You know, I've come to the decision after working with high school kids that it's a fad. What do I mean by that?
Kids do things to get attention: from their peers, from their parents, from those in authority. That's why kids act out, and that's why kids have interesting modes of dress. That's why kids push for "innovative" music--because it pushes the envelope.
This nature--probing the envelope--is key to understanding this phenomenon. Kids are going to push the envelope: consider bedtime. "Mom, can I stay up 'til 10?" If that works, you push for later and later. If it doesn't, 9:30 is your next offer. Kids push, push, push, until they find the limit.
A loving parent sets those limits. It can really hurt to do that. Hell, it hurts me as a twenty-something working with kids to set those limits on kids for things that adults would do with no recourse [such as alcohol consumption, etc.]. It bothers the snot out of me to tell kids not to drink at their age when I am just 4-10 years older [depending on what age group I'm working with at the time] and can drink most folks I know under the table.
Unfortunately, some parents, rather than set limits, become uninvolved in their kids' lives. Becoming uninvolved is a process--because kids want their parents to be involved, for the most part. Yeah, even at the teen ages, they still want some parental involvement, though they only want it on their terms. The kids keep reaching out for things that aren't there--loving parents who want to know what's going on. And considering that brain development is still going on at that age, they can contemplate things from a whole new perspective without good parental supervision: hence, the idea to go out and take a lot of people out with you.
I contemplated and nearly did commit suicide just five years ago. But while I was at a residential high school where taking out a few of my peers would have gotten me a shitload of publicity, and I did have access to guns, including one of my own, when I was suicidal and wanted attention, I never thought of doing something like killing my peers. But now that a couple deranged people have done it, it now becomes plausible and has mindshare. The "early adopters" have created a market for killing.
I'm sure there are a ton of posts about how kids picking on kids are nothing new. Sure wasn't when my parents were growing up, sure wasn't as I was growing up. That's true. What's different is that there are new methods of acting out in the social conscious. Wonder why teen smoking and drug use is somewhat down? They've found something new to try.
And, like a bad kidney stone, this too, shall pass.
Actually, it's a lot more expensive than you might first think. A good bit of adult sites now use streaming video, which not only eat up bandwidth like you wouldn't believe, but also costs a LOT to license to use. Also, most adult sites have to pay constantly for new content (whether it be pictures, stories, etc.).
The pay for talent gets the latter. I should have mentioned site costs on the former, but I was focusing primarily on staffing. We've actually joked about running our own porn site, but my morals keep me from it. =)
Now, you mention that an e-zine needs marketing and PR people. Why? Marketing for a standard content site can be as easy as going to places like Lycos' Affiliate Program and signing up. Boom. Ad space is sold. Why complicate the matter and hire 6 figured executives to do the same thing? And why does a site need PR? If the content is useful, people will find it though links from related sites, search engines, etc. A web site that needs PR needs PR because the niche that they're trying to fill may not be there. I seriously doubt that magazines that cater to specific content areas have PR people.
We don't have 'em yet. I hope we never do. Personally, I find talking with people invigorating, so I have no problem being a PR contact. [It just cuts into my sleep time, that's all.]
But marketing and PR is a little more necessary for ezines than porn. Porn is something people want and crave. Sportswriting...they can take it or leave it. We have to do a little offline promotion, but I seriously doubt you'll be shilling ninenine.com on your local talk radio station. I have done that with TOTK.com on our local sports talk station. Granted, it was the cost of my time, but someday, the opportunities might get to the point where someone else has to do it...
No, I really think that the business models of adult sites and e-zines are almost exactly the same, with the only difference is that one is paying for writers, and the other is paying for pre-prepared content. There are very large adult web site companies such as IDG which are making money hand over fist. I don't think that their business model is that different, from say, Salon's.. Other than content, it's exactly the same. The difference is mindset. Most people in the adult industry are the kind of people who want to run a business as best as they can, and who start in their basements witha single PC and a dialup account. More 'traditional' companies, on the other hand, are started by manager types, and start out with bank loans, offices, etc. They're expensive from the get-go because the management doesn't know any other way to do it.
You're right: they shouldn't be. I'd argue that perhaps the talent costs of writers are higher than porn, but then 1) I'm not paying my guys right now [hell, I don't get paid to edit their stuff OR write] and 2) I'm not going to look into the costs of porn talent. =)
Ahhhh, but not every content business is like the porn industry. With porn, you have to pay:
Talent.
