It wouldn't take a lot of products that fail to deliver after being funded to substantially weaken the funder-side perception of it being a good deal in general.
Yes it would, because funders aren't stupid.
One community that has really gone amok on Kickstarter is the online board game community. It stands to reason, because we're very well organized online compared to many other hobbies, and board games are usually small, risky ventures. When Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games) proposes a reprint of OGRE, we know who he is and that he is capable of going through. Tasty Minstrel games isn't nearly as big a company as Steve Jackson's, but when they put out Kings of Air and Steam, we can easily look them up and see that they have completed several other kickstarter board games. And even for a relatively unknown designer, at a relatively unknown company, a game like Island Fortess has a chance, because it's vetted and endorsed by a community dedicated to doing just that.
When other communities get as net-savvy as the board game community, expect them to follow.
If the kickstarter bubble bursts (through a sullied reputation or scamming or whatever), another one will come along to replace it that learns from the mistakes of the past.
It has already happened. Kickstarter isn't the first incarnation of the concept. Its ideological predecessor, fundable.org, went defunct due to credit card scammers using it to launder money / little success in wrapping people's heads around the concept (even though it was essentially the same as Kickstarter).
About the only thing I can see is someone else coming along to steal Kickstarter's thunder,
Oh, you mean like RocketHub, IndieGoGo, PeerBackers, Eppela, Start Some Good, CoFolio, New Jelly, Quirky, ProFounder, Microventures, Crowdfunder, Chipin, Ulule, Cofundos, Buzzbnk, Biracy, Digital Garage, Sonicangel, Spot.us... ? They haven't exactly succeeded.
A few of those serve legitimate purposes, especially allowing payment with other tools than Amazon Payments, and allowing project starters to be from anywhere not just the US. But most of them haven't even comprehended half of Kickstarter's business model, they're just blindly trying to get onto the bandwagon.
Also, it should be mentioned that Kickstarter was not the first site of its kind either. The now defunct fundable.org was.
That is not the defining attribute of democracy. Remember, the ancient Athenians wouldn't even consider our institutions democratic at all - they considered mass voting inherently oligarchic.
A classic trick, count all newspapers as being equally important.
Where I live, there are plenty of newspapers that have a "red" history, pretty much every village had its own labor newspaper back in the day. Many of these exist today, but their circulation is insignificant, and they mostly reprint notices from the huge (right-wing owned) news agencies.
Depressing thing is, they must have prepared for this. You do not rampantly break the laws with robocalls to thousands of citizens and expect it to not get publicity.
The guy who did it did a lot to conceal his tracks, too: he knew perfectly well there would be an uproar.
They merely were confident they would ride the uproar out, that their loyalists would just circle the wagons, and in some weeks or months the public will have forgotten.
Your critique of naive direct democracy - that leaders arise, but are informal and therefore not subject to safeguards - is an excellent one.
I disagree. It's a trivial one, and it doesn't address the basic improvement to "direct democracy" that has been with it from the start: lotteries. (Al least you do).
This was accomplished despite the excellence of the design of the American system
Excellence? By their fruits ye shall know them. The framers of the US constitution had many objectives, but all of them wanted to defend and foster a "natural" aristocracy of some kind. Most of them considered the disposessed merely a threat to the stability of the state, not persons with a legitimate stake in the system (which is why a certain level of wealth was a prerequisite of voting rights). For a long while, thanks in large part to Abe Lincoln and the civil war, the document's aristocratic values took the backseat to the more populistic ones it also contains.
The reason American juries are dysfunctional, is that they mandate unanimity. They are also (as a consequence of this dynfunctionality, apparent to all) not very randomly selected at all. The Athenians, in many matters, did not allow their juries to deliberate: They had an intutitive appreciation that a jury's collective choice (by majority voting) will only be good if they form their opinions independently.
