I also have to say, $200,000/year might not qualify you as "rich", but it sure as shit doesn't qualify you as "poor". If you make $250k, then you have to be $2.5k in taxes. I think you can afford it.
That's not the only part of that quote I would want to question. Why is this a priority?
We have all kinds of problems in this country, so why is it a big priority for the government to help a handful of industries deal with petty civil disputes? I bet golf courses all over this country have problems with trespassing, but we don't make it a "bipartisan priority" in Congress to have law enforcement respond to trespassing complaints more quickly.
Are there people still arguing about this? I mean, at this point, who cares? Yeah, both Apple and Microsoft stole from Xerox. Actually, Apple and Microsoft and Google and lots of other companies continue to steal from each other. Patent issues aside, the important question is not who thought of the idea first, but who has the best implementation.
I actually like that OSX has become more and more colorless as time has gone on. In my opinion, the operating system itself should not draw your attention to it. Even the application should not really draw your attention to it. I want to pay attention to my data, and everything else about the UI should be fairly bland and unobtrusive.
I don't know if it's Steve Jobs driving this, but it would kind of make sense. I seem to recall some quote of his hinting that it was a bad idea to rely too heavily on color to convey important information in a UI. Maybe it wasn't Jobs who said it, but the idea was that colors could be too unclear. Like something turns pink, and you have to distinguish that from red, magenta, purple, or hot-pink. Then you have to know what the color pink indicates. And then the UI designers need to figure out how to create an alternative cue for color-blind people.
The anger and fear that corporations will take over is silly.
You're right, it's silly to fear that corporations will take over... because they already have taken over. It's perfectly reasonable to be angry and frightened about the irresponsible behavior of the corporations who already control a lot of things about our lives.
Either you don't know what's going on or you're purposefully spreading misinformation. Virgin and Boost are Sprint. Cingular is AT&T. Really there are only 4 companies to speak of: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. And it'll probably be down to 3 in the next few years.
But these 4 companies don't compete very vigorously. If anything, the cost of SMS messaging leads me to believe they're coordinating.
So long as people keep paying their bills, the market is bearing this imposition. I am all but certain that this is another example of telcoms limiting and crippling their services rather than improving their infrastructure.
I wouldn't say that it's "a classic example". Often the phrase "what the market will bear" implies a real market-- you know, with meaningful competition. This is more an issue of "what consumers will bear before they give up on having cell phones at all."
The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.
Ok, then maybe you can clue me in on the secret...? Because the first time I tried twitter, I didn't get it, but had a nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. The second time I tried, I had the same experience. I've tried a few more times, and each time I feel like I don't get it.
I get facebook, at least, in that it's relatively easy to find your real-life friends and keep in touch with them. Most of what people post is a bit inane, but I can find the phone number of an old highschool friend if I want to, even if he changed his number a week ago and I haven't talked to him in 3 years.
So I have a twitter account. What the hell am I supposed to do with it?
I'm not an expert of any kind, but my general concern with the web has been growing as static documents have become applications. It's the same reason I don't like the idea of javascript in PDFs. I like the idea of a static document that doesn't do anything, but is merely viewable. Yes, yes, I know that it's possible for malformed documents to trigger exploits in the document viewer, but that seems like it should be more rare and easy to protect against.
At you upgrade HTML to make web applications more and more powerful, it seems likely to me (from a non-expert standpoint) that you're increasing the variety of security concerns we need to worry about. There's a part of me that wishes we had two different things: a web browser that allowed for safe passive viewing of relatively static content, and an application that supported an application framework similar to current web applications.
Ok, I'm ready for people to yell at me for being stupid now.
Well I think h4rr4r at least has a point that statistics for the number of jobs, the increased tax revenue, and the increase in GDP does not actually mean that it would be economically productive for people to buy 10% more software. People always cite GDP, but money spent on fixing broken windows is also counted toward GDP.
The little coverage I've seen sticks strictly to usability ("aspects" and this very early revision of the UI).
Personally, I don't even this it's fair to be too critical of usability at this point. From the Diaspora website:
Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.
So this really is just an initial alpha release of an open source project. It's not really meant to be seen or dealt with by anyone who isn't involved in the development. It's like we're posting reviews of the first internal built of the next version of Microsoft Office and saying, "Well it's buggy and it's not ready for prime time. This throws the future of Office into doubt."
Like with all creative endeavors, you need to start somewhere. At this stage of development, you mostly just want something to start with, to capture the basic overarching ideas. By all means, be critical and make suggestions. Submit bug reports if you find a bug. It doesn't make sense, though, to say, "well this will never work because it's not release-quality right now!"
I think the point was that, if this were a closed project, no one would have acess to anything yet-- not the source, not the binary, nothing.
This was not intend to be a secure release or a complete release. This was the first release of an open source project, just to say "here, we have something, so let's get started.". If you expected to be rolling your own diaspora server right now, then you really didn't understand what was going on.
This is going off-topic, but you're right; people have oversimplified.
It's the same basic problem as taxes and spending. It's not just an issue of whether the government is taxing too much or too little, but an even bigger issue is, who are they taxing and for what behavior? Similarly, there's not a simple dollar amount that the government should spend, and if they spend that amount everything will be good. The question is, what are they spending that money on?
