When it comes to intellectual "property", the full picture is likely to only enrage me further. The upshot is usually that companies have turned their temporary monopolies (what copyright is, or used to be) into actual property, and at the same time turned what by rights should be our property into a temporary license that can be revoked on a whim.
I am old fashioned and I like building a library of music and movies, even if it's a digital one. Streaming's no good precisely because of this issue: Netflix doesn't renew their license or I move to a different country or whatever, and stuff randomly disappears. Like the removal guys stealing a couple of my books when I move house. Here's a deal for the movie companies: sell me a license that entitles me to a copy of your movie. You don't need to actually provide the file or a disc, I can get the file myself, not to worry. Save us both a little money and hassle. As long as that license continues to grant me the right to have that movie in whatever format on any device, in perpetuity. I'll pay, gladly.
1) Say "blockchain" a lot.
2) Come up with some bogus online service that people will pay for by crypto coin. Storage, social media something something, distributed music bla bla, fan reward collectible dingus, etc.
3) Set up your coin. Pre-mine or pre-assign plenty of coins to the company "for future allocations"
4) Flog your shitty service online. A paralax scrolling website is essential, as are thin fonts. Do not present any meaningful information! (Not that you had any)
5) Once your coin hits a decent price on the exchanges, sell your stash and announce that your coins were "stolen by a hacker"
6) Fold. And profit.
That's the thing: they might have been successful if they had only gotten $800k. Or a bit more perhaps. Their problem wasn't that they didn't have enough money, they had too much of it, then they lost focus and overspent. Not the first startup to fall into this trap either.
First they get their data from the exact same spot. If the road stands up to normal use, doesn't wreck bicycle tires, doesn't turn incredibly slippery in rain or snow, isn't riddled with holes after a few frost / thaw cycles, doesn't kill a kitten an hour with microplastics produced by wear and tear... then it's time to build a longer stretch and see if the economics also work out.
Yeah, all in all this is a pretty interesting experiment.
plastic wearing off and beingreleased into the environment.
There's likely to be some of that. But probably a great deal less than we currently have, with most plastic going unrecycled.
Repairable is also a concern. It's not like an asphalt road that can be easily patched. Or maybe it can. I didn't RTFA.
It being plastic, there might be a simple way using heat & resin to patch a bad spot. Or you lift out a section and drop in a new one, I don't know. But I have my doubts about the greatly reduced construction times these guys claim: most of the effort in building new roads seems to go into preparing the right of way, the foundation, and grading, and you still need to do all that when using these plastic segments. Once they've done the ground work, surfacing the road doesn't seem to actually take that much time. But perhaps it's different for bike paths.
How will they be kept free of clogs? And how easy will it be to unclog them? Then there's the question of how the drainage channels will deal with snow melting and entering the drains and re-freezing at night or when the temperature drops.
Here in the Netherlands, drainage is pretty much a solved problem.
And that made all the difference. Back when the iPhone came out, there were already quite a few smartphones on the market, with stylus-based touchscreens. Apple's phone made it easy to quickly check the news, your mail, the train schedule... and if you saw someone take out a phone, poke at it for a few seconds, then put it away again, 10 to 1 it was an iPhone.
It's not about which phrase describes things better. You are right: people feel threatened about this stuff. You can't say "master / slave" anymore in discussions on engineering or CS. You can't say "black" anymore unless you are, you know, black. And you can't say "mailman" anymore either to refer to the profession of schlepping letters around the neighborhood. Poor, elderly, obese, words like that are also off-limits or will be soon. Other people, whoever they are, now decide what you can and cannot say, and that is a powerful thing that frightens people. Maybe they are reminded by Orwell's NewSpeak.
That's most certainly not going to be the only customer.
Also, what if they install this device in my old and dying neighbour's house, and the thing is also able to track me and my wife? That's pretty sensitive data. Perhaps they will ask our permission: "surely you wouldn't deprive your dying neighbour the care he deserves over some pidling privacy concerns? Do you have something to hide?"
It's not really like pushing normally or pushing hard. What you do is "push through", you tap an app's icon normally then increase the pressure, and up pops the hidden menu or whatever. The phone gives you a little clicky feedback which makes it feel like you're pushing through a stiff mechanical resistance. It takes getting used to, but only a little.
As someone who developed apps for fun and a little profit I say: exactly this. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, but I always thought that eventually this feature would see much wider use once Apple incorporated it on all their phones. Now that they have decided to not include the feauture on their "low end" phones, it's effectively dead.
