OS X puts a cool GUI on top of Unix, right? Which is what Windows did to MS-DOS to compete with the Mac (or just get GUI), no? Which is what KDE and GNOME have been trying to do for years, correct?
So if Apple and MS can do it, why not the "open source community" - the same people, presumably, who've built the server layer of the entire modern Internet: Apache, Linux, BIND, etc. Not to mention Perl, MySQL, PHP. Whatever...
Apple sucks. They've conned "artists", basically, they have minimal market share with an influential group in computer/Net/design circles, which they parlay into stock market survival. But they ripped off millions, me included, by charging triple for their hardware, and pulling that off by designer packaging and marketing - a Scully strategy from the '80s. I started out using Macs for DTP, and flipped when I found out that A) I could get more choice for a third of the price in PCs, and, B) within a year or two Photoshop, Quark, etc, ported to PC, were for my purposes, identical. And the Mac GUI is not easier than Windows if you don't know either.
I'm not a programmer/nerd/geek, so I stick to Win98 'cause I started with GUI, not command line. But I do mainly Net stuff, for years, working remotely on Linux/Apache, etc, etc. So it's all one continuous thing to me, really: Win on my end, merging into Linux/Apache, etc online (like Telnet in from a Win app, but I'm operating a Unix shell...)... MS I believe is "evil" because they're a big corp, and by definition they're trying to trap their consumers within their proprietary model at all costs, keep growing, monopolize - they don't have an expiry date like replicants in Blade Runner, so that's their nature. So I know I could have a way cooler OS than Windows. But Win works.
I've had 98 for 2-1/2 years on one main machine, installing HUNDREDS of every sort of demo, shareware, junk, and it's never melted down, no OS reinstall. Crash, and it restarts! I can find anything for it. And I can even run ancient programs. Unlike Apple.
Of course, most of the s/w could be ported/duplicated in a minute, if there was a Linux (or any other) core effective desktop GUI package to control it all. I don't feel like Win is a choice, it's just the by far the best of a bad lot. I'm ready to jump...
So, Apple is true to form with OS X...if you buy gadgets, feel self-conscious using a Palm IIIx these days, have had and broken a VAIO, well, I'm sure OS X is cool... A gadget.
Otherwise, what's the big deal? It's why someone doesn't just get on with the desktop Linux packaging!!!!! What's the problem?
BTW, last StarOffice was slow, but the latest OpenOffice seems pretty peppy. Dunno how well the MS FILTERS work both ways, but it seems pretty well like an MS Office replacement already...
As a pop sci-fi reader, I call novels like "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" Near-Future-Fi - like Max Headroom's "20 minutes into the future..." - stories that blend the present with technological and social visions of the future that're rapidly morphing into reality, more or less, as time goes by.
"London Fields", by kinda literary Brit author, Martin Amis, falls clearly into the Near-Future-Fi category. It's not classified as science fiction, and it doesn't really point to technological innovation. It's more of an extrapolation of the effects of the digitally-networked, media-blitzed world we're living in now. Eerily near-normal...
Frontline conflict journalism is dead - journalists are the first targets in regional wars; living war correspondents are more often than not multiple amputees.
The news is the weather. With no war to report on, but some sort of bizarre ecological evolution going on, extreme weather is front page violence. Weather leads the news.
With general weirdness the order of the day, one tabloid has found a new niche - print Prozac - by covering only the cheeriest of good news.
Turning the corner of a city block into glaring sunlight, one may be startled by the unsettling postion of the sun - was it always at that angle?
And still, the must mundane, "normal" things are carry on. Darts, as in, the popular British pub game, are as popular as bowling is on American TV. Championship darts is just another path to fame and fortune in a modern electronic world...
It's been a while since I've read "London Fields", and maybe my memory is putting more emphasis on the parts that struck me. And it's definitely a bit of a read, especially compared to the easy film treatment style of a lot of pop sci-fi.
Soon I will begin to physically flog myself, I must be soooo stupid, since 90% of what I read on slashdot I don't understand. Maybe it's 'cause I'm not a geek programmer.
What it is is, ALL OF SLASHDOT is bait for about four people like me, who take ALL OF THE OTHER COMMENTS SERIOUSLY and go off like idiot kneejerk monkees... Right?
Like:
>Contrary to what the...RIAA would have you believe
Unless Moby and Lenny Kravitz have mysteriously tipped the scales, until at least a few years ago, most of the money made by the "major labels", the main "members" of the RIAA, came from artists signed BEFORE 1980. I forget the percentages, but they were overwhelming. Well into the '90s. And it makes sense. How many generations are now buying Zeppelin albums - three...four? Soooooo, what the hell is the RIAA representing NOW, fronting for. Indie dance labels? The DJ vinyl market? New music doesn't need the major label path, the distribution end's dead... The RIAA is most likely fronting for intellectual property rights grabs too outrageous for other parts of their members' corporate families to try for, because they're a falling star, have nothing to lose. Giving the RIAA credibility as a music representative if it's not ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY is giving them legitimacy, helping in their, um, EVIL cause... Not that I have anything against Rod Stewart. Carly Simon?...
>Large sections of the population have a negative view of techies
Large sections of the population don't know that email address contain an @ sign followed by letters a dot and more letters. And Web addresses end in those.letter things too. They must be confused about the DotCom revolution.
>when big corporations will pull their heads out of their asses and start to actually listen to their customers for a change
What are they doing now? Making billions and billions of dollars by ACCIDENT. By pissing off their customers. By creating advertising and publicity campaigns that're totally out of tune with the customers they don't listen to that they are promoting themselves out of business?
Isn't globalization the name o' the game? WTO and all that?
Hasn't it been decided that it's not worth it - well, no PROFITABLE to - use American labor to work for American-based (for now) multinational corporations?
Isn't it clear that it's too freakin' expensive to maintain the full-blown illusion of prosperity in America - that idea was dropped a couple decades ago.
Which is why the poor in America are blatantly ignored, and US billionaires multiply (15 billionaires for the first half of the '80s, 90 by '90, 260 today - where are all these billionaires coming from - and that's AFTER the Dotcom Bust).
Name ONE shining example of US foreign policy (this one's just 'cause I can't even think of what foreign policy IS exactly - is that like the War on Terroism and the Coalition; supporting Israel with a few billion a year; the Gulf War - or are those military policy? I'm clueless...)
Nothing clever, witty, sensational here - just a statement and a plain straight-up plea for collective common sense.
There is NO DOUBT that there is an organized Establishment effort to kill freedom on the Net, to minimize the Net "commons", the general free zone that fuelled the Net Dream-turned-DotCom-Boom, and seems to have survived the Bust...so far.
There is NO VISUAL RALLYING SYMBOL to represent modern awareness of and opposition to threats to Net freedom, something like the blue ribbon of years ago that showed an apparently broadbased support for a Net freedom cause. This necessary symbol must exist, but it can't just BE, it has to POINT to a fully-equipped site to turn to for more.
There is NO PLACE TO TURN for an individual who wishes to help protect Net freedom, a one-stop site with comprehensive, readable info, and, above all, the ability to match a person's level of interest with an effective channel for action: places to learn more, make a donation, send a petition or letter, make a REALLY BIG DONATION, volunteer time and skills, offer a lifetime of commitment to an aspect of the cause.
