Google pretty much has pioneered a 3rd party payer system (like healthcare) for the high-tech world. Individuals who use their services are NOT their customers. Customers give businesses money. These individuals are clients, and businesses like Google can treat their clients like shit because they are expendible, replace-able and when they do, they can often get more paying customers.
Lots of other new comapnies are also sucking off the 3rd party payer (advertiser) model too, at the expense of individuals' privacy.
I agree completely. What you need to realize is that Google has enabled a third-party payer system similar to what is happening in healthcare.
Party 1: Google (business)
Party 2: Kraft (customer placing ads)
Party 3: person searching for Mac -n- Cheese (individual)
Those people that are using Google service s are not really "customers" of Google. For a business, customers are people who give the business MONEY -- the vast majority of people in the world who use Google services are not customers; they are what I call "clients". Clients are a specific kind of user - ones that don't give you cash, but are essential to the business model. The Customers of Google are those people and businesses that give them money: advertisers.
This 3rd-party payment system is now widespread in the online world, currently with advertising and soon with other services. The problem is that the 2 of the three parties in most cases are businesses exchanging money and information, and the 3rd party is the individual, who can get suckered and used (or in this case listened to).
Just like healthcare, 3rd party payment systems lead to significant inefficiencies in the marketplace. This is one of the reasons why the US spends so much on healthcare (like 16% of GDP) and still has crappy health, overall compared to other nations. The inefficiency in the High-Tech Ad market is different than healthcare, yet no less detrimental to individuals in the long run.
Within our current economic system, companies must continually grow to survive. All large groups tend to become slower and more bureaucratic over time, and their ability to innovate declines. This leads to a tremendous pressure to generate continuously increasing revenue from existing methods.
Individuals motivations for privacy and security will inevitably come to odds with the profit drive of corporations. There is simply no way around this. It is not good enough to say that "the market will decide", and companies that screw over people will fail... because the only way to dissuade companies from selling out individuals is for there to be some economic pain inflicted on the company for such behavior. Currently there is a significant imbalance between how companies make money from wide groups of people, yet each individual has little or no effect on the actions of the company.
Web 2.0 is showing us that power to the individual is increasing, dramatically.
We will see more and more "mutual benefit" clubs/collectives - organizations who primarily serve the interests of the individual - that pop up and by aggregating individual interests pull people away from the profit-motivated corporations.
Currently it is difficult legally to create and manage such collectives as they get large (>20-50 members), but it is inevitable, as the profit motives will end up screwing too many people.
You need to be given bonus time to keep playing if you do a good job. Basically make the interaction change if you do a good job, and you will hook a lot more people.
They need to give more feedback on what the other person labeled images you have already done. This will make teh team work together better.
so when will we wake up to how simple the whole identity issue is.
currently we use dob and ssn as the primary key to trusted electronic identity. they are managed by the state, which is slow and inefficient. when stole, there is almost no way to change ssn, and dob can never be changed.
the key should be a cert, under control of the individual, and the rest should be open or tied to a signature from that person's cert. a cert would be easy to fix/replace when it is lost or stolen.
community efforts exist now to start heading this way, but they are not taking hold - most are too complex, or they try and keep big business in their pocket.
There are no bad ideas, only bad actions. There are no bad ideas, only bad actions. There are no bad ideas, only bad actions.
Preventing people from having certain information for moral reasons (assertions that the information is "bad") not only fails, it is harmful to the ideas of an open, accepting society that promotes health.
Ideas are just information, and all information has positive value. Once governments get into the business of dictating what people think, totalitarianism becomes possible.
Microsoft is a dinosaur and the comet has already hit. Time to get out while the gettin' out is still possible.
I was unsure about the conclusion until I used Vista, but it now is fairly clear: Windows 2000 will be the best OS they ever made.
The best thing that could happen for the human race is if MS were to get bought out by a cabal of private billionaires who fired almost everyone, put an idealist at the helm, and rebuilt the comapany and all the systems on an open source model.
This would end the absurdly inneficient closed source model once and for all.
As someone with the letters P,h,D in my professional background - I speak with some authority on the subject: Yes, quite a few of the "Ph.D. club-card holders" are completely full of shit.
Caveat Emptor. Grow up Americans. Think for yourselves, people.
and since when does testifying in front of congress give someone credibility? The people in Congress are not the brightest critters out there. To me, congressional testimony is as good as saying you were a witness in a trial. Whoop de doo.
