It's not the information, it's the content. Content has to be generated continuously.
And that's hopefully where the Kickstarter model can help.
1. Crowd-source the funds needed to make a bunch of content. 2. Release the content to the Intertubez with an open licence that allows copying but preserves attribution. 3. Let the tubez do all the work of distribution and the social media do all the work of publicity. 4. Sit back and accumulate fame (but not money) for your work 5. Go back to 1 and leverage your newly increased fame to crowd-source more money for more content. Repeat until rich, dead, or you start charging too much for too low quality product and your audience hates you.
I don't see why this wouldn't work, and it would completely invert the piracy "problem" into a solution.
I'm an xkcd fan, but this chart is just really, really bad science and abysmal health physics. It pervasively confuses the crucial difference between one-time external exposure ("radiation"), and ongoing internal exposure from ingestion of bioaccumulating radioactive isotopes (such as iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137). They're completely different exposure mechanisms and you simply can't compare them directly - except to say that eating or breathing in a radioactive particle is orders of magnitude worse than standing next to that particle and absorbing the radiation through the skin. Inverse square law for the win (or lose, in the human's case).
Leukemia effects are better understood. It does not seem to follow a linear model, but if it did its effects are roughly a factor of 2 per Sievert. That is, if you are exposed to a one time dose of 1 Sv, your risk of developing Leukemia would triple.
Can you explain this maths for those of us who didn't learn in college that 2=3?
We "spend" too much on the military-- yet we "spend" MORE on Medicare than the Military, and "spend" almost as much on Welfare as we "spend" on the Military
Sure, but the military kills people, creates terrorists, and threatens the destruction of all life on earth. That's so much more important and worthwhile than just taking care of our elders and and allowing poor people to have dignity. So we should axe all social programs and put the money into a giant death laser on the Moon; that would ensure Freedom forever.
Extreme Libertarians refuse to engage in a sensible discussion on how to solve this in practice, instead contenting themselves with repeating mantra's such as "the market will sort it out" or "property rights".
Arguably, if the entire universe is a market, the "market" does sort everything out, in that everything that exists, exists because the universe allows it to exist.
This of course makes "the market will provide X" indistinguishable from a null statement. Of course the market will provide X; the market is everything that's possible. But at what price will it choose to provide X? "Zero quantity of X for infinity dollars after infinite years" is a perfectly valid solution of the supply/demand equation. And "the market will provide War, Terror, Starvation and Death for 1000 years for 99% of the population, and Bohemian Luxury for a tiny elite" is also a perfectly valid solution.
To subvert a common libertarian example - if someone points a gun at me and says "dig your own grave or die right now", they're not actually taking me out of the market mechanism to do that. They're simply providing a rational choice (dig or die), a service (not immediately shooting me), and a charge (my digging). It's a valid contract, and I have the choice to accept or reject. Obviously if I reject the contract I may die, but - Atlas shrugs - that's life, isn't it? The market as a whole sees no self-interest in my continuing to live unless I provide it with services, and if we get really technical and precise about decoupling every private action from empathy, just *because* someone pulls the trigger on the gun they privately own and control, doesn't mean I'm *necessarily* going to die - I do also have the choice to dodge out of the way, etc, etc. There really is no there there in libertarianism; we can keep playing the "I'm not responsible for your happiness, even though I can logically foresee that the result of my actions will hurt you" game forever.
The problem is that as humans we have actual concrete needs which we would like actual concrete solutions for inside a feasible timeframe, and not just an abstract "well, you'll get that if/when it's possible for whatever price you're willing to pay". And sometimes those solutions require more than just shrugging and assuming someone else will solve them, which is what free market theory boils down to in the end.
You're mid-labeling anarchy. Libertarianism supports rights monopoly through property.
Yep, and this quality of monopoly leads directly by logical progression to literal medieval-style feudalism (property-owners consolidate; property-owners rent the use of their property to others who may re-rent it; society devolves on an accelerating spiral into an overclass of owners with all the rights and an underclass of renters at the absolute mercy of the owners, without even the right to purchase the justice of their peers; an optional hierarchy of idle rich monarchs, dukes, barons, etc being possible in between; the decentralisation of violence allowing wars to becoming a common means of settling disputes). All from one little right called "property". Actually, from two things: from nominal ownership of "property" being abstracted and separated from its actual use and upkeep by the people who work it (the renters, serfs or workers); and from this abstract property right being allowed to trump all other actual human rights such as food, safety and justice.
