> "This is precisely what happens when you turn yourself into an "evil" company like Sony did and Apple are a long way through the process of doing".
This will happen regardless of whether you are an "evil" company or not. The biggest factor seems to be how big your userbase is.
Glad we're referencing reliable sources like the "World Socialist Web Site". I've seen some truly ridiculous news articles on there. I especially like how they always rush to defend North Korea's actions and paint everyone else as nasty aggressors. (Seriously, do those guys at wsws think that any communist country is ever guilty of anything? Or do they think communist = "good guys no matter what". Because I've never seen them criticize a communist regime for anything.)
It's also worth mentioning that 80,000 inmates is 3.5% of the total prison population, which is not that common. It's also not terribly profitable, considering how much money it costs to hold someone in prison versus the amount of money they generate from their labor.
"Prisoners who refuse to work under these conditions are labeled “uncooperative” and risk losing time off for “good behavior,” as well as privileges such as library access and recreation."
Yeah, I'd really believe the wsws's word when they make that claim. Like I said, only 1 in 30 prisoners are involved in prison labor, yet the wsws talks, they make it sound like everyone is forced to work. It's not clear that "80,000" doing prison labor means working full-time. For all we know, they work a few hours a week.
There's also a difference between slave labor (where prisoners are forced to work, especially when it's 12 hours/day) versus work programs that are voluntary and allow prisoners to earn money which they will have when they are released from prison.
I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.
Just an FYI: the average house in the US uses about 930 kwh of energy per month. So, 93 kwh works out to about 3x the national average. Energy use in the US is highest in the US' South (because AC uses a lot of electricity), and we're talking about Canada here, so 93 kwh/day is probably more than 3x than average consumption for Canada.
It's too bad that Clinton didn't manage to kill Bin Laden back in the late 90s when he launched a cruise missile strike on Afghanistan. Reportedly, Bin Laden narrowly missed being at that location when the cruise missiles came in. (And, I still remember how all the foreign press went apeshit about how Clinton did the strike to distract everyone from the Lewinski affair. I thought the foreign press was a bunch of short-sighted parasites then, and I still think so today.)
"bin Laden cost the US at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years... every dollar spent by al-Qaida in attacking the US has cost Washington $1m in economic fallout and military spending."
Really? Because that works out to al-Queda spending only 3 million dollars over the past fifteen years. I think that's a bullshit number. There's no way al-Queda spent only 3 million dollars for everything, including hiding Bin Laden for the past ten years.
> "The BBC has argued that people like this kind reporting, which is basically saying that people are too dumb to understand and have to be told what to think."
I think what you wrote after "which is basically saying..." is a biased conclusion. (Which is kind of funny considering your assertion about being able to report simply the known facts.)
I would say that it's difficult to report without any bias. Not only can people slant a story in a certain direction, and that slant can be based on desires to see a particular outcome (because of a profit-motive or some other influence, like the desire to see gay marriage legalized or made illegal), past cultural beliefs, etc. But, stories can even be biased in the facts that they choose to reveal or not reveal (I've seen news outlets selectively report the facts based on which way it slants readers conclusions). Selecting which stories to report can be a bias (showing a bunch of stories about Black-Americans committing crimes versus Black-Americans bettering their lives through education and hard work can be a bias and can influence the public in different directions). Choosing which stories they make the top story can be a form of bias. Stories which reinforce the conservative or liberal "narrative" can be a form of bias (for example, stories about laws being apparently biased against Whites and Christians are huge bait for conservative news outlets, but those same outlets won't report on laws biased against minorities or minor-religions, thus reinforcing viewers' beliefs in the conservative narrative that White Christians are under siege and treated unfairly in America).
> "There's a reason this place is called Kosdot by long time readers."
Strange. I've never heard the word. A google search for the term doesn't turn-up anything related to Slashdot, either (at least not in the first thirty results, except for a daily kos reference to the "kosdot effect" - i.e. causing a website to go down due to excess traffic, like slashdot does). Are you the only person referring to it as "Kosdot"?
Copyright establishes a market for digital goods (which would otherwise be all-free, and therefore a waste of time to create), hence copyright is capitalist.
(Sigh) As much as I hate defending the MPAA because they do want to extend copyright as far as they can, it doesn't mean they're guilty of everything.
The MPAA wants to control the entertainment sphere of the world.
