"Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done." In my experience, this translates into a dead-end grunt job.
Possibly, but not necessarily. That's basically what you want out of any startup employee. Even if you're CEO, you'll be bringing in the mail, and you'd be more likely to go fetch coffee than the devs would, as they are the bottleneck.
So they could legitimately be trying to run things more as a bunch of internal startups than as the typical large, hierarchy-focused company. That's certainly possible, as they still have a lot of people there who fondly remember the early days when you could just get stuff done. Further evidence in favor of that is the relatively uncoordinated way they run their products; it suggests that they really do have a lot of small groups running around and doing things, and worrying about coordination later.
The fancy documentation and support contract is a different product that some companies are willing to pay more for. It's also bundling. It's not differential pricing on the same product.
You're correct that throwing in a few trimmings makes it technically a different product. However, if the software is not materially different, I'm inclined to call it the same product in a practical sense. There are a number of software products that are effectively sold like that, and I'm sure you can find them if you look.
This is especially true for "enterprise" products. I promise you that the people who will actually pay $1m for software (and pay another $50k annually for support) will not buy the same software used for $110 from some random guy. And they won't buy the $100 version at Walmart either. I know it's irrational, but that's what you get when you let a bunch of primates run things. For proof, just look at large-company adoption of free software.
I'd like to see both differential pricing and all on-selling restrictions made illegal. This would promote a more free, fair and optimal market. Not simple to implement though.
Creating and paying a large bureaucracy to keep me from selling what I want to whom I choose is a use of "more free" that I'm unfamiliar with. And the other fellow is right; your "more optimal" market is one where in my example I'd just not sell to the low end, so the vast majority of potential consumers would just miss out.
Monopolies = industrial feudalism
Now here we agree. In fact, I'd go farther. Every large corporation I've seen the guts of is run feudally. And given how it trains people to think, I believe it's one of the biggest threats to democracy.
The amusing fact is that this is nothing more than a capitalist version of taking from the rich (those are willing and able to pay more) and giving to the poor (those aren't willing or able to pay more).
Some people might think you are kidding there, but there really are cases where everybody wins from differential pricing, and businesses really do take from the rich so they can afford to sell to the poor. Let me add an example to make it clearer:
Imagine you want to build some sort of clever new software. You see that 10,000 people would pay $100 for it (as a fun toy, say), and 5 companies would pay $1m for it, because they can each make $3m from using it commercially.
If the software costs $1m to develop and you sell all the copies for $100, your profit will be $500. Nobody's going to go to all that trouble for $500, so you wouldn't make the software. And if you did, you'd be steamed that these companies made millions while you got pocket lint.
However, if you sell the first 5 copies for $1m each (with, say, some fancy documentation and a support contract), you can then go on to release a consumer version to get everybody else. You get $5m in the bank, so you're happy. The companies netted $10m, so they're happy. And everybody else got a fun toy at a reasonable price.
Note that although your average price per copy there is $600, you couldn't get the same effect by charging $600; none of the consumers would pay that much for a toy.
He and his crew are bandits. They have come to power to sack the treasury, transferring as much cash to their cronies as possible. The situation is so bad that one risks sounding slightly insane even talking about it honestly.
Don't get me wrong, I personally am counting the days until Bush, et al, leave office. (Quite literally, thanks to a beloved birthday gift from this site.) But I don't think they qualify here.
Maybe I'm comparing too much what's going on in Russia or half of Africa, but kleptocracy does not seem to be one of the Bush administration's major sins. Sure, they've given a fair bit of dough to Haliburton, but I think that was a minor side effect rather than a major goal. I think most of their financially dubious behavior has been more about social engineering (massive tax cuts for the wealthy), empire-building (Iraq, etc), and buying votes (faith-based initiative funding, unjustifiable and giant increases in farm subsidies, the explosion in earmarks).
I think were personal or crony enrichment a major goal, they would have been much better at it.
We had a ballot initiative to change the redistricting process, but people are so stupid that voted against it. From what I gathered after the election, it was one of those initiatives people voted against because they didn't understand it, or they turned off their mind and listened to whatever ideological sewage source they favor.
