"Doesn't American Express have something like this? It's called Private Payments. It gives you a unique number that's lets you obscure your identity."
very nice but..."No cards issued outside of the U.S. are currently eligible for Private Payments; however, if you are a U.S. Cardmember, you can use Private Payments to make purchases at non-U.S. sites or merchants." (from their FAQ).
Metal Storm is not a Gauss gun. It's simply one or more barrels, each containing multiple bullets with a propellant stacked in between the bullets. Electronics set off the propellants in a timed fashion, allowing incredible rates of fire.
The use for Metal Storm seems to be rather limited though. Large caliber and/or explosive or armor-piercing rounds are more efficient against hardened targets, and a Gatling seems to do just fine against fast moving targets (Goalkeeper / Phalanx antimissile systems). The only interesting application I saw was in underwater anti-torpedo systems.
Don't listen to this guy!! Or rather, do listen to him, and others as well:-)
What I mean to say is that the market for music is rather diverse, and you will probably end up catering to a subset. Yes, some people like physical CDs. If you can manage to let such people select tracks, burn the CD for them, stick in a nicely printed sleeve and ship the physical thing to him for $15, you could capture this part of the market.
But... there are plenty of people (like me) who do not care one bit for the physical product. I have lots of CD's, which I only play in my car stereo that I plan to replace with an MP3 or MiniDisc player anyway. I buy the CD, then rip the songs off it. I play my music from the computer at home. In the car or on the walkman I like to compose my own albums rather than play the prepackaged ones, so I use custom-burned CDs or MiniDiscs.
My point: do a proper market study to find out who your customers actually are, and what they want. I seriously doubt that you will find one "way to go" or that "this is so not the way to go.".
"Sell your services, dont sell your mp3s, people want to pay for services not for music. Do what AOL does, dont sell the websites, sell the service, set it up so we have to pay to access the blog, the mp3s, the pictures, and anything else a fan may like, make them pay to access the forum, and use MP3s are just part of the whole package."
Hell no. Stick to your core business: music. Yes, do the rest as well, the blogs, pictures, and so on (I like the ability to obtain CD cover art), perhaps as a premium service for subscribers. But your core business is music: sell that! When I visit the site, I will do so to download music, and I'd be willing to pay for that. If I'd find enough music to interest me, I would take a subscription if it was offered. I might be interested in cover art, artist blogs and video clips, but if I had to pay to access these, I would simply do without them. My advice: offer these additional services for free to hook your customers to your site, and hope that it'll make them buy more music from you.
That said, it's a good idea to set up subscription-type plans, where a user pays a monthly fee for limited or unlimited downloads, ie. charge $0.99 a song, and $15/month for 50 songs each month. Perhaps offer subscribers a few extra services.
Also think about selling download bundles / gift certificates! Ie. an (electronic) gift certificate for 50 songs that you can order and mail to someone else for their birthday. If your current customers like your service, they'll want gift certificates and with those they will do your marketing for you, in a way.
"The enemy is the person operating an ongoing fraudulent enterprise which motivates the guy sending the mail to do that. This is also the EASIEST person to catch, since they have to get paid somehow and the money CAN be followed."
I wholeheartedly agree that in the fight against spam, the guy hiring a spammer is our enemy as well. However what's to stop me from hiring a spammer to promote my competitor's business, thereby landing him in legal troubles?
My mistake, I meant to say that business will patent the things (things that have been done for 1000's of years and have simply been ported to a new medium), not the words for them. That may not have been clear from my previous post.
"This word shows the worst side of tech--inventing a word for something that A) already exists in the physical world and B) has undergone ZERO changes outside of being ported to new technology."
What about "C) just sounds plain awful"?. Blog. Blegh. Imagine this conversation of a mother and AOL subscriber, and her 14 year old son:
"Johnnie, what are you doing?"
- "I'm blogging, ma!"
"Stop that right now!!! You'll go blind!"
By the way, the tech world will indeed invent awful new words for things covered by your points A), and B). Business, however, will patent them.