Photographers.
Web developer/graphic designers.
Site manager.
For me to be similar with our ezines, I'd have to pay:
Our writers.
Our editors.
Web developers/graphic designers.
Site managers.
Marketroids.
PR flacks.
With porn, once the image is captured, you're done. Porn talent can, er, display their wares anywhere they choose. My talent all get exclusivity clauses in their contracts, because our writers make our ezine. Also, except for sites focused around specific talent, I don't imagine that "viewers" want to interact with the talent. With writing, it's vitally necessary to the creative process.
I never thought I'd come to comparing my writers [as Chief Editor, I think of them that way, though I'm younger than almost all of them] to porn talent. I just hope like hell they don't find this thread...=)
Ask most any content producer what they want to get paid with, and they'll reply, "Micropayments." But it's because we use the term the wrong way.
After carefully reading Clay Shirky's comments on micropayments, he makes sense: paying before you're sure about the quality of something is a bad idea. Even with a respected content producer, how are you sure that they will maintain standards?
Case in point: Tom Clancy. I haunt alt.books.tom-clancy, and much discussion has raged there about the declining quality of his novels. Some have stated that they will never again rush to their bookstore on release day and pay full price for a first-edition hardback. I am almost to that point myself--because the quality hasn't been maintained.
What most of us content producers want is to charge, but not charge highly. We can't do it with credit cards--most folks know about the charges there. [What, you think Visa stays solvent just with our high balances? =) I wish.] So "micropayments" is our answer, although the traditional micropayment method [pay $0.NN for my bit o' content] isn't really what we want.
Maintain our public archives for N months--probably a quarter. IOW, you can see stuff from 01/2001-03/2001, but you're screwed before then.
Maintain our email lists as no-charge subscriptions for those who don't wish to pay. Place ads on those lists.
Offer access to six years of articles in the archives if you're a subscriber. [Cost: $2-5/mo. That range is broad because we haven't done market research yet.]
Offer ad-free email lists if you just want the straight poppo. [Cost: $5-10/mo, depending on the list, market research, and how much it costs us in lost revenue. We probably wouldn't seek to make up all the "lost" ad revenue--probably offer a break of, say, 20-25% over what we'd bring in with ads.]
If anyone has comments on this system, I'd love to hear them. Since we're an ezine, we can try to adapt the magazine business model to the Internet, all the while trying to kill the notion that information and storage are combined. My rationale on charging for archive access is just like asking us to store your old copies of Sports Illustrated--as long as you don't mind if we peruse the swimsuit issue. [Carol Alt: yowza!]
Here's a solution to the bad journalism on the web: Universities, High schools and even elemenntary schools should devote major parts of thier curicculum to teaching students to filter information.
They do: it's called critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, they don't teach enough of it. QED: average age of/. trolls...
Kurt's comment about magazines not surviving solely alone on subscription fees is true as well. So the thought is, "Why not take in both sources of revenue?"
I'd love better targetting of ads. I also like/. enough to pay a small [say $1-2/mo] subscription fee. If my subscription fee combined with my UID gets me the ability to give them feedback on ads--giving me ads I might actually care about--I'll definitely pony up the money.
See,/. is free for all out there as a loss-leader. You can post anonymously. You can look it over before grabbing an account. It's like having your magazine at a library or a newsstand--you can browse before buying. That's one thing you have to have before people will subscribe to your stuff. The only people who can charge by-the-article or by-the-report are stock brokers and those with ungodly good reputations about things, like WSJ.
But subscriptions must also provide added value. A/. subscription could provide added value in targetting of ads and, I'm sure, other ways. [I'm actually thinking of a Web-mail system, because people who pay you money will be easier to beat with cluesticks, and having gmorris@slashdot.org has to evangelize for/. to non-ubergeeks.] The/. crew seems pretty smart.
In short: it's worth a shot. Hell,/. in its original incarnation was worth a shot. It's all still an experiment, as people often note with karma. =) If/. wants an ad-system/subscription-fee tester, I'll be happy to give it a try.
Here's how I imagine an ezine conglomerate like TOTK.com Sports using micropayments:
Give access to our recent articles on the Web. As the original poster notes, if you haven't seen our content before, you have no way of knowing whether you'd want to pay for it. In terms of the current day, current content is a "loss leader" in that we "sell" it at cost--none, really, other than intellectual capital.
