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Silicon Valley Investors Wants to Fund a 'Good For Society' Facebook Replacement (calacanis.com)
Silicon Valley angel investor Jason Calacanis just announced the "Openbook Challenge," a competition to create a replacement for Facebook.
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
The ideal Facebook replacement costs zero bucks.
If there is no money to be made, then it should be sponsored by the state. Computers do consume energy after all. And we know that giving full control to the state just put more ties into three letters agencies. Another service would be e-mail. I do not know what is worse: e-mail read by Google or e-mail read by the NSA/CIA/others without any warrants.
The good replacement for a bad thing is the absence of the bad thing.
A constitution without a 2nd amendment would be nice.
-- Cheers!
But his approach doesn't really make a business. He intends to change social media from a website and a vendor who sells your info to advertisers, to a peer-to-peer protocol that our devices implement to propagate what we want to tell our friends, kind of like a modern-day NNTP with hard crypto privacy controls.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
- Openbook will run out of money (yes, it costs money to run servers for hundreds of millions of users)
- Openbook will sell ads to fund themselves
- Openbook will realize it's even more profitable to collect data and sell it to the highest bidder
- Openbook will get a "think of the children" or "Uuh! Terrorism!" injunction from some court or governmental agency, and will share their data with them
- Openbook = Facebook
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Fuck crypto currencies, or to be more exact, fuck crypto-currencies that set the difficulty rate so that huge amounts of energy has to be wasted in order to "mine" the currency - that just isn't necessary.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
and accountability to users and all the other things Facebook is screwing up. Or more accurately anger that trump supposedly benefited finally got people to care about all these things, when they couldn't have given a rat's arse that their electronic lives were being bought and sold six ways from sunday just a few months prior. You got to give him credit for this amazing awakening.
I don't know if its willful or blind idiocy, but everything humans have created has been used for evil by someone. The more detached from others they are, the worse it has gotten. Facebook got huge and couldn't see the trees for the forest. Whatever any of these people come up with... will eventually be sold to a corporation that won't see the users as anything but a profit center and begin to exploit it.
Maybe next time instead of our data, its our computer's data. Maybes it not our browsing habits, but our usage habits. They'll try to abstract and wind up right back in the exact same place.
Because the fastest way to grow is to give your product away, and the fastest way to profit is to throw your morals out the window.
Facebook got huge the same way Google got huge... by creating a lure to get your eyes on ads, then selling you to advertisers. The only huge corporation that gives it away and stays free is Twitter, and they are on the auction block to anyone who can figure out how to monetize them (hint, it will be ads).
The entire point of social media is attention. YOUR attention. To keep your eyes glued to a screen and show you ads. That is ALL it is for. Yes you get benefits from it, if you didn't, you would not stay and see those ads, and the platform would die like so many others. The idea of making a social network that somehow avoids this forever and ever is just an ignorant rant from someone who doesn't understand how business works. Users will not pay subscription fees to join a social network, not when they can get it somewhere else for free. Oh they are running from Facebook in droves you say? And ask them where they are going, or who they are still using. Google +, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. These companies are no different, they just have yet to get caught doing the same shit Facebook was caught doing. And it is inevitable they will be caught at it. And the users will flock to the next free thing because being social SHOULD be free... but as long as hardware and software on a centralized platform is required, it never will be.
... or the UK or Japan or Australia or Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
Seriously people can't shoot themselves in the foot if you don't give them a loaded gun to do it with
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times.
It's easy to see that this is not true. Plenty of European states without something comparable to the 2nd amendment, but with constitutional rules comparable to 1th, 4th and 5th Amendment.
Jan
That's because America has been guaranteeing their security for free for 75 years. What has long enabled that free world to exist is the post-WWII American security over watch which allowed countries of all sizes to escape fear. The Americans outlawed war among the participating members of the international system, and for the first time in world history imposed security upon the global commons so that anyone could purchase any resource from anywhere as well as export any product (most notably to the open, ravenous U.S. market).
And we get precisely zero thanks for this, and vile mistreatment. I haven't heard a kind word for years and years and years. Americans on holiday will lie and say they're Canadian just to avoid being verbally abused.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
http://archive.is/hnfJQ
The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT *POSSIBLY* DO THAT.)
