You are right, it's strikingly easy. Step 1: code everything in PHP with a lightweight database behind it. Step 2, get a hundred thousand servers (not an exaggeration) scattered all over the world to host it. Step 3, site back and watch the "perceived value" of your company continue to grow.
Then again, somehow Twitter has managed to have a far shakier time scaling up despite being responsible for a collection of 140 character strings and a few microscopic pictures... So apparently there is some luck/magic/skill involved along the way.
Most rational libertarians would agree that the government's business in business includes fraud prevention, contract enforcement, and standardization of terms and measures used in contracts - all of which can be summarazied as "make contracts work". Contracts are nearly a religion for some libertarians.
Also, I don't think "non-profit" means what you want it to mean. For example, it's ofen the "non-profit" hospitals that are the most expensive and ritzy, and least likely to extend care to the indigent.
He said insurance companies should be nonprofit (meaning they exist just to pay the bills and manage the risk, not provide a return for investors) however this ignores the capitalist need for competition since the quest for profit is what drives an insurance company to innovate with something awesome like a default swap instead of just selling policies for houses and boring crap like that. Ahem I am getting off track.
You are thinking of "nonprofit" retirement homes, those tend to be the hardest places to get into as they are often religious, exclusive, and upscale enough to have no need for competition. Nonprofit hospitals may be more expensive and exclusive, but it's harder to hide from young sick people who don't have insurance than it is from old people who can't find the bathroom so it all kind of evens out.
The only legitimate job of a securities law enforcement division is to protect investors against the specific crimes of theft, fraud, and breach of contract.
I believe Ayn Rand herself argued that taxation to fund contract enforcement is not a legitimate use of governmental force, but that the service should be provided on a percentage-of-transaction basis, and used as an optional means of generating revenue.
Yeah we aren't going to tax you, we are just going to collect a fee based on the total amount of the transaction and use it for purposes pursuant to the good of the general public.
Wow Ayn Rand has done it again! She solved taxation!!!!!!!!!11oneoneoneelevntybillion
Don't miss their claim to cure Myocardial Infarction (also known as a heart attack). The next time you have a heart attack, don't bother calling 911, just jump on the internet, order up a stem cell treatment, fly out to god-knows-where, and have them cure you right quick.
Hey, it has to be at least as effective as CPR, right?
Oh, forgot to mention that anything but the upgrade or full version will actually not be legal (i.e. the OEM version), since you aren't starting with a "Brand new" pc. You know, for what it's worth.
You can use a Win 7 upgrade license on XP just as well as you can with Vista. I did that a few days ago, in fact. Of course, as you point out it's not much cheaper than the OEM full version license. Most companies probably want the Pro version, btw, since they have networking to do.
Is anyone asking for a billion dollars to pay for their dead pelican? The general consensus is they just want *fewer dead pelicans*. Just paying for the actual damage, plus a bit of the amortized losses going forward, is going to cripple them sufficiently. No one is saying (that I have heard) that they need to do anything than pay for the billions and billions of dollars worth of property and prosperity that they already destroyed. Maybe the government will want a turn at flogging them with a punitive suit just so congressmen can look like they are in control come election season, but individuals just want to be *made right*.
"RIAA declares LimeWire saved the economy from spending $1.5 Trillion on shitty music it didn't really need, and at least $1.4 Trillion of which wasn't worth listening to a second time anyway"
When the numbers you throw around are significantly larger than your industry's profits from the better part of a century, and start to close in on a fraction of the GDP, you sure make it easy to poke fun at you. Do they really think anyone is going to, for even a second, believe that they would have made $1.5 trillion dollars had it not been for one crappy P2P tool? OMGLOL
If anything, every dime they put toward stupid commercials and other PR stunts should be matched (by them) and put into a "Future of the Gulf Coast" fund where it can be used solely for long term needs to be determined at a later date. Then, in 10 years when the fisheries still are in a terrible state and BP is in a legal battle over how the cleanup was handled and what government did what without BPs consent they will have a little money to put toward rebuilding the ecology of the coast.
Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.
Because low quality prints are fine for old people who can't tell the difference. This is the sort of thing that will probably keep some guy's inlaws from pestering him on a weekly basis if they can just get their hands on recent pics of the grandkids without having to work that dang mouse.