A fair while ago, I read an article. in suck or Salon, describing how the geek community was busy primping and glowing and preparing to bask in the radiance of the Brave New Net World they were building, while DC lobbyists were pounding through Net legislation designed for the future, to take control when things had shaken out. It mentioned 1,500 pieces of Net legislation being lobbied for in DC, or maybe that was 1,500 corporate Net lobbyists, or both. And that was then.
The DotCom Bubble has Burst - an occurrence I think of as less bad luck, bad ideas and bad business, and more a case of young talent being given enough rope (read: cash) to hang themselves, thus neutralizing a new competitive wave - an "accidentally on purpose" kind of thing. Still, "Net people", geeks, whatever, seem every bit as vocal these days about Net rights, and as passive on a practical level as before. AND beaten down by the Bust to boot.
It's clear that, today, there is no separation between code, coding, using code, and having access to code or to code-driven products: be it game boxes or more-or-less uncensored, open online communication. And the Net is the Code Superhighway that we're all traveling, sans speed limits and toolbooths, checkpoints and national borders...so far.
What? Do you read this and, MAYBE, go, "Yeah, this sounds right, and I should help do something about it"...and then click on? Am I doing the same, only a little less efficiently, by writing this message? What will you do?
I think I managed to rant through a fairly informed list of reasons and opinions why micropayment is so slow in coming.
If you're interested, just look at the other ballpeen replies in the topic.
The short version BEFORE this slashdot post (which I started): Obviously, large business interests have no...interest in seeing a cash-based system work. Credit card, and even direct debit, suck, for various reasons, a major one being, not THAT many people and not necessarily the people who would be a significant market for indie microcost products, have cards, or want to use them, or have anything left on them.
The short(ish) version after reading the comments here: It's the rebel-without-a-clue GEEKS who may've had as big a hand in this as any loose conspiracy of big business interests. As you, the tiny minority, noticed, this is a shocking array of lame answers from people who you'd think could see beyond paying for National Enquirer Online's daily horoscope, or whatever, to the freedom it would bring to indie producers: writers, musicians, artists, the possibilities are endless.
Forget anonymous cash, just get CASH-based micropayment online and see what happens!
As I said also in another rant: It's like the lemonade stand. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... Micropayments accessible to ANYONE with cash is the true spirit of free market action. Like dropping a buck in a buskers hat 'cause he played a fine tune. Value for dollar.
(I feel like an activist now. Can't remember when I used the same examples, words, rhetoric, whatever, more than once in the same place...)
I said, given these revolutionary times, some things have to be taken as a rule of thumb: one rule, CORPS & GOVS are BAD. Not every incorporated entity, or even big multimillion dollar companies. We're talking the MNCs, the transnational, M&A to sumo status conglomerates. The AOLTW, MS, GE, automakers, etc. The top of the Fortune 500.
You could disagree with this being a revolutionary time. I can't argue past a pop, reading alt news sources online point, but from what I have seen, things are getting critical. The DMCA and hundreds of other little bits and pieces of legislation are already in and starting to kick in. The dotcom golden age of independence was drowned in...oh, coincidence, billions of dollars. The FCC is about to start regulating the Net. Now the gov wants its own Net. AOL wants ICANN to make keywords an alternate or replacement to URLs. Their national channels often advertise shows with AOL keywords and no URLs. They alone have 30 million subs, and 80 million on IM - it's plausible that someone says, let's shut down the Net and use AOL instead. Colin Powell was/is(?) on the AOL board, appeared as a guest with Steve Case for the Carlyle group. His son is chairman of the FCC, appointed by Bush. The Net is going DOWN... if things are done.
I'm not a WTO fanatic, I really didn't even know what all that was about until a couple months ago. 9-11 didn't freak me out, it just made me finally look around a little. And it's a revolution, civil ideological war fought by proxy with no one really watching. The military is stunned, still in the LAST turn of the century. The power elite is thus exposed. The people need to rally and revise, but they don't even know this is all going on.
So I was responding to someone who seemed to be saying: look, I'm working on one of these projects military homeland defense, evil Bush things, and hey, the people are cool, and the arguments aren't unreasonable.
And when things are as trick as they are, that type of thinking isn't open-minded, it's classically naive. That's the way these things work.
Hence, rule of thumb. No the same as saying STOP THINKING. Just, use this - as opposed to who knows what void - as a STARTING POINT when you evaluate, before you conclude and start spreading the word of your revelation.
Like Lemmy from Motorhead said to me in a real life interview, "Maybe Hitler was right." It was from a dream of his. Didn't print it. You gotta evaluate, use your head. A few "absolutes" can help!
Reasonable rant. Nice diatribe. Unfortunately, and probably not because you're sub-intelligent, just haven't really thought things through...thoroughly wrong, wrong-headed, and destructive to the very things you purport to support.
Still reading? Here's why (briefly!):
What most people don't understand is the full extent of CONTENT IS KING. The PERCEPTION is that "content" is good, or else you can call it junk. Little thought is given to the ways in which content is created. By the great tormented genius writer/painter/wanker cyberfi writer, whatever? By a collaborative group of artists and technicians and others, like on a movie? Sure. BUT, as was the case with zines - all indie media - and is accelerated online, EDITING can also be a completely freestanding form of "art", or "content creation". An Editor can be, though isn't necessarily, an artist, and there are lots of styles.
Take slasdot. It's pretty interesting, hardcore participation, and it relies on editing. Story submissions first by a smaller group of editors, then the karma points, by "the people" supported by democracyware - kinda like the jury system. But you're right - it's not even a 1-cent a post site. That doesn't make it bad...it's what it is, hopefully what it intended to be.
That's POINT #1: Volume of posting and popularity don't make "content" online, in the sense of what people will pay with. Traffic should be able to generate revenue other ways, but not always by content for sale.
But look at fuckedcompany. They're like slashdot with a sensationalistic theme. They charge now for most of the shit. I get pissed when I can't see the stuff. I won't subscribe...I haven't so far. But I don't click away not caring...I WANNA KNOW what those pay-to-view rumors are. The guy, Pud or whatever, is making out fine with pretty hefty subs, due to the insane corporate VC people and the remaining trendy ThinkGeek geeks with cash. But if a microcash system existed, and he couldn't charge his sub rates but had to go for pennies a rumor and I had a simple click-don't click 5-10-25 cent decision, like video games, I'd be a'clickin'.
What does that have to do with editing? The couple other dotcom bubble burst watch sites, urban expose and whatever, I once read, but probably wouldn't click to pay, or very seldom. Why? EDITING. An editor can be obvious, rewriting, doing the lead pieces, or pretty invisible, just tweaking the system, shaping the space. Fuckedcompany got the right balance, maybe he had a good inside crew to start, but a bunch of buddies doesn't hold stuff up. His flavor overall made it worth paying for.
Which is POINT#2: the light touch - a good feel for encouraging unknowns, noninvasive editing, just listening to the traffic and making mild adjustments, is a particularly online EDITOR AS CREATOR style. He's the guy the trad journalists were worried about without knowing it 10 years ago when they thought newspapers would go under 'cause everyone would be reporting online with windowfront view of every story in the world, real-time. But few of that editor class has emerged. They will. Hopefully before the Net gets strangled. Shaping a flow can create CONTENT.