No, they're fighting to control the content they created. No need to exaggerate.
They don't want competition from newer more modern companies, so they use the law to guarantee no competition can exist.
No company wants competition to exist, but what's going on here has nothing to do with driving out competition. Anyone can create a movie production company.
They don't want the "customer" to have control, they want it so they can maximize profits for themselves.
Yes, companies want to maximize profits (what company doesn't?), and, yes, there are many cases where we don't want them / shouldn't let them maximize profits in certain ways (for example, we broke up the movie company / movie theater monopoly because it worked to block any competition). Personally, I always thought the movie rental business was always really weird. Apparently, they can buy one copy of a movie and rent it as many times as they want. With this new "rental" business, I can see why movie companies would (legitimately) have a problem with this business model - it's a super efficient way of renting movies that would allow movie-rental companies to rent a single movie a dozen times a day. But, then, I can see why movie companies have a problem with the traditional movie-rental business, so I don't know.
Anyway, my main point is that the MPAA might hate competition, but they have zero control over what other people or companies create. They're only fighting to have control over the stuff they themselves created. No need to exaggerate, as if the MPAA owns all movies created everywhere by anyone.
> "All of this is likely moot as the kid does not own the rights to the compounds. TFA doesn't specify whether they are novel but my guess would be he worked with a library of existing compounds that showed some activity against cystic fibrosis in preliminary screenings."
My understanding is that the kid used two preexisting drugs for cystic fibrosis and used them together. Essentially, the same thing people are doing with AIDS drugs cocktails.
To be fair, it's not clear from the picture that the dish was functional. Who knows what kind of condition the system was in. The house was likely inhabited before Bin Laden was there, and maybe they had used it previously.
Also, the angle of the dish is very low. Satellite dishes point at satellites in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they are organized in a band around the equator. Since Pakistan isn't that far from the equator, it would look at satellites that were more or less overhead. (Yeah, some satellites might appear slightly over the horizon to the east and west.) I just think the fact that the dish is pointed at something like 10 degrees above the horizon might suggest that it's not actually functional.
> "Instaling keyloggers on EVERY machine?"
Oh, please. That wouldn't be hard, especially if you could write a virus that would propagate the keylogger to every machine in the local network.
> "That would have to imply you're logging EVERYONE's passwords *before* emails are sent, because you can't know that an Osama email has just been sent until it's been sent. I definitely don't think the CIA has that kind of power/reach in Pakistan, and that would be a major breech of basic human rights."
Yeah, like the CIA is going to be concerned about putting keyloggers on machines to catch Bin Laden because they'd be afraid of breaching basic human rights. Are you familiar with Carnivore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) ?
> "How long does it take to hit a send button, pop the thumb drive out of the PC and hit the road?"
Quite a while considering that Bin Laden was likely responding to multiple emails at the same time.
> "I seriously doubt these guys ever really visited the same Internet cafe twice"
I'm pretty sure there were only a limited number of internet cafes within five miles. Considering that Bin Laden was doing this for years, I doubt his courier was making long trips to distant internet cafes to avoid revisiting the same one.
> "assuming Osama had several trusted couriers, you could send different people to the same cafe on different occasions, just don't send the same guy to the same place twice."
And that requires giving out Bin Laden's password information to more people and trusting more people, which makes the option less attractive.
> "How many Internet Cafes are there in Pakistan? I'd guess many - thousands, perhaps?"
That's the wrong question. Obviously, his courier wasn't traveling 1000+ miles to reach every internet cafe in Pakistan. (Bin Laden was a thousand miles from Karachi so why are we including every internet cafe in Pakistan as potential dropoff points?) I'd bet money that the internet cafe used by his courier was rarely more than 20 miles from Bin Laden for 90% of the emails sent. Yeah, if you want to maintain secrecy for a few emails, you might travel a long distance, but it gets to be a pain of you're doing this for years. I'd bet laziness would eventually take over and you'd stay within a fairly confined area for sending emails.
> "thwarted the US government's best eavesdroppers despite having no Internet access in his hideout."
