I realize you're saying this in jest, but a better second part of that statement would be, "Only corporations will do chemistry." I don't like sounding like an anti-business reactionary, but we're seeing more and more of these situations where due to liability, licensing, and security concerns, only large businesses are seen as capable and 'trustworthy' enough to persue technological advancement.
Which is crazy, of course, because corporations are bound by design to be interested only in developments with visible returns on investment and restricted only by the ethical constraints that may get said corporation sued. There's no interest in investigating random or merely 'interesting' things that can produce the really interesting and exciting diamonds in the rough of unexpected discovery.
The amount of resources to do research can be remarkably small. The tools to run a small bacterial lab can be aquired for a few thousand dollars, and a chemical lab costs about the same (used centrifuge, a bunch of glassware, thermometers, agitators, water baths, etc). Sure you won't be doing DNA sequencing, but you can maybe make your own superglue or discover a bacterium that has interesting soil-fixing properties. The tools that Pastuer used won't cost you very much in today's market. But you'll never be able to get insurance or convince your local newspaper that you're legit because you don't have a quarterly report.
Are we willing to trust all our future scientific advances to the same people that want to put DRM in movies?
I'm bringing up the 1st Amendment in that it's unconstitutional to prevent people from talking about their experiences with products (not the hack itself, even though I think that's pretty darn obviously fair use).
If that trumps the DCMA, well, it hasn't been tested in court. It damn well should, otherwise all consumer advocacy is out the window. And that's the type of thing that the 1st amendment in suppossed to protect us all from.
You're right in that the Bill of Rights gets trotted out an awful lot to support a lot of sideways arguments, but in this case I think it's perfectly appropriate to say that the 1st Amendment should protect individual Americans who want to publish information about what they found out when taking apart a commercial product.
This is very true in many respects, except that your conclusion is very apologist. It's true that Mac has changed it's market, and has every right who it's selling things to and what it want to make easy or hard for other people, but there's a very big line in the sand that they're crossing here.
When I buy a piece of software, I have every right to do whatever I want to it myself. Reselling modified versions, no, but I bought it and it's mine. If I want to put extra ones and zeros in it, while forfeiting any warranty, that's MY damn business. Similarly for any hardware that I buy I can solder whatever the hell I want to it, and the person who sold it to me has no right to tell me that I can't.
Now we have these companies that make their money off of bundling things like OS and hardware, or ink cartridges and printers (or razorblades and razors!), that think that buy letting you buy one they 'own' your 'experience' and can force you to do only what the want with it. That's bullshit! There's no moral reason they should define what I can or cannot do with their product.
Attacking people who express their First Amendment rights (and since these sites are being shut down by the DCMA I assume they're in the US) to tell other people what they've found out about a product they OWN, on the basis of their business model, is fucking violation of civil rights. It's not 'hack unfriendly'.
I've owned 3 macs, and an old apple IIe back in the day, and have a little airport station and an iPod now. I've always enjoyed Apple products, and all the little hacks and easter eggs that give their products character. But that's not in their new authoritarian business model and I'm getting very ill looking at Apple today.
Oh, please. Did you get that post off of a slash comment storage site? That argument has been used against open source forever, but you'll still find the same OSS tcp stack, text editors, shells, compilers, mail transport agents, DNS servers, timeservers, firewall software, media encoders/decoders, graphic manipulation libraries, webservers, vnc servers, DHCP servers, CIFS servers, FTP servers, and a whole lot more making up the underfabric of the internet without offering much, if any, direct support. We just accept that they're there because they've always been there.
Comments like these just prove that the commenter is too far removed to understand that they aren't going to see then next OSS killer app start up until someone else tells them it's there.
Most likely it looks rickety because it's half-inflated. Airships do slowly leak their helium, especially when under pressure. There's no point in keeping it that full when it's getting moved around the runway.
The issue really isn't terrorists, it's stores of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons delivered via missile/rocket/guided shell. Using GPS makes it far, far easier to make precision weapons that will accomplish the goal with far fewer delivery vehicles and smaller warheads.