So when you say, everything should be free, and I want to get a cheap ($300) Rackspace account, but that's a little stiff as a monthly donation from me to whoever reads whatever I put up...what's free?
By putting down the idea of payment - and this is only PRINT so far, there's music, artwork, services, endless stuff - you're helping do what the VC did: buried the spirit in cash. If I was a conspiracy theory guy, I'd say the dotcom boombust was a power elite nuclear strike: remember that Details/Conde Naste internal memo leaked: "We don't know what this digital thing is, but whatever it is, we can't let it leave us in the dust." What's a couple billion thrown at a bunch of unready crews if it means beating down a generation of indie Net producers. Financial napalm.
Short version: Quality by individual effort will rise anywhere but in a corporate world. And people know it. And given half a chance - like with a good micropayment system, like Cartio seems to be - they WILL pay.
Like I said in another post: haven't you ever taken great satisfaction in dropping a buck in the case of some guy busking in the subway 'cause he was just freakin' great! That's fair consumerism. Value for dollar.
All right, I'm going nuts here. But I can't believe these consistently lame answers.
This has nothing to do with Yahoo! and MSNBC, it's about individuals, the little guys, the indie labels, the tattoo artists, the lone filmmakers. And the kids with computers who can crank out a better 90 minute fx flick than hollywood, for a fraction of the cost, and just need to get paid.
1. Everyone does not have a credit card. US is, I think 60% penetration? World, 20%. Take out the maxed out, the non-users, the completely in another market, it's not many people. And who's the most likely audience for indie gear: sure some Blue Card yuppy hackers and graphic artists, but a lot more people with cash, no cards.
2. I ran an indie music site that got up to nearly a million page views a month, 20,000+ unique visits a week. On a $30 account - they lived up to their unlimited bandwidth claim - my time, a few other volunteers, and a ton of site posting activity. One or two columns, or charts, could easily have pulled in 10cents a view, racked up 1,000 views a day, $100, $700 a week. For a start, that pays my bills. Rent too. Hey, food also. Sure the big guys rack up the pennies like they always do - but now others can too.
3. If you looked, the free setup is 20% flat charge. Then 15% and 10% if you invest one time in programs at $8K and %28K. So my $700 is $560 pretax. Cost me nothing... 20% is relative - just fine if you get what you need, versus nothing.
Cartio is free to the user. No card fee, period. 1 cent to 10 dollars Euro/US more or less the same.
Click and go, basically.
Anonymous cash - true digital cash, untraceable - is the ideal. But the biggest hurdle is geing able to get real cash digital, after that, especially for microtransactions, I'm not worried about privacy. I don't have credit to steal. I can't be laundering money, unless it's some kid's stolen lunch money. So privacy is a luxury, when it comes to dealing with the credit card people, or not.
So sad. Fish in barrel. Just 'cause Nielsen - the lone consistently sane Web figure with profile - is a year off, gives this guy the extra conviction he needs to be so wrong. At least, he won't stand out from the crowd.
>>These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.
Well, duh. All of the non-cash, or badly structured, failures. Credit cards by any other name. What do you expect? Historically, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor poorer. Your next article....
>>Users hate them.
Says you. Lemme talk to the users. Where's your quotes?
>>In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions.
I'm pasting quotes backward, but either direction, it's the same thing over and over. This is MICROpayments, not CAR payments. Who the f******** agonizes over spending a dime? And if you do get caught in inevitable scam sites, well, you move to hell along. You want to find the cool shit, and support it. With your quarter. Ever tossed a buck, with such satisfaction, in a subway busker's case? That's spontaneious micropayment, natural as hell.
>>Thus the anxiety of buying is a permanent feature of micropayment systems, since economic decisions are made on the margin - not, "Is a drink worth a dollar?" but, "Is the next drink worth the next dollar?" Anything that requires the user to approve a transaction creates this anxiety, no matter what the mechanism for deciding or paying is.
BS. Credit card mentality. Amusement parks should stop selling parkwide tickets -they don't work (maybe they have, evil bastards). SEE BELOW.
>>The desired state for micropayments - "Get the user to authorize payment without creating any overhead" - can thus never be achieved, because the anxiety of decision making creates overhead. No matter how simple the interface is, there will always be transactions too small to be worth the hassle.
Again, CREDIT CARDS AND DIRECT DEBITS 'cause anxiety. When was the decision anxiety so great about where to plug quarters in a video arcade, or looking over a candy bar rack. When you know what you have, you're fine.
>>Micropayment advocates mistakenly believe that efficient allocation of resources is the purpose of markets. The reasons markets work are not because users have embraced efficiency but because markets are the best place to allow users to maximize their preferences, and very often their preferences are not for conservation of cheap resources.
Sounds like he's talking about the idiots who DON'T get micropayment no matter how hard they try, than consumer behavior. Yeah, users do want to maximize their preferences, like being able to get stuff not produced by AOLTW, no matter how cheap. Who's talking about "conserving cheap resources", it's about people paying what they can afford, to people who those amounts make a difference, 'cause there's no train of middlemen.
>>the real world abounds with items of vanishingly small value: a single stick of gum, a single newspaper article, a single day's rent. There are three principal solutions to this problem offline - aggregation, subscription, and subsidy - that are used individually or in combination.
This the WTO model: break down decision barriers between individuals, meld minds, mandate group behavior, toss 'em a bone. I wanna pay a guy a nickel for his cool underground strip. Period. I don't want to card it, I certainly don't want to accomplish this via aggregation, subscription, and a subsidy....
Did you read this article, or just the subheads? No wonder I got such a bad attitude sitting on panels with experts.
I always thought it was some kinda IMF/World Bank/Visa conspiracy to keep micropayment down, but now I'm thinking it's the geeks, led by that Anonymous Coward guy...
What a bunch of clueless comments. Just bait, right?
Micropayments are the missing link in any sort of indie Net movement. Most of the creatives - artists, programmers - and the smaller and mid-size companies that would support 'em, got beat right down, financially and emotionally, with the dotcom fiasco. What a cheap way to kill the street competition and a new freak medium - smothering with cash works just as well as a plastic bag over the head!
Meanwhile, the ONE clear thing about the Net threat to the Establishment since '95-'96 WAS that micorpayments, done right, could provide real people the missing economic link to make the Net work for them.
Not freakin' credit card-based crap (ccard penetration outside the US is around 20%, and Americans are long since maxed out). Not even debit cards. You want a kid to be able to scrounge a fiver, take it to the 7-11, shove it in a machine, get a card like a subway card or library card or discount phone card, go home, start surfin' and be able to click and pay, dime here, nickel there, a buck for a pretty heavily compressed indie track (two bucks for a fatter file)... A little hard manga past that over 13? sign...
It's classic human consumer nature. The old candy store and what do you do with that quarter or buck. Jawbreaker, licorice, y'know... THAT'S A FAIR DISCRETIONARY BUYING SET-UP: lotsa instagratification choice, priced so you can both browse and buy.
Forget the anonymous cash aspect, take just the CASH aspect. All previous micro systems were tied to plastic - very limiting to the audience, by the mindset alone - and then to the increasingly-proven-evil debit mode (you can't really get debits to stop).
A GOOD micropayment system lets indie artists draw comics, bands and labels release tracks, every funny or fanatical freak who can type churn out fiction, reportage, lyrics, people create jewellery, put up friggin' FRACTALS for sale. No limits.
