Well, if they're planning to do a science fiction show/movie, then they're automatically doing better -- because there isn't any science fiction on television.
Just happen to be on a huge IP block where some guy (might be) spamming? Congratulations, you -- an entirely unrelated individual with your own business and service that relies on email as a vital part of your system -- are now on the SpamHaus blocklist with absolutely no recourse. That's how a nuclear bomb works, right? Indiscriminately dropping an oversized weapon on or near a target and obliterating everything surrounding it?
I wound up on SpamHaus, once. I ran a huge auction site and timely email communication was the most vital element of the system. After days of dealing with the bullshit, my colo still hadn't been able to clear the IP block from Spamhaus. Ultimately, the only solution was for them to move me to a server on the other side of the country, in one of their other colos with an entirely different IP block.
Lesson I learned? Blacklists are shit. Especially when they have little or no customer service to facilitate people who are wrongly listed. I couldn't remove the blacklist I was using on my mailserver fast enough, after I came to that realization (this was almost a decade ago).
It's called "being unemployed", which is the result most Slashdotters would face if they threw away their phones and computers that they, you know, do their job on.
Re:Isn't that the point of crowdfunding?
on
Has Kickstarter Peaked?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The primary problem Kickstarter is having right now is that they let just about anything in, so it's flooded with crap. They don't even adhere to their own rules (like, no "fund my life" projects and no charities -- but just recently there was one to fund someone sending their kid to camp for a week). The other is a lack of vetting. When your entire business plan is "get a cut of funding given to successful projects", you need to make sure people feel safe and some degree of trust in backing things via your site. If you let in a flood of scams (and there have been a number) or things that are clearly poorly thought out from the get-go, you are damaging the entire crowd-funding concept. It may cost more money, time, and other resources -- but they need to start vetting people and projects. That you are who you say you are. That your project even makes sense, etc.
The recent four or five "build the death star" and "defend the galaxy from the death star by helping fund the rebel forces X-Wing project" joke shit doesn't help, either.
Yeah, they're pretty shitty about that. I've been bugging them for over a year to provide a way to filter down your searches so that you can say "show me everything in the video game and table top gaming categories, ordered by submission date" -- and maybe offer an RSS feed of the resulting filter. To this day, all you can do is drill down and view a category by popularity. Or view them by "most recently added" (but there's no way to do this per-category, so you have to view a never-ending flow of shit with people wanting to fund their child's debut pop album, their own gospel album, a music video, their shitty little vegan hipster food cart, or their poorly written, never-proof-read series of novels.
The majority of people would respond: "Well, if they say it'll make us safer, then that's what we have to do. We all have to do our part and sacrifice just a little bit if we want to be safe from terrorists".
You can protect your email, as long as it stays on your own server in your own home under your own control and isn't connected to the internet.
Encryption is a pretty good option, until they classify encryption as being a criminal tool that is illegal simply to posses, the same way possessing some tools of the criminal trade already are.
Privacy is a losing fight. The best we can do is hold them at bay a little longer, but every passing year (and especially every generation of more subservient and less questioning sheep) brings us a new tide of government incursion that slowly erodes the beach of privacy and personal liberty. I think it is inevitable that this is the course of all governments, given time. We've had ours for a couple hundred years. Now we move on to the next phase and become more European, I suppose. Maybe we'll get the long lunch times, in return, though.
Why in the fuck would I want to drown out the signal of my RSS feed with the NOISE of a bunch of shitty social networking crap? I don't give the slightest fuck what my "friends" on social networking are eating for lunch, doing for the weekend, or what smarmy observation they have about life.
It's really a shame that guy has the "Democrat" tag, because he repeatedly seems to be on the rational side of things, instead of the "republican" or "democrat" side of things. The guy has been around for as long as I remember (almost my entire life, at least) and tends toward progressive technology view points and privacy for citizens at every turn. I generally lump all of the assholes together, but there really are a couple decent guys like Wyden who seem to stick to their guns and defend what is right for people. Too bad they're always trampled by the majority of twits.
