Also the coercion problem is removed if you are allowed to vote several times, and only the last vote counts. Your boss --or whoever-- would have to watch you day and night to make sure you didn't change your vote. Also, you always could go to a physical ballot and change your vote even after the online vote period ends. Phyiscal votes would take precedence over online ones, you couldn't do away with them anyway.
Oh, I see: allow both online and physical, with physical taking preference.
That would give vote buyers no guarantee. However, because of the effort involved,
most votes would still be successfully bought.
Posting out voting codes would break the secret ballot, as codes are linked to people (even if promises were made to destroy the link data after the poll).
Not if you send the encrypted vote to one office (that cant read the encryption) where your id is checked and the code is removed, and then they send that to an independant office where the vote is decrypted and counted. Like they do with snail mail voting, using multiple envelopes, one with your name, and the other one inside with your vote.
That's OK if you trust them not to subvert the system.
Matching voters to votes is just not possible
with voter-selected voting codes. Of course the flipside of making votes
more secret can be to make them easier to sell.
Also the coercion problem is removed if you are allowed to vote several times, and only the last vote counts. Your boss --or whoever-- would have to watch you day and night to make sure you didn't change your vote. Also, you always could go to a physical ballot and change your vote even after the online vote period ends. Phyiscal votes would take precedence over online ones, you couldn't do away with them anyway.
That's clever. But wouldn't vote buyers always cast their
votes just before polling closed?
An alternative to make vote-selling harder would be to put voting
codes in a form that couldn't be electronically transmitted.
Say as RFID tags that had to be scanned at voting kiosks.
Voting and elections in general are the fundamental expression of democracy, they should always be run low-tech, readily available to the public for scrutiny by the parties, and manual recount.
The secret ballot is already being undermined by increasing
use of postal ballots. The question is whether the participation,
speed, and cost advantages of an electronic voting method outweigh
the risks when used for a particular office in a particular society.
In any case, if you wanted to ensure your online ballot was secret,
you wouldn't vote at home, so as to use an IP address that's
different from one that your ISP records as being yours.
So perhaps the best use of electronic voting is to cheaply
increase the number of polling stations, allowing you to vote
from any computer or public kiosk.
This would provide a more secret ballot than postal voting,
and better protection against fraud than the current method
of stating your name and getting it crossed of a roll in order to get
a ballot paper.
Nothing's perfect. It's all about workable tradeoffs. Experiments
should be conducted with less important public offices.
I don't see how there's any issue keeping it a secret ballot. It would be trivial to code a system which stores the user details and whether they've voted or not in one table, then in another table the votes. There would be no possible way to reconcile who voted with what they voted for if you're not storing information on who was logged in when in the system as well as the time when each vote was entered.
The vote and identity information have to be able to be brought
together in order to enforce a single vote per person. So though
you may be given assurances that this matching isn't stored,
it's still possible.
Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
Posting out voting codes would break the secret ballot, as codes are linked to people (even if promises were made to destroy the link data after the poll).
But this problem could be avoided by having people choose their own voting code card from thousands displayed on tables when they attend a polling station for their next regular vote. Then there's no way to connect a code to a person.
But as you pointed out, the problem of making it easy to sell your vote remains, disenfranchising the poor. But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
Instead of Facebook's community assistance, and Google's assistance from the cloud, a third way is Rbate's model of assistance from professional helpers, which includes a search engine that's dedicated to allowing people to find such helpers.
Helpers can not only include the usual forms of professional information, advice, and assistance (professional reviews, aggregators of consumer reviews, and full-service retailers), but consultants and recommendation engines that can offer more personalized service. Relying on reviews takes too much work to find and understand the information you're looking for, while retail service, which has often been pretty clueless, is further suffering due to competition from online and discount outlets.
If you pay these helpers for the help they give rather than the ads they expose or the sales they mediate (retailers & affiliates), you can make it easier for professional help to be free.
Eventually though, people be willing to pay fees for professional assistance for more products than just big ones like investment advice.