Yeah, I was dumbfounded too. Another popular reason to oppose: people they didn't like were for it, ergo there must be something bad in it somewhere, even if they couldn't say what it was.
Another one that killed me was the understandable but horrific, "it will cost my party seats". Understandable, because that's part of how partisan politics works. But horrific because it elevates personal victory to the highest station, ignoring things like good goverment or fair representation.
The point of this forum is to generate advertising clicks/views for the owners of this forum.
The point of any business is to make money. Most of them do that by providing a service that's valuable to all concerned. Part of the service here is providing a place for discussion.
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense". Groklaw shouldn't be about its creator.
Aww, that's cute! Completely naive, but darling.
Seriously, have you ever been sued? Even when you are 100% sure that you are in the right, you still have to pay $250 an hour to your lawyer to fend off all the bullshit they care to throw. With SCO, that may be a near-infinite supply. And if you miss something in preparation or they find something that they can distort into an apparent problem? Then you could be well and truly fucked. Even if it all turns out perfectly, it's months or years of stress, just because there's so much on the line and so much out of your control.
Make no mistake: if somebody suggests you have "nothing to hide", that's the time to clam up completely.
Are you saying that in this day and age that most computers and their browsers don't support a cross platform java sandbox?
Of course they theoretically support it. Do they have it? If they do, is the startup time for a person with their browser under 500 ms?
Until the answer to both those questions is yes for 95% or more of typical web users, client-side Java is of no use to me in the places where I'd use GWT.
If one is going to compile code to an "executable" form, in this case java script, why does it actually matter what form it is. Why not compile it to java?
Because every browser has a roughly adequate JavaScript interpreter that is integrated with page rendering.
Like most compilers, things like GWT adapt programmer brains to the execution environment.
If a student were to create a work, and license that work to other students with terms in the license that state that when the work is incorporated into any original work no citation is to be given, would it still be considered plagiarism to use it in a work without attribution to the original author?
Basically, yes. When you hand in your paper with your name on it, you are representing your work as your own. They might call it "academic fraud" rather than "plagiarism", but either way it's both forbidden and wrong.
so, since the students works are the primary resource for TurnItIn to remain viable, how much of a cut should the clean students get for their work?
Exactly as much as they can make selling their paper on the open market to another service like TurnItIn. That is, zero.
The basic point of copyright is to give authors an incentive to create and publish their works. That incentive is not diminished, because TurnItIn is not sellling the papers on or making additional copies. The universities have given them a copy, and they keep it. The students have experienced no harm, and so have no grounds to sue.
It's obvious to me, as a trained ufologist, that this is not a natural phenomenon. This hexagonal structure was BUILT by intelligent life.
It's obvious to me, as a trained psychoceramicist, that anybody who claims to be a "trained ufologist" already has some biases on the topic of what counts as activity by space aliens.
On the other hand (and as TFA points out), the key word is empathy. Without empathy, social structures cannot exist. If everyone and everyone is solely self-interested, groups of cooperating individuals could never thrive as they would be destroyed internally by conflicting self-interest.
Not quite. We evolved the capacity for empathy precisely because our genes are solely self-interested, and people acting with empathy is a survival trait. Similar cooperation mechanisms exist for many other animals, from parrots to vampire bats.
Well the "why" tends to be pretty simple and straightforward, until you bring religion into it and then its generally pretty arbitrary.
I don't think that's the case at all, and I'm somewhere between a-religious and antireligious.
The whys of morality, even if it's all biology, get pretty complicated. That's because they're evolution-tuned strategies rather than carefully considered moral systems. And because different people have reasonable but different perspectives on the same thing. Compare and contrast the "right to life" versus "right to die" movements, for example.
And religions, for a lot of things, pretty far from arbitrary. A lot of their moral views parallel the intuitive ones. More come from careful consideration of social effects. And even the ones that appear arbitrary often have interesting roots. E.g., a historical case that doesn't mean much anymore (like "don't eat pork"). Or they just happen to supportpower structures (like "the Pope is infalliable").