It's fascinating and a little scary how quickly libertarianism deconstructs itself even in theory. The Path to Serfdom, indeed.
That's reality people -- you don't have the time, the resources, and if you took the academic attitude to work with you, you'd be cut up and used as shark food by everyone else for being so damn slow and pragmatic when they need things working tonight so they can go home after being there for 15 effing hours to make the latest milestone.
And that attitude towards correctness and security is exactly why we have a Net filled with tens of millions of infected botnet hosts.
These folks learn the classics, but then go out and are forced to make a living by making new editions of Twilight, Hunger Games, etc. As a bonus, they're not allowed (by edict and budget) to change more than 25% of the nouns (in aggregate, not as categories).
So, just like any writer working on an existing universe, like Marvel, DC, or Star Wars, then.
"Okay, so focus groups this summer show that teen vampires are the new hotness. Write us a six-novel series set on Endor immediately after the destruction of the Second Death Star involving Ewoks, summer school, vampires and flying unicorn ponies. Make Luke Skywalker and Han Solo the main male leads, but you can't give either of them any kind of dramatic arc. But he needs to be dark and brooding and intense. Oh, and since Disney just bought the rights, we'll need you to have Minnie Mouse and the Little Mermaid as competing romantic interests. And we've also got videogame rights, but no guns are allowed, so if you could work in at least two platform-jumping sequences, that would be great. We need to achieve a target audience buy-in of at least 80% with the first book, rising to 95% by the third, and your pay will be scaled accordingly. You've got six weeks; that should be enough to complete the series, right?"
Welcome to the Real World of legacy code and conflicting requirements.
No rational user can expect to use a service allowing for *unlimited* unilateral policy changes that may occur at random points in the future.
And once again, Welcome to the Cloud (tm). This is what you get when you follow a glib marketing trend which has no fundamental basis in reality.
If you don't have technological means of control over the use of your data, don't expect legal means of control to be worth the electrons they're transmitted with.
The concept of cloud computing isn't, in itself, fatally flawed. But the current stampede into putting everything online in proprietary, obfuscated, gated services without defining sensible encryption and backup protocols is.
Right. Like those long-range missile programs. What did any of that ever lead to?
Yeah! We were promised a world-ending atomic holocaust back in the 1950s! When DO we get our world-ending atomic holocaust, you lazy government missile researchers?
Good ol' Reagan tried his best to unleash the forces of capitalism in the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, but the Democrats in Congress and that pinko-lefty Gorbachev blocked him. The Soviet Union fell apart and there wasn't even a single kiloton-level detonation. Talk about government incompetence! That's what Communism did for the Russians. Couldn't even blow up Kazakhstan. And under Clinton's watch? He threw out perfectly good working missiles. Inefficient, wasteful, utterly unproductive.
I'll tell you this, if we had a fully privatised nuclear arms race right from the beginning, we'd have had a gosh-darned made in the USA atomic holocaust by 1959 and it would have been awesome.
Why does it always come down to the "it's free, deal with it" attitude? As if paid services never get shut down...
Right. It's not "it's free, deal with it". Try "it's the Cloud, deal with it".
The Cloud will always die. The Cloud will always eat your data. The Cloud will always steal your privacy. The Cloud will always skimp on safety, reliability and security, expose you to risk, and charge the highest prices it can get away with - because that's how it's designed to work. It's not working for you. It's working to make money for the investors. Their aim is not your happiness, it's your data and money.
Don't trust your data to stay secure and reliable in a cloud service any more than you'd trust water to not run downhill after you pour it out of a bottle. It's simply not in its nature to be the things you want it to be. Treat every Cloud - free or paid - as a temporary, public, publishing service for stuff you don't care about at all, and you'll be fine.
If you really care about secrecy and reliability, keep your data inhouse where YOU have the incentive to do those things.
It's always, nakedly, been about wealth redistribution.
