TomOfTTB

The problem with this article is he lacks any historical perspective. The offline companies he quotes have all been around for a long time (relatively speaking) and that contributes to their position.

For example, Coca-Cola existed for 17 years before Pepsi even came on the scene. That's longer than all but two of the online "monopolies" he referenced (see the "great new monopolies" link). Beyond that Pepsi has been around fighting Coke for dominance for the past 100+ years.

Same with McDonalds (1955) and Anheuser-Busch (1852).

In all these stories the initial company had as much dominance as online companies do now. Pepsi was founded by a guy who wasn't willing to pay Coca-Cola's prices and realized he could produce Pepsi and sell it for half the price of Coke while still making a profit (See "Twice as much for a Nickle")

On the tech companies you're already starting to see erosion in the older monopolies. Windows is starting to see serious losses from increasing Mac sales, Intel has been beating AMD back with a stick and even Google is having to make improvements to keep Bing at bay.

So it will literally be decades before we can know if the author's thesis is even remotely valid

Overall this is probably the strangest attack I've ever seen.

Usually when someone is hacked a group will come out, take responsibility and then explain why they did it. In this case a group claiming to be Anonymous came out, took responsibility but then never really explained what Stratfor had done to deserve the attack. Then you had other people claiming to be anonymous claim they weren't responsible for the attack.

I'm not one to indulge in Conspiracy theories. Since this hack could also be seen as discrediting both Anonymous (by making them look like a group who randomly attacks people).

So if Stratfor is an honest broker of information this could be seen as a hack designed to discredit two sources of information which would be in the best interest of anyone who has information they wouldn't want shared.

Or not. Again I'm normally not one to believe in conspiracies.

I complain every time there's traffic on the road I use to get to work. It doesn't mean I consider it essential that I make it to work in 6 minutes instead of 11. People complain about all kinds of inessential inconveniences.

Two things I've found to be true of the human condition...

1. They always think their status quo is more important than it is ("If I lose this job my life is over", "I can't live if we break up", etc...)

2. They always adapt far quicker than they think they will once things do change

I don’t want to give a false impression. I don’t advocate this mindset. But from a historical perspective it isn’t that hard to understand. The history of mankind has always been a process of vacillating between societies motivated by self-profit and societies that attempt to live communally.

Right now the world has shifted more towards self-profit because we’re still living in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s collapse (the largest communal society ever attempted). But that doesn’t mean the idea of communal living has gone away completely. What the USSR proved more than anything is a society needs self-profit motivation in order to get people to put in the effort to excel.

There were no startups in the USSR because no one was willing to put a large amount of effort into something that would eventually be owned by the government.

But in that context artistic expression takes on a different bent because it is something most artists feel compelled to put effort into even without a profit motivation. So the question becomes “if something costs almost nothing to produce and the creator is compelled to create it without a profit motivation should it then be communal?”

Well first his metaphor doesn't really hold weight. Selling a Used Book is a one-to-one transaction in which the receiver is getting a less than perfect copy. Putting an e-book on a p2p network is a one-to-many transaction that transmits a perfect copy each time.

But that doesn't necessarily invalidate his overall point.

As far as his larger point is concerned I don't think I can say he's right or wrong. What I can say is he's not really looking at the deeper issues.

The real issue behind piracy is societal values. Those who advocate this opinion are basically saying people only have the right to profit from their creations to recover their costs. Beyond that the content belongs to society. That's the only justification for piracy (since you're arguing the cost of distribution is so low the user doesn't need to be compensated for it)

You can dress that up with arguments about fans loving artists and giving them additional revenue streams but since those additional revenue streams are separate transactions that may or may not occur you can't use them as justification for not paying an artist initially for his/her creation.

Beyond that there's the issue of choice. Even if all the pro-piracy arguments are true there will be some artists who simply don't want their work pirated. Even if it's irrational (look at artists like AC/DC who still refuse to sell their music digitally). By imposing piracy on those artists you're again saying their art belongs to society once created.

So that brings us back to the question of societal values. Do we as a society believe content should belong to the entire society upon creation or does it belong to the creator who can choose to distribute it in the way they see fit (even if that means handing it over to a record company or some other corporate entity)?

I don't see how this strategy could work. The reality is most people don't care about SOPA or even understand the consequences of it. No politician is going to get thrown out because of it (especially not with Media Companies money behind them allowing them to run ads on Abortion, Gay Marriage, and a bunch of other hedge issues that large portions of people actually do care about)

I mean, lets be honest here. The media companies can pump way more money into the system then SOPA opposers can take out with a boycott. If that weren't the case this battle would have been won long ago.