Does this mean that sellers will now add a "sales tax" to what they're selling in order to compensate for this new tax? And who decides how much tax is paid? States? The National Government? (Please excuse my ignorance in American Government policies)
This is not a new tax. The IRS is just saying that people are required to pay income tax, and that they believe that a lot of eBay sellers are failing to do that. In the US, the federal government is the main collector of income tax, but many states have one as well.
Sales taxes are purely a state and local matter. That's another big loophole. If I buy a computer locally, I pay sales tax, and it is collected automatically by the vendor. If I buy one from out of state, I am still obliged to pay the tax, but it is not collected automatically. At the end of the year on my state taxes, I'm supposed to declare and pay for the computer purchase. In practice, most people don't.
The article itself is a massively wordy orgy of bullshit and bananas, written by a person that's clearly trying way too fucking hard to write. The writer violates a basic concept of writing, and writing well; get your point across with as few words as possible.
Any non-retarded reindeer on Santa's sleigh would be able to fly. There's a problem in the premise. Calling an imaginary purchase and transition plan non-retarded doesn't in any way explain how Wikipedia could have any market value, or how it could somehow retain enough volunteer leaders once dedicated to the non-commercial purpose of the project to assure a critical mass required to maintain an open document against malicious or ill-informed tampering. The only thing that could possibly be sold that a well-funded entrepreneur couldn't reproduce on their own is the URL. There is no way to assure the goodwill of thousands of contributors would somehow magically attach to a string of a dozen characters.
I have already explained elsewhere why Wikipedia has market value, but the quick summary is that many web properties are valued on traffic and users alone. You don't need a magic technology, and it doesn't matter what your competitors can develop if you have a network effect going for you.
Take MySpace as an example. They have no interesting technology at all. None. What they have is users. Or take eBay. Their web site looks like something out of a time capsule, and people have built much better auction sites. Does it matter? No, because they have the users. And why do these guys have the users? It's because they have the users. Ta da! The network effect in action.
And Wikipedia doesn't just have the users, they have one of the top Google spots on thousands and thousands of common search terms. That's not a dozen characters, that's millions of incoming links on many thousands of different sites. No matter how well-funded you are, you can't buy that.
And as to your unsupported assertion that a transition to other ownership is a priori impossible, tell it to your reindeer. I told you one way it could be done, and I'm sure there are others. That you can't imagine how it could happen isn't proof that it can't happen; it's just proof you can't imagine it. I can somehow believe a guy who joined Slashdot nearly ten years after they started doesn't yet know absolutely every possible way to run a community site.
no working commercial property appraiser or financial auditor will publicly agree with you.
Huh. I guess I've only worked on internet startups for, oh, a dozen years, so maybe I don't know much about the topic. But I've never met a commerial property appraiser doing due diligence for an internet property. Out here, people are perfectly comfortable investing millions in interesting notions and wild schemes. Know many commercial property appraisers who bless those deals? Seriously, send me their card. I know plenty of people who'd get a frickin' bank loan instead of giving 40% of their next company to VCs.
Unless you can point to an offer on the table, all you have is a big fat imagination
For a guy whose entire case is built on alternating between imagining things and failing to imagine them, you should be careful knocking imagination.
Imagine you are google, and you just bought Wikipedia for a billion bucks. All the admins just quit
At that point, they have already failed. Which could happen. But any non-retarded purchase and transition plan would have community PR as the number one aspect. And it wouldn't even be very hard. Remember, they don't have to retain everybody. And if they do it as a Wikipedia-can't-survive-without-this play, most people with objections would roll over rather than see it die.
Remember that most of the people heavily involved are, by their nature, people who really like making and maintaining things. Breaking them goes against their nature.
The namespace and servers might have value, but the unprotected copyright makes the content unmarketable.
As I said before and again elsewhere in this thread, the content doesn't matter to the valuation. Not at all. The servers barely matter; they're a fraction of one percent of the total value of the property. It's the users, the contributors, the links, and the brand that people will pay for.
Recent sales are of sites with a very different business model. Their content is not easily obtained and most off their users are not interested in such things as Creative Commons or GNU licenses and their impact on how we view ownership and use rights. YouTube's [...]
