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$30 mil ... let's do some math. Dreamworks has 22 movies that have grossed on average $163 Million in the box office. Approximately 16 Million tickets are sold for each Dreamworks film. Owning all the Dreamworks films on DVD or Bluray assuming a price of $15 each would cost $330. Meanwhile, Netflix has 20 Million subscribers paying at least $8/month. Subscribing to Netflix streaming for 3.5 years costs $336.

From Netflix perspective, $1.50 out of $96 per year from every subscriber is being given to Dreamworks (presumably as a one-time fee?) per month, or $33 out of $96 for all 22 Dreamworks films. Assuming Netflix gets a license to carry the 22 films indefinitely, this seems like a big win for them. If they spend 30% of their annual revenues on "permanent high-quality movies" then within the next five or ten years they will have a very respectable listing of 200+ high-quality movies that don't cost then anything year-to-year.

I mean, if it gets them away from the "annual reoccurring cost" model that I assume they have with most studios, then it's a good thing. I assume the reason they stopped dealing with Starz was because Starz had rights to "take their ball and go home", I believe. It seems like Netflix future big money deals won't have this sort of clause that let's the studios pull their content catalog, right? Or am I wrong? I'm kinda guessing here... I don't really know the details.

Ceglia invested $1,000 in 2003 and is now expecting a 25,000,000% return on his investment. Get in line, Ceg even expecting your $1,000 back would be unreasonable.

Wikipedia used to be the "site that everyone could edit". Now it is the site that everyone can edit, so long as everyone is a Wikipedia admin. Everyone ELSE's edits get removed.

One time I created a Wikipedia page for something I considered interesting, which didn't have a page yet. I wrote a detailed page with lots of links and information. It took me at least an hour. I wanted to contribute this small piece of knowledge to the whole, which I understood to be the whole point of Wikipedia. In less than 12 hours, my page had been removed and tagged as not being noteworthy enough for whoever. So I wasted my time trying to share my knowledge. Nowaways, if you want a page to be added, you cannot add it yourself. You have to ASK THAT IT BE ADDED.

Not only that, but edits to existing pages--no matter whether they are of value or not--are almost always reverted.

My time is much better spent sharing my knowledge by answering people's questions on Quora. Wikipedia clearly is not interested in what I have to say.

Except that Google had no entry in the market prior to Apple. Apple started development of what is now 'iOS' back in 2004 for the iPad. Jobs killed it and the OS was instead placed in the iPhone. Google on the other hand, had a rather clunky idea for the Android operating system which they tossed shortly after, they got a glimpse of the iPhone and instead came out with a phone OS and interface strikingly similar to the iphone (albeit a year later into the market than Apple).

http://www.quora.com/Android-OS/What-did-Android-look-like-before-the-iPhone-was-unveiled

I'm sorry, but Google has basically pushed a product out, given it to third parties, and then washed it's hands of any IP issues. They have taken a similar tack with VP8. Google fans immediately assumes that Google is the 'good guy' and also points out that Google never sues anyone without considering that none of these other companies were invested in the search engine business with the exception of MS Bing. They didn't compete directly with any 'product' that Google had prior to this. Google released a product in a heavily patented field without patents protection, and is now whining that they are getting sued or that their third party vendors are getting sued for patent infringement. Did they seriously think the folks who own these patents would just sit idly buy while Google just gives away tech and/or ideas that they hold patents for?

You may not like the legal system, the patent system, or anything in between the two, but frankly, Google is being a dumb ass here and playing the victim when a blind man could have seen this coming a mile away. Apple is already getting the pants sued off of them for their entry in to the market for the same reason. They were the 'new' kid on the block prior to Google, with the exception that they went in and bought patents or patented their ideas along the way. Google had no such foresight.

Care to link? I wasn't able to find any on amo. No answer on quora either.

Appreciate the citations.

