My point is that in any free market system there would be an equilibrium between "scam" and "privacy". In today's market the balance has swung signficantly in favor of "scam" at the expense of privacy.
I want free market.
----- I certainly don't go about whining ----- You and so many people are hypersensitized to whining. Did your parents beat you constantly and admonish you for "whining"? You seem to get a power trip out of levelling the accusation.
I have no barriers. The barriers are imposed by people who have a vested interest in preventing me from doing these things myself. The barriers are imposed by people who gain financially from prohibiting me from doing these things myself.
----- In fact, some cards are anonymous -- you can get an anonymous Albertson's card. They still track what is bought on that account, but they don't know who you are. ----- I don't believe this for a moment. This is the same as the non-tracking cookies on the web. Perhaps the issuer doesn't care who you are and perhaps they don't put any uniquely indentifiable information in that one cookie but the people they sell the list to can easily recontruct identifying information when cross-referencing with two or three others lists. It's a rather simple logic puzzle.
Joe lives in a blue house, Mary owns a cat, Bob eats cheese at dinner, the person who owns a dog likes ping-pong, the fish lives in a house with chimney, the single man drives a Ford, the twins don't have pets, the Lexus owner buys only top-cut steak, Mr. Perkins always shops between 5 and 6 PM, etc. etc. etc.
You start a new job for a manager that you know nothing about in a large company. You notice that the last two or three people who worked for your new manager left but those topics of discussion are casually dropped whenever they're brought up. You don't want to press the issue.
You notice that any day you use your debit card tied to your bank account with the companies' credit union and the last transaction indicates that you stayed out late results in your manager being extra mindful of what time you come to the office the next day and he's also extra mindful of exactly what time you leave. These days frequently become the days in which he needs you to stay later or is more likely to make a comment that you were in at 8:45 am and not 8:30 am. Official company starting time is still 9:00 am but the whole situation provides more tension.
Privacy is never an issue until someone violates it. The fact is you'll never be able to prove how they violated it because the information likely went through three or four priveleged sources who have been indoctrinated with the corporate "management knows best, keep your mouth SHUT" policy.
Other than being an ignorant, opportunistic retailer with a strongarm government Guido-boy behind you, what gives you the right to charge me more than the other guy over there?
I smell a scam in the whole rebate card system. I can't prove it and I can't yet begin to think what purpose it serves but it just reeks of a scam. Any time strings are placed on discounts there's some old guy behind a curtain laughing his way to the bank at the participants' expense.
----- if you want cheap vegetables, grow them yourself ----- I want cheap beer but there's a law about how much I can make. I want cheap liquor but there's a law about how much I can distill and that's not even taking into consideration the OSHA safety regulations regarding a still. I want cheap tobacco but there's a zoning regulation which prevent me from turning my backyard into a plantation. There's also the significant startup cost of buying a piece of property large enough to support reasonable yields for more than a few years in a row. I want cheap grass but some knobhead in Washington made that flat-out illegal and then convinced the majority of the states to do the same.
You're right, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but it sure doesn't make me feel any better about paying $26.50 for a rotten apple and a glass of chlorinated water. As long as our government continues to subsidize and legislate in favor of the major distributors that's what we're getting.
----- Or do you want to live in a world where crimes against the unpopular are cheered and go unpunished? ----- News Flash! Today's top headlines!
American Society Verified to Function as a Communist Pyramid Scheme ----- Using complex statistical models, mathematicians at MIT, RIT, RHIT, and Harvey Mudd have confirmed that the flow of money and power in the United States seems to follow the exact same patterns as a systems (commonly known as "pyramid schemes") in former communist USSR.
"We're seeing a lot of favoritism and elitism. People with less intellectual capability and lower levels of honesty are routineley being allowed to use and abuse people with more intellectual capability and higher standards simply through the exercising of influence and power realized through purely social connections. If the victims ever realize the manipulation they're in then they are faced with a losing battle trying to recruit help to combat the corporate leech attached to their neck. We're also seeing many students from wealthy backgrounds, properly shielded from the pressures of everyday life, cruising easily through PhD programs and into high-profile positions while students of equal or even greater intellectual capability coming from less priveleged backgrounds are forced to take their Bachelor's degree and get into the working world."
