$51,914 is the median income, I make $65k, and they're like "ok so you're an out-of-touch rich asshole."
Median household income and there's on average 2.6 persons per household. You alone make more than most families. Get yourself a deadbeat wife who shares a kid 60/40 with her ex to support and give $13k to charity, then you're down to being average - and you'd have to give up a lot more to be poor. Besides I've found that the difference in disposable income and total income is two totally different things. If you make say $3000 a month and have $2000 in expenses, then a person who earns 20% less has 60% less disposable income ($1000 vs $400). Those extra dollars on the top make a huge difference.
I wish I knew anybody who had any success at using open source projects while unemployed to "count as being employed"
It doesn't, but it might help you lose a little "I sat on my lazy bum ass all day" stigma. Showing that you actually like to code and don't do it just because you get a pay check would be a huge plus in my book.
It happens, I applied for a job that was essentially what I'd been doing for 5 years + more related experience because I was out of a job and already before the first round interview I got a reply saying I had a most impressive resume and that I was probably overqualified for the position, but if I hadn't received any other offers they were willing to take a chat. Of course they were right on the money because I did get other offers for a more senior position and I probably wouldn't have stayed long anyway. Companies don't like to hire people who they think take the job only as a stop-gap, no matter how much you say otherwise. Even McDonalds doesn't like to train new people how to make french fries, they'd rather hire someone who won't be getting any other job.
This is obviously of benefit to the employer, but also to the prospective employee.
Not really, if you're a weak candidate you might get "lucky", if you're a strong candidate your true value will probably show faster by simply going to more interviews - in fact some of them may overvalue you as well. It's not nearly as bad for you to be passed up for a job that you "should have" gotten as an employer stuck with a lemon hire. The only reason I'd go with this is because I was really desperate that there was this job or no job or that I really, really wanted to work for this company. Since the latter is not the case, I suspect it's a lot of the former and those are not the good candidates. And that doesn't include the possibility of a scam, that they're only using you for free labor with no intent to hire.
8. PUBLICITY/GRANT OF RIGHTS Except where prohibited by law, by entering the Contest, as a condition of participating in this Contest, entrant agrees to allow Sponsor and its designees to use entrant's name, photograph, likeness, statements, biographical information, voice and city and state address for advertising and promotional purposes for this and similar promotions, worldwide, and in perpetuity, in any and all forms of media, now known or hereafter devised without additional compensation, review or approval rights, notification or permission, except where prohibited by law.
His view of the stock market is cynical. The guy selling you stock might really be taking a vacation. He might be a 'boomer selling down his IRA to make ends meet. Cuban sounds like yet another Internet mind-reader in this piece.
Maybe, but unless you're going to make a company takeover and go private then you're dependent on what other people will pay for the stock in the future. If you think a stock is under/overvalued, fine. When is the market going to realize that? Or is that stock still going to be under/overvalued in 1, 2, 5, 10 years when you want to get out? If you realize that the next product Apple is launching is going to be an iFlop, you can short stock now and cash in a year from now when it's obvious from market reports and financial statements. It's not enough to simply be smarter than the market, the market has to catch on and move the stock price for you to make money.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a common carrier, essentially an internet service provider.
Legally neither WMF or ISPs are common carriers as telecoms are. The only "common-carrierish" protection WMF and ISPs have is the law I quoted which explicitly only covers copyright. Anything else is down to normal common law, you're not guilty of murder just because someone else killed a person with your gun but they don't have any special kind of shield from lawsuits.
Besides, thanks to the DMCA, you can't sue the WMF for defamation. Read up on the law, it might be educational.
Maybe you should read it yourself?
17 USC 512 - Limitations on liability relating to material online (c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users. - (1) In general. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider-
There is nothing in the DMCA that shields you from a defamation lawsuit or any other legal liability except copyright infringement.
At some point, I came to consider the ads as no different than your run-of-the-mill spammer - They go out of their way to waste my time, get me to look at their crap, try to con me into spending money, all on something in which I have no interest to start with. They fight back against ad-blocking technology with ever more subtle ways of getting around our filters, and yet they still can't take the goddamned hint.
