It's a waste of time to worry about problems that have no solutions, and there is no amount of money that can solve the problem of greedy love of money. I'm not even sure it makes sense to describe such a thing as a real problem. More like a state of nature, in this case the nature of a disturbed personality. (No, I insist that a corporation is NOT a person and it has nothing, especially not a personality.)
I think economics should be replaced with time-based ekronomics. From that perspective, tracking your location becomes a question of whether it increases the happy and memorable use of your time. Abuse of privacy cannot be justified by an appeal to the greater profit of some corporate entity.
You can't delete system apps on Android. You can turn them off on later versions of the OS, but that may cripple the operation of other apps that depend on them. Not sure about Google Maps, but Google Play is definitely deep in the system and there are also security-related reasons you need it.
Not sure about the GPS details, but the phone can get an approximate location by other methods.
These are the kinds of technical topics that were once addressed by slashdot discussions, assuming my memory is not playing tricks on me. I'll search some more among the comments that have been moderated "insightful" or "informative", but I'm not expecting much these days. (Expecting even less when I search for "funny". Where have all the comedians gone? Long time past.)
Of course, it may be a more fundamental problem that this discussion is already on the edge of death from old age. There is a fix, but slashdot is unlikely to implement that kind of dynamic search capability. I would even be willing to chip in towards implementing such capabilities, but even less likely that slashdot can shift to or supplementally add that sort of economic model.
I can't see the AC troll you're replying to, but I was able to see your comment only because it got enough positive mod points to raise it to visibility.
Actually, I understand not putting your name on it. Get your own NSA file right here from slashdot. Now do you actually think they can't get your identity if they care that much?
Sad, but that's the reality of where America is now. Actually, I can go you a couple of notches higher on the paranoia scale. I think Snowden was probably played for a fool, and he didn't disclose anything that the NSA and CIA didn't agree on. If they couldn't figure out his personality and start watching him before he started collecting the documents, then they are seriously incompetent.
They might have included a few real tidbits in there to give his "leak" plausibility, but I think the real dirt is still under the rug, and the real goal was to crank up the paranoia so people like you are afraid to criticize the government in public.
Now if I ever saw a mod point to give, I'd look for a joke to mod up. Not a one so far.
Basically daunted by the topic, but I read a lot of books. Started with classic SF such as Heinlein and Asimov, but trying to pick the best is an overwhelming challenge. I do see mention of those two above, but Iain M Banks seems to be missing. His Culture books are ultimately optimistic about the future in the same way that Star Trek is. Too well written to dismiss as space opera, though grandiose enough.
I don't think it's just a matter of being here too early. I'll try to remember to come back later, but right now there are no "funny" and no "insightful" posts. Obviously an easy target for both cases. Well, maybe not so much for the insight side, though it saddens me that such greedy incompetence may well destroy Samsung as in now.
I really have trouble understanding how someone can screw up the technology of basic physics. There must be a missing or defective temperature sensor involved here, but this is a case where there obviously should have been several sensors.
However the bigger problem, the veritable elephant in the room, is the increasing dominance of evil companies. When was the last time you got to choose the best company (or politician) instead of the least bad option? The rules of the game are written for bribes, and the biggest bribers are NOT the nicest guys in the room.
Rather the people bribing the politicians to write their favorite rules have massive and incurable problems. There is NO amount of money that would satisfy them. Their companies and their corporate profits could NEVER be YUUGE enough to cure their incurable problem of insatiable greed.
Such greed is EVIL. Welcome to modern capitalism, where the ONLY "virtue" is shareholder value measured in dollars.
Whenever I hear about IBM these days, the main thought in my head is "age discrimination". More so when the story is about pumping cash into propping up ancient products with minor improvements. It would be nice if they treated old humans with as much respect as old products, eh?
Details available upon polite request, but it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would be interested in details about IBM these years. Something about cognitive solutions in the cloud? Or has the buzz-phrase changed again?
The main problem with Kickstarter is the lack of success criteria. I think that crowd-funding is actually a good idea, but their implementation seems fatally flawed because their business model is a flat percentage off the top, without any accountability. They just want to pump as much money as possible towards projects, and as far as I know, they do nothing to help with the planning or evaluation.