The flaw in your statement is that it assumes adherence to the constitution, which we have dismissed at every opportunity over the last fifteen years. In a world where privacy, due-process, and protection of citizenship mean nothing, a little interstate commerce and taxation is trivial. Further, just as we have plenty of people in our population that say things like "we have too much free speech and the government should regulate the news" and "we should give up some of our privacy to be more secure against turr-ism", we have plenty of people who say "gosh,we gotsta pay more taxes, because it's our civic duty!" (entirely neglecting who it should also be our civic duty not to allow politicians to completely abuse the revenue they're empowered to spend).
And maybe instead of saying "let's make it fair" (huh? fair? wtf are you talking about?), how about we say "let's address the fact that if you buy something from out of state, there's really no reason for the state to need to collect taxes on it"? I mean, what resource is being consumed by your external purchase? The use of the local roads, which the delivery company driving your product to your door already pays taxes on via gas (and their own taxation for doing business in the state, physically)?
It seems to me we're addressing the wrong "problem" and doing it in the wrong direction. It's like saying "let's make everything fair by sinking to the lowest common denominator".
Yes, but it's an inevitability. The same way you may stave off significant privacy invasions for a couple years, you may be able to stave off internet taxation, too. In the long term, though, they will take what they want and nobody will really complain.
If only they were at least as tenacious about constraining spending and their budgets as they are about taking more money from citizens. I guess there's no need for them to be overly concerned with that, though, when there are so many idiots out there cheering shit like this on, because they're eager to hand over more of their pay checks every year.
I don't know if you're in the US or not, but if you are, buying from outside the country won't help you, because you'll still have to deal with US Customs fees/taxes/levies/whatever.
Collecting existing sales taxes on online sales . . . that are NOT in their state.
If I cross the border into Oregon and buy some groceries, I don't pay sales tax. If I return back to Washington with those groceries, should the Oregon grocery store be forced to report the spending and pay the sales tax to Oregon for the money I spent, based on Washington's sales tax?
This is all overly complicated money-grabbing bullshit and anyone celebrating the idea is naive. At the most, sales tax should be enforced and it should be the job of the resident to facilitate accounting and payment; not some retailer in another state who has nothing to do with you.
The ass-licking around here is even more amazing, sometimes.
And why should they be taxed if they don't have a physical presence in the state? What resources are they utilizing? The roads? That the delivery persons delivering your purchase already pay taxes on via gas taxes?
This is all about pigs wanting more money as a solution to budget problems, instead of adjusting their fucking budget, to begin with and backed by the big brick and mortar corps that can't stand up to the competition. (The idea that no taxation online is hurting local mom and pop stores is bullshit, because the big brick and mortar chains have already crushed mom and pop). They think if we have to pay taxes online, we'll buy from their local stores, instead. Guess what? It's not going to work. If I can buy it for the same price online as in person, I'm going to buy online and have it at my doorstep. In fact, I'm going to buy online even more, just to spite them.
Then, of course, there's also the issue that *it should not be the retailer's job to pay my taxes -- it should be mine*.
Hm. . . This isn't a social media site any more than FIDOnet, Usenet, or any discussion forum since the beginning of the web has been a "social media site".
The problem with a service from Google is that -- despite them being huge and likely being around forever, unlike small shops that could succumb to financial problems down the road -- you still can't trust that it'll be around in a year. And if you run into any problems, good fucking luck getting a human being to help you. Even if you're a paying customer.
I had entries in my RSS feed that were stuck as unread for three years. Absolutely nothing would nudge them out of there. It was annoying.
Oh, and their interfaces often suck and are incomplete and don't work very well with each other (go have a look at Google Drive/Docs/whatever it is this week).
I'll stick with Evernote, thanks (and I am someone who once liked the idea of just caving in and letting Google be my go-to spot for all my main services, instead of having them spread apart ten totally separate places that did things ten different ways and didn't interact at all).
We've already lost that. There are hardly any hard-nosed beat-reporters out there. Journalism in 2013 (and for most of the last fifteen years) has consisted of pulling down and repeating the AP feed and rehashing PR faxes.
Slashdot Mirror
It was an enjoyable watch, but in retrospect, it was a one-trick pony.
Considering it was made in 2012 by people in the US, there's no reason it couldn't have been made to reflect it.
Then again, I don't really have much interest in watching it. I already watched (and watched it get canceled) Boss, which was fantastic.
Well, if they're planning to do a science fiction show/movie, then they're automatically doing better -- because there isn't any science fiction on television.