Property is just a social convention. We don't have laws that define what the idea of property is -- we have lots that define who owns what -- but property itself, the idea is just a common norm we all have bought into.
[[ N.B. the world could work a whole lot better once we get away from this notion ]]
it reeks of PR.... the kind of PR that happens when people are REALLY trying to get others accept a point that is hard to accept.
I've been following the "dark" story on and off since I stopped studying physics seriously after college. The MOND system makes a whole lot of sense. My non-professional-physicist read on the MOND / DARK controversy is that several of the alternate theories (like MOND) that remove the need for dark matter are fairly convincing. Dark matter is not convincing at all - not testable, not observable, and reminds me a lot of Santa Claus. Somebody brought the presents, right? The problem is that a vast majority of cosmologists are all so far down the dark matter band wagon that if dark matter goes away... lots of careers will be lost. Destroyed. These professionals who trade solely in reputation and intellectual-ism will have their rug pulled right out from under them.
A much more plausible explanation is that some people are trying really hard to amp up the PR. Sort of like what happens when you need a distraction from a big debate, so you get all the airline travelers to throw away liquids. Anyone who tells you they have proof for something that by definition can not be observed is selling PR. For those of you who believe it without question, I've got a bridge I'll sell you.
After taking about 30 minutes and reading no less than 6 heavily biased PR pieces... I say this stinks. It's certainly not science - (yet).
This is another example of how market inefficiencies are maintained for a profit, and where the disconnect between the theory of a "free market" and the reality of the actual market are so far apart.
I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.
After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.
I thought it was a good point.
Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.
It has come to our attantion that it is a LOT more difficult to keep you all under our control when you are well educateed and well connected. As such, we, the corrupt career politicials (that really have only our own interests at heart), all 410 of us, have decided to stop letting you connect with each other so easily.
We've decided that it would be best if the big corporations decide how much people should pay to have access over the shared global computer networks. We've decided that public services that offer Internet connections should restrict sites that allow people to connect and share information. You see, when all you "people" (plebs) out there keep sharing information and educating each other (for free) about what we're doing -- it makes us look REALLY bad. It erodes our ability to craft the message we want you to hear. It prevents us from keeping the food locked up and you worried about how to survive, so that you'll work real hard.
We're not going to stop this pattern. Each time it looks like the people have too much freedom, understand the world too well, or have too much information about how the state operates, we are going to pass more laws that try to keep ourselves in power. We're not even going to consider rational debate on how we should be paid, or really who we work for - we work for our own self interest!
Sincerely Yours, The Senators and Representatives, leaders and crooks, cronies and career jackashers who have the world by the balls and have no interest in letting go...
No. I don't see the primary "role" of governemnt to enforce laws. Law enforcement is an effect. The are to enforce laws only to the extent they fulfil the "protect us" and the "let us have peaceable interactions" roles.
People use "clearly" to assert statements that are anything but clear. Mostly, your post doesn't make much sense to me.
"Merely clarifyiing existing laws" is laughable. Copyright laws are completely absurd now. This is why the market is finding other solutions.
"What the government is really doing" is more horrifying than we know. Of course I overlook it, everyone does - that's why governments can get away with torture and waging wars. What exactly do you mean - what ARE they doing here?
Discussion of enforcement of laws without bringing in the broader context of why and who and how regarding a law is not of interest to me. This will ruffle many feathers on the "traditionalists" of the world, but I never agreed to the idea that a bunch of companies could pay off corrupt officials so they could pass laws that I would blindly follow. There are a lot of laws now that fall under this classification, and frankly, I never signed up for that, nor would I now.
many societies, (like the american indians) existed for long stretches without any concept of owning land. the idea of owning land is a modern invention by people, and, as a species, we would be much better off getting rid of it. Such a change would take considerable revolution in the way people think and function, but the resulting system would be much more peaceful and more productive.
