I agree - and for smaller sites with less resources, you're basically encouraging traffic that eats your bandwidth and gives you no benefit in return for it.
Personally, I manually delete the small amount of spam Mollom doesn't catch,and all links have the nofollow on them. I seriously doubt the spammers are looking to see if their spam posts "work" because if they did, they'd see that I was deleting them fairly quickly and they were getting no pagerank from them anyway.
The "sandbox" is great if you have lots of spare resources and you're participating in a decentralised anti-spam solution. Otherwise it's most probably just a waste of your resources.
Of course, these gadgets will do nothing to weed out the "crash for cash" events which cost the industry £350 million per year (http://www.roadhawk.co.uk/blog/crash-for-cash-case-study/)
Being a crap driver and having an accident is one thing, but actively trying to scam money out of insurance companies is another. I'd prefer they went after the scammers a little more rigorously than trying to tell 30-somethings to give them tracking information in the name of some meagre discount which still leaves them more expensive than their competitors.
I actually agree with you - it's a futile law. However, what it has done is made website owners think about what they're doing. Granted, most just say "we use cookies, if you use our site you agree to get them from us", but some sites are dropping the 3rd party cookies they don't need because they don't want to have to argue the toss for something they don't use.
This hasn't revolutionised anything, it hasn't even made an incremental change, but it's started a conversation. In that sense it's good. In most others it's an expensive waste of time.
Personally, Ghostery does all I need to stop this sort of thing. I pretty much recommend absolutely everyone uses it. The only places I've found it needs any manual intervention is on sites like Thingiverse that use a third party comment system. However, you can tell Ghostery just to block cookies and not all the other shenanigans that sites use to track you, and then you'll have slightly less privacy, but 100% functionality.
I imagine it's a lot easier to change the software than it is to change the hardware. I have no idea what kit the rover has in it, but since my phone camera used to take bad pictures until a software update came along, I should think Nasa probably want to upgrade the software in their cameras in preference to biking a new camera out to Mars. I seem to remember that the drill may contaminate samples with teflon or something - that being the case, I'm sure they've got a fancy filter than can remove most of the "noise" from the contamination in the traces they get from the samples the drill gets. I'll bet they'd rather do that on the rover itself than trying to do it all back home after some of the data has been lost.
I also doubt they have one software system to rule them all. You can bet "we're doing a software update" is actually to update subsystems, which could be revived if the update failed for some reason (albeit with a tedious/expensive hand-crafted additional update procedure). I'll bet the core system used to manage all this stuff gets updates very rarely, but the peripherals could conceivably get them quite regularly.
This is/was one of Sebastian Thrun goals - he wants to see motorways turn into privatised railways. The cars will literally drive inches away from each other, because that way you maximise the utilisation of available road surface, but also everyone gets a fuel economy boost from the guy in front. If your car needs to get off the road, then it just slides out and the gap closes up. If you want to join the flow, then a gap opens up and you slide in.
He says that we only use something like 2% of the available road surface at the moment. If that's true, then you could imagine that the multi-lane roads we have might only need to be single lane, and still support many times more card than we can support at the moment. Interesting stuff indeed...
Version 2.0 will take care of all of this. C'mon, give them a chance - they've gone a long way, but there's a longer way to go before you buy one of these cars in the local dealership.
In London we have "car clubs" that do this without the autonomous vehicles. Near my house there's a small car parked in a normal residential parking space. I can walk up to it, open the door and drive it around for a couple of hours. If I need to put fuel in, I can do that via fuel card (or reclaim money if I can't use the fuel card for some reason). If there's anything wrong with the car, or I have an accident, I push the "call" button and talk to an operator. All this by pre-booking online, and paying on my credit card after I return the car to it's normal resting place.
It's an expensive way to replace a car you already own, but it's a cheap way to borrow a car for an hour or two a week. When we get autonomous vehicles, it'll probably become entirely more popular, and different vehicles will arrive at your house, as you describe. Can't wait;-)
See... right there is some complexity that causes a problem. If the minimum hold time is one second, then what constitutes "hold", and why one second? Why not 0.1 second, or 2 seconds? If I'm short on something, does that constitute a position that I need to hold, after all, I've sold before I buy, so did I hold to go short, or do I hold to buy to close out my position? How do you know if I'm short? Am I short as a company, or short on the particular account I'm trading on? To answer all these questions you need to put in clarifications to your original simple, elegant "solution". As soon as you do that, you've got a simple principle with millions of exceptions, which is anything but simple, and anything but regulatable or transparent. In short, you'd actually make things worse.