From what I understood, the German PP tries to advocate the original direct democracy over the current representative democracy by utilizing social networking as a forum for collecting votes on each issue within the party. The problem with system itself originally was scaling, it simply didn't scale well beyond small city-state sized community and only now do we have realistic technological means to try to make it actually work on larger scale.
It's a bit sad how this myth continues to spread, with no one looking at what ancient direct democracy was like at all.
(Not that the Pirates are any better, sadly).
Athenian democracy was based on sortition, the drawing of lots. Most decisions weren't done in the assembly - what we associate with direct democracy today. They were done by representative samples of eligible citizens.
It did scale. In fact, they moved towards increasing reliance on juries and decreased reliance on the assembly, precisely because they saw the scalability problems associated with "direct democracy" as we know it. They understood that what we today call direct democracy was not necessarily more democratic. They understood that voting was inherently supportive of oligarchy, as drawing of lots was for democracy. (The "direct democracy" forum of Athens was also shared by their hyperaristocratic neighbour Sparta).
The kind of internet "democracy" the Pirates use is of course extremely vulnerable to be couped by demagogic loudmouths, people who can afford to have an opinion on everything and be loud and persistent about it. Unless they (re)discover sortition, I expect the Pirates to ditch these experiments as the failures they are and become a conventional political party.
But this doesn't help unless other competing tools actually can use it. Since you typically can't upload an entire existing mail archive to the major hosted webmail providers, it doesn't matter if you can download it from whichever one you picked first, you're still effectively locked in and there is a significant barrier to competition.
The barrier is on the other end. You can't blame Google. It's not lock-in, it's lock-out. It's the closed garden business models of the past in all its dysfunctional glory.
How about exporting your entire Google Mail archive and importing it into Hotmail?
If that is difficult, it's a problem with Hotmail, not GMail. I backed up my entire archive recently - with GMail's POP/IMAP interface, it's a piece of cake.
And you know what? I've never had the need before, but I tried exporting a spreadsheet from Google Docs just now, just to see. I expected to get it in openoffice format at least.
Turns out I can get it in Excel too, in addition to a PDF export.
Google is the ONLY major company taking data liberation seriously.
... which was heavily based on work by the KDE project, remember - webkit started out as a fork of Konqueror.
And Android, while it was its own startup, was based on the Linux kernel (which is the work of a lot of people and groups, including Google). Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants here.
As to "innovation", I don't think dropbox's business model (desktop folders synced to the cloud!) is all that revolutionary. I would be surprised if they were the first to try it. It's a damn obvious concept once you have a cloud, which we merely hadn't until recently. The bigger question is why Google took so long in adding this functionality to Google Docs.
But when we're talking pure in-house innovation: Google Translate was and is an unappreciated sensation. Yes, academia had tried statistical translation before, but not with anything remotely resembling the success of GT.
Nokia is an old time innnovator and a big player in the industry. No way can they be called a patent troll.
Once-innovative companies that have passed their peak always seem to go down in a blaze of shrill patent lawsuit "glory". They deserve to be called patent trolls when they switch business models like that.
According to a poster above, they found the stego software as well, alerting them to the possibility of an embedded document. So, it was encrypted but the password was brute forced.
Eh, can't really verify this. CNN mentions only a password. Reading the original article in might give more details, but it's such a pain. English version, anyone?
The lesson, steganography is of little or no use if investigators become aware of the steganography method you use. Primary rule of steganography is you don't talk about steganography. Or, REVEAL NAME of the software.
The porn provides plausible deniability. If he gets caught, he's supposed to admit shamefully smuggling porn into countries where it's illegal.
It's still pretty stupid, as there are easier ways to transfer both plans and porn than stego-ed and unencrypted on a memory card in your underwear. What kind of idiots know about stego but don't apply even basic encryption to the stegoed message?
Slashdot Mirror
Can I ask, what projects are these?
I supported a project that's seriously over time, more than a year by now. But people are very reasonable about it, as long as we think we'll get there in the end.