----- Server break-ins and uptime are only a problem if you don't have the resources and equipment in place to facilitate a speedy transition to a redundant system ----- A speedy and redundant transition of your web-server only proves one thing: it's just as speedy and redundant for the intruder to be on nearly every box on the network.
Maybe you have three rack systems for webspace and the intruder is only caught on that one PC that belongs to the secretary down the hall. What assurance do you have that that secretaries' PC wasn't running a brute force password cracker on your servers for the last nine months? Of course the rack system logs don't look suspicious. All of the logins are perfectly valid. If the intruder really knows what he's doing then it's not tough to have a script filter and regenerate the.log files.
----- but that's the bitch about security - the paranoia never stops digging deeper:) ----- I started out college in '93 as a comp. eng. major. I switched to chemistry because I wanted to keep computers as a hobby and not pollute them with the need to make money. While I sadly watched the Amiga die and the world move to Microsoft I accepted it as a result of giving up computers as an academic pursuit. I never learned C, I never built any *nix/*bsd OS for my home PC, I wistfully used NeXT in the school labs.
In 1998, my Win95 was backdoored through an IRC exploit. I noticed that things were wrong but couldn't fix them. I had no Win95 install CD. The McAfee Vscan provided by the school couldn't finish a scan without crashing. Apps began crashing. My audio card would work and then not work and then work and then not work. The hard drive never quit grinding away. Bad blocks began to show up two or three at a time, then fifteen or twenty, and then I'd be on the road to get a new hard drive. Then my own Win98SE cd. Then a new motherboard. The new motherboard shipped with theral sensors and BIOS thermal monitoring. I haven't seen the thermal monitoring screen in the BIOS since the first Windows BsoD and I've tried nearly every BIOS rev. FIC provides for the PA-2013.
I'd finally had enough. I resolved to give up on Microsoft sometime in late '99 and dove into Linux. My first install was Debian 2.2. There was an rpc.statd remote root vuln. in Debian 2.2. The box was rooted within 2 weeks of being up and online.
I now have two systems. Both of them run Win98SE cleanly. Both of them run Debian Sid cleanly. Both of them run a modified LFS cvs from early this year cleanly.
The security paranoia may never quit digging deeper but once you hit the bottom you know where you stand.
Cleaning up after a root compromise is about the most time-consuming and psychologically demanding thing that one can do. Let's face it: the guy who's a wizard at writing GUI apis isn't necessarily going to be a security hacker. The biggest issue to deal with when rebuilding a system after a root compromise is the paranoia. 99% of even diligent *nix/*bsd users skip the paranoia step and reinstall using the closest available media. The paranoid among us, however, consider much more than "how do I get the system back to a usable state".
How long has the system been compromised? What was the initial compromise vector? What additional compromise vectors have been added? Has critical boot binaries been infected? Has boot sector code been modified? When was the last time _KNOWN GOOD_ media was made? Is it possible that bootable CDs were created which contain compromised code or boot sector viruses? Is it possible that the compromised system has been compromised long enough that the BIOS has been compromised? Did any other intruders make use of the door left open by the initial intruder? Were any of the subsequent intruders knowledgeable enough to know the architecture of the compromised machine to a level which might allow them to introduce low-level code to connect priveleged areas of kernel memory to a back door similar to NetBus or Sub7?
It's not the teenage script-kiddie cracker that is the real concern. The concern is that a teenage script-kiddie opens a hole in the system and then a real Ada ace finds the hole and really makes the system his own. The real Ada ace is the guy who never talks about what he's cracked, anywhere. He never talks about that tunnel through the chipset.
But... *yawn* exploits are never exploitable until after Microsoft has published them.
GI Joe was one of the first games on the C64 where one spent more time loading from module to module (character selection, terrain selection, fight, character selection, terrain selection, fight) than doing anything else. It was still a fun game.:)
The binary is 90kb. It supports multiple workspaces, raising/lowering/resizing/hiding windows, background pics, color schemes, and very simple window decorations which "stay out of the way".