The sharecropper analogy reminded me of a 'Father and Son' cartoon by Peter van Straaten. The cartoon is set in the 70s with an arch-conservative father and his rebellious son with socialist ideals:
Son:"But dad, if only you would see how the capitalists become rich at the expense of the workers, it'd be enough to make anyone become a socialist."
- Father: "That is a rather unhealthy response. A healthy Dutch lad will work hard and become a capitalist himself!"
This happens in the software industry as well. I remember a group of students creating a bit of software to render certain fonts correctly in Windows (Arabic ones I think, their letters have some peculiarities). They started a small business and sold the software... until Microsoft decided to offer this ability with Windows for free. Bad news for the students? Hell no, Microsoft had bought their company and technology, and incorporated it into Windows. These guys got themselves a tidy bundle of cash. Sell-outs? Perhaps. Would MS simply have used someone else's technology, had these guys decided not to sell? Probably. The 'sharecroppers' in my example may not have much choice in the matter, but they did very well for themselves.
"I doubt you will see much of that. If the spammers can be located, and the entire premise of a law is that they can, it would be easy to demonstrate that this was what was happening, at which point we could slap the offenders with charges appropriate to corporate espionage or anticompetitive practices as well as spamming"
The point is that one of the proposed laws would legislate going after the people who hire spammers, since the spammers themselves can't be located, or are located offshore where US law cannot touch them. If hiring a spammer is made illegal, one could hire a spammer to spam for a competitor's product.
Many of your votes are not for complex issues, but for persons. Rather than having everyone vote on a multitude of difficult and detailed matters, most systems of government let you vote for someone to represent yourself. Most people may not be able to make informed decisions on matters of government, but they are a lot better at picking someone who they know will represent their interests best. At the most, we could have a literacy test for running for office...
Incidentally, that's why I am against using referenda too liberally. In a referendum, each individual (even the dim ones) are asked to personally make a judgment in complicated matters of government.
"Let's see... worse performance, no improved security because we're talking Microsoft here, no cross-platform capability... yup, sounds like a winner."
Worse performance, compared to what? Compared to Java (one of the competitors in the Enterprise / Web Services market),.Net seems to measure up nicely.
Security? Most of the security holes in enterprise setups using MS are due to clueless system admins. I have worked for many companies where security on their MS systems has never been an issue. In contrast, I have also seen wide-open Unix applications, because the developers couldn't be arsed to adress security. It all depends on your people.
Cross-platform?.Net will interoperate with other platforms just fine. It will not run on those other platforms, true, but for many corporations that is not an issue. Many of them are now finding out that neither putting all their eggs in one basket and choosing a single vendor/platform, nor designing everything to be platform independent and free of vendor lock-in, are winning IT strategies, or even viable ones. Changing technology, insights and the average product lifecycle make it all a pointless exercise. (caveat: that depends heavily on the type of company, and its IT requirements. There are probably companies for which these have proven to be viable strategies). What one can do is design applications so that they communicate easily with each other, so that applications or even components can be replaced piecemeal, on different platforms or languages if need be, and interface with legacy systems as well..Net attempts to achieve that, partly by using open standards for communications and the virtual engine (just how open these standards are is debatable).
If you develop or use Unix systems exclusively, just ignore all this and move on. However, if some of your applications will run on a Windows platform, you might want to look into.Net. Despite the failure of the marketing hype (and the obvious flaws of the Windows platform), the technology isn't half bad.
Check out some of the older fish determination guides: some of them actually have information on the tastiness listed with each fish. These won't be in the guides though.
"Introduction: 6305 mails in (basically) one day
We received 5880 bounces and forwards
We received 12 spams for @cyberangels
We received 40 attempts to annoy Cyberangels
We received 371 complaints about Cyberangels
We received 2 business mails"
In other words, they received 12 spams and 413 legitimate emails (not counting the bounces). That can't be right; everyone knows that most inboxes have a ratio of spam/non spam that is more like 413:12 rather than 12:413. Liars!;-)
The article goes a bit further than that, and states that our bodies have certain physical responses to 'being connected' That's an indication of where the 'pleasurable' feeling comes from, and also that this can lead to addict-like compulsive behaviour.