If you're off by a few feet with one of these weapons, it's no big deal. But if you're off by a quarter mile, you've just wasted a very very expensive/scarce piece of technology (which you probably were *REALLY* counting on, considering the scenarios these weapons are used in). Being off a quarter mile when you're firing something into an orbital ballistic arc isn't all that improbable either, unless you've got extremely precise target locations and the vehicle can precisely make corrections in-flight.
A very large part of the nuclear megatonnage gap between the US and the USSR in the 80's wasn't so much that the US was getting out-produced, but that the US didn't have to build as many warheads to be effective. With it's technology, the US could very precisely put an ICBM re-entry vehicle wherever they wanted, using a smaller warhead (allowing for more warheads in the rocket, fewer rockets, less overall cost, etc) while the Soviets had to use larger warheads, more rockets, more cost, to accomplish it's military missions.
Galileo will make it cheaper for other nations to make NBC weapons deliverable to remote targets, possibly encouraging their development. This makes the American military very unhappy, especially since they're not doing so hot (for various reasons) on the ballistic missile defense front.
I guess it's possible that a terrorist could cobble together a home-made buzz-bomb cruise missile and use GPS to guide it, but from a military standpoint terrorists are just very minor annoyances. Industrial nations with cost effective NBC delivery systems are dire threats.
So the whole 'terrorists' cry, like you're saying, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a global sense. It's not like the accuracy of GPS now isn't something a terrorist could use and nobody is going to know to manipulate the funcion of a single terrorist-employed GPS unit before it does it's work. This is just something US officials can use to sway Western opinion while clouding the real, and politically distasteful, issues.
I'm astounded by the crap I'm reading here in the comments. The benefits for Google are enormous and obvious, and the price is more than fair. Everyone is so burnt on their perception of the AOL client with it's 'me too' members they don't see what it really is.
1) AOL makes $1 billion in *profit* every year. Makes a $20 billion valuation easy to grasp. Yes, 2/3 of that is from dial up users that's eroding. But the advertising portion is growing dramatically every year (per eyeball internet ads are still very cheap compared to print, that's going to change).
2) AOL has millions and millions of users. Not just members per se, but users of it's services via aim.com, aol.com, netscape.com, VOIP, AOLRadio + WinAmp, etc. It wants to provide features to all of these with web services (mail, IM, address books, etc) instead of it's old fashioned heavy client (and make money off of it with ads). Google is building these types of features, also to make money with ads, but has almost no member base. Excellent match there, merging the backends of those memberships to give AOL users (again, not just those paying for dial-up) access to Google's features.
3) AOL provides Google with a large amount of it's cash. Letting Microsoft have a partnership would be a hard blow to Google's bottom line and permanently establish Microsoft as a search titan (just like how a partnership with AOL made MS the browser champion).
4) AOL internally is an Open Source heavy shop (no shit). If they have to choose between Google and Microsoft, they can work with Google much more easily and have the expertise to do so. The only thing Microsoft could do is take the name (not much value there, really) and kill the company to spite Google. Retrofitting would be like rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
The issue here is that AOL is owned by a corporate parent that hates them and won't AOL do what they need to move past 1999. They won't give them access to their cable systems, they compete directly against them in VOIP, won't let them trade in media content, and openly dis them in their media outlets. The true crime is that TW didn't just sell AOL to Google directly. Google is going to regret every percentage point that TW still holds. *That's* the true danger of this deal... what TW might make Google do to use AOL.
So, okay, AOL is 'shit'. AOL users are 'stupid'. The company is 'evil'. Whatever. It's still the most powerful single consumer internet access company and it's a valuable asset... especially if it goes to an organization (like Google) that can move it's members to purely ad-supported features.
Re:[OT] Re:How to boycott? mercantilism
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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Lincoln definetly didn't flinch at abridging the rights of the people during the war, but if you follow history at all you'd know that the US of the 1860's was no empire. You're letting your vision of "Amerika" today cloud the past.
