When there is high-quality content, supporters will keep it alive. Look at xkcd, not an ad on the site but yet it still remains updated and high-quality and free.
Yeah, we might lose some mediocrity, but high quality will remain.
Your choice of what example you give of "High Quality" leaves me baffled. Of all the bazillion sites on the internet you chose a comic.
But looking past that.....
How do "supporters" keep something alive? What puts food on the owners table and shoes on his children's feet?
12 million hits per hour does nothing but put him further in debt to his hosting company.
If I want free content, I put up with some ads. If the Ads get too obnoxious the content is no longer worth the trouble and I leave.
Or maybe I read the site through RSS, depriving the site of all its revenue, my way of telling the site that their ads campaign is too intensive and obnoxious.
3D is doing better at the movies, but fewer people are going to the movies (compensated by higher prices), and the movie version seems to work better.
Actually, the news for 2012 was that box office and admissions (the former measures revenue and the latter is bodies), was down. That turned out to be totally false when the numbers finally came in.
Both Revenue and Admissions were UP over the prior year. Up by 6% in the US/Canada whether measured in dollars or head-counts. (page 9). Some of this is due to the fact that the recession was really biting in 2011, which reduced head-count. But Revenue never took a backward slide. This trend holds true for worldwide revenue and head counts as well.
However, 3D Box Office revenue is off significantly in 2012. From a high of 2.2 billion down to 1.8. The bloom is off the rose.
Ticket prices have not kept up with the rate of inflation in the last two years, although the industry was raising prices during the height of the depression. (?!). A movie ticket costs on average 80 cents more than id did 4 years ago.
Still, in the US and Canada, Non-moviegoers account for 32% of the population in the age group that attends movies.
One could argue that VHS vs Beta was a useful experiment for its time. True some people got stuck with a technology that lost the race, but by that time the entire tape scenario had run its course and people were moving to DVDs anyway. The market decided, and it wasn't strictly along technical grounds (which is the same for the HD-DVD/Blue Ray battle).
Having been through this twice, the consumer public has gotten very nervous about competing technologies that are released about the same time. What happens is that they pretty much hold back from buying anything in quantity until some clarity appears in the market.
This is exactly what is happening with 3D TV. People see it, Ooo and Ahh, followed quickly by Yawns. The headaches induced by the glasses, the multiple standards, the limited availability of broadcast material (usually at higher cost) just have way too many people sitting on the sidelines.
With today's technology you would think that they could build both into a single machine to protect against obsolescence, especially when the media is identical in size or the various broadcast technologies can be identified and handled by and additional $12 worth of electronics in each TV set.
But the main problem is that 3D TV is pretty much a gimmick. Certain contrived scenes (Avatar) can make it work wonders, but they have nothing to do with the storytelling (and actually detract from it). But by and large it ads nothing of lasting value.
Yes, and each incarnation leaves gullible first adapters with expensive toys laying around that they can never use. Or maybe they buy up few movies 3D and watch them over and over again just to convince themselves it wasn't such a dumb purchase after all. (Like laserdisks).
The problems of 3D TV are never going to be solved with a flat image plane. We've been through this before. When manufacturers have to warn kids away from their product (even if the warnings turned out to be overwrought), you should probably realize that there is something less than optimum going on. And when movies that were never shot in 3D start appearing in 3D you know the effect is all computer generated an guaranteed to be sub-optimum. In fact if you need special glasses to view 3D TV you know its less than optimum before you even see it.
This idea will work someday, when we get multi-planar TV sets or holographic displays that you can actually walk around and view from different angles. That's not likely to be a technology you hang on your wall. Because faking depth really doesn't work very well, and the resistance to wearing the glasses is significant.
We still reference dates with BC/AD, what wrong with negative Episode numbers, and even decimal versions if they decide to squeeze something between two others?
Or betting yet, just let it end, and use their imagination to come up with something totally new and different rather than changing one digit in the title and slapping a brand new copyright date on the same old movie.
There's no way a service that pairs random people together will ever take off until the roads are safer overall.
