If the price of my great big display is that it sadly that leaves room for greedy clowns to slip advertisement into my field of view, so be it, I have to keep getting more creative to keep the stupid stuff out. This is a request for the world at large. Someone out there. Provide commercial media without commercials and people will gladly pay the premium. I would, in a heart beat!
The problem is that advertising has usurped the role of micropayments - visit a page and the owner gets about a tenth of a cent for each ad displayed. We need a ubiquitous system of micropayments in order to cut out the advertiser middleman on the web because everything is so decentralized that the old subscription model doesn't really fit.
They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles.
To be fair, this is the Berkeley PD we're talking about, here. It's not like there's a tax-paying public there. It's mostly students and professors, and everyone who actually makes money is (primarily) paid by the University. It's more like a corporate state of Greek times.
What? Are you trying to say that because the tax burden for the police is not shared evenly then the police have less of a requirement to serve the public in general? Sounds like you are arguing for the cops being replaced with Pinkertons.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police. Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
This isn't about fairness, it is about abuse of power. None of your other examples involve the public trust. The cops get all kinds of special privileges to enable them to do their jobs, so they have a higher standard to up hold than some guy driving to the grocery store in his company car.
The reason there is little sign that this kind of abuse of power will stop is in part due to people making false equivalancies to excuse it.
"A friend of President Obama's from Harvard Law School, Genachowski has brought a culture of wheeling and dealing to the FCC, on whose decisions billions of telecom dollars ride."
When they lead with the guy is a "friend of Obama" you know they are more interested in playing politics than in a meaningful examination of the problems.
In the US there seems to be a focus on the government doing what is good for corporate greed and not what is good for society.:(
The problem is access. The corps always couch their arguments in "what is good for society" rationalizations and the people running the government don't get to hear from any other viewpoints because everybody else can't afford the lobbyists. Even with the "revolving door" between industry and government, most of the people who take that obviously corrupt path justify it as doing good for themselves while doing good for the public.
The best we can hope for is that corps with opposing economic interests will also come up with rationalizations for their own benefit. For example, Netflix finally started a PAC to lobby for network neutrality - previously they thought they could avoid playing politics and it would all just magically work out for them.
when she was attacked by the FailFandom brigade for comments ever-so-mildly critical of Islam.
But I strongly oppose this
She gave you a warning about her tribalist leanings with her rationalizations based on bad math, you chose to excuse them rather than recognize them as the tip of the iceberg. Wanting to chip people in order to more easily recognize members of what she thinks is a "good tribe" is entirely consistent with her previous position.
There's a bunch of raw imagery up from Cassini at the CICLOPS imaging lab site here.
A lot of the Cassini imagery was used for the animated, 3D IMAX movie Quantum Quest which, incidentally, stars both Captains Kirk, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. It is a kids movie, so don't expect too much.
And I don't necessarily believe the legality of something changes simply because technology can do what humans can't.
It does change when the original compromise - in this case license plates - was made in a context where such technology not only did not exist, it wasn't even conceivable at the time. Context is everything.
That argument of scale is the same argument the RIAA makes to differentiate P2P technology and 80s tape-trading.
That's tangent bait that I will take - the RIAA had just as much of a shit-fit about 80s tape trading as they have had about p2p. The context at the time was that taping was the worst possible thing for the music industry - just for starters they basically neutered DAT and they nearly got themselves a blank tape tax (they did get one in Canada). And then there is the famous quote from Jack Valenti of the MPAA - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." So, any argument that MAFIAA types may make today about how the 80s tape trading wasn't really a threat needs to be seen in context with what they actually said back in the 80s.
I thought someone might counterargue that traffic laws need to be changed. You can argue that traffic laws should be changed/liberalized but you need to make some extreme changes to the laws to be consistent. You need to argue for the more extreme position of making the traffic laws so liberal that a large majority are *never* breaking them.
It is funny that you think that is an extreme position when that is actually the way the laws are intended to work. National DOT guidelines specify that speed limits should be set according to the "85th percentile speed" which is determined as the speed at which 85 percent of drivers naturally limit themselves to on the particular road. Most, probably all, states have incorporated those national DOT guidelines into their traffic laws. The extremists are the local yokels who post unwarranted speed limits in violation of their own traffic codes.
It's a pretty public thing already, and it's government-issued so the only data being collected that they don't already have is my location, but again, any driver on the freeway can already see me.
