journals and the better your chances of getting cited.

    However, in the presence of large amounts of public monies being allocated to an individual discipline, the temptation of forming a monopsony can prove overwhelming. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575010931344004278.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2009 @ 04:15am

    Re: Re: I do not have any obligation to pay for others' broadband access

    I do feel the same way about rural postal service (I do believe the USPS should not have a monopoly on anything).

    The same applies to the all other rural utilities.

    As I remind people, there were schools waaaaaay before there were government schools. People have a way of solving problems for themselves much more effectively than a distant government office.

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2009 @ 04:10am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: I do not have any obligation to pay for others' broadband access

    Anonymous Coward asks:

    > Are you stupid?

    No I am not. It seems, however, you cannot read. I said current farmers. If all current farmers decided to stop farming, no one would starve because new farmers would take their places. This is pretty elementary.

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2009 @ 09:49am

    Re: Wow

    The economically relevant criterion is never whether this or that subsidy does any good at all. For everything, even heroin addiction, provides some benefits.

    The economically relevant criterion is whether the benefits from providing service to this area exceed the cost of providing that service.

    Please do read the story of the $47,000 land line (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/national/01phone.html). Of course, those people in the bayou now enjoy being able to call their neighbors. Was it worth it? Absolutely not.

    My experience and intuition tell me the $47,000 land line will be more representative of this whole broadband subsidy deal. There is no economically valid reason for there to be broadband access everywhere in the U.S.

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2009 @ 06:03am

    Re: Re: I do not have any obligation to pay for others' broadband access

    Oh, please. I do not eat because people farm: People farm because I eat.

    People are free to choose not to farm. It might be hard to swallow, but no one is going to starve if all current farmers stopped farming.


    It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.


    And that has provided us with more food than was imaginable throughout the entire history of humankind.

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2009 @ 05:58am

    Re: I tend to leave it to the business to decide what will improve their profits

    If a business makes the "wrong" decisions vis-à-vis products and service, it will driven out of the market.

    ... Uhm, except, of course, if they are, a-hem, regulated and subsidized by the government.

  • On the post: CenturyLink Won't Provide DSL, Wants To Block Competitor From Getting Fed Funds To Offer Wireless

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2009 @ 05:09am

    I do not have any obligation to pay for others' broadband access

    It is not competition when your "competitor" can cross-subsidize operations by using other people's money.

    The whole idea of providing people who live in rural areas with broadband access using tax-payer funds is repulsive. People choose where they live. All choices are about trade-offs. People who live in rural areas trade-off urban facilities for open spaces, nature, insulation from neighbors etc. That is a valid life-style choice. However, I do not have the responsibility to make their lives more comfortable.

    If the some ISP wants to offer DSL to three households separated by acres of wide open spaces, it should feel free to do it. On the other hand, this is clearly not socially optimal as the total cost of providing the service exceeds the total benefits potential subscribers would derive from the service.

    If it were otherwise, the ISP would not need subsidies to provide the service.

    If I were operating an ISP, and I saw someone set up another operation that does not have to profit (because, uhm, taxpayers all over the country are paying their costs), I would be more than a little miffed as well.

    Reminds me of the Kathleen Blanco spent something like $700,000 to bring POTS to 15 elderly people living in the bayou in February, 2005:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/national/01phone.html

  • On the post: That Random Coin Toss? Not So Random Afterall…

    Sinan Unur ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2009 @ 10:28am

    Random vs uncertain

    By "random", we mean an event where all possible outcomes can be enumerated and we can attach probabilities to those outcomes.

    If the outcomes and/or the probabilities cannot be enumerated, the situation involves "uncertainty" rather than randomness: That is, we do not know what we do not know.

    The distinction is important.