Charge for subscriptions via email. Since we hold our weekly content out a few days as an impetus to subscribe [note: we don't do that on dailies], there is incentive to get it in email. Also, email is great because you can read it offline, at your leisure, etc. A well-formatted ASCII ezine can be a joy to read if you don't let it run too long.
Charge for access to our Web archives. Presumably, if you're paying us, you like our content. =) If you like it, you'll like the archives, too, because you'll want to see what we've had to say about sports over the years. Also, with some of the articles, it makes for damned great research material, and some folks like that stuff.
Do I expect to make scads of money? Nope. I could make a shitload more, likely, if I got $5 CPM text ads in my various ezines. If you think that isn't a chunk of change, start running numbers of subscribers in the tens of thousands for a daily ezine--not bad work if you can get it [and run three to five ads per day]. But that's not what I want to do--I just want to cover costs and have pretty toys. If I wanted to work as a "professional", I'd have gone to journalism school.
...I both want and need micropayments to become a reality. Why? I look at the Consumer Reports business model--no ads--and see something that should easily work on the Web. However, I don't think that our sports content is good enough--yet--to merit charging CR-level prices. And in trying to go lower, we will get up by transaction fees and be in the same position as we are with Flycast.
Soon, I think a whole lot of DIY e-publishers are going to be with us. We love what we're doing, and we don't want to become rich sports boors [say hello, Mr. Sheffield], but we would like to cover costs and maybe even take a little home one of these days...
I would say this one attempt to misread what he said casts a great deal of doubt on your ability to make even the vaguest stab at objectively judging his opinions.
The main reason I would imagine that it was brought up was that Allchin's comments have received much scrutiny, and any response from RMS would be read with nearly as much interest. People that are new to the GPL need to know how it's different from other licenses, don't they?
The important rule of running any serious advocacy program is this: "Never miss an opportunity to educate someone."
Now, because many of us here on/. have heard this before, it sounds like a "tired party line", but to some people, it's the first time they've heard about it. Are we so egotistical to think that RMS was talking to us? Realize that his audience is diverse in these situations, and he has to give something novel to all of them.
You know, this idea isn't entirely bad. I build all my sites by hand with templates and such that are W3C compliant. [If you look at TOTK.com, you'll see that it's not, but *I* don't build it.] I encourage others to do the same, for two reasons:
Streamlining of HTML markup. [I have too many friends who build a site in MS Word and save it as HTML, then upload. I'm not kidding. I challenged one guy to build a page from start to finish, time himself, show me the end result, and let me build a similar page from scratch by hand. I beat his time, and my file was about 25% smaller. Heh.]
Knowledge of what you're actually doing. I'd rather see people understand the structural elements of HTML and how UA's represent them than just say, "It works, so I don't care." A little knowledge goes a long, long way.
That said, the adoption rate is either going to help this or harm it. I would have no problem adding something like this to some of my sites. However, I've got one problem: one of them, our SGA Web site, is most often viewed by students on campus. This usually means labs, and lab techs are loathe to take labs down while they upgrade the Web browser, especially when it's not a high-demand item.
It would actually be better if a couple of big sites would do this, but guess what? They won't.
It appeals to the windmill-tilting standard-bearer in me, but I'm not going to rush out there to be the first Don Quixote...
The biggest problem with what you suggest is that you're aiming at a moving target. Each class going through a high school is different--in some areas, it's all dependent on how many kids were born that year. [More kids having an effect on how classes interact, etc.]
The thing that I've always chuckled about with the SAT is that ETS realizes its a moving target, and they normalize the test scores every once in a while [two years?]. My SAT score would probably be higher if I'd taken it when my brother did, back when the test studies weren't as complete.
Hell, I own a high [1510] SAT score, but it hasn't done me much good in college [roughly 3.0 GPA]. It's a measure of roughly how smart you are and how lucky you are on a particular day. I took the ACT five times, and only once did I see a significant [3-point] jump.
What do you mean, my dorm room is not my personal residence? I live here, and pay for the privilege.
It all depends on how your "leasing" arrangement works. You might want to look at it.
I know that at my school, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, the state is the lessor and the student is the lessee. In that arrangement, all the lessor has to do is perform routine health inspections--which my current apartment complex can do, too, if they feel the need.