What hint would that be, that you want the site to be run by magic pixies that don't have any server costs, don't have any bandwidth costs and don't have any costs creating the content? Most people hate pay-walls and subscriptions with a vengeance so you don't want to give them your money, you don't want to give them eyeball time, you should get the part that benefits you but they shouldn't get the part that benefits them. Nobody wants ads as such, if customers do it's so they can get more content or pay less. It used to be that if you don't like what they're offering, don't buy it. If you don't like all the ads on TV, don't watch it. If you don't like all the ads on a website, don't go there.
Ad blockers are part of a bigger cultural change which is "if you don't like the deal, rewrite it". Don't like all the ads on TV? Get a PVR to skip them. Don't like the web ads? Get an ad blocker to browse the site without them. Don't like the DRM on BluRays? Download it off TPB. It's like a boycott, except the hard part of forgoing something you actually wanted. And there's a lot of people out there that just aren't reasonable in what they want, but nobody's going to sell them a Ferrari for $100. In the digital world there's no limits though, if you don't feel paying a buck for Angry Birds is reasonable and want to pirate it for nothing then you can. And the more unreasonable you are, the more you can justify.
According to the article that $426 was made in less than one day (the first), and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week.
Uh, what? Opening day sales are usually way higher than your average day, usually people make up their opinion pretty quick if they want it or not. I'd be surprised if he breaks the $1000 barrier in a week and it's not like week two is going to be like week one either.
Wireless broadcasts without encryption, however, are akin to a neighbor who yells loud enough for everyone to know their family's business. I don't see any difference between my neighbors having a heated conversation that I can hear inside my house and them sending unencrypted packets into my house.
The difference is that each packet is keyed to the recipients address and to listen in you need a device explicitly made to intercept packets going to others. If you have tenants and offer them internet service and set up a dump of their traffic, are you doing a wiretap? Hell yes. If you are on a cable loop and modify the cable modem to dump all packets for everyone on the loop, are you doing a wiretap? Hell yes. Note that in an earlier case they found the exception didn't apply to cordless phones - the intent was obviously that it was designed to only be received on the handset it belonged to. Wifi packets are the same, you only intend to communicate with that one card and not the world. That it's unencrypted is mostly irrelevant, if you go through a door marked "staff only" you're trespassing even though it was unlocked. The intented user was clear.
So you're quite happy to live in a world where every time you want to "do things" you have to go scouring through law books and beg the government for permission?
In a lot of cases where I'd call it preemptive crime prevention, yes. For example if you pretend to be a doctor but don't have a license to practice medicine, we don't have to wait for an actual malpractice case. You are already breaking the law just by trying. If you operate a restaurant I don't mind that you have to have a permit so that health inspectors both know you exist and have a right to investigate your facilities before you put people in the hospital. If you pretend to operate a charity, I don't mind that you need a permit that requires documentation that the money goes where you say it's going and is not a fraud. I don't mind that the government must approval of your rental units before there is a house fire where someone doesn't get out because there's no fire exit and you're charged with manslaughter.
A permit is not something the government should hand or not hand out on a whim, it should have a clearly defined list of requirements and those who fulfill the requirements should get a permit. Of course you could say that the "free market" should fix this, that people would simply stop going to unsanitary restaurants but the practical experience has been that the market hasn't fixed this so instead of quoting dogma we found a solution that did. Sure you can have too much bureaucracy as well, but a lot of the time the businesses trying to fly "under the radar" without a permit do so because they are breaking a lot of other laws and regulations that are there for a reason. If I just pick a place to eat at random I don't expect great food, but I do expect that it's fit for human consumption. It's really not too much to ask.
The environments should agree on using the same underpinnings: not just the Linux kernel, but also what lies between the kernel and the GNOME/KDE libraries. They should also make sure that they are interoperable.
And here's the real problem, GNOME/KDE aren't interoperable because GTK and Qt aren't interoperable because C and C++ aren't interoperable. Oh you can sorta write a C library that works on both like D-bus but major interaction between C and C++ code is going to a be a lot of pain. There's too much bad blood between then and neither C or C++ is very compelling languages to build a 21st century desktop. If I had a hundred million dollars to spend or an army of open source coders who'd obey my commands I'd port Dalvik to the desktop and get people started on building a new desktop in Java, without Oracle's JVM and without a lot of the early cruft that isn't supported on Dalvik. I think several of the security arrangements are good too, like each application running in its own VM. It's just a helluva lot of work to remake all of GNOME/KDE.