Sounds to me like you just made the case that random pairing might produce BETTER results.
And apparently the service has taken off enough to catch the attention of Cab drivers and regulators in several states. After all if everyone in Alberta drove like that there wouldn't be an un-dented car anywhere.
Perhaps if LYFT lost the silly mustache logo and went for something a little less conspicuous the cabbies would never have noticed them.
why would they bother with Earth ? Deep gravity well, close to the sun and plagued with solar flares, full of microbes... Pluto with all the frozen gases or the asteroid belt would be much more appealing.
On what planet would you expect to be free of all of those?
Must be a guy. Probably one who never rides in a cab. Probably one too young to have a daughter or girl-friend.
Your view will change over time son, probably the first time you put your girlfriend or daughter in a cab to the airport for the first time, and look with horror at the neck tattoos and filthy clothes of the driver. You'll be wishing for more regulation.
Right there is the root of the problem. The TIME it takes to get anywhere, with sometimes two or three bus/train changes, mismatched schedules and waits.
I've a niece who is the queen of mass-transit, and seemingly has the entire DC route map and schedules memorized, even for places she rarely goes.
I find Google Maps Transit is useful in some cities, but by and large public transportation only works for commuting, and visitors or any place out of the ordinary requires a lot of map and route study, or just jump in a cab and pay.
Agreed. Its quite a bit different than Slugging that is/was popular in some cities.
These newer programs have apps for ride matching, rating systems, and at least informally set fees. Its a regulation dodge more than anything else.
Still, I would love to see a similar rating system for individual taxi drivers, because half of them don't bathe, 60% of them are surly, 5 to10% of them on any given day don't look remotely like the credentials hanging in the cab, and the vehicles themselves are filthy and often barely road worthy.
Computers are nothing but automated intelligence. If the communications analyst would have dismissed idle chatter and gossip in english, then presumably the software would too. If the Analyst would have been more suspicious of the same content in Arabic then the software would as well.
So yes, computerized analysis counts a being looked at.
But the current thread is about the naivete and self delusion necessary to assume that the entire content of letters, email, voice calls, etc is NOT recorded or even scanned, and ONLY metadata is recorded. There isn't shred of evidence to support this view and Snowden and others have specifically stated that it is not so.
Social Engineering and spear phishing attacks are easier to protect against than hand waving into existence a custom processor architecture installed in untrusted computers running on an untrusted cloud so that you could send encrypted data and programs to run there on.
In fact by simply limiting what each legitimate user can do to JUST those things needed to do their job, you can cut the vast majority of Social Engineering and spear phishing opportunities. After that, education of the user is all that is really required.
Because even if you postulate the existence of some secure computing facility with specialized processors to handle encrypted workload at enormous expense, you will still have the possibility of social engineering and spear phishing attacks. The difference is, you will be paying 13 times as much for your computing and have another whole organization against which social engineering and spear phishing attacks can be applied.
Adding more targets for Social Engineering and spear phishing attacks is exactly the wrong approach.
They're framing this as practical science, meant to be applicable...but there's no problem to apply it to.
To be fair, they are framing it as a solution to the problem of running sensitive data and programs on untrusted (cloud) computers beyond one's immediate control.
That might make sense except they had to assume into existence some special hardware.
They had to postulate the existence custom processor. And they had to accept a 13.5 times greater execution time imposed by such a processor.
Where would this be used? I'm totally at a loss to speculate what kind or work load would justify (somehow) insuring that your untrusted computers contained said processor AND paying for 13 time the execution charges JUST so you could do the computation on an untrusted computer on some untrusted network.
They postulate sending encrypted data and programs to run on this computer in an untrusted network somewhere, in the hands of untrusted people.
If your computing load is that sensitive, buy a box, hire an armed guard to feed your trained pack of attack dogs, and put them in the rack room with instructions to kill. It would be cheaper.
As long as they do not look into the content of our emails/phone calls, we couldn't care less if they check 'who is talking to whom'.
Chuckle... Such naivete.
Lets force the news papers to throw in the obligatory denial of looking at content. That will bring the useful idiots out of the woodwork jumping to our defense.