There's Ingres and Firebird articles in the past day too. Just because one database is mentioned, all of them have to be? Is there a technology diversity movement I didn't hear about? Do we have to be inclusive of all software without making any value judgements lest we hurt the feelings of the zealo(:cough:) users of said software?
C'mon, it's tools, not religion. And if it is religion, then go set up some faith based software community and see how far that gets you.
Er, that's blatantly misleading. The community version is the same thing as the paid version, minus support. They're just encouraging you to buy support from them.
They are the same thing because they're both political tactics, trying to get theology taught in schools rather than actual scientific theories.
Check out wikipedia's entry on the wedge strategy. It's a simple repackaging of creationism in light of the failure to get creationism in American schools in the past. The books and promotional materials put out by the groups pushing the protestant agenda are identical for both, except the words 'Creation' are changed with 'ID'.
I still don't think that this is going to change anything for TiVo (good or bad). "Tivo users will be able to find programs in Yahoo!'s listings and send them to Tivo to record", but AOL users have been able to do this for quite some time, and I don't think that it has much benefit over Tivo's own selection page. I doubt Yahoo's will either.
And AOL probably would have made a lot more off of advertising for Time Warner if they hadn't made all the TW fiefdoms hate their guts after trying to force them to use AOL mail instead of Outlook. But that's got nothing to do with their valuation of 5 billion now.
In the first 6 months of this year AOL had revenue of 4.2 billion with operating income of 692 million. Performance was similar for last year.
That means that at 5 billion, they'd pay for themselves with interest in 5 years. Providing they can just stay where they're at (and god forbid, increase revenue), they could pay for themselves with interest in 5 years.
Members are only a part of AOL's revenue stream. They mostly make their money from advertising on aol.com, spinner, moviephone, digital city, nullsoft, ICQ, AIM, etc. So the member/dollar metric doesn't really apply to them any more.
In fact, the specter of that metric is why AOLTW is valued as low as it is. Until AOL gets measured on something other than it's monthly fee divided by it's membership, nobody is going to care how much profit it makes.
If Google did have a stake in AOL, it'd have access to 50% of the instant messaging marketplace rather than trying to build one of it's own, with tens of millions of pairs of eyeballs looking at their targeted ads.
Humpf. If you're involved in the art world of today you know that it's far more valuable to be recognized by the self deluded art community than to actually produce profound work if you want to make money. The originality or quality of your pieces is far secondary to how well you can impress the bohemians at the art show. Is that what you're trying to protect here? Because that's not what the article or most of these posters are taking on.
The vast majority of artwork these days is created by legions of uncredited corporate wage slaves, mostly for advertising. Even most of the music on the radio is 'for hire' compositions, leaving the modern artist without any real claim to their own work. These files being shared are a symptom that the profit model of said companies, sucking profits out of uncompensated artists while screwing the affecionado at every opportunity, is no longer maintainable. The technology they used to add as a value, distribution and marketing, is irrelevant in the world of instant download gratification and web buzz.
Don't think that because you're a 'starving artist' you're in the same boat as them. You'll still have your snobby art shows with people buying your overpriced originals becase it makes them look cool. If you're a musician you can now sell your own music directly and make more money with actually PLAYING your stuff rather than suffering the interference of a media company telling you what's marketable and owning your stuff.
We can all do without litigious corporations using lawyers to maintain irrelevant business models that are hurtful to both artist and customer.
As for the rest of your stuff about eminent domain and communists, I'll mostly let it pass since that's obviously just rant to make your post more provocative, and it doesn't make much sense.
Whay the hell does it matter if it's a natural cycle? Just because something is 'natural' doesn't mean it's good (or, when did all these neo-cons turn into hippies?). If by changing our energy behaviour we can somehow help arrest this process WE NEED TO DO IT. If we need to put up solar shields to arrest this process WE NEED TO DO IT. Global climate change will invalidate huge parts of our world infrastructure and devastate our economies and cause untold human misery.
Frankly, I find the republican party's stance on this baffling. Unless all they really care about is short term energy profits (and I'd like to think that a party that large has a lot more interests than that), it's pointless to deny that global warming is happening and that something must be done to preserve our standard of living.