A well commented code base is like a pool full of clean water. Poor/absent/misleading commented code is like piss. The value of having a pool rapidly deteriorates if someone's pissing in it, even if by volume there's far more water than piss. The only way you're going to keep the pool clean is if you have chemicals in the water that immediately lets you know if someone is pissing and can evict them, that is to say code review. But if you already have a pool of piss, writing good comments is like pouring a liter of water into it - it's still a pool of piss. The only thing you can do is empty the pool and start over and try to do better next time. So I'm more it depends on the state of the code - if it has good comments, write good comments. If it is salvageable, salvage it. If it is a lost cause, don't waste any time trying to band-aid it.
You're simply not being creative enough. For example you could use this on bundles - sure you might know what A, B and C costs individually, but if you're on product A's page and get an offer for a bundle, that's pretty hard to compare. You probably don't want to offer the exact same bundle at different prices, but there's a huge set of possible bundles so you'll rarely reuse them. Or you can just "classify" your customers so your good customers are offered one set of bundles and your less good customers different bundles. As long as everyone is offered a bundle nobody might realize they're being played. There's probably a few other ways I can think of too to make people think you have to "qualify" for this offer so it's not for everyone. Very special deal just for you, my friend.
People think they can outsmart those that work in marketing, they're usually wrong. One example I remember good was from a coupon catalog, based on purchasing habits from store cards they had a pretty good idea when women got pregnant and delivered. But if they filled the coupon magazine with the kind of products pregnant women and new mothers buy, they'd feel it was creepy. So they mixed it with anti-products putting lawn mowers next to the baby products making people think it was just random. Astroturfers don't just put in perfect 5 ratings, they put in "petty" sounding 4 star reviews and the occasional whining 2 star review to make it look real. It's no coincidence that the products you need at the grocery store are spread around so you must pass through all the other sections. They plan for all this.
Don't kid yourself, Nokia has been a de facto Microsoft subsidiary since Elop became CEO.
If he trashed Symbian and Meego then executed Windows Phone well I could buy that, but my Occam's razor suggests the answer is even simpler. If this was an "inside job" by Microsoft they'd want to preserve as much as possible of Nokia to sell Windows Phones. So far it only looks like corporate suicide by a terribly incompetent CEO.
I'm guessing that for now they are telling the truth, because first you have to make people accept giving DNA for various random cases. Then you point out the obvious waste and absurdity in collecting this information and throwing it away again and again. Since most people feel they're paying way too much taxes already they'll go with it and get permission to store it so they can just ask your permission to reuse it. Then they'll complain of the administration cost of getting permission for each individual use and make the default a permanent permission. From there you can just slow-roll it to cover more crimes to get more people in the system. And if you've boiled the frog well enough, perhaps the 51% will find that the other 49% should be in the system too.
Make no mistake, ideas are dime a dozen. Everyone has one, and everyone thinks their idea will make them a million dollars. The reason not everyone is a millionaire is that the conversion between idea and money is dependent much more on execution of the idea than the idea itself.
So far everyone agrees with you.
If more entrepreneurs understood this instead of focusing on the product, there would be fewer failure stories to talk about. Now don't get me wrong, a good product is *very* important, but it's still a small part of the larger picture.
I think you're at the core but you're failing to make the point real clear. Everybody has heard that ideas is a dime a dozen. The problem is the founder who thinks "execution of the idea" is to turn the idea into a product. Just because I have the idea for a software I need code to implement it, an architecture, user interface, source revision control, security rights, storage, hardware capacity, network capacity and a zillion other things - obviously there's a ton of work between an idea and a turn-key product.
And like you say, it's very important but so is sales, marketing, distribution, support, human resources, finance, legal and all the other core and support functions to run a company. If you want to start a business you have to start all these tracks in parallel, you can't wait until you have a finished product and go "Umm... so how do we sell this?" And I'd guess that most successful start-ups has at least one guy who doesn't speak tech and isn't dragged down into the technical details of the product and can concentrate on all those other things.
Something that gave them the "wow" factor, something that said they'd steal Apple's profits or Android's popularity. Sure, it's an alright launch for a platform that has a 3.5% market share and climbing but this is Nokia we're talking about, the Chipzilla of cell phones. The people still holding Nokia stock are those who bought into the Elop kool-aid and for every quarter some of them go "You took a smoldering platform and poured gasoline on it for THIS?!", their Q2 sales were crap and compared to Q2 last year they've gone from a 391 million euro profit to a 327 million loss on operations - that is they're now losing money on selling phones before all the other costs. They can't afford to burn this kind of cash for long, and if the steam runs out before their market share recovers, well...