Most algo traders don't speculate - that is, they don't buy something in expection of a price change to sell it later. Instead, they buy in one place and sell in another in as-close-to-zero time as possible. This arbitrage is what removes the inefficiencies of the market - those inefficiencies have been shown, time and time again, to be problematic for normal, healthy trade. You need look no further than DVDs prices and availability around the world to see how an inefficient market hurts the ordinary 99%ers. Even recent history in stock markets shows that when the markets were inefficient, certain people got very rich by exploiting those inefficiencies where ordinary folk could not do the same thing (and in fact were exploited at the expense of the few). At least anyone can set up an arbitrage (or speculatative) trading shop and be on equal footing with all the others doing the same thing (sure, you probably don't have the know-how or the setup capital, but at least there's not some sort of club that no matter how rich or clever you are you can never join).
I'm not saying that all algo-trading is good - in fact, as the algo traders get bigger, they're able to trade more money, which makes them dominant in particular areas. As we've seen with the banks, once entities get too big then their failure is seen as scary. As Knight has shown, algo-traders aren't immune from catastrophic losses, and the nature of their trade is such that they could lose that money very quickly. I don't want to see us end up saying "oh, XYZ is now so big that their collapse would hurt millions of jobs, so we've better bail them out". The thing is, in 20 years, we'll probably be doing exactly that. That's not the algo traders being "bad", that's crap leadership from our governments, and crap regulation. Here in the UK no supermarket can own more than 30% of the overall market (which is achieved through regulation). So even if a major brand fails, we're not all going to starve. I'm inclined to believe similar regulations need to exist in financial circles (although I'm not sure how they'd be set out). The same may be true for big businesses generally actually. It's not like there was no suffering when Enron collapsed, for example.
To sum up: As I said further up the page: Whatever rules or changes you can think of will be worked around by armies of highly intelligent, highly motivated people who will spend their entire working lives working around your "clever" rules. Your best bet isn't to try and beat these organisations, you're better off working with them to get some wider gain from the things they do.
If you tried to get everyone to only trade once per day or once per second, you'd actually end up with *more* radical price swings than you do today. The reason is that in the gaps between trading times people would be loading up the market with trades. However, only the matching ones get executed, so in order to guarantee a fill, you'd have to offer or bid wider than you do when you can trade instantly. If a stock looks like it's tanking, then people will be desperate to sell, so will offer at lower and lower prices to guarantee a cash-out - that will drag the price down more sharply than instant trading.
To try this another way, the "gradient" between ticks, or between seconds on any stock at any time is currently quite shallow. Of course, every once in a while, the gradient gets steep, but it won't do it for long before it smooths out a bit. Let's say a stock loses 50% of it's value in 5 minutes at most (I know, some go quicker and deeper, but let's be honest, most don't).
If you tried to limit order frequency, the gradients would be steeper, although it would take longer to achieve the same effect. So a stock may lose 50% of it's value over 10 "ticks", which might be 10 days, but that's actually faster than losing it over 5 minutes of real-time trading, where it's probably all happened in a few hundred ticks.
The value of the asset is what someone else will pay for it - that's all.
If I have a bottle of tap water and walk out into the city, the asset value will be close to zero - everyone's got a tap, so no one needs my asset. If I go into a desert, then maybe I can sell it for a couple of bucks. The underlying asset hasn't changed, yet the value has.
Algo traders do care about the asset value - it's just that the asset isn't a tangible thing. Just like you care about how much a music download costs - that too isn't a tangible asset, yet it has a value. If everything has to be a tangible asset, then we'd live in a world without music recordings, TV,/. and a bazillion other things. The only "gaming" going on is on you - you believe the market is some magical place where you'll be safe. No one has a right to make money on a market of any kind. You couldn't start buying and selling vegetables without worrying about Sprawlmart undercutting you because they're better at it than you, and you can't buy and sell on an exchange without someone else doing it better than you.