Are you familiar with the sad story of Diaspora as funded via Kickstarter?
By the way, RACS predates my hearing about Kickstarter, and I think it was already a better design because of using a fixed budget.
Would you be interested in donating to slashdot on a per-project basis? For examples, an ongoing-cost project could pay for some part of slashdot to keep running, while a feature-development project might pay for improving an old feature or creating a new one. If enough members chipped in, then the project would go forward?
Part of a much more complete idea, but here's just one obvious extension: If a feature incurs ongoing costs but its ongoing-cost project runs out of money, then that feature would be temporarily disabled until enough people funded it. Obvious incentive of letting wannabe donors use the feature while the rest of the funding is still pending...
By the way, the same approach could be adopted to journalism, though I think the projects would be more naturally oriented along the dimension of internal and external. Internal projects would be funding the authors, video producers, and researchers, while external projects would be targeted at solving the actual problems described in the articles or videos.
How about a privacy protection agent (PPA) who sits in the middle? The broker would auction off metered bits of your time based on how much time you want to spend on shopping. Honest companies that offer valuable goods and services would be glad to make their pitches to qualified customers, while the PPA would be strongly motivated to protect your privacy to stay in the loop.
PPAs would compete for your business based on various parameters (such as the percentage of the auction proceeds you get to keep) and services (such as high quality spam filtering), while the PPAs would compete for the companies' business based on how well they can qualify the potential customers. You would always be free to pack up your personal information and take it to a different PPA, and it should be illegal for anyone to keep, copy, or use your personal information without your consent. (Okay, the last part went into pie-in-the-sky territory, though I think it is already implicit in the Bill of Rights in America and in various other personal-rights documents around the world.)
Absolutely not, but actually the GNU programmers should not be working for free, either. However, I do think there should probably be a discount from market wages in exchange for the freedom and control over the work you are doing, whether it is writing articles or code.
My focus is on how small donors can get some of the respect and accountability that large donors have. It seems I'm failing to get that point across. Will it help to say that I think that donor anonymity (or redirection as in "on behalf of" donations) is a secondary aspect and that the technical approach of rms is barely relevant?
I think you are exaggerating. You really know "many people" who want their charitable donations to be anonymous? I know a lot of people, but I can't think of any of them who make a big issue of anonymity when they donate to charity.
The primary situation where "many people" want their donations to be anonymous are political, and their motivations are usually quite nefarious. Some mix of astroturfing and tax evasion. For such reasons I think it is usually better if the charity know and keep track of where the money came from, though the donors' should certainly have the option to request that their names not be listed in such places as donor lists on public webpages. That should provide sufficient anonymity for most people.
In contrast, rms is focused on technical issues of anonymous donations as though the fear of being revealed as the donor would prevent people from donating to a good cause. Doesn't that strike you as a a bit odd? You might not want to make an issue of your donations, you might prefer to remain in the background, but should you be afraid of being exposed as a donor? (Actually, there are certain occasions when you should be afraid, but I don't see how to map any of them to directly to this proposal by rms on his terms. Those situations would be incidental beneficiaries.)
Your reply is not very clear, and the issue of his lack of understanding of money isn't that important to me, but I'll try to clarify things a bit. Then I hope you can understand why this once again illustrates that secondary problem.
There is a real problem with the mass media depending on advertising. It creates a desperation for eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. The abuse of privacy part is actually secondary, but they are trying to increase the value of the eyeballs. The primary problem with that economic model for the media is results like Trump and terrorism. Trump has essentially played the eyeballs-for-advertising game to win free publicity worth billions of dollars. The terrorists also want the free publicity, though mostly in search of recruits, but their quest for publicity strongly motivates creating corpses, especially in new and more newsworthy places.
Now rms seems to think that anonymous donations can somehow replace advertising revenue or force media outlets to stop abusing our privacy. This is one of those cases where he's gone pretty far into his weird little universe... If someone wants to donate money to support a media outlet (often a news website), then the issue of anonymity is quite secondary, though some nice people do prefer to donate anonymously (while other less nice people want to make anonymous donations for reasons that can be downright nefarious). (Yes, I'm biased in favor of openness.)