If it's not well regulated, open and the result of mutually beneficial agreement then expect someone smarter than you to take it from you: this rule applies to money, commerce and war.
Seems to me bitcoin is of mutual benefit - there are people who want to pay with bitcoins and people who want to be paid with bitcoins. That there are a lot of other people who'd like to rob us blind doesn't change that, any more than burglars and bank robbers and shoplifters do in the real world. It's just back to the days of the wild wild west when the sheriff was nowhere to be found and you have to protect your own assets.
Furthermore, a workweek of maybe 20-25 hours is the max for me. I tried self-employment, but motivation and discipline are a bit hard to come by, and it's not something that will work for me long-term. In theory it's perfect, in practice not so much.
I don't want to be self-employed either, but it's because I'm not a good salesman, not a good negotiator, hate the administrative parts of contracts and schedules and billing and I don't want my entire paycheck to depend on finding work. If you don't have the motivation and discipline for the work itself you're not going to be much of an employee either, on top of your other issues. If you want to find a job I wouldn't let that shine through, because I saw big red blinking "do not hire" signs that had nothing to do with your schizophrenia.
I'm guessing many of them are marketing companies, since torrent feeds give you a fairly accurate picture of what's hot or not and where without the PR spin. Otherwise I don't see much point, the legal value of an IP deteriorates quickly - either you have to send a C&D or sue now, in a year nobody knows who it belonged to.
The point should be that the Hugo Awards hold the copyright to their awards ceremony, which includes distribution rights; by the erroneous blocking of the stream, Hugo's right to distribute was grievously infringed. That infringement like any other infringement should by remedied by the assessment of considerable monetary penalties.
Nonsense. Nobody else distributed their show, so their rights were not violated. They don't have any rights to use UStream's service for their distribution, only an agreement and I'm sure the free service says they can stop any stream for any reason at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
$51,914 is the median income, I make $65k, and they're like "ok so you're an out-of-touch rich asshole."
Median household income and there's on average 2.6 persons per household. You alone make more than most families. Get yourself a deadbeat wife who shares a kid 60/40 with her ex to support and give $13k to charity, then you're down to being average - and you'd have to give up a lot more to be poor. Besides I've found that the difference in disposable income and total income is two totally different things. If you make say $3000 a month and have $2000 in expenses, then a person who earns 20% less has 60% less disposable income ($1000 vs $400). Those extra dollars on the top make a huge difference.
I wish I knew anybody who had any success at using open source projects while unemployed to "count as being employed"
It doesn't, but it might help you lose a little "I sat on my lazy bum ass all day" stigma. Showing that you actually like to code and don't do it just because you get a pay check would be a huge plus in my book.
It happens, I applied for a job that was essentially what I'd been doing for 5 years + more related experience because I was out of a job and already before the first round interview I got a reply saying I had a most impressive resume and that I was probably overqualified for the position, but if I hadn't received any other offers they were willing to take a chat. Of course they were right on the money because I did get other offers for a more senior position and I probably wouldn't have stayed long anyway. Companies don't like to hire people who they think take the job only as a stop-gap, no matter how much you say otherwise. Even McDonalds doesn't like to train new people how to make french fries, they'd rather hire someone who won't be getting any other job.
This is obviously of benefit to the employer, but also to the prospective employee.
Not really, if you're a weak candidate you might get "lucky", if you're a strong candidate your true value will probably show faster by simply going to more interviews - in fact some of them may overvalue you as well. It's not nearly as bad for you to be passed up for a job that you "should have" gotten as an employer stuck with a lemon hire. The only reason I'd go with this is because I was really desperate that there was this job or no job or that I really, really wanted to work for this company. Since the latter is not the case, I suspect it's a lot of the former and those are not the good candidates. And that doesn't include the possibility of a scam, that they're only using you for free labor with no intent to hire.
8. PUBLICITY/GRANT OF RIGHTS Except where prohibited by law, by entering the Contest, as a condition of participating in this Contest, entrant agrees to allow Sponsor and its designees to use entrant's name, photograph, likeness, statements, biographical information, voice and city and state address for advertising and promotional purposes for this and similar promotions, worldwide, and in perpetuity, in any and all forms of media, now known or hereafter devised without additional compensation, review or approval rights, notification or permission, except where prohibited by law.