Hell, even if the party is a corporatist bastion, why can't it direct corporations to private anti-global warming projects like alternative energy? There's no reason that Shell and Chevron can't get their profits from other sources. It's just as bad as the goverment protecting a failing business model like studio music or movies. Hell, it's much worse, considering we already KNOW Africa's droughts and famine are the direct result of global warming.
Heh, you're obviously not an American. We've got fairly tough drunk driving laws, lots of teetotalers, super high prices in the 'burbs for houses ($500k for a.1 acre 2000sqft townhouse is the median), and very few pubs or clubs anywhere except in the cities, and 'trendy' apartment complexes everywhere.
The problem is that American culture is obsessed with automobiles. We see them as an extention of ourselves, and our homes. Is the club 30 miles away? Drive there. A friend lives 60 miles away? Drive to see them. A concert is going on in a city 300 miles away? Grab someone to go with you and hop in the car. We think nothing of driving for hours and hours to get somewhere.
And cities SUCK for cars, making them VERY undesireable to live in (in the American ideal). For a carless city dweller, the ONLY places you can go are in the city... which might be fine for you but you'll find it a pain in the ass not being able to jaunt out of the city, pick up a piece of furniture or a monitor or a cat on a whim.
The American obsession with cars won't end (that'd be like asking the English to give up pubs), we've built our lives around them. What should happen, and what can happen, is making cars lighter/more efficient/smaller. SUV's are so popular because they exploit tons of loopholes in the car laws that were intended to help farmers, not soccer moms. Until they get legislated off the roads, it's simply unsafe to have a little Prius or Smartcar.
Oh, and in America, you can only get diesel pickup trucks and VWs. What's up with that?
Of course it's not his interest. He's interested in doing only what's fun for him, which is great. Wonderful. I wish I had a passion like that, both as intellectually advanced and challenging as being a primary developer on an acclaimed operating system.
But my point is that attitude doesn't help with adoption, and with getting more respect and resources. Which is why the *BSD's will always lag behind Linux in adoption, features, and capability. Just like how Intel can use a chipset like x86 which has so many shortcomings, but with raw adoption (and therefore cash and further R&D) can make one of the fastest processors in the world.
So they don't care about adoption? Good for them, no reason to cloud what they are doing for themselves with things they don't like to do just to get more lusers on their mailing lists. But I should stop hearing "You should be using *BSD because it's better than Linux/Solaris/HPUX/Whatever", because it's not. And it won't be as long as it's their personal hobby and not a true attempt to build a widely accepted operating system.
These science missions, and US space and military research, can be traced to almost all of the great technological advancements of our time. Spending money on these costs less than the worldwide blockbuster movie budget and greatly increases our technological prowess.
Hell, if it wasn't for DARPA, we wouldn't even be posting here.
Those million pissed off voters need to start understanding where their standard of living comes from.
You like saying other people have made your point when they haven't, don't you?
I'm completely disinterested in the OSs represented in this thread, but can't help but think that you don't recognize that you're being the exact kind of person that turns people away from projects.
Sure, you say you don't want them, because they don't fit your ideal of a computer user. Simply, that makes them not want you either. As well as the OS that to them you represent.::shrug:: So enjoy your bed. Just remember that this is the real reason that there won't be many users or resources headed BSD's way.
... but he will still be counted as a subscriber, leading to good per-subscriber infection rates. For fairness' sake AOL should really not count these users as subscribers either, nor the dialup users.
That's a really good point, and I'd have to agree. What I'd really find interesting though is how many of those zombies ARE dial-up (not just for AOL, but for all of the ISP's). Sure, individually they'd be ineffective, but en-masse they're probably worth looking at.
I'm sure that exploit scripts don't bother checking to see if the connection is broadband or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I can't help but suggest your use of the acronymn SOB and the adjective ornery doesn't press your case.
I don't think EFF means what you think it means.