At UAH's dorms, folks can do lots of what they want with their connection, but running servers usually gets you pzapped, because our bandwidth really is in short supply. UAH also kadinked Napster for the same reason [officially]. I do know I saw the effect of Napster on our network personally, because my computer in the SGA Office would slow to a crawl, connection-wise, when all the students got out of classes and fired their downloads back up.
But back to my original comment, your privacy questions mainly have to do with the way your leasing/rental arrangement works. If you're signing a lease, read the lease. If you're paying a fee [and there can be a difference], there's a big difference. Varies from school to school and lease to lease, just like the rest of the world.
Of course, it's not like this is that important, anyway. It's just ISS, right? Actually, Destiny's not even truly outfitted with racks. We need another couple flights before science can really happen...and NASA's pushing the science back right now in favor of the assembly sequence anyway. That's okay--lots of the science isn't ready. =) --
Granted, the computing power to do this would be nuts, and acceptance would be a pain, but it would be possible to construct a system that allows people to determine where they want to go and has the car drive them there. If everyone is using the same system, speed limits become irrelevant, because cars could be driven at whatever speed is most efficient for the route, depending on traffic, etc.
Are you an engineer? Are you an engineer in aerospace? Look, in the '80s, the era of unlimited budgets was gone. Even the lowest bidder does very good work. Cost and schedule are two very, very big drivers in aerospace. You just have to deal with that fact and go on with it... --
I'm not sure where you're getting this information from. NASA rolled out Atlantis fully intending to launch her. However, after that was done test results came back on some spare cables which were found to have decayed while in storage. NASA then decided to roll back Atlantis and take whatever steps were necessary to test the SRB comm cables in her, even though those cables were believed to be fine.
This is an example of the system working. NASA was all set to launch, but when they found out there was even a slight chance that the cables they were using might be frayed, simply because they found a completely different set of cables elsewhere that was, they made the decision to roll the shuttle back to the VAB, at a cost of millions of dollars and a delay of weeks. They did the tests, the cables did indeed check out A-OK, and now they can launch in clean conscience. There's nothing idiotic about any of this as I see it.
First, I work in aerospace. We heard about the booster cable problem in late November or early December through the routine grapevine. Noise about the next launch died down significantly, and the push to get U.S. Lab done on time let up *just* a bit. [I work with one of the guys who gets sent down to Kennedy some of the time to work inside ISS modules.]
After the last launch, it was found that one of the SRB's didn't separate from the primary firing mechanism, but the secondary. Because of issues with separation--heck, look what happened when the restraints failed on STS 51-L, because that was perhaps the most catastrophic of the failures right there--NASA quietly put all the fleet on standby.
The cables that caused the rollback to happen were only found as part of an investigation prompted by the above. It's good to see the thing rolled back, but having unresolved SRB separation issues is a bad thing.
In some ways, the system is working, but we were all frustrated that they ever rolled STS out there in the first place. Plus hell, we all hate late January launches [the last FDRD baselined launch date was 01/18]. 51-L, Apollo I...we prefer to just wait a while. Superstitious? You bet your ass.
I don't dispute that they were warned. Going with Thiokol over United [who, yes, had a better design] was an engineering decision. True engineering decisions have time and cost as part of it. As far as knowing the outcome, sure they did! Various NASA documents have the "catastrophic failure rate" of STS at about 2% of all launches. We're at about 0.95% today. So, as a NASA subcontractor, I cringe like hell with every launch. This is my job on the line, dammit. =) --
Of course it's difficult! Because of compressible flow, there is a nice shock cone all around the craft. It's not all that easy to make mass cross the cone, and there's not enough room to kick it out any other way. Trust me--if there was a way to get the astronauts out of the orbiter on the way up and do it safely, NASA would have implemented the change long before now. --
Re:The importance of clear design
on
The Challenger
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· Score: 3
The Thiokol guys knew their audience: NASA PHB's like shiny, pretty pictures. If you've looked at NASA documentation [just check out NASA Watch], you'll see that they like this to be the way they get information. Hell, on the ISS Flight Plans, they have a NASA-distributed traffic light icon that is red, yellow, or green for the overall flight based on the overall flight criteria.
Tufte's conclusions are correct in many ways, but NASA's bureaucratic whims are as much to blame. For one thing, the entire STS system wasn't designed to launch below 40F. Yet they did anyway. The O-Rings were just one of many things that could have failed...in fact, the primary O-ring on one SRB failed on the fifteenth shuttle flight--at a launch temp of 53F--and that sparked the study and discussion of what happened with Challenger.