I've often wondered if present day Windows OS wasn't merely hacked together GPL code compiled with a custom compiler. The existence of etc/services and etc/protocols, the look and feel of the Windows windowmanager, some of the widgets, all have the feel of a frankenstein Linux. If that were true then perhaps the GPL is viral...
Finally, a/. article which doesn't immediately remind me of pyramid schemes, political graft, the extortion of the American people by their corporate executive overlords... (though all of these things combined contributed to the death of Commodore and the rise of the x86 architecture).
Even if domain names are useful for more than 10 years what is the public going to do when registrars start biting the bankruptcy bullet?
Say Network Solutions gets 10000 people to sign up for 100 year domain names and then goes belly up (after the executives raid the newly acquired funding glut). What then? No other registrars are legally required to honor those DNS servers that I'm aware of.
"Ooops. Sorry about that. You need to re-register... and we over at RegistrarQ just raised our rates."
This is precisely the kind of thing that made so many companies restate their earnings in the last year. Enron did it, Xerox did it, Tyco did it. Every company was stating current earnings which encompassed the total value of long term contracts or even contracts which hadn't been formally signed yet.
Honestly I don't expect that anyone's changed anything. With so many mergers in the last few years everyone's had more than enough chance to properly structure the accounting ledger to put this sort of thing into the proper loopholes.
Of course they'll report this lump sum in the quarter received. And then they'll report the remaining portion of the contract in the next quarter, and the remaining portion in the quarter after that, and the remaining portion in the quarter after that...
Oh b_llsh_t. If some big corporation loses their domain name because they failed to re-register they'll simply sue whoever picked it up in a fashion similar to the MikeRoweSoft fiasco. They'll have the domain name back within 24 hours. At the very worst this will be the corporate excuse to wax someone that upper management has been targeting for a long time coming.
----- The sooner we stop pretending, the better. ----- I agree. Let's get it right out in the open: The constitution is dead, the Tenth amendment doesn't exist, we live in a socialist society managed by a communist government that breeds a middle and lower class for the express purpose of exploitation to the financial advantage of those in the upper class.
It's a sad day when you don't begrudge your tax dollars because you like infrastructure or because it's something you want. You're too easily giving a blank check away. My point is: _other_ people don't begrudge _your_ tax dollars either because there's something _else_ that _they_ want.
You don't just help pay for Google by clicking on AdWords links. While that's a nice easy explanation it's also terribly naive. Google has a board of directors and investment brokers like anyone else. If they don't have a "board of directors" or "investment brokers" they have an equivalent. Names change, the system's the same. If Google isn't making enough money from their AdWords links that's okay. As long as the consumer base remains complacent they (the board of directors and investment brokers) can fund a losing venture using the gains that they make from artificially raising revenue in other investments. The same broker hypothetically losing money on Google could be making a killing by raising your insurance rates if that's where he manages investments and holds influence. In some ways it's completely desirable to continue to hold losing bets. If the consumer base ever staggers out of complacency the losing bets are tax writeoffs to offset the capital gains won by pulling out of an investment portfolio that is targeted by activist groups.
For example: Consumer watchdog groups file an unfair practices suit against company XYZ which I own a large amount of stock in. As an investment broker I cash out of XYZ and similarly bankrupt the 6 losing.com startups that I'm funding. I collect business insurance on the.coms, keep my winnings from XYZ, and skip out on the taxes by balancing the gains and losses in the stock portfolio. Meanwhile it's the end consumer that ends up footing the bill for the lawsuit filed against XYZ because the same company which pays me for business insurance recoups the loss by raising rates on auto or homeowners insurance.
It's a cat-and-mouse game that most Anericans can't follow mathematically and, in their minds, that makes it impossible. This explains why Americans are suckers born, bred and educated by public schools.
----- And, Orkut is all kinds of free ----- Be careful when you say "free".
For example: broadcast television is "free" but that doesn't mean that you aren't shelling out for it through your tax dollars or service fees imposed on other parts of your life. Major media companies are intimately tied to many other companies and industries through collaborations, contracts, investments, and informally through their executive boards. While they may not be able to charge you to receive broadcast signals their charging the advertisers or receiving supplemental income from government agencies. Trickle down (and around) isn't just about job creation it's also about billing. It may seem free on the front end but rest assured that the suits are getting more than their fair share of revenue from it.