As for food, on a very short term horizon (weeks) I agree. But the relation also holds on all time scales (months and years and generations) - meaning that the population will adjust to available food levels (up or down) over long periods of time. This understanding eliminates the scarcity arguement for food. By definition, living people will always have enough food over long time scales.
you imply that losing profits is a resulting problem that must be adressed.
this mentality is somthing that must be addressed loudly and clearly - as it drives significant stupidity in legislation and mob thinking.
repeat ten times: "it is not the job of the state to maintain profits for any company or industry" repeat ten times: "the state exists to protect our welfare and ALLOW lawful commerce"
the market will decide which companies fail. when the state steps in and trys to jig with the market, corruption and grift are the natural result. this is why we have absurd copyright length now (resulting in new market solutions like cc licensing) this legislation seems at first pass to be another example.
thank god we have a bunch of different governments still that can't agree how to keep tabs everything
the idea that when *I* chose to privately send information to myself in a different place requires the PERMISSION of the state is completely absurd, to me. This is not what the state should be doing at all. I don't harm anyone, I pay for the service myself, and it's no one else's business what I do with information I already have (at least in my own idealistic view of the world). It seems clear actions like licensing these activities is a transparent attempt to prevent new methods of information exchange to maintain profits with outdated models.
the battle over information [access/ownership/control] will continue to get worse and worse and undermine "traditional" models of business and governments - and all of society. thinking about these issues far enough brings directly into focus questions of what 'property' and 'ownership' really mean and if humans are going to maintain the current conventions of property for very long. but that is a much longer discussion - but I'll seed with this...
we're already in a world where information is much more valuable than physical goods. the really amazing thing about information is that when we share it, we don't lose it - if fact the only way to maintain information over really long periods of time (eons) is to KEEP using it. So if all the most valuable things in the world can be copied and distributed nearly free, why do we need to own things? The answers are completely incompatible with capitalism and the current health level of most people -- but it's where we will eventually come to realize long-term stability and peace in the human race.
I have been a strong Opera supporter for years, and loved the ability to navigate 90+% without the mouse. I started using Firfefox in the last 6 months for it's developer tools. To mimic the functions of Opera I use an extension called Mouseless Browsing (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/879/) which has been very nice.
The reality you deal wih inside a virtual world can be much better than the one you have to deal with in the "real" world. This is why the games are attractive. One gets to control much more inside virtual environments, and the metrics for success are much easier to attain.
Slashdot Mirror
Google pretty much has pioneered a 3rd party payer system (like healthcare) for the high-tech world. Individuals who use their services are NOT their customers. Customers give businesses money. These individuals are clients, and businesses like Google can treat their clients like shit because they are expendible, replace-able and when they do, they can often get more paying customers.
Lots of other new comapnies are also sucking off the 3rd party payer (advertiser) model too, at the expense of individuals' privacy.
I agree completely. What you need to realize is that Google has enabled a third-party payer system similar to what is happening in healthcare.
Party 1: Google (business)
Party 2: Kraft (customer placing ads)
Party 3: person searching for Mac -n- Cheese (individual)
Those people that are using Google service s are not really "customers" of Google. For a business, customers are people who give the business MONEY -- the vast majority of people in the world who use Google services are not customers; they are what I call "clients". Clients are a specific kind of user - ones that don't give you cash, but are essential to the business model. The Customers of Google are those people and businesses that give them money: advertisers.
This 3rd-party payment system is now widespread in the online world, currently with advertising and soon with other services. The problem is that the 2 of the three parties in most cases are businesses exchanging money and information, and the 3rd party is the individual, who can get suckered and used (or in this case listened to).
Just like healthcare, 3rd party payment systems lead to significant inefficiencies in the marketplace. This is one of the reasons why the US spends so much on healthcare (like 16% of GDP) and still has crappy health, overall compared to other nations. The inefficiency in the High-Tech Ad market is different than healthcare, yet no less detrimental to individuals in the long run.
My rambling, biased thoughts on this issue:
... because the only way to dissuade companies from selling out individuals is for there to be some economic pain inflicted on the company for such behavior. Currently there is a significant imbalance between how companies make money from wide groups of people, yet each individual has little or no effect on the actions of the company.
Within our current economic system, companies must continually grow to survive. All large groups tend to become slower and more bureaucratic over time, and their ability to innovate declines. This leads to a tremendous pressure to generate continuously increasing revenue from existing methods.
Individuals motivations for privacy and security will inevitably come to odds with the profit drive of corporations. There is simply no way around this. It is not good enough to say that "the market will decide", and companies that screw over people will fail
Web 2.0 is showing us that power to the individual is increasing, dramatically.
We will see more and more "mutual benefit" clubs/collectives - organizations who primarily serve the interests of the individual - that pop up and by aggregating individual interests pull people away from the profit-motivated corporations.
Currently it is difficult legally to create and manage such collectives as they get large (>20-50 members), but it is inevitable, as the profit motives will end up screwing too many people.
So they need to make this more like a game.
You need to be given bonus time to keep playing if you do a good job. Basically make the interaction change if you do a good job, and you will hook a lot more people.
