Just so. Again, wish I had mod points to give. Earlier I made a comment about Apple and Microsoft taking over the real ownership of the hardware (including smartphones).
Reminded me of another Windows 10 problem that hasn't been mentioned here. On one of my dual boot (GRUB) machines, the upgraded Windows 7 disk became inaccessible from Ubuntu until the fast boot option of Windows 10 was disabled.
On this topic, I have to say that Apple seems to have the best approach, with the quick login. No, you aren't really able to do anything yet, but at least it feels like you've done everything you could, and quickly. The waiting time for the machine to actually be usable doesn't feel nearly as bad?
I feel like that guy who lost all his time complaining about the time...
Anyway, this is related to the earlier comment I added about network sharing via Windows 10. Not in that earlier post, but I also tried to tackle it from the other side of sharing on Linux (Ubuntu) at one point.
My theory was that the Linux approach was sound and probably secure, too, but Microsoft had worked quite hard and probably even skillfully to make it a pain in the tukhus from the Windows 10 side. Kind of hard to summarize, but my conclusion was that I would have to tweak Windows 10 so hard to make it work that I would ever after be fighting with Microsoft for control of my own machine.
That's actually an aspect of the black box philosophy that you cannot, even in theory, understand what is going on under the covers of the computers (and smartphones) that you supposedly own. However, I don't blame Microsoft for this one. I think they stole that idea from Apple, who implemented it with the Mac (when they abandoned the open philosophy of the Apple II).
Not the topic I was looking for, but you set me off... The clock, oh the clock... (Need ekronomics.)
The success of Windows is NOT driven by technology, but by clever financial models, and the people supporting Linux and OSS have yet to come up with a good one. I would argue that the two most important keys to Microsoft's dominance are selling upstream to the makers, not the users, and more importantly, perfecting the denial of financial liability without any consideration of the damage inflicted or Microsoft's own incompetence. Windows 10 is mostly significant insofar as it represents an attempt to steal... Er, I mean copy and improve Apple's newer financial model.
I suffer from delusions of grand solutions. Crowdfunding a la Kickstarter is about 1/3 of the way towards an answer. I think the "charity share brokerage" approach could get at least 2/3 of the way there, but I am probably deluded about the wisdom of crowds, too.
Time, gentleman. (If there are interested responses or queries for details I should be able to reply later in the week.)
Murphy's Law in action. Can't recall the last time a topic I suggested got top-paged on slashdot, so I feel strongly obliged to look over the responses, but I have a really heavy schedule today and just a short time this morning before I have to leave... Do what I can, but that's what they all say.
This post reminded me of experiences trying to share files over the network from a Windows 10 machine. Really a bad idea, even if the other machine is Windows 10. The idea of sharing over the network is great, but the security problems were difficult and Microsoft, in its infinite non-wisdom, decided to "cure" the problem by making it quite difficult to share files via network-shared folders or disks. My initial quest was to share some old files from a converted-to-Windows-10 machine with machines running Ubuntu and OS X, as well as other Windows machines. Finally reduced to using Dropbox with a bit of Google Drive on the side.
Conclusion? Maybe sharing storage is just too dangerous for "normal" people, even with a technical bent? Or maybe the foundation as implemented and populized way back in Windows 95 was just too rotten and poorly conceived? No, I don't know if this is a security problem that could have been prevented by better thinking up front, but it certainly seems to me that Microsoft has thrown in the towel.
No, once again you are twisting and distorting what I actually wrote, perhaps projecting your own fears.
Maybe you should try to figure out what my sig means in terms of my underlying philosophy. As it applies to this topic, and though you don't seem to justify the effort, I would summarize it that free competition is a fundamentally good thing, but you should not let your true enemies twist the rules of the competitive game against you.
Far more than your reply merits, but have you considered the overall economic ramifications of letting the terrorists make so many people live in fear? For example, have you flown on a plane recently? As Bruce Schneier put it in Data and Goliath, we are completely redesigning our airports around our fears of possible terrorist attacks--and we are still failing to prevent those attacks. And yet, each and every time one of those attacks succeeds, we reward the attackers with vast amounts of free publicity and then punish ourselves by spending more money in the insane quest for perfect security.
Freedom involves a certain degree of risk, but it's hard to assess the reasonable risks when you are too busy sh!tt!ng in your pants (or even weeping in sympathy) in response to the sensationalized news.
The end result is the rise of authoritarian liars like Donald Trump. Many of his followers believe they will have perfect security as soon as he wins. Reality begs to differ.