They tried that at the portals, The Globe, at least, others? Open a mini store. Or ebay. But these are different animals, CREDIT CARD secured. PayPal's hardly better.
If Cartio delivers invoice and personal check/money order fill options, THAT'S a revolution. Not only don't a ton of people have cards, or cards with anything left, people HATE them deep down. Spending cash is real.
As for usage: the click to far syndrome's spreading, slightly sneaker than in the XXX world. Been to Salon lately. Click a juicy headline. Start reading a couple paras. Suddenly: PREMIUM CONTENT, DUDE, SUB HERE. Even fuckedcompany is subscription: click too far and it's login or pay time. Papers like Variety, hardcore trades, the NY Times, etc have been doing that for a while, a teaser regular page with headlines and leads, then click a story and it's the subscriber page! Variety is a classic - try reading a juicy story.
And that's subs for $10-20-30+ a year, or even a month. Take DJ culture instead, it supports the talented quite well thanks, by NOT supporting the vast infrastructural overhead of a major label, or other big corp. Stay real, and charge reasonable, and you end up with more in your pocket than signing that big corporate contract to do whatever.
And people LIKE to pay, when they feel the payment is going direct. Buying with a card from a middleman is wack. Cracking Adobe software is cold. But sending three bucks to U-Turn records DIRECT may be questionable, but if you wanna do it, it's not less money for you, it's satisfaction!
Good micropayment is the lemonade stand. It's Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... It's FREE ENTERPRISE...everyone can play, and pay to play as well.
You did actually know this, right? Just teasing me?
I'm just arguing, sincerely but senselessly, while watching all my submissioins get rejected for a while. Then I'll go away, probably.
But for now, I think that was a rhetorical question. It's just another pitiful part of the giant snare. Most of those 60% aren't exactly gonna be able to retire on there deferred earnings or whatever. But they feel they have a stake in the megacorps... Interesting!
60% own stock in US corps? Really? That's, like, one share of MS each? 'Cause 65% of Americans will retire with NO MONEY IN THE BANK. 1% of Americans have more wealth than 90% of the rest, and the next 9% ALSO have as much wealth as the 90% rest. Which is, um, 10% of Americans have twice the wealth of the other 90%. So how much stock does that 60% have!
In the Silly Happy Days, wasn't Bill Gates' personal worth at one point equal to that of HALF THE US POPULATION?
I think yes!
Neat! And now the FCC can regulate the Net!
on
New Nokia Phone
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· Score: 2
Hmmm, ICQ PLUS video imaging...? Sounds kind of like "some sort of new-fangled video Instant Messaging product that it calls an Advanced IM-based High-Speed Service, or 'AIHS'", don't it?
THAT came from Michael Powell, son of Colin, then a commissioner (now the Bush-appointed Chairman) of the FCC, not recused from the AOLTW merger vote even though dad was on the AOL board with $13million in stock options. It's from Powell Jr's pre-release statement after the merger went through. AIHS? Read on...
"Despite the Majority's analysis [of AOL's IM] that purports to show a competitive problem in need of a remedy, the Majority (perhaps to its credit) does not mandate interoperability for current iterations of IM.... When a regulatory agency has to make up its own acronym to describe a product or service it intends to regulate, one should be concerned. ("Behold the Wizard of AIHS.")
"The concern is the implication for Internet regulation. This Order makes clear that the FCC has jurisdiction to regulate virtually every Internet product, or service that facilitates communications under Title I of the Communications Act. But, imposing IM conditions under that authority ignores the fact that the Commission, for decades now, has expressly declined to regulate similar computer, data processing and information services for the very reason that such interference would undermine the energy and drive toward innovation that characterizes these highly competitive markets. Based on the letter of the statute, this may be correct and FCC involvement in Internet communications services may be inevitable. Yet, the implications of that step are not fully considered here and that is why I am most hesitant (indeed unwilling) to make such a substantial leap in the context of an adjudicatory proceeding, without greater notice and a fuller and broader opportunity to comment that would result from an inquiry or rulemaking proceeding."
So AOL's IM near monopoly was left intact through the merger, to protect the open innovation of the Net, UNTIL a new-fangled video Instant Messaging product arrived. Then, perhaps, it would be time to get with the Net regulations... Goodie!
(See Michael's scrapbook photos, read his statements: click The Chairman.}
The dissection of your reply - in the reply below - is, as someone else snidely pointed out in after it, overly literal and pumped up. But basically, it misses your point, which was clear from the beginning.
Considering that most hip young hackers and IT types are all in general a smug lot - it's the nature of cliques. And absolutes tend to go with this often obnoxious territory. So that comment is obvious.
However, these days, with history going in cycles as it does, we are in revolutionary phase, and a lot of it is ideologically driven, rather than by technology or blood. And in that case, SOME things have to be taken pretty close to absolute, so as not to cloud more important issues.
CORPORATE CONGLOMERATES and GOVERNMENTS are, on the whole, BAD these days. Just look at the record. And what's on deck. The INDIVIDUALS, all tens and hundreds of thousands of them that make these corps and govs go, are still mostly just right as rain, fine folk, good people.
Good people do bad things. Even when they don't mean to. It's dangerous to confuse the individual people with their collective actions. And it's worse to take the soul out of science.
Most people, one on one, are GOOD. I'm quite sure that rampant EVIL is about as rare snuff flicks.
No doubt, the people you've been dealing with are as nice and well-intentioned as they seem to you. That doesn't make what's being done just as peachy keen as well.
It's the basic "guns don't kill people argument" -- inconclusive!
Discussing.NET development, but not Microsoft antitrust, or whether Samba should be de-balled, or whether circumventing copyright protection should be illegal to speak about in technical terms, or whether the FCC should start regulating Net comm protocols, or...
Even easier and more efficient: outlaw the Web, replace with AOL!
It's up and running and has 20% of America online already, it's more accesible with Keywords instead of those pesky URLs and no @ things on email, and it'll boost the economy as helping megacorporateconglomerates always does - good to go...
This from an article published in 2000. It's so easy for people to:
A. call clear statements like this The Obvious, and thereby ignore it, not bothering to REPEAT IT, as often and to as many people as possible, and ACT accordingly;
B. Brush off anything that attributes non-pop media patterns as "conspiracy theory" junk - hey, anything's possible, so why should I believe you?
Somebody took the time to write this out, hence the quote, but it's what A LOT of us really know, and ignore on the day-to-day, for reasons A or B (that latter usually being plain fear):
"The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.
The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos--where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated--have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.
So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labor, [taken to new extremes by the requirements of a "war on terrorism" and "homeland security"]. The Rubicon has been crossed--the techniques of oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to the core.
"In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs [and terrorism]; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets--and you can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied [and now, as a matter of public policy, ramping up Cold War-style covert activity against states, groups and individuals worldwide, to combat a "stateless terrorist enemy"]. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.
"The mechanisms of the police state are in place."
Pubished in 2000. My emphasis and updates added...
MHO: People of good conscience should start with acquiring knowledge, actually locating, discussing, and, on the basis of having checked out, supporting organizations like EFF. For a start. Maybe repeat in front of the mirror: "Every day, in every way, my Internet is shrinking to nothing, unless I do something about it." Try rereading the Emperor's New Clothes... Ask yourself: Where was I when the DMCA was passed?