Youtube is a perfect example of what I'm saying. Most of the pageviews on there are for stolen content. That's even worse than GFDL content. But nobody cares. They were bought for exactly the same thing that makes Wikipedia valuable. Users, traffic, inbound links, and brand.
Most Wikipedia users don't know or care about CC or GFDL either. They go there because it comes up in Google, or because somebody links to it, or because somebody told them about it. Even most of the contributors don't care that much about the licenses. It's just a small subset who would be sad about that. And I'm part of that subset, so I'm not discounting them. They're just not numerically significant.
That's the crux of the problem - you're valuable because people work for free - will the still do that if you were a commercial enterprise?
Yes, if handled well. People do vast amounts of free work for commercial sites like Flickr, YouTube, IMDB, Yelp, and... Slashdot. There are plenty of companies getting VC money right now based on the Tom Sawyer model. Because it has been proven to work.
For Wikipedia, it's mainly a question of how the sale would be handled. With the right sort of drama around it, with the Foundation saying, "We'll die without this," then most people will happily see it rescued by somebody not obviously evil.
I hope it doesn't happen, by the way. But as somebody soaking in the internet startup community, I'm confident that there would be buyers at prices above $100m.
Again, why buy it? All the info is yours for free
This just doesn't matter. The big lesson of Wikipedia is that information is now effectively free. The largest user of their content is tiny in comparison. And that's with some added value; the pure clone sites are much further down.
The asset is not the content, it's the vast user base kept there through network effects.
there's a 17 yo kid in GA that recently got a mandatory 10 year sentence for receiving a blowjob from a 15 yo girl.
I think you're talking about Genarlow Wilson. IMHO, he got completely shafted. There's a great article about him. Were I in the DA's district, I'd be rounding up an impeachment petition right now. It's a fucking travesty.
So, Wiki's probably worth exactly the resale value of its servers; plus perhaps a little for the url. Since it is essentially duplicatable by anyone with server space to host it there is no value to the intangibles, i.e. the content.
Bzzzt! I gather you don't do much work in the VC-funded web world.
Wikipedia has massive traffic, massive inbound linking, a massive community, and a well-known brand. Those are huge intangible assets in the sale of any online property. If you compare other recent sales on those metrics, we're talking in the hundreds of millions, easy.
Yes, it's a little touchier to sell Wikipedia than your average web site, as the current community is relatively anti-commerce. But if it's a choice between shutting it down and putting it under, say, Google's protective wing, with just a modest set of Google ads down the side, enough would go along to keep it a viable property. And if the Wikimedia Foundation were willing to sell it for below market to get special terms, there are all sorts of other plausible homes for it.
Randi claims that most applicants never agree to a "proper test protocol", and are never tested. But he also points out that both sides have to agree what that "proper test protocol" is. So either side can basically tank the process by being disagreeable. With a million dollars on the line (not to mention his reputation), you have to believe that Randi has a serious incentive to make sure that nobody passes the test. Apparently the easiest way to do so is to ensure that nobody (or only a very few people) actually gets to take the test.
The descriptions I've read of what he considers proper test protocols are quite reasonable. Do you have any actual evidence of them making unreasonable requirements to sink things? Or are you just engaging in FUD?
Looking at the forum on applicants, for example, things seem pretty above-board. In addition to the specifics, which seem fine, you can see that Randi often delegates the negotiations to skeptic groups. Are you suggesting they they are all in secret collusion with Randi to drive these people off?
ow if the criteria were set and judged by a neutral third party, then I might have a little more faith in the challenge. But I doubt that would ever happen because JREF would then face the chance (however minute) of actually losing the money and the bragging rights.
Then start your own prize. Don't have a million dollars? That doesn't matter. Randi didn't either. Back in the day, I and a lot of other people signed notes backing the prize. Now it sounds like he has cash in hand. If you put together a prize with criteria that are better than Randi's, you'll do even better. But make sure you include some experts in flimflammery as part of it. A good mix of scientists and magicians is what I'd like to see.
Slashdot Mirror
"Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done." In my experience, this translates into a dead-end grunt job.
Possibly, but not necessarily. That's basically what you want out of any startup employee. Even if you're CEO, you'll be bringing in the mail, and you'd be more likely to go fetch coffee than the devs would, as they are the bottleneck.