So, here's my question: by having an intermediary go to the internet cafe, Bin Laden could avoid being seen. However, how does this avoid eavesdropping? It seems to me that if they ever find one of Bin Laden's emails (by sniffing packets or by capturing one of his email targets and tracing back his email to the original IP address), then you could get back to the original internet cafe. Depending on the number of internet cafes in the area, you could start monitoring traffic and figure out which guy was sending them. Then, you could follow the guy to see where he went, which would lead you to Bin Laden. Also, if you infect the computers in the local internet cafes with a keylogger, you could get into Bin Laden's email accounts. By using the intermediary, Bin Laden only added a step or two to the whole procedure and avoided being seen in an internet cafe himself. It wasn't some sort of foolproof method for sending emails.
Let's see: Apple takes 30% of the revenue from e-books sold on the iPad. Some clever developer discovers they can write an app that they give away for free, then they sell e-books for the iPad and Apple earns 0% of the revenue from every e-book sold through this loophole. Developer gets mad because Apple closes the loophole. Seriously, did they really believe that Apple would leave this loophole open? Does the developer think that they can write an "App Store" app for the iPad, give it away for free, sell apps through their App-Store and cut Apple out of the picture as far as any revenue goes?
I'd also point out the inaccuracy of the headline "Developer Blames Apple for Ruining eBook Business", since it should read "Developer Blames Apple for Ruining their eBook business which is built on the iPad".
The article also states "the trouble started when Apple began taking 30% of the sale price of books sold through its app. As publishing pricing models meant BeamItDown already made less than a 30% cut, its margins went from minimal to negative." I guess that means the developer is going to have to take a smaller percentage (maybe 10%) and pay Apple their 30%, which puts them at higher cost than Apple. This means they'll have to make such a kick-ass app that they can compete with Apple's direct eBook sales, even though the author gets a smaller cut of the sales price.
I think I'd be a lot happier if conservative news and conservative viewers would actually admit that they have a right-wing bias. Instead, they constantly like to pretend that they've got The Unvarnished Truth, and everybody else has left-wing-bias blinders on. If some right-winger wants to complain that Keith Olbermann or John Stewart are biased towards the left, I don't have a problem with that. I understand that. But, if I complain that they aren't getting the full story from their biased news sources, they get all pissy, like FOX News, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh's musings were handed down from on high and I'm a dirty infidel for undermining The Truth.
> "90% or more of the news links take you AWAY from Drudge to sites with an array of political leanings, both right and left."
Heh, heh. Drudge isn't really linking to left-leaning articles. I used to visit Drudge for a while. Pretty soon, I'd play a game called "name the political party". Whenever they had a headline about a politician where I didn't recognize who they were or which political party they were with, I'd play a game called "name the political party". I was actually pretty good at it. If the headline was downplaying a politician's wrongdoing, then you could pretty much guess he was Republican. If it was a blistering headline attacking the politician, it was either a Democrat or a Republican that they were turning their back on because he had dome something they couldn't condone. The very fact that I could guess the political party based on how harshly they attacked them in the headline should be pretty good evidence of a right-wing bias.
I also thought it was interesting in the last election that they refused to give the electoral vote count between Obama and McCain, choosing, instead to show the popular vote. Of course, the electoral vote tends to magnify the gap between the winner and loser, and they wanted to minimize how badly McCain lost. I'd bet money that they showed the electoral count and minimized the popular vote count during the Bush-Gore election, since Gore won the popular vote.
Do you really think Drudge would get an approving nod from Rush Limbaugh if he wasn't a right winger? "Matt Drudge is the man who is to the Internet, what I am to broadcasting." -- Rush Limbaugh
I think Drudge's favorite newsource is Andrew Breitbart, who is most definitely conservative.
I think Craigslist does that to reduce bandwidth costs. They're a tiny company (about 30 employees) with 20 billion pageviews/month. For a long time, they had no way to generate revenue at all - until they started charging for job postings.
Around the time of the French Revolution, the French came up with some metric ways of measuring time. They created a calendar of 30 days each month (with five extra days each year), and the time of day was split into divisions of ten ("ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
Shall we standardize our electrical plug shapes, too? At least the US and most of North America has a standard shape. There are currently 13 different plugs because everyone wanted to develop their own.
> Ok, if you think using Groupon is unprofitable, don't use it!
That's kind of the point. Companies are still figuring out if it's worth it or not. That's what the post is about. I've also heard that a lot of restaurants hope to make money because groupon customers will bring a friend or buy more than the coupon is worth. I've heard (through the planet money podcast) that customers just haven't been buying much over the coupon value, which makes it harder for restaurants. Again, it's an exploratory thing - businesses don't know how profitable the groupon will be in terms of people buying things above the cost of the coupon or whether they'll be repeat customers.