The economic models that rms is most familiar with are different. As a tenured professor, his personal living expenses are covered. Not really a criticism, but I guess it should be mentioned because poor people often prioritize funding their next meals.
Most of his projects have been funded by large donors (though I'm including research grants as a form of donation). There are two problems there. One is that large donors can change their minds, especially when their pockets get shrunk a bit. The other problem is bad decisions from on high. (BtW, the economic models I discussed with him were oriented around small donors, people like me (and probably you).)
I actually admire rms and regard him as a great man, but probably for smaller values of "great". In particular, he has little conception of money and his financial models have never demonstrated anything approaching viability or critical mass.
In years past I actually ran a few alternative financial models past him. He did ask an extremely perceptive question in one exchange. The question led me to a significant improvement in a financial model, but mostly he convinced me that he never has understood money, and probably never will. He wouldn't even be interested in whether or not he helped out, but he lives in a kind of money-free fantasy land, and I think his latest suggestion is just more evidence. Yes, he sees part of the problem, but his idea of anonymity as the solution is completely half-baked. If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?
What the online media needs is a focus on SOLUTIONS. How many of us are sick and tired of reading about problems without solutions, and the media should earn a kind of tithe for helping to SOLVE the problems. The articles should be followed by links to some solution projects, and if enough readers (or viewers of a video) agree to support a project, then it would get funded, and the website would get a percentage for (1) publicizing the problem, (2) bringing donors to the solution project, and (3) evaluating the results and reporting them.
The details don't really matter to me, so in that sense I might be as bad as rms. You can call it an agent's fee if you prefer, though before that discussion with rms I mostly called it RACS (for Reverse Auction Charity Shares) and at some point afterwards I favored the idea of a charity share brokerage. DAUPR.
Can someone explain to me what the joke was? Or maybe the funny mod doesn't mean anything? Or perhaps I also lost my sense of humor when my vote was removed?
Oh, wait. Oracle apparently and unfortunately seems to have a highly viable financial model. The current problem is merely that OpenOffice is NOT a part of those profits.
So how about considering SOLUTIONS. At least LibreOffice got mentioned in a couple of posts, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed: Is the financial model viable? I don't know enough about LibreOffice to say, but if the economic model is as fundamentally broken, then it doesn't really matter, does it?
What about a BETTER financial model? Beating the same dead horse, but how about creating a simple mechanism for the lusers... Er, I mean the honorable users, to fund OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) with special focus on the features they actually WANT?
I just love flogging that dead horse, don't I? Even worse that the same dead horse could be used to make slashdot viable (pending its next change of ownership and debt assumption).
Yeah, of course I'm talking about the idea of the charity share brokerage where the users would buy shares in ongoing-cost projects for features they want to keep using and feature development projects for new features. At this point I can only believe that it's the breakeven idea that is anathema. Unless there are profits, no one is interested, eh?
I'd start another poll on the topic, but it seems pointless. If anyone is interested (and I'm not holding my breath), feel free to make the polite request for additional details. Meanwhile, I'll continue switching over to LibreOffice pending its demise. OpenOffice, it was nice knowing ya, and I'll try to attend the funeral if it's sufficiently convenient.
Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to express the usual disappointment with the state of today's slashdot and the lack of high-quality comments. If the charity share brokerage system were in effect, features that would improve the quality of the discussions would be my favored donations. Not sure if that means addressing the trollage or fixing the moderation, but right now there is no decision to be made because there is no such system.
Greatly disappointed by the lack of humorous or insightful comments, but maybe they exist without visibility or sufficient positive moderation. Not surprised, but that's how slashdot has evolved. I don't see the joke in the topic, so I'll go for insight, such as it was. Kudos to you if you can see a joke in this topic.
This article is a good example of how Watson can be leveraged to cut out the humans. Where the studios used to need a significant number of people to do the work, now a single editor with this leverage will probably be able to keep up with all the movies they want to make, and use the leftover time to make more trailers to pick from for each movie, to boot.