BU is suing over the use of off the shelf parts in devices.
Stop throwing the word "design" out there like it matters. It doesn't.
BU didn't defend its parent against manufacturers of these commonly available parts which are sold in the US every day, because they knew their patents were invalid.
The University failed to defend their patent while all sorts of third parties put the devices into production and sold them openly on the components market world wide. Apple produces nothing. They don't have a single Fab. They buy parts on the open market, and have them delivered to Foxconn.
Open market commodities, uncontested by the claimed patent holder do not become violations simple by being incorporated into a device.
BU manufacturers nothing except lawsuit. Google "patent assertion entities" and learn what trolling is all about.
On the surface this sounds like patents which relate to semiconductor physics and process technologies.
This is _exactly_ the kind of thing the patent system was designed for! They're not goofy/obvious/stupid software patents - they are extremely complicated and non-trivial processes.
This isn't a "rounded corners" case and doesn't look like a patent troll.
Yes it is a troll.
Look, Apple doesn't manufacture ANYTHING. Neither does AMAZON. The companies they hire to build their devices buy parts on the open market. Those parts manufacturers (which may include Samsung) are the proper targets for Lawsuits if Boston U actually has a case. Not someone simply buying a component on the market and using it. Especially when those components have been available on the market for 20 years.
B.U. might just as well sue YOU for using a LED without a license.
(64% of voters approved of the referendum, but the turnout was only 33% of eligible voters.) So that's two thirds of the one third that actually voted, or about 20%.
The Muslim brotherhood made sure it was "the right 20%" that got into the poling places.
It would seem that the Army and the Courts are the only things acting in Egypt's best interest. They threw out Mubarak and they are throwing out this Usurper as well.
Flawed they may be but the poit is to set the ground rules so people know what to do and have something to look to when things get crazy and emotion runs high. Frankly I agree with the parent, the fact that Egypt can't ride it out until the next election and then replace Morsi having learned a lesson about electing theocrats, suggests to me the nation is unlikely to develop the spine it takes to have a democracy and keep it.
More likely they realized that if they didn't act soon, they wouldn't be able to act at all. Read the excellent post on CNN from Chariman of the History department in Cairo. He viewed Morsy as his President, he really tried.
Quoting:
The Brotherhoodization policy has gone way beyond what is normally expected in any healthy transitional process. In addition to the provincial governors -- who are gradually being replaced by Brotherhood members -- the Police Academy is reportedly being infiltrated by members of the clandestine organization. Within the Ministry of Education, replacements have reached the level of school principals. And the new Minister of Culture has replaced the head of the Cairo Opera House, dismissed the head of the Cairo Ballet Company, the head of the Egyptian Book Authority (the largest government publishing house) , and the director of the National Library and the National Archives. The new appointees have no credentials except being members or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Its quite telling for an Islamic Majority Nation to step back from the Islamification of everyday life. Far from not "riding it out", waiting for an election that would in all likelihood never happen, they demanded Morsy's ouster, and set about bringing to fulfillment the revolution that was hijacked by Islam.
Even in the US, the Declaration of Independence wasn't followed immediately by the Constitution. We had the failed Articles of Confederation, which was barely sufficient to see us through the War of Independence, but couldn't govern the nation in times of Peace. The major difference is our War was so long (9 years) and so brutal that any remaining disagreement wasn't about the political ideology, but rather the apparatus.
Slashdot Mirror
When there is high-quality content, supporters will keep it alive. Look at xkcd, not an ad on the site but yet it still remains updated and high-quality and free.
Yeah, we might lose some mediocrity, but high quality will remain.
Your choice of what example you give of "High Quality" leaves me baffled. Of all the bazillion sites on the internet you chose a comic.
But looking past that.....
How do "supporters" keep something alive? What puts food on the owners table and shoes on his children's feet?
12 million hits per hour does nothing but put him further in debt to his hosting company.
If I want free content, I put up with some ads. If the Ads get too obnoxious the content is no longer worth the trouble and I leave.
