Natch', the concept of "economic majority" is extremely nebulous and in any event almost completely based on transaction volume. If you make a thousand 5 cent transactions a day, you get that many votes on wether or not you're using X network to sign off on your blocks. OTOH, if you have a million dollars in BTC but only trade once a month (or even better, you have a future contract denominated in BTC, like hosting contract or a promissory note), you get almost no vote at all.
Tinpot dictatorships hate the Internet for the same reasons global superpowers like the US or Russia hate the UN.
The Internet looks decentralized but in practice it works to extend the economic and cultural hegemony of the incumbent operators; The UN looks decentralized but in practice it's really a mechanism for small countries to enjoin and harry large, powerful ones on an equal footing.
Awesome, now go to the UN and tell Indonesia that's why you're banhammering them from the Internet unless they stop censoring YouTube.
That's the GPs point, that the Internet (read: US political appointees and telecom consortia) has the right to cut off any country it pleases if they exceed some standard of illiberalism. It has nothing to do with how a country is governed, places like Indonesia or the UAE have really popular and democratic despotisms.
I have no kind words for the ITU, but any replacement that attempts to breach national sovereignty, under the cover of "International human rights" or any idealistic conception, is apt to be counterproductive and a net negative to world peace and the rule of law.
Note that you've shifted the argument from "the Internet," to "individuals," as if The Internet and the decisions of any Internet regulatory body were somehow equivalent to, and deserved the same high standard of protection as, individual rights.
As if the present governing institutions of the Internet weren't a cartel? An intensely pro-western one at that, and where you see the Internet fighting for individual rights, more than few others see it as a club that works to expand western cultural hegemony. It's like nuclear technology -- you can tell Iran that their government is obviously warlike and unworthy of nuclear weapons, but the government comes right back and says that what the UN really wants is to make Iran prostrate before the incumbent nuclear powers. Predictably, the Iranian people, the people whose freedom we supposedly cherish and are doing all of this for the benefit of, side with their government, because even though they're evil bastards, at least they're Persian evil bastards and they don't dress up condescension with hypocritical pieties about "rights" and "self-determination of peoples."
No accommodations should be made to make things easy for censorious, oppressive governments to act in such a manner.
I don't see how this principle could stand, without forcing nation-states to submit their laws to the UN (or Vint Cerf for that matter) for approval as "sufficiently non-oppresive." Let alone your proposal for Internet trade warfare -- do you really think denying Amazon.com to the people of Shiraz is going to get them to turn against the Basij?
Hey, stop arresting and deporting people who bypass legal channels to enter your country!
The whole point is that undocumented migrants don't see it that way, to them, la migra is the oppressor trying to force them to eat lizards at the Nike factory in Matamoros, when they could be earning a small fortune mowing lawns in San Antonio, working for people who are falling over themselves to pay them. The idea that a state has the right to use force to prevent this or that case of economic migration is, SURPRISE!, very contentious and a source of genuine dispute between nations and peoples.
Guess what: the US has "legal channels" for keeping out the wetbacks, Japan has "legal channels" for torturing dolphins, Germany has "legal channels" for suppressing political parties, just as Egypt has "legal channels," for the very same thing. Who are international diplomats, university academics, let alone foreigners, to pass judgement on any state?
This is more than a little like Niemoller principle -- it's easy to attack repressive regimes, but if you come for the freedom of North Korea to make its laws, where does it stop? Does the US get an out, because everything it does is obviously virtuous? And how do all the other nation-states feel about that rather clubby arrangement?
I believe Ericsson was a quite popular brand of phone in the dumbphone era, but their reputation has since died off.
This is a company that made something like $26 billion in revenue last year. They're still a first-tier vendor for back-end equipment.
Maybe we should make some law that says a person's patents don't count, provided they stop making products that attract the attention of shallow cellphone trend blogs.
Shorter Vint Cerf: Some proposals would actually allow sovereign governments to enforce their sovereignty, as bad as that may be.
Nobody would support the UN forcing the US government to do anything; it's funny when we're shocked that Russia or China would insist on being able to regulate cables and boxen that operate on their own frigging soil.
Of course governments can censor speech and cut off Internet access, that's their prerogative. Or are we working from the idea that the Internet is actually greater and more important than any government, and that the laws of a state (democratic or not) are not binding upon it? How do you think an American government would react if it was told by the UN, or Mexico, that it was forbidden from arresting undocumented migrants, because such action would infringe upon an individual's absolute freedom of movement, as protected by some UN declaration of human rights?
Freedom is a good thing, freedom of speech is a good thing, in the US we are blessed to have a national polity that respects it. The Internet can allow it to flourish in other places too. However, any goodwill for your cause is likely going to be depleted twice over if people in Iran and Burma come to believe that, as shitty as their government may be, actual decisions that govern their virtual life take place in Marina del Rey, and it wouldn't matter who was running their country. They'd call it imperialism, and they'd be right.