Their conclusion is as follows: They don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It's just a matter of how long it takes.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/23/an-opinion-on-gun-control-repost/
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have no issues at all with Facebook keeping data on me. To expect less online is foolish. If you want an experiment get a script for a diabetic meter. Your doctor will swear he never lets out information as will almost all drug stores. But within 24 hours the phone calls will start offering you diabetic supplies. I get at least one call a day from companies offering me supposedly better diabetic supplies. Sometimes i get three in one day. Everyone sells data. You can bet when you buy groceries that data is also collected and sold. You pay auto insurance on one car yet you purchased three sets of tires while telling the insurance company you only drive 20,000 miles a year. You tell the truth and say that you do not own a motorcycle and yet your credit card reflects you buying three or four gallons of gas twice a week on weekends. It turns out that your brother is over seas and you constantly drive his bike. The point is that we are entering an age in which honesty will be earned and cheating will be used against you. Why does anyone consider that wrong? The truth will set you free more often than not.
What was cool about facebook is that it connected college students to each other. I was on facebook because all of my friends were on it. But later facebook opened to the greater public, globally, and then I saw a friend request in 2012 from an aunt and cousins I haven't spoken to in 15 years (and didn't wish to do it again, really) I decided that the only way to deny this request "gracefully" is simply to leave facebook. And I haven't missed it since then.
That analysis does not seem well supported by history. It is certainly not the lesson of the American Civil War. I'm afraid that the Confederacy tried to secede, the existing "Union" treated it as an illegal rebellion, and the Confederacy lost for a long list of reasons.
The "armed the teachers" article of your second post also does not seem well founded. It does not even acknowledge possibility of accidental shooting by those teachers, or of theft of the firearms on school grounds, especially at the poorest schools with the most armed violence.
Even funnier is how Obama was praised for his shrewd use of social media. The hypocrisy is palpable. If the left likes the candidate, all is well and the person is a genius. If not, how dare they use the tools available to win.
We saw the same with Bill Clinton. Everyone excuses (or used to) his treatment of Monica Lewinsky. She was an employee/intern. The apologists would say "it's just sex." But Trump' s extramarital relationships are somehow disqualifiers for being President.
These are double standards. I know both sides dabble in this, but when the left does it, it seems to drone on forever on every "news" network except one.
No need to thank me. Just use Diaspora*, open, distributed, optionally self hosted Facebook alternative
At best, this is an historical sidebar. At worst, a ploy to take us off topic. I'll respond once and then drop out.
I agree the 2nd Amendment was there originally to protect the others, or worst case it was "the reset button on the constitution". Reading the letters and essays by Federalists and Anti-Federalists makes clear this was the intent. Military technology at the time made it sensible.
However, successful rebellion means "We won", not "We killed a lot of people and then we were killed". For a rebellion, you are putting yourself on the line, not some proxy nation/tribe/oppressed people. "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" et al. The Gatling gun (Civil War), the Maxim (WW I), the tank (WW II), the Apache attack helicopter (Vietnam), and the AI-controlled drone (Middle East) pretty much obliterated the value of rifles (automatic or not) for purposes of successful rebellion against the US Govt. Furthermore, for urban rebellion, guns make enough noise to be triangulated, and any human holding one will be caught on video and identified. Any serious rebel is thinking Cambridge Analytica-style Big Data, weaponized drone swarms, and infowar campaigns to convince a few million peiople to risk death for the cause. [Ohhh, so that is what the Koch brothers and Mercers are up to... :-)]
It becomes pretty clear that informed (not mal-informed) voting is vastly more efficient than guns for changing the nation's path. For that we need a sense of community, not wedge issues like gun control. Which brings us back to the need for a non-commercial free-as-in-speech social media mechanism.
So, while I reload carefully enough to shoot "ragged clover leafs" with my rifle, and can watch the rechamber with my pistol, all my energy these days goes into makerspaces, meetups, and playing music. "Make love not war".
That analysis does not seem well supported by history. It is certainly not the lesson of the American Civil War. I'm afraid that the Confederacy tried to secede, the existing "Union" treated it as an illegal rebellion, and the Confederacy lost for a long list of reasons.