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Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment
on
The Challenger
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· Score: 4
I had this discussion with some guys from work last night. They remarked that it indeed was one of those watershed American events, like the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 landing, Reagan getting shot, etc.
What disparate views we had; our quality engineer [who's 59] was driving out to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for a review of some payload when the radio bulletins first came out. [Being a NASA town, they came out damned quick.] His comment was, "Oh, shit, it's finally happened."
Me [I'm 22], I was in first grade and distinctly remember the horror of my teacher, who had gotten decently far in the Teacher in Space program. That moment is one of the reasons I'm close to an aerospace engineering degree today [although I realize now I'm more of a writer than an engineer, but hey].
The other guy [who's 41] was at work, and there were no TV's and few radios. Word spread by mouth--"Did you hear? Did you hear? Challenger just blew up?" Scott said the most surreal moment was seeing Ernst Stuhlinger, one of Wehrner von Braun's rocket team, walking around the building, asking people, "Tell me how this could happen? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?" Scott said that he never got an answer from anyone, and he never seemed to really see anyone as he asked them.
Yes, it's one of those days that will live in infamy.
See, Roblimo, you have CowboyNeal make it into a poll: "Which/. Personality Do You Want to See Us Interview Next?" Then CowboyNeal can *finally* win one of those polls...legitimately. =) --
Safety is more important now. Launch decisions aren't made for political reasons anymore. [The desire was to have 51-L up while Reagan made his State of the Union Address.]
The mission team considers all weather effects now. Hell, STS was only qualified to meet a 40 F floor for launch conditions, yet it was launched at around 35 F. Why go outside your safety margins?
Engineers have more say than managers on go/no-go. After guys like Ebeling and Boisjoly at Thiokol weren't listened to--NASA/MSFC Jud Lovingood thought Thiokol's decision for a GO was unanimous, but it wasn't among the engineers--and the craft did blow up, the engineers got more say in launch decisions.
The American public learned that Space Still Ain't Easy or Routine.
Still, with all of that, NASA rolled out Atlantis a few weeks ago, knowing that a concern about--you guessed it!--the SRB separation mechanism would likely delay the launch. The cost of rolling out and rolling back is expensive, yet in the name of good PR, NASA did it anyway. Idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I've come to the decision after working with high school kids that it's a fad. What do I mean by that?
Kids do things to get attention: from their peers, from their parents, from those in authority. That's why kids act out, and that's why kids have interesting modes of dress. That's why kids push for "innovative" music--because it pushes the envelope.
This nature--probing the envelope--is key to understanding this phenomenon. Kids are going to push the envelope: consider bedtime. "Mom, can I stay up 'til 10?" If that works, you push for later and later. If it doesn't, 9:30 is your next offer. Kids push, push, push, until they find the limit.
A loving parent sets those limits. It can really hurt to do that. Hell, it hurts me as a twenty-something working with kids to set those limits on kids for things that adults would do with no recourse [such as alcohol consumption, etc.]. It bothers the snot out of me to tell kids not to drink at their age when I am just 4-10 years older [depending on what age group I'm working with at the time] and can drink most folks I know under the table.
Unfortunately, some parents, rather than set limits, become uninvolved in their kids' lives. Becoming uninvolved is a process--because kids want their parents to be involved, for the most part. Yeah, even at the teen ages, they still want some parental involvement, though they only want it on their terms. The kids keep reaching out for things that aren't there--loving parents who want to know what's going on. And considering that brain development is still going on at that age, they can contemplate things from a whole new perspective without good parental supervision: hence, the idea to go out and take a lot of people out with you.
I contemplated and nearly did commit suicide just five years ago. But while I was at a residential high school where taking out a few of my peers would have gotten me a shitload of publicity, and I did have access to guns, including one of my own, when I was suicidal and wanted attention, I never thought of doing something like killing my peers. But now that a couple deranged people have done it, it now becomes plausible and has mindshare. The "early adopters" have created a market for killing.
I'm sure there are a ton of posts about how kids picking on kids are nothing new. Sure wasn't when my parents were growing up, sure wasn't as I was growing up. That's true. What's different is that there are new methods of acting out in the social conscious. Wonder why teen smoking and drug use is somewhat down? They've found something new to try.
