Yup, thank God that Amazon doesn't have any personally identifiable information about their customers and can't track their browsing or purchasing habits!
The British courts ruled that it was outside of their jurisdiction?
Yes, they did in 1968, but that doesn't mean that it is sovereign. It would be covered by the same laws as a ship with no flag. When it fell inside the UK's territorial waters, it would be bound by these same laws and fall under the UK's jurisdiction until such a point as it moved into international waters.
Well then, the thing to do is to have two versions of Wikileaks. One that only publishes things not about China, and is hosted in China, one that only publishes things about China, and is hosted in the USA...
Actually, that's quite a good design. If the pedal is a rocker, so tilting it forwards is break and brake is accelerate then it's easy to switch between brake and accelerate quickly (reducing the reaction time required for safe stops) and it is impossible to accelerate and brake at the same time.
I raced gocarts that had that design. The bit where the break block caught fire convinced me that you are correct. Designing controls so that it is not just possible, but easy, to press both the break and accelerator at the same time is not a good idea...
I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by
Really? How many jobs? There was a story a few months ago about an Apple datacenter getting a few million in tax breaks and employing a total of 40 people. Datacenters are full of computers, not full of people. They require very few people on-site to keep things working. Anyone else can (and, for security reasons, often does) work off site and sometimes hundreds of miles away. Even the infrastructure that one requires tends not to produce much by way of jobs.
The difference between Slashdot and Facebook is that Slashdot is entirely public. Even Slashdot journals are world-readable, the most you can do is restrict who can comment on them. There is no point in deleting a Slashdot account, because anything you've ever posted is already public and may be mirrored by things like archive.org or the Google cache. There is a point in deleting a Facebook account, because it's a means of contacting you (users can't send messages to other Slashdot users), and because there is semi-private data associated with it.
It's not Randall's fault, but, xkcd is a cancer on the Internet strangling creativity. Nerds need to stop repeating their boring catchphrases constantly.
Because before xkcd nerds never repeated catchphrases from, for example, Monty Python...
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably
While we're imagining things that are totally impossible for us to build with any current technology or anything currently under development, why not imagine a warp drive or an interstellar teleporter?
1g is a HUGE acceleration to maintain. The best ion drive we have at the moment, pushing a small probe, manages about 1E-6 g. Or, to put it another way, we'd need to be able to provide a 6 orders of magnitude bigger thrust-to-mass ratio than we currently have, as well as scaling it up from a small probe to something capable of sustaining humans. Beyond that there are two other major problems:
Ion drives need electrical power. You can use photovoltaics in the inner solar system, but the power you can get from these drops off quite quickly as you get away from the sun. That basically means you need nuclear power. And that means (if humans are on board) you need a lot of shielding (i.e. mass) plus enough fuel to run the reactor at a high output for years (i.e. more mass).
And then there's the reaction mass. The only way of propelling things across space that we've found so far is to use reaction drives. This means you have to chuck something out of the back and see momentum conserved. As your mass goes up, so does the mass of propellant that you need to expel to accelerate at the same rate. If you want to be able to accelerate at 1g for 10 years then you're going to need an insane amount of propellant, even if your drive is going to be able to expel it at thousands of times your speed.
And this is the real problem with space. We are decades - at least - away from the power and materials technology required to do anything interesting in space and, since most of the technology required has lots of useful applications on Earth, it's going to be developed anyway. All space missions now do is direct funding away from developing the technology that we'd need to do interesting things in space...
Yes, but it was also important. The outcome of the US getting to the moon first was a treaty with the USSR that banned weapons in space. The USSR would almost certainly not have signed such a treaty if they'd maintained their early lead in the space race: they'd have put nukes in LEO and had a first and second strike capability that the USA could not match. The moon itself was largely irrelevant - investing a lot in rocket development and building the launch capability was.
Pay them a quarter of a US wage then. That will only add $20 to the price, and still be a lot more than they're currently getting. Additionally, it will mean that a lot of them will actually be able to afford Apple products, increasing the size of the potential market.