Ignoring the storage issue, which is huge, your analogy to other drivers breaks down in that no other driver is able to view and process every single license plate on the road. It would be an unreasonable task for a human to look at the plate of every car that passes by and do anything meaningful with that information (like real-time searches of databases of plates) therefor using a camera and a computer to do it instead verges on, if not outright qualifies as, an unreasonable search.
If this is really important, they can get a warrant. Otherwise it is not important enough to justify pushing back our constitutional rights to freedom of travel and freedom from unreasonable searches.
Looking for facts on the original infractions, I googled and found this. An excerpt:
Suing Tenenbaum were Sony Corp. (6758) and its Arista Records, Warner Music Group's Warner Bros. and Atlantic labels and Vivendi SA's (VIV) Universal Music Group. They said he...
You realize you are quoting the plantif, right? Those aren't "facts" those are the words chosen by a multi-million dollar PR company to make the guy look as least sympathetic as possible. They even tried to make him look like a bad son disobeying his father, it is hard to get more manipulative than that.
Man, the fucked up thing is that the Australians aren't even the most dangerous thing on the continent. We'll probably lose a couple hundred guys just to the local wildlife.
respect is due to someone who marries his pre-fame college sweetheart when he could likely take his pick from just about any of the top millionaire supermodels.
On the other hand, millionaire supermodels come with all kinds of headaches that a normal girl doesn't. Whose to say he won't get as much strange as he wants even now - isn't that what facebook is for anyhow?
Good, he needs to sue them for BILLIONS and give them reason to never repeat this mistake again.
We need something more creative for the malfeasance of public servants because any monetary awards will just nickle-and-dime the taxpayer who won't notice it and won't have the influence to fix the problems anyway.
I propose indentured servitude. Anyone with significant involvement in pursuing this ridiculous case owes Sonne just as many hours of unpaid labor as they forced him to waste defending himself. Lets see that vindictive prosecutor made to personally mow Sonne's lawn every week for the next decade.
The vast majority of searches for Facebook you don't see as they are db calls: every single item in your news feed, every single comment on those items, who liked them, etc: that are all searches. And that's going to take a hell of a long time to collect over such a network.
Don't fool yourself by overloading the term "search,." All the stuff you are talking about is nothing more complicated than checking a queue. Faceook is not doing a global search, it is simply checking the "output queues" of known friends.
Ain't no reason a distrbuted system can't do exactly the same thing - any time a user is online, all of their friends just push the contents of their output queues to them. You'll get updates that are effectively just as rapid as facebook. For those freaks with 5000+ friends, that may be a scalability problem, at least for a smartphone. But for the average person with ~200 friends we aren't talking a terribly high load.
Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it.
Your premise is something I addressed in my original post - most people are within wifi range most of the time so data limits are only applicable to "life-line" situations. Even today, over 100 million US residents own smartphones. I don't think it is a stretch to say that once you eliminate people who don't use social networking, that 100+ million smartphone users starts to look like at least 75% of the remaining population and those numbers will only increase as time passes.
Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.
Searching on gnutella is far more common than searching on facebook. The entire point of gnutella is to find new stuff. The entire point of facebook is to communicate with people you have already found. So what if a DHT is less efficient than a centralized search? People don't search enough on facebook for it to be a significant factor. But even then, given the six degrees rule a DHT that mimics social circles would probably be just as fast as a centralized search engine for more than 99% of searches.
I'd like to know how current Facebook can be done with a fully decentralised system. The "likes", the news feed with updates from friends who may or may not be online right then, etc.
Social networking is not a hard real-time system. It is no big deal if news feed updates take a couple of hours in the case where both end-points aren't online simultaneously - after all if they aren't online it doesn't really matter if facebook is instantaneous or not either since being offline means you can't read the update regardless of centralization.
And for those rare cases where a user is only online for very limited amounts of time? Let their social circle cache their information, so that as long as any one friend is online to receive an update, anyone else can come along and pull that same information from the friend instead of directly from the source.
Anyone who thinks they are going to start a service to replace facebook without making money their #1 priority is an idiot who will fail the moment they have to open a hundred million $ data center.
That is only true if the idea is to replace facebook with a facebook clone. That will never happen.
What could happen is a distributed social network. One of the most common effects of the internet has been disintermediation. The thing is that facebook itself is ripe for disintermediation - it has set itself up as the intermediary for hundreds of millions of people. But we don't need facebook to get between us and our friends.