It's always easy to list one or two films that sucked, but they make hundreds every year. Nerds don't like most movies but on average the ones they do make tend to do alright. Even the abortion that is Green Lantern made its nut -- remember, foreigners love even pretty bad action movies; entertainment is one of the few sectors of the economy where the US runs a huge trade surplus.
What apparently could save the indie/ultra low budget movie industry is that today's ~$3k DSLR's in many ways surpass ~$50k 32mm film cameras from a couple of years back,
No they don't, though they're ok. As always, though, the most expensive part of filmmaking is compensating talent and doing the VFX; even with film the actual physical costs haven't been an issue in some time.
Netflix pays an amount-per-view, either against an up-front access fee or not -- it's a small amount, but it's something. their model to charge subscribers a flat fee and simply have such a huge number of titles available that people are willing to pay a premium over what they actually consume, just to have the full-time access to the titles.
Netflix lost the Starz content because Starz wanted an amount per subscriber-month, like a premium cable channel, and Netflix (probably rightly) deduced that having a premium tier would ruin their business model, because all of the sudden subscribers would have to jump through hoops (let alone pay more) to access particular movies. Starz demanded the premium tier because they (also probably rightly) deduced that they were losing cable sub revenue to Netflix. This is why HBO and Showtime are strict about not releasing any of their stuff to the Internet unless you're already a cable subscriber or a lengthy blackout period has elapsed.
I've always seen the Long Tail with videogames to be a bit touchy, since game platforms seem to go through periodic upgrades and it becomes more and more difficult to get your hands on $ARBITRARY_GAME, let alone structure a business model to collect revenue from them. The HUGE hits are sometimes kept in bundles and updated to new platforms, but they disappear.
Movies are quite different in this regard, because they can be replicated to new platforms mechanically -- you don't have to hire developers to keep them available on the new format.
A 3% return on 20 million units is preferable to a 100% return on 20,000:)
I work in the film industry and the story is about the same; this is why we seem to keep making marginally-good $200 million films, instead of twenty $10 million films, 16 of which bomb because they don't find their audience. If you want to do something really edgy an original, you can do it, just don't go to Paramount (or EA in this case) and expect them to front you the money, and you're much more likely getting your money back if you premiere on Netflix.
I'm not sure this is an Earth-shattering tragedy, it has a lot to do with the way large corporations make decisions, and organize themselves around their distribution chains.
I am in the UK, and I don't imagine very many secondary school kids believing anything "on authority".
How exactly do you know all of the steps of the Krebs cycle? Or more germane to the issue before us, how do you know the half-life of Carbon-14? These simply cannot be demo'd in a comprehensive school science class, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Working scientists never actually repeat every experiment they read about, they accept the reported conclusions because they rely on the integrity of the peer review system, which is built on trust and authority. A scientist who presumes he's surrounded by liars would make an interesting doctoral dissertation for a philosophy PhD, but he isn't going to accomplish much.
There's a difference between "valid", "logical" and "persuasive." Essentially the post is just personal preference dressed up as logic, by taking what are lifestyle choices and casting them as non-negotiable requirements.
I think within 20-30 years, social security will be just about tapped out and unable to pay more than a small percentage of people that paid in.
Note that according to the latest Trustee's report the trust fund will pay full retirement benefits until 2033, and thereafter will still be paying 75% of scheduled benefits through 2086 -- not a "small percentage". It's been proposed that the deficit could be completely wiped-out by means-testing OASDI payouts...
You don't believe in evolution - you accept it, just as you accept the map of the Solar system and the periodic table. There's no place for believing.
Don't drag epistemology into it:) How people know things, wether it's by faith or evidence, isn't relevant to the debate -- most kids in 4th grade are going to take most of what they hear in science class on authority, which isn't much better than faith.
The debate over teaching evolution is where that authority comes from -- will it come from objective knowledge, or from churchmen? And is teaching the Origins of Man going to be about the search for truth and knowledge, or is it going to be a lesson about morality? That's the dispute.
Its more about cool factor and being seen with the device, even in the business world.
What gave you the impression this was a new development? Do your executive's vehicles come from BMW or Kia?
A big part of business is appearances, and that's not cynical, that's the facts. The idea that "business" is about utilitarian efficiency and grinding commoditization is wrongheaded and moralistic in all the wrong ways.
We can't celebrate the free market and then concern-troll it with accusations of superficiality or "cool factor" the moment people start buying things we don't like. You gotta have a little faith that people know what they actually want, and aren't just brainwashed robots. (If they are then there's really no point to any of this.)
You make it too complicated. The international boycotts against South Africa were justified because they were effective. An embargo against Saudi Arabia would be ineffective, even if it were possible.
