I think Napster subscription service could be a great deal for very many people. There are already more than 100,000 subscribers to subscription services like Rhapsody for $10/month, and this seems like a much better value. I won't do it, because I own an iPod, but if Apple offered a service like this I might try it for a few months. I mean, HBO is $12/month. Would you rather watch HBO or have a bottom-less pile of music to listen?
Not to mention, this is a fantastic way to discover new music. Some people probably spend $50/month on music, and with this service, you could sample music more economically.
Do the songs go away when you stop paying? Sure they do, just like HBO stops working, the TiVo turns into a doorstop and your cell phone becomes a paper weight. I don't know if Napster will succeed, but I think it's silly to dismiss it out of hand. It may not be for everyone, but if they could get 10% of the market, that would be enormous. And is Apple announced a competitive service tomorrow, they'd have 500,000 subscribers by Monday.
This post is so on target and the responses to it are so naive that it needs to be said:
Products are priced to maxmimize profit, not to make their money back plus a little extra. Bottled water is sold in vending machines along the beaches in L.A. for $1.50 a bottle. They used to cost $0.75, but the price was slowly raised. Why?
Take a thought experiment. Say it costs $0.40 to sell a bottle of water at the beach. That's $0.20 for the water, $0.10 for electricity and $0.10 for labor (re-filling the machine). Sell them at $0.75 a pop, and that's $0.35 profit. Sell them at $1.50 a pop, and that's $1.05 (I added an extra nickel for electricity since it's a fixed cost). That means to earn $105, they used to need to sell 300 bottles, now they only need to sell 100 bottles to make the same profit. Apparently, that must be the case since the price remains high; otherwise they would lower it.
Now, imagine if a competitor moved in next to them. They might decide to sell water for $0.75/bottle. Instantly, the original vendor (Arrowhead) would see their sales and profits plummet. They would be forced to lower their prices in order to make any money. That's why competition is good, it generally forces everyone to lower their prices.
The alternatives currently? Tap water, no charge. Which is probably why the $1.50 price has stuck; price-sensitive customers will choose the free water instead of $0.75 or $1.50 water. But if you really need a cold, bottled drink, it's a great deal at $0.75 or $1.50. In this case, it looks like the presence of a free alternative may be increasing the price of bottled water (but maybe not). Seems like a fascinating case study.
Whar's changed? Well, Apple is dominating the industry, and every other player out there (MS, Creative, RIAA) wants to knock Apple off their perch. No other DRM format will work with the iPod, so the only option is to sell DRM-free stuff that will work on the iPod. The RIAA might figure that if don't let Robertson sell MP3s that they might hoist their own petard.
P.S. Love the goal, hate the name. It reeks of a BuyMusic or Lindows (who came up with that one?) type rip-off, which hurts its prospect. Why not MP3 Store or something clever instead of begging for a lawsuit. He should've learned his lesson after getting MP3.com sued out of 3/4 of their money after ripping all those CDs.
The linked article is a bunch of crap, and I suspect the writers have ulterior motives based on the way they present the data. As bad as a 0.8% drunk? Bull! Something like 50% of all fatalities are caused by drunk drivers, and I bet there are a lot more people talking on the phone than there are people driving drunk-- and they cause nowhere near 50% of road fatalities. Plus, when I talk on my cellphone, I don't do so unless the road is clear and the traffic is calm. If there's an incident ahead of me, I stop talking while I concentrate on the road.
I bet that people have slower reaction times when changing the radio station. Have slower reactions on clear sunny days. Have slower reactions while disciplining their kids. Have slower reactions while not tailgating. And guess what? The slower reaction times on sunny days and while not tailgating don't make the driver less safe, it just means the driver alters his approach based on the surroundings.