----- the same vortex of stupidity that caught us all in the Dot-Bomb Era. ----- Your viewpoint is a little too limited. Think about it as a pyramid scheme. There are a small number of people in very elevated positions that made schloads of money off of the Dot-Bomb Era. To them it wasn't a vortex of stupidity. To them it was nothing short of sheer brilliance supported by the herd mentality in society. Those top-level investors led the public into huge investments, funneled the cash to themselves, disappeared via the back route, and left the rest of the economy holding the bag full of dogpoop.
The social networking and VC sites are operating on the same premise. Hype up the service, milk it for all it's worth, and then duck out the back door once the critical mass of incoming money has been reached. When the small controlling minority at the top leaves (rich) the rest of us will lose our investments (poor).
It's really no different than what the banks did back in the 20s. They encouraged the government first to funnel taxpayer money into the system. This inflated the system. Because the system was inflated the private investors began contributing heavily. Once the critical mass was reached in 1929 the top investors walked off with the profits and couldn't be found. The banks closed their doors and said the gov't had the money. The gov't said the money was with the investment brokers. The investment brokers said they had loaned the money out to small businesses.
Twelve thousand cups, three peas, and the real magician is hiding in some big mansion out in Nevada.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
There is nothing in it for you. It's a business model. If they can't dazzle you with the brilliance of their service they'll get 1000 other people to sign up based upon their b_llsh_t. The end goal of these social networking services is not to work for the advancement of society. Their end goal is to make money. If they can come up with five or six poster children whose lives were advanced then so much the better for their marketing spiel.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
There was a story on Slashdot a while back about a social networking mapping program. In fact, if you google for "social networking visualization software" you'll find a number of them.
I imagine that Orkut is working to develop their own social networking mapping software and all of its users are becoming part of a vast experiment in modeling of social systems.
You are not people. Your number is Liberty-4527.:))))
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that in any free market system there would be an equilibrium between "scam" and "privacy". In today's market the balance has swung signficantly in favor of "scam" at the expense of privacy.
I want free market.
-----
I certainly don't go about whining
-----
You and so many people are hypersensitized to whining. Did your parents beat you constantly and admonish you for "whining"? You seem to get a power trip out of levelling the accusation.
I have no barriers. The barriers are imposed by people who have a vested interest in preventing me from doing these things myself. The barriers are imposed by people who gain financially from prohibiting me from doing these things myself.
-----
In fact, some cards are anonymous -- you can get an anonymous Albertson's card. They still track what is bought on that account, but they don't know who you are.
-----
I don't believe this for a moment. This is the same as the non-tracking cookies on the web. Perhaps the issuer doesn't care who you are and perhaps they don't put any uniquely indentifiable information in that one cookie but the people they sell the list to can easily recontruct identifying information when cross-referencing with two or three others lists. It's a rather simple logic puzzle.
Joe lives in a blue house, Mary owns a cat, Bob eats cheese at dinner, the person who owns a dog likes ping-pong, the fish lives in a house with chimney, the single man drives a Ford, the twins don't have pets, the Lexus owner buys only top-cut steak, Mr. Perkins always shops between 5 and 6 PM, etc. etc. etc.
You start a new job for a manager that you know nothing about in a large company. You notice that the last two or three people who worked for your new manager left but those topics of discussion are casually dropped whenever they're brought up. You don't want to press the issue.
You notice that any day you use your debit card tied to your bank account with the companies' credit union and the last transaction indicates that you stayed out late results in your manager being extra mindful of what time you come to the office the next day and he's also extra mindful of exactly what time you leave. These days frequently become the days in which he needs you to stay later or is more likely to make a comment that you were in at 8:45 am and not 8:30 am. Official company starting time is still 9:00 am but the whole situation provides more tension.
Privacy is never an issue until someone violates it. The fact is you'll never be able to prove how they violated it because the information likely went through three or four priveleged sources who have been indoctrinated with the corporate "management knows best, keep your mouth SHUT" policy.
Other than being an ignorant, opportunistic retailer with a strongarm government Guido-boy behind you, what gives you the right to charge me more than the other guy over there?