To be fair, you could also go the other direction. For example, you say, "1. They surveyed 360 businesses but only 150 responded. Obviously the unsatisfied ones would be biased towards responding. This could cut the "real" would -not-repeat-rate by as much as half." Who says the unsatisfied ones would be biased towards reporting? Maybe the unsatisfied ones are apathetic towards responding, and the satisfied ones are energized to respond. You say that the "This could cut the "real" would -not-repeat-rate by as much as half", but maybe the real would-not-repeat rate is much higher than that.
3. Finally, who cares about "would you run another Groupon"? The right question is "If you had it to do over again, would you run your first Groupon?". Since the objective is advertising to the Groupon base, once is enough. Even a merchant who profited on a first Groupon might not want to run another.
Actually, it matters a lot because it means you aren't getting repeat business. Sure, there are new businesses opening every month, and those businesses might want to take advantage of groupon, but, right now, groupon might be getting all the new businesses who started within the last year. In another year from now, they might only get all the businesses that opened within that month. That's a steep decline in the number of businesses wanting to do groupon. Also, with fewer businesses using groupon a year from now, there's less talk about groupon, which means businesses might miss-out on using them. And, if businesses are unhappy with using groupon the first time, there might be negative talk about groupon, causing businesses to pass-up the deal because there's a decent chance for having a bad experience.
By the way, do you work for groupon or one of the other online-coupon services? I hear that there's already big conventions for these internet-coupon marketers. It all suggests to me that were nearing the top of the bubble for online-coupon companies.
> "I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said..."
I'm a left-leaning slashdotter. Could you explain why I'd find what you said offensive, or are you operating under the mistake assumption that "left leaning" = "people who believe business is evil, by definition".
Slashdot Mirror
> "This is precisely what happens when you turn yourself into an "evil" company like Sony did and Apple are a long way through the process of doing".
This will happen regardless of whether you are an "evil" company or not. The biggest factor seems to be how big your userbase is.
Glad we're referencing reliable sources like the "World Socialist Web Site". I've seen some truly ridiculous news articles on there. I especially like how they always rush to defend North Korea's actions and paint everyone else as nasty aggressors. (Seriously, do those guys at wsws think that any communist country is ever guilty of anything? Or do they think communist = "good guys no matter what". Because I've never seen them criticize a communist regime for anything.)
It's also worth mentioning that 80,000 inmates is 3.5% of the total prison population, which is not that common. It's also not terribly profitable, considering how much money it costs to hold someone in prison versus the amount of money they generate from their labor.
"Prisoners who refuse to work under these conditions are labeled “uncooperative” and risk losing time off for “good behavior,” as well as privileges such as library access and recreation."
Yeah, I'd really believe the wsws's word when they make that claim. Like I said, only 1 in 30 prisoners are involved in prison labor, yet the wsws talks, they make it sound like everyone is forced to work. It's not clear that "80,000" doing prison labor means working full-time. For all we know, they work a few hours a week.
There's also a difference between slave labor (where prisoners are forced to work, especially when it's 12 hours/day) versus work programs that are voluntary and allow prisoners to earn money which they will have when they are released from prison.
I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.
Just an FYI: the average house in the US uses about 930 kwh of energy per month. So, 93 kwh works out to about 3x the national average. Energy use in the US is highest in the US' South (because AC uses a lot of electricity), and we're talking about Canada here, so 93 kwh/day is probably more than 3x than average consumption for Canada.
> "Falkvinge from pirate bay party"
You realize you're not helping your argument with that, don't you?
It's too bad that Clinton didn't manage to kill Bin Laden back in the late 90s when he launched a cruise missile strike on Afghanistan. Reportedly, Bin Laden narrowly missed being at that location when the cruise missiles came in. (And, I still remember how all the foreign press went apeshit about how Clinton did the strike to distract everyone from the Lewinski affair. I thought the foreign press was a bunch of short-sighted parasites then, and I still think so today.)
... every dollar spent by al-Qaida in attacking the US has cost Washington $1m in economic fallout and military spending."
