At the very least, Kickstarter would have to seriously ramp up their percentage (they get 5% and the rest goes to Amazon for payment processing)
Bear in mind, Kickstarter's service is essentially uniform across all projects - they don't provide more for a $3 million project than they do for a $1k one. 5% of $3 million is a big chunk of change. At the moment, Kickstarter is pocketing the lot.
Now, I've got no complaints about that - they're providing a valuable service, and now they're getting the dividends - but it's not like they're running on razor-slim margins on those projects anyway. If they only required escrow for projects which received over $1 million, there still wouldn't be a huge number of projects that qualified.
deal with the bad press that comes with that kind of work. And now they'd have lost their, "we're just a collection service" veil.
Whereas now they've got to deal with the bad press that comes with being thought of as a haven for scam artists and rip-offs.
Fair enough, they might want to go to that effort. But if they don't, I believe that sooner or later, someone else will. That's the whole deal with the free market. Kickstarter's got quite a lot of room in their margins, and sooner or later, somebody else is going to start up who's filling to make less money in order to attract people.
Remember, the main thing Kickstarter has going for it is brand name. Their technology isn't prohibitively complex or anything. If the Kickstarter brand starts to get tarnished, and competitors can offer services that Kickstarter can't or won't, Kickstarter will be in dire straights.
"Shouldn't we be glad to have Venture Capitalists cut out of the loop so that companies actually listen to us?"
They aren't the same, but they don't have to be for that statement to be true. Kickstarter projects do have to listen to backers to some degree, or they won't get them. Now, there's a lot less control than the VC relationship, but there's also a lot less commitment from the backer too. My interest in this whole model is it's potential long-term effect on copyright issues - if creators are paid for their work before it's produced, then copyright as a model for providing income starts to become unnecessary.
Most projects when they list on Kickstarter are already well advanced. Depending on the type of project, they've probably already made pilots/mockups/prototypes, done their own market research, looked into manufacturing costs, etc. There's also not enough datra released on a Kickstarter prospectus to really give anyone else a really big edge.
People with big funding wouldn't race to market anyway - they'd clone the project after it's released, then out-market the original.
I called Kickstarter on my blog (I know, I'm going to start calling myself a futurist soon). When Kickstarter popped up, it was almost exactly as I'd thought of it, with one key difference - and I think they're really going to have to address that difference as investment ramps up and confidence in their brand name becomes more important.
In my model, I assumed that the crowd-sourcing service would also act as escrow - that they'd release funds as-needed to projects, instead of handing it over in one lump sum. The project owner would have to specify milestones and demonstrate completion before they could access the rest of the cash. Now, obviously, with small projects gaining only a couple of grand, that's probably not going to fly, but with million-dollar projects becoming ever more common, I think either Kickstarter is going to have to start adopting that sort of model, or someone else will, and will eat their lunch.
That's a cool story, but it really has nothing to do with the article. It's basically a fortuitous coincidence that other people don't know what fennel looks like, and have blogged about it associated with the phrase "what vegetable is this?"
This looks like it's primarily interested with homonyms - words with different meanings, but the same arrangement of letters. Like, say, "Prince". Prince could refer either to the title, a particular holder of that title, a brandname, or a bunch of other things. Think wikipedia's disambiguation page. This technology is basically giving google the ability to determine which particular meaning a given instance of the word is talking about, given context.
For instance, if a page contained the phrase "Taj Mahal menu", Google would know internally that that page referred to the Taj Mahal restaurant because it has a sufficient knowledge of semantics and context to understand that monuments and musicians don't have menus, but restaurants do, and that the phrase "Taj Mahal" could refer to any of those things.
The only technical thing they're changing is the voting mechanism, which, as this shows, is pretty much broken. It was ok when Facebook was maybe 1000 people at a couple of US colleges, but since it requires a quorum of 30%, it's pretty much useless now.
