Yes, it was difficult to immigrate to the U.S. 100 years ago, but for some more than others. There are pieces of history that don't get a lot of airtime in grade school or high school history, such as the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Many more followed within the last century, including the Immigartion Act of 1924.
Within the context of all of the immigration restrictions that the U.S. government has put in place throughout its history against groups popularly stereotyped as carriers of disease, of low moral character, and lazy, the current immigration debate looks to me like just one more iteration of us vs them xenophobia in the U.S.
If DDT were still in use, the Bald Eagle would be extinct, along with several other birds.
As I understand it, before DDT was banned in the U.S., it's main effect on bird reproduction was a result of its being sprayed outside in massive quantities to kill teh bugz. Today, the rest of the world (where it's not banned) has different protocols; turns out small amounts in a room, for example, keeps the room mosquito free. And no one thinks massive outdoor spraying makes sense anymore.
Maybe a reaction of "let's use this tool more wisely" would've done just as well at preserving wild birds as the "it's evil, let's ban it" reaction did. And we'd have, y'know, a useful tool available too.
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Or it will be forced to innovate and create a system that hasn't existed before, to go with technologies and distribution methods that haven't existed before. A broken business model might destroy an industry, but only in the process of creating room for a new, more relevant model to rise from its ashes.
I've been writing fiction for pleasure for years, and recently started a concerted push to finish something and present it to the world. I've had to step back and recognize that my notions about publishing were outdated - even 2 years ago, things were different.
My current approach is, as a previous poster noted, that I'm writing for the privilege of getting to share my thoughts with the world.
I've also seen the virtual tip jar work in specific situations, and right now I'm most interested in pursuing a model where 1) I do the marketing, making the book available digitally for free, or as a print on demand for cost, and 2) including in the book a note to the effect of "if you're enjoying this, please visit $WEBSITE and throw something in the tip jar."
Is it naive? I don't know. But it seems like trusting in readers' good natures is where I land when I pivot 180 degrees from the DRM and sue mentality.
Apple sells high end products. Apple's target audience is people who will pay more for aesthetics, and for a bottom liner on troubleshooting. Apple's less concerned with selling more products than selling more expensive products.
A single digit market share isn't a problem with this model, because Apple's skimming the cream off the market, and leaving PC manufacturers to compete on price with very slim margins.
This reminds me of the introduction to Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, where he talks about his admittedly faulty memory colliding with a biographer's researched facts. He concludes a long explanation with "...the wrong sentence still feels to me righter than the right one."
No, this technology isn't appropriate for financial transactions. But anywhere that randomness could open the door to unexpected results that shed new light on something, I think this could be pretty exciting.
The major carriers pre-empted the legislation by switching to prorated ETFs. For example, my last Verizon contract had a $175 ETF, which decreased by $5 for each month you're in the contract. Still a considerable hit even if you're only a few months from the end. Just enough to keep congress at bay, I guess.
Verizon gets a lot of flak here and elsewhere for locking up phone capabilities. And as a current Verizon customer, I'd certainly love to be able to transfer files between my phone and computer with Bluetooth. At the same time, I still generally recommend Verizon to friends looking at switching or getting new service because here in San Francisco, as most places I've travelled in the U.S., my phone service just works.
Verizon Wireless reminds me of another company whose products I've grown to appreciate: Apple. Both companies seem to share a business model rooted in some common principles, producing a similar result: it just works.
Both companies control the hardware (Apple by making it, Verizon by installing their own interface), so they can solve users' problems when they crop up (under warranty, anyway...). And both companies charge a premium up front for their products, with users receiving solutions in exchange while using it. If you want to save some money, you get a PC and spend time and/or money getting things set up, configured, updated, upgraded as time goes on, or you use AT&T wireless and take your chances with network connectivity and customer service. But Verizon and Apple base their business models on making it work, and charging a premium for that.
No doubt folks will post here with horror stories with Apple tech support or Verizon customer service. My point is that in comparison, a given group of customers (non-techies with Apple, busy people with Verizon) are more satisfied with these companies overall than with other companies. Check out Consumer Reports' most recent survey of cell phone companies - they all rated abysmal in service, but they found Verizon the least so...
It's hard to imagine that spam filters have gotten to the point where spamming doesn't make economic sense. After all, the business model is something like
Send an email to 10,000 random people
Get money from one of those people
Profit
Even adding a couple zeroes to the recipient number (which improved spam filters should be doing) doesn't make much of a dent in the total expenses, if I understand correctly.
Lawsuits under the CAN SPAM law, however, could make it too costly to get past step 1. Unfortunately, it seems like the judicial system still needs a little help here.
The Electronics Takeback Coalition runs a computer takeback campaign and maintains a list of electronics recyclers who they have deemed "responsible" based on a pledge the listed recyclers have signed onto. The pledge includes no exporting, no sending to prisons (where labor safety standards are often nonexistent or unenforced), and not sending it to landfills or incinerators.