I realize you're saying this in jest, but a better second part of that statement would be, "Only corporations will do chemistry." I don't like sounding like an anti-business reactionary, but we're seeing more and more of these situations where due to liability, licensing, and security concerns, only large businesses are seen as capable and 'trustworthy' enough to persue technological advancement.
Which is crazy, of course, because corporations are bound by design to be interested only in developments with visible returns on investment and restricted only by the ethical constraints that may get said corporation sued. There's no interest in investigating random or merely 'interesting' things that can produce the really interesting and exciting diamonds in the rough of unexpected discovery.
The amount of resources to do research can be remarkably small. The tools to run a small bacterial lab can be aquired for a few thousand dollars, and a chemical lab costs about the same (used centrifuge, a bunch of glassware, thermometers, agitators, water baths, etc). Sure you won't be doing DNA sequencing, but you can maybe make your own superglue or discover a bacterium that has interesting soil-fixing properties. The tools that Pastuer used won't cost you very much in today's market. But you'll never be able to get insurance or convince your local newspaper that you're legit because you don't have a quarterly report.
Are we willing to trust all our future scientific advances to the same people that want to put DRM in movies?
I'm bringing up the 1st Amendment in that it's unconstitutional to prevent people from talking about their experiences with products (not the hack itself, even though I think that's pretty darn obviously fair use).
If that trumps the DCMA, well, it hasn't been tested in court. It damn well should, otherwise all consumer advocacy is out the window. And that's the type of thing that the 1st amendment in suppossed to protect us all from.
You're right in that the Bill of Rights gets trotted out an awful lot to support a lot of sideways arguments, but in this case I think it's perfectly appropriate to say that the 1st Amendment should protect individual Americans who want to publish information about what they found out when taking apart a commercial product.
Running a copy of OSX you paid for on hardare you paid for is not piracy.
This is very true in many respects, except that your conclusion is very apologist. It's true that Mac has changed it's market, and has every right who it's selling things to and what it want to make easy or hard for other people, but there's a very big line in the sand that they're crossing here.
When I buy a piece of software, I have every right to do whatever I want to it myself. Reselling modified versions, no, but I bought it and it's mine. If I want to put extra ones and zeros in it, while forfeiting any warranty, that's MY damn business. Similarly for any hardware that I buy I can solder whatever the hell I want to it, and the person who sold it to me has no right to tell me that I can't.
Now we have these companies that make their money off of bundling things like OS and hardware, or ink cartridges and printers (or razorblades and razors!), that think that buy letting you buy one they 'own' your 'experience' and can force you to do only what the want with it. That's bullshit! There's no moral reason they should define what I can or cannot do with their product.
Attacking people who express their First Amendment rights (and since these sites are being shut down by the DCMA I assume they're in the US) to tell other people what they've found out about a product they OWN, on the basis of their business model, is fucking violation of civil rights. It's not 'hack unfriendly'.
I've owned 3 macs, and an old apple IIe back in the day, and have a little airport station and an iPod now. I've always enjoyed Apple products, and all the little hacks and easter eggs that give their products character. But that's not in their new authoritarian business model and I'm getting very ill looking at Apple today.
Oh, please. Did you get that post off of a slash comment storage site? That argument has been used against open source forever, but you'll still find the same OSS tcp stack, text editors, shells, compilers, mail transport agents, DNS servers, timeservers, firewall software, media encoders/decoders, graphic manipulation libraries, webservers, vnc servers, DHCP servers, CIFS servers, FTP servers, and a whole lot more making up the underfabric of the internet without offering much, if any, direct support. We just accept that they're there because they've always been there.
Comments like these just prove that the commenter is too far removed to understand that they aren't going to see then next OSS killer app start up until someone else tells them it's there.
Most likely it looks rickety because it's half-inflated. Airships do slowly leak their helium, especially when under pressure. There's no point in keeping it that full when it's getting moved around the runway.
The issue really isn't terrorists, it's stores of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons delivered via missile/rocket/guided shell. Using GPS makes it far, far easier to make precision weapons that will accomplish the goal with far fewer delivery vehicles and smaller warheads.