Really these are all complicated issues, but there are a lot of people who need it to be bring everything down to a yes-or-no answer.
Also it's worth noting that this might not be a horrible deal. I don't know the market well enough to gauge it, but if Apple is providing all of the storage, bandwidth, ad deals and ad placement, etc. then it might be that all the content owners need to bring is the content.
40% of ad revenue sounds like a lot, but does Google kick >60% of their ad revenue back to the websites that place ads? 30% of subscription fees, again, sounds like a lot, but that means you get 70% without needing to pay any of the costs associated with distribution.
I agree that it needs to work well or it won't be adopted. I just don't think people will really have that hard of a time understanding that just because *my* social networking site is down, that doesn't mean that *everyone's* social networking site is down.
It's like today, people understand that MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn are 3 different sites. Unfortunately, they're 3 different sites that are completely incapable of interacting with each other. So wouldn't it be good if you created a design and protocol that allowed different social networking sites to interact, and then created open source social networking software that implemented that protocol?
People understand that. Damnit, facebook is down. But when you split the community, people will say, "Hey, is diaspora down?" non-techie: "Dunno what's wrong, it works for me, maybe your computer is busted."
I don't know, people are capable of understanding "my email is down" without believing that all email is down. People can understand "my blog is down" without thinking all blogs are down. Why shouldn't they be able to understand, "My social networking host is down," without expecting all social networking to be down?
Because I think that's the goal here: to make social networking decentralized the way that websites and email are decentralized. Right now, we don't have to host all of our websites on the same host. We don't need to use Gmail to send messages to Gmail users. But because of bad design, you need to have a Facebook profile if you want to do social networking with Facebook users.
Secondly, cancer is growing in all of us, all the time... The reason we don't all die of tumors shortly after birth is because the immune system identifies them and eliminates them.
There are other factors that keep cancerous cells in check, too. Apparently angiogenesis plays a role in allowing cancer to grow.
It's not new. Amazon has had Kindle software for a while now, for iPhones, Blackberries, Android phones, and even desktop machines.
To me, this has been one of the things that Amazon has done right with the Kindle-- they made it so if you buy a book, you can access it almost anywhere. Of course, there's still the question of whether you want to read a book on a 3" LCD screen...
Slashdot Mirror
Study your history. The USA has been collecting taxes since it's founding.
I also have to say, $200,000/year might not qualify you as "rich", but it sure as shit doesn't qualify you as "poor". If you make $250k, then you have to be $2.5k in taxes. I think you can afford it.
You don't even need to ship them to Bora Bora. Just take away copyright and patent protection, and see how Microsoft and Amazon fare.
That's not the only part of that quote I would want to question. Why is this a priority?
We have all kinds of problems in this country, so why is it a big priority for the government to help a handful of industries deal with petty civil disputes? I bet golf courses all over this country have problems with trespassing, but we don't make it a "bipartisan priority" in Congress to have law enforcement respond to trespassing complaints more quickly.
Are there people still arguing about this? I mean, at this point, who cares? Yeah, both Apple and Microsoft stole from Xerox. Actually, Apple and Microsoft and Google and lots of other companies continue to steal from each other. Patent issues aside, the important question is not who thought of the idea first, but who has the best implementation.
I actually like that OSX has become more and more colorless as time has gone on. In my opinion, the operating system itself should not draw your attention to it. Even the application should not really draw your attention to it. I want to pay attention to my data, and everything else about the UI should be fairly bland and unobtrusive.
I don't know if it's Steve Jobs driving this, but it would kind of make sense. I seem to recall some quote of his hinting that it was a bad idea to rely too heavily on color to convey important information in a UI. Maybe it wasn't Jobs who said it, but the idea was that colors could be too unclear. Like something turns pink, and you have to distinguish that from red, magenta, purple, or hot-pink. Then you have to know what the color pink indicates. And then the UI designers need to figure out how to create an alternative cue for color-blind people.
The anger and fear that corporations will take over is silly.
You're right, it's silly to fear that corporations will take over... because they already have taken over. It's perfectly reasonable to be angry and frightened about the irresponsible behavior of the corporations who already control a lot of things about our lives.
Why did you post this again?
Either you don't know what's going on or you're purposefully spreading misinformation. Virgin and Boost are Sprint. Cingular is AT&T. Really there are only 4 companies to speak of: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. And it'll probably be down to 3 in the next few years.
But these 4 companies don't compete very vigorously. If anything, the cost of SMS messaging leads me to believe they're coordinating.
So long as people keep paying their bills, the market is bearing this imposition. I am all but certain that this is another example of telcoms limiting and crippling their services rather than improving their infrastructure.
I wouldn't say that it's "a classic example". Often the phrase "what the market will bear" implies a real market-- you know, with meaningful competition. This is more an issue of "what consumers will bear before they give up on having cell phones at all."
Are there people out there with interesting things to say?
The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.
Ok, then maybe you can clue me in on the secret...? Because the first time I tried twitter, I didn't get it, but had a nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. The second time I tried, I had the same experience. I've tried a few more times, and each time I feel like I don't get it.