To answer the question: essentially, there is no difference as long as the driver pays attention to the road the same way in both circumstances. The people who want to ban talking on a cell phone while driving are probably the same people who would rather drive cross-country than fly because "driving is safer." It isn't. They even bring up the "what about the children" argument, which might as well replace Goddard's law.
on't want to die in a car accident, then don't get in a car. Want to punish cell phone drivers who cause accidents? Fine, just make sure you treat all distracted drivers the same, and good luck deciding whether or not a driver is legally distracted. I'm sick of these holier-than-thou troublemakers who come to a conclusion then go looking desperately for the facts to back it up. This study does nothing of the sort, but it hasn't stopped our brain-dead media from trumpeting a worthless study that "proves" talking on a cell phone while driving is dangerous.
I know this is mostly a joke, but to a large degree it's true. I've seen captchas implemented in blogs for comment posting, and it seems like such overkill. My group-blog has implemented a very simple password scheme to prevent comment spammers. Initially, the thought was to use a captcha, until we realized it would suck to use on our Treos or other cell phones. Then we considered listing the solution in text so that any human could read it. Since it would be a home-grown solution, comment spammers would not be effective since it wouldn't be worth the effort to defeat it.
In the end, my co-blogger required a password to post a comment, and the password never changes; this way, MT remembers us and we never have to re-type it. Even if we wrote the password in big, bold type above every entry (we don't, as we're a mostly stealth blog), I doubt we'd get any comment spam. We only implemented this a few months ago when comment spam rapidly went from once-a-month to twice-a-day (and looking to get much worse).
In the end, it's a simple, elegant solution to the problem of comment spamming in personal blogs. And it doesn't require any processing power either (unlike some blacklists, which nearly killed our server due to some quirks).
That's the first time I've ever seen a double-typo! First, you searched for "fired chicken" instead of "fried chicken," then when you wrote about it, you claimed to have searched for "friend chicken." No wonder you were surprised by the results! And UNT only shows up so how because they also misspelled "fried chicken." Hilarious.
I mean, c'mon! A web bug was found on a page at Apple that has PowerBookG5 in the filename? Please explain to me, using small words so I can understand, how this points to the PowerBook G5 being released "very soon."
The hard drop upgrade was $50 before, and it's still $50 now. The article (and the MacNN story the submitter cribbed it from ) are both wrong.
Product won't fly, details scarce
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This story needs some more details. The website is a re-hash of the press release and appears to be a naked grab to get some adsense revenue. Not to mention that details on the product itself is scarce, and it takes a lot of digging to figure out that this keyboard doesn't even have dedicated number keys. Nice idea, no story yet.
Good point. It's even sillier to complain about Google in light of the fact that AOL was paying these coders for years while they developed Mozilla, and AOL is certified Evil!
Firefox's lead developer is now a paid employee of Google. Mostly what they want is a better Firefox that can compete with Explorer, and make the web as a whole more standards compliant. This will decrease people's reliance on Windows, and make the web more of a platform. Google is, so far, the best developer on the web platform.
And honestly, if the project starts to suck, either Goodger will leave Google and find another sponsor, or the project will fork, and Google's version won't be the one known as Firefox. That would be bad for Google, and render the whole exercise pointless.
It may be a "conflict of interest," but that doesn't mean it will be bad. Google is an arrogant corporation (not in a bad way), and they think that with a level playing field, they will kick the a** of MS and everybody else. They want Firefox to level the playing field so they can win. The worst possible outcome would be for Firefox to become Google-optimized at the expense of how it works on thee rest of the web; that will hurt Firefox & Google.
Don't worry who's paying the bills; worry about the code he generates, and be happy that he's being paid to work on Firefox, which simply ensures that he'll continue to work on it.
That's the question. Will HDMI allow content creators to destroy the ability to eaily copy digital media, whether it's being used for piracy or fair-use? Or, is HDMI headed down the same path as Circuit City's DivX-- a clumsy & eventually transparent attempt by Hollywood to extract more money from customers while providing less service? We all know how that played out, with the savvy early-adopter types shunning it and telling their friends to skip it as well. Or does any of it matter, since the FCC has mandated that all digital TVs must be HDCP compliant anyways?