I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones. It won't be much longer until phones will have terabytes of storage and constant high-bandwidth connections - even with cell tower bandwidth at such a premium, most people are within the range of a friendly wifi hotspot for the majority of their day. The need for centralization is practically over with already. You can host your "wall" and your photo albums and whatever other media you want directly on your phone and you'll get 100% of what makes facebook valuable to 99% of its users without all of the pandering to Big Data's stalking addiction.
All it is going to take is a good quality phone-centric social network app and facebook will shrivel up and blow the way of myspace and geocities.
"they are being stalked by Big Data. It is the stalking part that creeps people out." As soon as I saw this I thought it must be you. Only you can post with that kind of pathetic overreaction, calling everything you don't care for "Big _____" as though anyone other than you thinks idiotic hyperbole makes a point. By the way, how much is Big Stupidity paying you to troll for them?
I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job.
He is being judged on how good he is at his job. He proved himself incompetent by making such an easily disprovable lie. The place he claimed to have a CS degree didn't even have a CS program when he claimed to have graduated. We didn't even need to get his transcripts to catch him. It is hard to imagine someone more incompetent than that.
The bothersome aspect of invasive advertisement is that it's invasive. If it's subtle and discreet......and my private information isn't being misused.....who really cares?
Uh, no. That problem is not that it is "invasive" - the "invasive" part is just what tips people off to the fact that they are being stalked by Big Data. It is the stalking part that creeps people out.
What carrier doesn't offer net neutrality at this point.
Then it should be really easy for them to agree to it, right?
As for not carrier locking phones. Phones in the USA are mostly paid for through large subsidies.
Red herring. Contracts can take care of making sure the subsidy is paid back - just like they make sure you pay even if you simply cancel and stop using the phone altogether. The point is that some carriers won't unlock phones that are paid off because it suits them to make your phone useless if you want to go to another carrier even though you've fullfilled your part of the bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
If the price of my great big display is that it sadly that leaves room for greedy clowns to slip advertisement into my field of view, so be it, I have to keep getting more creative to keep the stupid stuff out. This is a request for the world at large. Someone out there. Provide commercial media without commercials and people will gladly pay the premium. I would, in a heart beat!
The problem is that advertising has usurped the role of micropayments - visit a page and the owner gets about a tenth of a cent for each ad displayed. We need a ubiquitous system of micropayments in order to cut out the advertiser middleman on the web because everything is so decentralized that the old subscription model doesn't really fit.
They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles.
For good reason, there is no such thing as a "secure back door" - just ask the prime minister of greece - they even ordered the equipment without the backdoor featureset, and they were still vulnerable.
To be fair, this is the Berkeley PD we're talking about, here. It's not like there's a tax-paying public there. It's mostly students and professors, and everyone who actually makes money is (primarily) paid by the University. It's more like a corporate state of Greek times.
What? Are you trying to say that because the tax burden for the police is not shared evenly then the police have less of a requirement to serve the public in general? Sounds like you are arguing for the cops being replaced with Pinkertons.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police. Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
This isn't about fairness, it is about abuse of power. None of your other examples involve the public trust. The cops get all kinds of special privileges to enable them to do their jobs, so they have a higher standard to up hold than some guy driving to the grocery store in his company car.
The reason there is little sign that this kind of abuse of power will stop is in part due to people making false equivalancies to excuse it.
"A friend of President Obama's from Harvard Law School, Genachowski has brought a culture of wheeling and dealing to the FCC, on whose decisions billions of telecom dollars ride."
When they lead with the guy is a "friend of Obama" you know they are more interested in playing politics than in a meaningful examination of the problems.
In the US there seems to be a focus on the government doing what is good for corporate greed and not what is good for society. :(
The problem is access. The corps always couch their arguments in "what is good for society" rationalizations and the people running the government don't get to hear from any other viewpoints because everybody else can't afford the lobbyists. Even with the "revolving door" between industry and government, most of the people who take that obviously corrupt path justify it as doing good for themselves while doing good for the public.
The best we can hope for is that corps with opposing economic interests will also come up with rationalizations for their own benefit. For example, Netflix finally started a PAC to lobby for network neutrality - previously they thought they could avoid playing politics and it would all just magically work out for them.
when she was attacked by the FailFandom brigade for comments ever-so-mildly critical of Islam.