For service like that (great selection, a variety of formats and bitrates, fast downloading, freedom to format-shift) I wouldn’t actually mind paying the rights holders. And if they are too scared to provide DRM free files, then they could sell me a certificate that entitles me to a copy of that movie in perpetuity. I’ll get the file myself from you know where.
I don’t mind pay per view or all-you-can-eat services like Spotify, because you are getting exactly what you are paying for: one view (or multiple views in a very short timeframe) of a particular movie, or access to whatever is on offer with the streaming service. If you don’t like their collection anymore, cancel your subscription at the end of the month.
If however you aim to build a library, physical discs or download-to-own content unencumbered by DRM are the only way to go. Everything else is just paying full price for rentals.
Dunno about other countries, but over here (NL) the PM most certainly isn't an MP. The PM and other ministers are generally (but not necessarily) selected from the newly elected MPs, but after they form a government they leave parliament, and people further down the lists of their respective parties fill the vacancies. Since one of the more important roles of parliament is to oversee and audit the business of government, it would be weird to have government be part of that.
You probably want them to be 'on the take' from YOU. They are probably NOT.
Why shouldn't they be? Politicians should put the people's interests first (and perhaps it should be the only interests they take into considerations). Yes, CEOs and shareholders are people too, and the public in general benefits from healthy commerce and healthy corporations. But businesses should only be kept healthy for the sake of people's interests, not for their own sake.
That is very much a problem with commissioners and MEPs in Europe: corporate lobbyists certainly have their ear, and whatever stuff they are being fed by those lobbyists is not well balanced - by public advocacy groups or by their own conscience - against the interests of the public at large. This law is proof of that. By the way, I fully expected this thing to pass. It is almost always the case when a law gets sent back by parliament, and is resubmitted again after a few changes. Hell, that's what they did with our so called constitution.
The big social media companies love this law. Because it makes it that much harder for some new upstart start-up to steal their eyeballs and profits.
The bigger issue however is covert censorship. For instance, if the EU start to make a stink about “hate speech” and have some sufficiently vague guidelines about what constitutes hate speech, the social media companies might be frightened into erring on the side of caution, and remove moderate but “undesirable” speech as well. They will be doing the dirty work, while Brussels keeps its hands clean.
If they think you can afford to pay more, they will charge more. And you can afford Prime... This is already very much the case with airlines but probably the future of online retailing as well. If you can come up with an algorithm that makes a reasonable guess at what a person would be willing to pay for an item, based on all the information they raped from them previously, Amazon and friends will be beating a path to your door.
The AC had legitimate objections against your point; these arguments come up every time in debates on privacy. Better to address than ignore these. Though I do wish Slashdot would do away with AC comments completely.
Why scare people? Because it has happened before. Cops looking up details of celebrities because they are bored, or details on their ex' new boyfriend to see if there's anything that can ruin that relationship, or in case of bent cops: details on cases having to do with their criminal friends. Some of these cops have been caught because there was good (fine grained) authorisation mechanism in place, a detailed audit trail, and alerts on suspicious activities. But a lot of these systems don't have any of that. So: we scare people so they demand that sufficient security and monitoring is put in place.
If the screwups are few enough, they will probably deal with them like they do with theft: ignore it. You can probably make a claim that you got overcharged and they will refund it without asking too many questions. Just make the process slightly cumbersome, and make some vague threats about banning you from the store after making too many false claims (by reviewing camera footage for instance) and they can probably afford to take you at your word when you make a claim, only doing occasional spot checks.
Agreed. And in an ideal world he should be able to smoke what he wants where he wants, with the public not thinking any less of him for it. But Musk would do well to realise that we don't live in an ideal, rational world, and that when you are running a public company, the public's opinion (or at least that of the stockholders) matters quite a bit.
Best thing for him would be to lay low, play nice and give Twitter - and himself - a bit of a rest. Once he gets Model 3 production fully on track, addresses these rumoured quality issues, and maybe have a couple good runs with the Crew Dragon capsule, he will have shown shareholders that he's the right man for the job. After that he can be as excentric as he likes...
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to intellectual "property", the full picture is likely to only enrage me further. The upshot is usually that companies have turned their temporary monopolies (what copyright is, or used to be) into actual property, and at the same time turned what by rights should be our property into a temporary license that can be revoked on a whim.