If you don't like my constructive suggestion, let's hear yours. I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, perhaps you should begin by trying to understand what I ACTUALLY wrote. Seems extremely unlikely, but maybe you could come up with an improvement or three. It's not like any new idea is perfect and immaculate as it develops, eh?
Do you actually believe what you wrote there? If so, then you are ignoring reality to an amazing degree or you are unable to perceive and understand reality. In either of those cases, there is no reason to attempt a discussion.
If you do NOT believe what you wrote, then there is some basis for a discussion around the question "Why?" The most rational reason would be if someone is paying you, but the problem in that case is that you are probably not supposed to admit it.
Seems to be an impasse. Let me predict you will shout the same crazy stuff, but louder. Perhaps you could shift to all caps?
Given your comment, is there any reason I should regard you as intellectually honest or writing in good faith?
My first suggestion is that you might start by READING what I actually wrote. If you cannot understand some part of it, then you should feel free to ask a question. If you cannot understand any of it, then perhaps it is too complicated an idea for you to understand. I will still attempt to answer questions, but my time is limited.
Each and EVERY time I see one of these feel-good stories about the google I just remember that their basic business model is to rape my personal information for THEIR profit. Any "free" service they offer is just a pittance on their profits from abusing my privacy.
There are alternatives, but if any business with an alternative economic model became an actual threat, you can be certain that EVERY company like the google that is firmly committed to abusing YOUR privacy would combine their resources to crush it into the dust. Eyeballs for ads is the GAWD.
Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier is a good discussion of the topic, though I think he's too kind of Amazon. I can say that even though I haven't finished the book because it is impossible to say enough bad things about Amazon. The google is still #2 or #2.5...
It's spelled NHK here, but their economic model is broken for other reasons.
I'm trying to focus on the distinctions among types of news. I think it is perfectly reasonable to compete for eyeballs on the basis of investigations into real problems. They used to call them "Scoops" in those pre-TV days you mentioned. These days, the speed of the Internet has basically destroyed that economic model. There are also naturally occurring news stories like floods and earthquakes where good news coverage is downright helpful in terms of responding or preventing panic. The value of such news is clearly positive.
In contrast, there are fake stories, like every controversial and idiotic thing Trump says. Great for gathering eyeballs, but I think you would be hard-pressed to make any argument for a positive value, even though the Donald has milked the free publicity to become an actual nominee of an actual major party Did you know that they estimated the value of ads corresponding to the free news coverage that Trump received in getting the nomination? The total was around $2 billion. That's billion with a "B" and dollars as in that thing Trump doesn't want us to know how few he actually has.
In the case of the terrorists, the value of their free publicity is much more negative to the rest of society. I would argue that they are distorting the entire society of their enemies. The mass media is profiting by acting as their accomplices, and that is WRONG.
You raised a new issue, but it is NOT mine. If you demand that I comment on it, I will say that terrorism is a tactic, not a stoppable thing. You can only make it more or less useful as a tactic, and the mass media is actively making it more useful. The "terrorists" would be fools not to take advantage of our weaknesses.
Yes, you see the problem, so at least you are a sufficiently casual observer of that aspect.
The implementation path does seem quite difficult. Let's say you could get some sort of consensus among the responsible news organizations (if any still exist), then how do you get the bad boys to come along? (I'm sure that FAUX "news" is bad, but these days CNN may be transcending the very notion of "bad".) Appeal to their patriotism? "We have to show Trump's empty podium! An actual speech from Bernie Sanders doesn't have any marketable eyeballs!"
You can't ask for the government to encourage anything along these lines. Absolutely proper to scream about censorship whenever the government steps into such a mess. Too complicated a "news story" to remember when the government had some positive influence on news coverage. Actually, even if you gave the news-as-public-service-not-profit-center guidelines some credit for creating modern journalistic ideals, you would be hard pressed to defend the ultimate results.
Be nice if you had a constructive thought or suggestion, however. Don't strain yourself on my behalf (though I'll continue to strain myself on the nation's behalf).
Why was that an AC post? Lack of appropriate evidence? Without saying whether or not I would personally look at any porn, I can present such evidence:
Around '97 I was working for one of the first ISPs in this country, and the president came right out and said that porn was paying for the Internet. I can't remember his exact words, but that was the gist of it. (Can't ask him now because he got shot to death when he was visiting the States a few years later (but that's another diversion).) I feel like the context of the discussion had included the newsgroup alt.binaries, which I had been running through UUCP between two other ISPs... His company owned one end of a major fiber link and the traffic volume was heavy on the porn. A frame relay pipe? Bad sign when all the personal details start feeling like histories of the Greeks and Romans.