They need to give more feedback on what the other person labeled images you have already done. This will make teh team work together better.
Why isn't flickr doing this?
so when will we wake up to how simple the whole identity issue is.
currently we use dob and ssn as the primary key to trusted electronic identity. they are managed by the state, which is slow and inefficient. when stole, there is almost no way to change ssn, and dob can never be changed.
the key should be a cert, under control of the individual, and the rest should be open or tied to a signature from that person's cert. a cert would be easy to fix/replace when it is lost or stolen.
community efforts exist now to start heading this way, but they are not taking hold - most are too complex, or they try and keep big business in their pocket.
Repeat after me:
There are no bad ideas, only bad actions.
There are no bad ideas, only bad actions.
There are no bad ideas, only bad actions.
Preventing people from having certain information for moral reasons (assertions that the information is "bad") not only fails, it is harmful to the ideas of an open, accepting society that promotes health.
Ideas are just information, and all information has positive value. Once governments get into the business of dictating what people think, totalitarianism becomes possible.
Microsoft is a dinosaur and the comet has already hit. Time to get out while the gettin' out is still possible.
I was unsure about the conclusion until I used Vista, but it now is fairly clear: Windows 2000 will be the best OS they ever made.
The best thing that could happen for the human race is if MS were to get bought out by a cabal of private billionaires who fired almost everyone, put an idealist at the helm, and rebuilt the comapany and all the systems on an open source model.
This would end the absurdly inneficient closed source model once and for all.
I'm going to win the lottery twice next week too.
Yes I am.
As someone with the letters P,h,D in my professional background - I speak with some authority on the subject: Yes, quite a few of the "Ph.D. club-card holders" are completely full of shit.
Caveat Emptor. Grow up Americans. Think for yourselves, people.
and since when does testifying in front of congress give someone credibility? The people in Congress are not the brightest critters out there. To me, congressional testimony is as good as saying you were a witness in a trial. Whoop de doo.
Property is just a social convention. We don't have laws that define what the idea of property is -- we have lots that define who owns what -- but property itself, the idea is just a common norm we all have bought into.
[[ N.B. the world could work a whole lot better once we get away from this notion ]]
it reeks of PR. ... the kind of PR that happens when people are REALLY trying to get others accept a point that is hard to accept.
I've been following the "dark" story on and off since I stopped studying physics seriously after college. The MOND system makes a whole lot of sense. My non-professional-physicist read on the MOND / DARK controversy is that several of the alternate theories (like MOND) that remove the need for dark matter are fairly convincing. Dark matter is not convincing at all - not testable, not observable, and reminds me a lot of Santa Claus. Somebody brought the presents, right? The problem is that a vast majority of cosmologists are all so far down the dark matter band wagon that if dark matter goes away... lots of careers will be lost. Destroyed. These professionals who trade solely in reputation and intellectual-ism will have their rug pulled right out from under them.
A much more plausible explanation is that some people are trying really hard to amp up the PR. Sort of like what happens when you need a distraction from a big debate, so you get all the airline travelers to throw away liquids. Anyone who tells you they have proof for something that by definition can not be observed is selling PR. For those of you who believe it without question, I've got a bridge I'll sell you.
After taking about 30 minutes and reading no less than 6 heavily biased PR pieces... I say this stinks. It's certainly not science - (yet).
This is another example of how market inefficiencies are maintained for a profit, and where the disconnect between the theory of a "free market" and the reality of the actual market are so far apart.
I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.
After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.
I thought it was a good point.
Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.
Then why do you post AC?
I can see it coming now... a tinfoil hat brigade shouting,
"that's because we never WENT to the moon!" and
"The original tapes would have proved it!"
You're enabling bad behavior. Tell your sister to take care of her PC herself. Problem solved.
Dear People of the World,
It has come to our attantion that it is a LOT more difficult to keep you all under our control when you are well educateed and well connected. As such, we, the corrupt career politicials (that really have only our own interests at heart), all 410 of us, have decided to stop letting you connect with each other so easily.
We've decided that it would be best if the big corporations decide how much people should pay to have access over the shared global computer networks. We've decided that public services that offer Internet connections should restrict sites that allow people to connect and share information. You see, when all you "people" (plebs) out there keep sharing information and educating each other (for free) about what we're doing -- it makes us look REALLY bad. It erodes our ability to craft the message we want you to hear. It prevents us from keeping the food locked up and you worried about how to survive, so that you'll work real hard.