"bin Laden cost the US at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years
Really? Because that works out to al-Queda spending only 3 million dollars over the past fifteen years. I think that's a bullshit number. There's no way al-Queda spent only 3 million dollars for everything, including hiding Bin Laden for the past ten years.
> "The BBC has argued that people like this kind reporting, which is basically saying that people are too dumb to understand and have to be told what to think."
I think what you wrote after "which is basically saying..." is a biased conclusion. (Which is kind of funny considering your assertion about being able to report simply the known facts.)
I would say that it's difficult to report without any bias. Not only can people slant a story in a certain direction, and that slant can be based on desires to see a particular outcome (because of a profit-motive or some other influence, like the desire to see gay marriage legalized or made illegal), past cultural beliefs, etc. But, stories can even be biased in the facts that they choose to reveal or not reveal (I've seen news outlets selectively report the facts based on which way it slants readers conclusions). Selecting which stories to report can be a bias (showing a bunch of stories about Black-Americans committing crimes versus Black-Americans bettering their lives through education and hard work can be a bias and can influence the public in different directions). Choosing which stories they make the top story can be a form of bias. Stories which reinforce the conservative or liberal "narrative" can be a form of bias (for example, stories about laws being apparently biased against Whites and Christians are huge bait for conservative news outlets, but those same outlets won't report on laws biased against minorities or minor-religions, thus reinforcing viewers' beliefs in the conservative narrative that White Christians are under siege and treated unfairly in America).
> "There's a reason this place is called Kosdot by long time readers."
Strange. I've never heard the word. A google search for the term doesn't turn-up anything related to Slashdot, either (at least not in the first thirty results, except for a daily kos reference to the "kosdot effect" - i.e. causing a website to go down due to excess traffic, like slashdot does). Are you the only person referring to it as "Kosdot"?
Copyright establishes a market for digital goods (which would otherwise be all-free, and therefore a waste of time to create), hence copyright is capitalist.
(Sigh) As much as I hate defending the MPAA because they do want to extend copyright as far as they can, it doesn't mean they're guilty of everything.
The MPAA wants to control the entertainment sphere of the world.
No, they're fighting to control the content they created. No need to exaggerate.
They don't want competition from newer more modern companies, so they use the law to guarantee no competition can exist.
No company wants competition to exist, but what's going on here has nothing to do with driving out competition. Anyone can create a movie production company.
They don't want the "customer" to have control, they want it so they can maximize profits for themselves.
Yes, companies want to maximize profits (what company doesn't?), and, yes, there are many cases where we don't want them / shouldn't let them maximize profits in certain ways (for example, we broke up the movie company / movie theater monopoly because it worked to block any competition). Personally, I always thought the movie rental business was always really weird. Apparently, they can buy one copy of a movie and rent it as many times as they want. With this new "rental" business, I can see why movie companies would (legitimately) have a problem with this business model - it's a super efficient way of renting movies that would allow movie-rental companies to rent a single movie a dozen times a day. But, then, I can see why movie companies have a problem with the traditional movie-rental business, so I don't know.
Anyway, my main point is that the MPAA might hate competition, but they have zero control over what other people or companies create. They're only fighting to have control over the stuff they themselves created. No need to exaggerate, as if the MPAA owns all movies created everywhere by anyone.
> "All of this is likely moot as the kid does not own the rights to the compounds. TFA doesn't specify whether they are novel but my guess would be he worked with a library of existing compounds that showed some activity against cystic fibrosis in preliminary screenings."
My understanding is that the kid used two preexisting drugs for cystic fibrosis and used them together. Essentially, the same thing people are doing with AIDS drugs cocktails.
To be fair, it's not clear from the picture that the dish was functional. Who knows what kind of condition the system was in. The house was likely inhabited before Bin Laden was there, and maybe they had used it previously.
Also, the angle of the dish is very low. Satellite dishes point at satellites in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they are organized in a band around the equator. Since Pakistan isn't that far from the equator, it would look at satellites that were more or less overhead. (Yeah, some satellites might appear slightly over the horizon to the east and west.) I just think the fact that the dish is pointed at something like 10 degrees above the horizon might suggest that it's not actually functional.
> "Instaling keyloggers on EVERY machine?"
Oh, please. That wouldn't be hard, especially if you could write a virus that would propagate the keylogger to every machine in the local network.