People can stop eating cookies any time they want (well, most of us can). But the article suggests it may be harder than that to get rid of the urge to compulsively reload Slashdot all day. It's the job of medical science to see if there is indeed a physical or mental addiction that can be diagnosed, and perhaps, treated. I know a few people who can't seem to kick the information habit, even though they themselves want to.
The phone would just reverse the text when you close the flip-top cover. This technology allows you to replace the two screens that some phones have (one of each side of the flip-top, with the outside one showing caller id and such) with one screen. Simpler & cheaper.
Re:The REAL problem is...
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1
...the car is, according to the article, "basically undrivable" at 10.000lbs, with hardly any room for the driver. You'd expect competing vehicles to be at least somewhat street legal.
"Then imagine discovering that most of that has been obfuscated so thoroughly by shitty authoring tools or lazy developers that it too is useless to you."
So your organisation represents the blind, and you find services that use visual methods to make sure a human is at the keyboard. Do you:
a) try and come up with alternative methods to check for a warm body at the keyboard, or
b) sue.
"This will be exploited. And there is no way we can avoid that. As the technology evolves it starts to be possible to anyone to use it. Including the government. And they will use it to spy on us. Face it."
At the very least we should press for laws to regulate what data may be collected, how that data is to be used, and our access to data collected on us personally. Yes, with such technology they can secretly collect more data than they are allowed to, and use it in unsanctioned ways, but at the least they will not be able to use it against you openly (in court, for instance).
For example, if the stated purpose of highway cameras and licence plate recognition software is "toll collection and monitoring of traffic density", but they subsequently use the collected data to check your speed, verify your car insurance and check that your MOT is up-to-date, then at the least they would not be allowed to use this data to send you tickets for violations.
"I would argue that millionaires DO NOT represent humanity and sending them out into space would only allow for the complete commercialization of space at the hands of a few unscrupulous privateers."
I would argue the opposite. Perhaps millionaires are as good a representative of humanity as nations... it all depends what you mean by "representing humanity". Better to dispense with this vague notion and get on with the real matter.
I have high hopes for privately funded space programs. That doesn't mean that all public funding should be dropped, perhaps we'll even see jointly funded missions in the future.
As for the results of a commercial space program being for 'private interests' only: look at many of the privately funded endeavours of the past and present. I would argue that private enterprise has brought jobs, wealth and comforts, especially to the common people (while making a few individuals super-rich, yes). Many things like running water, air travel, cheap and ubiquitous communication and countless other things would be nonexistent today, or exist only as playthings for the very wealthy, if it wasn't for private enterprise.
I don't see why space would be any different. Sure, a guy like Branson might enjoy riding his very own rocket to the moon to enjoy the sights rather than to conduct science, but you can bet that he'll be lying awake nights figuring out how he can sell the rest of us tickets to the moon, for a million, $100k, or perhaps even $10k. Can you see NASA or the other space organisations showing even the slightest interest in space tourism? The very idea abhors them... It's kind of ironic that space commercialisation is pioneered by the ex-communist Russian Space Agency.
No sir... if you want to live to ride a rocket and see the moon for yourself, put your money on private enterprise and the likes of Branson, not on NASA.
"I do at the least believe contests like the X-Prize are the real future of aeronautics. They allot a prize, and say 'Make something that does 'X'', and many groups from incredibly different backgrounds and ideals come up with technology that could and will do the job."
This happened in the past: prizes were offered for first to cross this or that ocean in under so many days, or first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, and people rose to the challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Not anytime soon I think, what with the EU 'asking' US e-commerce companies to collect the European VAT for them. Besides they don't have to hurry, as far as I know the European I-Tunes site isn't live yet either.
"Doesn't American Express have something like this? It's called Private Payments. It gives you a unique number that's lets you obscure your identity."
very nice but..."No cards issued outside of the U.S. are currently eligible for Private Payments; however, if you are a U.S. Cardmember, you can use Private Payments to make purchases at non-U.S. sites or merchants." (from their FAQ).