Everything else is basically a language change to provide clarification of existing policies, not an actual change of policies. And if you look at the comments on those posts, it's almost all people copy-and-pasting the same fake pseudo-legalese crap about ownership of data. If any of the people posting them had bothered reading the thing they were posting on, they'd see that Facebook has no intention of claiming ownership of posted content.
So, all in all, it's a storm in a teacup, magnified by people who make money from faux outrage.
Uh, yeah, that's how I ended up replying to one. Half of them are reasonable, and half of them are just as much knee-jerk, sky-is-falling drivel as yours. About the usual proportion.
Name one piece of software that client-side security has prevented being pirated.
You're correct, it is only honesty and the good intentions of the majority of us that keep the model working, not DRM. DRM does not provide any protection from piracy. What it does do is provide vendors with, say, regional lock-in models that allows them to benefit from the effects of globalisation, while forcing their customers to pay through the nose.
Well, at least one of those is bunk. This is all taking place on cleared land, so the growth being burnt is new growth. The carbon it's "pumping out" into the atmosphere is carbon that it captured from the atmosphere recently. Carbon is a cycle; the only sort of carbon emission that matters is carbon that upsets that cycle - usually, from long-term sequestered sources, like fossil fuels and old-growth forests.
And that's cool - there's the option to turn it on for thems that wants it. Where it crosses the line is where they insist (like the GP) that having the option isn't enough, and that paranoia must be the default.
Which only goes to reinforce my point - there is a relationship between investments in feature A and feature B. Whether it's positive like you suggest (feature A produces enough money to then produce feature B) or negative like I suggest (cost of feature A precludes timely completion of feature B), the two are not completely distinct like the GP suggested. Also note that it's possible that we're both correct - feature A produces money used to create feature B, but feature B's release was still delayed by the focus on A.
You haven't thought about your viewpoint from a financial perspective much have you?
Well, no, because I wasn't responding to a financial question. The GP was saying that spending time one consoles had no opportunity cost, when it came to developing PvP. That's false.
Whether it's overall a financial win for the company, or whether - over the longterm - both features can be developed more efficiently by doing both is irrelevant to the GPs point and my argument. Assuming limited resources, any feature developed comes at the expense of other features - even if they require different skills.
Brooke's law speaks to the futility of jamming people onto a project late in the game. It has no applicability at all when it comes for hiring people at the start of a project.
Okay, what if I submit a design to print a 3D gun (or replacement parts for one)? What about the packaging for, say, a credit card skimmer? How about a timing circuit made entirely out of electrically-conductive plastic (so it doesn't show up on an x-ray scanner)?
Um, then you should receive a 3D gun, the packaging for a credit card skimmer, or a timing circuit. Haven't we gotten past this "make the tools illegal" crap yet? It's what you do with them, not the item itself that's problematic, and there are valid uses for all the above.
No, client-side security is like someone else putting a lock on your front door. It's there to extort a profit out of you, not provide you with any benefit. People are clearly justified in ripping the damn thing off their property, and people like Mr. Angel should be praised for showing them how.
The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP
So? If they weren't working on porting to consoles, they could have hired more PvP-oriented devs and less console-oriented ones. If there were no opportunity costs in porting, every game would be released for every platform.
The reality is, that most users don't really care if someone sees their bookmarks. It's only a problem for privacy-obsessed nerds who project their mania onto other people.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very least, Kickstarter would have to seriously ramp up their percentage (they get 5% and the rest goes to Amazon for payment processing)
Bear in mind, Kickstarter's service is essentially uniform across all projects - they don't provide more for a $3 million project than they do for a $1k one. 5% of $3 million is a big chunk of change. At the moment, Kickstarter is pocketing the lot.
Now, I've got no complaints about that - they're providing a valuable service, and now they're getting the dividends - but it's not like they're running on razor-slim margins on those projects anyway. If they only required escrow for projects which received over $1 million, there still wouldn't be a huge number of projects that qualified.
deal with the bad press that comes with that kind of work. And now they'd have lost their, "we're just a collection service" veil.