Website is to Blog as RSS is to Twitter
on
One-Tweet Wonders
·
· Score: 1
Twitter democratizes feeds, just as blogs democratized websites.
I never did like the polling aspect of RSS. At least Twitter allows updates to be pushed to a central server.
But is Twitter then just like email from whitelisted, default-no-reply addresses,
made low-latency with rapid server polling, where the message fits in the subject line,
plus an easy way to join and leave personal mailing lists.
The no-reply feature does allow people to talk without listening, which I'm not sure is a good thing.
But blogs are also often like that.
This is quite close to my first thought about this: why does it have to be free? Just because it is for Linux or Open Source? Open Source does not necessarily mean free-of-charge, not even free-as-in-speech. That one can look at the source and modify it doesn't necessarily mean you have the right to redistribute it, or that you can obtain it for free.
You're quite right that there's no reason for open software to always be gratis. But unrestricted redistribution
is one of FOSS's strengths.
It's quite possible to charge for software that is both source-available and redistributable. Rails Wheels does this.
Now if only they can come with a simple way to pay small amounts (and that is a big issue - without having to buy "credits" in advance or whatever) I think it can give a great boost to open-source developers. If an application is good, well yes I'd happily donate a small amount (though much rather after obtaining it; not beforehand - try before you buy). Not US$50 or so - more like a dollar or two. Let a couple hundred people do so and the developer can buy himself a nice upgrade for his computer. Always nice when your hobby gives you something real in return.
You can make small payments feasible by having a store that allows you to
aggregate your purchases for various pieces of software at quarterly intervals, as
Rails Wheels does.
Also, we shouldn't be stuck on panhandling as a way to get paid for open software.
You can charge a compulsory one-off or quarterly fee when the software is being used
(rather than just evaluated). In return you give the purchaser ticket-based support and a
"licenced user" web-badge.
Licence fees should also vary with the type of user, and the benefit being gained.
Say, making it free for non-commercial users, cheap for small commercial operations,
and more expensive (but still great value) for large users.
The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?
No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep,
which is even mentioned in TFA.
I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral
cortex, and my hypothesis (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used
to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical
columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.
Yeah, rather than a percentage of the gross there
should be a fixed price per use that varies according
to the user's ability to pay.
Rails Wheels
does this by allowing the price of a software package to vary
according to both the user's type (non-profit, government,
personal-promotional, or for-profit) and the user's size
(as measured by the number of employees).
Is that supposed to be a list of problems or a list of alternative business models, because I only see one problem in that list and it tends to apply to any business model, not just those you've listed.
That was a list of alternative ways that give people the time and the tools
to bring creative works, that others may find useful, into being.
Nothing comes from nothing.
So, your proof of effectiveness of your proposal is simply the failure of a worse system? You have to be better than the systems that are working now. Not better than than the systems that are failing now.
I think that open software is currently being held back by the tangling of
the two frees. A better mechanism for charging for software and paying
developers, while retaining the advantages of open development and distribution,
would improve the availability and usefulness of such software.
Are you saying that anyone selling non-physical easily-redistributed goods should give up trying to charge for them? Music, video, news, software, etc.
Yes.
I think that direct payment will continue to be a common form
of compensation. There are too many problems with the alternatives:
amateurism, self-promotion, employer-sponsored, ad-supported,
donation-supported, or selling associated products (support,
t-shirts, concerts, etc.)
And I bet you can't name a single multi-licensed project that has both a significant amount of outsider contributors and a non-Free license as one of the options.
Precisely. Outside contributors are scared off submitting to projects like
MySQL that make uncompensated commercial use of them.
1) It is just another variant on creating artificial scarcity of a non-scarce resource.
Are you saying that anyone selling non-physical easily-redistributed
goods should give up trying to charge for them? Music, video, news,
software, etc.
While proprietary software is usually protected through compilation and
licence keys, commercial open-source software must rely on two different
protections: copyright that prevents non-clean-room reverse-engineering,
and licence conditions that require users to pay in certain circumstances.