"I know this is slashdot, but before I condemn "the capitalist pigs and their puppets in the government," I would like to know the whole story."
;-)
Nah, as Asimov said: it's far easier to argue from ignorance
Metal Storm is not a Gauss gun. It's simply one or more barrels, each containing multiple bullets with a propellant stacked in between the bullets. Electronics set off the propellants in a timed fashion, allowing incredible rates of fire.
The use for Metal Storm seems to be rather limited though. Large caliber and/or explosive or armor-piercing rounds are more efficient against hardened targets, and a Gatling seems to do just fine against fast moving targets (Goalkeeper / Phalanx antimissile systems). The only interesting application I saw was in underwater anti-torpedo systems.
Enlighten me, what else does NASCAR have to offer?
"This is so not the way to go."
:-)
Don't listen to this guy!! Or rather, do listen to him, and others as well
What I mean to say is that the market for music is rather diverse, and you will probably end up catering to a subset. Yes, some people like physical CDs. If you can manage to let such people select tracks, burn the CD for them, stick in a nicely printed sleeve and ship the physical thing to him for $15, you could capture this part of the market.
But... there are plenty of people (like me) who do not care one bit for the physical product. I have lots of CD's, which I only play in my car stereo that I plan to replace with an MP3 or MiniDisc player anyway. I buy the CD, then rip the songs off it. I play my music from the computer at home. In the car or on the walkman I like to compose my own albums rather than play the prepackaged ones, so I use custom-burned CDs or MiniDiscs.
My point: do a proper market study to find out who your customers actually are, and what they want. I seriously doubt that you will find one "way to go" or that "this is so not the way to go.".
"Sell your services, dont sell your mp3s, people want to pay for services not for music. Do what AOL does, dont sell the websites, sell the service, set it up so we have to pay to access the blog, the mp3s, the pictures, and anything else a fan may like, make them pay to access the forum, and use MP3s are just part of the whole package."
Hell no. Stick to your core business: music. Yes, do the rest as well, the blogs, pictures, and so on (I like the ability to obtain CD cover art), perhaps as a premium service for subscribers. But your core business is music: sell that! When I visit the site, I will do so to download music, and I'd be willing to pay for that. If I'd find enough music to interest me, I would take a subscription if it was offered. I might be interested in cover art, artist blogs and video clips, but if I had to pay to access these, I would simply do without them. My advice: offer these additional services for free to hook your customers to your site, and hope that it'll make them buy more music from you.
That said, it's a good idea to set up subscription-type plans, where a user pays a monthly fee for limited or unlimited downloads, ie. charge $0.99 a song, and $15/month for 50 songs each month. Perhaps offer subscribers a few extra services.
Also think about selling download bundles / gift certificates! Ie. an (electronic) gift certificate for 50 songs that you can order and mail to someone else for their birthday. If your current customers like your service, they'll want gift certificates and with those they will do your marketing for you, in a way.
"The enemy is the person operating an ongoing fraudulent enterprise which motivates the guy sending the mail to do that. This is also the EASIEST person to catch, since they have to get paid somehow and the money CAN be followed."
I wholeheartedly agree that in the fight against spam, the guy hiring a spammer is our enemy as well. However what's to stop me from hiring a spammer to promote my competitor's business, thereby landing him in legal troubles?
I am well aware of the difference.
My mistake, I meant to say that business will patent the things (things that have been done for 1000's of years and have simply been ported to a new medium), not the words for them. That may not have been clear from my previous post.
"This word shows the worst side of tech--inventing a word for something that A) already exists in the physical world and B) has undergone ZERO changes outside of being ported to new technology."
What about "C) just sounds plain awful"?. Blog. Blegh. Imagine this conversation of a mother and AOL subscriber, and her 14 year old son:
"Johnnie, what are you doing?"
- "I'm blogging, ma!"
"Stop that right now!!! You'll go blind!"