> "That would have to imply you're logging EVERYONE's passwords *before* emails are sent, because you can't know that an Osama email has just been sent until it's been sent. I definitely don't think the CIA has that kind of power/reach in Pakistan, and that would be a major breech of basic human rights."
Yeah, like the CIA is going to be concerned about putting keyloggers on machines to catch Bin Laden because they'd be afraid of breaching basic human rights. Are you familiar with Carnivore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) ?
> "How long does it take to hit a send button, pop the thumb drive out of the PC and hit the road?"
Quite a while considering that Bin Laden was likely responding to multiple emails at the same time.
> "I seriously doubt these guys ever really visited the same Internet cafe twice"
I'm pretty sure there were only a limited number of internet cafes within five miles. Considering that Bin Laden was doing this for years, I doubt his courier was making long trips to distant internet cafes to avoid revisiting the same one.
> "assuming Osama had several trusted couriers, you could send different people to the same cafe on different occasions, just don't send the same guy to the same place twice."
And that requires giving out Bin Laden's password information to more people and trusting more people, which makes the option less attractive.
> "How many Internet Cafes are there in Pakistan? I'd guess many - thousands, perhaps?"
That's the wrong question. Obviously, his courier wasn't traveling 1000+ miles to reach every internet cafe in Pakistan. (Bin Laden was a thousand miles from Karachi so why are we including every internet cafe in Pakistan as potential dropoff points?) I'd bet money that the internet cafe used by his courier was rarely more than 20 miles from Bin Laden for 90% of the emails sent. Yeah, if you want to maintain secrecy for a few emails, you might travel a long distance, but it gets to be a pain of you're doing this for years. I'd bet laziness would eventually take over and you'd stay within a fairly confined area for sending emails.
> "thwarted the US government's best eavesdroppers despite having no Internet access in his hideout."
So, here's my question: by having an intermediary go to the internet cafe, Bin Laden could avoid being seen. However, how does this avoid eavesdropping? It seems to me that if they ever find one of Bin Laden's emails (by sniffing packets or by capturing one of his email targets and tracing back his email to the original IP address), then you could get back to the original internet cafe. Depending on the number of internet cafes in the area, you could start monitoring traffic and figure out which guy was sending them. Then, you could follow the guy to see where he went, which would lead you to Bin Laden. Also, if you infect the computers in the local internet cafes with a keylogger, you could get into Bin Laden's email accounts. By using the intermediary, Bin Laden only added a step or two to the whole procedure and avoided being seen in an internet cafe himself. It wasn't some sort of foolproof method for sending emails.
Let's see: Apple takes 30% of the revenue from e-books sold on the iPad. Some clever developer discovers they can write an app that they give away for free, then they sell e-books for the iPad and Apple earns 0% of the revenue from every e-book sold through this loophole. Developer gets mad because Apple closes the loophole. Seriously, did they really believe that Apple would leave this loophole open? Does the developer think that they can write an "App Store" app for the iPad, give it away for free, sell apps through their App-Store and cut Apple out of the picture as far as any revenue goes?
I'd also point out the inaccuracy of the headline "Developer Blames Apple for Ruining eBook Business", since it should read "Developer Blames Apple for Ruining their eBook business which is built on the iPad".
The article also states "the trouble started when Apple began taking 30% of the sale price of books sold through its app. As publishing pricing models meant BeamItDown already made less than a 30% cut, its margins went from minimal to negative." I guess that means the developer is going to have to take a smaller percentage (maybe 10%) and pay Apple their 30%, which puts them at higher cost than Apple. This means they'll have to make such a kick-ass app that they can compete with Apple's direct eBook sales, even though the author gets a smaller cut of the sales price.
I think I'd be a lot happier if conservative news and conservative viewers would actually admit that they have a right-wing bias. Instead, they constantly like to pretend that they've got The Unvarnished Truth, and everybody else has left-wing-bias blinders on. If some right-winger wants to complain that Keith Olbermann or John Stewart are biased towards the left, I don't have a problem with that. I understand that. But, if I complain that they aren't getting the full story from their biased news sources, they get all pissy, like FOX News, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh's musings were handed down from on high and I'm a dirty infidel for undermining The Truth.
> "90% or more of the news links take you AWAY from Drudge to sites with an array of political leanings, both right and left."