So they could legitimately be trying to run things more as a bunch of internal startups than as the typical large, hierarchy-focused company. That's certainly possible, as they still have a lot of people there who fondly remember the early days when you could just get stuff done. Further evidence in favor of that is the relatively uncoordinated way they run their products; it suggests that they really do have a lot of small groups running around and doing things, and worrying about coordination later.
The fancy documentation and support contract is a different product that some companies are willing to pay more for. It's also bundling. It's not differential pricing on the same product.
You're correct that throwing in a few trimmings makes it technically a different product. However, if the software is not materially different, I'm inclined to call it the same product in a practical sense. There are a number of software products that are effectively sold like that, and I'm sure you can find them if you look.
This is especially true for "enterprise" products. I promise you that the people who will actually pay $1m for software (and pay another $50k annually for support) will not buy the same software used for $110 from some random guy. And they won't buy the $100 version at Walmart either. I know it's irrational, but that's what you get when you let a bunch of primates run things. For proof, just look at large-company adoption of free software.
I'd like to see both differential pricing and all on-selling restrictions made illegal. This would promote a more free, fair and optimal market. Not simple to implement though.
Creating and paying a large bureaucracy to keep me from selling what I want to whom I choose is a use of "more free" that I'm unfamiliar with. And the other fellow is right; your "more optimal" market is one where in my example I'd just not sell to the low end, so the vast majority of potential consumers would just miss out.
Monopolies = industrial feudalism
Now here we agree. In fact, I'd go farther. Every large corporation I've seen the guts of is run feudally. And given how it trains people to think, I believe it's one of the biggest threats to democracy.
The amusing fact is that this is nothing more than a capitalist version of taking from the rich (those are willing and able to pay more) and giving to the poor (those aren't willing or able to pay more).
Some people might think you are kidding there, but there really are cases where everybody wins from differential pricing, and businesses really do take from the rich so they can afford to sell to the poor. Let me add an example to make it clearer:
Imagine you want to build some sort of clever new software. You see that 10,000 people would pay $100 for it (as a fun toy, say), and 5 companies would pay $1m for it, because they can each make $3m from using it commercially.
If the software costs $1m to develop and you sell all the copies for $100, your profit will be $500. Nobody's going to go to all that trouble for $500, so you wouldn't make the software. And if you did, you'd be steamed that these companies made millions while you got pocket lint.
However, if you sell the first 5 copies for $1m each (with, say, some fancy documentation and a support contract), you can then go on to release a consumer version to get everybody else. You get $5m in the bank, so you're happy. The companies netted $10m, so they're happy. And everybody else got a fun toy at a reasonable price.
Note that although your average price per copy there is $600, you couldn't get the same effect by charging $600; none of the consumers would pay that much for a toy.
So yes a BJ was involved, but he was impeached for lying under oath about a BJ. Something any one of us would do jail time for.
Don't be hasty. For me, whether or not I'd do jail time would really depend on the quality of the blow job.
He and his crew are bandits. They have come to power to sack the treasury, transferring as much cash to their cronies as possible. The situation is so bad that one risks sounding slightly insane even talking about it honestly.
Don't get me wrong, I personally am counting the days until Bush, et al, leave office. (Quite literally, thanks to a beloved birthday gift from this site.) But I don't think they qualify here.
Maybe I'm comparing too much what's going on in Russia or half of Africa, but kleptocracy does not seem to be one of the Bush administration's major sins. Sure, they've given a fair bit of dough to Haliburton, but I think that was a minor side effect rather than a major goal. I think most of their financially dubious behavior has been more about social engineering (massive tax cuts for the wealthy), empire-building (Iraq, etc), and buying votes (faith-based initiative funding, unjustifiable and giant increases in farm subsidies, the explosion in earmarks).
I think were personal or crony enrichment a major goal, they would have been much better at it.
We had a ballot initiative to change the redistricting process, but people are so stupid that voted against it. From what I gathered after the election, it was one of those initiatives people voted against because they didn't understand it, or they turned off their mind and listened to whatever ideological sewage source they favor.