Whereas now they've got to deal with the bad press that comes with being thought of as a haven for scam artists and rip-offs.
Fair enough, they might want to go to that effort. But if they don't, I believe that sooner or later, someone else will. That's the whole deal with the free market. Kickstarter's got quite a lot of room in their margins, and sooner or later, somebody else is going to start up who's filling to make less money in order to attract people.
Remember, the main thing Kickstarter has going for it is brand name. Their technology isn't prohibitively complex or anything. If the Kickstarter brand starts to get tarnished, and competitors can offer services that Kickstarter can't or won't, Kickstarter will be in dire straights.
"Shouldn't we be glad to have Venture Capitalists cut out of the loop so that companies actually listen to us?"
They aren't the same, but they don't have to be for that statement to be true. Kickstarter projects do have to listen to backers to some degree, or they won't get them. Now, there's a lot less control than the VC relationship, but there's also a lot less commitment from the backer too. My interest in this whole model is it's potential long-term effect on copyright issues - if creators are paid for their work before it's produced, then copyright as a model for providing income starts to become unnecessary.
Most projects when they list on Kickstarter are already well advanced. Depending on the type of project, they've probably already made pilots/mockups/prototypes, done their own market research, looked into manufacturing costs, etc. There's also not enough datra released on a Kickstarter prospectus to really give anyone else a really big edge.
People with big funding wouldn't race to market anyway - they'd clone the project after it's released, then out-market the original.
I called Kickstarter on my blog (I know, I'm going to start calling myself a futurist soon). When Kickstarter popped up, it was almost exactly as I'd thought of it, with one key difference - and I think they're really going to have to address that difference as investment ramps up and confidence in their brand name becomes more important.
In my model, I assumed that the crowd-sourcing service would also act as escrow - that they'd release funds as-needed to projects, instead of handing it over in one lump sum. The project owner would have to specify milestones and demonstrate completion before they could access the rest of the cash. Now, obviously, with small projects gaining only a couple of grand, that's probably not going to fly, but with million-dollar projects becoming ever more common, I think either Kickstarter is going to have to start adopting that sort of model, or someone else will, and will eat their lunch.
I guess "Asteroid Misses Earth, Just Like It's Done Every 4 Years For Millennia" just wasn't catchy enough
Simpler rule: Don't bitch about changes unless you've read what they are
Great expense? What great expense?
The primary reason for this change was to remove the whole clunky voting mechanism that the site has long-since outgrown.
Because navigating HTML is hard:
https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-prn1/676641/517/256230001169573_786305489.pdf
https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/cfs-ak-ash3/676387/193/460431350669077_1950233864.pdf
That's a cool story, but it really has nothing to do with the article. It's basically a fortuitous coincidence that other people don't know what fennel looks like, and have blogged about it associated with the phrase "what vegetable is this?"
This looks like it's primarily interested with homonyms - words with different meanings, but the same arrangement of letters. Like, say, "Prince". Prince could refer either to the title, a particular holder of that title, a brandname, or a bunch of other things. Think wikipedia's disambiguation page. This technology is basically giving google the ability to determine which particular meaning a given instance of the word is talking about, given context.
For instance, if a page contained the phrase "Taj Mahal menu", Google would know internally that that page referred to the Taj Mahal restaurant because it has a sufficient knowledge of semantics and context to understand that monuments and musicians don't have menus, but restaurants do, and that the phrase "Taj Mahal" could refer to any of those things.
And this story, just like any other, fails to actually enumerate the changes are. Why? Because the changes, really, aren't a big deal at all.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-governance/explanation-of-changes/10152338051340301
The only technical thing they're changing is the voting mechanism, which, as this shows, is pretty much broken. It was ok when Facebook was maybe 1000 people at a couple of US colleges, but since it requires a quorum of 30%, it's pretty much useless now.
Everything else is basically a language change to provide clarification of existing policies, not an actual change of policies. And if you look at the comments on those posts, it's almost all people copy-and-pasting the same fake pseudo-legalese crap about ownership of data. If any of the people posting them had bothered reading the thing they were posting on, they'd see that Facebook has no intention of claiming ownership of posted content.
