Those 'like' buttons are a couple lines of HTML to put on your site. And sites have developed a lot of them (I think some news sites load about 6-7 different ones each time?).
They're not "Facebook". They're just a feature of Web 2.0 - and highly replaceable.
The mistake you're making is that those buttons are leading to some type of competitive advantage to Facebook, when all the actual financial data shows it's not - Facebook might have tons of user demographics, but it isn't meaningfully translating to fiscal outcomes and I'd put big questions over their ability to advertise effectively - my yardstick for this has become "will they ever not show you an ad, if they don't think it's relevant?". For Facebook this is still no - for Google search ads it's a little bit yet (the 'featured result' ads don't always appear).
Every feature of Facebook that caused me to sign on with it when it first opened, is available through Twitter
Ok, then, post a single article with 300 words to twitter. There are lots of things I dislike about FB, not the least of which is that 95% of the margin ads feature amply endowed young females regardless of the product in question, but at least I can post a complete paragraph plus a pic or two in one element.
This is why I question the long term viability of Facebook: I've had it ad-blocked since forever. I will never un-adblock it. And you've stated the exact reason why and why it's a problem: with all their data, the only ads they push are still "broadest possible demographic" ads that are just unwelcome.
Its because if Facebook actually had to try and acknowledge the problem seriously, they'd have to acknowledge seriously that they really do have a whole lot of great big question marks over their future - i.e. who pays them for things? Why would they? Do their users stick around when this happens?
The problem is that we have no unexplained observations to go off of. You find a particle at CERN these days, it turns out to have been predicted by the Standard Model.
So you come up with a neat way to explain the tiny but important discrepancies, follow the mathematics through and find you now require some additional actors to square away the effects you don't see but would've anyway. Suddenly you've got a bunch of new particles in your hypothesis - all of which are required to make it work. Yet disappointingly nothing unexplained coming out of the LHC which might be one of them.
Whenever we do find something new - and chances are good the LHC will see something outside the Standard Model - it'll be a race to see if any of the current proposals predict something or require something which matches.
It's been a tricky one since no one was able to convince themselves it wasn't just measurement error for a long time, but the most recent results seem to say it's real - and no one can propose a good explanation as to why.
Any new theory has to account for why the old theory worked for the cases it did. General relativity simplifies at low speeds to Newtonian mechanics for example.
Or from the letter - the Earth is round, but assuming it's flat over short distances is perfectly valid (and we do it all the time - the idea of building level or flat floors for example).
Dark matter is required to account for the structure of our galaxy. Sans dark matter, there is not enough observed mass by an order of magnitude in our galaxy to account for the observed galactic rotation curve.
"Unseen matter" is actually the softball bet their, as opposed to the idea that somehow - and nobody really knows or has ever seen how - gravity works differently over long distances. It's just the unseen matter has to have specific properties to fit with observation.
Said truly by someone so sure of their middle-class existence that they can't imagine how they could ever come to be involved with the justice system...
Derived units are all over the place - science is positivist, you use whatever model makes it easiest to work with your data. The problem with the amp was that the definition of the standard was not realizable precisely - you can't have infinite wires, so you two wires of some length and hope you avoid end effects messing it up too much. Which means everyone trying to realize a standard amp gets it a little different as a result of the definition itself.
Then there's the problems of just making the wires longer (they get heavier, they sag, you have to worry about more space). The benefit of the new system is you could fit it on a benchtop, and it's exact - you count exactly that number of electrons and that gives you an amp definition, which anyone can recreate and which doesn't have a built-in uncertainty to its realization.
There are proposals to build reference standards like this, but how you define it is irrelevant if you can't actually measure it that way accurately. One proposal for the kilogram standard was based on electrochemical deposition of gold (ion acculumation). This is appealing because you can as this article shows, count electrons very accurately (and we get better at it all the time) and so if you're pulling Au+ out of solution, then you just do so until you reach the exact number of electrons you needed to get the exact amount of Au you needed. More importantly, you can do it fast.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - the practical realizations are still less accurate then the current system, and it also requires fixing a whole bunch of other constants, and it also is very difficult to actually create secondary standards off of the mechanism.
