Social networking sites have a life cycle like nightclubs, and it's short. They start, if they're lucky they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, the cool people move out, and they decline. Has-been social networking sites include AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Social networking sites have to be valued like movies - they have to make money over their run. They're not ongoing businesses.
Wrong.
People abandon social services because they are slow, riddled with bugs, and a different site pops up that can satisfy their requirements in a better way.
People will not abandon Facebook because it becomes uncool. They will abandon it when a better site comes along.
Just because flat sounds fair using simplistic "everyone pays the same fraction of their income (or wealth)" reasoning doesn't mean it is. If you want to be actually 'fair' then you need to consider the consequences of a policy, not merely if it feels right on paper.
But the exact same argument works the opposite way. 1% of a billion is a lot more money than 1% of a few thousand - why should rich pay even more?
To take the argument overboard in the opposite direction would be to demand fixed tax - $10.000 per year for everyone;)
I think the base issue is that the very rich tend to find loopholes and often pay very little tax at all. Or to contrast with your example - Do you think Bill Gates paid as much tax on his last dollar as you did? Surely not.
Microsoft might play their games to hinder development as much as they can, but at least in this country the turn towards Open Standards seems inevitable.
Which is exactly why they can support ODF so MS Office can be used by the government to create "open" documents - but nobody can read those documents unless they also use MS Office.
You have your audiophiles, your car guys, musicians, and artists, the list goes on. Why does a musician want a certain amp or guitar? Is it because he wants his peen to go to 11?
But instead how can we ask them to perform some very menial task on the computer with a reward of our services?
So maybe your company would like image or video corpora tagged with words in a different language and background of a different culture? Those are becoming more of an asset. Or perhaps you want to boost a wiki in a particular language? Or perhaps you could offer premiums on translations and bother to attempt teach them a second language through cheap software?
The embodiment of optimism.
You are so amazingly right. Make them do something valuable with their time and use Internet to distribute wealth more fair.
The problem is to find a task that benefits humanity, can be broken up and solved by people with little education. At a higher wage than the shady competitors.
If you can manage that, though, you should be raking in millions pretty soon.
Let's see how this plays out for some copyright protester. He sets up a laptop outside MPAA headquarters, downloads that Wolverine pre-release (never mind how he gets an internet connection), and plays it for everyone around. Most likely outcome is he's ignored, of course, but let's assume he's not. The MPAA calls the cops. The cops arrest him, under a criminal copyright infringement statute. It's page 3 news, at best. The guy disappears into the system, maybe rating a Slashdot article at conviction and sentencing, maybe even an AP brief. He's in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for a few years. Few know about it. Fewer care. Nothing changes.
So why are these rules considered the only "ethical" way to do it? Perhaps it is precisely because they are ineffective: those who support the status quo are seizing the high ground by declaring that in order to object "ethically", one must also object ineffectively. Why, as an opponent of that status quo, should I or anyone else accept their definitions of "ethical"?
Parent suggested a better approach for disobedience in the very post you are replying to. Using a pre-release to gain public support would be moronic.
What concerns me the most is how my stored data will be affected. Hardware can be replaced, but data is volatile and (I presume) also susceptible to the sun's random bursts.
Your data should be fine (as well as your redundant backups).
I tend to think this is fairly wise way to rule a country. Sure, you can't make fast moves like you can in America, but on the other hand, the changes that happen are well thought out and not apt to be reversed after the next election. The instability of the cabinet brings, maybe contradictionary, stability to the country as a whole.
But in some ways, you can move faster.
When both parties are somewhat conservative and in bed with the industry, the populace may establish a separate party to promote an important issue that the ruling parties are ignoring. Anything that gains 4% (in sweden) or more votes has actual power and must be taken into consideration.
The only ones benefiting from a two-party system are the two ruling parties. Seriously.
This is an oft-repeated fallacy, that most people don't need powerful CPUs or OSs. A post above claims to have been saying this since the Pentium II days. This is essentially the same short-sightedness as the apocryphal "128K ought to be enough for anybody" remark from way back when.
It is a comment to the general trend that the replacement cycle of computers is slowing down. A 2005 computer today is much more up to date than a 1995 computer was 1999.
We will (maybe soon) reach a point where computers will break down sooner than they become obsolete. That's a mathematical fact - the exponential growth will come to an end.
This is a very different from "enough from anyone". (If you can't see the difference, good luck on your mocking attempts!;)
The administration isn't looking at the short term here -- they see the writing on the wall and want to cement the USA's position as an economic superpower as the manufacturing leaves us behind.
It's a really, really bad idea.