I smell a scam in the whole rebate card system. I can't prove it and I can't yet begin to think what purpose it serves but it just reeks of a scam. Any time strings are placed on discounts there's some old guy behind a curtain laughing his way to the bank at the participants' expense.
-----
if you want cheap vegetables, grow them yourself
-----
I want cheap beer but there's a law about how much I can make.
I want cheap liquor but there's a law about how much I can distill and that's not even taking into consideration the OSHA safety regulations regarding a still.
I want cheap tobacco but there's a zoning regulation which prevent me from turning my backyard into a plantation. There's also the significant startup cost of buying a piece of property large enough to support reasonable yields for more than a few years in a row.
I want cheap grass but some knobhead in Washington made that flat-out illegal and then convinced the majority of the states to do the same.
You're right, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but it sure doesn't make me feel any better about paying $26.50 for a rotten apple and a glass of chlorinated water. As long as our government continues to subsidize and legislate in favor of the major distributors that's what we're getting.
The question isn't whether or not you're paranoid, Lenny. The question is whether or not you're paranoid ENOUGH.
It's always whining when it's someone else's concern. Either contribute something positive or quit trolling people who are trying to figure it out.
-----
Or do you want to live in a world where crimes against the unpopular are cheered and go unpunished?
-----
News Flash! Today's top headlines!
American Society Verified to Function as a Communist Pyramid Scheme
-----
Using complex statistical models, mathematicians at MIT, RIT, RHIT, and Harvey Mudd have confirmed that the flow of money and power in the United States seems to follow the exact same patterns as a systems (commonly known as "pyramid schemes") in former communist USSR.
"We're seeing a lot of favoritism and elitism. People with less intellectual capability and lower levels of honesty are routineley being allowed to use and abuse people with more intellectual capability and higher standards simply through the exercising of influence and power realized through purely social connections. If the victims ever realize the manipulation they're in then they are faced with a losing battle trying to recruit help to combat the corporate leech attached to their neck. We're also seeing many students from wealthy backgrounds, properly shielded from the pressures of everyday life, cruising easily through PhD programs and into high-profile positions while students of equal or even greater intellectual capability coming from less priveleged backgrounds are forced to take their Bachelor's degree and get into the working world."
-----
.log files.
Server break-ins and uptime are only a problem if you don't have the resources and equipment in place to facilitate a speedy transition to a redundant system
-----
A speedy and redundant transition of your web-server only proves one thing: it's just as speedy and redundant for the intruder to be on nearly every box on the network.
Maybe you have three rack systems for webspace and the intruder is only caught on that one PC that belongs to the secretary down the hall. What assurance do you have that that secretaries' PC wasn't running a brute force password cracker on your servers for the last nine months? Of course the rack system logs don't look suspicious. All of the logins are perfectly valid. If the intruder really knows what he's doing then it's not tough to have a script filter and regenerate the
----- :)
but that's the bitch about security - the paranoia never stops digging deeper
-----
I started out college in '93 as a comp. eng. major. I switched to chemistry because I wanted to keep computers as a hobby and not pollute them with the need to make money. While I sadly watched the Amiga die and the world move to Microsoft I accepted it as a result of giving up computers as an academic pursuit. I never learned C, I never built any *nix/*bsd OS for my home PC, I wistfully used NeXT in the school labs.
In 1998, my Win95 was backdoored through an IRC exploit. I noticed that things were wrong but couldn't fix them. I had no Win95 install CD. The McAfee Vscan provided by the school couldn't finish a scan without crashing. Apps began crashing. My audio card would work and then not work and then work and then not work. The hard drive never quit grinding away. Bad blocks began to show up two or three at a time, then fifteen or twenty, and then I'd be on the road to get a new hard drive. Then my own Win98SE cd. Then a new motherboard. The new motherboard shipped with theral sensors and BIOS thermal monitoring. I haven't seen the thermal monitoring screen in the BIOS since the first Windows BsoD and I've tried nearly every BIOS rev. FIC provides for the PA-2013.
I'd finally had enough. I resolved to give up on Microsoft sometime in late '99 and dove into Linux. My first install was Debian 2.2. There was an rpc.statd remote root vuln. in Debian 2.2. The box was rooted within 2 weeks of being up and online.