And, like a bad kidney stone, this too, shall pass.
--
Esperanto--the universal language!
Oh, you meant programming language.
[Man, what a bitch it would be to try to code in Magyar...]
--
The pay for talent gets the latter. I should have mentioned site costs on the former, but I was focusing primarily on staffing. We've actually joked about running our own porn site, but my morals keep me from it. =)
We don't have 'em yet. I hope we never do. Personally, I find talking with people invigorating, so I have no problem being a PR contact. [It just cuts into my sleep time, that's all.]
But marketing and PR is a little more necessary for ezines than porn. Porn is something people want and crave. Sportswriting...they can take it or leave it. We have to do a little offline promotion, but I seriously doubt you'll be shilling ninenine.com on your local talk radio station. I have done that with TOTK.com on our local sports talk station. Granted, it was the cost of my time, but someday, the opportunities might get to the point where someone else has to do it...
You're right: they shouldn't be. I'd argue that perhaps the talent costs of writers are higher than porn, but then 1) I'm not paying my guys right now [hell, I don't get paid to edit their stuff OR write] and 2) I'm not going to look into the costs of porn talent. =)
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Ahhhh, but not every content business is like the porn industry. With porn, you have to pay:
For me to be similar with our ezines, I'd have to pay:
With porn, once the image is captured, you're done. Porn talent can, er, display their wares anywhere they choose. My talent all get exclusivity clauses in their contracts, because our writers make our ezine. Also, except for sites focused around specific talent, I don't imagine that "viewers" want to interact with the talent. With writing, it's vitally necessary to the creative process.
I never thought I'd come to comparing my writers [as Chief Editor, I think of them that way, though I'm younger than almost all of them] to porn talent. I just hope like hell they don't find this thread...=)
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Ask most any content producer what they want to get paid with, and they'll reply, "Micropayments." But it's because we use the term the wrong way.
After carefully reading Clay Shirky's comments on micropayments, he makes sense: paying before you're sure about the quality of something is a bad idea. Even with a respected content producer, how are you sure that they will maintain standards?
Case in point: Tom Clancy. I haunt alt.books.tom-clancy, and much discussion has raged there about the declining quality of his novels. Some have stated that they will never again rush to their bookstore on release day and pay full price for a first-edition hardback. I am almost to that point myself--because the quality hasn't been maintained.
What most of us content producers want is to charge, but not charge highly. We can't do it with credit cards--most folks know about the charges there. [What, you think Visa stays solvent just with our high balances? =) I wish.] So "micropayments" is our answer, although the traditional micropayment method [pay $0.NN for my bit o' content] isn't really what we want.
Here's where we are probably going:
If anyone has comments on this system, I'd love to hear them. Since we're an ezine, we can try to adapt the magazine business model to the Internet, all the while trying to kill the notion that information and storage are combined. My rationale on charging for archive access is just like asking us to store your old copies of Sports Illustrated--as long as you don't mind if we peruse the swimsuit issue. [Carol Alt: yowza!]
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They do: it's called critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, they don't teach enough of it. QED: average age of /. trolls...
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Kurt's comment about magazines not surviving solely alone on subscription fees is true as well. So the thought is, "Why not take in both sources of revenue?"
I'd love better targetting of ads. I also like /. enough to pay a small [say $1-2/mo] subscription fee. If my subscription fee combined with my UID gets me the ability to give them feedback on ads--giving me ads I might actually care about--I'll definitely pony up the money.
See, /. is free for all out there as a loss-leader. You can post anonymously. You can look it over before grabbing an account. It's like having your magazine at a library or a newsstand--you can browse before buying. That's one thing you have to have before people will subscribe to your stuff. The only people who can charge by-the-article or by-the-report are stock brokers and those with ungodly good reputations about things, like WSJ.
But subscriptions must also provide added value. A /. subscription could provide added value in targetting of ads and, I'm sure, other ways. [I'm actually thinking of a Web-mail system, because people who pay you money will be easier to beat with cluesticks, and having gmorris@slashdot.org has to evangelize for /. to non-ubergeeks.] The /. crew seems pretty smart.
In short: it's worth a shot. Hell, /. in its original incarnation was worth a shot. It's all still an experiment, as people often note with karma. =) If /. wants an ad-system/subscription-fee tester, I'll be happy to give it a try.