Peak Oil: the very quotation you include sums up why it will never be a problem: if oil becomes scarce, price will rise; as price rises, alternatives become economical, and the substitution effect occurs. The same thing essentially happened to the whale oil industry. I will acknowledge that oil reserves among OPEC countries are almost certainly vastly overstated: when production quotas became tied to "proven reserves" in 1985, Kuwait boosted their declared reserves from 63.90 to 90.00 billion barrels of oil (a 40.85% increase). In 1988 alone, Iran claimed to find an additional 44.05 billion barrels in declaring 92.85 billion barrels against 1984s 48.80 billion barrels (+90.27%), Iraq jumped from 47.10 to a nice, round 100.00 billion barrels (+112.31%, where it stayed, consistently (and regardless of production), for another four years, before increasing to 115), while Venezuela suddenly got lucky and declared 56.30 vs. 1984s 25 billion barrels (+125.20%). In 1990, Saudi Arabia suddenly declared an increase of 51.79% in oil reserves (from 169.97 to an even 258 billion barrels), while in 1988, Abu Dhabi went from 31.00 to 92.21 billion barrels (+194%). Even little old Dubai got into the act, in 1988 nearly tripling their reserves to 4 billion barrels from 1.35 previously. 1988 was one hell of a busy year in the world of oil discoveries: the five countries which increased their declared reserves went from a combined 153.25 billion barrels to a whopping 345.36 billion barrels!

Overfishing: I'll admit I can't speak intelligently on this issue, except to point out the role government subsidies play. For example, in Canada, fishermen (fisherpeople?) are paid by the government for six or more months of the year because they cannot earn a suitable income on their fishing income alone. Absent these subsidies I suggest a whole lot fewer people would be out there fishing. Of course, like trees, fishes are not a finite resource: you can always make more of them.

Extinction: I know this is an unpopular view, but I say: who cares? I honestly don't mean that flippantly. I just mean that species have gone extinct throughout the history of the earth, while other ones pop up for a while. According to some guy on Quora (I'm too tired to look up more sources - sorry!), somewhere between 6,000 and 19,000 new multicellular species are discovered each year http://www.quora.com/How-many-new-species-are-discovered-every-year. Is it "bad" that some (or perhaps even many) species disappear simply because of humans? If you accept that humans are part of nature, then you should conclude that there is no real difference between species becoming extinct because of a meteorite or because of humans or because of anything else. The view that humans are somehow "outside of nature" is very odd to me: birds build nests, beavers build dams and humans build skyscrapers and nuclear plants. The nests and dams and skyscrapers and nuclear plants are all simply animals reorganizing their environment to their benefit, and are all "natural" in my world view. I don't see humans as an affront to nature. YMMV.

As for "widespread destruction of forests", as I mention above regarding fishies, we can always make more trees. In fact, there are more trees now in the US than there were 100 years ago: according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the number of trees in the US increased by 4,441,000 hectares between 1900 and 2005 http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/32185/en/usa/.

In any case, I'm glad to learn you are indeed optimistic, as I'm optimistic too, and for the same reasons you are, except for the "human population reduction" you mention, which has been tried in various ways with poor results (see Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and others). Humans are humans' best and most precious resource, and more of them is a good thing.

Reply from an engineer who worked at Facebook 2007-2011.

The ex-Facebook developers who founded Quora think Facebook is stuck on [PHP] for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now .

That's definitely the problem.

Don't get me wrong, I think BTCs are crank goods, mainly due to governance issues and institutional opacity -- just because you can see the source code doesn't mean the maintainers aren't going to change it tomorrow if it would make them a buck in the process, and all the major BTC trading firms are completely unaccountable and un-audited.

But the technology in principle would allow public repudiation of a transaction, though not actual rollback.

it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant

Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.

http://www.quora.com/Solar-Towers/How-much-water-for-evaporative-cooling-do-solar-thermal-power-generators-need-per-watt-hour-generated

I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.