I am old fashioned and I like building a library of music and movies, even if it's a digital one. Streaming's no good precisely because of this issue: Netflix doesn't renew their license or I move to a different country or whatever, and stuff randomly disappears. Like the removal guys stealing a couple of my books when I move house. Here's a deal for the movie companies: sell me a license that entitles me to a copy of your movie. You don't need to actually provide the file or a disc, I can get the file myself, not to worry. Save us both a little money and hassle. As long as that license continues to grant me the right to have that movie in whatever format on any device, in perpetuity. I'll pay, gladly.
Terang bulan
how to think like blockchain entrepreneurs
1) Say "blockchain" a lot.
2) Come up with some bogus online service that people will pay for by crypto coin. Storage, social media something something, distributed music bla bla, fan reward collectible dingus, etc.
3) Set up your coin. Pre-mine or pre-assign plenty of coins to the company "for future allocations"
4) Flog your shitty service online. A paralax scrolling website is essential, as are thin fonts. Do not present any meaningful information! (Not that you had any)
5) Once your coin hits a decent price on the exchanges, sell your stash and announce that your coins were "stolen by a hacker"
6) Fold. And profit.
That's the thing: they might have been successful if they had only gotten $800k. Or a bit more perhaps. Their problem wasn't that they didn't have enough money, they had too much of it, then they lost focus and overspent. Not the first startup to fall into this trap either.
First they get their data from the exact same spot. If the road stands up to normal use, doesn't wreck bicycle tires, doesn't turn incredibly slippery in rain or snow, isn't riddled with holes after a few frost / thaw cycles, doesn't kill a kitten an hour with microplastics produced by wear and tear... then it's time to build a longer stretch and see if the economics also work out.
plastic wearing off and beingreleased into the environment.
There's likely to be some of that. But probably a great deal less than we currently have, with most plastic going unrecycled.
Repairable is also a concern. It's not like an asphalt road that can be easily patched. Or maybe it can. I didn't RTFA.
It being plastic, there might be a simple way using heat & resin to patch a bad spot. Or you lift out a section and drop in a new one, I don't know. But I have my doubts about the greatly reduced construction times these guys claim: most of the effort in building new roads seems to go into preparing the right of way, the foundation, and grading, and you still need to do all that when using these plastic segments. Once they've done the ground work, surfacing the road doesn't seem to actually take that much time. But perhaps it's different for bike paths.
How will they be kept free of clogs? And how easy will it be to unclog them? Then there's the question of how the drainage channels will deal with snow melting and entering the drains and re-freezing at night or when the temperature drops.
Here in the Netherlands, drainage is pretty much a solved problem.
And that made all the difference. Back when the iPhone came out, there were already quite a few smartphones on the market, with stylus-based touchscreens. Apple's phone made it easy to quickly check the news, your mail, the train schedule... and if you saw someone take out a phone, poke at it for a few seconds, then put it away again, 10 to 1 it was an iPhone.
What Apple did was bring it to market first
Yes, that is what innovation is, as opposed to invention. And that's what the article calls it even if they use the word invention a few times.
It's not about which phrase describes things better. You are right: people feel threatened about this stuff. You can't say "master / slave" anymore in discussions on engineering or CS. You can't say "black" anymore unless you are, you know, black. And you can't say "mailman" anymore either to refer to the profession of schlepping letters around the neighborhood. Poor, elderly, obese, words like that are also off-limits or will be soon. Other people, whoever they are, now decide what you can and cannot say, and that is a powerful thing that frightens people. Maybe they are reminded by Orwell's NewSpeak.
That's most certainly not going to be the only customer.
Also, what if they install this device in my old and dying neighbour's house, and the thing is also able to track me and my wife? That's pretty sensitive data. Perhaps they will ask our permission: "surely you wouldn't deprive your dying neighbour the care he deserves over some pidling privacy concerns? Do you have something to hide?"
It's not really like pushing normally or pushing hard. What you do is "push through", you tap an app's icon normally then increase the pressure, and up pops the hidden menu or whatever. The phone gives you a little clicky feedback which makes it feel like you're pushing through a stiff mechanical resistance. It takes getting used to, but only a little.
As someone who developed apps for fun and a little profit I say: exactly this. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, but I always thought that eventually this feature would see much wider use once Apple incorporated it on all their phones. Now that they have decided to not include the feauture on their "low end" phones, it's effectively dead.