The Confederacy lost for basically just one reason: It was underequipped. It also didn't hurt that The North got help from Canada. There was help for the North to the north, and no help for the South to the south.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Clearly a two year old post from /r/conspiracy with no supporting proof or citations is a 100% unassailable source for the truth.
I would suspect a few patents might get in the way...
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First.
Really?
Any idea why it didn't work?
Silicon Valley Investors want to capitalize on the current wave of hate for Facebook to create a replacement that will make a lot of money.
Also, we should all trust that the investors will be happy with small returns on their investment and won't make demands later on which would force the replacement to perform the same Orwellian profit-seeking behavior that Facebook is hated for.
As others have noted, it costs money to run servers, apply patches, and man help desks. Any attempt at getting someone else to pay (sponsors, states, ads) leads right back to trouble. To be trusted, it will have to be fully paid by user-fees, iron-clad no-commercialization, and have user voting rights on changes to the bylaws.
So, how much would it cost? Given community-supported OSS software, cloud servers, and volunteer help communities, it wouldn't take much per person "at scale". If you assume $5/mo for 10M users (a reasonable start toward world domination), you have $600M/yr. You can run a lot of servers on that.
But how to get people to move, given the network effect of Facebook? I mostly leave it to others to solve -- I don't use Facebook precisely because I knew the business model from the start. But I would suggest:
a) Offer Facebook a free pass on the 2011 settlement ($40,000 per violation times 87M users) in exchange for open copyright on Facebook's look-and-feel.
b) Ask the Parkland students to define a new-and-better Facebook replacement (i.e, copyright issues). They in turn would communicate with their vast Internet-native community. Then us old(er) guys could code it up.
c) Write it in Python, with optimizations where needed in C. I don't trust democracy to Java, Javascript, and C++.
Internet sites are at least in some part responsible for the divisions within society increasing. The reason is simple enough, when you visit the site, it immediately tries to learn what you like and give your more of it.
The idea is innocuous enough, they simply want to increase engagement between the user and the site. The result is that the user is quickly exposed only to those things that the site thinks are of interest to you.
It is quite is easy to create an experiment and see for yourself. Clear your cookies (flash based etc.) and create a new user, ideally on a different browser than you normally use. Compare what you see to your existing user and browser and you will see just how far your experience has been curated just for you. The problem is that in doing this users quickly lose exposure to different ideologies.
The result is that instead of connecting society, Facebook, Google etc have instead created echo chambers. They are so efficient at telling people what they think people want to see that people no longer even see the headlines for anything else. When people only hear things from one ideology they tend to become less rounded and more partisan. The longer the ideological echo chamber is allowed to persist, the more partisan society will become.
First Law of Social Benefit: The amount of noise an individual makes about "The Good of Society" will be in inverse proportion to the amount of good that individual contributes to society themselves.
They will have to operate in a capitalistic society and such a "society" will favor NOT ALL, but only a part of it, as seen right now.
Same goes for other social structures communistic totalitarian, monarchy, plutocracy and what else there is. Seems some countries in northern Europe are doing somewhat better, Norway, Sweden, where social well-being has been found to improve when the spread between wealth and income between individual shrinks.
So - let's wait a couple of centuries and see how this pans out, if there will be an environment for mammals to flourish. Maybe lichens and fungi will do better and happier...
Europe doesn't even have freedom of speech anymore. If you live in the UK say something negative about muslims publicly. You will get a visit from police.
How about just funding some useful FOSS project for an open standard mesh-networked E-Mail/Usenet replacement with proper FOSS clients for all major OSes including Linux and BSD, to get the opinion leaders (us) on board. That would rid us of Facebook and other product along those lines.
But I guess that would involve actcual investment and provide actual results in short time, rather than just getting some PR with an inflated press release.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The trouble is you say this:
That's because America has been guaranteeing their security for free for 75 years. What has long enabled that free world to exist is the post-WWII American security over watch which allowed countries of all sizes to escape fear.
Followed by this:
And we get precisely zero thanks for this, and vile mistreatment.