I think you may be more concerned with intangible assets that are linked to their tangible counterparts by such complex means that there is no way to mentally link the two. IMHO, this is where problems occur because there's no way the average politician or financial regulator is ever going to be able to think about them in such a way as to protect the majority of us from the minority. And yes, we do need that protection, just as the majority of us need protection from the minority of murderers. How you stop intangibles when they get "too intangible" is anyone's guess.
I think the point is that new content has greater value than old content. If you download FilmX on the day of release and watch it, and then don't go to the cinema, you'd deprived the film company of your cinema ticket revenues. Likewise, if that also means you don't bother getting a Netflix account so don't bother getting it from there, you've (more tangentially) deprives the film company of your subscription revenues. However, thankfully, it's eventually on free-to-view TV in your area - you're out that night, but since it's been on the TV, the film company's been paid right? No, still not - because you didn't watch the ads, which is how the TV company gets paid, which is how they pay the film company.
Since this is/., I'll use a car analogy. This sort of thinking is like saying you want a new car for second hand prices. It's okay though, because someone's bought the car when it was new, so that means everyone's getting paid. Sadly, you'd missed out the bit where the initial purchaser has to take the hit on the depreciation just so you can have the car for less money than it's worth.
This might all sound like I'm a *AA apologist - I'm really not, and FWIW, I'm in total agreement that they need to start giving us their content in the way we want it. However, there are far too many justifications that make out that copying/downloading is okay because "nasty media company didn't do what I wanted" that are just plain false in any reasonable world. It's perfectly reasonable to charge more for something when it's new (because actually, when something is new, it has infinite scarcity), and no product ever created does exactly what you want without compromise, so it's reasonable that media won't either.
However, the *AA have a long way to go before they reach "reasonable". What I'd like to see is an international streaming service that has films on it in exactly the same day/time as the first cinema showings of the same. Of course, if that ever happens, *AA will probably try to charge more for it than a cinema ticket, and then blame "piracy" for the lack of uptake of their new service.
FWIW, I'd love to see this sort of thing. Even if "the crowd" only ended up designing the hangar they store the rocket in before it goes to the launch pad or whatever, it's still part of the whole picture, and you can't do space exploration without boring things like hangars and brackets.
However, as someone else points out, the specs required would be so detailed you could probably design the thing in less time than writing the specs. There might be some room for crowd sourced testing though ("Hey, we made a piece of this magic rope for the space elevator. See if you can snap it!";-)
Exactly, and 5GB is so incredibly cheap to buy in a USB stick or whatever, there's no need to use a cloud to store it. If they were offering 500G or some such, then maybe it would be useful. Hell, I've got 32GB in my phone, 5G just isn't worth worrying about.
Yeah, I thought the same - and yes it was. However, I think that was just a demo sort of thing, and not real. I guess they've actually done the science to make it work for real this time.
I have to say, this is a good thing - it's something like 4 hours of you and your buddy squeezing you into the current suits, and then several hours packed into an airlock with your tools and whatnot. Being able to step into the suit, and maybe even zip it up yourself (or with help), and then have them slam the door shut behind you and you be out in space without needing to faff about in an airlock is pretty damn cool. Likewise, popping back in to visit the khazi becomes a vaguely realistic possibility. Good stuff for more ordinary people to get into space (rather than needing astronaut super-humans):-)
...and use a few different ones. I personally favour Drupal, but very few corporates use it for anything "serious". At werk we have an Adobe product, which I can't recommend at all. In the past, I've worked with some home-brew solutions (at big web shops).
The point is, they all have their foibals, and having general knowledge of the area is better than saying "I'm a drupal dev".
Businesses will switch when the money talks. The cost of IPs isn't a problem at the moment (and your competitors all need to spend the same). When they're like a million dollars a pop it might get interesting.
When end users start calling up saying "your website is down" or whatever, then they'll start moving. No business is going to spend hundreds of thousands doing the work to get IPv6 compatible if it doesn't bring them any users.
For me personally, I'll go IPv6 when: - My ISP has an IPv6 option - they don't currently, meaning I'd have to tunnel, which seems sort of pointless except to play about (which I might, but only because I'm a geek) - Netgear (or someone like them) makes a £50 router that supports IPv6. Right now, the best I've found is about £150 (although I haven't re-checked for about a year, so I may be wrong about that)
Once I'm IPv6, I'll be expecting services to be available on it - although I'll have an IPv4 fallback, it won't be my preferred mode of transport, so the providers will (gradually) find the time to change. I suspect sometime around 2018 at the earliest.