Slashdot Mirror
OS X puts a cool GUI on top of Unix, right? Which is what Windows did to MS-DOS to compete with the Mac (or just get GUI), no? Which is what KDE and GNOME have been trying to do for years, correct?
So if Apple and MS can do it, why not the "open source community" - the same people, presumably, who've built the server layer of the entire modern Internet: Apache, Linux, BIND, etc. Not to mention Perl, MySQL, PHP. Whatever...
Apple sucks. They've conned "artists", basically, they have minimal market share with an influential group in computer/Net/design circles, which they parlay into stock market survival. But they ripped off millions, me included, by charging triple for their hardware, and pulling that off by designer packaging and marketing - a Scully strategy from the '80s. I started out using Macs for DTP, and flipped when I found out that A) I could get more choice for a third of the price in PCs, and, B) within a year or two Photoshop, Quark, etc, ported to PC, were for my purposes, identical. And the Mac GUI is not easier than Windows if you don't know either.
I'm not a programmer/nerd/geek, so I stick to Win98 'cause I started with GUI, not command line. But I do mainly Net stuff, for years, working remotely on Linux/Apache, etc, etc. So it's all one continuous thing to me, really: Win on my end, merging into Linux/Apache, etc online (like Telnet in from a Win app, but I'm operating a Unix shell...)... MS I believe is "evil" because they're a big corp, and by definition they're trying to trap their consumers within their proprietary model at all costs, keep growing, monopolize - they don't have an expiry date like replicants in Blade Runner, so that's their nature. So I know I could have a way cooler OS than Windows. But Win works.
I've had 98 for 2-1/2 years on one main machine, installing HUNDREDS of every sort of demo, shareware, junk, and it's never melted down, no OS reinstall. Crash, and it restarts! I can find anything for it. And I can even run ancient programs. Unlike Apple.
Of course, most of the s/w could be ported/duplicated in a minute, if there was a Linux (or any other) core effective desktop GUI package to control it all. I don't feel like Win is a choice, it's just the by far the best of a bad lot. I'm ready to jump...
So, Apple is true to form with OS X...if you buy gadgets, feel self-conscious using a Palm IIIx these days, have had and broken a VAIO, well, I'm sure OS X is cool... A gadget.
Otherwise, what's the big deal? It's why someone doesn't just get on with the desktop Linux packaging!!!!! What's the problem?
BTW, last StarOffice was slow, but the latest OpenOffice seems pretty peppy. Dunno how well the MS FILTERS work both ways, but it seems pretty well like an MS Office replacement already...
As a pop sci-fi reader, I call novels like "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" Near-Future-Fi - like Max Headroom's "20 minutes into the future..." - stories that blend the present with technological and social visions of the future that're rapidly morphing into reality, more or less, as time goes by.
"London Fields", by kinda literary Brit author, Martin Amis, falls clearly into the Near-Future-Fi category. It's not classified as science fiction, and it doesn't really point to technological innovation. It's more of an extrapolation of the effects of the digitally-networked, media-blitzed world we're living in now. Eerily near-normal...
Frontline conflict journalism is dead - journalists are the first targets in regional wars; living war correspondents are more often than not multiple amputees.
The news is the weather. With no war to report on, but some sort of bizarre ecological evolution going on, extreme weather is front page violence. Weather leads the news.
With general weirdness the order of the day, one tabloid has found a new niche - print Prozac - by covering only the cheeriest of good news.
Turning the corner of a city block into glaring sunlight, one may be startled by the unsettling postion of the sun - was it always at that angle?
And still, the must mundane, "normal" things are carry on. Darts, as in, the popular British pub game, are as popular as bowling is on American TV. Championship darts is just another path to fame and fortune in a modern electronic world...
It's been a while since I've read "London Fields", and maybe my memory is putting more emphasis on the parts that struck me. And it's definitely a bit of a read, especially compared to the easy film treatment style of a lot of pop sci-fi.
But it's definitely worth a look.
Saying that you figure the comment you're replying to is SARCASTIC doesn't automaticaly mean your answer isn't SERIOUS.
Anyway, I was replying to what you said, serious or not.
And the monkees have everything to do with everything.
Aren't you being overly SERIOUS!
Soon I will begin to physically flog myself, I must be soooo stupid, since 90% of what I read on slashdot I don't understand. Maybe it's 'cause I'm not a geek programmer.
...RIAA would have you believe
.letter things too. They must be confused about the DotCom revolution.
What it is is, ALL OF SLASHDOT is bait for about four people like me, who take ALL OF THE OTHER COMMENTS SERIOUSLY and go off like idiot kneejerk monkees... Right?
Like:
>Contrary to what the
Unless Moby and Lenny Kravitz have mysteriously tipped the scales, until at least a few years ago, most of the money made by the "major labels", the main "members" of the RIAA, came from artists signed BEFORE 1980. I forget the percentages, but they were overwhelming. Well into the '90s. And it makes sense. How many generations are now buying Zeppelin albums - three...four? Soooooo, what the hell is the RIAA representing NOW, fronting for. Indie dance labels? The DJ vinyl market? New music doesn't need the major label path, the distribution end's dead... The RIAA is most likely fronting for intellectual property rights grabs too outrageous for other parts of their members' corporate families to try for, because they're a falling star, have nothing to lose. Giving the RIAA credibility as a music representative if it's not ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY is giving them legitimacy, helping in their, um, EVIL cause... Not that I have anything against Rod Stewart. Carly Simon?...
>Large sections of the population have a negative view of techies
Large sections of the population don't know that email address contain an @ sign followed by letters a dot and more letters. And Web addresses end in those
>when big corporations will pull their heads out of their asses and start to actually listen to their customers for a change
What are they doing now? Making billions and billions of dollars by ACCIDENT. By pissing off their customers. By creating advertising and publicity campaigns that're totally out of tune with the customers they don't listen to that they are promoting themselves out of business?
I don't feel like flogging...actually.
As the trusty old saying goes: SAY WHAT?
Isn't globalization the name o' the game? WTO and all that?
Hasn't it been decided that it's not worth it - well, no PROFITABLE to - use American labor to work for American-based (for now) multinational corporations?
Isn't it clear that it's too freakin' expensive to maintain the full-blown illusion of prosperity in America - that idea was dropped a couple decades ago.
Which is why the poor in America are blatantly ignored, and US billionaires multiply (15 billionaires for the first half of the '80s, 90 by '90, 260 today - where are all these billionaires coming from - and that's AFTER the Dotcom Bust).
Name ONE shining example of US foreign policy (this one's just 'cause I can't even think of what foreign policy IS exactly - is that like the War on Terroism and the Coalition; supporting Israel with a few billion a year; the Gulf War - or are those military policy? I'm clueless...)
Remember, He'p!
Is this the same two-shot system that the US people used to ratify WTO membership and activities.
No doubt, this is a matter of mixing apples and bananas, but I thought I'd ask...
Nothing clever, witty, sensational here - just a statement and a plain straight-up plea for collective common sense.
There is NO DOUBT that there is an organized Establishment effort to kill freedom on the Net, to minimize the Net "commons", the general free zone that fuelled the Net Dream-turned-DotCom-Boom, and seems to have survived the Bust...so far.