Well, ideally, but a big part of the point of a lecture is to let you know what it is that you don't understand. There's a reason why you only have something like 12 hours of lectures a week[1]: you're supposed to spend the rest of the time studying. Lectures are there to give a guided tour of a part of the subject, not to give you a complete understanding. They are supposed to tell you what it is that you should learn.
[1] Less true in US universities, which don't seem to have worked out that they are supposed to be universities and not schools.
One of my father's lecturers said that information was transferred from him to his students notes without going through their brains. I never took notes in lectures when I went to university and I generally did better than people who did. If you don't understand something, go and read a book about it after the lecture. Distracting yourself from the lecturer while you're trying to understand what he's saying isn't going to help.
There are going to be about 4,000 geeks in Brussels next weekend for FOSDEM - I bet at least half of them could be persuaded to pop over to the EU parliament for a little bit of protesting...
Given how baroque both languages are, creating something that either parses PHP or emits valid C++ is an achievement. Doing something that manages both is even more impressive...
Except that in Apple's case, they actually do innovate. In fact, I can think of a department in Apple that probably innovates as much as the whole of the rest of the industry. What other company has a legal department that would think of patenting screen-shaped as a shape for a tablet?
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd
Actually, that seems pretty low to me. If Facebook can't harvest information worth $7.50 to advertisers, political parties, and so on from each user then I'd be very surprised.
In the last US Presidential election, Obama spent $7.39 per vote, McCain spent $5.78 per vote (as with every other recent US election, the candidate who spent the most won). In most elections, around 80% of the voting population has already decided to vote for either the red team or the blue team and will always vote for their favourite colour. In winner-takes-all states, the effect of getting a few tens of thousand of undecideds to vote for your team means that you win the election. Facebook has enough information to make a mostly accurate list of who these undecided people are and where they live. How much do you think that information is worth? I bet either party would pay $10/name for it, maybe more if you promised not to sell it to the other party.
Now, of course, not every person in Facebook will be on that list - probably only a few million - but that's just one example. How about the list of people who own cars and are bad at arithmetic? That would be very valuable to a lot of insurance companies...
I don't see why you think Facebook has no revenue. Google makes crazy amounts of money selling advertising based on the information that they've harvested. Facebook harvests even more information (their tracking cookies are personally identifiable and, for a couple of hundred million people, linked to real names, addresses, dates of birth, and so on, and they have a lot more personal communication to mine than Google), and sells not just advertising but also the information itself. Until people realise that Facebook is selling them a service worth a couple of dollars a year in exchange for personal information worth tens or hundreds of dollars, they'll keep making money...
Add to that, the fact that the gamer nerds in question were typically in their early teens. In hindsight, it's very amusing, but at the time it seemed very important...
I rent DVDs from a company that also offers a streaming service. This used to use Flash, which wasn't ideal, but it did work. I streamed things to two devices: my TouchPad and the FreeBSD box connected to my surround-sound system and projector. Now, as someone who owns a surround sound system and a projector, and pays for a DVD rental subscription, I'm probably right in the middle of the target demographic for Hollywood - someone who enjoys films and is willing to pay for them.
This month, the company replaced its Flash service with Silverlight. They did this under pressure from the copyright holders because Silverlight has DRM that Flash lacks. This DRM has not yet been cracked, so I can't use it. They claim that they did this to reduce piracy, however I don't see the pirates inconvenienced by this at all. If I look on ThePirateBay, pretty much anything I might want to watch is there in a DRM-free format that will work on either of my systems, and often at a higher quality than the streaming service.
They could have made the service available as DRM-free H.264 (or WebM, or whatever) downloads at a few quality points, with some reasonable limits (say, 30-60h a month) on the total downloads. Any incentive I would have to pirate would evaporate. I'd have the media in a format that worked on almost every device I own - and was easy to transcode for others. A format that was easy for me to take with me on a mobile device, for example to watch on the train or plane when I'm travelling.