I wonder if education might help here. We all have a lot of mis-placed vanity, and I wonder if knowing more about what's involved in our purchase might help slow us down a bit.
Just this morning I was looking for short, cheap optical cables. I found this one and had a little chuckle to myself:
Yep, it's a 24ct gold plated optical cable. I'll bet it's just a crappy polymer optical fibre, but it's gold plated for "BEST DIGITAL SURROUND SOUND". The smallest bit of education would render sales for this pretty difficult;-)
If you don't have an opinion, start with an SQL database. If you've got what you think is a specific use case, you've done your research, and have prototyped up a demo, then consider a NoSQL solution.
Right now, NoSQL isn't safe enough for noobs to use, but a run-of-the-mill MySQL or whatever is easy to get to "good enough". Until you run out of puff from that, keep out of NoSQL.
How on earth anyone was allowed to take their 'payment' in shares alone is another fault of GS. They knew the deal couldn't include cash because there was none. Here's an important lesson - if there's no cash on the table, then there's no cash anywhere. Get your 500 million in cash, or it isn't real.
On a smaller scale, I remember one dotcom I worked for. The sales people would look at the share price and say stuff like "when my options mature, I'll make 250K". Of course, 6 months later when the options matured they were lucky to have make 2.50. Until it's in your hand, it's not real.
On an even smaller scale, it's like when your boss tells you "I can't give you a pay rise right now, but you're doing really well. Let's set something up for 6 months time". Of course, in 6 months, he'll have been moved on, promoted or left the company and your new boss won't honour the old (non contractual) arrangement. Until it's in your contract, it's not real.
Depends where you are... We've had the MP's expenses scandal, phone hacking, government in bed with Murdoch and olympic tickets for sale under the counter. All that in the last year or so.
However, what I will say is that even though a couple of these are really pretty serious, they have caused a 'scandal', but nothing like the scale of things that have gone before. That's not a quality issue, or a news paper circulation issue - it's because the people just don't care like they once did. We're more interested who's winning X Factor than we are about constitutional peril, and so quality journalism has less of a standing in our lives.
That said, I've never understood why newspapers couldn't do a "just buy the bits you want", so we didn't end up with a sunday paper that was 80% useless. I also never understood why they spend 3 paragraphs getting to the bloody point. These are the primary reasons I don't read the papers and go elsewhere for my news.
One thought I had was: 1) Put people on the train 2) Evacuate the tube 3) Start the train moving 4) let the air back in behind the train
I'm sure (1) costs a lot to do, but (4) gives you some free acceleration because opening a hatch isn't especially expensive. I'm sure someone will chime in telling me why this won't work, but as I said, it was just a thought.
The proxy is a good way to use TPB (and I agree about the fallout). However, so is using Plusnet or a raft of other ISPs that haven't had court orders slapped on them yet. Make sure to tell BT why you're leaving too (of course, if you're at the start of your contract, you may have to wait a while, so the proxy is your friend).
BT aren't helpless in all this - they could run full page ads in the national papers about this, they could write to all their subscribers, they could lobby the government. They have, to their credit, shot a few lawyers at this for a while. That didn't work though, and neither did posting on/. about how upset we were. Stopping giving them money is the next thing to do.
I'm on Plusnet, and (so far) am not blocked from TPB (well, at least, I just tried it via shell terminal, which looks fine). FWIW, the mobile network Three doesn't have the invasive porn blockers that Vodaphone and O2 have either.
Don't fret about a new error code (although it would be nice to have one - although I like the suggestion above to host a page saying to check out the EFF). For now, just vote with your feet and pick a better ISP. When they're all doing it, then let's talk. For now, commercial pressure should be plenty.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - and for smaller sites with less resources, you're basically encouraging traffic that eats your bandwidth and gives you no benefit in return for it.
Personally, I manually delete the small amount of spam Mollom doesn't catch,and all links have the nofollow on them. I seriously doubt the spammers are looking to see if their spam posts "work" because if they did, they'd see that I was deleting them fairly quickly and they were getting no pagerank from them anyway.
