The problem with pay-for-play and other models is that there are big fees in the processing of the transaction. They should set up their own little financial system where people can transfer $5 from their bank account and then just directly transfer the money from there. ING Direct does this transfer for free for me, so I can't see there being any expense for them to do this on small payments. It'd require some overhead, but it'd be worth it as it would quickly infuse their site with a lot of cash. They could then just charge literally $0.01-$0.05 per transaction and make good money. That way, a $0.25 tip would earn several times more than it would on iTMS for the artists.
The AP could have beaten them to this, offering a service that charges $10 a month for basic access, then they could add an arrangement where a blogger could pay them $0.50-$1.00 for a full license to use a particular article on their blog. Once again, institutional arrogance has gotten the better of them.
I just checked my last grocery receipt and I have saved somewhere between $200 and $250 this year so far using that card. That's good money for me to be saving. That's about a month and a half of gas money for my commute to work! I could care less if I lose a little privacy for that kind of savings because I get something that I can see the benefits of.
But what have I gotten out of **government** privacy invasions.
Jack.
Shit.
Unless you are one of those soccer moms or country club dads who is so terrified of a few sabre-rattling third world nutjobs that you think that anything that gives you a 0.000000000001% great chance of not being hit by a terrorist is worth it.
(Being a southern, I saw respond with a middle finger and rebel yell)
I was thinking about this general issue last night and realized the great irony that Brazil and "enlightened" Europe would have to outlaw a lot of South Park episodes because they would offend the sensibilities of some group, typically homosexuals. I'm entirely unimpressed with these countries and their "progressiveness" that says that throwing around human sexuality is ok, but saying offensive things is not.
Oh don't even start that bullshit about majorities versus minorities. The minorities are just as bad as the majorities. I've met just as many gays that instantly assume I'm going to want to stone them to death because I'm technically a fundamentalist, as I have met pseudo-Christians who would probably join a mob to stone them. I'm an asshole, they're an asshole. EVERYONE'S AN ASSHOLE on these issues at some point!
You know what breeds hate and resentment? Empowering people to turn subjective feelings into a legal weapon. You instantly empower a hate group the moment you ban it. I bet the KKK would grow 50-100% every year if it were outlawed. It's just a way for societies to brush their issues under the national carpet and pretend that all is well.
Well guess what?! It isn't! All manner of bigotry is rampant around the world and the force of law is not going to change hearts. Law has been used to smooth these things over time and again in the past and it **always** fails. The only thing that changes bigotry into love is a spiritual rebirth and that is something that cannot be legislated.
My mom put their whole dilemma succinctly when she said, "this copy of Windows is mine and I don't give a shit what Microsoft thinks. I bought it, it belongs to me."
I'll be the first to say that I despise the vast majority of the legal profession. I despise the mindset, the technicalities, the sophistry (what does "is" mean?) and all of that crap. Copyright law is a lawyer's dream because it is convoluted, technical and requires a legal prophet to understand.
Normal people don't have any use for the legal arguments about licensing and things like that. Copyright law is undermined with every argument that does not appeal to the norms of physical property culture.
That Congress makes these laws and then passes them off to the FCC. They'll make some half-assed bad law. The FCC will be lobbied everyday by the telecoms until it works out in THEIR favor and we'll be even worse off because they'll have worked the laws against the market. It may take a decade to undo that kind of damage if it even happens.
Laptops for students makes no sense. A laptop is just an expensive machine that is not going to do anything for a student with bad teachers and little motivation to learn. It'll just be another taxpayer-paid for toy.
and with net neutrality issues. If they are not blocking it for a bonafide technical problem like DDoS or spam, they lose their common carrier status until everything is resolved to perfect legality. Then, let the lawsuits and prosecutions of the ISP commence in the mean time.
I like Wikipedia, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise which is that it allows every bozo to contribute. That's what the blogosphere is for, but that's not what an encyclopedia is supposed to be based on. Do you really want people without credentials to be contributing?