Heh, heh. Drudge isn't really linking to left-leaning articles. I used to visit Drudge for a while. Pretty soon, I'd play a game called "name the political party". Whenever they had a headline about a politician where I didn't recognize who they were or which political party they were with, I'd play a game called "name the political party". I was actually pretty good at it. If the headline was downplaying a politician's wrongdoing, then you could pretty much guess he was Republican. If it was a blistering headline attacking the politician, it was either a Democrat or a Republican that they were turning their back on because he had dome something they couldn't condone. The very fact that I could guess the political party based on how harshly they attacked them in the headline should be pretty good evidence of a right-wing bias.
I also thought it was interesting in the last election that they refused to give the electoral vote count between Obama and McCain, choosing, instead to show the popular vote. Of course, the electoral vote tends to magnify the gap between the winner and loser, and they wanted to minimize how badly McCain lost. I'd bet money that they showed the electoral count and minimized the popular vote count during the Bush-Gore election, since Gore won the popular vote.
Do you really think Drudge would get an approving nod from Rush Limbaugh if he wasn't a right winger? "Matt Drudge is the man who is to the Internet, what I am to broadcasting." -- Rush Limbaugh
I think Drudge's favorite newsource is Andrew Breitbart, who is most definitely conservative.
I think Craigslist does that to reduce bandwidth costs. They're a tiny company (about 30 employees) with 20 billion pageviews/month. For a long time, they had no way to generate revenue at all - until they started charging for job postings.
That's why I only go to websites with rainbow colors and flashing comic sans font for information. Also, these guys are doing everything right: http://www.theonion.com/articles/the-white-nation-will-never-resume-its-rightful-pl,20303/
Around the time of the French Revolution, the French came up with some metric ways of measuring time. They created a calendar of 30 days each month (with five extra days each year), and the time of day was split into divisions of ten ("ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
Just so you know: most countries in the Americas use 120v. Europe used to use 120v, as well. Now, the Old World almost all use 240v. ( http://users.telenet.be/worldstandards/electricity.htm )
Shall we standardize our electrical plug shapes, too? At least the US and most of North America has a standard shape. There are currently 13 different plugs because everyone wanted to develop their own.
> Ok, if you think using Groupon is unprofitable, don't use it!
That's kind of the point. Companies are still figuring out if it's worth it or not. That's what the post is about. I've also heard that a lot of restaurants hope to make money because groupon customers will bring a friend or buy more than the coupon is worth. I've heard (through the planet money podcast) that customers just haven't been buying much over the coupon value, which makes it harder for restaurants. Again, it's an exploratory thing - businesses don't know how profitable the groupon will be in terms of people buying things above the cost of the coupon or whether they'll be repeat customers.
To be fair, you could also go the other direction. For example, you say, "1. They surveyed 360 businesses but only 150 responded. Obviously the unsatisfied ones would be biased towards responding. This could cut the "real" would -not-repeat-rate by as much as half." Who says the unsatisfied ones would be biased towards reporting? Maybe the unsatisfied ones are apathetic towards responding, and the satisfied ones are energized to respond. You say that the "This could cut the "real" would -not-repeat-rate by as much as half", but maybe the real would-not-repeat rate is much higher than that.
3. Finally, who cares about "would you run another Groupon"? The right question is "If you had it to do over again, would you run your first Groupon?". Since the objective is advertising to the Groupon base, once is enough. Even a merchant who profited on a first Groupon might not want to run another.
Actually, it matters a lot because it means you aren't getting repeat business. Sure, there are new businesses opening every month, and those businesses might want to take advantage of groupon, but, right now, groupon might be getting all the new businesses who started within the last year. In another year from now, they might only get all the businesses that opened within that month. That's a steep decline in the number of businesses wanting to do groupon. Also, with fewer businesses using groupon a year from now, there's less talk about groupon, which means businesses might miss-out on using them. And, if businesses are unhappy with using groupon the first time, there might be negative talk about groupon, causing businesses to pass-up the deal because there's a decent chance for having a bad experience.
By the way, do you work for groupon or one of the other online-coupon services? I hear that there's already big conventions for these internet-coupon marketers. It all suggests to me that were nearing the top of the bubble for online-coupon companies.
> "I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said..."
I'm a left-leaning slashdotter. Could you explain why I'd find what you said offensive, or are you operating under the mistake assumption that "left leaning" = "people who believe business is evil, by definition".