Of course to extract payment while avoiding a rash of litigation you must
rely more on people's goodwill than with more closed systems of distribution.
But that's better than being stuck with gratis because you believe that it's
impossible to charge for the software itself.
2) Few people are going to contribute casually to any such project due to the restrictions on redistribution and the almost certain unfairness in distribution of funding.
Au contraire, the prospect of some reward, even if the development
committee may not always make that fair, is far better than the
exploitation that occurs when commercial dual-licenced projects demand
uncompensated copyright assignment of all submissions.
What they mean is that selective pressure due to critical energy needs favored successively smaller brained individuals who were more able to effectively survive and have fertile offspring. Over the course of many generations, this led to small brains.
It's not worth it to spend $10 million to decide who will get $10million, and if you spend an hour each one 150K applications, you need 80 employees full-time for a year, which will cost you pretty close to that, when you include benefits, taxes etc.
I guess a lot of the suggestions are very similar, or very crappy, so can be dealt with quickly though, so should be realistic to give this a reasonable review with substantially less resurces, still it's going to require atleast a man-year or two.
I actually submitted two ideas, and you had to start with a max-150-character
title, then a max-150-word summary. So they should be able to do
a lot better than a one-hour average.
I think a year to assess them would be OK. Unless of course
one idea happened to be a swine flu cure, an Italian earthquake
predictor, or a financial meltdown circuit breaker.
I'd rather Google spend the time to carefully consider all submissions,
instead of just selecting some motherhood ideas and round-filing the
rest. In fact they've said that each winning idea may draw on many
separate entries to crowd-source the optimal way to implement it..
But it's true that if any organization can devote resources to getting
these examined in a timely fashion, it's Google.
Not yet today. I think it might be an artifact of all the process isolation. It's currently got about 8 tabs open and is going at about 200+ mb of RAM. I haven't closed it since I wrote it this morning. I'm still using it. I would go so far as to say that it doesn't bleed RAM like Firefox or Safari.
That sounds good. I have to restart FF3 every day or two, which is less
often than FF2, but still annoying, particularly when I find out I've
lost the original version of pages that have since been changed.
I've read that the FF Firebug plugin, which I make heavy use of, is
leaky. Perhaps naked FF is a lot better than I'm experiencing.
But I find another reason for preferring FF over IE is the font
rendering. Perhaps there's some problem with my XP setup, but
text in IE is thinner and more pixelated than in FF, making sites
look a lot worse. So you see this, or do I have anti-aliasing
somehow turned off?
...my idea of browsing the web involves launching through pages at break-neck speed middle-clicking links as I go along and loading about 20-30 tabs at a time.
This is why page load performance is not that important.
I view most pages minutes after I open them.
Memory management is much more important.
If you have any questions or challenges for IE 8 and don't run windows or ie 8,
let me know and I will give you the results.
Like Firefox, does the browser gradually slow down and have to
be regularly re-started?
Have a look at the Rails Wheels
licence system, used by some Ruby on Rails plugins.
It allows customization and redistribution, but ensures that the original
author gets paid when any derivative work is in live use on a website.
Plugin authors can allocate income shares to others,
giving authors of significant patches an incentive to
contribute back to the original (commercial) package.
I will never ever submit to advertisers. It is fundamentally dishonest as a practice. It insults our collective intelligence and provides absolutely no useful information about a service or a product. It is the equivalent of a woman flashing her titties at a bunch of guys to manipulate their wallets out of their pockets like a master illusionist, except 1/1,000,000 as enjoyable. If one learns about advertising and marketing they quickly find it is all about how to manipulate the consumer. How does that sound like an evolved practice worthy of humanity and its potential?
Advertising has gone crazy in recent years as the Internet-driven
democratisation of content has put pressure on both old and new media.
Advertising is like a dying sun that is inflating even as its
fuel is being exhausted. It will soon go nova and become either
a dull dwarf or black hole.