By the way, the tech world will indeed invent awful new words for things covered by your points A), and B). Business, however, will patent them.
The sharecropper analogy reminded me of a 'Father and Son' cartoon by Peter van Straaten. The cartoon is set in the 70s with an arch-conservative father and his rebellious son with socialist ideals:
Son:"But dad, if only you would see how the capitalists become rich at the expense of the workers, it'd be enough to make anyone become a socialist."
- Father: "That is a rather unhealthy response. A healthy Dutch lad will work hard and become a capitalist himself!"
This happens in the software industry as well. I remember a group of students creating a bit of software to render certain fonts correctly in Windows (Arabic ones I think, their letters have some peculiarities). They started a small business and sold the software... until Microsoft decided to offer this ability with Windows for free. Bad news for the students? Hell no, Microsoft had bought their company and technology, and incorporated it into Windows. These guys got themselves a tidy bundle of cash. Sell-outs? Perhaps. Would MS simply have used someone else's technology, had these guys decided not to sell? Probably. The 'sharecroppers' in my example may not have much choice in the matter, but they did very well for themselves.
"I doubt you will see much of that. If the spammers can be located, and the entire premise of a law is that they can, it would be easy to demonstrate that this was what was happening, at which point we could slap the offenders with charges appropriate to corporate espionage or anticompetitive practices as well as spamming"
The point is that one of the proposed laws would legislate going after the people who hire spammers, since the spammers themselves can't be located, or are located offshore where US law cannot touch them. If hiring a spammer is made illegal, one could hire a spammer to spam for a competitor's product.
Many of your votes are not for complex issues, but for persons. Rather than having everyone vote on a multitude of difficult and detailed matters, most systems of government let you vote for someone to represent yourself. Most people may not be able to make informed decisions on matters of government, but they are a lot better at picking someone who they know will represent their interests best. At the most, we could have a literacy test for running for office...
Incidentally, that's why I am against using referenda too liberally. In a referendum, each individual (even the dim ones) are asked to personally make a judgment in complicated matters of government.
Nevertheless I will make a note of it *grins*
"Let's see... worse performance, no improved security because we're talking Microsoft here, no cross-platform capability... yup, sounds like a winner."
.Net seems to measure up nicely.
.Net will interoperate with other platforms just fine. It will not run on those other platforms, true, but for many corporations that is not an issue. Many of them are now finding out that neither putting all their eggs in one basket and choosing a single vendor/platform, nor designing everything to be platform independent and free of vendor lock-in, are winning IT strategies, or even viable ones. Changing technology, insights and the average product lifecycle make it all a pointless exercise. (caveat: that depends heavily on the type of company, and its IT requirements. There are probably companies for which these have proven to be viable strategies). What one can do is design applications so that they communicate easily with each other, so that applications or even components can be replaced piecemeal, on different platforms or languages if need be, and interface with legacy systems as well. .Net attempts to achieve that, partly by using open standards for communications and the virtual engine (just how open these standards are is debatable).
.Net. Despite the failure of the marketing hype (and the obvious flaws of the Windows platform), the technology isn't half bad.
Worse performance, compared to what? Compared to Java (one of the competitors in the Enterprise / Web Services market),
Security? Most of the security holes in enterprise setups using MS are due to clueless system admins. I have worked for many companies where security on their MS systems has never been an issue. In contrast, I have also seen wide-open Unix applications, because the developers couldn't be arsed to adress security. It all depends on your people.
Cross-platform?
If you develop or use Unix systems exclusively, just ignore all this and move on. However, if some of your applications will run on a Windows platform, you might want to look into
"I'm thinking that should be uncharted, as in no charts have been drawn up mapping it..."
Kiff (sighing): "It's not uncharted, captain, you lost the chart". (Futurama)
"How do they taste?"
Check out some of the older fish determination guides: some of them actually have information on the tastiness listed with each fish. These won't be in the guides though.