Oh, the humanity! Those nasty, wicked, impoverished nations teeming with starving people who have all the money and social rank and political power and weapons will force - at gunpoint, even! or maybe just with their hectoring, angry words! or their faces! - a tiny beseiged elite of virtuous billionaires to solve a problem facing everyone and which just drowned New York. But the problem can't be solved, because drowning countries is right and just and honourable and we all know it. And yet they pass bad laws like this. It's horrible, that's what it is. But oh well. It's not like educated billionaires who own mega-corporations have any power in the world, is it? Always they're the ones who get downtrodden and stepped on by the naked jackboot of the filthy masses. All those poor people, swarming everywhere! Eating and breeding and voting! Every day, vote vote vote! Like it's a democracy or something! Filling the world's governments with twisted, perverse policies that benefit the middle-class! Don't the billionaires get any say at all? Those long-suffering saints! One day things must change! One day, just once, a billionaire will stand up and say "No!" to a poor person! One day Atlas must shrug!
Yeah, I don't think that's how the balance of social power actually works anywhere outside Ayn Rand or Paul Ryan's mind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the information, it's the content. Content has to be generated continuously.
And that's hopefully where the Kickstarter model can help.
1. Crowd-source the funds needed to make a bunch of content.
2. Release the content to the Intertubez with an open licence that allows copying but preserves attribution.
3. Let the tubez do all the work of distribution and the social media do all the work of publicity.
4. Sit back and accumulate fame (but not money) for your work
5. Go back to 1 and leverage your newly increased fame to crowd-source more money for more content. Repeat until rich, dead, or you start charging too much for too low quality product and your audience hates you.
I don't see why this wouldn't work, and it would completely invert the piracy "problem" into a solution.
Really, that's the name?
It's as legit as everything in .co.nz, and we're generally a law-abiding bunch here of hobbits here in New Zealand.
Australia is the country you're probably thinking of that's entirely populated by criminals.
Cows produces methane on earth.
But cows can't survive on Titan's climate.
There must be a lot of "something" on Titan that are producing the massive amount of methane.
Spherical cows, obviously.
I'm an xkcd fan, but this chart is just really, really bad science and abysmal health physics. It pervasively confuses the crucial difference between one-time external exposure ("radiation"), and ongoing internal exposure from ingestion of bioaccumulating radioactive isotopes (such as iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137). They're completely different exposure mechanisms and you simply can't compare them directly - except to say that eating or breathing in a radioactive particle is orders of magnitude worse than standing next to that particle and absorbing the radiation through the skin. Inverse square law for the win (or lose, in the human's case).
http://www.orcbs.msu.edu/radiation/programs_guidelines/radmanual/16rm_exposure.htm
Leukemia effects are better understood. It does not seem to follow a linear model, but if it did its effects are roughly a factor of 2 per Sievert. That is, if you are exposed to a one time dose of 1 Sv, your risk of developing Leukemia would triple.
Can you explain this maths for those of us who didn't learn in college that 2=3?
We "spend" too much on the military-- yet we "spend" MORE on Medicare than the Military, and "spend" almost as much on Welfare as we "spend" on the Military
Sure, but the military kills people, creates terrorists, and threatens the destruction of all life on earth. That's so much more important and worthwhile than just taking care of our elders and and allowing poor people to have dignity. So we should axe all social programs and put the money into a giant death laser on the Moon; that would ensure Freedom forever.
Extreme Libertarians refuse to engage in a sensible discussion on how to solve this in practice, instead contenting themselves with repeating mantra's such as "the market will sort it out" or "property rights".
Arguably, if the entire universe is a market, the "market" does sort everything out, in that everything that exists, exists because the universe allows it to exist.
This of course makes "the market will provide X" indistinguishable from a null statement. Of course the market will provide X; the market is everything that's possible. But at what price will it choose to provide X? "Zero quantity of X for infinity dollars after infinite years" is a perfectly valid solution of the supply/demand equation. And "the market will provide War, Terror, Starvation and Death for 1000 years for 99% of the population, and Bohemian Luxury for a tiny elite" is also a perfectly valid solution.