There is NO VISUAL RALLYING SYMBOL to represent modern awareness of and opposition to threats to Net freedom, something like the blue ribbon of years ago that showed an apparently broadbased support for a Net freedom cause. This necessary symbol must exist, but it can't just BE, it has to POINT to a fully-equipped site to turn to for more.
There is NO PLACE TO TURN for an individual who wishes to help protect Net freedom, a one-stop site with comprehensive, readable info, and, above all, the ability to match a person's level of interest with an effective channel for action: places to learn more, make a donation, send a petition or letter, make a REALLY BIG DONATION, volunteer time and skills, offer a lifetime of commitment to an aspect of the cause.
A fair while ago, I read an article. in suck or Salon, describing how the geek community was busy primping and glowing and preparing to bask in the radiance of the Brave New Net World they were building, while DC lobbyists were pounding through Net legislation designed for the future, to take control when things had shaken out. It mentioned 1,500 pieces of Net legislation being lobbied for in DC, or maybe that was 1,500 corporate Net lobbyists, or both. And that was then.
The DotCom Bubble has Burst - an occurrence I think of as less bad luck, bad ideas and bad business, and more a case of young talent being given enough rope (read: cash) to hang themselves, thus neutralizing a new competitive wave - an "accidentally on purpose" kind of thing. Still, "Net people", geeks, whatever, seem every bit as vocal these days about Net rights, and as passive on a practical level as before. AND beaten down by the Bust to boot.
It's clear that, today, there is no separation between code, coding, using code, and having access to code or to code-driven products: be it game boxes or more-or-less uncensored, open online communication. And the Net is the Code Superhighway that we're all traveling, sans speed limits and toolbooths, checkpoints and national borders...so far.
What? Do you read this and, MAYBE, go, "Yeah, this sounds right, and I should help do something about it"...and then click on? Am I doing the same, only a little less efficiently, by writing this message? What will you do?
I think I managed to rant through a fairly informed list of reasons and opinions why micropayment is so slow in coming.
If you're interested, just look at the other ballpeen replies in the topic.
The short version BEFORE this slashdot post (which I started): Obviously, large business interests have no...interest in seeing a cash-based system work. Credit card, and even direct debit, suck, for various reasons, a major one being, not THAT many people and not necessarily the people who would be a significant market for indie microcost products, have cards, or want to use them, or have anything left on them.
The short(ish) version after reading the comments here: It's the rebel-without-a-clue GEEKS who may've had as big a hand in this as any loose conspiracy of big business interests. As you, the tiny minority, noticed, this is a shocking array of lame answers from people who you'd think could see beyond paying for National Enquirer Online's daily horoscope, or whatever, to the freedom it would bring to indie producers: writers, musicians, artists, the possibilities are endless.
Forget anonymous cash, just get CASH-based micropayment online and see what happens!
As I said also in another rant: It's like the lemonade stand. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... Micropayments accessible to ANYONE with cash is the true spirit of free market action. Like dropping a buck in a buskers hat 'cause he played a fine tune. Value for dollar.
(I feel like an activist now. Can't remember when I used the same examples, words, rhetoric, whatever, more than once in the same place...)
I said, given these revolutionary times, some things have to be taken as a rule of thumb: one rule, CORPS & GOVS are BAD. Not every incorporated entity, or even big multimillion dollar companies. We're talking the MNCs, the transnational, M&A to sumo status conglomerates. The AOLTW, MS, GE, automakers, etc. The top of the Fortune 500.
You could disagree with this being a revolutionary time. I can't argue past a pop, reading alt news sources online point, but from what I have seen, things are getting critical. The DMCA and hundreds of other little bits and pieces of legislation are already in and starting to kick in. The dotcom golden age of independence was drowned in...oh, coincidence, billions of dollars. The FCC is about to start regulating the Net. Now the gov wants its own Net. AOL wants ICANN to make keywords an alternate or replacement to URLs. Their national channels often advertise shows with AOL keywords and no URLs. They alone have 30 million subs, and 80 million on IM - it's plausible that someone says, let's shut down the Net and use AOL instead. Colin Powell was/is(?) on the AOL board, appeared as a guest with Steve Case for the Carlyle group. His son is chairman of the FCC, appointed by Bush. The Net is going DOWN... if things are done.
I'm not a WTO fanatic, I really didn't even know what all that was about until a couple months ago. 9-11 didn't freak me out, it just made me finally look around a little. And it's a revolution, civil ideological war fought by proxy with no one really watching. The military is stunned, still in the LAST turn of the century. The power elite is thus exposed. The people need to rally and revise, but they don't even know this is all going on.
So I was responding to someone who seemed to be saying: look, I'm working on one of these projects military homeland defense, evil Bush things, and hey, the people are cool, and the arguments aren't unreasonable.
And when things are as trick as they are, that type of thinking isn't open-minded, it's classically naive. That's the way these things work.
Hence, rule of thumb. No the same as saying STOP THINKING. Just, use this - as opposed to who knows what void - as a STARTING POINT when you evaluate, before you conclude and start spreading the word of your revelation.
Like Lemmy from Motorhead said to me in a real life interview, "Maybe Hitler was right." It was from a dream of his. Didn't print it. You gotta evaluate, use your head. A few "absolutes" can help!
Reasonable rant. Nice diatribe. Unfortunately, and probably not because you're sub-intelligent, just haven't really thought things through...thoroughly wrong, wrong-headed, and destructive to the very things you purport to support.
Still reading? Here's why (briefly!):
What most people don't understand is the full extent of CONTENT IS KING. The PERCEPTION is that "content" is good, or else you can call it junk. Little thought is given to the ways in which content is created. By the great tormented genius writer/painter/wanker cyberfi writer, whatever? By a collaborative group of artists and technicians and others, like on a movie? Sure. BUT, as was the case with zines - all indie media - and is accelerated online, EDITING can also be a completely freestanding form of "art", or "content creation". An Editor can be, though isn't necessarily, an artist, and there are lots of styles.
Take slasdot. It's pretty interesting, hardcore participation, and it relies on editing. Story submissions first by a smaller group of editors, then the karma points, by "the people" supported by democracyware - kinda like the jury system. But you're right - it's not even a 1-cent a post site. That doesn't make it bad...it's what it is, hopefully what it intended to be.
That's POINT #1: Volume of posting and popularity don't make "content" online, in the sense of what people will pay with. Traffic should be able to generate revenue other ways, but not always by content for sale.
But look at fuckedcompany. They're like slashdot with a sensationalistic theme. They charge now for most of the shit. I get pissed when I can't see the stuff. I won't subscribe...I haven't so far. But I don't click away not caring...I WANNA KNOW what those pay-to-view rumors are. The guy, Pud or whatever, is making out fine with pretty hefty subs, due to the insane corporate VC people and the remaining trendy ThinkGeek geeks with cash. But if a microcash system existed, and he couldn't charge his sub rates but had to go for pennies a rumor and I had a simple click-don't click 5-10-25 cent decision, like video games, I'd be a'clickin'.
What does that have to do with editing? The couple other dotcom bubble burst watch sites, urban expose and whatever, I once read, but probably wouldn't click to pay, or very seldom. Why? EDITING. An editor can be obvious, rewriting, doing the lead pieces, or pretty invisible, just tweaking the system, shaping the space. Fuckedcompany got the right balance, maybe he had a good inside crew to start, but a bunch of buddies doesn't hold stuff up. His flavor overall made it worth paying for.