Now here's my suggestion on how to fix it. They need to hire a few full time staffers with their donations and have them handle written applications to contribute to Wikipedia. Let anyone with sound credentials contribute, but require that they prove that they have some idea of what they are talking about. Then, allow anyone to sign up for an account that allows them to post thoughtful critiques if they have some informal knowledge and have good reason to believe than an "authoritative source" may be inaccurate. If they just troll, block them after a few warnings or something.
These same violent pricks and bitches would no doubt cry "Fascist!" at any cops that participates in an effort to control a globalization protest or some other left-wing cause. Yet here they are, engaging in many of the classic coercion tactics of the brownshirts. Fear, intimidation, violence.
It's always "activism" when the left does it, but fascism when the right does it. I hope the FBI nails these fucks hard because they are a much greater threat to this country than any Islamic nutjob. Why? They're potential voters. They're violent extremists who actually act on their rhetoric. They're the closest thing we have to an organized domestic terrorism problem.
And before anyone brings up abortion clinic bombers, you want to know why it isn't a problem? Because there are a lot of Christians like me who wouldn't hesitate to shoot those violent fucks if we caught them in the act. Why? Our religion teaches that preserving life is a duty of all Jews and Christians.
I believe abortion is murder, but so is murdering a doctor because as much as I'd like to call it equivalent to a concentration camp, I can't because it's too insidious and two wrongs don't make a right. These guys don't care about such moral complexities. To them it's just murder so they go out and murder. This is the essence of "judge not lest you be judged," not the crap about blindly accepting everyone's personal choices as being as good as the next guy's.
So, in short, I wish the FBI and police the best of luck. May they hunt down these violent little brownshirts and lock their asses away. Even the protestors. As far as I am concerned, the first amendment does not extend protection to protests done outside someone's home. That is fear and intimidation and the police are quite justified in arresting and charging every "protestor" as harasser or stalker.
But this reminds me of those times when Mandrake had to beg for donations. Not quite in the same ball park just yet, but it doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in me about their direction. This is the sort of thing I might expect from a non-commercial project, not from a company.
Selfishness has become par for the course in American culture. You can have it all! It's all about YOU!!!
American culture has become a cesspool of me, me, me attitudes. And you know what I see, working in Northern Virginia around a lot of very wealth middle age people who are like this? Nothing but unhappiness! The happiest people I know are the ones who aren't that well off, but have rejected modern values for sacrifice and committment in their families and marriages.
We will all die someday. When you are on your deathbed, are you going to be happy that you had a great career that forced you to stay away from your wife and kids? How about you, ladies. Are y'all going to look back fondly on the years you had kids, but even though your husbands could support your family, you worked anyway because "feelin fullfilled" meant more to you than being close to your kids as you rasied them? Then you wonder why they don't know their parents and act lost or are embittered to parents whose priorities were all fucked up.
I have news for you, modern America. The reason you are fucked up and rotting from the inside out is that you have no soul. It is not all about you in the here and now. When you get married, you are responsible to uplift your spouse and take care of them, even if you don't "feel love" toward them right now. When you have kids, they are your priority, not your job and "need to feel fullfilled." That means that you don't work more than you need to to provide and be secure in the future. Drive the damn Scion tC instead of the Lexus if you have to.
You know that judicial activism that those "right wing wingnuts" bitch about? This is an example of it. Judges seem to often lack any common sense, reading comprehension skills and any sense of limit on what words can actually mean. Kelo v. New London's gang rape of the phrase "public use," which was interpretted in its most legalistic and textbook definition, rather than it is more long-lived, vernacular use, is but one of many examples... this being the latest.
Even most patent law defenders would agree that this is bad and outside the scope of what patents are for. Unfortunately, judges have often proved that if they can interpet something some way, they will almost seemingly for the hell of it.
The only solution I can think of involves ending life-long terms and breaking up the law schools, which are, quite frankly, dens of sophistry, malfeasance, linguistic license and villainy. Generally speaking, any law that requires a highly specialized person, trained **in the law** (not the regulated profession), to interpet it, is a bad law.