To subvert a common libertarian example - if someone points a gun at me and says "dig your own grave or die right now", they're not actually taking me out of the market mechanism to do that. They're simply providing a rational choice (dig or die), a service (not immediately shooting me), and a charge (my digging). It's a valid contract, and I have the choice to accept or reject. Obviously if I reject the contract I may die, but - Atlas shrugs - that's life, isn't it? The market as a whole sees no self-interest in my continuing to live unless I provide it with services, and if we get really technical and precise about decoupling every private action from empathy, just *because* someone pulls the trigger on the gun they privately own and control, doesn't mean I'm *necessarily* going to die - I do also have the choice to dodge out of the way, etc, etc. There really is no there there in libertarianism; we can keep playing the "I'm not responsible for your happiness, even though I can logically foresee that the result of my actions will hurt you" game forever.
The problem is that as humans we have actual concrete needs which we would like actual concrete solutions for inside a feasible timeframe, and not just an abstract "well, you'll get that if/when it's possible for whatever price you're willing to pay". And sometimes those solutions require more than just shrugging and assuming someone else will solve them, which is what free market theory boils down to in the end.
You're mid-labeling anarchy. Libertarianism supports rights monopoly through property.
Yep, and this quality of monopoly leads directly by logical progression to literal medieval-style feudalism (property-owners consolidate; property-owners rent the use of their property to others who may re-rent it; society devolves on an accelerating spiral into an overclass of owners with all the rights and an underclass of renters at the absolute mercy of the owners, without even the right to purchase the justice of their peers; an optional hierarchy of idle rich monarchs, dukes, barons, etc being possible in between; the decentralisation of violence allowing wars to becoming a common means of settling disputes). All from one little right called "property". Actually, from two things: from nominal ownership of "property" being abstracted and separated from its actual use and upkeep by the people who work it (the renters, serfs or workers); and from this abstract property right being allowed to trump all other actual human rights such as food, safety and justice.
It's fascinating and a little scary how quickly libertarianism deconstructs itself even in theory. The Path to Serfdom, indeed.
The past is prolog; now we each go forth to write our own sequel.
That's reality people -- you don't have the time, the resources, and if you took the academic attitude to work with you, you'd be cut up and used as shark food by everyone else for being so damn slow and pragmatic when they need things working tonight so they can go home after being there for 15 effing hours to make the latest milestone.
And that attitude towards correctness and security is exactly why we have a Net filled with tens of millions of infected botnet hosts.
it's an intentionally unsubtle jab at the obbession with reality TV and violence in our culture.
A "jab" at violence-porn which creates more media product of exactly the same kind that it claims to mock, and profits exceedingly by it.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that's not only "unsubtle", it's exploitation, not satire.
It's even worse than that.
These folks learn the classics, but then go out and are forced to make a living by making new editions of Twilight, Hunger Games, etc. As a bonus, they're not allowed (by edict and budget) to change more than 25% of the nouns (in aggregate, not as categories).
So, just like any writer working on an existing universe, like Marvel, DC, or Star Wars, then.
"Okay, so focus groups this summer show that teen vampires are the new hotness. Write us a six-novel series set on Endor immediately after the destruction of the Second Death Star involving Ewoks, summer school, vampires and flying unicorn ponies. Make Luke Skywalker and Han Solo the main male leads, but you can't give either of them any kind of dramatic arc. But he needs to be dark and brooding and intense. Oh, and since Disney just bought the rights, we'll need you to have Minnie Mouse and the Little Mermaid as competing romantic interests. And we've also got videogame rights, but no guns are allowed, so if you could work in at least two platform-jumping sequences, that would be great. We need to achieve a target audience buy-in of at least 80% with the first book, rising to 95% by the third, and your pay will be scaled accordingly. You've got six weeks; that should be enough to complete the series, right?"
Welcome to the Real World of legacy code and conflicting requirements.
No rational user can expect to use a service allowing for *unlimited* unilateral policy changes that may occur at random points in the future.
And once again, Welcome to the Cloud (tm). This is what you get when you follow a glib marketing trend which has no fundamental basis in reality.
If you don't have technological means of control over the use of your data, don't expect legal means of control to be worth the electrons they're transmitted with.
The concept of cloud computing isn't, in itself, fatally flawed. But the current stampede into putting everything online in proprietary, obfuscated, gated services without defining sensible encryption and backup protocols is.
Because the original terms of service were perfectly reasonable.