I get facebook, at least, in that it's relatively easy to find your real-life friends and keep in touch with them. Most of what people post is a bit inane, but I can find the phone number of an old highschool friend if I want to, even if he changed his number a week ago and I haven't talked to him in 3 years.
So I have a twitter account. What the hell am I supposed to do with it?
I'm not an expert of any kind, but my general concern with the web has been growing as static documents have become applications. It's the same reason I don't like the idea of javascript in PDFs. I like the idea of a static document that doesn't do anything, but is merely viewable. Yes, yes, I know that it's possible for malformed documents to trigger exploits in the document viewer, but that seems like it should be more rare and easy to protect against.
At you upgrade HTML to make web applications more and more powerful, it seems likely to me (from a non-expert standpoint) that you're increasing the variety of security concerns we need to worry about. There's a part of me that wishes we had two different things: a web browser that allowed for safe passive viewing of relatively static content, and an application that supported an application framework similar to current web applications.
Ok, I'm ready for people to yell at me for being stupid now.
Your econ 101 class didn't teach you that economics is not a zero-sum game?
Well I think h4rr4r at least has a point that statistics for the number of jobs, the increased tax revenue, and the increase in GDP does not actually mean that it would be economically productive for people to buy 10% more software. People always cite GDP, but money spent on fixing broken windows is also counted toward GDP.
The little coverage I've seen sticks strictly to usability ("aspects" and this very early revision of the UI) .
Personally, I don't even this it's fair to be too critical of usability at this point. From the Diaspora website:
Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.
So this really is just an initial alpha release of an open source project. It's not really meant to be seen or dealt with by anyone who isn't involved in the development. It's like we're posting reviews of the first internal built of the next version of Microsoft Office and saying, "Well it's buggy and it's not ready for prime time. This throws the future of Office into doubt."
Like with all creative endeavors, you need to start somewhere. At this stage of development, you mostly just want something to start with, to capture the basic overarching ideas. By all means, be critical and make suggestions. Submit bug reports if you find a bug. It doesn't make sense, though, to say, "well this will never work because it's not release-quality right now!"
I think the point was that, if this were a closed project, no one would have acess to anything yet-- not the source, not the binary, nothing.
This was not intend to be a secure release or a complete release. This was the first release of an open source project, just to say "here, we have something, so let's get started.". If you expected to be rolling your own diaspora server right now, then you really didn't understand what was going on.
This is going off-topic, but you're right; people have oversimplified.
It's the same basic problem as taxes and spending. It's not just an issue of whether the government is taxing too much or too little, but an even bigger issue is, who are they taxing and for what behavior? Similarly, there's not a simple dollar amount that the government should spend, and if they spend that amount everything will be good. The question is, what are they spending that money on?
Really these are all complicated issues, but there are a lot of people who need it to be bring everything down to a yes-or-no answer.
Also it's worth noting that this might not be a horrible deal. I don't know the market well enough to gauge it, but if Apple is providing all of the storage, bandwidth, ad deals and ad placement, etc. then it might be that all the content owners need to bring is the content.
40% of ad revenue sounds like a lot, but does Google kick >60% of their ad revenue back to the websites that place ads? 30% of subscription fees, again, sounds like a lot, but that means you get 70% without needing to pay any of the costs associated with distribution.
I agree that it needs to work well or it won't be adopted. I just don't think people will really have that hard of a time understanding that just because *my* social networking site is down, that doesn't mean that *everyone's* social networking site is down.
It's like today, people understand that MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn are 3 different sites. Unfortunately, they're 3 different sites that are completely incapable of interacting with each other. So wouldn't it be good if you created a design and protocol that allowed different social networking sites to interact, and then created open source social networking software that implemented that protocol?
People understand that. Damnit, facebook is down. But when you split the community, people will say, "Hey, is diaspora down?" non-techie: "Dunno what's wrong, it works for me, maybe your computer is busted."
I don't know, people are capable of understanding "my email is down" without believing that all email is down. People can understand "my blog is down" without thinking all blogs are down. Why shouldn't they be able to understand, "My social networking host is down," without expecting all social networking to be down?
Because I think that's the goal here: to make social networking decentralized the way that websites and email are decentralized. Right now, we don't have to host all of our websites on the same host. We don't need to use Gmail to send messages to Gmail users. But because of bad design, you need to have a Facebook profile if you want to do social networking with Facebook users.
It'd be necessary. It just wouldn't be as expensive.
Secondly, cancer is growing in all of us, all the time... The reason we don't all die of tumors shortly after birth is because the immune system identifies them and eliminates them.
There are other factors that keep cancerous cells in check, too. Apparently angiogenesis plays a role in allowing cancer to grow.
...relies on exploiting bugs in the stock OS...
Yeah, that's what I mean by hacking.
It's not new. Amazon has had Kindle software for a while now, for iPhones, Blackberries, Android phones, and even desktop machines.
To me, this has been one of the things that Amazon has done right with the Kindle-- they made it so if you buy a book, you can access it almost anywhere. Of course, there's still the question of whether you want to read a book on a 3" LCD screen...