If you're off by a few feet with one of these weapons, it's no big deal. But if you're off by a quarter mile, you've just wasted a very very expensive/scarce piece of technology (which you probably were *REALLY* counting on, considering the scenarios these weapons are used in). Being off a quarter mile when you're firing something into an orbital ballistic arc isn't all that improbable either, unless you've got extremely precise target locations and the vehicle can precisely make corrections in-flight.
A very large part of the nuclear megatonnage gap between the US and the USSR in the 80's wasn't so much that the US was getting out-produced, but that the US didn't have to build as many warheads to be effective. With it's technology, the US could very precisely put an ICBM re-entry vehicle wherever they wanted, using a smaller warhead (allowing for more warheads in the rocket, fewer rockets, less overall cost, etc) while the Soviets had to use larger warheads, more rockets, more cost, to accomplish it's military missions.
Galileo will make it cheaper for other nations to make NBC weapons deliverable to remote targets, possibly encouraging their development. This makes the American military very unhappy, especially since they're not doing so hot (for various reasons) on the ballistic missile defense front.
I guess it's possible that a terrorist could cobble together a home-made buzz-bomb cruise missile and use GPS to guide it, but from a military standpoint terrorists are just very minor annoyances. Industrial nations with cost effective NBC delivery systems are dire threats.
So the whole 'terrorists' cry, like you're saying, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a global sense. It's not like the accuracy of GPS now isn't something a terrorist could use and nobody is going to know to manipulate the funcion of a single terrorist-employed GPS unit before it does it's work. This is just something US officials can use to sway Western opinion while clouding the real, and politically distasteful, issues.
But would that be EvilMonkey Slayer or Evil MonkeySlayer...
If we had spaces allowed in usernames, only then would we know!
I'm astounded by the crap I'm reading here in the comments. The benefits for Google are enormous and obvious, and the price is more than fair. Everyone is so burnt on their perception of the AOL client with it's 'me too' members they don't see what it really is.
1) AOL makes $1 billion in *profit* every year. Makes a $20 billion valuation easy to grasp. Yes, 2/3 of that is from dial up users that's eroding. But the advertising portion is growing dramatically every year (per eyeball internet ads are still very cheap compared to print, that's going to change).
2) AOL has millions and millions of users. Not just members per se, but users of it's services via aim.com, aol.com, netscape.com, VOIP, AOLRadio + WinAmp, etc. It wants to provide features to all of these with web services (mail, IM, address books, etc) instead of it's old fashioned heavy client (and make money off of it with ads). Google is building these types of features, also to make money with ads, but has almost no member base. Excellent match there, merging the backends of those memberships to give AOL users (again, not just those paying for dial-up) access to Google's features.
3) AOL provides Google with a large amount of it's cash. Letting Microsoft have a partnership would be a hard blow to Google's bottom line and permanently establish Microsoft as a search titan (just like how a partnership with AOL made MS the browser champion).
4) AOL internally is an Open Source heavy shop (no shit). If they have to choose between Google and Microsoft, they can work with Google much more easily and have the expertise to do so. The only thing Microsoft could do is take the name (not much value there, really) and kill the company to spite Google. Retrofitting would be like rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
The issue here is that AOL is owned by a corporate parent that hates them and won't AOL do what they need to move past 1999. They won't give them access to their cable systems, they compete directly against them in VOIP, won't let them trade in media content, and openly dis them in their media outlets. The true crime is that TW didn't just sell AOL to Google directly. Google is going to regret every percentage point that TW still holds. *That's* the true danger of this deal... what TW might make Google do to use AOL.
Take a look at Steve Case's opinion on all of this in this Washington Post article.
So, okay, AOL is 'shit'. AOL users are 'stupid'. The company is 'evil'. Whatever. It's still the most powerful single consumer internet access company and it's a valuable asset... especially if it goes to an organization (like Google) that can move it's members to purely ad-supported features.
Lincoln definetly didn't flinch at abridging the rights of the people during the war, but if you follow history at all you'd know that the US of the 1860's was no empire. You're letting your vision of "Amerika" today cloud the past.