I think it's part of the big secret plan of today's so-called IBM. "Respect for the individual" was the OLD idea. The new goal is "Replace the individuals". A few transient employees brought onboard as briefly required. The only question will be "Who can do the work most cheaply?" Actually, there might be one question before that: "Can Watson to do this work without needing any human being?"
That brief comment is the only visible one rated "insightful" that barely touches on the obvious insights here.
Obviously the FBI is complaining about a technology that it would like to ban or regulate. Sorry, you fibbing FBIers, you KNOW that it doesn't work that way. You can't make everyone forget and even if you could, the technology would simply be rediscovered. The law of gravity is more than a good idea, and ditto on the mathematics of information theory.
If the FBI wasn't constantly abusing innocent people, then those innocent people would not feel motivated to encrypt their personal information. Of course, it is not the FBI or even the government that is committing most of the abuse. Most of the abuses are coming from private companies that merely bribe the politicians to subvert the Constitution for their greater profits. Most of those abuses are actually with carrots rather than sticks, but they are still wrong.
BAD economics. Naughty, naughty. The financial models should not incentivize bad behavior, but the bad result is quite predictable. Solutions exist. DAUPR.
Your reply wasn't clear enough, but you may have been thinking that I was comparing GE to a startup. The startup that I was working for was a quasi-independent entity within GE, but it was using surplus cycles on a large network of Fujitsu mainframes. This was somewhat pre-Internet, and the actual model was CompuServe, which is already enough to discredit the entrepreneurial claim. Rather GE was just trying to claim a piece of the pie, and at that time no one (especially not at GE) understood how the pie was going to explode into the Internet.
If your comment is primarily about the original article, then I think we are in agreement. They (GE's managers) want the atmosphere of a startup, but without the risk, which is an unsolvable paradox (IMNSHO). The best approximation is to partition the company into small cells and accept that some of them will die. However, once that becomes institutionalized, the companies still seem to lose their entrepreneurial spirit. The chaos element is apparently necessary, but big companies (like GE) are allergic to chaos.
Whenever I see a comment like that from a low ID I speculate that the actual person passed away or otherwise abandoned slashdot and the account has been hacked for residual credibility.
In solution form, there should be a text analysis tool to assess when the tone of posts has changed enough to indicate a hacked account. Part of a broader security system?
Many years ago I worked for a startup subsidiary of GE and I was not impressed with the management style. I don't think it's just sour grapes due to my being pushed out the door, because the entire subsidiary died a couple of years later. Some kind of Internet thing. Of course it was doomed, eh?
Then again, after reading Jack Welch's book, I think there are grounds for concern. If GE is still as he made it in his image, then it's a dangerous and sociopathic entity. If it were an actual human being, then it is probable that we would all be dead now. Shades of the vicious ASI (artificial super-intelligence) in Our Final Invention (My quasi-review at https://ello.co/shanen0/post/g... as of last week?) No respect for your humanity after GE gets enough IoT devices into the market, and they still design lots of devices for the Chinese to build. Of course the Chinese involvement creates another layer of concern.
We need an economic system that rethinks things in terms of freedom. Cf my sig, eh?
Sounds like your company may have made the transition that I think my former employer is secretly working on, and if so, I understand why you didn't mention the name... I'll call it the Price Waterhouse model because of a friend who joined that company just after getting his MBA.
PW overhires fresh meat with the deliberate intention of eliminating almost all of them within the first two years. The cream of the cream are the only ones they want to keep, or at least that was how he described it those many years ago. As it would be adapted to the modern day, the new hires would essentially be one- or two-year interns whose contracts would mostly expire, with a few thousand retained each year for actual long-term careers.
The symptom at my former employer was a focus on optimizing the onboarding and offboarding processes so that most of the actual work can be done on a staffing-as-needed basis. Managerial guidance from the careerists, but that's another focus of cost containment.
Slashdot Mirror
Predicted disappointment confirmed. Even worse than the waste of my time, one of the discovered posts actually contained a technical error.