Only getting paid on "confirmed purchases". To me this is a rip of for webmasters. The few times I have bought something I saw advertised on a web page.. I didn't access it through the ad. I googled for it later when a need for such product arose. Ads don't usually have an immediate effect imo.. they are cumulative. You see a product name over and over.. and eventually decide to buy it. You see the same ad for some web host every time you visit a site.. then one day you need web hosting.. and the name pops up. Chances are you are not going to go click on the ad.. but non the less the ad was effective.
Vendors love cost-per-action because it gives them a predictable return on their investment. But yes, the publisher only gets paid for a fraction of the help they give to the consumer, as well putting pressure on the publisher
to speak well of the product.
I'm involved with a company
that has one solution to this problem:
Asking consumers during post-purchase cashback claims to list the
media and services that they found helpful, and then distributing product maker bonuses among the cited services. This allows the publisher
to benefit even if the purchase was offline, even if they were only
one of several sources that the consumer consulted, and even if
they write a negative review that leads the consumer to another product.
People don't want to read advertorial, sites employing advertorial become useless and folks will stop reading them.
Unless we move to a totally amateur system, there needs to be
some way for professional publishers to get paid for their work.
The only method that avoids any conflict of interest is if the
consumer of the media pays directly for its use. But the subscription
model is breaking down as the web democratises publishing.
Only a suitable micropayment system can save it.
Other ways of funding media are either becoming unsustainable, such as pushing distracting ads, or potentially compromise publishers' independence
(negotiating advertising directly with product makers, or receiving revenue from (rarely disclosed) affiliate relationships).
I'm in favour of funding professional media by bonuses that product makers
pay for the help they give to consumers, done in a way that
is both fully-disclosed and buffers media from dealing with the
bonus payers.
Here's a summary.
Slashdot Mirror
Also the coercion problem is removed if you are allowed to vote several times, and only the last vote counts. Your boss --or whoever-- would have to watch you day and night to make sure you didn't change your vote. Also, you always could go to a physical ballot and change your vote even after the online vote period ends. Phyiscal votes would take precedence over online ones, you couldn't do away with them anyway.
Oh, I see: allow both online and physical, with physical taking preference.
That would give vote buyers no guarantee. However, because of the effort involved, most votes would still be successfully bought.
Posting out voting codes would break the secret ballot, as codes are linked to people (even if promises were made to destroy the link data after the poll).
Not if you send the encrypted vote to one office (that cant read the encryption) where your id is checked and the code is removed, and then they send that to an independant office where the vote is decrypted and counted. Like they do with snail mail voting, using multiple envelopes, one with your name, and the other one inside with your vote.
That's OK if you trust them not to subvert the system. Matching voters to votes is just not possible with voter-selected voting codes. Of course the flipside of making votes more secret can be to make them easier to sell.
Also the coercion problem is removed if you are allowed to vote several times, and only the last vote counts. Your boss --or whoever-- would have to watch you day and night to make sure you didn't change your vote. Also, you always could go to a physical ballot and change your vote even after the online vote period ends. Phyiscal votes would take precedence over online ones, you couldn't do away with them anyway.
That's clever. But wouldn't vote buyers always cast their votes just before polling closed?
An alternative to make vote-selling harder would be to put voting codes in a form that couldn't be electronically transmitted. Say as RFID tags that had to be scanned at voting kiosks.
Voting and elections in general are the fundamental expression of democracy, they should always be run low-tech, readily available to the public for scrutiny by the parties, and manual recount.
The secret ballot is already being undermined by increasing use of postal ballots. The question is whether the participation, speed, and cost advantages of an electronic voting method outweigh the risks when used for a particular office in a particular society.
In any case, if you wanted to ensure your online ballot was secret, you wouldn't vote at home, so as to use an IP address that's different from one that your ISP records as being yours. So perhaps the best use of electronic voting is to cheaply increase the number of polling stations, allowing you to vote from any computer or public kiosk.