SpamHaus is like a nuclear bomb. Fuck them.
Just happen to be on a huge IP block where some guy (might be) spamming? Congratulations, you -- an entirely unrelated individual with your own business and service that relies on email as a vital part of your system -- are now on the SpamHaus blocklist with absolutely no recourse. That's how a nuclear bomb works, right? Indiscriminately dropping an oversized weapon on or near a target and obliterating everything surrounding it?
I wound up on SpamHaus, once. I ran a huge auction site and timely email communication was the most vital element of the system. After days of dealing with the bullshit, my colo still hadn't been able to clear the IP block from Spamhaus. Ultimately, the only solution was for them to move me to a server on the other side of the country, in one of their other colos with an entirely different IP block.
Lesson I learned? Blacklists are shit. Especially when they have little or no customer service to facilitate people who are wrongly listed. I couldn't remove the blacklist I was using on my mailserver fast enough, after I came to that realization (this was almost a decade ago).
Don't worry, we're going to address your health concerns by outsourcing your job and your entire division ant a third the cost.
It's called "being unemployed", which is the result most Slashdotters would face if they threw away their phones and computers that they, you know, do their job on.
The primary problem Kickstarter is having right now is that they let just about anything in, so it's flooded with crap. They don't even adhere to their own rules (like, no "fund my life" projects and no charities -- but just recently there was one to fund someone sending their kid to camp for a week). The other is a lack of vetting. When your entire business plan is "get a cut of funding given to successful projects", you need to make sure people feel safe and some degree of trust in backing things via your site. If you let in a flood of scams (and there have been a number) or things that are clearly poorly thought out from the get-go, you are damaging the entire crowd-funding concept. It may cost more money, time, and other resources -- but they need to start vetting people and projects. That you are who you say you are. That your project even makes sense, etc.
The recent four or five "build the death star" and "defend the galaxy from the death star by helping fund the rebel forces X-Wing project" joke shit doesn't help, either.
Yeah, they're pretty shitty about that. I've been bugging them for over a year to provide a way to filter down your searches so that you can say "show me everything in the video game and table top gaming categories, ordered by submission date" -- and maybe offer an RSS feed of the resulting filter. To this day, all you can do is drill down and view a category by popularity. Or view them by "most recently added" (but there's no way to do this per-category, so you have to view a never-ending flow of shit with people wanting to fund their child's debut pop album, their own gospel album, a music video, their shitty little vegan hipster food cart, or their poorly written, never-proof-read series of novels.
None. Everything you do online is transmitted over lines owned by a corporation and, therefore, likely tapped at the backbone.
You overestimate the American public.
The majority of people would respond: "Well, if they say it'll make us safer, then that's what we have to do. We all have to do our part and sacrifice just a little bit if we want to be safe from terrorists".
Unfortunately, this requires that you convince others to do the same and that's not going to happen.
You can protect your email, as long as it stays on your own server in your own home under your own control and isn't connected to the internet.
Encryption is a pretty good option, until they classify encryption as being a criminal tool that is illegal simply to posses, the same way possessing some tools of the criminal trade already are.
Privacy is a losing fight. The best we can do is hold them at bay a little longer, but every passing year (and especially every generation of more subservient and less questioning sheep) brings us a new tide of government incursion that slowly erodes the beach of privacy and personal liberty. I think it is inevitable that this is the course of all governments, given time. We've had ours for a couple hundred years. Now we move on to the next phase and become more European, I suppose. Maybe we'll get the long lunch times, in return, though.
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc?
Why in the fuck would I want to drown out the signal of my RSS feed with the NOISE of a bunch of shitty social networking crap? I don't give the slightest fuck what my "friends" on social networking are eating for lunch, doing for the weekend, or what smarmy observation they have about life.
[Ron] Wyden (D-OR), Nay
It's really a shame that guy has the "Democrat" tag, because he repeatedly seems to be on the rational side of things, instead of the "republican" or "democrat" side of things. The guy has been around for as long as I remember (almost my entire life, at least) and tends toward progressive technology view points and privacy for citizens at every turn. I generally lump all of the assholes together, but there really are a couple decent guys like Wyden who seem to stick to their guns and defend what is right for people. Too bad they're always trampled by the majority of twits.