His view of the stock market is cynical. The guy selling you stock might really be taking a vacation. He might be a 'boomer selling down his IRA to make ends meet. Cuban sounds like yet another Internet mind-reader in this piece.
Maybe, but unless you're going to make a company takeover and go private then you're dependent on what other people will pay for the stock in the future. If you think a stock is under/overvalued, fine. When is the market going to realize that? Or is that stock still going to be under/overvalued in 1, 2, 5, 10 years when you want to get out? If you realize that the next product Apple is launching is going to be an iFlop, you can short stock now and cash in a year from now when it's obvious from market reports and financial statements. It's not enough to simply be smarter than the market, the market has to catch on and move the stock price for you to make money.
I did and ended up as a nerd that hangs out on Slashdot. Does that count as "fine"?
The Wikimedia Foundation is a common carrier, essentially an internet service provider.
Legally neither WMF or ISPs are common carriers as telecoms are. The only "common-carrierish" protection WMF and ISPs have is the law I quoted which explicitly only covers copyright. Anything else is down to normal common law, you're not guilty of murder just because someone else killed a person with your gun but they don't have any special kind of shield from lawsuits.
Besides, thanks to the DMCA, you can't sue the WMF for defamation. Read up on the law, it might be educational.
Maybe you should read it yourself?
17 USC 512 - Limitations on liability relating to material online
(c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users. -
(1) In general. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider-
There is nothing in the DMCA that shields you from a defamation lawsuit or any other legal liability except copyright infringement.
At some point, I came to consider the ads as no different than your run-of-the-mill spammer - They go out of their way to waste my time, get me to look at their crap, try to con me into spending money, all on something in which I have no interest to start with. They fight back against ad-blocking technology with ever more subtle ways of getting around our filters, and yet they still can't take the goddamned hint.
What hint would that be, that you want the site to be run by magic pixies that don't have any server costs, don't have any bandwidth costs and don't have any costs creating the content? Most people hate pay-walls and subscriptions with a vengeance so you don't want to give them your money, you don't want to give them eyeball time, you should get the part that benefits you but they shouldn't get the part that benefits them. Nobody wants ads as such, if customers do it's so they can get more content or pay less. It used to be that if you don't like what they're offering, don't buy it. If you don't like all the ads on TV, don't watch it. If you don't like all the ads on a website, don't go there.
Ad blockers are part of a bigger cultural change which is "if you don't like the deal, rewrite it". Don't like all the ads on TV? Get a PVR to skip them. Don't like the web ads? Get an ad blocker to browse the site without them. Don't like the DRM on BluRays? Download it off TPB. It's like a boycott, except the hard part of forgoing something you actually wanted. And there's a lot of people out there that just aren't reasonable in what they want, but nobody's going to sell them a Ferrari for $100. In the digital world there's no limits though, if you don't feel paying a buck for Angry Birds is reasonable and want to pirate it for nothing then you can. And the more unreasonable you are, the more you can justify.
According to the article that $426 was made in less than one day (the first), and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week.
Uh, what? Opening day sales are usually way higher than your average day, usually people make up their opinion pretty quick if they want it or not. I'd be surprised if he breaks the $1000 barrier in a week and it's not like week two is going to be like week one either.
Wireless broadcasts without encryption, however, are akin to a neighbor who yells loud enough for everyone to know their family's business. I don't see any difference between my neighbors having a heated conversation that I can hear inside my house and them sending unencrypted packets into my house.
The difference is that each packet is keyed to the recipients address and to listen in you need a device explicitly made to intercept packets going to others. If you have tenants and offer them internet service and set up a dump of their traffic, are you doing a wiretap? Hell yes. If you are on a cable loop and modify the cable modem to dump all packets for everyone on the loop, are you doing a wiretap? Hell yes. Note that in an earlier case they found the exception didn't apply to cordless phones - the intent was obviously that it was designed to only be received on the handset it belonged to. Wifi packets are the same, you only intend to communicate with that one card and not the world. That it's unencrypted is mostly irrelevant, if you go through a door marked "staff only" you're trespassing even though it was unlocked. The intented user was clear.