It's a waste of time to worry about problems that have no solutions, and there is no amount of money that can solve the problem of greedy love of money. I'm not even sure it makes sense to describe such a thing as a real problem. More like a state of nature, in this case the nature of a disturbed personality. (No, I insist that a corporation is NOT a person and it has nothing, especially not a personality.)
I think economics should be replaced with time-based ekronomics. From that perspective, tracking your location becomes a question of whether it increases the happy and memorable use of your time. Abuse of privacy cannot be justified by an appeal to the greater profit of some corporate entity.
You can't delete system apps on Android. You can turn them off on later versions of the OS, but that may cripple the operation of other apps that depend on them. Not sure about Google Maps, but Google Play is definitely deep in the system and there are also security-related reasons you need it.
Not sure about the GPS details, but the phone can get an approximate location by other methods.
These are the kinds of technical topics that were once addressed by slashdot discussions, assuming my memory is not playing tricks on me. I'll search some more among the comments that have been moderated "insightful" or "informative", but I'm not expecting much these days. (Expecting even less when I search for "funny". Where have all the comedians gone? Long time past.)
Of course, it may be a more fundamental problem that this discussion is already on the edge of death from old age. There is a fix, but slashdot is unlikely to implement that kind of dynamic search capability. I would even be willing to chip in towards implementing such capabilities, but even less likely that slashdot can shift to or supplementally add that sort of economic model.
I can't see the AC troll you're replying to, but I was able to see your comment only because it got enough positive mod points to raise it to visibility.
Actually, I understand not putting your name on it. Get your own NSA file right here from slashdot. Now do you actually think they can't get your identity if they care that much?
Sad, but that's the reality of where America is now. Actually, I can go you a couple of notches higher on the paranoia scale. I think Snowden was probably played for a fool, and he didn't disclose anything that the NSA and CIA didn't agree on. If they couldn't figure out his personality and start watching him before he started collecting the documents, then they are seriously incompetent.
They might have included a few real tidbits in there to give his "leak" plausibility, but I think the real dirt is still under the rug, and the real goal was to crank up the paranoia so people like you are afraid to criticize the government in public.
Now if I ever saw a mod point to give, I'd look for a joke to mod up. Not a one so far.
Basically daunted by the topic, but I read a lot of books. Started with classic SF such as Heinlein and Asimov, but trying to pick the best is an overwhelming challenge. I do see mention of those two above, but Iain M Banks seems to be missing. His Culture books are ultimately optimistic about the future in the same way that Star Trek is. Too well written to dismiss as space opera, though grandiose enough.
I'd give you a funny mod if I ever got a point. However, my favorite joke of that type is still:
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
BANG
NO TERRIER
I don't think it's just a matter of being here too early. I'll try to remember to come back later, but right now there are no "funny" and no "insightful" posts. Obviously an easy target for both cases. Well, maybe not so much for the insight side, though it saddens me that such greedy incompetence may well destroy Samsung as in now.
I really have trouble understanding how someone can screw up the technology of basic physics. There must be a missing or defective temperature sensor involved here, but this is a case where there obviously should have been several sensors.
Yes, what's wrong with Sparc?
Oracle.
However the bigger problem, the veritable elephant in the room, is the increasing dominance of evil companies. When was the last time you got to choose the best company (or politician) instead of the least bad option? The rules of the game are written for bribes, and the biggest bribers are NOT the nicest guys in the room.
Rather the people bribing the politicians to write their favorite rules have massive and incurable problems. There is NO amount of money that would satisfy them. Their companies and their corporate profits could NEVER be YUUGE enough to cure their incurable problem of insatiable greed.
Such greed is EVIL. Welcome to modern capitalism, where the ONLY "virtue" is shareholder value measured in dollars.
Whenever I hear about IBM these days, the main thought in my head is "age discrimination". More so when the story is about pumping cash into propping up ancient products with minor improvements. It would be nice if they treated old humans with as much respect as old products, eh?
Details available upon polite request, but it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would be interested in details about IBM these years. Something about cognitive solutions in the cloud? Or has the buzz-phrase changed again?