All proposed gravitation based standards are less accurate then then current kilogram standard (gravity is too weak to be meaningfully measured accurately in the lab - after all, it takes a whole planet to supply 1kg of force on the current standard!).
There's also the problem of making the standard practical, and distributable. A perfect standard that you can't use to create secondary standards is useless. A perfect standard that can't be replicated reasonably widely is also useless.
It's not iridium coated, it's iridium-alloyed - adds hardness.
The problem here is declaring something involving atoms impossible, and well, on the atomic scale nothing is. It sits in lit room at room temperature - there is a whole hell of a lot of EM falling on it, and so every now and again somewhere on it you might exceed the work function of the metal and sputter it. You've also got to deal with not just air sticking to it, but being absorbed into it's bulk - atmospheric humidity would be a big concern since water sticks to everything and is just about impossible to get rid of. Then you've got hydrogen and helium diffusion as well.
Huh? Newegg was not sued for stealing their software, they were accused of stealing the CONCEPT of a shopping cart. A concept that has been around for hundreds of years, if not longer (hence the prior art).
At long last a judge who is not impressed with the corporate idea that adding the phrase "on a computer", "on a cell phone", or "on the Internet" to a hundreds year old idea magically makes it a totally new, never thought of before idea.
It's more than that - think of it this way: Soverain Effectively patented the most obvious way to walk to a store, put things in a cart, take them to the register and pay for them. Imagine some arsehole doing that to every person. Everyone has to find an unpatented means of going to the store, getting things to the "register" (which for the patent avoidance will be something completely unregister like) and paying ("I choose to steal from you, but tip you handsomely for having a nice store") It's beyond absurd - like most software patents.
Some assholes are certainly trying - see the way that patent trolls for wi-fi were target hotels and resorts, rather then manufacturers.
> Deflation makes an item worth $1000, worth $990 later. It hurts people with assets. However, if you have cash, that same amount of cash will buy more as deflation continues. Deflation is bad because SMART people stop buying things that will be cheaper tomorrow and inventory in shops is a bad thing because you pay interest on holding it while it reduces in value.
You are correct in every point. What you miss, however, is the elephant in the room. If people stop buying assets, that means the end of consumerism. From an ecological perspective, this is the only way to stop the climate catastrophe and mass extinction events that are becoming increasingly serious.
There is so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.
For one thing, mass extinction events aren't "common".
Secondly: consumerism isn't about people buying assets. It's about them buying disposable, consumable items, as the norm i the economy.
Thirdly: consumerism is not linked to climate change. Emissions of Greenhouse Gases are. Which are also not actually linked to consumerism. There is absolutely nothing implicit in the idea of consumerism which is associated with climate change. Consumerism also isn't linked (implicitly) to resource consumption - since it's just about the item as used by the consumer, not it's lifecycle. And on top of that, you can have perpetual economic growth on a finite resource base easily - since industry is essentially asymptotic towards 100% efficiency. You can grow your economy by going from 90% efficient to 95% to 99% to 99.9%. You don't grow as fast, but you do grow.
[quote]If I have purchased all the nonessential goods I need, and I have money left over, then I'm going to go and figure out what to do with that money. If there's not a lot of it, then I will save it. If there's a bunch, I will spend some to have fun. If there's a crapton, I might invest it. I don't see why this would change just because the numbers are getting smaller.[/quote]
Why would you invest any money, when if you have a lot of it, it's just going to sit there increasing in value with you doing nothing with it?
More importantly, why would anyone borrow it, when the principal will be larger then the amount they originally borrowed and progressively represent more and more of their real earnings?
It's a catch-22: you want to invest, but to justify that you need to charge an interest rate, but since everyone ends up already paying a de facto interest rate via deflation they'll do almost anything to avoid borrowing.
Ross is not an idiot, he is a hero who tried to run usefull service which could save many lives by ensuring some quality of the goods the shop was selling (thanks to user ratings)....I feel sorry for his live ruined by the government.
Yeah, just ignore the people he tried to have murdered and all.