Perhaps you are telling someone living in a country where the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of a left wing democracy with an American allied brutal dictatorship that America made them free.
I can't imagine why that didn't go down very well!
I'm sure the Vietnamese wold like to hear your thoughts on how American guaranteed their security too!
And then there's the Iraq debacle where Saddam was deposed and replced in no small part by ISIS who are even worse.
The thing is, American has done a bunch of good and a bunch of bad (it's almost like it's made up of people, fancy that!). And much of it has been very much to support America's interests.
Some Americans like to claim America is the world's policeman which is fine and all, sometimes the policeman is John McLaine, other times Keystone Kops, and other times Sherrif Arpaio.
The fact you can't see that is why you're met with derision so much of the time.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
LOL, considering that part of that agreement was that the USD was used as a reserve currency, thereby guaranteeing the US endless supplies of debt, which contrary to popular belief does not really need to be paid back as long as the status quo is retained, which is what US policy is all about.
Seriously, you must have rocks in your head if you think the US did all of this out of altruism. Next, you will be saying that the US sent soldiers to Europe ww1 & 2 out of your love of fellow man, rather than that US national interests were under threat. (ww1 was affecting trade, ww2 worried the US that the Russkies would roll over the top of Germany all the way to the Atlantic, creating a massive Soviet state)
Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly like the US or its political system and materialistic culture, but I have plenty of American friends and I don't abuse Americans in the streets either. But I also don't feel any need to thank you.
That's because America has been guaranteeing their security for free for 75 years. What has long enabled that free world to exist is the post-WWII American security over watch which allowed countries of all sizes to escape fear. The Americans outlawed war among the participating members of the international system, and for the first time in world history imposed security upon the global commons so that anyone could purchase any resource from anywhere as well as export any product (most notably to the open, ravenous U.S. market).
And we get precisely zero thanks for this, and vile mistreatment. I haven't heard a kind word for years and years and years. Americans on holiday will lie and say they're Canadian just to avoid being verbally abused.
See what I mean? Nothing but vile abuse. This is the thanks we get for giving Europeans peace for 75 years and enabling them to spend their money on a welfare state instead of wasting it on defending themselves.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Hahaha the UK... A perfect example of why citizens need to be armed.
You have no freedom. You're terrified of speaking truths, or even your own thoughts, because 2/3rds of your police force is dedicated to prosecuting thought crimes.
We can just train some bots to handle that.
Have gnu, will travel.
First, this is a reactionary action. If someone wanted to supplant Facebook during the height of social unrest about it, they would have needed to start several the development years ago.
Second, what makes Facebook attractive to most is the critical mass of users. It's the ubiquity that if you use it, it's the most likely venue to find your friends also on it. I can shift and try any number of new social networks, but if the people i want to reach are not there, it's a non-starter.
Third, social site success is achieved via a mixture of timing, fantastical luck and hitting the sweet spot of user interest. Creating a Facebook alternative is comparatively easy. Achieving success is surprisingly difficult.
Forth, balkanization of the social media market won't help anyone achieve critical mass. Launching 7 efforts at supplanting Facebook seems like a good idea. "Surely one of them will be successful". But in reality the more there are, the more fragmented the audience becomes, making it even more difficult for one of them to achieve dominant success.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
No, they don't want to create a Faceboook replacement. They just want to get enough attention that their start-up investments get bought out by Facebook and they rake in the money.
Absolutely.
I don't know about the self-hosting thing though, I think a bigger barrier than ISP intervention is interest, I don't think most people are interested in having a personal web page. It's safe to say that nearly every person who visits this site can make a web page but how many of us even want one?
To turn a profit, by definition you must take more than you produce. So either Openbook will be a premium social networking site for the privacy-aware that takes your money instead of your privacy (cryptocurrency is just a hyper-inefficient and criminal-friendly form of money) effectively making them a charity-supported operation, or the best they could hope for is something approaching "neutral."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... or the UK or Japan or Australia or Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises ... Of the 47 murders in London so far this year, 31 have been committed with knives"
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
I'm sure the Vietnamese wold like to hear your thoughts on how American guaranteed their security too!
june 2015: "This week, the United States and Vietnam deepened their defense ties during a three-day trip by U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to the Southeast Asian state. Most notably, Carter and his counterpart, Vietnamese Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh, inked a Joint Vision Statement on Defense Relations. The statement itself, which comes as both sides celebrate the 20th anniversary of the normalization of their ties, is not wholly new. It builds on a 2011 memorandum of understanding ..."
https://thediplomat.com/2015/0...