The "sandbox" is great if you have lots of spare resources and you're participating in a decentralised anti-spam solution. Otherwise it's most probably just a waste of your resources.
Of course, these gadgets will do nothing to weed out the "crash for cash" events which cost the industry £350 million per year (http://www.roadhawk.co.uk/blog/crash-for-cash-case-study/)
Being a crap driver and having an accident is one thing, but actively trying to scam money out of insurance companies is another. I'd prefer they went after the scammers a little more rigorously than trying to tell 30-somethings to give them tracking information in the name of some meagre discount which still leaves them more expensive than their competitors.
I actually agree with you - it's a futile law. However, what it has done is made website owners think about what they're doing. Granted, most just say "we use cookies, if you use our site you agree to get them from us", but some sites are dropping the 3rd party cookies they don't need because they don't want to have to argue the toss for something they don't use.
This hasn't revolutionised anything, it hasn't even made an incremental change, but it's started a conversation. In that sense it's good. In most others it's an expensive waste of time.
Personally, Ghostery does all I need to stop this sort of thing. I pretty much recommend absolutely everyone uses it. The only places I've found it needs any manual intervention is on sites like Thingiverse that use a third party comment system. However, you can tell Ghostery just to block cookies and not all the other shenanigans that sites use to track you, and then you'll have slightly less privacy, but 100% functionality.
I imagine it's a lot easier to change the software than it is to change the hardware. I have no idea what kit the rover has in it, but since my phone camera used to take bad pictures until a software update came along, I should think Nasa probably want to upgrade the software in their cameras in preference to biking a new camera out to Mars. I seem to remember that the drill may contaminate samples with teflon or something - that being the case, I'm sure they've got a fancy filter than can remove most of the "noise" from the contamination in the traces they get from the samples the drill gets. I'll bet they'd rather do that on the rover itself than trying to do it all back home after some of the data has been lost.
I also doubt they have one software system to rule them all. You can bet "we're doing a software update" is actually to update subsystems, which could be revived if the update failed for some reason (albeit with a tedious/expensive hand-crafted additional update procedure). I'll bet the core system used to manage all this stuff gets updates very rarely, but the peripherals could conceivably get them quite regularly.
This is/was one of Sebastian Thrun goals - he wants to see motorways turn into privatised railways. The cars will literally drive inches away from each other, because that way you maximise the utilisation of available road surface, but also everyone gets a fuel economy boost from the guy in front. If your car needs to get off the road, then it just slides out and the gap closes up. If you want to join the flow, then a gap opens up and you slide in.
He says that we only use something like 2% of the available road surface at the moment. If that's true, then you could imagine that the multi-lane roads we have might only need to be single lane, and still support many times more card than we can support at the moment. Interesting stuff indeed...
Version 2.0 will take care of all of this. C'mon, give them a chance - they've gone a long way, but there's a longer way to go before you buy one of these cars in the local dealership.
In London we have "car clubs" that do this without the autonomous vehicles. Near my house there's a small car parked in a normal residential parking space. I can walk up to it, open the door and drive it around for a couple of hours. If I need to put fuel in, I can do that via fuel card (or reclaim money if I can't use the fuel card for some reason). If there's anything wrong with the car, or I have an accident, I push the "call" button and talk to an operator. All this by pre-booking online, and paying on my credit card after I return the car to it's normal resting place.
It's an expensive way to replace a car you already own, but it's a cheap way to borrow a car for an hour or two a week. When we get autonomous vehicles, it'll probably become entirely more popular, and different vehicles will arrive at your house, as you describe. Can't wait ;-)
See... right there is some complexity that causes a problem. If the minimum hold time is one second, then what constitutes "hold", and why one second? Why not 0.1 second, or 2 seconds? If I'm short on something, does that constitute a position that I need to hold, after all, I've sold before I buy, so did I hold to go short, or do I hold to buy to close out my position? How do you know if I'm short? Am I short as a company, or short on the particular account I'm trading on? To answer all these questions you need to put in clarifications to your original simple, elegant "solution". As soon as you do that, you've got a simple principle with millions of exceptions, which is anything but simple, and anything but regulatable or transparent. In short, you'd actually make things worse.