I understand the rationale behind this. But manufacturing IS power. IP is a concept based on the moral that copying is bad and that the innovator should be rewarded.
Manufacturing is factories. When things turn bad, factories are refitted to make guns and tanks instead of toys and cars. China and India have some 2 billion inhabitants. If they also have the factories, they could pretty much define international law as they see fit.
So... Is the future a world where the US imposes "robber baron" IP on the rest of the world while keeping military might to enforce the tribute they demand?
But if I get strong results in the poll, I may have to reconsider my overall outlook, maybe even make a career change.
Nothing gets the word out better than a celebrity-level stand-up comedian basing his show on mocking the RIAA.
(Somehow, though, I think the "celebrity level" comedy might be easier said that done;)
On the positive side, such a man would surely benefit from also being a competent lawyer - due to the massive lawsuits that the RIAA would immediately file for each and every humorous reference targeting them.
Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener. (...) Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.
Seriously, throwing working equipment on the garbage dump is about the least green anyone can possibly do.
It's a sunk cost. To justify a replacement, the power savings must be larger than the environmental impact of producing the replacement.
The thing is, "God did it" doesn't give you any equations or principles. String theory, while it may turn out to be completely wrong, at least gives us something to test.
Wooooosh? No?
Granted, GP wasn't funny, but he makes a slightly valid point. String theory have not yet given us anything to test, although parent is claiming the opposite.
At the moment there are no falsifiable predictions that is actually possible to carry out. Thus you can make a (though somewhat extreme) comparison to religions.
While much has been made of Google's amazing ability to make money with online advertisements, the cracks in the dike are beginning to leak.
Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards. As Google increases server-side requirements to support their growing portfolio of online products, they will reach a point where advertising simply won't be profitable anymore. Youtube with its heavy server-side requirements (even running on lighttpd!) just isn't cost effective considering the number of pages they need to serve and the direct links to media they provide.
As someone who likes services that are free, I will mourn the loss of advertiser-paid services, but in terms of the viability of the web this day was inevitable.
Dude, you forgot the most important part:
It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Google is dying.
Regardless of what your tea leaves say, he was only a week off
You only need 365 predictions per year to hit the exact date. Would the correct one be a genius or just lucky?
A 1 week margin means a prediction covers 7 days on both sides. That's 15 days. You can cover a full year that way with 24 people making one prediction each.
Which is probably a smaller number of people than there are earthquake researchers in Italy.
We used to kill off the stupid fucks, or let them do themselves in with their own stupidity. But once we became civilized we started coddling stupid fucks, so they thrived against all natural odds and eventually overran us, and consequently the world is now being run by stupid fucks.
You would be amazed how often the stupid fucks killed off the smart guys. Uncivilized societies tend to favor muscle more than intelligence.
In any case, natural selection is irrelevant with the current pace of progress.
We'll be manipulating genes long before evolution having any impact on humanity. Alternatively, we're on an unsustainable track and will collapse back to pre-industrial society. In either case, a few thousand years of civilization does not really change much for the gene pool.
In the days where not everyone could afford a 'copying machine' it was perfectly okay. Things have changed, laws essentially didn't.
The laws changed. In the opposite direction.
Culture is spread around the earth in a fraction of a second. Music, movies and games are changing so fast and produced in such amounts that most is forgotten after a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Social networking sites have a life cycle like nightclubs, and it's short.
They start, if they're lucky they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, the
cool people move out, and they decline. Has-been social networking sites include
AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Social networking
sites have to be valued like movies - they have to make money over
their run. They're not ongoing businesses.
Wrong.
People abandon social services because they are slow, riddled with bugs, and a different site pops up that can satisfy their requirements in a better way.
People will not abandon Facebook because it becomes uncool. They will abandon it when a better site comes along.
Just because flat sounds fair using simplistic "everyone pays the same fraction of their income (or wealth)" reasoning doesn't mean it is. If you want to be actually 'fair' then you need to consider the consequences of a policy, not merely if it feels right on paper.
But the exact same argument works the opposite way. 1% of a billion is a lot more money than 1% of a few thousand - why should rich pay even more?
To take the argument overboard in the opposite direction would be to demand fixed tax - $10.000 per year for everyone ;)
I think the base issue is that the very rich tend to find loopholes and often pay very little tax at all. Or to contrast with your example - Do you think Bill Gates paid as much tax on his last dollar as you did? Surely not.
(PS: subjective is not a basis for fairness.)
Microsoft might play their games to hinder development as much as they can, but at least in this country the turn towards Open Standards seems inevitable.
Which is exactly why they can support ODF so MS Office can be used by the government to create "open" documents - but nobody can read those documents unless they also use MS Office.