Never mind the corruption(making Chicago look saintly) and contempt for the US that still exists there.
Who are you referring to? Every country outside the USA? Every single one? From what I have learned of the Americas (having spent some time in Mexico and Brazil) is that they are a lot like America, being that they have standards and would prefer that their citizens don't get exploited for someone *elses* benefit. China and other parts of Asia, on the other hand (been there, too) don't really care about that.
South America is too much *like us* to want to export work to, the cost savings just isn't there when you compare it to China, Vietnam, etc. However, as things change (like this article points out) that equation will adjust and the Americas could become a viable alternative to (gasp!) actually making something ourselves.
Yes, direct and life-altering consequences for the 30 or so seconds it takes for them to figure out that aspirin bottles are being filled with Zoloft and generators are randomly exploding left and right. Then, they send a military team to kill you (in the name of antiterrorism) and they plug the holes at whatever price is necessary (in the name of antiterrorism) and then, if anyone outside the government HAD even noticed, they would be back to life as usual.
They ARE thinking of the children... didn't you read the summary? Russia wants to give out "cyberwarfare arms limitation treats" to all the good little girls and boys who do their homework, listen to their parents, and most importantly do *not* start DDOS attacks or run password guessers against random hosts in the.mil domain.
What better way to make the world a peaceful place than to start with the children? Here's hoping they haven't fixed that typo by the time my comment hits!
I was convinced I couldn't concentrate thanks to Toxoplasmosis... But I guess if I managed to get through an entire Economist article, I can't be doing *too* bad. Maybe it's just hypochondria?
I know a little bit about IP geolocation, but when I got an iPod touch and fired it up for the first time on my home network I was *stunned* to see that it pinpointed my location to within one or two houses when using the Google Maps app despite having no GPS and no other identifiable information entered into the device. Maybe they are using this data to drive geolocation based on SSID instead of IP? Can anyone explain how else IP geolocation can be so accurate?
The problem is that states DO have the power to control what goes on in their borders, and invariably they try to use the US constitution (their interpretation of it) as a way to justify the laws they pass. If it doesn't pass constitutional muster it must not be OK in the state, right? Well if it doesn't pass muster it must not be OK in other states, either; we all have the same constitution to follow.
So, either you can argue that the US constitution has influence hugely exaggerated from it's intention, or you can let what goes on in a court in Vermont dictate what happens to people in New Mexico. Since people rarely get elected on the platform of "I have a new, radical idea about how the constitution works" I think the chances of this happening any time soon are slim.
How much of reality is governed by the first few search results on Google? You are ignoring the emphasis people place on trusting anything that appears on more than one web site, and Google makes it easier than ever to find exactly what you are looking for (truthful or not). Google could have us (meaning a majority of internet goers) believing that the Russians went to the moon and sold the pictures to the US in exchange for letting Cuba have missiles; all they need is to inflate the rank of a few particularly ridiculous web sites and every google for "moon landing hoax" will end in the reader believing whatever the summaries tell them.
When you were a kid, did you flip through the Encyclopedia thinking "hmm I bet that's not true"? Well you should have, print encyclopedias are rife with error but any librarian will tell you "if it's in there it's good enough to be true". Who's a kid to believe?
As Americans we have to understand that we have an extremely serious problem with corruption that goes back for decades, if not centuries.
Nail, meet head. Can you really call it corruption if it's been going on *the whole time*???
You can't "correct" something that has always been the way it is. You need an approach other than "it should have always been legal" because no one attaches to that, even if they may agree with you. Slow and steady change that can't be refuted is the way to go. Look at gambling. Once a completely taboo business in any but two of the 50 states, it's now got a brick and mortar presence in half of the states in the US. How? Nice, slow change marked by appealing to the common good while mitigating the downsides. State lotteries, Horse and dog racing, Video poker. Before you know it, the problems have been solved (with respect to getting citizens to buy off on it) and it's open season.
How not to get your issue pushed forward?
"Pot should be legal 'cause, like, 'legalize it!' man. peace."
The same thing goes for these copyright cases. If the argument is self referential, you won't win; plain and simple.