The main problem with Kickstarter is the lack of success criteria. I think that crowd-funding is actually a good idea, but their implementation seems fatally flawed because their business model is a flat percentage off the top, without any accountability. They just want to pump as much money as possible towards projects, and as far as I know, they do nothing to help with the planning or evaluation.
Are you familiar with the sad story of Diaspora as funded via Kickstarter?
By the way, RACS predates my hearing about Kickstarter, and I think it was already a better design because of using a fixed budget.
Would you be interested in donating to slashdot on a per-project basis? For examples, an ongoing-cost project could pay for some part of slashdot to keep running, while a feature-development project might pay for improving an old feature or creating a new one. If enough members chipped in, then the project would go forward?
Part of a much more complete idea, but here's just one obvious extension: If a feature incurs ongoing costs but its ongoing-cost project runs out of money, then that feature would be temporarily disabled until enough people funded it. Obvious incentive of letting wannabe donors use the feature while the rest of the funding is still pending...
By the way, the same approach could be adopted to journalism, though I think the projects would be more naturally oriented along the dimension of internal and external. Internal projects would be funding the authors, video producers, and researchers, while external projects would be targeted at solving the actual problems described in the articles or videos.
How about a privacy protection agent (PPA) who sits in the middle? The broker would auction off metered bits of your time based on how much time you want to spend on shopping. Honest companies that offer valuable goods and services would be glad to make their pitches to qualified customers, while the PPA would be strongly motivated to protect your privacy to stay in the loop.
PPAs would compete for your business based on various parameters (such as the percentage of the auction proceeds you get to keep) and services (such as high quality spam filtering), while the PPAs would compete for the companies' business based on how well they can qualify the potential customers. You would always be free to pack up your personal information and take it to a different PPA, and it should be illegal for anyone to keep, copy, or use your personal information without your consent. (Okay, the last part went into pie-in-the-sky territory, though I think it is already implicit in the Bill of Rights in America and in various other personal-rights documents around the world.)
Absolutely not, but actually the GNU programmers should not be working for free, either. However, I do think there should probably be a discount from market wages in exchange for the freedom and control over the work you are doing, whether it is writing articles or code.
My focus is on how small donors can get some of the respect and accountability that large donors have. It seems I'm failing to get that point across. Will it help to say that I think that donor anonymity (or redirection as in "on behalf of" donations) is a secondary aspect and that the technical approach of rms is barely relevant?
I think you are exaggerating. You really know "many people" who want their charitable donations to be anonymous? I know a lot of people, but I can't think of any of them who make a big issue of anonymity when they donate to charity.
The primary situation where "many people" want their donations to be anonymous are political, and their motivations are usually quite nefarious. Some mix of astroturfing and tax evasion. For such reasons I think it is usually better if the charity know and keep track of where the money came from, though the donors' should certainly have the option to request that their names not be listed in such places as donor lists on public webpages. That should provide sufficient anonymity for most people.
In contrast, rms is focused on technical issues of anonymous donations as though the fear of being revealed as the donor would prevent people from donating to a good cause. Doesn't that strike you as a a bit odd? You might not want to make an issue of your donations, you might prefer to remain in the background, but should you be afraid of being exposed as a donor? (Actually, there are certain occasions when you should be afraid, but I don't see how to map any of them to directly to this proposal by rms on his terms. Those situations would be incidental beneficiaries.)
Your reply is not very clear, and the issue of his lack of understanding of money isn't that important to me, but I'll try to clarify things a bit. Then I hope you can understand why this once again illustrates that secondary problem.
There is a real problem with the mass media depending on advertising. It creates a desperation for eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. The abuse of privacy part is actually secondary, but they are trying to increase the value of the eyeballs. The primary problem with that economic model for the media is results like Trump and terrorism. Trump has essentially played the eyeballs-for-advertising game to win free publicity worth billions of dollars. The terrorists also want the free publicity, though mostly in search of recruits, but their quest for publicity strongly motivates creating corpses, especially in new and more newsworthy places.
Now rms seems to think that anonymous donations can somehow replace advertising revenue or force media outlets to stop abusing our privacy. This is one of those cases where he's gone pretty far into his weird little universe... If someone wants to donate money to support a media outlet (often a news website), then the issue of anonymity is quite secondary, though some nice people do prefer to donate anonymously (while other less nice people want to make anonymous donations for reasons that can be downright nefarious). (Yes, I'm biased in favor of openness.)