Having said that, maybe this is a case of the broken clock being right twice a day? Here's Bill Maher's version in text form:
The sad reality is that Gawker's broken economic model isn't that different from the the others, and ALL of the mass media (that I know about) is similarly broken. Gawker wanted lots of eyeballs to sell to advertisers, and the website just pushed the edge too hard in their quest for more eyeballs. They fell off, went boom.
The rest of the mass media is competing for eyeballs with Trump antics and disaster porn. Still the same quest for eyeballs to sell.
Gawker went one way, but only a minor difference that Trump has milked the free publicity all the way to the so-called Republican nomination. More serious difference when terrorists milk the free publicity. More like a death spiral on both sides. The mass media is killing itself trying to give the biggest and best free publicity to the terrorists, while the terrorists are killing other people and just trying to kill enough this time to get more publicity than last time.
Alternative economic model to address that last problem: Stop competing for eyeballs when that is supporting the terrorists. Set up a special non-competitive news office (SNCNO?) to handle such publicity-seeking manufactured news. If a story falls into the terrorism-support bucket, then this SNCNO will handle it. They will produce unified reports of the terrorism, and all of the mass media outlets will be allowed to use as much or as little of those reports as they want to. The reports will be accurate consensus of the news, but with no sensationalism or competitive considerations. This economic model would put the shoe on the other foot. Everyone would still need to report the real news, but there would be no incentive to play up the terrorism parts, and the incentive to compete for more eyeballs would be on the REAL news, not the fake manufactured news.
Other economic models available upon polite request. Too bad I don't have an economic model to sell them. They are just too intuitively obvious to the most casual observer (in the literal, not idiomatic, sense).
Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why. (However, just to refer to another, I think Diaspora may have been the best idea to die for bad planning combined with overfunding from the crowd. Not sure if it should be "literally die", because that depends on the relationship of Diaspora to the visionary's suicide.)
I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.
The way I'm thinking is different. A really short capsule summary might be something like:
If funding is confirmed by September 15, then beginning on October 1, in two months we plan to design a PCB motherboard with the following interfaces. This will involve two people working full time, both of whom have committed to do the work, and who have agreed to payment of $10,000 for their time. At least 5 prototype boards will be produced for testing. The success criteria are (1) that the boards can be mass produced (lot size 100) for a cost of $15 each, and (2) the prototypes will be tested and proved to satisfy the specifications in the table below. The total project cost is estimated at $30,000, calling for 3,000 supporters at $10 each.
Once you have the first project completed, you can start the next step, but I think it's important to keep control over what you're doing at each phase. There are several mechanisms to do that, but I'm getting too long for the slashdot channel...
Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see a complete proposal before I'd chip in. I'd want to see the schedule, the budget, the resources, and the success criteria to know if the project succeeded. The summary sounds way too grand, so I think I'd want to see it broken down into pieces that are small enough to understand, too. Also important to make sure nothing is overlooked, such as sufficient testing. Be fine if the same organization that helped check the proposal evaluated and reported on the results (perhaps holding the money, too).
P.S. I think this is a solution to the general problems with all of the crowdfunding systems that I have examined. No accountability or adequate planning. The same kind of approach could be adapted to the slashdot situation, breaking features into development projects, maintenance projects, and ongoing-cost projects.
More importantly, why don't you let the members help pay you to look into things?
Based on my experiences in pitching these ideas over the last few years, it seems to me that the main reason "decision makers" hate the ideas is that they fear loss of control. There are plenty of ways to keep a leash on the mob, most obviously be retaining careful control over the projects that actually get offered for funding.
Actually I think of it as a kind of dual of the spam problem. What sort of email system would help people who get too much non-spam? Or perhaps I'm just trying to reduce my own tension because I want to react to something that a celebrity had done (usually what an author has written in my case), but I don't actually want to waste their extremely valuable creative time?
What I would like to receive when I write to such a person would be a robotic reply from their celebrity email system. It would actually return a webform based on the analysis of my email. As I work through the reply I would be able to confirm the analysis (or provide feedback to improve the analysis) while hopefully getting answers to any questions or recording my sentiments for the convenience of the author in question. After getting through the analysis (which would also prove I'm not a robot), then I would be able to submit the form and the answers would be tallied up and I could see how other people feel on the same issues.