Yeah, I was dumbfounded too. Another popular reason to oppose: people they didn't like were for it, ergo there must be something bad in it somewhere, even if they couldn't say what it was.
Another one that killed me was the understandable but horrific, "it will cost my party seats". Understandable, because that's part of how partisan politics works. But horrific because it elevates personal victory to the highest station, ignoring things like good goverment or fair representation.
The point of this forum is to generate advertising clicks/views for the owners of this forum.
The point of any business is to make money. Most of them do that by providing a service that's valuable to all concerned. Part of the service here is providing a place for discussion.
SpeakEasy terminated me after six months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo.
Could you post proof of that? I've been downloading and uploading like a madman, and I've never heard a peep from them.
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense". Groklaw shouldn't be about its creator.
Aww, that's cute! Completely naive, but darling.
Seriously, have you ever been sued? Even when you are 100% sure that you are in the right, you still have to pay $250 an hour to your lawyer to fend off all the bullshit they care to throw. With SCO, that may be a near-infinite supply. And if you miss something in preparation or they find something that they can distort into an apparent problem? Then you could be well and truly fucked. Even if it all turns out perfectly, it's months or years of stress, just because there's so much on the line and so much out of your control.
Make no mistake: if somebody suggests you have "nothing to hide", that's the time to clam up completely.
Are you saying that in this day and age that most computers and their browsers don't support a cross platform java sandbox?
Of course they theoretically support it. Do they have it? If they do, is the startup time for a person with their browser under 500 ms?
Until the answer to both those questions is yes for 95% or more of typical web users, client-side Java is of no use to me in the places where I'd use GWT.
If one is going to compile code to an "executable" form, in this case java script, why does it actually matter what form it is. Why not compile it to java?
Because every browser has a roughly adequate JavaScript interpreter that is integrated with page rendering.
Like most compilers, things like GWT adapt programmer brains to the execution environment.
For a long time my sig was
touch -- -rf\ \*
Then I stopped being a sysadmin, and no longer hate everyone.
If a student were to create a work, and license that work to other students with terms in the license that state that when the work is incorporated into any original work no citation is to be given, would it still be considered plagiarism to use it in a work without attribution to the original author?
Basically, yes. When you hand in your paper with your name on it, you are representing your work as your own. They might call it "academic fraud" rather than "plagiarism", but either way it's both forbidden and wrong.
so, since the students works are the primary resource for TurnItIn to remain viable, how much of a cut should the clean students get for their work?
Exactly as much as they can make selling their paper on the open market to another service like TurnItIn. That is, zero.
The basic point of copyright is to give authors an incentive to create and publish their works. That incentive is not diminished, because TurnItIn is not sellling the papers on or making additional copies. The universities have given them a copy, and they keep it. The students have experienced no harm, and so have no grounds to sue.
It's obvious to me, as a trained ufologist, that this is not a natural phenomenon. This hexagonal structure was BUILT by intelligent life.
It's obvious to me, as a trained psychoceramicist, that anybody who claims to be a "trained ufologist" already has some biases on the topic of what counts as activity by space aliens.
On the other hand (and as TFA points out), the key word is empathy. Without empathy, social structures cannot exist. If everyone and everyone is solely self-interested, groups of cooperating individuals could never thrive as they would be destroyed internally by conflicting self-interest.
Not quite. We evolved the capacity for empathy precisely because our genes are solely self-interested, and people acting with empathy is a survival trait. Similar cooperation mechanisms exist for many other animals, from parrots to vampire bats.
Well the "why" tends to be pretty simple and straightforward, until you bring religion into it and then its generally pretty arbitrary.
I don't think that's the case at all, and I'm somewhere between a-religious and antireligious.
The whys of morality, even if it's all biology, get pretty complicated. That's because they're evolution-tuned strategies rather than carefully considered moral systems. And because different people have reasonable but different perspectives on the same thing. Compare and contrast the "right to life" versus "right to die" movements, for example.
And religions, for a lot of things, pretty far from arbitrary. A lot of their moral views parallel the intuitive ones. More come from careful consideration of social effects. And even the ones that appear arbitrary often have interesting roots. E.g., a historical case that doesn't mean much anymore (like "don't eat pork"). Or they just happen to supportpower structures (like "the Pope is infalliable").