Or maybe I read the site through RSS, depriving the site of all its revenue, my way of telling the site that their ads campaign is
too intensive and obnoxious.
3D is doing better at the movies, but fewer people are going to the movies (compensated by higher prices), and the movie version seems to work better.
Actually, the news for 2012 was that box office and admissions (the former measures revenue and the latter is bodies), was down. That turned out to be totally false when the numbers finally came in.
Some interesting facts gleaned from here: http://www.mpaa.org/Resources/3037b7a4-58a2-4109-8012-58fca3abdf1b.pdf
Both Revenue and Admissions were UP over the prior year. Up by 6% in the US/Canada whether measured in dollars or head-counts. (page 9).
Some of this is due to the fact that the recession was really biting in 2011, which reduced head-count. But Revenue never took a backward slide.
This trend holds true for worldwide revenue and head counts as well.
However, 3D Box Office revenue is off significantly in 2012. From a high of 2.2 billion down to 1.8. The bloom is off the rose.
Ticket prices have not kept up with the rate of inflation in the last two years, although the industry was raising prices during the height of the depression. (?!).
A movie ticket costs on average 80 cents more than id did 4 years ago.
Still, in the US and Canada, Non-moviegoers account for 32% of the population in the age group that attends movies.
And a common standard... otherwise it is VHS vs. Beta again.
Or HD-DVD vs Blue Ray.
One could argue that VHS vs Beta was a useful experiment for its time.
True some people got stuck with a technology that lost the race, but by that time the entire tape scenario had run its course and people were moving to DVDs anyway. The market decided, and it wasn't strictly along technical grounds (which is the same for the HD-DVD/Blue Ray battle).
Having been through this twice, the consumer public has gotten very nervous about competing technologies that are released about the same time. What happens is that they pretty much hold back from buying anything in quantity until some clarity appears in the market.
This is exactly what is happening with 3D TV. People see it, Ooo and Ahh, followed quickly by Yawns. The headaches induced by the glasses, the multiple standards, the limited availability of broadcast material (usually at higher cost) just have way too many people sitting on the sidelines.
With today's technology you would think that they could build both into a single machine to protect against obsolescence, especially when the media is identical in size or the various broadcast technologies can be identified and handled by and additional $12 worth of electronics in each TV set.
But the main problem is that 3D TV is pretty much a gimmick. Certain contrived scenes (Avatar) can make it work wonders, but they have nothing to do with the storytelling (and actually detract from it). But by and large it ads nothing of lasting value.
Yes, and each incarnation leaves gullible first adapters with expensive toys laying around that they can never use. Or maybe they buy up few movies 3D and watch them over and over again just to convince themselves it wasn't such a dumb purchase after all. (Like laserdisks).
The problems of 3D TV are never going to be solved with a flat image plane. We've been through this before. When manufacturers have to warn kids away from their product (even if the warnings turned out to be overwrought), you should probably realize that there is something less than optimum going on. And when movies that were never shot in 3D start appearing in 3D you know the effect is all computer generated an guaranteed to be sub-optimum. In fact if you need special glasses to view 3D TV you know its less than optimum before you even see it.
This idea will work someday, when we get multi-planar TV sets or holographic displays that you can actually walk around and view from different angles. That's not likely to be a technology you hang on your wall. Because faking depth really doesn't work very well, and the resistance to wearing the glasses is significant.
Why change anything?
We still reference dates with BC/AD, what wrong with negative Episode numbers, and even decimal versions if they decide to squeeze something between two others?
Or betting yet, just let it end, and use their imagination to come up with something totally new and different rather than changing one digit in the title and slapping a brand new copyright date on the same old movie.
There's no way a service that pairs random people together will ever take off until the roads are safer overall.
Sounds to me like you just made the case that random pairing might produce BETTER results.
And apparently the service has taken off enough to catch the attention of Cab drivers and regulators in several states.
After all if everyone in Alberta drove like that there wouldn't be an un-dented car anywhere.
Perhaps if LYFT lost the silly mustache logo and went for something a little less conspicuous the cabbies would never have noticed them.