If they go to them and say "we caught this user account accessing child porn," on what basis can Google morally and legally not comply? Google is not a court, and should have to comply with the law like the average person does. Anything less and they become, as Locke feared, a law unto themselves, which is the last thing we want any rich institution to become.
One of the things that is a lot more common today than it has been in American history, yes, even back in the "bumpkin days" of America pre-industrialization, is that people just don't critically think anymore. "Special device?" Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills would look at a few simple things and freak:
1) All computer security systems have been defeated. 2) This is kinda like one of them thar computer security systems that has been defeated. 3) I'm carrying this thing around the world, and any schmo who can defeat it, can identify me faster than the police can. 4) There are a lot of terrorists and terrorism sympathizers who'd just love to off me because I'm American.
If you aren't careful, you'll be broadcasting enough info out there that you'll be easily victimized.
WikiSearch anyone? It's about time that people started realizing that these companies are not going to make this easy on anyone. I would gladly pay $5-$10/month to pay for the bills of an open source, accountable search service that doesn't keep so much data on me it makes the Stasi look like amateurs.
It depends on the area that you work in. There are parts of it which, and parts that are not. It's a Department, not an agency! You are talking about the largest part of the federal government, one that spans well over a million employees, in fact probably several million employees between all of the agencies and military branches. You can just chalk your experience up, perhaps, to having a less informed client. Many others are very eager to get technical solutions that just work and care more about that than the "look and feel."
While free software purists debate things like binary-only drivers, the rest of the world moves on with more important issues. Do you want hardware support, huh? Do you want companies to actually build products on open source software stacks? Then stop begrudging them the right to choose what works for them, so long as it is in compliance with the basic requirements. Stop doing this little totalitarian inquisition of whether a company is a "good corporate citizen" based on whether or not they "do enough." I almost can't believe that people actually debate whether or not Google should have to open up its code because of the "spirit of the GPL."
This sort of moral grandstanding pisses me off. It accomplishes nothing other than to serve as a sort of self-esteem booster for rigid ideologues for when they inevitably fail to adapt to reality. It's mental masturbation that has all of the pleasantries of a clusterbomb going off on a playground because of how many people it denies a future to. You want freedom? Learn to live in *gasp* a pluralistic society. That means that some people might not like Open Source Uber Alles.
Call me crazy, but it sounds like the FBI didn't know what it wanted and SAIC was too scared and proud to play contractor hardball with its client to get the job done. The FBI is legendary for its fractured leadership, fiefdoms (makes most agencies look like a single organism it's so bad) and crap like that.
They've already made two good choices: a small, but real keyboard and Qt.
Now, if they charge that extra $50-$100 to make it pretty powerful and debug the damn software, they'll be set. That was my biggest complaint about my 770. The software that was included crashed **constantly** and was just... wrong, especially that thing they called a new reader.
Blogger seems to be the source of a lot of the spam blogs that account for the stats like a new blog every half second on technorati. Does Google have any incentive to change this fact, since the bandwidth costs are minimal, it drives up their blogger stats and it brings more people into the Google ecosystem?
Crazy idea here... maybe the reason Apple doesn't really put any meaningful controls in place for a while other than a piece of paper is that they want a handful of geeks to get ahold of bootleg copies, test them on non-Apple hardware and talk about the results? That accomplishes two things: gets them data and doesn't tip their hand. I wouldn't put such a sneaky way of using people past Steve Jobs.
That number is just small enough to seem effective to the bulk of opinionated political junkies who know next to nothing about computers, statistics, etc., but large enough to allow the TSA to catch no terrorists while claiming credit for being busy. It's a bureaucratic win-win. Little hard and scary work, lots of busy work and everyone is happy until it doesn't do its job when it counts, a terrorist gets through and people die.
Then, TSA gets more power.
The only time that failure is bad for such an agency is when it makes Congress seriously ask "so who is going to get the first pink slips?"
Slashdot Mirror
"You can't compete with me. I was here first. Go away!"