So, all in all, it's a storm in a teacup, magnified by people who make money from faux outrage.
It should let me decide how and what to filter.
What, you mean like typing in "porn" if you want to search for porn?
I guess it's up to me to run my own web crawler. A plug computer or Raspberry Pi might be ideal for just that.
Uh-huh. You're going to index the internet with a Raspberry Pi. Good luck with that.
Have you even read the comments in this topic?
Uh, yeah, that's how I ended up replying to one. Half of them are reasonable, and half of them are just as much knee-jerk, sky-is-falling drivel as yours. About the usual proportion.
A search engine filters out results. That's its purpose. What do you want them to do - dump their full index for every search query?
If Google wanted to filter out political issues, they wouldn't need to do it under the guise of SafeSearch. They'd just do it.
Oh no, a search engine that only shows you what you explicitly search for! Bring out the pitchforks!
Moron.
Name one piece of software that client-side security has prevented being pirated.
You're correct, it is only honesty and the good intentions of the majority of us that keep the model working, not DRM. DRM does not provide any protection from piracy. What it does do is provide vendors with, say, regional lock-in models that allows them to benefit from the effects of globalisation, while forcing their customers to pay through the nose.
Well, at least one of those is bunk. This is all taking place on cleared land, so the growth being burnt is new growth. The carbon it's "pumping out" into the atmosphere is carbon that it captured from the atmosphere recently. Carbon is a cycle; the only sort of carbon emission that matters is carbon that upsets that cycle - usually, from long-term sequestered sources, like fossil fuels and old-growth forests.
And I think your assumption that any given gun is necessarily unlicensed is going to get you laughed out of the logicians club.
And that's cool - there's the option to turn it on for thems that wants it. Where it crosses the line is where they insist (like the GP) that having the option isn't enough, and that paranoia must be the default.
Which only goes to reinforce my point - there is a relationship between investments in feature A and feature B. Whether it's positive like you suggest (feature A produces enough money to then produce feature B) or negative like I suggest (cost of feature A precludes timely completion of feature B), the two are not completely distinct like the GP suggested. Also note that it's possible that we're both correct - feature A produces money used to create feature B, but feature B's release was still delayed by the focus on A.
You haven't thought about your viewpoint from a financial perspective much have you?
Well, no, because I wasn't responding to a financial question. The GP was saying that spending time one consoles had no opportunity cost, when it came to developing PvP. That's false.
Whether it's overall a financial win for the company, or whether - over the longterm - both features can be developed more efficiently by doing both is irrelevant to the GPs point and my argument. Assuming limited resources, any feature developed comes at the expense of other features - even if they require different skills.
Brooke's law speaks to the futility of jamming people onto a project late in the game. It has no applicability at all when it comes for hiring people at the start of a project.
Okay, what if I submit a design to print a 3D gun (or replacement parts for one)? What about the packaging for, say, a credit card skimmer? How about a timing circuit made entirely out of electrically-conductive plastic (so it doesn't show up on an x-ray scanner)?
Um, then you should receive a 3D gun, the packaging for a credit card skimmer, or a timing circuit. Haven't we gotten past this "make the tools illegal" crap yet? It's what you do with them, not the item itself that's problematic, and there are valid uses for all the above.
No, client-side security is like someone else putting a lock on your front door. It's there to extort a profit out of you, not provide you with any benefit. People are clearly justified in ripping the damn thing off their property, and people like Mr. Angel should be praised for showing them how.
The people porting it to console likely don't even possess the same skillset as the people working on PvP
So? If they weren't working on porting to consoles, they could have hired more PvP-oriented devs and less console-oriented ones. If there were no opportunity costs in porting, every game would be released for every platform.
The reality is, that most users don't really care if someone sees their bookmarks. It's only a problem for privacy-obsessed nerds who project their mania onto other people.