Norway? More like Snore-way!
(Got lions and tigers only in Kenya!)
You have your audiophiles, your car guys, musicians, and artists, the list goes on. Why does a musician want a certain amp or guitar? Is it because he wants his peen to go to 11?
Yes.
I tried that but we have nothing in common so she dumped me.
Conclusion: You need an even better graphics card to impress the ladies.
But instead how can we ask them to perform some very menial task on the computer with a reward of our services?
So maybe your company would like image or video corpora tagged with words in a different language and background of a different culture? Those are becoming more of an asset. Or perhaps you want to boost a wiki in a particular language? Or perhaps you could offer premiums on translations and bother to attempt teach them a second language through cheap software?
The embodiment of optimism.
You are so amazingly right. Make them do something valuable with their time and use Internet to distribute wealth more fair.
Unfortunately, examples of "very menial tasks" are:
- Gold farming
- Captcha answering
The problem is to find a task that benefits humanity, can be broken up and solved by people with little education. At a higher wage than the shady competitors.
If you can manage that, though, you should be raking in millions pretty soon.
Let's see how this plays out for some copyright protester. He sets up a laptop outside MPAA headquarters, downloads that Wolverine pre-release (never mind how he gets an internet connection), and plays it for everyone around. Most likely outcome is he's ignored, of course, but let's assume he's not. The MPAA calls the cops. The cops arrest him, under a criminal copyright infringement statute. It's page 3 news, at best. The guy disappears into the system, maybe rating a Slashdot article at conviction and sentencing, maybe even an AP brief. He's in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for a few years. Few know about it. Fewer care. Nothing changes.
So why are these rules considered the only "ethical" way to do it? Perhaps it is precisely because they are ineffective: those who support the status quo are seizing the high ground by declaring that in order to object "ethically", one must also object ineffectively. Why, as an opponent of that status quo, should I or anyone else accept their definitions of "ethical"?
Parent suggested a better approach for disobedience in the very post you are replying to. Using a pre-release to gain public support would be moronic.
What concerns me the most is how my stored data will be affected. Hardware can be replaced, but data is volatile and (I presume) also susceptible to the sun's random bursts.
Your data should be fine (as well as your redundant backups).
The worst-case scenario for solar flares are nationwide chaos / civilization collapse. No gas, no power, no running water, no food in supermarkets.
You are primarily concerned about data? Yes, that would be worrying about nothing...
I tend to think this is fairly wise way to rule a country. Sure, you can't make fast moves like you can in America, but on the other hand, the changes that happen are well thought out and not apt to be reversed after the next election. The instability of the cabinet brings, maybe contradictionary, stability to the country as a whole.
But in some ways, you can move faster.
When both parties are somewhat conservative and in bed with the industry, the populace may establish a separate party to promote an important issue that the ruling parties are ignoring. Anything that gains 4% (in sweden) or more votes has actual power and must be taken into consideration.
The only ones benefiting from a two-party system are the two ruling parties. Seriously.
So in 10 years when we have the hardware to do this kinda thing on the average home PC... how scary is THAT going to be?
Poser pr0n is already bad enough now, can you imagine when it's a) Photorealistic and b) Based on real people?
I can see the scandals now.
"IL&M Apologizes for accidental leak of 3d Model Data"
"Jamie Lynn Spears / JFK sex tape confirmed fake"
"George Washington Punk Rock Show a surprise hit on new Youtube 5.0"
"'Jesus' starring in new Talk show on UPN, Neo-Christian groups object."
This, and several other issues, are the reason that the Internet is incompatible with big media.
Celebrities/Superstardom as we know it today is actually quite strongly linked to a one-to-many information distribution.
This is an oft-repeated fallacy, that most people don't need powerful CPUs or OSs. A post above claims to have been saying this since the Pentium II days. This is essentially the same short-sightedness as the apocryphal "128K ought to be enough for anybody" remark from way back when.
It is a comment to the general trend that the replacement cycle of computers is slowing down. A 2005 computer today is much more up to date than a 1995 computer was 1999.
We will (maybe soon) reach a point where computers will break down sooner than they become obsolete. That's a mathematical fact - the exponential growth will come to an end.
This is a very different from "enough from anyone". (If you can't see the difference, good luck on your mocking attempts! ;)
The administration isn't looking at the short term here -- they see the writing on the wall and want to cement the USA's position as an economic superpower as the manufacturing leaves us behind.
It's a really, really bad idea.
I understand the rationale behind this. But manufacturing IS power. IP is a concept based on the moral that copying is bad and that the innovator should be rewarded.