Most algo traders don't speculate - that is, they don't buy something in expection of a price change to sell it later. Instead, they buy in one place and sell in another in as-close-to-zero time as possible. This arbitrage is what removes the inefficiencies of the market - those inefficiencies have been shown, time and time again, to be problematic for normal, healthy trade. You need look no further than DVDs prices and availability around the world to see how an inefficient market hurts the ordinary 99%ers. Even recent history in stock markets shows that when the markets were inefficient, certain people got very rich by exploiting those inefficiencies where ordinary folk could not do the same thing (and in fact were exploited at the expense of the few). At least anyone can set up an arbitrage (or speculatative) trading shop and be on equal footing with all the others doing the same thing (sure, you probably don't have the know-how or the setup capital, but at least there's not some sort of club that no matter how rich or clever you are you can never join).
I'm not saying that all algo-trading is good - in fact, as the algo traders get bigger, they're able to trade more money, which makes them dominant in particular areas. As we've seen with the banks, once entities get too big then their failure is seen as scary. As Knight has shown, algo-traders aren't immune from catastrophic losses, and the nature of their trade is such that they could lose that money very quickly. I don't want to see us end up saying "oh, XYZ is now so big that their collapse would hurt millions of jobs, so we've better bail them out". The thing is, in 20 years, we'll probably be doing exactly that. That's not the algo traders being "bad", that's crap leadership from our governments, and crap regulation. Here in the UK no supermarket can own more than 30% of the overall market (which is achieved through regulation). So even if a major brand fails, we're not all going to starve. I'm inclined to believe similar regulations need to exist in financial circles (although I'm not sure how they'd be set out). The same may be true for big businesses generally actually. It's not like there was no suffering when Enron collapsed, for example.
To sum up: As I said further up the page: Whatever rules or changes you can think of will be worked around by armies of highly intelligent, highly motivated people who will spend their entire working lives working around your "clever" rules. Your best bet isn't to try and beat these organisations, you're better off working with them to get some wider gain from the things they do.
Actually, lots happens while markets are closed. That's how come the open price is rarely the same as the close price - and, if you're a stop-loss sort of trader, it can open below your stop-loss, and guess what, you lose a lot more than you thought you were going to. Here's a list of big gaps: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-23/s-p-500-stocks-with-biggest-gap-between-market-price-estimate.html
If you tried to get everyone to only trade once per day or once per second, you'd actually end up with *more* radical price swings than you do today. The reason is that in the gaps between trading times people would be loading up the market with trades. However, only the matching ones get executed, so in order to guarantee a fill, you'd have to offer or bid wider than you do when you can trade instantly. If a stock looks like it's tanking, then people will be desperate to sell, so will offer at lower and lower prices to guarantee a cash-out - that will drag the price down more sharply than instant trading.
To try this another way, the "gradient" between ticks, or between seconds on any stock at any time is currently quite shallow. Of course, every once in a while, the gradient gets steep, but it won't do it for long before it smooths out a bit. Let's say a stock loses 50% of it's value in 5 minutes at most (I know, some go quicker and deeper, but let's be honest, most don't).
If you tried to limit order frequency, the gradients would be steeper, although it would take longer to achieve the same effect. So a stock may lose 50% of it's value over 10 "ticks", which might be 10 days, but that's actually faster than losing it over 5 minutes of real-time trading, where it's probably all happened in a few hundred ticks.
The value of the asset is what someone else will pay for it - that's all.
If I have a bottle of tap water and walk out into the city, the asset value will be close to zero - everyone's got a tap, so no one needs my asset. If I go into a desert, then maybe I can sell it for a couple of bucks. The underlying asset hasn't changed, yet the value has.
Algo traders do care about the asset value - it's just that the asset isn't a tangible thing. Just like you care about how much a music download costs - that too isn't a tangible asset, yet it has a value. If everything has to be a tangible asset, then we'd live in a world without music recordings, TV, /. and a bazillion other things. The only "gaming" going on is on you - you believe the market is some magical place where you'll be safe. No one has a right to make money on a market of any kind. You couldn't start buying and selling vegetables without worrying about Sprawlmart undercutting you because they're better at it than you, and you can't buy and sell on an exchange without someone else doing it better than you.