This would provide a more secret ballot than postal voting, and better protection against fraud than the current method of stating your name and getting it crossed of a roll in order to get a ballot paper.
Nothing's perfect. It's all about workable tradeoffs. Experiments should be conducted with less important public offices.
I don't see how there's any issue keeping it a secret ballot. It would be trivial to code a system which stores the user details and whether they've voted or not in one table, then in another table the votes. There would be no possible way to reconcile who voted with what they voted for if you're not storing information on who was logged in when in the system as well as the time when each vote was entered.
The vote and identity information have to be able to be brought together in order to enforce a single vote per person. So though you may be given assurances that this matching isn't stored, it's still possible.
Maybe send each citizen a card with an online access code? But the non-technological means of tampering with a person's vote will still apply, i.e. coercing them by one way or another, or even the lure of financial gain: "here, pay you 20 bucks to vote for Mr. X"... which is a way for the system to become corrupted.
So again: Do not want.
Posting out voting codes would break the secret ballot, as codes are linked to people (even if promises were made to destroy the link data after the poll).
But this problem could be avoided by having people choose their own voting code card from thousands displayed on tables when they attend a polling station for their next regular vote. Then there's no way to connect a code to a person.
But as you pointed out, the problem of making it easy to sell your vote remains, disenfranchising the poor. But the problem may be manageable in countries that are sufficiently rich and have sufficiently strong democratic traditions.
Instead of Facebook's community assistance, and Google's assistance from the cloud, a third way is Rbate's model of assistance from professional helpers, which includes a search engine that's dedicated to allowing people to find such helpers.
Helpers can not only include the usual forms of professional information, advice, and assistance (professional reviews, aggregators of consumer reviews, and full-service retailers), but consultants and recommendation engines that can offer more personalized service. Relying on reviews takes too much work to find and understand the information you're looking for, while retail service, which has often been pretty clueless, is further suffering due to competition from online and discount outlets.
If you pay these helpers for the help they give rather than the ads they expose or the sales they mediate (retailers & affiliates), you can make it easier for professional help to be free.
Eventually though, people be willing to pay fees for professional assistance for more products than just big ones like investment advice.
Twitter democratizes feeds, just as blogs democratized websites.
I never did like the polling aspect of RSS. At least Twitter allows updates to be pushed to a central server.
But is Twitter then just like email from whitelisted, default-no-reply addresses, made low-latency with rapid server polling, where the message fits in the subject line, plus an easy way to join and leave personal mailing lists.
The no-reply feature does allow people to talk without listening, which I'm not sure is a good thing. But blogs are also often like that.
This is quite close to my first thought about this: why does it have to be free? Just because it is for Linux or Open Source? Open Source does not necessarily mean free-of-charge, not even free-as-in-speech. That one can look at the source and modify it doesn't necessarily mean you have the right to redistribute it, or that you can obtain it for free.
You're quite right that there's no reason for open software to always be gratis. But unrestricted redistribution is one of FOSS's strengths.
It's quite possible to charge for software that is both source-available and redistributable. Rails Wheels does this.
Now if only they can come with a simple way to pay small amounts (and that is a big issue - without having to buy "credits" in advance or whatever) I think it can give a great boost to open-source developers. If an application is good, well yes I'd happily donate a small amount (though much rather after obtaining it; not beforehand - try before you buy). Not US$50 or so - more like a dollar or two. Let a couple hundred people do so and the developer can buy himself a nice upgrade for his computer. Always nice when your hobby gives you something real in return.
You can make small payments feasible by having a store that allows you to aggregate your purchases for various pieces of software at quarterly intervals, as Rails Wheels does.
Also, we shouldn't be stuck on panhandling as a way to get paid for open software. You can charge a compulsory one-off or quarterly fee when the software is being used (rather than just evaluated). In return you give the purchaser ticket-based support and a "licenced user" web-badge.
Licence fees should also vary with the type of user, and the benefit being gained. Say, making it free for non-commercial users, cheap for small commercial operations, and more expensive (but still great value) for large users.