Yes it would, because funders aren't stupid.
One community that has really gone amok on Kickstarter is the online board game community. It stands to reason, because we're very well organized online compared to many other hobbies, and board games are usually small, risky ventures. When Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games) proposes a reprint of OGRE, we know who he is and that he is capable of going through. Tasty Minstrel games isn't nearly as big a company as Steve Jackson's, but when they put out Kings of Air and Steam, we can easily look them up and see that they have completed several other kickstarter board games. And even for a relatively unknown designer, at a relatively unknown company, a game like Island Fortess has a chance, because it's vetted and endorsed by a community dedicated to doing just that.
When other communities get as net-savvy as the board game community, expect them to follow.
.
This. People must understand that when they support a kickstarter project, they're supporting a venture. Ventures sometimes fail.
Businesses sometimes go bankrupt too. This doesn't prevent the vast majority of purchases in the business world being done on credit.
But sure, as in any venture, you shouldn't support it if you don't think the project starters can go through with it.
It has already happened. Kickstarter isn't the first incarnation of the concept. Its ideological predecessor, fundable.org, went defunct due to credit card scammers using it to launder money / little success in wrapping people's heads around the concept (even though it was essentially the same as Kickstarter).
Oh, you mean like RocketHub, IndieGoGo, PeerBackers, Eppela, Start Some Good, CoFolio, New Jelly, Quirky, ProFounder, Microventures, Crowdfunder, Chipin, Ulule, Cofundos, Buzzbnk, Biracy, Digital Garage, Sonicangel, Spot.us ... ? They haven't exactly succeeded.
A few of those serve legitimate purposes, especially allowing payment with other tools than Amazon Payments, and allowing project starters to be from anywhere not just the US. But most of them haven't even comprehended half of Kickstarter's business model, they're just blindly trying to get onto the bandwagon.
Also, it should be mentioned that Kickstarter was not the first site of its kind either. The now defunct fundable.org was.
That is not the defining attribute of democracy. Remember, the ancient Athenians wouldn't even consider our institutions democratic at all - they considered mass voting inherently oligarchic.
A classic trick, count all newspapers as being equally important.
Where I live, there are plenty of newspapers that have a "red" history, pretty much every village had its own labor newspaper back in the day. Many of these exist today, but their circulation is insignificant, and they mostly reprint notices from the huge (right-wing owned) news agencies.
Depressing thing is, they must have prepared for this. You do not rampantly break the laws with robocalls to thousands of citizens and expect it to not get publicity.
The guy who did it did a lot to conceal his tracks, too: he knew perfectly well there would be an uproar.
They merely were confident they would ride the uproar out, that their loyalists would just circle the wagons, and in some weeks or months the public will have forgotten.
You do not take a joke, Google person.
Give me some more descriptions of what you imagine your political opponents to be like!
I disagree. It's a trivial one, and it doesn't address the basic improvement to "direct democracy" that has been with it from the start: lotteries. (Al least you do).
Excellence? By their fruits ye shall know them. The framers of the US constitution had many objectives, but all of them wanted to defend and foster a "natural" aristocracy of some kind. Most of them considered the disposessed merely a threat to the stability of the state, not persons with a legitimate stake in the system (which is why a certain level of wealth was a prerequisite of voting rights). For a long while, thanks in large part to Abe Lincoln and the civil war, the document's aristocratic values took the backseat to the more populistic ones it also contains.
The reason American juries are dysfunctional, is that they mandate unanimity. They are also (as a consequence of this dynfunctionality, apparent to all) not very randomly selected at all. The Athenians, in many matters, did not allow their juries to deliberate: They had an intutitive appreciation that a jury's collective choice (by majority voting) will only be good if they form their opinions independently.
That was invented 2500 years ago, it's a shame that you haven't heard about it: Sortition, or selection by lot.
It's a bit sad how this myth continues to spread, with no one looking at what ancient direct democracy was like at all.