So you're quite happy to live in a world where every time you want to "do things" you have to go scouring through law books and beg the government for permission?
In a lot of cases where I'd call it preemptive crime prevention, yes. For example if you pretend to be a doctor but don't have a license to practice medicine, we don't have to wait for an actual malpractice case. You are already breaking the law just by trying. If you operate a restaurant I don't mind that you have to have a permit so that health inspectors both know you exist and have a right to investigate your facilities before you put people in the hospital. If you pretend to operate a charity, I don't mind that you need a permit that requires documentation that the money goes where you say it's going and is not a fraud. I don't mind that the government must approval of your rental units before there is a house fire where someone doesn't get out because there's no fire exit and you're charged with manslaughter.
A permit is not something the government should hand or not hand out on a whim, it should have a clearly defined list of requirements and those who fulfill the requirements should get a permit. Of course you could say that the "free market" should fix this, that people would simply stop going to unsanitary restaurants but the practical experience has been that the market hasn't fixed this so instead of quoting dogma we found a solution that did. Sure you can have too much bureaucracy as well, but a lot of the time the businesses trying to fly "under the radar" without a permit do so because they are breaking a lot of other laws and regulations that are there for a reason. If I just pick a place to eat at random I don't expect great food, but I do expect that it's fit for human consumption. It's really not too much to ask.
The environments should agree on using the same underpinnings: not just the Linux kernel, but also what lies between the kernel and the GNOME/KDE libraries. They should also make sure that they are interoperable.
And here's the real problem, GNOME/KDE aren't interoperable because GTK and Qt aren't interoperable because C and C++ aren't interoperable. Oh you can sorta write a C library that works on both like D-bus but major interaction between C and C++ code is going to a be a lot of pain. There's too much bad blood between then and neither C or C++ is very compelling languages to build a 21st century desktop. If I had a hundred million dollars to spend or an army of open source coders who'd obey my commands I'd port Dalvik to the desktop and get people started on building a new desktop in Java, without Oracle's JVM and without a lot of the early cruft that isn't supported on Dalvik. I think several of the security arrangements are good too, like each application running in its own VM. It's just a helluva lot of work to remake all of GNOME/KDE.
A well commented code base is like a pool full of clean water. Poor/absent/misleading commented code is like piss. The value of having a pool rapidly deteriorates if someone's pissing in it, even if by volume there's far more water than piss. The only way you're going to keep the pool clean is if you have chemicals in the water that immediately lets you know if someone is pissing and can evict them, that is to say code review. But if you already have a pool of piss, writing good comments is like pouring a liter of water into it - it's still a pool of piss. The only thing you can do is empty the pool and start over and try to do better next time. So I'm more it depends on the state of the code - if it has good comments, write good comments. If it is salvageable, salvage it. If it is a lost cause, don't waste any time trying to band-aid it.
You're simply not being creative enough. For example you could use this on bundles - sure you might know what A, B and C costs individually, but if you're on product A's page and get an offer for a bundle, that's pretty hard to compare. You probably don't want to offer the exact same bundle at different prices, but there's a huge set of possible bundles so you'll rarely reuse them. Or you can just "classify" your customers so your good customers are offered one set of bundles and your less good customers different bundles. As long as everyone is offered a bundle nobody might realize they're being played. There's probably a few other ways I can think of too to make people think you have to "qualify" for this offer so it's not for everyone. Very special deal just for you, my friend.
People think they can outsmart those that work in marketing, they're usually wrong. One example I remember good was from a coupon catalog, based on purchasing habits from store cards they had a pretty good idea when women got pregnant and delivered. But if they filled the coupon magazine with the kind of products pregnant women and new mothers buy, they'd feel it was creepy. So they mixed it with anti-products putting lawn mowers next to the baby products making people think it was just random. Astroturfers don't just put in perfect 5 ratings, they put in "petty" sounding 4 star reviews and the occasional whining 2 star review to make it look real. It's no coincidence that the products you need at the grocery store are spread around so you must pass through all the other sections. They plan for all this.
It's slashdot, mark parent redundant ;)
Don't kid yourself, Nokia has been a de facto Microsoft subsidiary since Elop became CEO.
If he trashed Symbian and Meego then executed Windows Phone well I could buy that, but my Occam's razor suggests the answer is even simpler. If this was an "inside job" by Microsoft they'd want to preserve as much as possible of Nokia to sell Windows Phones. So far it only looks like corporate suicide by a terribly incompetent CEO.