But I strongly oppose this
She gave you a warning about her tribalist leanings with her rationalizations based on bad math, you chose to excuse them rather than recognize them as the tip of the iceberg. Wanting to chip people in order to more easily recognize members of what she thinks is a "good tribe" is entirely consistent with her previous position.
There's a bunch of raw imagery up from Cassini at the CICLOPS imaging lab site here.
A lot of the Cassini imagery was used for the animated, 3D IMAX movie Quantum Quest which, incidentally, stars both Captains Kirk, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. It is a kids movie, so don't expect too much.
And I don't necessarily believe the legality of something changes simply because technology can do what humans can't.
It does change when the original compromise - in this case license plates - was made in a context where such technology not only did not exist, it wasn't even conceivable at the time. Context is everything.
That argument of scale is the same argument the RIAA makes to differentiate P2P technology and 80s tape-trading.
That's tangent bait that I will take - the RIAA had just as much of a shit-fit about 80s tape trading as they have had about p2p. The context at the time was that taping was the worst possible thing for the music industry - just for starters they basically neutered DAT and they nearly got themselves a blank tape tax (they did get one in Canada). And then there is the famous quote from Jack Valenti of the MPAA - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." So, any argument that MAFIAA types may make today about how the 80s tape trading wasn't really a threat needs to be seen in context with what they actually said back in the 80s.
I thought someone might counterargue that traffic laws need to be changed. You can argue that traffic laws should be changed/liberalized but you need to make some extreme changes to the laws to be consistent. You need to argue for the more extreme position of making the traffic laws so liberal that a large majority are *never* breaking them.
It is funny that you think that is an extreme position when that is actually the way the laws are intended to work. National DOT guidelines specify that speed limits should be set according to the "85th percentile speed" which is determined as the speed at which 85 percent of drivers naturally limit themselves to on the particular road. Most, probably all, states have incorporated those national DOT guidelines into their traffic laws. The extremists are the local yokels who post unwarranted speed limits in violation of their own traffic codes.
It's a pretty public thing already, and it's government-issued so the only data being collected that they don't already have is my location, but again, any driver on the freeway can already see me.
Ignoring the storage issue, which is huge, your analogy to other drivers breaks down in that no other driver is able to view and process every single license plate on the road. It would be an unreasonable task for a human to look at the plate of every car that passes by and do anything meaningful with that information (like real-time searches of databases of plates) therefor using a camera and a computer to do it instead verges on, if not outright qualifies as, an unreasonable search.
If this is really important, they can get a warrant. Otherwise it is not important enough to justify pushing back our constitutional rights to freedom of travel and freedom from unreasonable searches.
Looking for facts on the original infractions, I googled and found this. An excerpt:
Suing Tenenbaum were Sony Corp. (6758) and its Arista Records, Warner Music Group's Warner Bros. and Atlantic labels and Vivendi SA's (VIV) Universal Music Group. They said he...
You realize you are quoting the plantif, right? Those aren't "facts" those are the words chosen by a multi-million dollar PR company to make the guy look as least sympathetic as possible. They even tried to make him look like a bad son disobeying his father, it is hard to get more manipulative than that.
Man, the fucked up thing is that the Australians aren't even the most dangerous thing on the continent. We'll probably lose a couple hundred guys just to the local wildlife.
Well yeah, even the kangaroos have stinger missiles.
respect is due to someone who marries his pre-fame college sweetheart when he could likely take his pick from just about any of the top millionaire supermodels.
On the other hand, millionaire supermodels come with all kinds of headaches that a normal girl doesn't. Whose to say he won't get as much strange as he wants even now - isn't that what facebook is for anyhow?
Good, he needs to sue them for BILLIONS and give them reason to never repeat this mistake again.
We need something more creative for the malfeasance of public servants because any monetary awards will just nickle-and-dime the taxpayer who won't notice it and won't have the influence to fix the problems anyway.
I propose indentured servitude. Anyone with significant involvement in pursuing this ridiculous case owes Sonne just as many hours of unpaid labor as they forced him to waste defending himself. Lets see that vindictive prosecutor made to personally mow Sonne's lawn every week for the next decade.
Newt Gingrich and company have been scaremongering about EMP bombs for years now.
Good god, do you get your news from SNL? His point was that Corporations are made up of people. Lots of people.
So, you are saying that what Romeny really meant was that Corporations are Soylent Green?
The vast majority of searches for Facebook you don't see as they are db calls: every single item in your news feed, every single comment on those items, who liked them, etc: that are all searches. And that's going to take a hell of a long time to collect over such a network.
