Slashdot Mirror

Then you have iTunes, Amazon, etc with music, I've never seen anything for $0.05.

Actually, I don't think I've seen anything for sale for $0.05 in some time, on the net or in physical form. Even eBay sets a minimum at $0.99.

But that begs the question. The reason they have to sell songs for $0.99 is that there's no effective micropayment system. A 6 cent song with a 35 cent processing fee? Of course, the *AA's want their cut, so it's not quite that simple, and they are acting as aggregator which is counter to the micropayment model.

Stores can't sell five cent merchandise due to labor and real estate costs. Maybe in the candy jar, but it's totally feasible when the store minder is a .jar.

You're making a good argument for discretionary payments below the threshold of decision. 99 cents for a bottle of Coke or an iTunes download (or food for a day for a starving child in a third-world country).

Newpapers are often under a buck (or closer to a buck these days) so people will just pick them up. You get a few dozen stories for that buck, and each author effectively receives a fraction of a microcent for each paper published with his article. The trick with micropayments is selling each article for a nickel instead and cutting out the middle-man. The author probably get a whole two cents per read, which is huge, in scale.

I think this will ultimately encourage better journalism since you can get more experts interested in writing with better returns.

Unfortunately, in the US, if a payment system is beginning to look feasible, the General Government swoops in and crushes or corrupts it (PayPal, eGold, etc.) Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover continue to benefit from such policies.

It's a magical land where people are happy

With your tax rates and no legal right to refuse an anal probe?

It's just the death of journalism as we know it.
Print, TV, and radio news outlets are going to have to decide if they are in the print/tv/radio news or if they are in the business of news.

It's important to realize that journalism and distribution have been tightly coupled, but the Internet makes that model obsolete.

Rather than having a Cincinnati 'science writer', we're going to have writers who are very good at certain fields of expertise within science, and their work can be widely distributed.

A blog post I made on this in May in the context of GPS technology:

Whenever I've been interviewed for a newspaper, words and facts have been twisted and/or just gotten wrong. Whenever I read a popular press article in an area where I have in-depth knowledge, it's wrong, at least in the details.

So, I just assume that's true all the time and go to specialists for real news reporting. I haven't checked, but I'd assume a place like Jane's would have a good article on this GPS thing.

How about this business model: be a journalist who's a bona-fide expert on GPS. Write completely accurate, insightful, and helpful news articles on GPS happenings. Charge alot for them.

The last part is the trick of course. But how many GPS journalists does the world need? No more than a handful. With the Internet it should be possible to greatly reduce the number of generalist journalists and start making 'newspapers' much better with experts. There's probably too much inertia at established papers but a disruptive model seems possible.

It's not 'mere blog aggregation' because most bloggers aren't writing in the form or quality required, but some scheme with writers, aggregators, and integrators could get it done. I don't see the value in local newspapers doing anything but inserting their local stories into layout and selling ads these days - find an integrator that matches your editorial values and outsource it.

Thus, I think the ad agencies will end up putting ads that aren't so offensive to any demographic, anyway. Unlike popups from the web, it's intended to be placed on public space.

Anytime you get an automated system involved, it can backfire.

I'm picturing Wolverine with sporks.

Wolverine with Sporks picture here. Money back guarantee.

Cameras in phones, cameras in purses, cameras in trunks of cars, cameras in PDAs, the list goes on. Most of the cameras also shoot video.

I have a Motorola flip phone made in the past few years and its camera (1.6 megapixel) is complete crap. I've actually tried taking a picture of a low-flying airplane at dusk, and it's all a blur.

Have a look at this one. It's taken in broad daylight, a slow-moving target, nearly overhead, with an actual 5 megapixel camera. It's point-and-shoot, but was fully extended with its 5X optical zoom. It's really hard to get more than a few pixels out of an object flying only about 5000-7000 ft.

Yeah, if I had my SLR with a good long, big lens and good low-light film, or a $1000-ish DSLR, I could probably take some good pictures like you describe. Fortunately, Moore's Law should put those kinds of sensors in cell phones within a decade, then maybe we'll see something like you describe.

there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.

Yeah, like Sarbox for instance?

Do you realize that many firms were allowed to leverage up 30 to 1?

Oh, I think the fractional reserve lending went higher than 30:1, especially if you count the trading of credit default swaps in a ring. That's exactly what took down Bear Stearns - one of the banks one day just told them they wouldn't buy them anymore, and the bank's entire liquidity disappeared. Brilliant move to take out a competitor, IMHO.

But when you have an organization like Freddie or Fannie promising to back those mortgages with taxpayer money then who cares what the rules are? If the banks actually had to assume the risk themselves you can be sure they never would have taken on the subprime mortgages. I mean, a $600,000 no-money-down, interest-only, no-income-verification loan at 6%? Only the government could pick up that deal.

Face it - we're in this mess because government insisted on subprime mortgages, government flooded the market with cheap money, government has been spooking the markets with all of its inflationary spending, and, yes, the ratings agencies are completely worthless. Whichever one gave AIG a great rating last month deserves to go down like Arthur Anderson did for its Enron deals. So now the government is attempting to solve the problem with more inflationary spending. And came damn close to putting out more cheap money last week, or so the insiders say. I wonder who hit them with that cluebat.