There's Ingres and Firebird articles in the past day too. Just because one database is mentioned, all of them have to be? Is there a technology diversity movement I didn't hear about? Do we have to be inclusive of all software without making any value judgements lest we hurt the feelings of the zealo(:cough:) users of said software?
C'mon, it's tools, not religion. And if it is religion, then go set up some faith based software community and see how far that gets you.
Er, that's blatantly misleading. The community version is the same thing as the paid version, minus support. They're just encouraging you to buy support from them.
They are the same thing because they're both political tactics, trying to get theology taught in schools rather than actual scientific theories.
Check out wikipedia's entry on the wedge strategy. It's a simple repackaging of creationism in light of the failure to get creationism in American schools in the past. The books and promotional materials put out by the groups pushing the protestant agenda are identical for both, except the words 'Creation' are changed with 'ID'.
I still don't think that this is going to change anything for TiVo (good or bad). "Tivo users will be able to find programs in Yahoo!'s listings and send them to Tivo to record", but AOL users have been able to do this for quite some time, and I don't think that it has much benefit over Tivo's own selection page. I doubt Yahoo's will either.
And AOL probably would have made a lot more off of advertising for Time Warner if they hadn't made all the TW fiefdoms hate their guts after trying to force them to use AOL mail instead of Outlook. But that's got nothing to do with their valuation of 5 billion now.
In the first 6 months of this year AOL had revenue of 4.2 billion with operating income of 692 million. Performance was similar for last year.
That means that at 5 billion, they'd pay for themselves with interest in 5 years. Providing they can just stay where they're at (and god forbid, increase revenue), they could pay for themselves with interest in 5 years.
Which doesn't sound all that overvalued, does it?
Members are only a part of AOL's revenue stream. They mostly make their money from advertising on aol.com, spinner, moviephone, digital city, nullsoft, ICQ, AIM, etc. So the member/dollar metric doesn't really apply to them any more.
In fact, the specter of that metric is why AOLTW is valued as low as it is. Until AOL gets measured on something other than it's monthly fee divided by it's membership, nobody is going to care how much profit it makes.
If Google did have a stake in AOL, it'd have access to 50% of the instant messaging marketplace rather than trying to build one of it's own, with tens of millions of pairs of eyeballs looking at their targeted ads.
Humpf. If you're involved in the art world of today you know that it's far more valuable to be recognized by the self deluded art community than to actually produce profound work if you want to make money. The originality or quality of your pieces is far secondary to how well you can impress the bohemians at the art show. Is that what you're trying to protect here? Because that's not what the article or most of these posters are taking on.
The vast majority of artwork these days is created by legions of uncredited corporate wage slaves, mostly for advertising. Even most of the music on the radio is 'for hire' compositions, leaving the modern artist without any real claim to their own work. These files being shared are a symptom that the profit model of said companies, sucking profits out of uncompensated artists while screwing the affecionado at every opportunity, is no longer maintainable. The technology they used to add as a value, distribution and marketing, is irrelevant in the world of instant download gratification and web buzz.
Don't think that because you're a 'starving artist' you're in the same boat as them. You'll still have your snobby art shows with people buying your overpriced originals becase it makes them look cool. If you're a musician you can now sell your own music directly and make more money with actually PLAYING your stuff rather than suffering the interference of a media company telling you what's marketable and owning your stuff.
We can all do without litigious corporations using lawyers to maintain irrelevant business models that are hurtful to both artist and customer.
As for the rest of your stuff about eminent domain and communists, I'll mostly let it pass since that's obviously just rant to make your post more provocative, and it doesn't make much sense.
Whay the hell does it matter if it's a natural cycle? Just because something is 'natural' doesn't mean it's good (or, when did all these neo-cons turn into hippies?). If by changing our energy behaviour we can somehow help arrest this process WE NEED TO DO IT. If we need to put up solar shields to arrest this process WE NEED TO DO IT. Global climate change will invalidate huge parts of our world infrastructure and devastate our economies and cause untold human misery.