There should also be some meta-options, too. For example, there could be an option to publish my letter on the author's website, preferably 'close to' the letters of people who feel similarly to me. Then we would be able to see the comments and react to them, still without bothering the celebrity. If some part of the website becomes highly active, then maybe that should also be brought to the celebrity's attention. Another obvious meta-option would be to argue for escalation, if the author of the email insists that the email needs more personal attention, but I think this should be deliberately made quite difficult.
In cases where the celebrity wants to communicate more personally with fans, certain email could be selected for a personal reply. Perhaps a lottery or a vote of other fans for the best email, and the celebrity's reply could be shared widely.
Anyway, I've written to a lot of authors over the years, and many of them have been kind enough to respond, but I wish I had been directed to a celebrity email system. Not sure about your situation, but slashdot used to be a hotbed of activity--and I noticed that you stayed out of the way after the wasps' nest poll was posted recently...
P.S. And once again I wish that slashdot were using a financial model such that I could help contribute to the development costs or the ongoing costs (in the case of some authors I admired).
Don't you [whipslash] need a celebrity email system?
Don't I need a way to spot such interesting articles? PERL is one of my favorite perversions, and I still use Strawberry PERL several times a week. Surprised I never noticed this article.
Kind of confused, however. On the one hand, you seem to be laying low (which only makes good sense in the absence of that celebrity email system), but on the other hand, you (if you are the source of the newest poll) seem determined to harvest the whirlwind. On the third hand, you didn't ask for any suggestions this time, though I have thought of several improvements to my troll-deterrence suggestion, mostly in terms of making it easier to implement (and more symmetrical) in the slashdot context. On the fourth hand, I still can't help pay for the implementation or ongoing costs of anything in particular (but could only donate in unacceptably general terms), and on the fifth hand I already forgot what hand this was...
Had to hit the head, which apparently reminded me to suggest Stallman (rms) as an interview candidate. See if you can get him to confess to his cancerous anti-design ideology of anarchism. After all, slashdot suffers from emacs disease, an extreme form of feeping creaturitis. (I've had several email exchanges with rms over the years, and they even contributed to the development of the financial model I've suggested slashdot should consider adding, but mostly I've concluded that he's from a different universe than the rest of us.)
Near as I can tell, the only significant asset would be the personal information, AKA the email address and associated data. Is there anything else of unique value in Yahoo? What could the assets be?
Anyway, I had been hoping that Yahoo would get desperate enough to fix their email system to try to avoid this sad ending. Nomad said "I shall effect repair", but his EQ was much higher than mine and I can't persuade anyone of any solutions, even when they are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Well, let me just check that you understand my main point and the distinction that I am trying to make:
Case 1: There is a terrible earthquake and tsunami and 20,000 people are killed. All of the media outlets compete aggressively to provide the most interesting coverage. Some media sources win, get more eyeballs, and get to boost the prices for their advertising and the company has higher profits (or smaller losses, which is quite often the case notwithstanding).
Case 2: Terrorists strike and kill thousands of people. All the media outlets compete aggressively to provide the most interesting coverage. The terrorists are not fully satisfied with their free publicity and any amount of terror that they have created. They probably study the "winning" media sources to see how they can make their next terrorist attack even MORE "newsworthy".
I hate Case 2. I don't think the facts of the tragedy are in dispute. Perhaps it should be part of the filtering that the terrorists will hate that the members of the pool will have to reach consensus on EVERYTHING that they report. Or another way to say it is that the media is being manipulated as PART of the story--and the terrorists are especially happy when they can kill reporters, too.
If you do understand my main point, then I think you should explain why it isn't a problem. Alternatively, if you agree that it is a problem, can you come up with a better solution? I'm not saying that my idea is perfect, but I think we need to do something along those lines or the terrorists are going to win in the long run. Maybe they already are winning if Donald Trump can ride the terror they've created into the White House.
Why is your comment annotated "(Score:1)"? Clicking on "Score" just returns "No comment history available." Never noticed such a thing before, but I just posted a comment elsewhere and got a "(Score:?)" annotation on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just so. Again, wish I had mod points to give. Earlier I made a comment about Apple and Microsoft taking over the real ownership of the hardware (including smartphones).
Time, gentleman.
Highly informative summary and again I wish I had a mod point for you. Informative to the point of insight?
Wish I had a mod point to give you.
Hmm... How about if the contributor of an article was rewarded with extra mod points in that article?