In short, South Africa was a small country that could be pushed around; Saudi Arabia makes too much oil for that to be possible. Any such demonstrations would be pointless and would cause more harm than the original insult.
Slashdot Mirror
Natch', the concept of "economic majority" is extremely nebulous and in any event almost completely based on transaction volume. If you make a thousand 5 cent transactions a day, you get that many votes on wether or not you're using X network to sign off on your blocks. OTOH, if you have a million dollars in BTC but only trade once a month (or even better, you have a future contract denominated in BTC, like hosting contract or a promissory note), you get almost no vote at all.
How?
Tinpot dictatorships hate the Internet for the same reasons global superpowers like the US or Russia hate the UN.
The Internet looks decentralized but in practice it works to extend the economic and cultural hegemony of the incumbent operators; The UN looks decentralized but in practice it's really a mechanism for small countries to enjoin and harry large, powerful ones on an equal footing.
But did he succeed in raising the bar?
Awesome, now go to the UN and tell Indonesia that's why you're banhammering them from the Internet unless they stop censoring YouTube.
That's the GPs point, that the Internet (read: US political appointees and telecom consortia) has the right to cut off any country it pleases if they exceed some standard of illiberalism. It has nothing to do with how a country is governed, places like Indonesia or the UAE have really popular and democratic despotisms.
I have no kind words for the ITU, but any replacement that attempts to breach national sovereignty, under the cover of "International human rights" or any idealistic conception, is apt to be counterproductive and a net negative to world peace and the rule of law.
Note that you've shifted the argument from "the Internet," to "individuals," as if The Internet and the decisions of any Internet regulatory body were somehow equivalent to, and deserved the same high standard of protection as, individual rights.
As if the present governing institutions of the Internet weren't a cartel? An intensely pro-western one at that, and where you see the Internet fighting for individual rights, more than few others see it as a club that works to expand western cultural hegemony. It's like nuclear technology -- you can tell Iran that their government is obviously warlike and unworthy of nuclear weapons, but the government comes right back and says that what the UN really wants is to make Iran prostrate before the incumbent nuclear powers. Predictably, the Iranian people, the people whose freedom we supposedly cherish and are doing all of this for the benefit of, side with their government, because even though they're evil bastards, at least they're Persian evil bastards and they don't dress up condescension with hypocritical pieties about "rights" and "self-determination of peoples."
I don't see how this principle could stand, without forcing nation-states to submit their laws to the UN (or Vint Cerf for that matter) for approval as "sufficiently non-oppresive." Let alone your proposal for Internet trade warfare -- do you really think denying Amazon.com to the people of Shiraz is going to get them to turn against the Basij?
The whole point is that undocumented migrants don't see it that way, to them, la migra is the oppressor trying to force them to eat lizards at the Nike factory in Matamoros, when they could be earning a small fortune mowing lawns in San Antonio, working for people who are falling over themselves to pay them. The idea that a state has the right to use force to prevent this or that case of economic migration is, SURPRISE!, very contentious and a source of genuine dispute between nations and peoples.
Guess what: the US has "legal channels" for keeping out the wetbacks, Japan has "legal channels" for torturing dolphins, Germany has "legal channels" for suppressing political parties, just as Egypt has "legal channels," for the very same thing. Who are international diplomats, university academics, let alone foreigners, to pass judgement on any state?
This is more than a little like Niemoller principle -- it's easy to attack repressive regimes, but if you come for the freedom of North Korea to make its laws, where does it stop? Does the US get an out, because everything it does is obviously virtuous? And how do all the other nation-states feel about that rather clubby arrangement?
This is a company that made something like $26 billion in revenue last year. They're still a first-tier vendor for back-end equipment.
Maybe we should make some law that says a person's patents don't count, provided they stop making products that attract the attention of shallow cellphone trend blogs.
Shorter Vint Cerf: Some proposals would actually allow sovereign governments to enforce their sovereignty, as bad as that may be.
Nobody would support the UN forcing the US government to do anything; it's funny when we're shocked that Russia or China would insist on being able to regulate cables and boxen that operate on their own frigging soil.
Of course governments can censor speech and cut off Internet access, that's their prerogative. Or are we working from the idea that the Internet is actually greater and more important than any government, and that the laws of a state (democratic or not) are not binding upon it? How do you think an American government would react if it was told by the UN, or Mexico, that it was forbidden from arresting undocumented migrants, because such action would infringe upon an individual's absolute freedom of movement, as protected by some UN declaration of human rights?
Freedom is a good thing, freedom of speech is a good thing, in the US we are blessed to have a national polity that respects it. The Internet can allow it to flourish in other places too. However, any goodwill for your cause is likely going to be depleted twice over if people in Iran and Burma come to believe that, as shitty as their government may be, actual decisions that govern their virtual life take place in Marina del Rey, and it wouldn't matter who was running their country. They'd call it imperialism, and they'd be right.