The economic models that rms is most familiar with are different. As a tenured professor, his personal living expenses are covered. Not really a criticism, but I guess it should be mentioned because poor people often prioritize funding their next meals.
Most of his projects have been funded by large donors (though I'm including research grants as a form of donation). There are two problems there. One is that large donors can change their minds, especially when their pockets get shrunk a bit. The other problem is bad decisions from on high. (BtW, the economic models I discussed with him were oriented around small donors, people like me (and probably you).)
I actually admire rms and regard him as a great man, but probably for smaller values of "great". In particular, he has little conception of money and his financial models have never demonstrated anything approaching viability or critical mass.
In years past I actually ran a few alternative financial models past him. He did ask an extremely perceptive question in one exchange. The question led me to a significant improvement in a financial model, but mostly he convinced me that he never has understood money, and probably never will. He wouldn't even be interested in whether or not he helped out, but he lives in a kind of money-free fantasy land, and I think his latest suggestion is just more evidence. Yes, he sees part of the problem, but his idea of anonymity as the solution is completely half-baked. If someone is motivated to donate, why would that motivation be affected by anonymity?
What the online media needs is a focus on SOLUTIONS. How many of us are sick and tired of reading about problems without solutions, and the media should earn a kind of tithe for helping to SOLVE the problems. The articles should be followed by links to some solution projects, and if enough readers (or viewers of a video) agree to support a project, then it would get funded, and the website would get a percentage for (1) publicizing the problem, (2) bringing donors to the solution project, and (3) evaluating the results and reporting them.
The details don't really matter to me, so in that sense I might be as bad as rms. You can call it an agent's fee if you prefer, though before that discussion with rms I mostly called it RACS (for Reverse Auction Charity Shares) and at some point afterwards I favored the idea of a charity share brokerage. DAUPR.
Can someone explain to me what the joke was? Or maybe the funny mod doesn't mean anything? Or perhaps I also lost my sense of humor when my vote was removed?
Oh, wait. Oracle apparently and unfortunately seems to have a highly viable financial model. The current problem is merely that OpenOffice is NOT a part of those profits.
So how about considering SOLUTIONS. At least LibreOffice got mentioned in a couple of posts, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed: Is the financial model viable? I don't know enough about LibreOffice to say, but if the economic model is as fundamentally broken, then it doesn't really matter, does it?
What about a BETTER financial model? Beating the same dead horse, but how about creating a simple mechanism for the lusers... Er, I mean the honorable users, to fund OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) with special focus on the features they actually WANT?
I just love flogging that dead horse, don't I? Even worse that the same dead horse could be used to make slashdot viable (pending its next change of ownership and debt assumption).
Yeah, of course I'm talking about the idea of the charity share brokerage where the users would buy shares in ongoing-cost projects for features they want to keep using and feature development projects for new features. At this point I can only believe that it's the breakeven idea that is anathema. Unless there are profits, no one is interested, eh?
I'd start another poll on the topic, but it seems pointless. If anyone is interested (and I'm not holding my breath), feel free to make the polite request for additional details. Meanwhile, I'll continue switching over to LibreOffice pending its demise. OpenOffice, it was nice knowing ya, and I'll try to attend the funeral if it's sufficiently convenient.
Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to express the usual disappointment with the state of today's slashdot and the lack of high-quality comments. If the charity share brokerage system were in effect, features that would improve the quality of the discussions would be my favored donations. Not sure if that means addressing the trollage or fixing the moderation, but right now there is no decision to be made because there is no such system.
I think that deserves a funny mod (on the theory you are in the other 2%), but I haven't had a mod point to give in many years.
Greatly disappointed by the lack of humorous or insightful comments, but maybe they exist without visibility or sufficient positive moderation. Not surprised, but that's how slashdot has evolved. I don't see the joke in the topic, so I'll go for insight, such as it was. Kudos to you if you can see a joke in this topic.