That might make some sense if citizens were able to purchase F18's, Guided missile destroyers, B52s and other fun things. Trying to defend agains the American military with a bump stock and and AR-15 seems a bit pointless.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times.
It's easy to see that this is not true. Plenty of European states without something comparable to the 2nd amendment, but with constitutional rules comparable to 1th, 4th and 5th Amendment.
And other European states (ex Switzerland) show that civilian access to firearms, even semiautomatic firearms, is not a problem. Of course criminal and mental background checks, safety training, and secure storage help.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And we get precisely zero thanks for this, and vile mistreatment.
Odd, when traveling in Europe I have been treated quite well. I take a few minutes to learn four words in the local language -- "hello", "please", "thank you", "bath room" -- and things go remarkable well. Usually after my "hello" in the local language the clerk/host/waiter begins talking in English. Where they cannot speak English a few English words and some pointing usually manages, and the local "please" and "thank you" among the few English words and pointing seems to keep things relaxed and pleasant. Give it a try. For me this even worked in that "vile den of anti-American bigotry", Paris. ;-)
We have gone through a few social networking tools and it turns out the most popular one is pretty simple. People don't want to jump through loads of hoops to contact friends. Why do you think people give up privacy? Because it enables convenience! Make it worthy and unfriendly, like Linux, and it won't be adopted ;)
Not to mention the 4th is slowly and steadily eroding in the US and the 2nd is not helping at all.
Bullshit the majority of European countries DO NOT have free speech. All the countries listed in the article DO NOT have free speech and have passed laws making it illegal to offend someone.
The EU is just ass backwards on free speech, it is hilarious that they also try to claim some kind of historical significance related to free speech, when the US had free speech, the majority of the countries were still ruled by monarchs, aka dictators.
Experienced technologists in crypto needed to implement beyond the look book UI. You are A+ team player. You work in small teams of three. You are a developer who ships. You have supported crypto in production. Secrets, you know how to keep...small.
Open to springboard schemes
Have the next month to give, the next decade open
Like the UK that just convicted someone of hate speech for rap lyrics from a Snap Dogg song she posted on Instagram to pay tribute to a boy who died in a car crash?
So, why do you think that Americans need to pretend to be Canadians in Europe? What caused that phenomenon?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
On a month by month basis in the very recent past then this is true. However, looking at such a short time scale probably isn't useful. For example, in January there were 18 killings investigated by the NYPD and 8 investigated by the police in London. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-4...
That was an interesting read. Thanks.
That was MySpace, before they prevented users from using the search/browse/filter functionality to find exactly who they wanted to interact with by interests, demographics, job networking, etc. Facebook bought and killed that by locking down all the features then auctioned it off after it lost the userbase and wasn't a threat. They want to be the ones controlling Facebook.
Semiautomatic? The Swiss militia (basically, everyone, though I think they're sexist enough to not include their women) requires members to keep FULLY automatic weapons, plus lots of ammo for same, on hand.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So the organisation can invest in one guy for part of a year, provided the founders don't get any of it. Essentially they expect that the replacement is somehow under way and mostly funded through other means - this is meant as a tiny little top-up.
It cant be tied to wall street/stocks at all in order to be a site that cares about what its users want. Google,FB are 2 prime examples of what happens to a company after they sell their ass to wallstreet and its money.
Jack of all trades,master of none
So, why do you think that Americans need to pretend to be Canadians in Europe? What caused that phenomenon?
Of the dozens of Americans I know that traveled in Europe none pretended to be Canadian, or felt a need to. Perhaps you confuse phenomenon with urban myth?
Inflection points, by definition, break the historical trend.
Semiautomatic? The Swiss militia (basically, everyone, though I think they're sexist enough to not include their women) requires members to keep FULLY automatic weapons, plus lots of ammo for same, on hand.