You're proposing tearing down one system, and creating a whole new set of problems, rather then implementing simple fixes to the existing one.
There's no need, for example, for booth workers to check if a ballot is valid before it's put in the ballot box. You get them to sign that they saw the ballot sheet when they handed it to the voter, and then voter votes and casts without any further intervention.
At no point then, does it become possible to tamper with the ballot without it being noticed.
4) Upon my timely death or loss of memory, my family will have all it needs to delete my embarrassing online photos
That is exactly what I thought about the question. Assuming amnesia or similar what password would actually be *needed*. I can only think of access to banking systems, but that can be solved by turning up in person with a photo id. Anything else is so irrelevant.
Well, I'd generally like some of my online communities I partake in to know what happened to me. Many a social circle is nearly entirely digital these days, and quite possibly fairly anonymous.
The problem is all of this information is incredibly public. What did I last buy on ebay? Probably a thing I then told a bunch of people I bought for a great price on ebay.
You could even game this system - do a bunch of fake logins, and use the questions to reverse-engineer the responses.
But even if we take your idea of "freedom" — do you suppose, Julian Assange would've been prosecuted for rape, had he not angered the world's powers? Do I need to remind you, which nice and free Socialist country is doing the prosecution?
Julian Assange has subtly turned the Wikileaks foundation into the "Julian Assange sexual assault defense fund".
Frankly, everyone is being taken for a ride since rather then reduce his image and involvement with it, he's made sure he's front and centre so that he can dodge court on a very serious but entirely unrelated charge. Wikileaks has been notably absent in trying to protect it's actual informants.
No what you said is that "intelligent people vote Republican" and then went on a tangent about the non-existent in-person voter fraud (which so far, has only been actually done by Republicans who then claimed they were "just showing it was possible" - you know, except they got caught and rightly jailed).
Slashdot Mirror
Those 'like' buttons are a couple lines of HTML to put on your site. And sites have developed a lot of them (I think some news sites load about 6-7 different ones each time?).
They're not "Facebook". They're just a feature of Web 2.0 - and highly replaceable.
The mistake you're making is that those buttons are leading to some type of competitive advantage to Facebook, when all the actual financial data shows it's not - Facebook might have tons of user demographics, but it isn't meaningfully translating to fiscal outcomes and I'd put big questions over their ability to advertise effectively - my yardstick for this has become "will they ever not show you an ad, if they don't think it's relevant?". For Facebook this is still no - for Google search ads it's a little bit yet (the 'featured result' ads don't always appear).
Every feature of Facebook that caused me to sign on with it when it first opened, is available through Twitter
Ok, then, post a single article with 300 words to twitter.
There are lots of things I dislike about FB, not the least of which is that 95% of the margin ads feature amply endowed young females regardless of the product in question, but at least I can post a complete paragraph plus a pic or two in one element.
This is why I question the long term viability of Facebook: I've had it ad-blocked since forever. I will never un-adblock it. And you've stated the exact reason why and why it's a problem: with all their data, the only ads they push are still "broadest possible demographic" ads that are just unwelcome.
Its because if Facebook actually had to try and acknowledge the problem seriously, they'd have to acknowledge seriously that they really do have a whole lot of great big question marks over their future - i.e. who pays them for things? Why would they? Do their users stick around when this happens?
The problem is that we have no unexplained observations to go off of. You find a particle at CERN these days, it turns out to have been predicted by the Standard Model.
So you come up with a neat way to explain the tiny but important discrepancies, follow the mathematics through and find you now require some additional actors to square away the effects you don't see but would've anyway. Suddenly you've got a bunch of new particles in your hypothesis - all of which are required to make it work. Yet disappointingly nothing unexplained coming out of the LHC which might be one of them.
Whenever we do find something new - and chances are good the LHC will see something outside the Standard Model - it'll be a race to see if any of the current proposals predict something or require something which matches.
I think he's referring to the 10% difference in the observed radius of force from the proton.
It's been a tricky one since no one was able to convince themselves it wasn't just measurement error for a long time, but the most recent results seem to say it's real - and no one can propose a good explanation as to why.