Don't fool yourself by overloading the term "search,." All the stuff you are talking about is nothing more complicated than checking a queue. Faceook is not doing a global search, it is simply checking the "output queues" of known friends.
Ain't no reason a distrbuted system can't do exactly the same thing - any time a user is online, all of their friends just push the contents of their output queues to them. You'll get updates that are effectively just as rapid as facebook. For those freaks with 5000+ friends, that may be a scalability problem, at least for a smartphone. But for the average person with ~200 friends we aren't talking a terribly high load.
Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it.
Your premise is something I addressed in my original post - most people are within wifi range most of the time so data limits are only applicable to "life-line" situations. Even today, over 100 million US residents own smartphones. I don't think it is a stretch to say that once you eliminate people who don't use social networking, that 100+ million smartphone users starts to look like at least 75% of the remaining population and those numbers will only increase as time passes.
Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.
Searching on gnutella is far more common than searching on facebook. The entire point of gnutella is to find new stuff. The entire point of facebook is to communicate with people you have already found. So what if a DHT is less efficient than a centralized search? People don't search enough on facebook for it to be a significant factor. But even then, given the six degrees rule a DHT that mimics social circles would probably be just as fast as a centralized search engine for more than 99% of searches.
I'd like to know how current Facebook can be done with a fully decentralised system. The "likes", the news feed with updates from friends who may or may not be online right then, etc.
Social networking is not a hard real-time system. It is no big deal if news feed updates take a couple of hours in the case where both end-points aren't online simultaneously - after all if they aren't online it doesn't really matter if facebook is instantaneous or not either since being offline means you can't read the update regardless of centralization.
And for those rare cases where a user is only online for very limited amounts of time? Let their social circle cache their information, so that as long as any one friend is online to receive an update, anyone else can come along and pull that same information from the friend instead of directly from the source.
Anyone who thinks they are going to start a service to replace facebook without making money their #1 priority is an idiot who will fail the moment they have to open a hundred million $ data center.
That is only true if the idea is to replace facebook with a facebook clone. That will never happen.
What could happen is a distributed social network. One of the most common effects of the internet has been disintermediation. The thing is that facebook itself is ripe for disintermediation - it has set itself up as the intermediary for hundreds of millions of people. But we don't need facebook to get between us and our friends.
I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones. It won't be much longer until phones will have terabytes of storage and constant high-bandwidth connections - even with cell tower bandwidth at such a premium, most people are within the range of a friendly wifi hotspot for the majority of their day. The need for centralization is practically over with already. You can host your "wall" and your photo albums and whatever other media you want directly on your phone and you'll get 100% of what makes facebook valuable to 99% of its users without all of the pandering to Big Data's stalking addiction.
All it is going to take is a good quality phone-centric social network app and facebook will shrivel up and blow the way of myspace and geocities.
"they are being stalked by Big Data. It is the stalking part that creeps people out." As soon as I saw this I thought it must be you. Only you can post with that kind of pathetic overreaction, calling everything you don't care for "Big _____" as though anyone other than you thinks idiotic hyperbole makes a point. By the way, how much is Big Stupidity paying you to troll for them?
Hey Big Man!
I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job.
He is being judged on how good he is at his job. He proved himself incompetent by making such an easily disprovable lie. The place he claimed to have a CS degree didn't even have a CS program when he claimed to have graduated. We didn't even need to get his transcripts to catch him. It is hard to imagine someone more incompetent than that.
The bothersome aspect of invasive advertisement is that it's invasive. If it's subtle and discreet......and my private information isn't being misused.....who really cares?
Uh, no. That problem is not that it is "invasive" - the "invasive" part is just what tips people off to the fact that they are being stalked by Big Data. It is the stalking part that creeps people out.
But you are thinking about the phone from a customer perspective.
Well excuse me for thinking about what's best for the people who own the spectrum.
What carrier doesn't offer net neutrality at this point.
Then it should be really easy for them to agree to it, right?
As for not carrier locking phones. Phones in the USA are mostly paid for through large subsidies.
Red herring. Contracts can take care of making sure the subsidy is paid back - just like they make sure you pay even if you simply cancel and stop using the phone altogether. The point is that some carriers won't unlock phones that are paid off because it suits them to make your phone useless if you want to go to another carrier even though you've fullfilled your part of the bargain.