I think you may be more concerned with intangible assets that are linked to their tangible counterparts by such complex means that there is no way to mentally link the two. IMHO, this is where problems occur because there's no way the average politician or financial regulator is ever going to be able to think about them in such a way as to protect the majority of us from the minority. And yes, we do need that protection, just as the majority of us need protection from the minority of murderers. How you stop intangibles when they get "too intangible" is anyone's guess.
I think the point is that new content has greater value than old content. If you download FilmX on the day of release and watch it, and then don't go to the cinema, you'd deprived the film company of your cinema ticket revenues. Likewise, if that also means you don't bother getting a Netflix account so don't bother getting it from there, you've (more tangentially) deprives the film company of your subscription revenues. However, thankfully, it's eventually on free-to-view TV in your area - you're out that night, but since it's been on the TV, the film company's been paid right? No, still not - because you didn't watch the ads, which is how the TV company gets paid, which is how they pay the film company.
Since this is /., I'll use a car analogy. This sort of thinking is like saying you want a new car for second hand prices. It's okay though, because someone's bought the car when it was new, so that means everyone's getting paid. Sadly, you'd missed out the bit where the initial purchaser has to take the hit on the depreciation just so you can have the car for less money than it's worth.
This might all sound like I'm a *AA apologist - I'm really not, and FWIW, I'm in total agreement that they need to start giving us their content in the way we want it. However, there are far too many justifications that make out that copying/downloading is okay because "nasty media company didn't do what I wanted" that are just plain false in any reasonable world. It's perfectly reasonable to charge more for something when it's new (because actually, when something is new, it has infinite scarcity), and no product ever created does exactly what you want without compromise, so it's reasonable that media won't either.
However, the *AA have a long way to go before they reach "reasonable". What I'd like to see is an international streaming service that has films on it in exactly the same day/time as the first cinema showings of the same. Of course, if that ever happens, *AA will probably try to charge more for it than a cinema ticket, and then blame "piracy" for the lack of uptake of their new service.
FWIW, I'd love to see this sort of thing. Even if "the crowd" only ended up designing the hangar they store the rocket in before it goes to the launch pad or whatever, it's still part of the whole picture, and you can't do space exploration without boring things like hangars and brackets.
However, as someone else points out, the specs required would be so detailed you could probably design the thing in less time than writing the specs. There might be some room for crowd sourced testing though ("Hey, we made a piece of this magic rope for the space elevator. See if you can snap it!" ;-)
Exactly, and 5GB is so incredibly cheap to buy in a USB stick or whatever, there's no need to use a cloud to store it. If they were offering 500G or some such, then maybe it would be useful. Hell, I've got 32GB in my phone, 5G just isn't worth worrying about.
Yeah, I thought the same - and yes it was. However, I think that was just a demo sort of thing, and not real. I guess they've actually done the science to make it work for real this time.
I have to say, this is a good thing - it's something like 4 hours of you and your buddy squeezing you into the current suits, and then several hours packed into an airlock with your tools and whatnot. Being able to step into the suit, and maybe even zip it up yourself (or with help), and then have them slam the door shut behind you and you be out in space without needing to faff about in an airlock is pretty damn cool. Likewise, popping back in to visit the khazi becomes a vaguely realistic possibility. Good stuff for more ordinary people to get into space (rather than needing astronaut super-humans) :-)
...and use a few different ones. I personally favour Drupal, but very few corporates use it for anything "serious". At werk we have an Adobe product, which I can't recommend at all. In the past, I've worked with some home-brew solutions (at big web shops).
The point is, they all have their foibals, and having general knowledge of the area is better than saying "I'm a drupal dev".
Businesses will switch when the money talks. The cost of IPs isn't a problem at the moment (and your competitors all need to spend the same). When they're like a million dollars a pop it might get interesting.
When end users start calling up saying "your website is down" or whatever, then they'll start moving. No business is going to spend hundreds of thousands doing the work to get IPv6 compatible if it doesn't bring them any users.
For me personally, I'll go IPv6 when:
- My ISP has an IPv6 option - they don't currently, meaning I'd have to tunnel, which seems sort of pointless except to play about (which I might, but only because I'm a geek)
- Netgear (or someone like them) makes a £50 router that supports IPv6. Right now, the best I've found is about £150 (although I haven't re-checked for about a year, so I may be wrong about that)
Once I'm IPv6, I'll be expecting services to be available on it - although I'll have an IPv4 fallback, it won't be my preferred mode of transport, so the providers will (gradually) find the time to change. I suspect sometime around 2018 at the earliest.