Which is POINT#2: the light touch - a good feel for encouraging unknowns, noninvasive editing, just listening to the traffic and making mild adjustments, is a particularly online EDITOR AS CREATOR style. He's the guy the trad journalists were worried about without knowing it 10 years ago when they thought newspapers would go under 'cause everyone would be reporting online with windowfront view of every story in the world, real-time. But few of that editor class has emerged. They will. Hopefully before the Net gets strangled. Shaping a flow can create CONTENT.
So when you say, everything should be free, and I want to get a cheap ($300) Rackspace account, but that's a little stiff as a monthly donation from me to whoever reads whatever I put up...what's free?
By putting down the idea of payment - and this is only PRINT so far, there's music, artwork, services, endless stuff - you're helping do what the VC did: buried the spirit in cash. If I was a conspiracy theory guy, I'd say the dotcom boombust was a power elite nuclear strike: remember that Details/Conde Naste internal memo leaked: "We don't know what this digital thing is, but whatever it is, we can't let it leave us in the dust." What's a couple billion thrown at a bunch of unready crews if it means beating down a generation of indie Net producers. Financial napalm.
Short version: Quality by individual effort will rise anywhere but in a corporate world. And people know it. And given half a chance - like with a good micropayment system, like Cartio seems to be - they WILL pay.
Like I said in another post: haven't you ever taken great satisfaction in dropping a buck in the case of some guy busking in the subway 'cause he was just freakin' great! That's fair consumerism. Value for dollar.
All right, I'm going nuts here. But I can't believe these consistently lame answers.
This has nothing to do with Yahoo! and MSNBC, it's about individuals, the little guys, the indie labels, the tattoo artists, the lone filmmakers. And the kids with computers who can crank out a better 90 minute fx flick than hollywood, for a fraction of the cost, and just need to get paid.
1. Everyone does not have a credit card. US is, I think 60% penetration? World, 20%. Take out the maxed out, the non-users, the completely in another market, it's not many people. And who's the most likely audience for indie gear: sure some Blue Card yuppy hackers and graphic artists, but a lot more people with cash, no cards.
2. I ran an indie music site that got up to nearly a million page views a month, 20,000+ unique visits a week. On a $30 account - they lived up to their unlimited bandwidth claim - my time, a few other volunteers, and a ton of site posting activity. One or two columns, or charts, could easily have pulled in 10cents a view, racked up 1,000 views a day, $100, $700 a week. For a start, that pays my bills. Rent too. Hey, food also. Sure the big guys rack up the pennies like they always do - but now others can too.
3. If you looked, the free setup is 20% flat charge. Then 15% and 10% if you invest one time in programs at $8K and %28K. So my $700 is $560 pretax. Cost me nothing... 20% is relative - just fine if you get what you need, versus nothing.
I'll go away now.
Wrong system.
Cartio is free to the user. No card fee, period. 1 cent to 10 dollars Euro/US more or less the same.
Click and go, basically.
Anonymous cash - true digital cash, untraceable - is the ideal. But the biggest hurdle is geing able to get real cash digital, after that, especially for microtransactions, I'm not worried about privacy. I don't have credit to steal. I can't be laundering money, unless it's some kid's stolen lunch money. So privacy is a luxury, when it comes to dealing with the credit card people, or not.
So sad. Fish in barrel. Just 'cause Nielsen - the lone consistently sane Web figure with profile - is a year off, gives this guy the extra conviction he needs to be so wrong. At least, he won't stand out from the crowd.
>>These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.
Well, duh. All of the non-cash, or badly structured, failures. Credit cards by any other name. What do you expect? Historically, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor poorer. Your next article....
>>Users hate them.
Says you. Lemme talk to the users. Where's your quotes?
>>In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions.
I'm pasting quotes backward, but either direction, it's the same thing over and over. This is MICROpayments, not CAR payments. Who the f******** agonizes over spending a dime? And if you do get caught in inevitable scam sites, well, you move to hell along. You want to find the cool shit, and support it. With your quarter. Ever tossed a buck, with such satisfaction, in a subway busker's case? That's spontaneious micropayment, natural as hell.
>>Thus the anxiety of buying is a permanent feature of micropayment systems, since economic decisions are made on the margin - not, "Is a drink worth a dollar?" but, "Is the next drink worth the next dollar?" Anything that requires the user to approve a transaction creates this anxiety, no matter what the mechanism for deciding or paying is.
BS. Credit card mentality. Amusement parks should stop selling parkwide tickets -they don't work (maybe they have, evil bastards). SEE BELOW.
>>The desired state for micropayments - "Get the user to authorize payment without creating any overhead" - can thus never be achieved, because the anxiety of decision making creates overhead. No matter how simple the interface is, there will always be transactions too small to be worth the hassle.
Again, CREDIT CARDS AND DIRECT DEBITS 'cause anxiety. When was the decision anxiety so great about where to plug quarters in a video arcade, or looking over a candy bar rack. When you know what you have, you're fine.
>>Micropayment advocates mistakenly believe that efficient allocation of resources is the purpose of markets. The reasons markets work are not because users have embraced efficiency but because markets are the best place to allow users to maximize their preferences, and very often their preferences are not for conservation of cheap resources.
Sounds like he's talking about the idiots who DON'T get micropayment no matter how hard they try, than consumer behavior. Yeah, users do want to maximize their preferences, like being able to get stuff not produced by AOLTW, no matter how cheap. Who's talking about "conserving cheap resources", it's about people paying what they can afford, to people who those amounts make a difference, 'cause there's no train of middlemen.
>>the real world abounds with items of vanishingly small value: a single stick of gum, a single newspaper article, a single day's rent. There are three principal solutions to this problem offline - aggregation, subscription, and subsidy - that are used individually or in combination.
This the WTO model: break down decision barriers between individuals, meld minds, mandate group behavior, toss 'em a bone. I wanna pay a guy a nickel for his cool underground strip. Period. I don't want to card it, I certainly don't want to accomplish this via aggregation, subscription, and a subsidy....
Did you read this article, or just the subheads? No wonder I got such a bad attitude sitting on panels with experts.
I always thought it was some kinda IMF/World Bank/Visa conspiracy to keep micropayment down, but now I'm thinking it's the geeks, led by that Anonymous Coward guy...
What a bunch of clueless comments. Just bait, right?
Micropayments are the missing link in any sort of indie Net movement. Most of the creatives - artists, programmers - and the smaller and mid-size companies that would support 'em, got beat right down, financially and emotionally, with the dotcom fiasco. What a cheap way to kill the street competition and a new freak medium - smothering with cash works just as well as a plastic bag over the head!
Meanwhile, the ONE clear thing about the Net threat to the Establishment since '95-'96 WAS that micorpayments, done right, could provide real people the missing economic link to make the Net work for them.
Not freakin' credit card-based crap (ccard penetration outside the US is around 20%, and Americans are long since maxed out). Not even debit cards. You want a kid to be able to scrounge a fiver, take it to the 7-11, shove it in a machine, get a card like a subway card or library card or discount phone card, go home, start surfin' and be able to click and pay, dime here, nickel there, a buck for a pretty heavily compressed indie track (two bucks for a fatter file)... A little hard manga past that over 13? sign...