Reminded me of another Windows 10 problem that hasn't been mentioned here. On one of my dual boot (GRUB) machines, the upgraded Windows 7 disk became inaccessible from Ubuntu until the fast boot option of Windows 10 was disabled.
On this topic, I have to say that Apple seems to have the best approach, with the quick login. No, you aren't really able to do anything yet, but at least it feels like you've done everything you could, and quickly. The waiting time for the machine to actually be usable doesn't feel nearly as bad?
I feel like that guy who lost all his time complaining about the time...
Anyway, this is related to the earlier comment I added about network sharing via Windows 10. Not in that earlier post, but I also tried to tackle it from the other side of sharing on Linux (Ubuntu) at one point.
My theory was that the Linux approach was sound and probably secure, too, but Microsoft had worked quite hard and probably even skillfully to make it a pain in the tukhus from the Windows 10 side. Kind of hard to summarize, but my conclusion was that I would have to tweak Windows 10 so hard to make it work that I would ever after be fighting with Microsoft for control of my own machine.
That's actually an aspect of the black box philosophy that you cannot, even in theory, understand what is going on under the covers of the computers (and smartphones) that you supposedly own. However, I don't blame Microsoft for this one. I think they stole that idea from Apple, who implemented it with the Mac (when they abandoned the open philosophy of the Apple II).
I wish I had a mod point to give you. (Also for some of the posts in the branch.)
Hmm... How about inherited score? An extra point if the branch of the thread is collecting lots of mod points?
Not the topic I was looking for, but you set me off... The clock, oh the clock... (Need ekronomics.)
The success of Windows is NOT driven by technology, but by clever financial models, and the people supporting Linux and OSS have yet to come up with a good one. I would argue that the two most important keys to Microsoft's dominance are selling upstream to the makers, not the users, and more importantly, perfecting the denial of financial liability without any consideration of the damage inflicted or Microsoft's own incompetence. Windows 10 is mostly significant insofar as it represents an attempt to steal... Er, I mean copy and improve Apple's newer financial model.
I suffer from delusions of grand solutions. Crowdfunding a la Kickstarter is about 1/3 of the way towards an answer. I think the "charity share brokerage" approach could get at least 2/3 of the way there, but I am probably deluded about the wisdom of crowds, too.
Time, gentleman. (If there are interested responses or queries for details I should be able to reply later in the week.)
Murphy's Law in action. Can't recall the last time a topic I suggested got top-paged on slashdot, so I feel strongly obliged to look over the responses, but I have a really heavy schedule today and just a short time this morning before I have to leave... Do what I can, but that's what they all say.
This post reminded me of experiences trying to share files over the network from a Windows 10 machine. Really a bad idea, even if the other machine is Windows 10. The idea of sharing over the network is great, but the security problems were difficult and Microsoft, in its infinite non-wisdom, decided to "cure" the problem by making it quite difficult to share files via network-shared folders or disks. My initial quest was to share some old files from a converted-to-Windows-10 machine with machines running Ubuntu and OS X, as well as other Windows machines. Finally reduced to using Dropbox with a bit of Google Drive on the side.
Conclusion? Maybe sharing storage is just too dangerous for "normal" people, even with a technical bent? Or maybe the foundation as implemented and populized way back in Windows 95 was just too rotten and poorly conceived? No, I don't know if this is a security problem that could have been prevented by better thinking up front, but it certainly seems to me that Microsoft has thrown in the towel.
No, once again you are twisting and distorting what I actually wrote, perhaps projecting your own fears.
Maybe you should try to figure out what my sig means in terms of my underlying philosophy. As it applies to this topic, and though you don't seem to justify the effort, I would summarize it that free competition is a fundamentally good thing, but you should not let your true enemies twist the rules of the competitive game against you.
Far more than your reply merits, but have you considered the overall economic ramifications of letting the terrorists make so many people live in fear? For example, have you flown on a plane recently? As Bruce Schneier put it in Data and Goliath , we are completely redesigning our airports around our fears of possible terrorist attacks--and we are still failing to prevent those attacks. And yet, each and every time one of those attacks succeeds, we reward the attackers with vast amounts of free publicity and then punish ourselves by spending more money in the insane quest for perfect security.
Freedom involves a certain degree of risk, but it's hard to assess the reasonable risks when you are too busy sh!tt!ng in your pants (or even weeping in sympathy) in response to the sensationalized news.
The end result is the rise of authoritarian liars like Donald Trump. Many of his followers believe they will have perfect security as soon as he wins. Reality begs to differ.