Here in San Francisco, I regularly bring recycling to Computer Recycling Center dropoffs. They even do pickups if you have at least 10 items to recycle at once.
I think Josh Wolf's refusal to testify is important for a couple reasons:
1) You wouldn't know it from mainstream media these days, but journalists have the opportunity to be important counterbalances to unchecked government power via investigating and bringing otherwise obscure activities into the light for public discussion and, perhaps, correction.
2) One important tool in a journalist's arsenal that enables them to do the above is their ability to collect news without being seen as tools/agents of the government. Think of Bob Woodward and Deep Throat (aka Mark Felt) - Woodward went 3 decades refusing to name Felt because he'd promised him confidentiality. If journalists can be compelled to testify about what they've done and seen in the course of doing their jobs, people around them are less likely to be interested in being filmed, interviewed, etc. This is the reason many states have shield laws, which protect journalists' sources and unpublished work. The US attorney in Josh Wolf's case had to go through acrobatics to bring this case in federal court, because California has a shield law - the only reason it's in federal court is because a San Francisco police car that sustained a broken taillight during the protest in question was paid for partially by federal money - that's the only federal link here!
I wonder if Apple can make the case that people already associate the "i*" with THEM, either the 'iPhones' TradeMark should be considered diluted, or it should be assigned to them. McDonald's has been vigorous with this. You can't name anything "Mc" something without getting a threatening letter from the company. Whether they're on firm legal ground, or just rely on their posturing, or somewhere in between, I'm not sure.
but it's a major difference between grouper and YouTube. The folks who created grouper built DRM into their schemes, creating a ready-to-use widget for some big media company to scoop up and plug into their (flawed) strategy. YouTube, not so much. Lotsa eyeballs, but so far just another iteration of
1. Build a ____ sharing site.
2. ???
3. Profit!
It's been a couple years since I last created a dual-boot system in order to test-drive the latest Linux - probably time to do it again. But dabbling on and off throughout the last decade, I've identified one behavior that typifies what's keeping Linux from widespread adoption: mouting and unmounting drives. If I insert a CD under Windows and then want to take it out, I push the button on my drive/keyboard and out it comes. Under Linux? I have to issue a command to the operating system to unmount it. This no doubt makes perfect sense to folks who write and maintain Linux, but it's utterly irrelevant to 99+% of potential users, and stands as a hurdle to usability.
I hate to say it, but it's gonna take a Linux interface whose use requires no more technical aptitude than using Windows XP before I'm gonna feel comfortable as an IT guy going to my director and recommending a switch.
Slashdot Mirror
Drat! From the headline, I thought this mission was kicking off a new wave of music in the spirit of the Flaming Lips.
Yes, it was difficult to immigrate to the U.S. 100 years ago, but for some more than others. There are pieces of history that don't get a lot of airtime in grade school or high school history, such as the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Many more followed within the last century, including the Immigartion Act of 1924. Within the context of all of the immigration restrictions that the U.S. government has put in place throughout its history against groups popularly stereotyped as carriers of disease, of low moral character, and lazy, the current immigration debate looks to me like just one more iteration of us vs them xenophobia in the U.S.
If DDT were still in use, the Bald Eagle would be extinct, along with several other birds.
As I understand it, before DDT was banned in the U.S., it's main effect on bird reproduction was a result of its being sprayed outside in massive quantities to kill teh bugz. Today, the rest of the world (where it's not banned) has different protocols; turns out small amounts in a room, for example, keeps the room mosquito free. And no one thinks massive outdoor spraying makes sense anymore. Maybe a reaction of "let's use this tool more wisely" would've done just as well at preserving wild birds as the "it's evil, let's ban it" reaction did. And we'd have, y'know, a useful tool available too.
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Or it will be forced to innovate and create a system that hasn't existed before, to go with technologies and distribution methods that haven't existed before. A broken business model might destroy an industry, but only in the process of creating room for a new, more relevant model to rise from its ashes.
I've been writing fiction for pleasure for years, and recently started a concerted push to finish something and present it to the world. I've had to step back and recognize that my notions about publishing were outdated - even 2 years ago, things were different. My current approach is, as a previous poster noted, that I'm writing for the privilege of getting to share my thoughts with the world. I've also seen the virtual tip jar work in specific situations, and right now I'm most interested in pursuing a model where 1) I do the marketing, making the book available digitally for free, or as a print on demand for cost, and 2) including in the book a note to the effect of "if you're enjoying this, please visit $WEBSITE and throw something in the tip jar." Is it naive? I don't know. But it seems like trusting in readers' good natures is where I land when I pivot 180 degrees from the DRM and sue mentality.
Apple sells high end products. Apple's target audience is people who will pay more for aesthetics, and for a bottom liner on troubleshooting. Apple's less concerned with selling more products than selling more expensive products. A single digit market share isn't a problem with this model, because Apple's skimming the cream off the market, and leaving PC manufacturers to compete on price with very slim margins.
This reminds me of the introduction to Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, where he talks about his admittedly faulty memory colliding with a biographer's researched facts. He concludes a long explanation with "...the wrong sentence still feels to me righter than the right one."