What does that mean anyways? Will consumer electronics companies still be allowed to include non-HDCP compliant inputs? I hope so, but I wouldn't put it pass our regulators to require the crippling of perfectly legal electronics (witness DAT & the broadcast flag). How can we stop this crap?
I use NoteTab Light, a vey simple text editor that apparently has some power-user type functionality, too. Mostly, I use it as a Notepad replacement, and it's much better IMHO. In addition to tabs (a la Firefox), it has row & column numbering, column selction capabilities, etc. Doesn't feel like a geek's text editor, even simple enough for Mom to use. Check it out.
They come out with similar reliability ratings now; I believe the shuttle had a rating of 99.9%. It might have been even higher before Challenger.
My point is, in an extremely complex structure like the shuttle, different components may interact in ways that aren't anticipated. It's the nature of a developmental system that your failure rate is essentially unknown. Even in modern aircraft this can occur, as demonstrated by the Concorde crash-- a type of failure no one had anticipated. But in the end, you can't extrapolate a reliability unless you know how every subsystem may fail, and how these subsystems may interact. How many flights did it take to get to six 9s reliability in commercial US air traffic? Expect it take just as many launches to achieve the same.
Six nines reliability sounds nice, but that works out to one failure in a million attempts. Realistically, until you've had 1 million succesful launched with only 1 failure, you could not claim six 9s reliability. That may be a good goal for an operational vehicle, but it's unrealistic for a development vehicle. We just don't know enough about what could go wrong to assign probabilities with that degree of certitude.
The problem isn't that spam deserves freedom of speech protections. The problem is that in order to control spam, you need to control the internet. As soon as these restrictions start popping up, it makes it oh so easy to start controlling the internet to start limiting other "bad things" like porn, racism, subversive speech and p2p. What's the old saying... you can't put the genie back in the bottle? If you really think you can limit/eliminate spam without making it very easy for governments & corporations to limit a wide variety of other topics, then you are much less cynical than I am.
That would be known as click fraud, which certainly violates Google's rules, likely qualifies as civil fraud, and possibly even could be a criminal matter as well. You're essentially depriving a company of their money intentionally, and you'll hit "good guys" and "bad guys" just as hard. Not to mention that it's not clear that even half the sites found in that search are for spammers... sending bulk email is certainly not illegal, Dell for one probably has 1 million opt-in (no kidding) subscribers.
So before you find yourself staring down the barrel of a civil lawsuit, I would recommend not writing a program to commit click fraud and widely distributing it. I'd love to see you invoke the "Betamax defense" in that one!
This is nothing more than a colossally stupid, complex idea which will only serve to benefit drivers of environmentally unfriendly (due to high gas consumption), needlessly dangerous (to drivers of other vehicles) expensive cars. Oh, and the trucking companies who do most of the damage to our roads, it will benefit them too. It will certainly benefit those who are paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run the complex systems, not to mention those who will charge about $5 Billion just to install the tracking devices. And the guys who install other supporting hardware. It may also benefit the politician who angles to name it after himself. And SUV dealers
Who won't it benefit? Drivers of fuel efficient cars. The state, which could spend $5 billion on much more effective things-- like fixing the roads, or installing real-time electricity meters on every home, or paying off our debt, or funding the UC system. It won't benefit motorcycle drivers. It won't benefit our state's clean air as more hydrocarbons are burned.
Put it into perspecrtive. The chart shows that a typical car owner pays $100/ year in gas taxes. And the article states the technology costs $100/car (I bet it won't be that cheap installed, but I'll let that one go). My guess is that the average car is in California for about 5 years, so that means 20% of the revenue goes to tracking the revenue! And that doesn't take into account the software, administrative or infrastructure part of the equation.
We have a great system now for taxing road usage; vehicles pay by the mile and heavier vehicles, which cause more road damage, pay more per vehicle mile. I don't know this, but I would bet that SUVs tend to be involved in more accidents than cars due to their decreased manueverability.