If you don't like my constructive suggestion, let's hear yours. I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, perhaps you should begin by trying to understand what I ACTUALLY wrote. Seems extremely unlikely, but maybe you could come up with an improvement or three. It's not like any new idea is perfect and immaculate as it develops, eh?
Do you actually believe what you wrote there? If so, then you are ignoring reality to an amazing degree or you are unable to perceive and understand reality. In either of those cases, there is no reason to attempt a discussion.
If you do NOT believe what you wrote, then there is some basis for a discussion around the question "Why?" The most rational reason would be if someone is paying you, but the problem in that case is that you are probably not supposed to admit it.
Seems to be an impasse. Let me predict you will shout the same crazy stuff, but louder. Perhaps you could shift to all caps?
No, that is not what I wrote.
Given your comment, is there any reason I should regard you as intellectually honest or writing in good faith?
My first suggestion is that you might start by READING what I actually wrote. If you cannot understand some part of it, then you should feel free to ask a question. If you cannot understand any of it, then perhaps it is too complicated an idea for you to understand. I will still attempt to answer questions, but my time is limited.
Each and EVERY time I see one of these feel-good stories about the google I just remember that their basic business model is to rape my personal information for THEIR profit. Any "free" service they offer is just a pittance on their profits from abusing my privacy.
There are alternatives, but if any business with an alternative economic model became an actual threat, you can be certain that EVERY company like the google that is firmly committed to abusing YOUR privacy would combine their resources to crush it into the dust. Eyeballs for ads is the GAWD.
Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier is a good discussion of the topic, though I think he's too kind of Amazon. I can say that even though I haven't finished the book because it is impossible to say enough bad things about Amazon. The google is still #2 or #2.5...
It's spelled NHK here, but their economic model is broken for other reasons.
I'm trying to focus on the distinctions among types of news. I think it is perfectly reasonable to compete for eyeballs on the basis of investigations into real problems. They used to call them "Scoops" in those pre-TV days you mentioned. These days, the speed of the Internet has basically destroyed that economic model. There are also naturally occurring news stories like floods and earthquakes where good news coverage is downright helpful in terms of responding or preventing panic. The value of such news is clearly positive.
In contrast, there are fake stories, like every controversial and idiotic thing Trump says. Great for gathering eyeballs, but I think you would be hard-pressed to make any argument for a positive value, even though the Donald has milked the free publicity to become an actual nominee of an actual major party Did you know that they estimated the value of ads corresponding to the free news coverage that Trump received in getting the nomination? The total was around $2 billion. That's billion with a "B" and dollars as in that thing Trump doesn't want us to know how few he actually has.
In the case of the terrorists, the value of their free publicity is much more negative to the rest of society. I would argue that they are distorting the entire society of their enemies. The mass media is profiting by acting as their accomplices, and that is WRONG.
You raised a new issue, but it is NOT mine. If you demand that I comment on it, I will say that terrorism is a tactic, not a stoppable thing. You can only make it more or less useful as a tactic, and the mass media is actively making it more useful. The "terrorists" would be fools not to take advantage of our weaknesses.
Yes, you see the problem, so at least you are a sufficiently casual observer of that aspect.
The implementation path does seem quite difficult. Let's say you could get some sort of consensus among the responsible news organizations (if any still exist), then how do you get the bad boys to come along? (I'm sure that FAUX "news" is bad, but these days CNN may be transcending the very notion of "bad".) Appeal to their patriotism? "We have to show Trump's empty podium! An actual speech from Bernie Sanders doesn't have any marketable eyeballs!"
You can't ask for the government to encourage anything along these lines. Absolutely proper to scream about censorship whenever the government steps into such a mess. Too complicated a "news story" to remember when the government had some positive influence on news coverage. Actually, even if you gave the news-as-public-service-not-profit-center guidelines some credit for creating modern journalistic ideals, you would be hard pressed to defend the ultimate results.
Be nice if you had a constructive thought or suggestion, however. Don't strain yourself on my behalf (though I'll continue to strain myself on the nation's behalf).
Couldn't find an HBO version, but here's a link to the video:
http://yourbrainonporn.com/com...
Did I mention that I worked in a convenience store during my student days...