Here's my thing... If someone is, say, "persuadable" enough to spend 1000 euros on *virtual fscking furniture* then what's to say they will have the sense to protect any of it? The police need to issue citations for criminal stupidity.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they are being allowed to get away with this shit.
Because our justice system is wholly subservient to business interests. It's not that hard to understand.
In a sane, logical world, somebody (the feds, the bar, whomever) would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sadly, I don't think we live in a sane world any more...
Is this really what tipped you off? Were the hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in jail not enough?
And here we are, at the real reason none of this will move forward. Instead of making substantive claims why this activity is illegal or unconstitutional, it gets dragged toward another, completely unrelated debate where it is sure to die a slow death. Good job! Next time, if you want to actually make a point instead of rubbing salt in the wound, leave the pot alone!
most people or most nerds? I don't think most people even get ABP, even if they run Firefox, let alone actually know what Javascript is or that its something that can be disabled. Turn off JS these days, and practically nothing works. better would be a plug-in which just prevents Smokescreen from being loaded in particular.
Disabling javascript at the user's will? Forget ABP, that's where noscript comes in! And who doesn't use noscript?
"I see now why people are so angry at the 'murky' nature of the App Store, and I'm starting to agree with them. My Frame was approved by Apple 3 times (once for each version we released), and... now, at version 1.2 they decide it's to be removed? How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog[?] There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it's immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare. It really is Apple's way or the highway..."
You can't use commas and semicolons properly, and/or you are so myopic that you can't see the forest for the apple trees. There are plenty of other platforms out there to develop for. If your business model relies on Apple's closed store app architecture to force you in front of users, and requires their zillion-user-plus install base in order to be profitable, maybe you don't have a very compelling product to begin with. What you are witnessing is the difference between Apple and an actual free market; live with it or move on. None of us outside the reality distortion field are surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, it's strikingly easy. Step 1: code everything in PHP with a lightweight database behind it. Step 2, get a hundred thousand servers (not an exaggeration) scattered all over the world to host it. Step 3, site back and watch the "perceived value" of your company continue to grow.
Then again, somehow Twitter has managed to have a far shakier time scaling up despite being responsible for a collection of 140 character strings and a few microscopic pictures... So apparently there is some luck/magic/skill involved along the way.
Most rational libertarians would agree that the government's business in business includes fraud prevention, contract enforcement, and standardization of terms and measures used in contracts - all of which can be summarazied as "make contracts work". Contracts are nearly a religion for some libertarians.
Also, I don't think "non-profit" means what you want it to mean. For example, it's ofen the "non-profit" hospitals that are the most expensive and ritzy, and least likely to extend care to the indigent.
He said insurance companies should be nonprofit (meaning they exist just to pay the bills and manage the risk, not provide a return for investors) however this ignores the capitalist need for competition since the quest for profit is what drives an insurance company to innovate with something awesome like a default swap instead of just selling policies for houses and boring crap like that. Ahem I am getting off track.
You are thinking of "nonprofit" retirement homes, those tend to be the hardest places to get into as they are often religious, exclusive, and upscale enough to have no need for competition. Nonprofit hospitals may be more expensive and exclusive, but it's harder to hide from young sick people who don't have insurance than it is from old people who can't find the bathroom so it all kind of evens out.
Citation
The only legitimate job of a securities law enforcement division is to protect investors against the specific crimes of theft, fraud, and breach of contract.
I believe Ayn Rand herself argued that taxation to fund contract enforcement is not a legitimate use of governmental force, but that the service should be provided on a percentage-of-transaction basis, and used as an optional means of generating revenue.
Also see the Heritage Foundation's Sentencing of Corporate Fraud and White Collar Crimes
Yeah we aren't going to tax you, we are just going to collect a fee based on the total amount of the transaction and use it for purposes pursuant to the good of the general public.
Wow Ayn Rand has done it again! She solved taxation!!!!!!!!!11oneoneoneelevntybillion
Don't miss their claim to cure Myocardial Infarction (also known as a heart attack). The next time you have a heart attack, don't bother calling 911, just jump on the internet, order up a stem cell treatment, fly out to god-knows-where, and have them cure you right quick.
Hey, it has to be at least as effective as CPR, right?
Oh, forgot to mention that anything but the upgrade or full version will actually not be legal (i.e. the OEM version), since you aren't starting with a "Brand new" pc. You know, for what it's worth.