The problem with pay-for-play and other models is that there are big fees in the processing of the transaction. They should set up their own little financial system where people can transfer $5 from their bank account and then just directly transfer the money from there. ING Direct does this transfer for free for me, so I can't see there being any expense for them to do this on small payments. It'd require some overhead, but it'd be worth it as it would quickly infuse their site with a lot of cash. They could then just charge literally $0.01-$0.05 per transaction and make good money. That way, a $0.25 tip would earn several times more than it would on iTMS for the artists.
The AP could have beaten them to this, offering a service that charges $10 a month for basic access, then they could add an arrangement where a blogger could pay them $0.50-$1.00 for a full license to use a particular article on their blog. Once again, institutional arrogance has gotten the better of them.
I just checked my last grocery receipt and I have saved somewhere between $200 and $250 this year so far using that card. That's good money for me to be saving. That's about a month and a half of gas money for my commute to work! I could care less if I lose a little privacy for that kind of savings because I get something that I can see the benefits of.
But what have I gotten out of **government** privacy invasions.
Jack.
Shit.
Unless you are one of those soccer moms or country club dads who is so terrified of a few sabre-rattling third world nutjobs that you think that anything that gives you a 0.000000000001% great chance of not being hit by a terrorist is worth it.
(Being a southern, I saw respond with a middle finger and rebel yell)
I was thinking about this general issue last night and realized the great irony that Brazil and "enlightened" Europe would have to outlaw a lot of South Park episodes because they would offend the sensibilities of some group, typically homosexuals. I'm entirely unimpressed with these countries and their "progressiveness" that says that throwing around human sexuality is ok, but saying offensive things is not.
Oh don't even start that bullshit about majorities versus minorities. The minorities are just as bad as the majorities. I've met just as many gays that instantly assume I'm going to want to stone them to death because I'm technically a fundamentalist, as I have met pseudo-Christians who would probably join a mob to stone them. I'm an asshole, they're an asshole. EVERYONE'S AN ASSHOLE on these issues at some point!
You know what breeds hate and resentment? Empowering people to turn subjective feelings into a legal weapon. You instantly empower a hate group the moment you ban it. I bet the KKK would grow 50-100% every year if it were outlawed. It's just a way for societies to brush their issues under the national carpet and pretend that all is well.
Well guess what?! It isn't! All manner of bigotry is rampant around the world and the force of law is not going to change hearts. Law has been used to smooth these things over time and again in the past and it **always** fails. The only thing that changes bigotry into love is a spiritual rebirth and that is something that cannot be legislated.
My mom put their whole dilemma succinctly when she said, "this copy of Windows is mine and I don't give a shit what Microsoft thinks. I bought it, it belongs to me."
I'll be the first to say that I despise the vast majority of the legal profession. I despise the mindset, the technicalities, the sophistry (what does "is" mean?) and all of that crap. Copyright law is a lawyer's dream because it is convoluted, technical and requires a legal prophet to understand.
Normal people don't have any use for the legal arguments about licensing and things like that. Copyright law is undermined with every argument that does not appeal to the norms of physical property culture.
That Congress makes these laws and then passes them off to the FCC. They'll make some half-assed bad law. The FCC will be lobbied everyday by the telecoms until it works out in THEIR favor and we'll be even worse off because they'll have worked the laws against the market. It may take a decade to undo that kind of damage if it even happens.
Laptops for students makes no sense. A laptop is just an expensive machine that is not going to do anything for a student with bad teachers and little motivation to learn. It'll just be another taxpayer-paid for toy.
and with net neutrality issues. If they are not blocking it for a bonafide technical problem like DDoS or spam, they lose their common carrier status until everything is resolved to perfect legality. Then, let the lawsuits and prosecutions of the ISP commence in the mean time.
That will teach them to play king maker.
I like Wikipedia, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise which is that it allows every bozo to contribute. That's what the blogosphere is for, but that's not what an encyclopedia is supposed to be based on. Do you really want people without credentials to be contributing?