Does this mean that sellers will now add a "sales tax" to what they're selling in order to compensate for this new tax? And who decides how much tax is paid? States? The National Government? (Please excuse my ignorance in American Government policies)
This is not a new tax. The IRS is just saying that people are required to pay income tax, and that they believe that a lot of eBay sellers are failing to do that. In the US, the federal government is the main collector of income tax, but many states have one as well.
Sales taxes are purely a state and local matter. That's another big loophole. If I buy a computer locally, I pay sales tax, and it is collected automatically by the vendor. If I buy one from out of state, I am still obliged to pay the tax, but it is not collected automatically. At the end of the year on my state taxes, I'm supposed to declare and pay for the computer purchase. In practice, most people don't.
The article itself is a massively wordy orgy of bullshit and bananas, written by a person that's clearly trying way too fucking hard to write. The writer violates a basic concept of writing, and writing well; get your point across with as few words as possible.
Sigh.
Any non-retarded reindeer on Santa's sleigh would be able to fly. There's a problem in the premise. Calling an imaginary purchase and transition plan non-retarded doesn't in any way explain how Wikipedia could have any market value, or how it could somehow retain enough volunteer leaders once dedicated to the non-commercial purpose of the project to assure a critical mass required to maintain an open document against malicious or ill-informed tampering. The only thing that could possibly be sold that a well-funded entrepreneur couldn't reproduce on their own is the URL. There is no way to assure the goodwill of thousands of contributors would somehow magically attach to a string of a dozen characters.
I have already explained elsewhere why Wikipedia has market value, but the quick summary is that many web properties are valued on traffic and users alone. You don't need a magic technology, and it doesn't matter what your competitors can develop if you have a network effect going for you.
Take MySpace as an example. They have no interesting technology at all. None. What they have is users. Or take eBay. Their web site looks like something out of a time capsule, and people have built much better auction sites. Does it matter? No, because they have the users. And why do these guys have the users? It's because they have the users. Ta da! The network effect in action.
And Wikipedia doesn't just have the users, they have one of the top Google spots on thousands and thousands of common search terms. That's not a dozen characters, that's millions of incoming links on many thousands of different sites. No matter how well-funded you are, you can't buy that.
And as to your unsupported assertion that a transition to other ownership is a priori impossible, tell it to your reindeer. I told you one way it could be done, and I'm sure there are others. That you can't imagine how it could happen isn't proof that it can't happen; it's just proof you can't imagine it. I can somehow believe a guy who joined Slashdot nearly ten years after they started doesn't yet know absolutely every possible way to run a community site.
no working commercial property appraiser or financial auditor will publicly agree with you.
Huh. I guess I've only worked on internet startups for, oh, a dozen years, so maybe I don't know much about the topic. But I've never met a commerial property appraiser doing due diligence for an internet property. Out here, people are perfectly comfortable investing millions in interesting notions and wild schemes. Know many commercial property appraisers who bless those deals? Seriously, send me their card. I know plenty of people who'd get a frickin' bank loan instead of giving 40% of their next company to VCs.
Unless you can point to an offer on the table, all you have is a big fat imagination
For a guy whose entire case is built on alternating between imagining things and failing to imagine them, you should be careful knocking imagination.
Imagine you are google, and you just bought Wikipedia for a billion bucks. All the admins just quit
At that point, they have already failed. Which could happen. But any non-retarded purchase and transition plan would have community PR as the number one aspect. And it wouldn't even be very hard. Remember, they don't have to retain everybody. And if they do it as a Wikipedia-can't-survive-without-this play, most people with objections would roll over rather than see it die.
Remember that most of the people heavily involved are, by their nature, people who really like making and maintaining things. Breaking them goes against their nature.
The namespace and servers might have value, but the unprotected copyright makes the content unmarketable.
As I said before and again elsewhere in this thread, the content doesn't matter to the valuation. Not at all. The servers barely matter; they're a fraction of one percent of the total value of the property. It's the users, the contributors, the links, and the brand that people will pay for.