You can use a Win 7 upgrade license on XP just as well as you can with Vista. I did that a few days ago, in fact. Of course, as you point out it's not much cheaper than the OEM full version license. Most companies probably want the Pro version, btw, since they have networking to do.
Who is saying BP needs punitives? Anyone?
Is anyone asking for a billion dollars to pay for their dead pelican? The general consensus is they just want *fewer dead pelicans*. Just paying for the actual damage, plus a bit of the amortized losses going forward, is going to cripple them sufficiently. No one is saying (that I have heard) that they need to do anything than pay for the billions and billions of dollars worth of property and prosperity that they already destroyed. Maybe the government will want a turn at flogging them with a punitive suit just so congressmen can look like they are in control come election season, but individuals just want to be *made right*.
My interpretation of the headline:
"RIAA declares LimeWire saved the economy from spending $1.5 Trillion on shitty music it didn't really need, and at least $1.4 Trillion of which wasn't worth listening to a second time anyway"
When the numbers you throw around are significantly larger than your industry's profits from the better part of a century, and start to close in on a fraction of the GDP, you sure make it easy to poke fun at you. Do they really think anyone is going to, for even a second, believe that they would have made $1.5 trillion dollars had it not been for one crappy P2P tool? OMGLOL
OMG lol.
You almost had me, then I saw this on the side of the page almost at the bottom:
Almost every home in Tokyo uses an Electronic Bidet to spray water at their butt.
Why don't we?
As if that weren't enough, right after it there's an ad for an $800 Ethernet tap...
If anything, every dime they put toward stupid commercials and other PR stunts should be matched (by them) and put into a "Future of the Gulf Coast" fund where it can be used solely for long term needs to be determined at a later date. Then, in 10 years when the fisheries still are in a terrible state and BP is in a legal battle over how the cleanup was handled and what government did what without BPs consent they will have a little money to put toward rebuilding the ecology of the coast.
@BPGlobalPR
By the way, we made it so if you google image search "oil spill" or "bp" you'll see some great celeb sideboob pics. #bpcares
Ah, the fun we poke.
Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.
Because low quality prints are fine for old people who can't tell the difference. This is the sort of thing that will probably keep some guy's inlaws from pestering him on a weekly basis if they can just get their hands on recent pics of the grandkids without having to work that dang mouse.
No thanks.
Never mind the corruption(making Chicago look saintly) and contempt for the US that still exists there.
Who are you referring to? Every country outside the USA? Every single one? From what I have learned of the Americas (having spent some time in Mexico and Brazil) is that they are a lot like America, being that they have standards and would prefer that their citizens don't get exploited for someone *elses* benefit. China and other parts of Asia, on the other hand (been there, too) don't really care about that.
South America is too much *like us* to want to export work to, the cost savings just isn't there when you compare it to China, Vietnam, etc. However, as things change (like this article points out) that equation will adjust and the Americas could become a viable alternative to (gasp!) actually making something ourselves.
Yes, direct and life-altering consequences for the 30 or so seconds it takes for them to figure out that aspirin bottles are being filled with Zoloft and generators are randomly exploding left and right. Then, they send a military team to kill you (in the name of antiterrorism) and they plug the holes at whatever price is necessary (in the name of antiterrorism) and then, if anyone outside the government HAD even noticed, they would be back to life as usual.
They ARE thinking of the children... didn't you read the summary? Russia wants to give out "cyberwarfare arms limitation treats" to all the good little girls and boys who do their homework, listen to their parents, and most importantly do *not* start DDOS attacks or run password guessers against random hosts in the .mil domain.
What better way to make the world a peaceful place than to start with the children? Here's hoping they haven't fixed that typo by the time my comment hits!
I was convinced I couldn't concentrate thanks to Toxoplasmosis... But I guess if I managed to get through an entire Economist article, I can't be doing *too* bad. Maybe it's just hypochondria?
I know a little bit about IP geolocation, but when I got an iPod touch and fired it up for the first time on my home network I was *stunned* to see that it pinpointed my location to within one or two houses when using the Google Maps app despite having no GPS and no other identifiable information entered into the device. Maybe they are using this data to drive geolocation based on SSID instead of IP? Can anyone explain how else IP geolocation can be so accurate?