Asimov wrote that great letter - the relativity of wrong.
Any new theory has to account for why the old theory worked for the cases it did. General relativity simplifies at low speeds to Newtonian mechanics for example.
Or from the letter - the Earth is round, but assuming it's flat over short distances is perfectly valid (and we do it all the time - the idea of building level or flat floors for example).
Dark matter is required to account for the structure of our galaxy. Sans dark matter, there is not enough observed mass by an order of magnitude in our galaxy to account for the observed galactic rotation curve.
"Unseen matter" is actually the softball bet their, as opposed to the idea that somehow - and nobody really knows or has ever seen how - gravity works differently over long distances. It's just the unseen matter has to have specific properties to fit with observation.
This assumes that the supply is meaningful fraction of the demand. The demand is huge, and as you add more reliable supply new demand is created.
Said truly by someone so sure of their middle-class existence that they can't imagine how they could ever come to be involved with the justice system...
Derived units are all over the place - science is positivist, you use whatever model makes it easiest to work with your data. The problem with the amp was that the definition of the standard was not realizable precisely - you can't have infinite wires, so you two wires of some length and hope you avoid end effects messing it up too much. Which means everyone trying to realize a standard amp gets it a little different as a result of the definition itself.
Then there's the problems of just making the wires longer (they get heavier, they sag, you have to worry about more space). The benefit of the new system is you could fit it on a benchtop, and it's exact - you count exactly that number of electrons and that gives you an amp definition, which anyone can recreate and which doesn't have a built-in uncertainty to its realization.
There are proposals to build reference standards like this, but how you define it is irrelevant if you can't actually measure it that way accurately. One proposal for the kilogram standard was based on electrochemical deposition of gold (ion acculumation). This is appealing because you can as this article shows, count electrons very accurately (and we get better at it all the time) and so if you're pulling Au+ out of solution, then you just do so until you reach the exact number of electrons you needed to get the exact amount of Au you needed. More importantly, you can do it fast.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - the practical realizations are still less accurate then the current system, and it also requires fixing a whole bunch of other constants, and it also is very difficult to actually create secondary standards off of the mechanism.
All proposed gravitation based standards are less accurate then then current kilogram standard (gravity is too weak to be meaningfully measured accurately in the lab - after all, it takes a whole planet to supply 1kg of force on the current standard!).
There's also the problem of making the standard practical, and distributable. A perfect standard that you can't use to create secondary standards is useless. A perfect standard that can't be replicated reasonably widely is also useless.
It's not iridium coated, it's iridium-alloyed - adds hardness.
The problem here is declaring something involving atoms impossible, and well, on the atomic scale nothing is. It sits in lit room at room temperature - there is a whole hell of a lot of EM falling on it, and so every now and again somewhere on it you might exceed the work function of the metal and sputter it. You've also got to deal with not just air sticking to it, but being absorbed into it's bulk - atmospheric humidity would be a big concern since water sticks to everything and is just about impossible to get rid of. Then you've got hydrogen and helium diffusion as well.
Software would still be covered by copyright.
Huh? Newegg was not sued for stealing their software, they were accused of stealing the CONCEPT of a shopping cart. A concept that has been around for hundreds of years, if not longer (hence the prior art).
At long last a judge who is not impressed with the corporate idea that adding the phrase "on a computer", "on a cell phone", or "on the Internet" to a hundreds year old idea magically makes it a totally new, never thought of before idea.
It's more than that - think of it this way: Soverain Effectively patented the most obvious way to walk to a store, put things in a cart, take them to the register and pay for them. Imagine some arsehole doing that to every person. Everyone has to find an unpatented means of going to the store, getting things to the "register" (which for the patent avoidance will be something completely unregister like) and paying ("I choose to steal from you, but tip you handsomely for having a nice store") It's beyond absurd - like most software patents.
Some assholes are certainly trying - see the way that patent trolls for wi-fi were target hotels and resorts, rather then manufacturers.
But you know, just ignore the murder.