This article is a good example of how Watson can be leveraged to cut out the humans. Where the studios used to need a significant number of people to do the work, now a single editor with this leverage will probably be able to keep up with all the movies they want to make, and use the leftover time to make more trailers to pick from for each movie, to boot.
I think it's part of the big secret plan of today's so-called IBM. "Respect for the individual" was the OLD idea. The new goal is "Replace the individuals". A few transient employees brought onboard as briefly required. The only question will be "Who can do the work most cheaply?" Actually, there might be one question before that: "Can Watson to do this work without needing any human being?"
That brief comment is the only visible one rated "insightful" that barely touches on the obvious insights here.
Obviously the FBI is complaining about a technology that it would like to ban or regulate. Sorry, you fibbing FBIers, you KNOW that it doesn't work that way. You can't make everyone forget and even if you could, the technology would simply be rediscovered. The law of gravity is more than a good idea, and ditto on the mathematics of information theory.
If the FBI wasn't constantly abusing innocent people, then those innocent people would not feel motivated to encrypt their personal information. Of course, it is not the FBI or even the government that is committing most of the abuse. Most of the abuses are coming from private companies that merely bribe the politicians to subvert the Constitution for their greater profits. Most of those abuses are actually with carrots rather than sticks, but they are still wrong.
BAD economics. Naughty, naughty. The financial models should not incentivize bad behavior, but the bad result is quite predictable. Solutions exist. DAUPR.
Your reply wasn't clear enough, but you may have been thinking that I was comparing GE to a startup. The startup that I was working for was a quasi-independent entity within GE, but it was using surplus cycles on a large network of Fujitsu mainframes. This was somewhat pre-Internet, and the actual model was CompuServe, which is already enough to discredit the entrepreneurial claim. Rather GE was just trying to claim a piece of the pie, and at that time no one (especially not at GE) understood how the pie was going to explode into the Internet.
If your comment is primarily about the original article, then I think we are in agreement. They (GE's managers) want the atmosphere of a startup, but without the risk, which is an unsolvable paradox (IMNSHO). The best approximation is to partition the company into small cells and accept that some of them will die. However, once that becomes institutionalized, the companies still seem to lose their entrepreneurial spirit. The chaos element is apparently necessary, but big companies (like GE) are allergic to chaos.
Who are you talking to?
Whenever I see a comment like that from a low ID I speculate that the actual person passed away or otherwise abandoned slashdot and the account has been hacked for residual credibility.
In solution form, there should be a text analysis tool to assess when the tone of posts has changed enough to indicate a hacked account. Part of a broader security system?
Many years ago I worked for a startup subsidiary of GE and I was not impressed with the management style. I don't think it's just sour grapes due to my being pushed out the door, because the entire subsidiary died a couple of years later. Some kind of Internet thing. Of course it was doomed, eh?
Then again, after reading Jack Welch's book, I think there are grounds for concern. If GE is still as he made it in his image, then it's a dangerous and sociopathic entity. If it were an actual human being, then it is probable that we would all be dead now. Shades of the vicious ASI (artificial super-intelligence) in Our Final Invention (My quasi-review at https://ello.co/shanen0/post/g... as of last week?) No respect for your humanity after GE gets enough IoT devices into the market, and they still design lots of devices for the Chinese to build. Of course the Chinese involvement creates another layer of concern.
We need an economic system that rethinks things in terms of freedom. Cf my sig, eh?
Sounds like your company may have made the transition that I think my former employer is secretly working on, and if so, I understand why you didn't mention the name... I'll call it the Price Waterhouse model because of a friend who joined that company just after getting his MBA.
PW overhires fresh meat with the deliberate intention of eliminating almost all of them within the first two years. The cream of the cream are the only ones they want to keep, or at least that was how he described it those many years ago. As it would be adapted to the modern day, the new hires would essentially be one- or two-year interns whose contracts would mostly expire, with a few thousand retained each year for actual long-term careers.
The symptom at my former employer was a focus on optimizing the onboarding and offboarding processes so that most of the actual work can be done on a staffing-as-needed basis. Managerial guidance from the careerists, but that's another focus of cost containment.
PROFIT!