Now here's my suggestion on how to fix it. They need to hire a few full time staffers with their donations and have them handle written applications to contribute to Wikipedia. Let anyone with sound credentials contribute, but require that they prove that they have some idea of what they are talking about. Then, allow anyone to sign up for an account that allows them to post thoughtful critiques if they have some informal knowledge and have good reason to believe than an "authoritative source" may be inaccurate. If they just troll, block them after a few warnings or something.
These same violent pricks and bitches would no doubt cry "Fascist!" at any cops that participates in an effort to control a globalization protest or some other left-wing cause. Yet here they are, engaging in many of the classic coercion tactics of the brownshirts. Fear, intimidation, violence.
It's always "activism" when the left does it, but fascism when the right does it. I hope the FBI nails these fucks hard because they are a much greater threat to this country than any Islamic nutjob. Why? They're potential voters. They're violent extremists who actually act on their rhetoric. They're the closest thing we have to an organized domestic terrorism problem.
And before anyone brings up abortion clinic bombers, you want to know why it isn't a problem? Because there are a lot of Christians like me who wouldn't hesitate to shoot those violent fucks if we caught them in the act. Why? Our religion teaches that preserving life is a duty of all Jews and Christians.
I believe abortion is murder, but so is murdering a doctor because as much as I'd like to call it equivalent to a concentration camp, I can't because it's too insidious and two wrongs don't make a right. These guys don't care about such moral complexities. To them it's just murder so they go out and murder. This is the essence of "judge not lest you be judged," not the crap about blindly accepting everyone's personal choices as being as good as the next guy's.
So, in short, I wish the FBI and police the best of luck. May they hunt down these violent little brownshirts and lock their asses away. Even the protestors. As far as I am concerned, the first amendment does not extend protection to protests done outside someone's home. That is fear and intimidation and the police are quite justified in arresting and charging every "protestor" as harasser or stalker.
But this reminds me of those times when Mandrake had to beg for donations. Not quite in the same ball park just yet, but it doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in me about their direction. This is the sort of thing I might expect from a non-commercial project, not from a company.
Selfishness has become par for the course in American culture. You can have it all! It's all about YOU!!!
American culture has become a cesspool of me, me, me attitudes. And you know what I see, working in Northern Virginia around a lot of very wealth middle age people who are like this? Nothing but unhappiness! The happiest people I know are the ones who aren't that well off, but have rejected modern values for sacrifice and committment in their families and marriages.
We will all die someday. When you are on your deathbed, are you going to be happy that you had a great career that forced you to stay away from your wife and kids? How about you, ladies. Are y'all going to look back fondly on the years you had kids, but even though your husbands could support your family, you worked anyway because "feelin fullfilled" meant more to you than being close to your kids as you rasied them? Then you wonder why they don't know their parents and act lost or are embittered to parents whose priorities were all fucked up.
I have news for you, modern America. The reason you are fucked up and rotting from the inside out is that you have no soul. It is not all about you in the here and now. When you get married, you are responsible to uplift your spouse and take care of them, even if you don't "feel love" toward them right now. When you have kids, they are your priority, not your job and "need to feel fullfilled." That means that you don't work more than you need to to provide and be secure in the future. Drive the damn Scion tC instead of the Lexus if you have to.
You know that judicial activism that those "right wing wingnuts" bitch about? This is an example of it. Judges seem to often lack any common sense, reading comprehension skills and any sense of limit on what words can actually mean. Kelo v. New London's gang rape of the phrase "public use," which was interpretted in its most legalistic and textbook definition, rather than it is more long-lived, vernacular use, is but one of many examples... this being the latest.
Even most patent law defenders would agree that this is bad and outside the scope of what patents are for. Unfortunately, judges have often proved that if they can interpet something some way, they will almost seemingly for the hell of it.
The only solution I can think of involves ending life-long terms and breaking up the law schools, which are, quite frankly, dens of sophistry, malfeasance, linguistic license and villainy. Generally speaking, any law that requires a highly specialized person, trained **in the law** (not the regulated profession), to interpet it, is a bad law.