Why was that an AC post? Lack of appropriate evidence? Without saying whether or not I would personally look at any porn, I can present such evidence:
Around '97 I was working for one of the first ISPs in this country, and the president came right out and said that porn was paying for the Internet. I can't remember his exact words, but that was the gist of it. (Can't ask him now because he got shot to death when he was visiting the States a few years later (but that's another diversion).) I feel like the context of the discussion had included the newsgroup alt.binaries, which I had been running through UUCP between two other ISPs... His company owned one end of a major fiber link and the traffic volume was heavy on the porn. A frame relay pipe? Bad sign when all the personal details start feeling like histories of the Greeks and Romans.
Having said that, maybe this is a case of the broken clock being right twice a day? Here's Bill Maher's version in text form:
http://www.hbo.com/real-time-w...
Another bad sign? I remember the video as though it was much more recent than 2011, but the text seems to match my memories pretty well.
Porn considered harmful?
The sad reality is that Gawker's broken economic model isn't that different from the the others, and ALL of the mass media (that I know about) is similarly broken. Gawker wanted lots of eyeballs to sell to advertisers, and the website just pushed the edge too hard in their quest for more eyeballs. They fell off, went boom.
The rest of the mass media is competing for eyeballs with Trump antics and disaster porn. Still the same quest for eyeballs to sell.
Gawker went one way, but only a minor difference that Trump has milked the free publicity all the way to the so-called Republican nomination. More serious difference when terrorists milk the free publicity. More like a death spiral on both sides. The mass media is killing itself trying to give the biggest and best free publicity to the terrorists, while the terrorists are killing other people and just trying to kill enough this time to get more publicity than last time.
Alternative economic model to address that last problem: Stop competing for eyeballs when that is supporting the terrorists. Set up a special non-competitive news office (SNCNO?) to handle such publicity-seeking manufactured news. If a story falls into the terrorism-support bucket, then this SNCNO will handle it. They will produce unified reports of the terrorism, and all of the mass media outlets will be allowed to use as much or as little of those reports as they want to. The reports will be accurate consensus of the news, but with no sensationalism or competitive considerations. This economic model would put the shoe on the other foot. Everyone would still need to report the real news, but there would be no incentive to play up the terrorism parts, and the incentive to compete for more eyeballs would be on the REAL news, not the fake manufactured news.
Other economic models available upon polite request. Too bad I don't have an economic model to sell them. They are just too intuitively obvious to the most casual observer (in the literal, not idiomatic, sense).
Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why. (However, just to refer to another, I think Diaspora may have been the best idea to die for bad planning combined with overfunding from the crowd. Not sure if it should be "literally die", because that depends on the relationship of Diaspora to the visionary's suicide.)
I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.
The way I'm thinking is different. A really short capsule summary might be something like:
If funding is confirmed by September 15, then beginning on October 1, in two months we plan to design a PCB motherboard with the following interfaces. This will involve two people working full time, both of whom have committed to do the work, and who have agreed to payment of $10,000 for their time. At least 5 prototype boards will be produced for testing. The success criteria are (1) that the boards can be mass produced (lot size 100) for a cost of $15 each, and (2) the prototypes will be tested and proved to satisfy the specifications in the table below. The total project cost is estimated at $30,000, calling for 3,000 supporters at $10 each.
Once you have the first project completed, you can start the next step, but I think it's important to keep control over what you're doing at each phase. There are several mechanisms to do that, but I'm getting too long for the slashdot channel...
Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see a complete proposal before I'd chip in. I'd want to see the schedule, the budget, the resources, and the success criteria to know if the project succeeded. The summary sounds way too grand, so I think I'd want to see it broken down into pieces that are small enough to understand, too. Also important to make sure nothing is overlooked, such as sufficient testing. Be fine if the same organization that helped check the proposal evaluated and reported on the results (perhaps holding the money, too).
P.S. I think this is a solution to the general problems with all of the crowdfunding systems that I have examined. No accountability or adequate planning. The same kind of approach could be adapted to the slashdot situation, breaking features into development projects, maintenance projects, and ongoing-cost projects.
More importantly, why don't you let the members help pay you to look into things?
Based on my experiences in pitching these ideas over the last few years, it seems to me that the main reason "decision makers" hate the ideas is that they fear loss of control. There are plenty of ways to keep a leash on the mob, most obviously be retaining careful control over the projects that actually get offered for funding.
Actually I think of it as a kind of dual of the spam problem. What sort of email system would help people who get too much non-spam? Or perhaps I'm just trying to reduce my own tension because I want to react to something that a celebrity had done (usually what an author has written in my case), but I don't actually want to waste their extremely valuable creative time?