The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?
No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep, which is even mentioned in TFA.
I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral cortex, and my hypothesis (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.
Yeah, rather than a percentage of the gross there should be a fixed price per use that varies according to the user's ability to pay.
Rails Wheels does this by allowing the price of a software package to vary according to both the user's type (non-profit, government, personal-promotional, or for-profit) and the user's size (as measured by the number of employees).
Is that supposed to be a list of problems or a list of alternative business models, because I only see one problem in that list and it tends to apply to any business model, not just those you've listed.
That was a list of alternative ways that give people the time and the tools to bring creative works, that others may find useful, into being. Nothing comes from nothing.
So, your proof of effectiveness of your proposal is simply the failure of a worse system? You have to be better than the systems that are working now. Not better than than the systems that are failing now.
I think that open software is currently being held back by the tangling of the two frees. A better mechanism for charging for software and paying developers, while retaining the advantages of open development and distribution, would improve the availability and usefulness of such software.
Are you saying that anyone selling non-physical easily-redistributed goods should give up trying to charge for them? Music, video, news, software, etc.
Yes.
I think that direct payment will continue to be a common form of compensation. There are too many problems with the alternatives: amateurism, self-promotion, employer-sponsored, ad-supported, donation-supported, or selling associated products (support, t-shirts, concerts, etc.)
And I bet you can't name a single multi-licensed project that has both a significant amount of outsider contributors and a non-Free license as one of the options.
Precisely. Outside contributors are scared off submitting to projects like MySQL that make uncompensated commercial use of them.
Your proposal has gots lots of problems
1) It is just another variant on creating artificial scarcity of a non-scarce resource.
Are you saying that anyone selling non-physical easily-redistributed goods should give up trying to charge for them? Music, video, news, software, etc.
While proprietary software is usually protected through compilation and licence keys, commercial open-source software must rely on two different protections: copyright that prevents non-clean-room reverse-engineering, and licence conditions that require users to pay in certain circumstances.
Of course to extract payment while avoiding a rash of litigation you must rely more on people's goodwill than with more closed systems of distribution. But that's better than being stuck with gratis because you believe that it's impossible to charge for the software itself.
2) Few people are going to contribute casually to any such project due to the restrictions on redistribution and the almost certain unfairness in distribution of funding.
Au contraire, the prospect of some reward, even if the development committee may not always make that fair, is far better than the exploitation that occurs when commercial dual-licenced projects demand uncompensated copyright assignment of all submissions.
What they mean is that selective pressure due to critical energy needs favored successively smaller brained individuals who were more able to effectively survive and have fertile offspring. Over the course of many generations, this led to small brains.
This is what happened to the Koala.
It depends, now doesn't it?
It's not worth it to spend $10 million to decide who will get $10million, and if you spend an hour each one 150K applications, you need 80 employees full-time for a year, which will cost you pretty close to that, when you include benefits, taxes etc.
I guess a lot of the suggestions are very similar, or very crappy, so can be dealt with quickly though, so should be realistic to give this a reasonable review with substantially less resurces, still it's going to require atleast a man-year or two.
I actually submitted two ideas, and you had to start with a max-150-character title, then a max-150-word summary. So they should be able to do a lot better than a one-hour average.
I think a year to assess them would be OK. Unless of course one idea happened to be a swine flu cure, an Italian earthquake predictor, or a financial meltdown circuit breaker.
I'd rather Google spend the time to carefully consider all submissions, instead of just selecting some motherhood ideas and round-filing the rest. In fact they've said that each winning idea may draw on many separate entries to crowd-source the optimal way to implement it..
But it's true that if any organization can devote resources to getting these examined in a timely fashion, it's Google.
Xdoclet was the straw that drove me from Java to Rails. All that Java jargon just blew my mind.
So when I saw scriptlet used in a Rails context, I had a visceral reaction.