I'll say it again: it's a colossally stupid idea which will waste billions in unneeded administrative, infrastructure & software costs that will lead to more pollution, less healthy air and decreased state revenue. I'll lay down on the tracks to stop this one.
I agree with almost everything you said, excpet for the last paragraph. Drastic changes don't always indicate that a company is desperate to survie; Microsoft turned on a dime (well, silver dollar) in 95-96 to capitalize on the internet. They may have been desperate to continue domination, but they were not desperate to survive.
2nd of all, I don't think TiVo has made any "drastic changes to its business model," rather it has decided to try and add another revenue stream. That's just smart business.
My main point is that in practice, this whole thing will probably be unintrusive & I doubt any viewers will be bothered by it. As long as the fast-forward button still works, is there any objection that doesn't essentially rely on, "but it's the principle of it!"
I own 2 TiVos and I could not agree more. I fast forward through commercials to save time, nothing more nothing less. As long as I can still fast-forward through them, what's the big deal?
The submitter's hysterical comments show an obvious distaste for this decision by TiVo, but his statement, "although it might help them in the short run it will most certainly backfire in the long run," displays a profound sense of arrogance; he knew about this for about 10 minutes before drawing a conclusion based on nothing more than gut, while TiVo Inc., has clearly thought about these issues and decided they were a net benenfit. I would like to know how the submitter became so "certain."
This has nothing to do with your rights or online, or Your Rights Online, it's a business decision no worse than Apple papering NYC with iPod ads. Get over yourself.
In the article, the author initially discusses attempts to develop an "Interpedia" in much the same way Wikipedia has eventually evolved. Nothing ever happened in that effort, besides universal agreement that Interpedia would eventually be better then Brittanica & an inability to actually start producing content (as opposed to mechanisms for dealing with content).
Reading the Slashdot comments here is very reminiscent of the Interpedia community. Just replace "content" with "accuracy" and it paints the picture very well. Wikipedia has to be more accurate than Brittanica because anyone can edit it. There's probably a good way to ensure accuracy in Wikipedia articles, and the author makes a pretty strong case that the current method is not it.
As the Interpedia goal was eventually realized with Wikipedia, Wikipedia's goal of accuracy will probably be met as well. But first someone has to start producing systematic accuracy.
I just read the votemaster description, and came over to Slashdot to submit the story. Funny. Despite being a small, self-run website, this is one I don't think Slashdot can even begin to take down (650,000 hits/day), although it's been the subject of DDoS attacks in the past. Being the computer wizard & all-around smart guy that Mr. Minix is, he's prepared for this by setting up backup site (just increment the number if it's down).
Mostly, I can wait to see how Linus is inspired by this project, writes his own version and then invites the global electoral community to help him make it even better. Take that! (j/k)
I think voting fraud has been around a long time. When discussing electronic voting, I think it's important to distinguish between fraud unique to electonic systems (such as recording the wrong choice, intercepting votes, etc.) and fraud that could have been used in the past (stuffing the ballot box). Adding one extra vote/machine may be easier to do universally with electronic machines, but casting fraudulent ballots has always been possible.
The real shame is that in the move to e-voting, we rushed into it initially and let vendors dictate the terms instead of designing a better system from the ground up. Not generating a voter-verified paper receipt is just stupid, no matter what excuses (Paper jam! There's a paper jam!) are put forth. Sadly, the early critics of the early e-voting pushed solutions like a receipt that the voter kept with him. That just created a nice strawman which was beat up on for 6 months before the movement got smart. And 4 years later, we are at best no better off than 4 years ago. I'm sure there will be an electronic version of the butterfly ballot next week, and that will only be the start of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Napster subscription service could be a great deal for very many people. There are already more than 100,000 subscribers to subscription services like Rhapsody for $10/month, and this seems like a much better value. I won't do it, because I own an iPod, but if Apple offered a service like this I might try it for a few months. I mean, HBO is $12/month. Would you rather watch HBO or have a bottom-less pile of music to listen?