It's classic human consumer nature. The old candy store and what do you do with that quarter or buck. Jawbreaker, licorice, y'know... THAT'S A FAIR DISCRETIONARY BUYING SET-UP: lotsa instagratification choice, priced so you can both browse and buy.
Forget the anonymous cash aspect, take just the CASH aspect. All previous micro systems were tied to plastic - very limiting to the audience, by the mindset alone - and then to the increasingly-proven-evil debit mode (you can't really get debits to stop).
A GOOD micropayment system lets indie artists draw comics, bands and labels release tracks, every funny or fanatical freak who can type churn out fiction, reportage, lyrics, people create jewellery, put up friggin' FRACTALS for sale. No limits.
They tried that at the portals, The Globe, at least, others? Open a mini store. Or ebay. But these are different animals, CREDIT CARD secured. PayPal's hardly better.
If Cartio delivers invoice and personal check/money order fill options, THAT'S a revolution. Not only don't a ton of people have cards, or cards with anything left, people HATE them deep down. Spending cash is real.
As for usage: the click to far syndrome's spreading, slightly sneaker than in the XXX world. Been to Salon lately. Click a juicy headline. Start reading a couple paras. Suddenly: PREMIUM CONTENT, DUDE, SUB HERE. Even fuckedcompany is subscription: click too far and it's login or pay time. Papers like Variety, hardcore trades, the NY Times, etc have been doing that for a while, a teaser regular page with headlines and leads, then click a story and it's the subscriber page! Variety is a classic - try reading a juicy story.
And that's subs for $10-20-30+ a year, or even a month. Take DJ culture instead, it supports the talented quite well thanks, by NOT supporting the vast infrastructural overhead of a major label, or other big corp. Stay real, and charge reasonable, and you end up with more in your pocket than signing that big corporate contract to do whatever.
And people LIKE to pay, when they feel the payment is going direct. Buying with a card from a middleman is wack. Cracking Adobe software is cold. But sending three bucks to U-Turn records DIRECT may be questionable, but if you wanna do it, it's not less money for you, it's satisfaction!
Good micropayment is the lemonade stand. It's Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... It's FREE ENTERPRISE...everyone can play, and pay to play as well.
You did actually know this, right? Just teasing me?
That's kind of like retarded haiku! Cool.
Who the hell is this Anonymous Coward?
Hello! Planetary disconnect....
On this particular world, if you don't spend on Christmas, YOU GET SHOT!
Where have ya been, lady.
I'm just arguing, sincerely but senselessly, while watching all my submissioins get rejected for a while. Then I'll go away, probably.
But for now, I think that was a rhetorical question. It's just another pitiful part of the giant snare. Most of those 60% aren't exactly gonna be able to retire on there deferred earnings or whatever. But they feel they have a stake in the megacorps... Interesting!
60% own stock in US corps? Really? That's, like, one share of MS each? 'Cause 65% of Americans will retire with NO MONEY IN THE BANK. 1% of Americans have more wealth than 90% of the rest, and the next 9% ALSO have as much wealth as the 90% rest. Which is, um, 10% of Americans have twice the wealth of the other 90%. So how much stock does that 60% have!
In the Silly Happy Days, wasn't Bill Gates' personal worth at one point equal to that of HALF THE US POPULATION?
I think yes!
THAT came from Michael Powell, son of Colin, then a commissioner (now the Bush-appointed Chairman) of the FCC, not recused from the AOLTW merger vote even though dad was on the AOL board with $13million in stock options. It's from Powell Jr's pre-release statement after the merger went through. AIHS? Read on...
"Despite the Majority's analysis [of AOL's IM] that purports to show a competitive problem in need of a remedy, the Majority (perhaps to its credit) does not mandate interoperability for current iterations of IM. ... When a regulatory agency has to make up its own acronym to describe a product or service it intends to regulate, one should be concerned. ("Behold the Wizard of AIHS.")
"The concern is the implication for Internet regulation. This Order makes clear that the FCC has jurisdiction to regulate virtually every Internet product, or service that facilitates communications under Title I of the Communications Act. But, imposing IM conditions under that authority ignores the fact that the Commission, for decades now, has expressly declined to regulate similar computer, data processing and information services for the very reason that such interference would undermine the energy and drive toward innovation that characterizes these highly competitive markets. Based on the letter of the statute, this may be correct and FCC involvement in Internet communications services may be inevitable. Yet, the implications of that step are not fully considered here and that is why I am most hesitant (indeed unwilling) to make such a substantial leap in the context of an adjudicatory proceeding, without greater notice and a fuller and broader opportunity to comment that would result from an inquiry or rulemaking proceeding."
So AOL's IM near monopoly was left intact through the merger, to protect the open innovation of the Net, UNTIL a new-fangled video Instant Messaging product arrived. Then, perhaps, it would be time to get with the Net regulations... Goodie!
(See Michael's scrapbook photos, read his statements: click The Chairman.}
Hey, I wanted to add anthrax vs the flu.
The dissection of your reply - in the reply below - is, as someone else snidely pointed out in after it, overly literal and pumped up. But basically, it misses your point, which was clear from the beginning.
Considering that most hip young hackers and IT types are all in general a smug lot - it's the nature of cliques. And absolutes tend to go with this often obnoxious territory. So that comment is obvious.
However, these days, with history going in cycles as it does, we are in revolutionary phase, and a lot of it is ideologically driven, rather than by technology or blood. And in that case, SOME things have to be taken pretty close to absolute, so as not to cloud more important issues.
CORPORATE CONGLOMERATES and GOVERNMENTS are, on the whole, BAD these days. Just look at the record. And what's on deck. The INDIVIDUALS, all tens and hundreds of thousands of them that make these corps and govs go, are still mostly just right as rain, fine folk, good people.
Good people do bad things. Even when they don't mean to. It's dangerous to confuse the individual people with their collective actions. And it's worse to take the soul out of science.
And you are saying...what?
Most people, one on one, are GOOD. I'm quite sure that rampant EVIL is about as rare snuff flicks.
No doubt, the people you've been dealing with are as nice and well-intentioned as they seem to you. That doesn't make what's being done just as peachy keen as well.
It's the basic "guns don't kill people argument" -- inconclusive!
That sort of non-political tech site?
Even easier and more efficient: outlaw the Web, replace with AOL! It's up and running and has 20% of America online already, it's more accesible with Keywords instead of those pesky URLs and no @ things on email, and it'll boost the economy as helping megacorporateconglomerates always does - good to go...
This from an article published in 2000. It's so easy for people to:
A. call clear statements like this The Obvious, and thereby ignore it, not bothering to REPEAT IT, as often and to as many people as possible, and ACT accordingly;
B. Brush off anything that attributes non-pop media patterns as "conspiracy theory" junk - hey, anything's possible, so why should I believe you?
Somebody took the time to write this out, hence the quote, but it's what A LOT of us really know, and ignore on the day-to-day, for reasons A or B (that latter usually being plain fear):
Pubished in 2000. My emphasis and updates added...
MHO: People of good conscience should start with acquiring knowledge, actually locating, discussing, and, on the basis of having checked out, supporting organizations like EFF. For a start. Maybe repeat in front of the mirror: "Every day, in every way, my Internet is shrinking to nothing, unless I do something about it." Try rereading the Emperor's New Clothes... Ask yourself: Where was I when the DMCA was passed?