I now have two systems. Both of them run Win98SE cleanly. Both of them run Debian Sid cleanly. Both of them run a modified LFS cvs from early this year cleanly.
The security paranoia may never quit digging deeper but once you hit the bottom you know where you stand.
Cleaning up after a root compromise is about the most time-consuming and psychologically demanding thing that one can do. Let's face it: the guy who's a wizard at writing GUI apis isn't necessarily going to be a security hacker. The biggest issue to deal with when rebuilding a system after a root compromise is the paranoia. 99% of even diligent *nix/*bsd users skip the paranoia step and reinstall using the closest available media. The paranoid among us, however, consider much more than "how do I get the system back to a usable state".
How long has the system been compromised? What was the initial compromise vector? What additional compromise vectors have been added? Has critical boot binaries been infected? Has boot sector code been modified? When was the last time _KNOWN GOOD_ media was made? Is it possible that bootable CDs were created which contain compromised code or boot sector viruses? Is it possible that the compromised system has been compromised long enough that the BIOS has been compromised? Did any other intruders make use of the door left open by the initial intruder? Were any of the subsequent intruders knowledgeable enough to know the architecture of the compromised machine to a level which might allow them to introduce low-level code to connect priveleged areas of kernel memory to a back door similar to NetBus or Sub7?
It's not the teenage script-kiddie cracker that is the real concern. The concern is that a teenage script-kiddie opens a hole in the system and then a real Ada ace finds the hole and really makes the system his own. The real Ada ace is the guy who never talks about what he's cracked, anywhere. He never talks about that tunnel through the chipset.
But... *yawn* exploits are never exploitable until after Microsoft has published them.
GI Joe was one of the first games on the C64 where one spent more time loading from module to module (character selection, terrain selection, fight, character selection, terrain selection, fight) than doing anything else. It was still a fun game. :)
udeproject.sourceforge.net
The binary is 90kb. It supports multiple workspaces, raising/lowering/resizing/hiding windows, background pics, color schemes, and very simple window decorations which "stay out of the way".
My favorite...
I know it's only your .sig but...
I've often wondered if present day Windows OS wasn't merely hacked together GPL code compiled with a custom compiler. The existence of etc/services and etc/protocols, the look and feel of the Windows windowmanager, some of the widgets, all have the feel of a frankenstein Linux. If that were true then perhaps the GPL is viral...
Finally, a /. article which doesn't immediately remind me of pyramid schemes, political graft, the extortion of the American people by their corporate executive overlords... (though all of these things combined contributed to the death of Commodore and the rise of the x86 architecture).
/.'ed.
Crap. And the site is
Even if domain names are useful for more than 10 years what is the public going to do when registrars start biting the bankruptcy bullet?
Say Network Solutions gets 10000 people to sign up for 100 year domain names and then goes belly up (after the executives raid the newly acquired funding glut). What then? No other registrars are legally required to honor those DNS servers that I'm aware of.
"Ooops. Sorry about that. You need to re-register... and we over at RegistrarQ just raised our rates."
This is precisely the kind of thing that made so many companies restate their earnings in the last year. Enron did it, Xerox did it, Tyco did it. Every company was stating current earnings which encompassed the total value of long term contracts or even contracts which hadn't been formally signed yet.
Honestly I don't expect that anyone's changed anything. With so many mergers in the last few years everyone's had more than enough chance to properly structure the accounting ledger to put this sort of thing into the proper loopholes.
Of course they'll report this lump sum in the quarter received. And then they'll report the remaining portion of the contract in the next quarter, and the remaining portion in the quarter after that, and the remaining portion in the quarter after that...
Oh b_llsh_t. If some big corporation loses their domain name because they failed to re-register they'll simply sue whoever picked it up in a fashion similar to the MikeRoweSoft fiasco. They'll have the domain name back within 24 hours. At the very worst this will be the corporate excuse to wax someone that upper management has been targeting for a long time coming.
-----
The sooner we stop pretending, the better.
-----
I agree. Let's get it right out in the open: The constitution is dead, the Tenth amendment doesn't exist, we live in a socialist society managed by a communist government that breeds a middle and lower class for the express purpose of exploitation to the financial advantage of those in the upper class.