Not to mention, this is a fantastic way to discover new music. Some people probably spend $50/month on music, and with this service, you could sample music more economically.
Do the songs go away when you stop paying? Sure they do, just like HBO stops working, the TiVo turns into a doorstop and your cell phone becomes a paper weight. I don't know if Napster will succeed, but I think it's silly to dismiss it out of hand. It may not be for everyone, but if they could get 10% of the market, that would be enormous. And is Apple announced a competitive service tomorrow, they'd have 500,000 subscribers by Monday.
This post is so on target and the responses to it are so naive that it needs to be said:
Products are priced to maxmimize profit, not to make their money back plus a little extra. Bottled water is sold in vending machines along the beaches in L.A. for $1.50 a bottle. They used to cost $0.75, but the price was slowly raised. Why?
Take a thought experiment. Say it costs $0.40 to sell a bottle of water at the beach. That's $0.20 for the water, $0.10 for electricity and $0.10 for labor (re-filling the machine). Sell them at $0.75 a pop, and that's $0.35 profit. Sell them at $1.50 a pop, and that's $1.05 (I added an extra nickel for electricity since it's a fixed cost). That means to earn $105, they used to need to sell 300 bottles, now they only need to sell 100 bottles to make the same profit. Apparently, that must be the case since the price remains high; otherwise they would lower it.
Now, imagine if a competitor moved in next to them. They might decide to sell water for $0.75/bottle. Instantly, the original vendor (Arrowhead) would see their sales and profits plummet. They would be forced to lower their prices in order to make any money. That's why competition is good, it generally forces everyone to lower their prices.
The alternatives currently? Tap water, no charge. Which is probably why the $1.50 price has stuck; price-sensitive customers will choose the free water instead of $0.75 or $1.50 water. But if you really need a cold, bottled drink, it's a great deal at $0.75 or $1.50. In this case, it looks like the presence of a free alternative may be increasing the price of bottled water (but maybe not). Seems like a fascinating case study.
Whar's changed? Well, Apple is dominating the industry, and every other player out there (MS, Creative, RIAA) wants to knock Apple off their perch. No other DRM format will work with the iPod, so the only option is to sell DRM-free stuff that will work on the iPod. The RIAA might figure that if don't let Robertson sell MP3s that they might hoist their own petard.
P.S. Love the goal, hate the name. It reeks of a BuyMusic or Lindows (who came up with that one?) type rip-off, which hurts its prospect. Why not MP3 Store or something clever instead of begging for a lawsuit. He should've learned his lesson after getting MP3.com sued out of 3/4 of their money after ripping all those CDs.
The linked article is a bunch of crap, and I suspect the writers have ulterior motives based on the way they present the data. As bad as a 0.8% drunk? Bull! Something like 50% of all fatalities are caused by drunk drivers, and I bet there are a lot more people talking on the phone than there are people driving drunk-- and they cause nowhere near 50% of road fatalities. Plus, when I talk on my cellphone, I don't do so unless the road is clear and the traffic is calm. If there's an incident ahead of me, I stop talking while I concentrate on the road.
I bet that people have slower reaction times when changing the radio station. Have slower reactions on clear sunny days. Have slower reactions while disciplining their kids. Have slower reactions while not tailgating. And guess what? The slower reaction times on sunny days and while not tailgating don't make the driver less safe, it just means the driver alters his approach based on the surroundings.