"Introduction: 6305 mails in (basically) one day
;-)
We received 5880 bounces and forwards
We received 12 spams for @cyberangels
We received 40 attempts to annoy Cyberangels
We received 371 complaints about Cyberangels
We received 2 business mails"
In other words, they received 12 spams and 413 legitimate emails (not counting the bounces). That can't be right; everyone knows that most inboxes have a ratio of spam/non spam that is more like 413:12 rather than 12:413. Liars!
The article goes a bit further than that, and states that our bodies have certain physical responses to 'being connected' That's an indication of where the 'pleasurable' feeling comes from, and also that this can lead to addict-like compulsive behaviour.
People can stop eating cookies any time they want (well, most of us can). But the article suggests it may be harder than that to get rid of the urge to compulsively reload Slashdot all day. It's the job of medical science to see if there is indeed a physical or mental addiction that can be diagnosed, and perhaps, treated. I know a few people who can't seem to kick the information habit, even though they themselves want to.
The phone would just reverse the text when you close the flip-top cover. This technology allows you to replace the two screens that some phones have (one of each side of the flip-top, with the outside one showing caller id and such) with one screen. Simpler & cheaper.
...the car is, according to the article, "basically undrivable" at 10.000lbs, with hardly any room for the driver. You'd expect competing vehicles to be at least somewhat street legal.
"Then imagine discovering that most of that has been obfuscated so thoroughly by shitty authoring tools or lazy developers that it too is useless to you."
So your organisation represents the blind, and you find services that use visual methods to make sure a human is at the keyboard. Do you:
a) try and come up with alternative methods to check for a warm body at the keyboard, or
b) sue.
"This will be exploited. And there is no way we can avoid that. As the technology evolves it starts to be possible to anyone to use it. Including the government. And they will use it to spy on us. Face it."
At the very least we should press for laws to regulate what data may be collected, how that data is to be used, and our access to data collected on us personally. Yes, with such technology they can secretly collect more data than they are allowed to, and use it in unsanctioned ways, but at the least they will not be able to use it against you openly (in court, for instance).
For example, if the stated purpose of highway cameras and licence plate recognition software is "toll collection and monitoring of traffic density", but they subsequently use the collected data to check your speed, verify your car insurance and check that your MOT is up-to-date, then at the least they would not be allowed to use this data to send you tickets for violations.
"I would argue that millionaires DO NOT represent humanity and sending them out into space would only allow for the complete commercialization of space at the hands of a few unscrupulous privateers."
I would argue the opposite. Perhaps millionaires are as good a representative of humanity as nations... it all depends what you mean by "representing humanity". Better to dispense with this vague notion and get on with the real matter.
I have high hopes for privately funded space programs. That doesn't mean that all public funding should be dropped, perhaps we'll even see jointly funded missions in the future.
As for the results of a commercial space program being for 'private interests' only: look at many of the privately funded endeavours of the past and present. I would argue that private enterprise has brought jobs, wealth and comforts, especially to the common people (while making a few individuals super-rich, yes). Many things like running water, air travel, cheap and ubiquitous communication and countless other things would be nonexistent today, or exist only as playthings for the very wealthy, if it wasn't for private enterprise.
I don't see why space would be any different. Sure, a guy like Branson might enjoy riding his very own rocket to the moon to enjoy the sights rather than to conduct science, but you can bet that he'll be lying awake nights figuring out how he can sell the rest of us tickets to the moon, for a million, $100k, or perhaps even $10k. Can you see NASA or the other space organisations showing even the slightest interest in space tourism? The very idea abhors them... It's kind of ironic that space commercialisation is pioneered by the ex-communist Russian Space Agency.
No sir... if you want to live to ride a rocket and see the moon for yourself, put your money on private enterprise and the likes of Branson, not on NASA.
"I do at the least believe contests like the X-Prize are the real future of aeronautics. They allot a prize, and say 'Make something that does 'X'', and many groups from incredibly different backgrounds and ideals come up with technology that could and will do the job."
This happened in the past: prizes were offered for first to cross this or that ocean in under so many days, or first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, and people rose to the challenge.