Cute, but even assuming the power (which we don't have) to send radio that far, it would not have reached them yet, for another million years or so.
They came from widely separated place beyond our Galaxy.
“Such subtlety ...” said Slartibartfast, “one has to admire it".
why would they bother with Earth ? Deep gravity well, close to the sun and plagued with solar flares, full of microbes ... Pluto with all the frozen gases or the asteroid belt would be much more appealing.
On what planet would you expect to be free of all of those?
Must be a guy. Probably one who never rides in a cab. Probably one too young to have a daughter or girl-friend.
Your view will change over time son, probably the first time you put your girlfriend or daughter in a cab to the airport for the first time, and look with horror at the neck tattoos and filthy clothes of the driver. You'll be wishing for more regulation.
I used to ride it all the time
Right there is the root of the problem. The TIME it takes to get anywhere, with sometimes two or three bus/train changes, mismatched schedules and waits.
I've a niece who is the queen of mass-transit, and seemingly has the entire DC route map and schedules memorized, even for places she rarely goes.
I find Google Maps Transit is useful in some cities, but by and large public transportation only works for commuting, and visitors or any place out of the ordinary requires a lot of map and route study, or just jump in a cab and pay.
Do you not see how other people drive on the road? Now you want to get in their car and let them drive you?
WTF
Do you see how Taxi Drivers drive on the road?
They are paid by the mile, so even if you ASK them the slow the hell down, they won't.
Why not take the rating system of Lyft and apply it to Taxi Drivers?
Better yet,
Why not have a QR code right there on the cab window, so you can see this driver's picture and record BEFORE you get in the cab?
Agreed. Its quite a bit different than Slugging that is/was popular in some cities.
These newer programs have apps for ride matching, rating systems, and at least informally set fees. Its a regulation dodge more than anything else.
Still, I would love to see a similar rating system for individual taxi drivers, because half of them don't bathe, 60% of them are surly, 5 to10% of them on any given day don't look remotely like the credentials hanging in the cab, and the vehicles themselves are filthy and often barely road worthy.
Computers are nothing but automated intelligence.
If the communications analyst would have dismissed idle chatter and gossip in english, then presumably the software would too.
If the Analyst would have been more suspicious of the same content in Arabic then the software would as well.
So yes, computerized analysis counts a being looked at.
But the current thread is about the naivete and self delusion necessary to assume that the entire content of letters, email, voice calls, etc is NOT recorded or even scanned, and ONLY metadata is recorded. There isn't shred of evidence to support this view and Snowden and others have specifically stated that it is not so.
Social Engineering and spear phishing attacks are easier to protect against than hand waving into existence a custom processor architecture installed in untrusted computers running on an untrusted cloud so that you could send encrypted data and programs to run there on.
In fact by simply limiting what each legitimate user can do to JUST those things needed to do their job, you can cut the vast majority of Social Engineering and spear phishing opportunities. After that, education of the user is all that is really required.
Because even if you postulate the existence of some secure computing facility with specialized processors to handle encrypted workload at enormous expense, you will still have the possibility of social engineering and spear phishing attacks. The difference is, you will be paying 13 times as much for your computing and have another whole organization against which social engineering and spear phishing attacks can be applied.
Adding more targets for Social Engineering and spear phishing attacks is exactly the wrong approach.
They're framing this as practical science, meant to be applicable...but there's no problem to apply it to.
To be fair, they are framing it as a solution to the problem of running sensitive data and programs on untrusted (cloud) computers beyond one's immediate control.
That might make sense except they had to assume into existence some special hardware.
They had to postulate the existence custom processor. And they had to accept a 13.5 times greater execution time imposed by such a processor.
Where would this be used? I'm totally at a loss to speculate what kind or work load would justify (somehow) insuring that your untrusted computers contained said processor AND paying for 13 time the execution charges JUST so you could do the computation on an untrusted computer on some untrusted network.
They postulate sending encrypted data and programs to run on this computer in an untrusted network somewhere, in the hands of untrusted people.