Manufacturing is factories. When things turn bad, factories are refitted to make guns and tanks instead of toys and cars. China and India have some 2 billion inhabitants. If they also have the factories, they could pretty much define international law as they see fit.
So... Is the future a world where the US imposes "robber baron" IP on the rest of the world while keeping military might to enforce the tribute they demand?
But if I get strong results in the poll, I may have to reconsider my overall outlook, maybe even make a career change.
Nothing gets the word out better than a celebrity-level stand-up comedian basing his show on mocking the RIAA.
(Somehow, though, I think the "celebrity level" comedy might be easier said that done ;)
On the positive side, such a man would surely benefit from also being a competent lawyer - due to the massive lawsuits that the RIAA would immediately file for each and every humorous reference targeting them.
Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener.
(...)
Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.
Seriously, throwing working equipment on the garbage dump is about the least green anyone can possibly do.
It's a sunk cost. To justify a replacement, the power savings must be larger than the environmental impact of producing the replacement.
You know, if legitimate software could ever learn how to make software as resilient as malware the world would be a better place.
Malware can blatantly ignore the user; kill performance, possible require OS reinstall and in the worst case delete user data.
Imagine 10-20 legitimate pieces of software installed at the same time if they were allowed to behave like that.
It's all about identifying the client's needs. Give them what they really need, not just what they ask for.
1 encrypted microSD card per client?
The thing is, "God did it" doesn't give you any equations or principles. String theory, while it may turn out to be completely wrong, at least gives us something to test.
Wooooosh? No?
Granted, GP wasn't funny, but he makes a slightly valid point. String theory have not yet given us anything to test, although parent is claiming the opposite.
At the moment there are no falsifiable predictions that is actually possible to carry out. Thus you can make a (though somewhat extreme) comparison to religions.
While much has been made of Google's amazing ability to make money with online advertisements, the cracks in the dike are beginning to leak.
Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards. As Google increases server-side requirements to support their growing portfolio of online products, they will reach a point where advertising simply won't be profitable anymore. Youtube with its heavy server-side requirements (even running on lighttpd!) just isn't cost effective considering the number of pages they need to serve and the direct links to media they provide.
As someone who likes services that are free, I will mourn the loss of advertiser-paid services, but in terms of the viability of the web this day was inevitable.
Dude, you forgot the most important part:
It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Google is dying.
How many people do you think would pay extra money to get an extra queen in chess?
And yet, you can't. The rules of chess are designed in such a way that it is not possible
(...)
But how are MMOs designed? A level 1 player cannot compare to a level 100 player.
It's the MMO business model. Reward people for spending time in a way that keep them subscribed for as long as possible.
Scrabble and chess can only be compared with FPS and RTS games. You keep nothing from the previous game except knowledge and skill as a player.
Regardless of what your tea leaves say, he was only a week off
You only need 365 predictions per year to hit the exact date. Would the correct one be a genius or just lucky?
A 1 week margin means a prediction covers 7 days on both sides. That's 15 days. You can cover a full year that way with 24 people making one prediction each.
Which is probably a smaller number of people than there are earthquake researchers in Italy.
Lowercase "m" means "milli," as in "milli-gigahertz." Which is the same as one megahertz. So actually, he is inadvertently correct. :)
But you must be consistent, which means that "g" isn't giga. It's 9.8 m/s^2.
Even factoring in the milli, running at 0,0098m/s^2 for 10 years is damned impressive, the computer should be up to 1% of light speed by now!
Which is *why* the rest of the world doesn't have to spend much in their military.
Why, exactly?
The rest of the world spends less because the USA go off attacking countries without any proof of WMD's?
You make it sound like a sacrifice to keep the rest of the world safe. It is not.
We used to kill off the stupid fucks, or let them do themselves in with their own stupidity. But once we became civilized we started coddling stupid fucks, so they thrived against all natural odds and eventually overran us, and consequently the world is now being run by stupid fucks.
You would be amazed how often the stupid fucks killed off the smart guys. Uncivilized societies tend to favor muscle more than intelligence.
In any case, natural selection is irrelevant with the current pace of progress.
We'll be manipulating genes long before evolution having any impact on humanity. Alternatively, we're on an unsustainable track and will collapse back to pre-industrial society. In either case, a few thousand years of civilization does not really change much for the gene pool.
In the days where not everyone could afford a 'copying machine' it was perfectly okay. Things have changed, laws essentially didn't.
The laws changed. In the opposite direction.
Culture is spread around the earth in a fraction of a second. Music, movies and games are changing so fast and produced in such amounts that most is forgotten after a year.
Copyright? Extendened to a century and more.