Now, their counter argument will be that it's easy for people to pirate them. But here's the thing: it is anyway. I rent DVDs now, and they've been trivial to copy for years. Even BluRays are not that hard to rip, and it only takes one person to rip a BD and upload it and anyone can easily pirate the HD version. I could hoard the downloads instead of buying them, but I don't tend to buy many movies anyway - I've hardly bought any since I started renting, and if I could download a film again easily then I'd have no incentive to keep a local copy.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: piracy is a psychological problem. It is a distraction. Movie companies should not be worrying about reducing piracy. Thinking about that means that they are asking the wrong question. The important question is not 'how do we reduce piracy?', it's 'how do we increase profits?' And the answer to the second question is stop trying so hard not to give customers what they want. A couple of concrete examples:
The movie studios delay DVD releases until months after the cinema release 'to avoid cannibalising cinema ticket sales'. Let's look at that statement. It means that, given the choice, a lot of people would rather buy / rent the DVD than go to the cinema. The industry's response? To not release the DVD! Of course, now they're not just competing with the cinema, they're competing with piracy. When a film is released in cinemas, you can usually watch it at home illegally immediately, or wait a few months before you can do it legally.
And when they do release the DVD, it's often late or with odd constraints. I rented Dollhouse Season 1 when it was first out on DVD. I added season 2 to my rental list immediately afterwards, and it showed up as 'reserved'. The Region 2 DVD is now released, but shows up as not available to rent...
This is private information, so won't be disclosed. The public filing will just say that GS owns 10% (or whatever) of the company. The people who own the shares in the fund do not have to be disclosed.
Who at the SEC decided that these 'non-shares' that Goldman's wanted to sell were garbage enough not to be sold in the USA, but somehow could be sold outside the USA?
My understanding is that nobody did. Someone at GS decided that not selling them in the USA let them avoid the need to bother with SEC approval.
So will this shadowy group of Goldman's customers now manipulate the IPO?
Possibly, although I suspect that the IPO means that GS has decided that the bubble is now over. They hyped the shares, sold them to their preferred customers (at a big profit) hyped them some more, got their customers to sell them to other people, and now they have no further interest in Facebook. It can go public, people can review its books, and it could file for chapter 11 next week for all GS cares. They've moved onto the next bubble.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, thank God that Amazon doesn't have any personally identifiable information about their customers and can't track their browsing or purchasing habits!
The British courts ruled that it was outside of their jurisdiction?
Yes, they did in 1968, but that doesn't mean that it is sovereign. It would be covered by the same laws as a ship with no flag. When it fell inside the UK's territorial waters, it would be bound by these same laws and fall under the UK's jurisdiction until such a point as it moved into international waters.
Well then, the thing to do is to have two versions of Wikileaks. One that only publishes things not about China, and is hosted in China, one that only publishes things about China, and is hosted in the USA...
No, this one is easy. If we want both to lose, there's no problem. It's only when you want one side to win that there's a problem...
Actually, that's quite a good design. If the pedal is a rocker, so tilting it forwards is break and brake is accelerate then it's easy to switch between brake and accelerate quickly (reducing the reaction time required for safe stops) and it is impossible to accelerate and brake at the same time.
Break break break? It seems I've forgotten how English is supposed to work...
I raced gocarts that had that design. The bit where the break block caught fire convinced me that you are correct. Designing controls so that it is not just possible, but easy, to press both the break and accelerator at the same time is not a good idea...
I ask honestly, because I've never lived anywhere that people wouldn't kill for a high-tech datacenter to provide some real jobs close by
Really? How many jobs? There was a story a few months ago about an Apple datacenter getting a few million in tax breaks and employing a total of 40 people. Datacenters are full of computers, not full of people. They require very few people on-site to keep things working. Anyone else can (and, for security reasons, often does) work off site and sometimes hundreds of miles away. Even the infrastructure that one requires tends not to produce much by way of jobs.
The difference between Slashdot and Facebook is that Slashdot is entirely public. Even Slashdot journals are world-readable, the most you can do is restrict who can comment on them. There is no point in deleting a Slashdot account, because anything you've ever posted is already public and may be mirrored by things like archive.org or the Google cache. There is a point in deleting a Facebook account, because it's a means of contacting you (users can't send messages to other Slashdot users), and because there is semi-private data associated with it.