For service like that (great selection, a variety of formats and bitrates, fast downloading, freedom to format-shift) I wouldn’t actually mind paying the rights holders. And if they are too scared to provide DRM free files, then they could sell me a certificate that entitles me to a copy of that movie in perpetuity. I’ll get the file myself from you know where.
I don’t mind pay per view or all-you-can-eat services like Spotify, because you are getting exactly what you are paying for: one view (or multiple views in a very short timeframe) of a particular movie, or access to whatever is on offer with the streaming service. If you don’t like their collection anymore, cancel your subscription at the end of the month.
If however you aim to build a library, physical discs or download-to-own content unencumbered by DRM are the only way to go. Everything else is just paying full price for rentals.
Dunno about other countries, but over here (NL) the PM most certainly isn't an MP. The PM and other ministers are generally (but not necessarily) selected from the newly elected MPs, but after they form a government they leave parliament, and people further down the lists of their respective parties fill the vacancies. Since one of the more important roles of parliament is to oversee and audit the business of government, it would be weird to have government be part of that.
You probably want them to be 'on the take' from YOU. They are probably NOT.
Why shouldn't they be? Politicians should put the people's interests first (and perhaps it should be the only interests they take into considerations). Yes, CEOs and shareholders are people too, and the public in general benefits from healthy commerce and healthy corporations. But businesses should only be kept healthy for the sake of people's interests, not for their own sake.
That is very much a problem with commissioners and MEPs in Europe: corporate lobbyists certainly have their ear, and whatever stuff they are being fed by those lobbyists is not well balanced - by public advocacy groups or by their own conscience - against the interests of the public at large. This law is proof of that. By the way, I fully expected this thing to pass. It is almost always the case when a law gets sent back by parliament, and is resubmitted again after a few changes. Hell, that's what they did with our so called constitution.
The big social media companies love this law. Because it makes it that much harder for some new upstart start-up to steal their eyeballs and profits.
The bigger issue however is covert censorship. For instance, if the EU start to make a stink about “hate speech” and have some sufficiently vague guidelines about what constitutes hate speech, the social media companies might be frightened into erring on the side of caution, and remove moderate but “undesirable” speech as well. They will be doing the dirty work, while Brussels keeps its hands clean.
If they think you can afford to pay more, they will charge more. And you can afford Prime... This is already very much the case with airlines but probably the future of online retailing as well. If you can come up with an algorithm that makes a reasonable guess at what a person would be willing to pay for an item, based on all the information they raped from them previously, Amazon and friends will be beating a path to your door.
I tried to buy plywood and supplies on Amazon but I couldnt find any because of all the damn ads!
The AC had legitimate objections against your point; these arguments come up every time in debates on privacy. Better to address than ignore these. Though I do wish Slashdot would do away with AC comments completely.
Why scare people? Because it has happened before. Cops looking up details of celebrities because they are bored, or details on their ex' new boyfriend to see if there's anything that can ruin that relationship, or in case of bent cops: details on cases having to do with their criminal friends. Some of these cops have been caught because there was good (fine grained) authorisation mechanism in place, a detailed audit trail, and alerts on suspicious activities. But a lot of these systems don't have any of that. So: we scare people so they demand that sufficient security and monitoring is put in place.
Top athletes and entertainers also make insane amounts. And somehow we’re all ok with that.
If the screwups are few enough, they will probably deal with them like they do with theft: ignore it. You can probably make a claim that you got overcharged and they will refund it without asking too many questions. Just make the process slightly cumbersome, and make some vague threats about banning you from the store after making too many false claims (by reviewing camera footage for instance) and they can probably afford to take you at your word when you make a claim, only doing occasional spot checks.
Agreed. And in an ideal world he should be able to smoke what he wants where he wants, with the public not thinking any less of him for it. But Musk would do well to realise that we don't live in an ideal, rational world, and that when you are running a public company, the public's opinion (or at least that of the stockholders) matters quite a bit.
Best thing for him would be to lay low, play nice and give Twitter - and himself - a bit of a rest. Once he gets Model 3 production fully on track, addresses these rumoured quality issues, and maybe have a couple good runs with the Crew Dragon capsule, he will have shown shareholders that he's the right man for the job. After that he can be as excentric as he likes...
It's not just Slahsdot in this case. The headlines everywhere read: "Elon tokes up during interview!!!"