Actually, google have been using android phones to gill out their database. I think they had to stop using the streetview cars. See this answer from a Google employee: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-keep-its-geolocation-database-updated-with-new-MAC-addresses

Excellent and informative post, but as to cesium, it has been demonstrated as being bioaccumulative. The output of the Chernobyl disaster is still making reindeer meat in Norway and wild boar in Germany unsafe to eat:

http://www.quora.com/Fisheries/What-are-the-probabilities-that-the-cesium-137-radiation-pouring-into-the-ocean-from-the-Fukushima-reactor-site-will-enter-the-japanese-current-concentrate-up-the-food-chain-and-destroy-the-Pacific-coast-salmon-fishery

I already asked on Quora about it:
http://www.quora.com/What-would-Netscape-5-0-Mariner-be-like-if-it-was-actually-finished-and-released

Yeah I don't know. "Sales and Marketing people" is their competitive advantage? Are they much higher quality than the Sales and Marketing folks anywhere else or did they just recycle an old business idea and merry it to the web at an opportune time? I would grant them first mover advantage for sure, but the question is whether they can sustain it in the face of stiffer competition and with the prospect of small business eventually realizing that the quality of the Groupon customer base sucks.

Probably not 60% right now, but the roll out is WAY slower than iOS devices

Android stats
Android 2.1 7 31.4%
Android 2.2 8 57.6%
Android 2.3 9 0.8%
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html

Some iOS stats
4.2.1: 52.89 %
4.2: 0.09 %
4.1: 27.50 %
http://www.quora.com/What-proportion-of-all-iPhone-owners-use-iOS4-*-today

About 50% of users run one version behind on Android where as around 50% run the LATEST version of iOS with the rest of the versions scattered.. iOS users can get the latest OS much faster (officially) than Android users.

The Nexus one barely got 1 years of updates then OFFICIAL compatibility was dropped but you could get updates by rooting.
Apple has been providing updates for 3 years for each of the iPhones before they become End of life, then users are left with Jailbreaking to get more features.

> Part of the "problem" with open source is that only us geek types give a
> damn about it. Average joe doesn't care about how "open" what he's
> buying is, which is why people continue to buy closed systems
> without a second thought.

Good point, and another part of the "problem" is that it honestly doesn't matter that much if your program is open or closed, what matters is if you can access your data, now and forever, and people are starting to wake up to that.

Rather than a repository for open apps (though that could be a part of it) I think open.org should be a 100% open cloud service. Something like Apple's MobileMe with some email, some document storage, etc. Start with a few simple things and do them well. SLOWLY grow into offering more features. Start distributing apps (either native or web-based) that can easily store their data in their space in open.org. (Like a menu in OpenOffice that says "Save to open.org") Educate users (I know it's like pissing up a hill but you should always make an effort) on how to back up their data locally (i.e., a pretty wrapper on rsync) and make it easy for them to back up their data locally as well because you just never know.

My sources disagree with what Paypal is saying. http://www.quora.com/Can-PayPal-withdraw-money-from-a-linked-Bank-account

I would contend that Wikipedia's biggest hoax of the decade hasn't been revealed yet.
I know of several hoaxes that still exist on prominent pages.

My son tells stories of the days he was in high school (2005-2006 or so), where they would have competitions to insert random "facts" into articles and see how long they would last. It was a game they played.

He told me that he happened to go to school with a baseball player's son, and in July 2006, someone had inserted that "Johnny Bench is the only major league baseball player who was also a professional bowler." As my son tells the story, Bench's son removed this false information many times, but his legitimate edits kept getting reverted by the Wikipedia staff. It doesn't appear on the page now, but it was on the Wikipedia page so long that it has been repeated around the web many times (Google '"Johnny Bench" bowler' has 184,000 hits).

And now one more! Did you hear that Johnny Bench was a professional Bowler?

I find it hilarious that a trusted source, his own son, couldn't get the mis-information corrected in Wikipedia. Maybe Quora has something up on Wikipedia. Maybe Wikipedia should add the "trusted source" feature that Quora has (identifying the contributor and their credentials).