Not yet today. I think it might be an artifact of all the process isolation. It's currently got about 8 tabs open and is going at about 200+ mb of RAM. I haven't closed it since I wrote it this morning. I'm still using it. I would go so far as to say that it doesn't bleed RAM like Firefox or Safari.
That sounds good. I have to restart FF3 every day or two, which is less often than FF2, but still annoying, particularly when I find out I've lost the original version of pages that have since been changed.
I've read that the FF Firebug plugin, which I make heavy use of, is leaky. Perhaps naked FF is a lot better than I'm experiencing.
But I find another reason for preferring FF over IE is the font rendering. Perhaps there's some problem with my XP setup, but text in IE is thinner and more pixelated than in FF, making sites look a lot worse. So you see this, or do I have anti-aliasing somehow turned off?
...my idea of browsing the web involves launching through pages at break-neck speed middle-clicking links as I go along and loading about 20-30 tabs at a time.
This is why page load performance is not that important. I view most pages minutes after I open them. Memory management is much more important.
If you have any questions or challenges for IE 8 and don't run windows or ie 8, let me know and I will give you the results.
Like Firefox, does the browser gradually slow down and have to be regularly re-started?
Have a look at the Rails Wheels licence system, used by some Ruby on Rails plugins.
It allows customization and redistribution, but ensures that the original author gets paid when any derivative work is in live use on a website.
Plugin authors can allocate income shares to others, giving authors of significant patches an incentive to contribute back to the original (commercial) package.
Yes, that sort of dynamic WYSIWYG would be even better.
OO is painful to use because the dialogs don't have apply buttons.
You have to navigate to bring up a dialog, estimate the settings that would look best, press OK, then keep repeating until satisfied.
I will never ever submit to advertisers. It is fundamentally dishonest as a practice. It insults our collective intelligence and provides absolutely no useful information about a service or a product. It is the equivalent of a woman flashing her titties at a bunch of guys to manipulate their wallets out of their pockets like a master illusionist, except 1/1,000,000 as enjoyable. If one learns about advertising and marketing they quickly find it is all about how to manipulate the consumer. How does that sound like an evolved practice worthy of humanity and its potential?
Advertising has gone crazy in recent years as the Internet-driven democratisation of content has put pressure on both old and new media. Advertising is like a dying sun that is inflating even as its fuel is being exhausted. It will soon go nova and become either a dull dwarf or black hole.
Only getting paid on "confirmed purchases". To me this is a rip of for webmasters. The few times I have bought something I saw advertised on a web page.. I didn't access it through the ad. I googled for it later when a need for such product arose. Ads don't usually have an immediate effect imo .. they are cumulative. You see a product name over and over.. and eventually decide to buy it. You see the same ad for some web host every time you visit a site.. then one day you need web hosting.. and the name pops up. Chances are you are not going to go click on the ad.. but non the less the ad was effective.
Vendors love cost-per-action because it gives them a predictable return on their investment. But yes, the publisher only gets paid for a fraction of the help they give to the consumer, as well putting pressure on the publisher to speak well of the product.
I'm involved with a company that has one solution to this problem: Asking consumers during post-purchase cashback claims to list the media and services that they found helpful, and then distributing product maker bonuses among the cited services. This allows the publisher to benefit even if the purchase was offline, even if they were only one of several sources that the consumer consulted, and even if they write a negative review that leads the consumer to another product.
Unless we move to a totally amateur system, there needs to be some way for professional publishers to get paid for their work.
The only method that avoids any conflict of interest is if the consumer of the media pays directly for its use. But the subscription model is breaking down as the web democratises publishing. Only a suitable micropayment system can save it.
Other ways of funding media are either becoming unsustainable, such as pushing distracting ads, or potentially compromise publishers' independence (negotiating advertising directly with product makers, or receiving revenue from (rarely disclosed) affiliate relationships).
I'm in favour of funding professional media by bonuses that product makers pay for the help they give to consumers, done in a way that is both fully-disclosed and buffers media from dealing with the bonus payers. Here's a summary.