Wow... life's pretty bleak.
It's a sad day when you don't begrudge your tax dollars because you like infrastructure or because it's something you want. You're too easily giving a blank check away. My point is: _other_ people don't begrudge _your_ tax dollars either because there's something _else_ that _they_ want.
.com startups that I'm funding. I collect business insurance on the .coms, keep my winnings from XYZ, and skip out on the taxes by balancing the gains and losses in the stock portfolio. Meanwhile it's the end consumer that ends up footing the bill for the lawsuit filed against XYZ because the same company which pays me for business insurance recoups the loss by raising rates on auto or homeowners insurance.
You don't just help pay for Google by clicking on AdWords links. While that's a nice easy explanation it's also terribly naive. Google has a board of directors and investment brokers like anyone else. If they don't have a "board of directors" or "investment brokers" they have an equivalent. Names change, the system's the same. If Google isn't making enough money from their AdWords links that's okay. As long as the consumer base remains complacent they (the board of directors and investment brokers) can fund a losing venture using the gains that they make from artificially raising revenue in other investments. The same broker hypothetically losing money on Google could be making a killing by raising your insurance rates if that's where he manages investments and holds influence. In some ways it's completely desirable to continue to hold losing bets. If the consumer base ever staggers out of complacency the losing bets are tax writeoffs to offset the capital gains won by pulling out of an investment portfolio that is targeted by activist groups.
For example: Consumer watchdog groups file an unfair practices suit against company XYZ which I own a large amount of stock in. As an investment broker I cash out of XYZ and similarly bankrupt the 6 losing
It's a cat-and-mouse game that most Anericans can't follow mathematically and, in their minds, that makes it impossible. This explains why Americans are suckers born, bred and educated by public schools.
-----
And, Orkut is all kinds of free
-----
Be careful when you say "free".
For example: broadcast television is "free" but that doesn't mean that you aren't shelling out for it through your tax dollars or service fees imposed on other parts of your life. Major media companies are intimately tied to many other companies and industries through collaborations, contracts, investments, and informally through their executive boards. While they may not be able to charge you to receive broadcast signals their charging the advertisers or receiving supplemental income from government agencies. Trickle down (and around) isn't just about job creation it's also about billing. It may seem free on the front end but rest assured that the suits are getting more than their fair share of revenue from it.
-----
the same vortex of stupidity that caught us all in the Dot-Bomb Era.
-----
Your viewpoint is a little too limited. Think about it as a pyramid scheme. There are a small number of people in very elevated positions that made schloads of money off of the Dot-Bomb Era. To them it wasn't a vortex of stupidity. To them it was nothing short of sheer brilliance supported by the herd mentality in society. Those top-level investors led the public into huge investments, funneled the cash to themselves, disappeared via the back route, and left the rest of the economy holding the bag full of dogpoop.
The social networking and VC sites are operating on the same premise. Hype up the service, milk it for all it's worth, and then duck out the back door once the critical mass of incoming money has been reached. When the small controlling minority at the top leaves (rich) the rest of us will lose our investments (poor).
It's really no different than what the banks did back in the 20s. They encouraged the government first to funnel taxpayer money into the system. This inflated the system. Because the system was inflated the private investors began contributing heavily. Once the critical mass was reached in 1929 the top investors walked off with the profits and couldn't be found. The banks closed their doors and said the gov't had the money. The gov't said the money was with the investment brokers. The investment brokers said they had loaned the money out to small businesses.
Twelve thousand cups, three peas, and the real magician is hiding in some big mansion out in Nevada.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
There is nothing in it for you. It's a business model. If they can't dazzle you with the brilliance of their service they'll get 1000 other people to sign up based upon their b_llsh_t. The end goal of these social networking services is not to work for the advancement of society. Their end goal is to make money. If they can come up with five or six poster children whose lives were advanced then so much the better for their marketing spiel.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
There was a story on Slashdot a while back about a social networking mapping program. In fact, if you google for "social networking visualization software" you'll find a number of them.
:))))
I imagine that Orkut is working to develop their own social networking mapping software and all of its users are becoming part of a vast experiment in modeling of social systems.
You are not people. Your number is Liberty-4527.