No, this technology isn't appropriate for financial transactions. But anywhere that randomness could open the door to unexpected results that shed new light on something, I think this could be pretty exciting.
The major carriers pre-empted the legislation by switching to prorated ETFs. For example, my last Verizon contract had a $175 ETF, which decreased by $5 for each month you're in the contract. Still a considerable hit even if you're only a few months from the end. Just enough to keep congress at bay, I guess.
It is a pretty awesome poem by Elizabeth Bishop
Yeah, but at least Microsoft is never going to raise their prices simply because their mother stopped giving them free sugar...
Ah, now everything is clear: the downfall of Microsoft is yet another collateral effect of the stealth French takeover of the Northwest U.S.
"Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville..."
Verizon gets a lot of flak here and elsewhere for locking up phone capabilities. And as a current Verizon customer, I'd certainly love to be able to transfer files between my phone and computer with Bluetooth. At the same time, I still generally recommend Verizon to friends looking at switching or getting new service because here in San Francisco, as most places I've travelled in the U.S., my phone service just works.
Verizon Wireless reminds me of another company whose products I've grown to appreciate: Apple. Both companies seem to share a business model rooted in some common principles, producing a similar result: it just works.
Both companies control the hardware (Apple by making it, Verizon by installing their own interface), so they can solve users' problems when they crop up (under warranty, anyway...). And both companies charge a premium up front for their products, with users receiving solutions in exchange while using it. If you want to save some money, you get a PC and spend time and/or money getting things set up, configured, updated, upgraded as time goes on, or you use AT&T wireless and take your chances with network connectivity and customer service. But Verizon and Apple base their business models on making it work, and charging a premium for that.
No doubt folks will post here with horror stories with Apple tech support or Verizon customer service. My point is that in comparison, a given group of customers (non-techies with Apple, busy people with Verizon) are more satisfied with these companies overall than with other companies. Check out Consumer Reports' most recent survey of cell phone companies - they all rated abysmal in service, but they found Verizon the least so...
It's hard to imagine that spam filters have gotten to the point where spamming doesn't make economic sense. After all, the business model is something like
Even adding a couple zeroes to the recipient number (which improved spam filters should be doing) doesn't make much of a dent in the total expenses, if I understand correctly. Lawsuits under the CAN SPAM law, however, could make it too costly to get past step 1. Unfortunately, it seems like the judicial system still needs a little help here.
The Electronics Takeback Coalition runs a computer takeback campaign and maintains a list of electronics recyclers who they have deemed "responsible" based on a pledge the listed recyclers have signed onto. The pledge includes no exporting, no sending to prisons (where labor safety standards are often nonexistent or unenforced), and not sending it to landfills or incinerators.
Here in San Francisco, I regularly bring recycling to Computer Recycling Center dropoffs. They even do pickups if you have at least 10 items to recycle at once.
What about the Crusades and Roger Ebert? Or are those only visible at the planearium?
I think Josh Wolf's refusal to testify is important for a couple reasons: 1) You wouldn't know it from mainstream media these days, but journalists have the opportunity to be important counterbalances to unchecked government power via investigating and bringing otherwise obscure activities into the light for public discussion and, perhaps, correction. 2) One important tool in a journalist's arsenal that enables them to do the above is their ability to collect news without being seen as tools/agents of the government. Think of Bob Woodward and Deep Throat (aka Mark Felt) - Woodward went 3 decades refusing to name Felt because he'd promised him confidentiality. If journalists can be compelled to testify about what they've done and seen in the course of doing their jobs, people around them are less likely to be interested in being filmed, interviewed, etc. This is the reason many states have shield laws, which protect journalists' sources and unpublished work. The US attorney in Josh Wolf's case had to go through acrobatics to bring this case in federal court, because California has a shield law - the only reason it's in federal court is because a San Francisco police car that sustained a broken taillight during the protest in question was paid for partially by federal money - that's the only federal link here!
but it's a major difference between grouper and YouTube. The folks who created grouper built DRM into their schemes, creating a ready-to-use widget for some big media company to scoop up and plug into their (flawed) strategy. YouTube, not so much. Lotsa eyeballs, but so far just another iteration of
1. Build a ____ sharing site.
2. ???
3. Profit!
It's been a couple years since I last created a dual-boot system in order to test-drive the latest Linux - probably time to do it again. But dabbling on and off throughout the last decade, I've identified one behavior that typifies what's keeping Linux from widespread adoption: mouting and unmounting drives. If I insert a CD under Windows and then want to take it out, I push the button on my drive/keyboard and out it comes. Under Linux? I have to issue a command to the operating system to unmount it. This no doubt makes perfect sense to folks who write and maintain Linux, but it's utterly irrelevant to 99+% of potential users, and stands as a hurdle to usability. I hate to say it, but it's gonna take a Linux interface whose use requires no more technical aptitude than using Windows XP before I'm gonna feel comfortable as an IT guy going to my director and recommending a switch.