It's always easy to list one or two films that sucked, but they make hundreds every year. Nerds don't like most movies but on average the ones they do make tend to do alright. Even the abortion that is Green Lantern made its nut -- remember, foreigners love even pretty bad action movies; entertainment is one of the few sectors of the economy where the US runs a huge trade surplus.
No they don't, though they're ok. As always, though, the most expensive part of filmmaking is compensating talent and doing the VFX; even with film the actual physical costs haven't been an issue in some time.
Netflix pays an amount-per-view, either against an up-front access fee or not -- it's a small amount, but it's something. their model to charge subscribers a flat fee and simply have such a huge number of titles available that people are willing to pay a premium over what they actually consume, just to have the full-time access to the titles.
Netflix lost the Starz content because Starz wanted an amount per subscriber-month, like a premium cable channel, and Netflix (probably rightly) deduced that having a premium tier would ruin their business model, because all of the sudden subscribers would have to jump through hoops (let alone pay more) to access particular movies. Starz demanded the premium tier because they (also probably rightly) deduced that they were losing cable sub revenue to Netflix. This is why HBO and Showtime are strict about not releasing any of their stuff to the Internet unless you're already a cable subscriber or a lengthy blackout period has elapsed.
I've always seen the Long Tail with videogames to be a bit touchy, since game platforms seem to go through periodic upgrades and it becomes more and more difficult to get your hands on $ARBITRARY_GAME, let alone structure a business model to collect revenue from them. The HUGE hits are sometimes kept in bundles and updated to new platforms, but they disappear.
Movies are quite different in this regard, because they can be replicated to new platforms mechanically -- you don't have to hire developers to keep them available on the new format.
A 3% return on 20 million units is preferable to a 100% return on 20,000 :)
I work in the film industry and the story is about the same; this is why we seem to keep making marginally-good $200 million films, instead of twenty $10 million films, 16 of which bomb because they don't find their audience. If you want to do something really edgy an original, you can do it, just don't go to Paramount (or EA in this case) and expect them to front you the money, and you're much more likely getting your money back if you premiere on Netflix.
I'm not sure this is an Earth-shattering tragedy, it has a lot to do with the way large corporations make decisions, and organize themselves around their distribution chains.
How exactly do you know all of the steps of the Krebs cycle? Or more germane to the issue before us, how do you know the half-life of Carbon-14? These simply cannot be demo'd in a comprehensive school science class, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Working scientists never actually repeat every experiment they read about, they accept the reported conclusions because they rely on the integrity of the peer review system, which is built on trust and authority. A scientist who presumes he's surrounded by liars would make an interesting doctoral dissertation for a philosophy PhD, but he isn't going to accomplish much.
There's a difference between "valid", "logical" and "persuasive." Essentially the post is just personal preference dressed up as logic, by taking what are lifestyle choices and casting them as non-negotiable requirements.
Note that according to the latest Trustee's report the trust fund will pay full retirement benefits until 2033, and thereafter will still be paying 75% of scheduled benefits through 2086 -- not a "small percentage". It's been proposed that the deficit could be completely wiped-out by means-testing OASDI payouts...
Der gonna take er jerbs!!!!
Don't drag epistemology into it :) How people know things, wether it's by faith or evidence, isn't relevant to the debate -- most kids in 4th grade are going to take most of what they hear in science class on authority, which isn't much better than faith.
The debate over teaching evolution is where that authority comes from -- will it come from objective knowledge, or from churchmen? And is teaching the Origins of Man going to be about the search for truth and knowledge, or is it going to be a lesson about morality? That's the dispute.
That's the answer you give in the interview, not "what is that?"
I'm a big Postgres fan and no Softie, but you sir preach ignorance as strength.
What gave you the impression this was a new development? Do your executive's vehicles come from BMW or Kia?
A big part of business is appearances, and that's not cynical, that's the facts. The idea that "business" is about utilitarian efficiency and grinding commoditization is wrongheaded and moralistic in all the wrong ways.
We can't celebrate the free market and then concern-troll it with accusations of superficiality or "cool factor" the moment people start buying things we don't like. You gotta have a little faith that people know what they actually want, and aren't just brainwashed robots. (If they are then there's really no point to any of this.)
"This, being the best of all possible worlds, God saw it fit to invent the Rope."
(Sound of gallows trap door opening.)
You make it too complicated. The international boycotts against South Africa were justified because they were effective. An embargo against Saudi Arabia would be ineffective, even if it were possible.
In short, South Africa was a small country that could be pushed around; Saudi Arabia makes too much oil for that to be possible. Any such demonstrations would be pointless and would cause more harm than the original insult.