It's not Randall's fault, but, xkcd is a cancer on the Internet strangling creativity. Nerds need to stop repeating their boring catchphrases constantly.
Because before xkcd nerds never repeated catchphrases from, for example, Monty Python...
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably
While we're imagining things that are totally impossible for us to build with any current technology or anything currently under development, why not imagine a warp drive or an interstellar teleporter?
1g is a HUGE acceleration to maintain. The best ion drive we have at the moment, pushing a small probe, manages about 1E-6 g. Or, to put it another way, we'd need to be able to provide a 6 orders of magnitude bigger thrust-to-mass ratio than we currently have, as well as scaling it up from a small probe to something capable of sustaining humans. Beyond that there are two other major problems:
Ion drives need electrical power. You can use photovoltaics in the inner solar system, but the power you can get from these drops off quite quickly as you get away from the sun. That basically means you need nuclear power. And that means (if humans are on board) you need a lot of shielding (i.e. mass) plus enough fuel to run the reactor at a high output for years (i.e. more mass).
And then there's the reaction mass. The only way of propelling things across space that we've found so far is to use reaction drives. This means you have to chuck something out of the back and see momentum conserved. As your mass goes up, so does the mass of propellant that you need to expel to accelerate at the same rate. If you want to be able to accelerate at 1g for 10 years then you're going to need an insane amount of propellant, even if your drive is going to be able to expel it at thousands of times your speed.
And this is the real problem with space. We are decades - at least - away from the power and materials technology required to do anything interesting in space and, since most of the technology required has lots of useful applications on Earth, it's going to be developed anyway. All space missions now do is direct funding away from developing the technology that we'd need to do interesting things in space...
Yes, but it was also important. The outcome of the US getting to the moon first was a treaty with the USSR that banned weapons in space. The USSR would almost certainly not have signed such a treaty if they'd maintained their early lead in the space race: they'd have put nukes in LEO and had a first and second strike capability that the USA could not match. The moon itself was largely irrelevant - investing a lot in rocket development and building the launch capability was.
Pay them a quarter of a US wage then. That will only add $20 to the price, and still be a lot more than they're currently getting. Additionally, it will mean that a lot of them will actually be able to afford Apple products, increasing the size of the potential market.
[1] Less true in US universities, which don't seem to have worked out that they are supposed to be universities and not schools.
One of my father's lecturers said that information was transferred from him to his students notes without going through their brains. I never took notes in lectures when I went to university and I generally did better than people who did. If you don't understand something, go and read a book about it after the lecture. Distracting yourself from the lecturer while you're trying to understand what he's saying isn't going to help.
There are going to be about 4,000 geeks in Brussels next weekend for FOSDEM - I bet at least half of them could be persuaded to pop over to the EU parliament for a little bit of protesting...
Given how baroque both languages are, creating something that either parses PHP or emits valid C++ is an achievement. Doing something that manages both is even more impressive...
Except that in Apple's case, they actually do innovate. In fact, I can think of a department in Apple that probably innovates as much as the whole of the rest of the industry. What other company has a legal department that would think of patenting screen-shaped as a shape for a tablet?
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd
Actually, that seems pretty low to me. If Facebook can't harvest information worth $7.50 to advertisers, political parties, and so on from each user then I'd be very surprised.
In the last US Presidential election, Obama spent $7.39 per vote, McCain spent $5.78 per vote (as with every other recent US election, the candidate who spent the most won). In most elections, around 80% of the voting population has already decided to vote for either the red team or the blue team and will always vote for their favourite colour. In winner-takes-all states, the effect of getting a few tens of thousand of undecideds to vote for your team means that you win the election. Facebook has enough information to make a mostly accurate list of who these undecided people are and where they live. How much do you think that information is worth? I bet either party would pay $10/name for it, maybe more if you promised not to sell it to the other party.
Now, of course, not every person in Facebook will be on that list - probably only a few million - but that's just one example. How about the list of people who own cars and are bad at arithmetic? That would be very valuable to a lot of insurance companies...