That is totally fucked up and should have never happened. End of story.

Amen to that, brotha. But who's gonna stop them?

Quite frankly I couldn't care less if they destroy the Dollar - except I'm forced to use it. It's not like I'm ever going to see any of the future entitlements I'm supposedly paying into. If competition in currencies wasn't illegal I'd just ignore the whole thing and put my money in a responsibly managed currency. Any efforts to create such a currency currently result in men with guns raiding your operation and stealing all of your assets. This ensures that politicians can continue to pay their banker friends and contributors with the future labor of the citizenry. One three line bill could solve many of our current problems. How you think that's gonna work out?

It's not going to just get warmer over short time periods.. It always amazes me that folks don't realize that.

What surprises me even more is how few people know that we've been experiencing global warming since 1830. AFAIK, we don't currently have a good model that can explain this.

Last year Ron Paul introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007 which would make alternate currencies legal, though not change other aspects of what you can do with currencies (e.g. money laundering would still be illegal).

Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth. Since that time, the government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes. As with any supply and demand equation, when they start running the printing presses to make more dollars, the dollars you have in you bank account become worth less. You're losing money value and the government is gaining money value, but your 'taxes' are low. One can see this in inflation charts which start to skyrocket in the 1970's, relative to decades previous. Interesting note: if we measured inflation today the way we used to back then, our inflation rate would be 11%.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a graph showing the value of the dollar vs. gold vs. oil. If we look at the start of the decade until now, if we were holding euros instead of dollars, gas would only be about $2.70 at the pump - that extra $1.30 can be viewed as lost power of the dollar. But, the euro is no panacea either - if you compare the price of gas to the price of gold, it's nearly flat. How about $1.20 gas? I actually saw $5 diesel in CT last weekend.

Not surprisingly, the government decided to stop keeping track of 'M3', or the money supply of the dollar recently. Private economists have continued the calculations and it's easy to see why the government doesn't want to talk about it.

So, back to the beginning, the government has taken irresponsible action with the way it manages the value of its currency, and they have laws preventing people from opting out of their mismanagement. Afraid of a little competition, are they? Experience shows that the most likely effect of competing currencies, even ones that mimic the way the government operated in your parents' generation, would be to pressure the government to exercise some restraint. Of course, if this competition is illegal, they'll continue with their outrageous devaluation.

Folks who think a little competition helps to keep markets fair, and monopolies hurt them, would do well to contact their representatives in government about the aforementioned bill.

Why is this news on slashdot?

Many Slashdotters are strongly freedom-oriented. They tend to like free software and civil liberties, among other types of freedom. Ron Paul was the freedom-oriented candidate. How is this confusing?

Ron Paul was a fringe candidate ... only the most hard core Ron Paul fans would even know he still had a presidential campaign.

Wow, are you Big Media or do you just buy their story hook, line and sinker? The truth is he got between 3% and 24% in the various primaries and caucuses. That's a respectable showing for a candidate, and he did better than several candidates who Big Media deemed "worthy". Have a look at how the NYT covered him on my blog. This is a snapshot of race results when he came in second in Nevada. They refused to list Ron Paul because they were crusading against him and managing the perception you have. Funny, the Democrats' race added up to 100% but the Republicans had a big missing percentage of voters, where could they have gone?

Now, why would reporters now boldly in the tank for Obama have it in for Ron Paul and back a strong socialist for the Republican nomination? We'll leave this as an exercise to the reader.

Faced with the difficulty of separating anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic influences, they reverted to the time-honored method of taking data.

The trouble is that some of the data doesn't support some of the theories. It used to be that scientists would be happy to falsify their theories or modify them when presented with new data. Lately it seems people are starting with theories and trying to find data to support them, which is fine to that extent, but then discounting data which is found that contradicts their theories.

NRA extremists

How do you define an 'NRA Extremist'? Is it anybody who believes the citizenry should be able to defend itself from a tyrannical government? Is it the kind of person who is 840 times less likely to commit gun crime than the general population?

(Related question: how in the world do you get an 11 month old to keep his glasses on? ;-)

Glue? When our daughter was born she needed UV therapy for billirubin and they glued velcro discs to her head to hold her "sunglasses" on.

I suppose an elastic head band might also work.

Here's a snapshot I grabbed of CNN's page after the election. Kerry conceded the election before they called it. :)

If you like this sort of thing, here's a Go Bush pumpkin as seen at this year's Keene Pumpkin Festival. We only got 27-some-odd thousand pumpkins lit this year. Game 1 of the Series in Sox country on the same night... Oh, well, another record next year, assuming the Sox win isn't a sign of the apocalypse.

This doesn't seem like the right tool for the job.

The pumpkin I did this year was done with a cheap little set from Walmart that has a tool which is basically a handle with a blade somewhere between a coping-saw blade and a scroll-saw blade. It's about 3" long.

The blade was not long enough to cut through a good sized (16" diameter) pumpkin's shell for diagonal cuts.

The Dremel tool is much shorter than that, so there's no way it could work.

Besides, a nice pattern requires some pretty fine detail work - you're going to slip with a powertool if you're not well practiced.

If you had to do a large number of carvings that wouldn't be seen up close you might want a roto-zip tool which has a longer shank. I've got the Porter Cable and it works pretty well.