Frankly, I find the republican party's stance on this baffling. Unless all they really care about is short term energy profits (and I'd like to think that a party that large has a lot more interests than that), it's pointless to deny that global warming is happening and that something must be done to preserve our standard of living.
Hell, even if the party is a corporatist bastion, why can't it direct corporations to private anti-global warming projects like alternative energy? There's no reason that Shell and Chevron can't get their profits from other sources. It's just as bad as the goverment protecting a failing business model like studio music or movies. Hell, it's much worse, considering we already KNOW Africa's droughts and famine are the direct result of global warming.
Really... wtf?
Heh, you're obviously not an American. We've got fairly tough drunk driving laws, lots of teetotalers, super high prices in the 'burbs for houses ($500k for a .1 acre 2000sqft townhouse is the median), and very few pubs or clubs anywhere except in the cities, and 'trendy' apartment complexes everywhere.
The problem is that American culture is obsessed with automobiles. We see them as an extention of ourselves, and our homes. Is the club 30 miles away? Drive there. A friend lives 60 miles away? Drive to see them. A concert is going on in a city 300 miles away? Grab someone to go with you and hop in the car. We think nothing of driving for hours and hours to get somewhere.
And cities SUCK for cars, making them VERY undesireable to live in (in the American ideal). For a carless city dweller, the ONLY places you can go are in the city... which might be fine for you but you'll find it a pain in the ass not being able to jaunt out of the city, pick up a piece of furniture or a monitor or a cat on a whim.
The American obsession with cars won't end (that'd be like asking the English to give up pubs), we've built our lives around them. What should happen, and what can happen, is making cars lighter/more efficient/smaller. SUV's are so popular because they exploit tons of loopholes in the car laws that were intended to help farmers, not soccer moms. Until they get legislated off the roads, it's simply unsafe to have a little Prius or Smartcar.
Oh, and in America, you can only get diesel pickup trucks and VWs. What's up with that?
Of course it's not his interest. He's interested in doing only what's fun for him, which is great. Wonderful. I wish I had a passion like that, both as intellectually advanced and challenging as being a primary developer on an acclaimed operating system.
But my point is that attitude doesn't help with adoption, and with getting more respect and resources. Which is why the *BSD's will always lag behind Linux in adoption, features, and capability. Just like how Intel can use a chipset like x86 which has so many shortcomings, but with raw adoption (and therefore cash and further R&D) can make one of the fastest processors in the world.
So they don't care about adoption? Good for them, no reason to cloud what they are doing for themselves with things they don't like to do just to get more lusers on their mailing lists. But I should stop hearing "You should be using *BSD because it's better than Linux/Solaris/HPUX/Whatever", because it's not. And it won't be as long as it's their personal hobby and not a true attempt to build a widely accepted operating system.
These science missions, and US space and military research, can be traced to almost all of the great technological advancements of our time. Spending money on these costs less than the worldwide blockbuster movie budget and greatly increases our technological prowess.
Hell, if it wasn't for DARPA, we wouldn't even be posting here.
Those million pissed off voters need to start understanding where their standard of living comes from.
You like saying other people have made your point when they haven't, don't you?
::shrug:: So enjoy your bed. Just remember that this is the real reason that there won't be many users or resources headed BSD's way.
I'm completely disinterested in the OSs represented in this thread, but can't help but think that you don't recognize that you're being the exact kind of person that turns people away from projects.
Sure, you say you don't want them, because they don't fit your ideal of a computer user. Simply, that makes them not want you either. As well as the OS that to them you represent.
... but he will still be counted as a subscriber, leading to good per-subscriber infection rates. For fairness' sake AOL should really not count these users as subscribers either, nor the dialup users.
That's a really good point, and I'd have to agree. What I'd really find interesting though is how many of those zombies ARE dial-up (not just for AOL, but for all of the ISP's). Sure, individually they'd be ineffective, but en-masse they're probably worth looking at.
I'm sure that exploit scripts don't bother checking to see if the connection is broadband or not.