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Here's how I imagine an ezine conglomerate like TOTK.com Sports using micropayments:
Do I expect to make scads of money? Nope. I could make a shitload more, likely, if I got $5 CPM text ads in my various ezines. If you think that isn't a chunk of change, start running numbers of subscribers in the tens of thousands for a daily ezine--not bad work if you can get it [and run three to five ads per day]. But that's not what I want to do--I just want to cover costs and have pretty toys. If I wanted to work as a "professional", I'd have gone to journalism school.
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...I both want and need micropayments to become a reality. Why? I look at the Consumer Reports business model--no ads--and see something that should easily work on the Web. However, I don't think that our sports content is good enough--yet--to merit charging CR-level prices. And in trying to go lower, we will get up by transaction fees and be in the same position as we are with Flycast.
Soon, I think a whole lot of DIY e-publishers are going to be with us. We love what we're doing, and we don't want to become rich sports boors [say hello, Mr. Sheffield], but we would like to cover costs and maybe even take a little home one of these days...
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The main reason I would imagine that it was brought up was that Allchin's comments have received much scrutiny, and any response from RMS would be read with nearly as much interest. People that are new to the GPL need to know how it's different from other licenses, don't they?
The important rule of running any serious advocacy program is this: "Never miss an opportunity to educate someone."
Now, because many of us here on /. have heard this before, it sounds like a "tired party line", but to some people, it's the first time they've heard about it. Are we so egotistical to think that RMS was talking to us? Realize that his audience is diverse in these situations, and he has to give something novel to all of them.
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Ahhhh, but when the HURD is heard from, will the herd keep HURD from being heard? Word.
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You know, this idea isn't entirely bad. I build all my sites by hand with templates and such that are W3C compliant. [If you look at TOTK.com, you'll see that it's not, but *I* don't build it.] I encourage others to do the same, for two reasons:
That said, the adoption rate is either going to help this or harm it. I would have no problem adding something like this to some of my sites. However, I've got one problem: one of them, our SGA Web site, is most often viewed by students on campus. This usually means labs, and lab techs are loathe to take labs down while they upgrade the Web browser, especially when it's not a high-demand item.
It would actually be better if a couple of big sites would do this, but guess what? They won't.
It appeals to the windmill-tilting standard-bearer in me, but I'm not going to rush out there to be the first Don Quixote...
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The biggest problem with what you suggest is that you're aiming at a moving target. Each class going through a high school is different--in some areas, it's all dependent on how many kids were born that year. [More kids having an effect on how classes interact, etc.]
The thing that I've always chuckled about with the SAT is that ETS realizes its a moving target, and they normalize the test scores every once in a while [two years?]. My SAT score would probably be higher if I'd taken it when my brother did, back when the test studies weren't as complete.
Hell, I own a high [1510] SAT score, but it hasn't done me much good in college [roughly 3.0 GPA]. It's a measure of roughly how smart you are and how lucky you are on a particular day. I took the ACT five times, and only once did I see a significant [3-point] jump.
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It all depends on how your "leasing" arrangement works. You might want to look at it.
I know that at my school, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, the state is the lessor and the student is the lessee. In that arrangement, all the lessor has to do is perform routine health inspections--which my current apartment complex can do, too, if they feel the need.
At UAH's dorms, folks can do lots of what they want with their connection, but running servers usually gets you pzapped, because our bandwidth really is in short supply. UAH also kadinked Napster for the same reason [officially]. I do know I saw the effect of Napster on our network personally, because my computer in the SGA Office would slow to a crawl, connection-wise, when all the students got out of classes and fired their downloads back up.
But back to my original comment, your privacy questions mainly have to do with the way your leasing/rental arrangement works. If you're signing a lease, read the lease. If you're paying a fee [and there can be a difference], there's a big difference. Varies from school to school and lease to lease, just like the rest of the world.
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Of course, it's not like this is that important, anyway. It's just ISS, right? Actually, Destiny's not even truly outfitted with racks. We need another couple flights before science can really happen...and NASA's pushing the science back right now in favor of the assembly sequence anyway. That's okay--lots of the science isn't ready. =)
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Granted, the computing power to do this would be nuts, and acceptance would be a pain, but it would be possible to construct a system that allows people to determine where they want to go and has the car drive them there. If everyone is using the same system, speed limits become irrelevant, because cars could be driven at whatever speed is most efficient for the route, depending on traffic, etc.