I'm guessing that for now they are telling the truth, because first you have to make people accept giving DNA for various random cases. Then you point out the obvious waste and absurdity in collecting this information and throwing it away again and again. Since most people feel they're paying way too much taxes already they'll go with it and get permission to store it so they can just ask your permission to reuse it. Then they'll complain of the administration cost of getting permission for each individual use and make the default a permanent permission. From there you can just slow-roll it to cover more crimes to get more people in the system. And if you've boiled the frog well enough, perhaps the 51% will find that the other 49% should be in the system too.
Make no mistake, ideas are dime a dozen. Everyone has one, and everyone thinks their idea will make them a million dollars. The reason not everyone is a millionaire is that the conversion between idea and money is dependent much more on execution of the idea than the idea itself.
So far everyone agrees with you.
If more entrepreneurs understood this instead of focusing on the product, there would be fewer failure stories to talk about. Now don't get me wrong, a good product is *very* important, but it's still a small part of the larger picture.
I think you're at the core but you're failing to make the point real clear. Everybody has heard that ideas is a dime a dozen. The problem is the founder who thinks "execution of the idea" is to turn the idea into a product. Just because I have the idea for a software I need code to implement it, an architecture, user interface, source revision control, security rights, storage, hardware capacity, network capacity and a zillion other things - obviously there's a ton of work between an idea and a turn-key product.
And like you say, it's very important but so is sales, marketing, distribution, support, human resources, finance, legal and all the other core and support functions to run a company. If you want to start a business you have to start all these tracks in parallel, you can't wait until you have a finished product and go "Umm... so how do we sell this?" And I'd guess that most successful start-ups has at least one guy who doesn't speak tech and isn't dragged down into the technical details of the product and can concentrate on all those other things.
Something that gave them the "wow" factor, something that said they'd steal Apple's profits or Android's popularity. Sure, it's an alright launch for a platform that has a 3.5% market share and climbing but this is Nokia we're talking about, the Chipzilla of cell phones. The people still holding Nokia stock are those who bought into the Elop kool-aid and for every quarter some of them go "You took a smoldering platform and poured gasoline on it for THIS?!", their Q2 sales were crap and compared to Q2 last year they've gone from a 391 million euro profit to a 327 million loss on operations - that is they're now losing money on selling phones before all the other costs. They can't afford to burn this kind of cash for long, and if the steam runs out before their market share recovers, well...
If it's not well regulated, open and the result of mutually beneficial agreement then expect someone smarter than you to take it from you: this rule applies to money, commerce and war.
Seems to me bitcoin is of mutual benefit - there are people who want to pay with bitcoins and people who want to be paid with bitcoins. That there are a lot of other people who'd like to rob us blind doesn't change that, any more than burglars and bank robbers and shoplifters do in the real world. It's just back to the days of the wild wild west when the sheriff was nowhere to be found and you have to protect your own assets.
Furthermore, a workweek of maybe 20-25 hours is the max for me. I tried self-employment, but motivation and discipline are a bit hard to come by, and it's not something that will work for me long-term. In theory it's perfect, in practice not so much.
I don't want to be self-employed either, but it's because I'm not a good salesman, not a good negotiator, hate the administrative parts of contracts and schedules and billing and I don't want my entire paycheck to depend on finding work. If you don't have the motivation and discipline for the work itself you're not going to be much of an employee either, on top of your other issues. If you want to find a job I wouldn't let that shine through, because I saw big red blinking "do not hire" signs that had nothing to do with your schizophrenia.
I'm guessing many of them are marketing companies, since torrent feeds give you a fairly accurate picture of what's hot or not and where without the PR spin. Otherwise I don't see much point, the legal value of an IP deteriorates quickly - either you have to send a C&D or sue now, in a year nobody knows who it belonged to.
The point should be that the Hugo Awards hold the copyright to their awards ceremony, which includes distribution rights; by the erroneous blocking of the stream, Hugo's right to distribute was grievously infringed. That infringement like any other infringement should by remedied by the assessment of considerable monetary penalties.
Nonsense. Nobody else distributed their show, so their rights were not violated. They don't have any rights to use UStream's service for their distribution, only an agreement and I'm sure the free service says they can stop any stream for any reason at any time.