That's like... 10,000,000,000,000,000 instances of taxpayers dollars being wasted! How many more times does this have to flop before it's canceled?
If they go to them and say "we caught this user account accessing child porn," on what basis can Google morally and legally not comply? Google is not a court, and should have to comply with the law like the average person does. Anything less and they become, as Locke feared, a law unto themselves, which is the last thing we want any rich institution to become.
One of the things that is a lot more common today than it has been in American history, yes, even back in the "bumpkin days" of America pre-industrialization, is that people just don't critically think anymore. "Special device?" Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills would look at a few simple things and freak:
1) All computer security systems have been defeated.
2) This is kinda like one of them thar computer security systems that has been defeated.
3) I'm carrying this thing around the world, and any schmo who can defeat it, can identify me faster than the police can.
4) There are a lot of terrorists and terrorism sympathizers who'd just love to off me because I'm American.
If you aren't careful, you'll be broadcasting enough info out there that you'll be easily victimized.
WikiSearch anyone? It's about time that people started realizing that these companies are not going to make this easy on anyone. I would gladly pay $5-$10/month to pay for the bills of an open source, accountable search service that doesn't keep so much data on me it makes the Stasi look like amateurs.
It depends on the area that you work in. There are parts of it which, and parts that are not. It's a Department, not an agency! You are talking about the largest part of the federal government, one that spans well over a million employees, in fact probably several million employees between all of the agencies and military branches. You can just chalk your experience up, perhaps, to having a less informed client. Many others are very eager to get technical solutions that just work and care more about that than the "look and feel."
While free software purists debate things like binary-only drivers, the rest of the world moves on with more important issues. Do you want hardware support, huh? Do you want companies to actually build products on open source software stacks? Then stop begrudging them the right to choose what works for them, so long as it is in compliance with the basic requirements. Stop doing this little totalitarian inquisition of whether a company is a "good corporate citizen" based on whether or not they "do enough." I almost can't believe that people actually debate whether or not Google should have to open up its code because of the "spirit of the GPL."
This sort of moral grandstanding pisses me off. It accomplishes nothing other than to serve as a sort of self-esteem booster for rigid ideologues for when they inevitably fail to adapt to reality. It's mental masturbation that has all of the pleasantries of a clusterbomb going off on a playground because of how many people it denies a future to. You want freedom? Learn to live in *gasp* a pluralistic society. That means that some people might not like Open Source Uber Alles.
Call me crazy, but it sounds like the FBI didn't know what it wanted and SAIC was too scared and proud to play contractor hardball with its client to get the job done. The FBI is legendary for its fractured leadership, fiefdoms (makes most agencies look like a single organism it's so bad) and crap like that.
They've already made two good choices: a small, but real keyboard and Qt.
Now, if they charge that extra $50-$100 to make it pretty powerful and debug the damn software, they'll be set. That was my biggest complaint about my 770. The software that was included crashed **constantly** and was just... wrong, especially that thing they called a new reader.
Blogger seems to be the source of a lot of the spam blogs that account for the stats like a new blog every half second on technorati. Does Google have any incentive to change this fact, since the bandwidth costs are minimal, it drives up their blogger stats and it brings more people into the Google ecosystem?
Crazy idea here... maybe the reason Apple doesn't really put any meaningful controls in place for a while other than a piece of paper is that they want a handful of geeks to get ahold of bootleg copies, test them on non-Apple hardware and talk about the results? That accomplishes two things: gets them data and doesn't tip their hand. I wouldn't put such a sneaky way of using people past Steve Jobs.
That number is just small enough to seem effective to the bulk of opinionated political junkies who know next to nothing about computers, statistics, etc., but large enough to allow the TSA to catch no terrorists while claiming credit for being busy. It's a bureaucratic win-win. Little hard and scary work, lots of busy work and everyone is happy until it doesn't do its job when it counts, a terrorist gets through and people die.
Then, TSA gets more power.
The only time that failure is bad for such an agency is when it makes Congress seriously ask "so who is going to get the first pink slips?"