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Are you an engineer? Are you an engineer in aerospace? Look, in the '80s, the era of unlimited budgets was gone. Even the lowest bidder does very good work. Cost and schedule are two very, very big drivers in aerospace. You just have to deal with that fact and go on with it...
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First, I work in aerospace. We heard about the booster cable problem in late November or early December through the routine grapevine. Noise about the next launch died down significantly, and the push to get U.S. Lab done on time let up *just* a bit. [I work with one of the guys who gets sent down to Kennedy some of the time to work inside ISS modules.]
After the last launch, it was found that one of the SRB's didn't separate from the primary firing mechanism, but the secondary. Because of issues with separation--heck, look what happened when the restraints failed on STS 51-L, because that was perhaps the most catastrophic of the failures right there--NASA quietly put all the fleet on standby.
The cables that caused the rollback to happen were only found as part of an investigation prompted by the above. It's good to see the thing rolled back, but having unresolved SRB separation issues is a bad thing.
In some ways, the system is working, but we were all frustrated that they ever rolled STS out there in the first place. Plus hell, we all hate late January launches [the last FDRD baselined launch date was 01/18]. 51-L, Apollo I...we prefer to just wait a while. Superstitious? You bet your ass.
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I don't dispute that they were warned. Going with Thiokol over United [who, yes, had a better design] was an engineering decision. True engineering decisions have time and cost as part of it. As far as knowing the outcome, sure they did! Various NASA documents have the "catastrophic failure rate" of STS at about 2% of all launches. We're at about 0.95% today. So, as a NASA subcontractor, I cringe like hell with every launch. This is my job on the line, dammit. =)
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Of course it's difficult! Because of compressible flow, there is a nice shock cone all around the craft. It's not all that easy to make mass cross the cone, and there's not enough room to kick it out any other way. Trust me--if there was a way to get the astronauts out of the orbiter on the way up and do it safely, NASA would have implemented the change long before now.
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The Thiokol guys knew their audience: NASA PHB's like shiny, pretty pictures. If you've looked at NASA documentation [just check out NASA Watch], you'll see that they like this to be the way they get information. Hell, on the ISS Flight Plans, they have a NASA-distributed traffic light icon that is red, yellow, or green for the overall flight based on the overall flight criteria.
Tufte's conclusions are correct in many ways, but NASA's bureaucratic whims are as much to blame. For one thing, the entire STS system wasn't designed to launch below 40F. Yet they did anyway. The O-Rings were just one of many things that could have failed...in fact, the primary O-ring on one SRB failed on the fifteenth shuttle flight--at a launch temp of 53F--and that sparked the study and discussion of what happened with Challenger.
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I had this discussion with some guys from work last night. They remarked that it indeed was one of those watershed American events, like the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 landing, Reagan getting shot, etc.
What disparate views we had; our quality engineer [who's 59] was driving out to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for a review of some payload when the radio bulletins first came out. [Being a NASA town, they came out damned quick.] His comment was, "Oh, shit, it's finally happened."
Me [I'm 22], I was in first grade and distinctly remember the horror of my teacher, who had gotten decently far in the Teacher in Space program. That moment is one of the reasons I'm close to an aerospace engineering degree today [although I realize now I'm more of a writer than an engineer, but hey].
The other guy [who's 41] was at work, and there were no TV's and few radios. Word spread by mouth--"Did you hear? Did you hear? Challenger just blew up?" Scott said the most surreal moment was seeing Ernst Stuhlinger, one of Wehrner von Braun's rocket team, walking around the building, asking people, "Tell me how this could happen? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?" Scott said that he never got an answer from anyone, and he never seemed to really see anyone as he asked them.
Yes, it's one of those days that will live in infamy.
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See, Roblimo, you have CowboyNeal make it into a poll: "Which /. Personality Do You Want to See Us Interview Next?" Then CowboyNeal can *finally* win one of those polls...legitimately. =)
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STS 51-L has a legacy:
Still, with all of that, NASA rolled out Atlantis a few weeks ago, knowing that a concern about--you guessed it!--the SRB separation mechanism would likely delay the launch. The cost of rolling out and rolling back is expensive, yet in the name of good PR, NASA did it anyway. Idiots.
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Yeah, it could happen at any time. Expect it while Britney Spears is "singing" and "dancing" on the stage.
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