The problem is that states DO have the power to control what goes on in their borders, and invariably they try to use the US constitution (their interpretation of it) as a way to justify the laws they pass. If it doesn't pass constitutional muster it must not be OK in the state, right? Well if it doesn't pass muster it must not be OK in other states, either; we all have the same constitution to follow.
So, either you can argue that the US constitution has influence hugely exaggerated from it's intention, or you can let what goes on in a court in Vermont dictate what happens to people in New Mexico. Since people rarely get elected on the platform of "I have a new, radical idea about how the constitution works" I think the chances of this happening any time soon are slim.
Should it though? Probably.
How much of reality is governed by the first few search results on Google? You are ignoring the emphasis people place on trusting anything that appears on more than one web site, and Google makes it easier than ever to find exactly what you are looking for (truthful or not). Google could have us (meaning a majority of internet goers) believing that the Russians went to the moon and sold the pictures to the US in exchange for letting Cuba have missiles; all they need is to inflate the rank of a few particularly ridiculous web sites and every google for "moon landing hoax" will end in the reader believing whatever the summaries tell them.
When you were a kid, did you flip through the Encyclopedia thinking "hmm I bet that's not true"? Well you should have, print encyclopedias are rife with error but any librarian will tell you "if it's in there it's good enough to be true". Who's a kid to believe?
As Americans we have to understand that we have an extremely serious problem with corruption that goes back for decades, if not centuries.
Nail, meet head. Can you really call it corruption if it's been going on *the whole time*???
You can't "correct" something that has always been the way it is. You need an approach other than "it should have always been legal" because no one attaches to that, even if they may agree with you. Slow and steady change that can't be refuted is the way to go. Look at gambling. Once a completely taboo business in any but two of the 50 states, it's now got a brick and mortar presence in half of the states in the US. How? Nice, slow change marked by appealing to the common good while mitigating the downsides. State lotteries, Horse and dog racing, Video poker. Before you know it, the problems have been solved (with respect to getting citizens to buy off on it) and it's open season.
How not to get your issue pushed forward?
"Pot should be legal 'cause, like, 'legalize it!' man. peace."
The same thing goes for these copyright cases. If the argument is self referential, you won't win; plain and simple.
Here's my thing... If someone is, say, "persuadable" enough to spend 1000 euros on *virtual fscking furniture* then what's to say they will have the sense to protect any of it? The police need to issue citations for criminal stupidity.
Oh, does anyone know if the pool is open?
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they are being allowed to get away with this shit.
Because our justice system is wholly subservient to business interests. It's not that hard to understand.
In a sane, logical world, somebody (the feds, the bar, whomever) would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sadly, I don't think we live in a sane world any more...
Is this really what tipped you off? Were the hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in jail not enough?
And here we are, at the real reason none of this will move forward. Instead of making substantive claims why this activity is illegal or unconstitutional, it gets dragged toward another, completely unrelated debate where it is sure to die a slow death. Good job! Next time, if you want to actually make a point instead of rubbing salt in the wound, leave the pot alone!
most people or most nerds? I don't think most people even get ABP, even if they run Firefox, let alone actually know what Javascript is or that its something that can be disabled. Turn off JS these days, and practically nothing works. better would be a plug-in which just prevents Smokescreen from being loaded in particular.
Disabling javascript at the user's will? Forget ABP, that's where noscript comes in! And who doesn't use noscript?
"I see now why people are so angry at the 'murky' nature of the App Store, and I'm starting to agree with them. My Frame was approved by Apple 3 times (once for each version we released), and... now, at version 1.2 they decide it's to be removed? How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog[?] There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it's immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare. It really is Apple's way or the highway..."
You can't use commas and semicolons properly, and/or you are so myopic that you can't see the forest for the apple trees. There are plenty of other platforms out there to develop for. If your business model relies on Apple's closed store app architecture to force you in front of users, and requires their zillion-user-plus install base in order to be profitable, maybe you don't have a very compelling product to begin with. What you are witnessing is the difference between Apple and an actual free market; live with it or move on. None of us outside the reality distortion field are surprised.
DIGG had the SCOOP on this underground tunnel story... What's it to you?
har har har har har