What I would like to receive when I write to such a person would be a robotic reply from their celebrity email system. It would actually return a webform based on the analysis of my email. As I work through the reply I would be able to confirm the analysis (or provide feedback to improve the analysis) while hopefully getting answers to any questions or recording my sentiments for the convenience of the author in question. After getting through the analysis (which would also prove I'm not a robot), then I would be able to submit the form and the answers would be tallied up and I could see how other people feel on the same issues.
There should also be some meta-options, too. For example, there could be an option to publish my letter on the author's website, preferably 'close to' the letters of people who feel similarly to me. Then we would be able to see the comments and react to them, still without bothering the celebrity. If some part of the website becomes highly active, then maybe that should also be brought to the celebrity's attention. Another obvious meta-option would be to argue for escalation, if the author of the email insists that the email needs more personal attention, but I think this should be deliberately made quite difficult.
In cases where the celebrity wants to communicate more personally with fans, certain email could be selected for a personal reply. Perhaps a lottery or a vote of other fans for the best email, and the celebrity's reply could be shared widely.
Anyway, I've written to a lot of authors over the years, and many of them have been kind enough to respond, but I wish I had been directed to a celebrity email system. Not sure about your situation, but slashdot used to be a hotbed of activity--and I noticed that you stayed out of the way after the wasps' nest poll was posted recently...
P.S. And once again I wish that slashdot were using a financial model such that I could help contribute to the development costs or the ongoing costs (in the case of some authors I admired).
Don't you [whipslash] need a celebrity email system?
Don't I need a way to spot such interesting articles? PERL is one of my favorite perversions, and I still use Strawberry PERL several times a week. Surprised I never noticed this article.
Kind of confused, however. On the one hand, you seem to be laying low (which only makes good sense in the absence of that celebrity email system), but on the other hand, you (if you are the source of the newest poll) seem determined to harvest the whirlwind. On the third hand, you didn't ask for any suggestions this time, though I have thought of several improvements to my troll-deterrence suggestion, mostly in terms of making it easier to implement (and more symmetrical) in the slashdot context. On the fourth hand, I still can't help pay for the implementation or ongoing costs of anything in particular (but could only donate in unacceptably general terms), and on the fifth hand I already forgot what hand this was...
Had to hit the head, which apparently reminded me to suggest Stallman (rms) as an interview candidate. See if you can get him to confess to his cancerous anti-design ideology of anarchism. After all, slashdot suffers from emacs disease, an extreme form of feeping creaturitis. (I've had several email exchanges with rms over the years, and they even contributed to the development of the financial model I've suggested slashdot should consider adding, but mostly I've concluded that he's from a different universe than the rest of us.)
Now to look at the secret Larry Wall interview...
Near as I can tell, the only significant asset would be the personal information, AKA the email address and associated data. Is there anything else of unique value in Yahoo? What could the assets be?
Anyway, I had been hoping that Yahoo would get desperate enough to fix their email system to try to avoid this sad ending. Nomad said "I shall effect repair", but his EQ was much higher than mine and I can't persuade anyone of any solutions, even when they are intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Well, let me just check that you understand my main point and the distinction that I am trying to make:
Case 1: There is a terrible earthquake and tsunami and 20,000 people are killed. All of the media outlets compete aggressively to provide the most interesting coverage. Some media sources win, get more eyeballs, and get to boost the prices for their advertising and the company has higher profits (or smaller losses, which is quite often the case notwithstanding).
Case 2: Terrorists strike and kill thousands of people. All the media outlets compete aggressively to provide the most interesting coverage. The terrorists are not fully satisfied with their free publicity and any amount of terror that they have created. They probably study the "winning" media sources to see how they can make their next terrorist attack even MORE "newsworthy".
I hate Case 2. I don't think the facts of the tragedy are in dispute. Perhaps it should be part of the filtering that the terrorists will hate that the members of the pool will have to reach consensus on EVERYTHING that they report. Or another way to say it is that the media is being manipulated as PART of the story--and the terrorists are especially happy when they can kill reporters, too.
If you do understand my main point, then I think you should explain why it isn't a problem. Alternatively, if you agree that it is a problem, can you come up with a better solution? I'm not saying that my idea is perfect, but I think we need to do something along those lines or the terrorists are going to win in the long run. Maybe they already are winning if Donald Trump can ride the terror they've created into the White House.
Why is your comment annotated "(Score:1)"? Clicking on "Score" just returns "No comment history available." Never noticed such a thing before, but I just posted a comment elsewhere and got a "(Score:?)" annotation on it.