And the whole point of terms of service is that they can change.
Welcome to The Cloud (tm). Where your data is our data forever, and our advertisers/governments/sponsors are your new best scary friends.
a camel is horse designed by committee.
A committee of hard-core desert survivalists who wanted an animal made of pure awesome.
a good example of why perl is awesome
The interfacing Linux and MSSQL, the running for five years, or the looking like Greek?
3. The 'Pockyclipse is really on the way
It is? I'm not surprised. I knew that stuff was scary when I first tasted it.
I love the title, "by a Canadian."
Is it worth mentioning here that a Canadian pretty much single-handedly created the entire WW2 US-British intelligence establishment?
Nope, probably not.
Right. Like those long-range missile programs. What did any of that ever lead to?
Yeah! We were promised a world-ending atomic holocaust back in the 1950s! When DO we get our world-ending atomic holocaust, you lazy government missile researchers?
Good ol' Reagan tried his best to unleash the forces of capitalism in the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, but the Democrats in Congress and that pinko-lefty Gorbachev blocked him. The Soviet Union fell apart and there wasn't even a single kiloton-level detonation. Talk about government incompetence! That's what Communism did for the Russians. Couldn't even blow up Kazakhstan. And under Clinton's watch? He threw out perfectly good working missiles. Inefficient, wasteful, utterly unproductive.
I'll tell you this, if we had a fully privatised nuclear arms race right from the beginning, we'd have had a gosh-darned made in the USA atomic holocaust by 1959 and it would have been awesome.
You can trust me. I'm "Anonymous Coward", and you've seen millions of articles from me which show my wide variety of expertise.
Noel? Is that you? I thought you were better known for your plays.
Why does it always come down to the "it's free, deal with it" attitude? As if paid services never get shut down...
Right. It's not "it's free, deal with it". Try "it's the Cloud, deal with it".
The Cloud will always die. The Cloud will always eat your data. The Cloud will always steal your privacy. The Cloud will always skimp on safety, reliability and security, expose you to risk, and charge the highest prices it can get away with - because that's how it's designed to work. It's not working for you. It's working to make money for the investors. Their aim is not your happiness, it's your data and money.
Don't trust your data to stay secure and reliable in a cloud service any more than you'd trust water to not run downhill after you pour it out of a bottle. It's simply not in its nature to be the things you want it to be. Treat every Cloud - free or paid - as a temporary, public, publishing service for stuff you don't care about at all, and you'll be fine.
If you really care about secrecy and reliability, keep your data inhouse where YOU have the incentive to do those things.
Think long term people. And watch more history shows on Greece, Rome, Persia, Turkey, Mesopotamia, .....
... so in the future the United States is going to have great cooking and lots of tourism?
whether or not we like getting blown up by terrorists, it's fair to say most people like to not be blown up.
So I can like getting blown up, but also like to not be blown up?
Well it's nice that I get the choice of both options. Might be a tad tricky to deliver however.
Our opponents are threatening to poison our supplies of drinking water; why should we not respond in kind?
By putting bottled water into their petrol tanks?
It's always, nakedly, been about wealth redistribution.
Oh, the humanity! Those nasty, wicked, impoverished nations teeming with starving people who have all the money and social rank and political power and weapons will force - at gunpoint, even! or maybe just with their hectoring, angry words! or their faces! - a tiny beseiged elite of virtuous billionaires to solve a problem facing everyone and which just drowned New York. But the problem can't be solved, because drowning countries is right and just and honourable and we all know it. And yet they pass bad laws like this. It's horrible, that's what it is. But oh well. It's not like educated billionaires who own mega-corporations have any power in the world, is it? Always they're the ones who get downtrodden and stepped on by the naked jackboot of the filthy masses. All those poor people, swarming everywhere! Eating and breeding and voting! Every day, vote vote vote! Like it's a democracy or something! Filling the world's governments with twisted, perverse policies that benefit the middle-class! Don't the billionaires get any say at all? Those long-suffering saints! One day things must change! One day, just once, a billionaire will stand up and say "No!" to a poor person! One day Atlas must shrug!
Yeah, I don't think that's how the balance of social power actually works anywhere outside Ayn Rand or Paul Ryan's mind.