I don't see why you think Facebook has no revenue. Google makes crazy amounts of money selling advertising based on the information that they've harvested. Facebook harvests even more information (their tracking cookies are personally identifiable and, for a couple of hundred million people, linked to real names, addresses, dates of birth, and so on, and they have a lot more personal communication to mine than Google), and sells not just advertising but also the information itself. Until people realise that Facebook is selling them a service worth a couple of dollars a year in exchange for personal information worth tens or hundreds of dollars, they'll keep making money...
Add to that, the fact that the gamer nerds in question were typically in their early teens. In hindsight, it's very amusing, but at the time it seemed very important...
I said a cheese shop, not a Cleese shop...
I rent DVDs from a company that also offers a streaming service. This used to use Flash, which wasn't ideal, but it did work. I streamed things to two devices: my TouchPad and the FreeBSD box connected to my surround-sound system and projector. Now, as someone who owns a surround sound system and a projector, and pays for a DVD rental subscription, I'm probably right in the middle of the target demographic for Hollywood - someone who enjoys films and is willing to pay for them.
This month, the company replaced its Flash service with Silverlight. They did this under pressure from the copyright holders because Silverlight has DRM that Flash lacks. This DRM has not yet been cracked, so I can't use it. They claim that they did this to reduce piracy, however I don't see the pirates inconvenienced by this at all. If I look on ThePirateBay, pretty much anything I might want to watch is there in a DRM-free format that will work on either of my systems, and often at a higher quality than the streaming service.
They could have made the service available as DRM-free H.264 (or WebM, or whatever) downloads at a few quality points, with some reasonable limits (say, 30-60h a month) on the total downloads. Any incentive I would have to pirate would evaporate. I'd have the media in a format that worked on almost every device I own - and was easy to transcode for others. A format that was easy for me to take with me on a mobile device, for example to watch on the train or plane when I'm travelling.
Now, their counter argument will be that it's easy for people to pirate them. But here's the thing: it is anyway. I rent DVDs now, and they've been trivial to copy for years. Even BluRays are not that hard to rip, and it only takes one person to rip a BD and upload it and anyone can easily pirate the HD version. I could hoard the downloads instead of buying them, but I don't tend to buy many movies anyway - I've hardly bought any since I started renting, and if I could download a film again easily then I'd have no incentive to keep a local copy.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: piracy is a psychological problem. It is a distraction. Movie companies should not be worrying about reducing piracy. Thinking about that means that they are asking the wrong question. The important question is not 'how do we reduce piracy?', it's 'how do we increase profits?' And the answer to the second question is stop trying so hard not to give customers what they want. A couple of concrete examples:
The movie studios delay DVD releases until months after the cinema release 'to avoid cannibalising cinema ticket sales'. Let's look at that statement. It means that, given the choice, a lot of people would rather buy / rent the DVD than go to the cinema. The industry's response? To not release the DVD! Of course, now they're not just competing with the cinema, they're competing with piracy. When a film is released in cinemas, you can usually watch it at home illegally immediately, or wait a few months before you can do it legally.
And when they do release the DVD, it's often late or with odd constraints. I rented Dollhouse Season 1 when it was first out on DVD. I added season 2 to my rental list immediately afterwards, and it showed up as 'reserved'. The Region 2 DVD is now released, but shows up as not available to rent...
Who bought those Goldman Sachs shares?
This is private information, so won't be disclosed. The public filing will just say that GS owns 10% (or whatever) of the company. The people who own the shares in the fund do not have to be disclosed.
Who at the SEC decided that these 'non-shares' that Goldman's wanted to sell were garbage enough not to be sold in the USA, but somehow could be sold outside the USA?
My understanding is that nobody did. Someone at GS decided that not selling them in the USA let them avoid the need to bother with SEC approval.
So will this shadowy group of Goldman's customers now manipulate the IPO?
Possibly, although I suspect that the IPO means that GS has decided that the bubble is now over. They hyped the shares, sold them to their preferred customers (at a big profit) hyped them some more, got their customers to sell them to other people, and now they have no further interest in Facebook. It can go public, people can review its books, and it could file for chapter 11 next week for all GS cares. They've moved onto the next bubble.