I believe keeping military ammo at home is no longer the case, except for highly specialized personnel. Keeping the military weapon itself at a local armory might now be an option for many, not sure on this one though.
In any case I am not referring to a reservist's issued weapon. I am referring to what a civilian may personally own. I believe a civilian may own weapons that would be banned in US jurisdictions like California.
... or the UK or Japan or Australia or Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises ... Of the 47 murders in London so far this year, 31 have been committed with knives"
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
There is a hue and cry for knife control in the UK. It's the logical next step.
In case people thought you were joking ...
"London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a crackdown on knives Sunday in response to the rising levels of violence in London, which recently surpassed New York City's homicide rate for the first time. "No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife," Khan tweeted. "Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.""
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Because the ideal replacement is going to be zero cost and zero profit.
It's time for "silicon valley investors" to step aside and let grassroots developers solve this problem.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...tells us all we need to know about how this will work out.
There's no point in arguing with DNS-and BIND, he's one of those Americans encountered on Slashdot sometimes.
He has absolutely no knowledge of the outside world, the tiny bit of history he knows about comes from the history channel and he's always right.
If you wrestle with a pig you both get filthy, but the pig loves it.
Give us something above and beyond what FB can even conceive of.... Here are some of my nutty ideas. :P
A VR room where you can meet your friends as if they are really there.
Lets do something more than just play games... let us search for habitable planets together... let us code together if we like.
Make it so that when folks learn things unintentionally even.
Augmented Reality get the folks to go outside.
People love free... you will need to start a revenue stream there needs to be another brilliant idea that would fund it.... github was built in a weekend... they are profitable.
Give the users a deep field telescope (of sorts) in orbit.... let people use it to search stars ect.
Teleportation... ya well maybe not :)
[($)]
Pay them... let them opt in for advertisers... give them 100% of the advertisers fee.
[($)]
Everybody jump through hoops to give us their best ideas. We'll siphon up the results of their efforts and several will 'win' which means they get to generate cash for us going forwards. Win win win, for us.
Requiem for the American Dream
Its not as simple as you suggest, the civilian vs military scenario actually a bit naive. If things were to degenerate to large scale rebellion various members of the military would likely be as conflicted as civilians. Civilian vs military unlikely, more likely civilian and military of faction A vs civilian and military of faction B. We have two example of this in US history, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. In one the legacy power lost, in the other the legacy power won. Conclusions on the proposed outcome of a third go at it are premature.
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times.
Yet there exist countries with neither that have higher standards of living than the USA. How does that fit in with you ideology?
The problem is mostly solved - send people text and images, and they will send them back. In the past we did this with e-mail, IRC, FTP, and USENET.
So I just need to go on USENET to find my highschool and college classmates? My cousins' wives are likely to post pictures of my little cousins on IRC? hrmm somehow I think you missed the point.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is true. However in all of 2017 there were 3 times as many murders in NYC compared to London. I think, that looking at this graph https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/... it's somewhat difficult to imagine that this year there will be fewer murders in London than NYC. Then again, maybe I'm wrong. The signals are noisy, on a short enough time scale it's possible make any sort of unfavourable comparison. If some guy breaks a five year dry spell by getting laid in the last half hour it doesn't make him Don Juan.
Seems like a product without a market. He seems to be taking advantage of the current headlines to bring in investor money - but he doesn't need to produce anything.
When (never) complete he'll dump it and move to the next big headline generator.
The idea that Silicon Valley Tech can solve all of our problems is a meme, a TV show, and also in recent headlines regarding "tech people being out of touch."
It was perfect. It was just what we wanted. It didn't show pictures, though -- we had to actually READ stuff and CLICK ON stuff if we wanted to see pictures or videos or hear sounds.
Facebook is a poor substitute, and I'm ashamed that we let usenet just drift away.
Presumably, this new site would have to have some kind of revenue, right? If they implemented some type of revenue sharing with the users, wouldn't that create a massive incentive to switch?
Haha, ...
The pig analogy I heared in software seminars, too. Same like 'arguing with an asshole', in the end they drag you down on their niveau and beat you by experience
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.