To answer the question: essentially, there is no difference as long as the driver pays attention to the road the same way in both circumstances. The people who want to ban talking on a cell phone while driving are probably the same people who would rather drive cross-country than fly because "driving is safer." It isn't. They even bring up the "what about the children" argument, which might as well replace Goddard's law.
on't want to die in a car accident, then don't get in a car. Want to punish cell phone drivers who cause accidents? Fine, just make sure you treat all distracted drivers the same, and good luck deciding whether or not a driver is legally distracted. I'm sick of these holier-than-thou troublemakers who come to a conclusion then go looking desperately for the facts to back it up. This study does nothing of the sort, but it hasn't stopped our brain-dead media from trumpeting a worthless study that "proves" talking on a cell phone while driving is dangerous.
I know this is mostly a joke, but to a large degree it's true. I've seen captchas implemented in blogs for comment posting, and it seems like such overkill. My group-blog has implemented a very simple password scheme to prevent comment spammers. Initially, the thought was to use a captcha, until we realized it would suck to use on our Treos or other cell phones. Then we considered listing the solution in text so that any human could read it. Since it would be a home-grown solution, comment spammers would not be effective since it wouldn't be worth the effort to defeat it.
In the end, my co-blogger required a password to post a comment, and the password never changes; this way, MT remembers us and we never have to re-type it. Even if we wrote the password in big, bold type above every entry (we don't, as we're a mostly stealth blog), I doubt we'd get any comment spam. We only implemented this a few months ago when comment spam rapidly went from once-a-month to twice-a-day (and looking to get much worse).
In the end, it's a simple, elegant solution to the problem of comment spamming in personal blogs. And it doesn't require any processing power either (unlike some blacklists, which nearly killed our server due to some quirks).
That's the first time I've ever seen a double-typo! First, you searched for "fired chicken" instead of "fried chicken," then when you wrote about it, you claimed to have searched for "friend chicken." No wonder you were surprised by the results! And UNT only shows up so how because they also misspelled "fried chicken." Hilarious.
I mean, c'mon! A web bug was found on a page at Apple that has PowerBookG5 in the filename? Please explain to me, using small words so I can understand, how this points to the PowerBook G5 being released "very soon."
The hard drop upgrade was $50 before, and it's still $50 now. The article (and the MacNN story the submitter cribbed it from ) are both wrong.
This story needs some more details. The website is a re-hash of the press release and appears to be a naked grab to get some adsense revenue. Not to mention that details on the product itself is scarce, and it takes a lot of digging to figure out that this keyboard doesn't even have dedicated number keys. Nice idea, no story yet.
Here's a close-up picture.
Good point. It's even sillier to complain about Google in light of the fact that AOL was paying these coders for years while they developed Mozilla, and AOL is certified Evil!
Firefox's lead developer is now a paid employee of Google. Mostly what they want is a better Firefox that can compete with Explorer, and make the web as a whole more standards compliant. This will decrease people's reliance on Windows, and make the web more of a platform. Google is, so far, the best developer on the web platform.
And honestly, if the project starts to suck, either Goodger will leave Google and find another sponsor, or the project will fork, and Google's version won't be the one known as Firefox. That would be bad for Google, and render the whole exercise pointless.
It may be a "conflict of interest," but that doesn't mean it will be bad. Google is an arrogant corporation (not in a bad way), and they think that with a level playing field, they will kick the a** of MS and everybody else. They want Firefox to level the playing field so they can win. The worst possible outcome would be for Firefox to become Google-optimized at the expense of how it works on thee rest of the web; that will hurt Firefox & Google.
Don't worry who's paying the bills; worry about the code he generates, and be happy that he's being paid to work on Firefox, which simply ensures that he'll continue to work on it.
That's the question. Will HDMI allow content creators to destroy the ability to eaily copy digital media, whether it's being used for piracy or fair-use? Or, is HDMI headed down the same path as Circuit City's DivX-- a clumsy & eventually transparent attempt by Hollywood to extract more money from customers while providing less service? We all know how that played out, with the savvy early-adopter types shunning it and telling their friends to skip it as well. Or does any of it matter, since the FCC has mandated that all digital TVs must be HDCP compliant anyways?