Recent sales are of sites with a very different business model. Their content is not easily obtained and most off their users are not interested in such things as Creative Commons or GNU licenses and their impact on how we view ownership and use rights. YouTube's [...]
Youtube is a perfect example of what I'm saying. Most of the pageviews on there are for stolen content. That's even worse than GFDL content. But nobody cares. They were bought for exactly the same thing that makes Wikipedia valuable. Users, traffic, inbound links, and brand.
Most Wikipedia users don't know or care about CC or GFDL either. They go there because it comes up in Google, or because somebody links to it, or because somebody told them about it. Even most of the contributors don't care that much about the licenses. It's just a small subset who would be sad about that. And I'm part of that subset, so I'm not discounting them. They're just not numerically significant.
That's the crux of the problem - you're valuable because people work for free - will the still do that if you were a commercial enterprise?
Yes, if handled well. People do vast amounts of free work for commercial sites like Flickr, YouTube, IMDB, Yelp, and... Slashdot. There are plenty of companies getting VC money right now based on the Tom Sawyer model. Because it has been proven to work.
For Wikipedia, it's mainly a question of how the sale would be handled. With the right sort of drama around it, with the Foundation saying, "We'll die without this," then most people will happily see it rescued by somebody not obviously evil.
I hope it doesn't happen, by the way. But as somebody soaking in the internet startup community, I'm confident that there would be buyers at prices above $100m.
Again, why buy it? All the info is yours for free
This just doesn't matter. The big lesson of Wikipedia is that information is now effectively free. The largest user of their content is tiny in comparison. And that's with some added value; the pure clone sites are much further down.
The asset is not the content, it's the vast user base kept there through network effects.
there's a 17 yo kid in GA that recently got a mandatory 10 year sentence for receiving a blowjob from a 15 yo girl.
I think you're talking about Genarlow Wilson. IMHO, he got completely shafted. There's a great article about him. Were I in the DA's district, I'd be rounding up an impeachment petition right now. It's a fucking travesty.
So, Wiki's probably worth exactly the resale value of its servers; plus perhaps a little for the url. Since it is essentially duplicatable by anyone with server space to host it there is no value to the intangibles, i.e. the content.
Bzzzt! I gather you don't do much work in the VC-funded web world.
Wikipedia has massive traffic, massive inbound linking, a massive community, and a well-known brand. Those are huge intangible assets in the sale of any online property. If you compare other recent sales on those metrics, we're talking in the hundreds of millions, easy.
Yes, it's a little touchier to sell Wikipedia than your average web site, as the current community is relatively anti-commerce. But if it's a choice between shutting it down and putting it under, say, Google's protective wing, with just a modest set of Google ads down the side, enough would go along to keep it a viable property. And if the Wikimedia Foundation were willing to sell it for below market to get special terms, there are all sorts of other plausible homes for it.
Randi claims that most applicants never agree to a "proper test protocol", and are never tested. But he also points out that both sides have to agree what that "proper test protocol" is. So either side can basically tank the process by being disagreeable. With a million dollars on the line (not to mention his reputation), you have to believe that Randi has a serious incentive to make sure that nobody passes the test. Apparently the easiest way to do so is to ensure that nobody (or only a very few people) actually gets to take the test.
The descriptions I've read of what he considers proper test protocols are quite reasonable. Do you have any actual evidence of them making unreasonable requirements to sink things? Or are you just engaging in FUD?
Looking at the forum on applicants, for example, things seem pretty above-board. In addition to the specifics, which seem fine, you can see that Randi often delegates the negotiations to skeptic groups. Are you suggesting they they are all in secret collusion with Randi to drive these people off?
ow if the criteria were set and judged by a neutral third party, then I might have a little more faith in the challenge. But I doubt that would ever happen because JREF would then face the chance (however minute) of actually losing the money and the bragging rights.
Then start your own prize. Don't have a million dollars? That doesn't matter. Randi didn't either. Back in the day, I and a lot of other people signed notes backing the prize. Now it sounds like he has cash in hand. If you put together a prize with criteria that are better than Randi's, you'll do even better. But make sure you include some experts in flimflammery as part of it. A good mix of scientists and magicians is what I'd like to see.