> Deflation makes an item worth $1000, worth $990 later. It hurts people with assets. However, if you have cash, that same amount of cash will buy more as deflation continues. Deflation is bad because SMART people stop buying things that will be cheaper tomorrow and inventory in shops is a bad thing because you pay interest on holding it while it reduces in value.
You are correct in every point. What you miss, however, is the elephant in the room. If people stop buying assets, that means the end of consumerism. From an ecological perspective, this is the only way to stop the climate catastrophe and mass extinction events that are becoming increasingly serious.
There is so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.
For one thing, mass extinction events aren't "common".
Secondly: consumerism isn't about people buying assets. It's about them buying disposable, consumable items, as the norm i the economy.
Thirdly: consumerism is not linked to climate change. Emissions of Greenhouse Gases are. Which are also not actually linked to consumerism. There is absolutely nothing implicit in the idea of consumerism which is associated with climate change. Consumerism also isn't linked (implicitly) to resource consumption - since it's just about the item as used by the consumer, not it's lifecycle. And on top of that, you can have perpetual economic growth on a finite resource base easily - since industry is essentially asymptotic towards 100% efficiency. You can grow your economy by going from 90% efficient to 95% to 99% to 99.9%. You don't grow as fast, but you do grow.
[quote]If I have purchased all the nonessential goods I need, and I have money left over, then I'm going to go and figure out what to do with that money. If there's not a lot of it, then I will save it. If there's a bunch, I will spend some to have fun. If there's a crapton, I might invest it. I don't see why this would change just because the numbers are getting smaller.[/quote]
Why would you invest any money, when if you have a lot of it, it's just going to sit there increasing in value with you doing nothing with it?
More importantly, why would anyone borrow it, when the principal will be larger then the amount they originally borrowed and progressively represent more and more of their real earnings?
It's a catch-22: you want to invest, but to justify that you need to charge an interest rate, but since everyone ends up already paying a de facto interest rate via deflation they'll do almost anything to avoid borrowing.
Bernie Madoff lasted decades. It was all just as worthless at the end.
Ross is not an idiot, he is a hero who tried to run usefull service which could save many lives by ensuring some quality of the goods the shop was selling (thanks to user ratings)....I feel sorry for his live ruined by the government.
Yeah, just ignore the people he tried to have murdered and all.
You're proposing tearing down one system, and creating a whole new set of problems, rather then implementing simple fixes to the existing one.
There's no need, for example, for booth workers to check if a ballot is valid before it's put in the ballot box. You get them to sign that they saw the ballot sheet when they handed it to the voter, and then voter votes and casts without any further intervention.
At no point then, does it become possible to tamper with the ballot without it being noticed.
4) Upon my timely death or loss of memory, my family will have all it needs to delete my embarrassing online photos
That is exactly what I thought about the question. Assuming amnesia or similar what password would actually be *needed*. I can only think of access to banking systems, but that can be solved by turning up in person with a photo id. Anything else is so irrelevant.
Well, I'd generally like some of my online communities I partake in to know what happened to me. Many a social circle is nearly entirely digital these days, and quite possibly fairly anonymous.
The problem is all of this information is incredibly public. What did I last buy on ebay? Probably a thing I then told a bunch of people I bought for a great price on ebay.
You could even game this system - do a bunch of fake logins, and use the questions to reverse-engineer the responses.
But even if we take your idea of "freedom" — do you suppose, Julian Assange would've been prosecuted for rape, had he not angered the world's powers? Do I need to remind you, which nice and free Socialist country is doing the prosecution?
Julian Assange has subtly turned the Wikileaks foundation into the "Julian Assange sexual assault defense fund".
Frankly, everyone is being taken for a ride since rather then reduce his image and involvement with it, he's made sure he's front and centre so that he can dodge court on a very serious but entirely unrelated charge. Wikileaks has been notably absent in trying to protect it's actual informants.
No what you said is that "intelligent people vote Republican" and then went on a tangent about the non-existent in-person voter fraud (which so far, has only been actually done by Republicans who then claimed they were "just showing it was possible" - you know, except they got caught and rightly jailed).