(Not that the Pirates are any better, sadly).
Athenian democracy was based on sortition, the drawing of lots. Most decisions weren't done in the assembly - what we associate with direct democracy today. They were done by representative samples of eligible citizens.
It did scale. In fact, they moved towards increasing reliance on juries and decreased reliance on the assembly, precisely because they saw the scalability problems associated with "direct democracy" as we know it. They understood that what we today call direct democracy was not necessarily more democratic. They understood that voting was inherently supportive of oligarchy, as drawing of lots was for democracy. (The "direct democracy" forum of Athens was also shared by their hyperaristocratic neighbour Sparta).
The kind of internet "democracy" the Pirates use is of course extremely vulnerable to be couped by demagogic loudmouths, people who can afford to have an opinion on everything and be loud and persistent about it. Unless they (re)discover sortition, I expect the Pirates to ditch these experiments as the failures they are and become a conventional political party.
The barrier is on the other end. You can't blame Google. It's not lock-in, it's lock-out. It's the closed garden business models of the past in all its dysfunctional glory.
If that is difficult, it's a problem with Hotmail, not GMail. I backed up my entire archive recently - with GMail's POP/IMAP interface, it's a piece of cake.
And you know what? I've never had the need before, but I tried exporting a spreadsheet from Google Docs just now, just to see. I expected to get it in openoffice format at least.
Turns out I can get it in Excel too, in addition to a PDF export.
Google is the ONLY major company taking data liberation seriously.
Paypal! Amazon payments! E-gold! Flooz!
I'm sure there are plenty of people you can pay if you need support for a google product. Feel free to make me an offer.
Compared to operating systems, there is extremely little lock-in for these products - there are plenty of reasonable competitors, too.
Were it only so. Unfortunately, I'm confident the threat of minority shareholder lawsuits make Google a lot more "evil" than it would like to be.
Gmail has search and spam filtering capabilities that no native client can remotely match. (Outlook's search functionality is a joke).
Searching and spam filtering are the two main features I need out of a mail client. The labeling system in gmail is just gravy.
And Android, while it was its own startup, was based on the Linux kernel (which is the work of a lot of people and groups, including Google). Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants here.
As to "innovation", I don't think dropbox's business model (desktop folders synced to the cloud!) is all that revolutionary. I would be surprised if they were the first to try it. It's a damn obvious concept once you have a cloud, which we merely hadn't until recently. The bigger question is why Google took so long in adding this functionality to Google Docs.
But when we're talking pure in-house innovation: Google Translate was and is an unappreciated sensation. Yes, academia had tried statistical translation before, but not with anything remotely resembling the success of GT.
Kodak, don't forget Kodak.
I absolutely think Apple has passed its peak.
There's no question Motorola has passed its peak. They sold of most of their real business to Google.
Samsung has for the most part (the part I know about) countersued after being sued themselves.
Companies like Google, Facebook, and many of the better phone makers don't appear to have jumped on the opportunistic lawsuit bandwagon.
Once-innovative companies that have passed their peak always seem to go down in a blaze of shrill patent lawsuit "glory". They deserve to be called patent trolls when they switch business models like that.
According to a poster above, they found the stego software as well, alerting them to the possibility of an embedded document. So, it was encrypted but the password was brute forced.
Eh, can't really verify this. CNN mentions only a password. Reading the original article in might give more details, but it's such a pain. English version, anyone?
The lesson, steganography is of little or no use if investigators become aware of the steganography method you use. Primary rule of steganography is you don't talk about steganography. Or, REVEAL NAME of the software.
The porn provides plausible deniability. If he gets caught, he's supposed to admit shamefully smuggling porn into countries where it's illegal.
It's still pretty stupid, as there are easier ways to transfer both plans and porn than stego-ed and unencrypted on a memory card in your underwear. What kind of idiots know about stego but don't apply even basic encryption to the stegoed message?