What does that mean anyways? Will consumer electronics companies still be allowed to include non-HDCP compliant inputs? I hope so, but I wouldn't put it pass our regulators to require the crippling of perfectly legal electronics (witness DAT & the broadcast flag). How can we stop this crap?
Mod parent down! No one has ever claimed Slashdot is any way related to journalism. Geeze, talk about building up a strawman just to knock it down. :)
(Actually, mod it up. Pretty informative.)
I use NoteTab Light, a vey simple text editor that apparently has some power-user type functionality, too. Mostly, I use it as a Notepad replacement, and it's much better IMHO. In addition to tabs (a la Firefox), it has row & column numbering, column selction capabilities, etc. Doesn't feel like a geek's text editor, even simple enough for Mom to use. Check it out.
They come out with similar reliability ratings now; I believe the shuttle had a rating of 99.9%. It might have been even higher before Challenger.
My point is, in an extremely complex structure like the shuttle, different components may interact in ways that aren't anticipated. It's the nature of a developmental system that your failure rate is essentially unknown. Even in modern aircraft this can occur, as demonstrated by the Concorde crash-- a type of failure no one had anticipated. But in the end, you can't extrapolate a reliability unless you know how every subsystem may fail, and how these subsystems may interact. How many flights did it take to get to six 9s reliability in commercial US air traffic? Expect it take just as many launches to achieve the same.
Six nines reliability sounds nice, but that works out to one failure in a million attempts. Realistically, until you've had 1 million succesful launched with only 1 failure, you could not claim six 9s reliability. That may be a good goal for an operational vehicle, but it's unrealistic for a development vehicle. We just don't know enough about what could go wrong to assign probabilities with that degree of certitude.
The problem isn't that spam deserves freedom of speech protections. The problem is that in order to control spam, you need to control the internet. As soon as these restrictions start popping up, it makes it oh so easy to start controlling the internet to start limiting other "bad things" like porn, racism, subversive speech and p2p. What's the old saying... you can't put the genie back in the bottle? If you really think you can limit/eliminate spam without making it very easy for governments & corporations to limit a wide variety of other topics, then you are much less cynical than I am.
That would be known as click fraud, which certainly violates Google's rules, likely qualifies as civil fraud, and possibly even could be a criminal matter as well. You're essentially depriving a company of their money intentionally, and you'll hit "good guys" and "bad guys" just as hard. Not to mention that it's not clear that even half the sites found in that search are for spammers... sending bulk email is certainly not illegal, Dell for one probably has 1 million opt-in (no kidding) subscribers.
So before you find yourself staring down the barrel of a civil lawsuit, I would recommend not writing a program to commit click fraud and widely distributing it. I'd love to see you invoke the "Betamax defense" in that one!
This is nothing more than a colossally stupid, complex idea which will only serve to benefit drivers of environmentally unfriendly (due to high gas consumption), needlessly dangerous (to drivers of other vehicles) expensive cars. Oh, and the trucking companies who do most of the damage to our roads, it will benefit them too. It will certainly benefit those who are paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run the complex systems, not to mention those who will charge about $5 Billion just to install the tracking devices. And the guys who install other supporting hardware. It may also benefit the politician who angles to name it after himself. And SUV dealers
Who won't it benefit? Drivers of fuel efficient cars. The state, which could spend $5 billion on much more effective things-- like fixing the roads, or installing real-time electricity meters on every home, or paying off our debt, or funding the UC system. It won't benefit motorcycle drivers. It won't benefit our state's clean air as more hydrocarbons are burned.
Put it into perspecrtive. The chart shows that a typical car owner pays $100/ year in gas taxes. And the article states the technology costs $100/car (I bet it won't be that cheap installed, but I'll let that one go). My guess is that the average car is in California for about 5 years, so that means 20% of the revenue goes to tracking the revenue! And that doesn't take into account the software, administrative or infrastructure part of the equation.
We have a great system now for taxing road usage; vehicles pay by the mile and heavier vehicles, which cause more road damage, pay more per vehicle mile. I don't know this, but I would bet that SUVs tend to be involved in more accidents than cars due to their decreased manueverability.