If your computing load is that sensitive, buy a box, hire an armed guard to feed your trained pack of attack dogs, and put them in the rack room with instructions to kill. It would be cheaper.
As long as they do not look into the content of our emails/phone calls, we couldn't care less if they check 'who is talking to whom'.
Chuckle... Such naivete.
Lets force the news papers to throw in the obligatory denial of looking at content. That will bring the useful idiots out of the woodwork jumping to our defense.
BU is suing over the use of off the shelf parts in devices.
Stop throwing the word "design" out there like it matters. It doesn't.
BU didn't defend its parent against manufacturers of these commonly available parts which are sold in the US every day, because they knew their patents were invalid.
Designs using off the shelf parts.
That's the thing you refuse to consider. The parts are readily available from a dozen different manufacturers.
Pick up any DigiKey catalog. OFF THE SHELF COMMODITIES.
The University failed to defend their patent while all sorts of third parties put the devices into production and sold them openly on the components market world wide. Apple produces nothing. They don't have a single Fab. They buy parts on the open market, and have them delivered to Foxconn.
Open market commodities, uncontested by the claimed patent holder do not become violations simple by being incorporated into a device.
BU manufacturers nothing except lawsuit. Google "patent assertion entities" and learn what trolling is all about.
On the surface this sounds like patents which relate to semiconductor physics and process technologies.
This is _exactly_ the kind of thing the patent system was designed for! They're not goofy/obvious/stupid software patents - they are extremely complicated and non-trivial processes.
This isn't a "rounded corners" case and doesn't look like a patent troll.
Yes it is a troll.
Look, Apple doesn't manufacture ANYTHING. Neither does AMAZON. The companies they hire to build their devices buy parts on the open market.
Those parts manufacturers (which may include Samsung) are the proper targets for Lawsuits if Boston U actually has a case. Not someone simply buying a component on the market and using it. Especially when those components have been available on the market for 20 years.
B.U. might just as well sue YOU for using a LED without a license.
Overwhelmingly Approved? Are you DAFT?
(64% of voters approved of the referendum, but the turnout was only 33% of eligible voters.)
So that's two thirds of the one third that actually voted, or about 20%.
The Muslim brotherhood made sure it was "the right 20%" that got into the poling places.
What would you say about a constitution that can be systematically ignored?
It would seem that the Army and the Courts are the only things acting in Egypt's best interest. They threw out Mubarak and they are throwing out this Usurper as well.
Flawed they may be but the poit is to set the ground rules so people know what to do and have something to look to when things get crazy and emotion runs high. Frankly I agree with the parent, the fact that Egypt can't ride it out until the next election and then replace Morsi having learned a lesson about electing theocrats, suggests to me the nation is unlikely to develop the spine it takes to have a democracy and keep it .
More likely they realized that if they didn't act soon, they wouldn't be able to act at all.
Read the excellent post on CNN from Chariman of the History department in Cairo. He viewed Morsy as his President, he really tried.
Quoting:
The Brotherhoodization policy has gone way beyond what is normally expected in any healthy transitional process. In addition to the provincial governors -- who are gradually being replaced by Brotherhood members -- the Police Academy is reportedly being infiltrated by members of the clandestine organization. Within the Ministry of Education, replacements have reached the level of school principals. And the new Minister of Culture has replaced the head of the Cairo Opera House, dismissed the head of the Cairo Ballet Company, the head of the Egyptian Book Authority (the largest government publishing house) , and the director of the National Library and the National Archives. The new appointees have no credentials except being members or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Its quite telling for an Islamic Majority Nation to step back from the Islamification of everyday life. Far from not "riding it out", waiting for an election that would in all likelihood never happen, they demanded Morsy's ouster, and set about bringing to fulfillment the revolution that was hijacked by Islam.
Even in the US, the Declaration of Independence wasn't followed immediately by the Constitution. We had the failed Articles of Confederation, which was barely sufficient to see us through the War of Independence, but couldn't govern the nation in times of Peace. The major difference is our War was so long (9 years) and so brutal that any remaining disagreement wasn't about the political ideology, but rather the apparatus.