We're not going to stop this pattern. Each time it looks like the people have too much freedom, understand the world too well, or have too much information about how the state operates, we are going to pass more laws that try to keep ourselves in power. We're not even going to consider rational debate on how we should be paid, or really who we work for - we work for our own self interest!
Sincerely Yours,
The Senators and Representatives, leaders and crooks, cronies and career jackashers who have the world by the balls and have no interest in letting go...
Are you about to start a debate on the rationality of the current copyright laws? I'd love to hear that!
Do you know what they are or how we got them? Ever hear of Disney?
No. I don't see the primary "role" of governemnt to enforce laws. Law enforcement is an effect. The are to enforce laws only to the extent they fulfil the "protect us" and the "let us have peaceable interactions" roles.
People use "clearly" to assert statements that are anything but clear. Mostly, your post doesn't make much sense to me.
"Merely clarifyiing existing laws" is laughable. Copyright laws are completely absurd now. This is why the market is finding other solutions.
"What the government is really doing" is more horrifying than we know. Of course I overlook it, everyone does - that's why governments can get away with torture and waging wars. What exactly do you mean - what ARE they doing here?
Discussion of enforcement of laws without bringing in the broader context of why and who and how regarding a law is not of interest to me. This will ruffle many feathers on the "traditionalists" of the world, but I never agreed to the idea that a bunch of companies could pay off corrupt officials so they could pass laws that I would blindly follow. There are a lot of laws now that fall under this classification, and frankly, I never signed up for that, nor would I now.
many societies, (like the american indians) existed for long stretches without any concept of owning land.
the idea of owning land is a modern invention by people, and, as a species, we would be much better off getting rid of it. Such a change would take considerable revolution in the way people think and function, but the resulting system would be much more peaceful and more productive.
As for food, on a very short term horizon (weeks) I agree. But the relation also holds on all time scales (months and years and generations) - meaning that the population will adjust to available food levels (up or down) over long periods of time. This understanding eliminates the scarcity arguement for food. By definition, living people will always have enough food over long time scales.
you imply that losing profits is a resulting problem that must be adressed.
this mentality is somthing that must be addressed loudly and clearly - as it drives significant stupidity in legislation and mob thinking.
repeat ten times: "it is not the job of the state to maintain profits for any company or industry"
repeat ten times: "the state exists to protect our welfare and ALLOW lawful commerce"
the market will decide which companies fail. when the state steps in and trys to jig with the market, corruption and grift are the natural result. this is why we have absurd copyright length now (resulting in new market solutions like cc licensing) this legislation seems at first pass to be another example.
hmm, last time I checked, food grows on trees. (It really does! ... and each tree makes lots of food)
t ml
BUT MOST IMPORTANT: the food supply defines our population, not the other way around.
see
http://media.anthropik.com/pdf/hopfenberg2003.pdf
http://www.potluck.com/offerings/increase.shtml
http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Science/index.sh
thank god we have a bunch of different governments still that can't agree how to keep tabs everything
the idea that when *I* chose to privately send information to myself in a different place requires the PERMISSION of the state is completely absurd, to me. This is not what the state should be doing at all. I don't harm anyone, I pay for the service myself, and it's no one else's business what I do with information I already have (at least in my own idealistic view of the world). It seems clear actions like licensing these activities is a transparent attempt to prevent new methods of information exchange to maintain profits with outdated models.
the battle over information [access/ownership/control] will continue to get worse and worse and undermine "traditional" models of business and governments - and all of society. thinking about these issues far enough brings directly into focus questions of what 'property' and 'ownership' really mean and if humans are going to maintain the current conventions of property for very long. but that is a much longer discussion - but I'll seed with this...
we're already in a world where information is much more valuable than physical goods. the really amazing thing about information is that when we share it, we don't lose it - if fact the only way to maintain information over really long periods of time (eons) is to KEEP using it. So if all the most valuable things in the world can be copied and distributed nearly free, why do we need to own things? The answers are completely incompatible with capitalism and the current health level of most people -- but it's where we will eventually come to realize long-term stability and peace in the human race.
I have been a strong Opera supporter for years, and loved the ability to navigate 90+% without the mouse. I started using Firfefox in the last 6 months for it's developer tools. To mimic the functions of Opera I use an extension called Mouseless Browsing (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/879/) which has been very nice.
The reality you deal wih inside a virtual world can be much better than the one you have to deal with in the "real" world. This is why the games are attractive. One gets to control much more inside virtual environments, and the metrics for success are much easier to attain.