I'll say it again: it's a colossally stupid idea which will waste billions in unneeded administrative, infrastructure & software costs that will lead to more pollution, less healthy air and decreased state revenue. I'll lay down on the tracks to stop this one.
I agree with almost everything you said, excpet for the last paragraph. Drastic changes don't always indicate that a company is desperate to survie; Microsoft turned on a dime (well, silver dollar) in 95-96 to capitalize on the internet. They may have been desperate to continue domination, but they were not desperate to survive.
2nd of all, I don't think TiVo has made any "drastic changes to its business model," rather it has decided to try and add another revenue stream. That's just smart business.
My main point is that in practice, this whole thing will probably be unintrusive & I doubt any viewers will be bothered by it. As long as the fast-forward button still works, is there any objection that doesn't essentially rely on, "but it's the principle of it!"
I own 2 TiVos and I could not agree more. I fast forward through commercials to save time, nothing more nothing less. As long as I can still fast-forward through them, what's the big deal?
The submitter's hysterical comments show an obvious distaste for this decision by TiVo, but his statement, "although it might help them in the short run it will most certainly backfire in the long run," displays a profound sense of arrogance; he knew about this for about 10 minutes before drawing a conclusion based on nothing more than gut, while TiVo Inc., has clearly thought about these issues and decided they were a net benenfit. I would like to know how the submitter became so "certain."
This has nothing to do with your rights or online, or Your Rights Online, it's a business decision no worse than Apple papering NYC with iPod ads. Get over yourself.
[good thing I have karma to burn]
In the article, the author initially discusses attempts to develop an "Interpedia" in much the same way Wikipedia has eventually evolved. Nothing ever happened in that effort, besides universal agreement that Interpedia would eventually be better then Brittanica & an inability to actually start producing content (as opposed to mechanisms for dealing with content).
Reading the Slashdot comments here is very reminiscent of the Interpedia community. Just replace "content" with "accuracy" and it paints the picture very well. Wikipedia has to be more accurate than Brittanica because anyone can edit it. There's probably a good way to ensure accuracy in Wikipedia articles, and the author makes a pretty strong case that the current method is not it.
As the Interpedia goal was eventually realized with Wikipedia, Wikipedia's goal of accuracy will probably be met as well. But first someone has to start producing systematic accuracy.
In case anyone doesn't know what a conjunction is, I found a good reference.
Apparently they're for hooking up words and phrases and clauses.
I just read the votemaster description, and came over to Slashdot to submit the story. Funny. Despite being a small, self-run website, this is one I don't think Slashdot can even begin to take down (650,000 hits/day), although it's been the subject of DDoS attacks in the past. Being the computer wizard & all-around smart guy that Mr. Minix is, he's prepared for this by setting up backup site (just increment the number if it's down).
Mostly, I can wait to see how Linus is inspired by this project, writes his own version and then invites the global electoral community to help him make it even better. Take that! (j/k)
I think voting fraud has been around a long time. When discussing electronic voting, I think it's important to distinguish between fraud unique to electonic systems (such as recording the wrong choice, intercepting votes, etc.) and fraud that could have been used in the past (stuffing the ballot box). Adding one extra vote/machine may be easier to do universally with electronic machines, but casting fraudulent ballots has always been possible.
The real shame is that in the move to e-voting, we rushed into it initially and let vendors dictate the terms instead of designing a better system from the ground up. Not generating a voter-verified paper receipt is just stupid, no matter what excuses (Paper jam! There's a paper jam!) are put forth. Sadly, the early critics of the early e-voting pushed solutions like a receipt that the voter kept with him. That just created a nice strawman which was beat up on for 6 months before the movement got smart. And 4 years later, we are at best no better off than 4 years ago. I'm sure there will be an electronic version of the butterfly ballot next week, and that will only be the start of it.