The flaw in your statement is that it assumes adherence to the constitution, which we have dismissed at every opportunity over the last fifteen years. In a world where privacy, due-process, and protection of citizenship mean nothing, a little interstate commerce and taxation is trivial. Further, just as we have plenty of people in our population that say things like "we have too much free speech and the government should regulate the news" and "we should give up some of our privacy to be more secure against turr-ism", we have plenty of people who say "gosh,we gotsta pay more taxes, because it's our civic duty!" (entirely neglecting who it should also be our civic duty not to allow politicians to completely abuse the revenue they're empowered to spend).
Why should the burden be placed on the seller?
And maybe instead of saying "let's make it fair" (huh? fair? wtf are you talking about?), how about we say "let's address the fact that if you buy something from out of state, there's really no reason for the state to need to collect taxes on it"? I mean, what resource is being consumed by your external purchase? The use of the local roads, which the delivery company driving your product to your door already pays taxes on via gas (and their own taxation for doing business in the state, physically)?
It seems to me we're addressing the wrong "problem" and doing it in the wrong direction. It's like saying "let's make everything fair by sinking to the lowest common denominator".
Yes, but it's an inevitability. The same way you may stave off significant privacy invasions for a couple years, you may be able to stave off internet taxation, too. In the long term, though, they will take what they want and nobody will really complain.
If only they were at least as tenacious about constraining spending and their budgets as they are about taking more money from citizens. I guess there's no need for them to be overly concerned with that, though, when there are so many idiots out there cheering shit like this on, because they're eager to hand over more of their pay checks every year.
I don't know if you're in the US or not, but if you are, buying from outside the country won't help you, because you'll still have to deal with US Customs fees/taxes/levies/whatever.
Collecting existing sales taxes on online sales . . . that are NOT in their state.
If I cross the border into Oregon and buy some groceries, I don't pay sales tax. If I return back to Washington with those groceries, should the Oregon grocery store be forced to report the spending and pay the sales tax to Oregon for the money I spent, based on Washington's sales tax?
This is all overly complicated money-grabbing bullshit and anyone celebrating the idea is naive. At the most, sales tax should be enforced and it should be the job of the resident to facilitate accounting and payment; not some retailer in another state who has nothing to do with you.
The ass-licking around here is even more amazing, sometimes.
And why should they be taxed if they don't have a physical presence in the state? What resources are they utilizing? The roads? That the delivery persons delivering your purchase already pay taxes on via gas taxes?
This is all about pigs wanting more money as a solution to budget problems, instead of adjusting their fucking budget, to begin with and backed by the big brick and mortar corps that can't stand up to the competition. (The idea that no taxation online is hurting local mom and pop stores is bullshit, because the big brick and mortar chains have already crushed mom and pop). They think if we have to pay taxes online, we'll buy from their local stores, instead. Guess what? It's not going to work. If I can buy it for the same price online as in person, I'm going to buy online and have it at my doorstep. In fact, I'm going to buy online even more, just to spite them.
Then, of course, there's also the issue that *it should not be the retailer's job to pay my taxes -- it should be mine*.
Hm. . . This isn't a social media site any more than FIDOnet, Usenet, or any discussion forum since the beginning of the web has been a "social media site".
Agreed. The government is all about fiscal accountability and doesn't waste money or spend money it doesn't have.
The problem with a service from Google is that -- despite them being huge and likely being around forever, unlike small shops that could succumb to financial problems down the road -- you still can't trust that it'll be around in a year. And if you run into any problems, good fucking luck getting a human being to help you. Even if you're a paying customer.
I had entries in my RSS feed that were stuck as unread for three years. Absolutely nothing would nudge them out of there. It was annoying.
Oh, and their interfaces often suck and are incomplete and don't work very well with each other (go have a look at Google Drive/Docs/whatever it is this week).
I'll stick with Evernote, thanks (and I am someone who once liked the idea of just caving in and letting Google be my go-to spot for all my main services, instead of having them spread apart ten totally separate places that did things ten different ways and didn't interact at all).
We've already lost that. There are hardly any hard-nosed beat-reporters out there. Journalism in 2013 (and for most of the last fifteen years) has consisted of pulling down and repeating the AP feed and rehashing PR faxes.
Because if there's one thing Slashdot is full of, it's . . . feminists . . . ?