I wonder if education might help here. We all have a lot of mis-placed vanity, and I wonder if knowing more about what's involved in our purchase might help slow us down a bit.
Just this morning I was looking for short, cheap optical cables. I found this one and had a little chuckle to myself:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resolution-Professional-suitable-HD-Surround/dp/B003F60WWM/ref=sr_1_7?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1342613690&sr=1-7
Yep, it's a 24ct gold plated optical cable. I'll bet it's just a crappy polymer optical fibre, but it's gold plated for "BEST DIGITAL SURROUND SOUND". The smallest bit of education would render sales for this pretty difficult ;-)
If you don't have an opinion, start with an SQL database. If you've got what you think is a specific use case, you've done your research, and have prototyped up a demo, then consider a NoSQL solution.
Right now, NoSQL isn't safe enough for noobs to use, but a run-of-the-mill MySQL or whatever is easy to get to "good enough". Until you run out of puff from that, keep out of NoSQL.
How on earth anyone was allowed to take their 'payment' in shares alone is another fault of GS. They knew the deal couldn't include cash because there was none. Here's an important lesson - if there's no cash on the table, then there's no cash anywhere. Get your 500 million in cash, or it isn't real.
On a smaller scale, I remember one dotcom I worked for. The sales people would look at the share price and say stuff like "when my options mature, I'll make 250K". Of course, 6 months later when the options matured they were lucky to have make 2.50. Until it's in your hand, it's not real.
On an even smaller scale, it's like when your boss tells you "I can't give you a pay rise right now, but you're doing really well. Let's set something up for 6 months time". Of course, in 6 months, he'll have been moved on, promoted or left the company and your new boss won't honour the old (non contractual) arrangement. Until it's in your contract, it's not real.
Depends where you are... We've had the MP's expenses scandal, phone hacking, government in bed with Murdoch and olympic tickets for sale under the counter. All that in the last year or so.
However, what I will say is that even though a couple of these are really pretty serious, they have caused a 'scandal', but nothing like the scale of things that have gone before. That's not a quality issue, or a news paper circulation issue - it's because the people just don't care like they once did. We're more interested who's winning X Factor than we are about constitutional peril, and so quality journalism has less of a standing in our lives.
That said, I've never understood why newspapers couldn't do a "just buy the bits you want", so we didn't end up with a sunday paper that was 80% useless. I also never understood why they spend 3 paragraphs getting to the bloody point. These are the primary reasons I don't read the papers and go elsewhere for my news.
Actually, it really could blow too ;-)
One thought I had was:
1) Put people on the train
2) Evacuate the tube
3) Start the train moving
4) let the air back in behind the train
I'm sure (1) costs a lot to do, but (4) gives you some free acceleration because opening a hatch isn't especially expensive. I'm sure someone will chime in telling me why this won't work, but as I said, it was just a thought.
Oh my, I never realised that the average readership of the average media outlet is drawn in by the headlines. That really *is* news. Wow.
How do I get the first of my three strikes? Please provide links ;-)
(Absolutely seriously, how does the ISP know what to log, and what to is infringing, and what thresholds, etc?)
The proxy is a good way to use TPB (and I agree about the fallout). However, so is using Plusnet or a raft of other ISPs that haven't had court orders slapped on them yet. Make sure to tell BT why you're leaving too (of course, if you're at the start of your contract, you may have to wait a while, so the proxy is your friend).
BT aren't helpless in all this - they could run full page ads in the national papers about this, they could write to all their subscribers, they could lobby the government. They have, to their credit, shot a few lawyers at this for a while. That didn't work though, and neither did posting on /. about how upset we were. Stopping giving them money is the next thing to do.
I'm on Plusnet, and (so far) am not blocked from TPB (well, at least, I just tried it via shell terminal, which looks fine). FWIW, the mobile network Three doesn't have the invasive porn blockers that Vodaphone and O2 have either.
Don't fret about a new error code (although it would be nice to have one - although I like the suggestion above to host a page saying to check out the EFF). For now, just vote with your feet and pick a better ISP. When they're all doing it, then let's talk. For now, commercial pressure should be plenty.