The only way you win this fight is by getting enough normal people to care about SOPA and that isn't accomplished through boycotts. It's accomplished by talking to people outside the insular tech community.

I don't know how you could be more wrong. But to go down the points...

Misguided vs Evil: An evil person tries to do the wrong thing while a misguided person does it on accident. How is that hard to understand? More importantly how is that not relevant. An evil person can't be convinced by their nature while a misguided person can.

Force vs Conversation: This is only true if the people passionate about SOPA have the power to force someone to do something. They don't. Their goal is to convince enough people to join them so they will have the power to do something.

On companies going down in flames: First, GoDaddy is not going down in flames. The internet community clearly doesn't have the power to do that as has been shown. So trying to deal from a position of power when you've been proven not to have that power is a strategy.

Second, what point does this example make? You're trying to make companies give up support for SOPA but, BY DEFINITION, these are companies that already support it. They can't go back in time and not support it. So how does killing GoDaddy even after they've folded do anything productive?

You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

I’ve been saying this for a while now and it’s only getting truer: the SOPA war is being lost because the people fighting against it have let hatred for their intellectual opponents compromise their case.

Rather than treat the other side as misguided everyone insists on treating them as evil. Using force as the only tool rather than trying to convince people.

Look at all the people who are STILL attacking GoDaddy! The point of a boycott is to give the company a chance to be in good standing again if they do what you want. If you then continue to attack after they’ve given in you remove any incentive for other companies to bend to your demands. This is very basic logic.

While on the other side the Media Companies are offering nothing but incentives. Read the last couple of paragraphs of the article. The Media Companies are rewarding Spain with all kinds of investments that they were holding up until the law gets passed.

I honestly think the media companies are going to give up on SOPA but only for PR reasons. They’ll then slip each individual component into other legislation so it goes virtually unnoticed. That’s what they did in Spain in that the SEL was a general law aimed at stimulus to maintain the economy not specifically about media (translate the “critics” section of this page: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_de_Econom%C3%ADa_Sostenible).

But that’s the problem with forcing people rather than convincing them. Eventually you have to look away and that’s when they go back to doing exactly what you tried to stop.

I could see how that line would tempt people to check-out of the article (and I can't blame you). But I think there's a reality to it we should pay attention to.

In a previous HN thread regarding this topic I asked why countries like Finland haven't overtaken the U.S. as far as success. Given their education system has been touted as dramatically better than ours for at least 20 years.

One of the replies I got was that these countries generate more well-rounded individuals and that's why these countries tend to do better on happiness surveys and such. And maybe that's true.

Maybe it's time to accept the reality that not all people want the same thing. That Americans have been taught to strive for excellence and that inevitably leaves others behind. While Finland values equality over all and is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of societal wealth so as to not have kids who think they need to work day and night to succeed.

I think I phrased it badly but the point still stands. The authors point was that teachers pay is the deciding factor in results. My point was those countries pay the same Denmark and the UK yet are getting better results. So pay is not the deciding factor.

You could very well be right. My point was the authors' conclusion didn't match their underlying data. So the validity of their underlying data didn't come into play.

Well Yes but there's a backstory to that.

If you talk to teachers who worked in the pre-union days they'll tell you it was a nightmare. Because it was run by low-level politicians (school board members) who were cowardly to the point of causing havok.

Put it this way. Most people don't know the political positions of their individual school board members. So if someone comes to their house and says "this member is bad" they'll generally vote against them on the theory of "better safe than sorry". Which meant every crazy parent who thought their kid was treated unfairly would raise a fuss and get teachers fired because the Principal answered to the School Board members and those members had extremely tenuous holds on their position. Meaning teachers were getting fired fairly regularly, often for doing nothing wrong.

Teachers Unions were born out of that abuse. The problem now is we've swung to the other extreme. Where even teachers who are bad can't get fired. But I wouldn't say the problem is the union contracts. If anything it's that we haven't found an appropriate metric for measuring teacher performance.

This seems like they walked in looking for proof of their already established conclusion. If you look at Finland, Australia, Korea, Japan and New Zealand you see a cluster of countries who are paying their teachers well and who aren't getting results (Edit: By this I mean the countries below them aren't getting results yet are paying the same amount). Compare Denmark to Finland or Spain to New Zealand and then explain to me how the authors' thesis rings true.

Plus we have anecdotal evidence that contradicts their conclusion in the U.S: Individual State salaries vary pretty significantly ($37,000 to $59,000) yet education results don't seem to reflect those salaries

Teacher Salary By State: http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state

State Education Rankings: http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/september/state-education-ran...

I don't entirely disagree with the thesis that making "teacher" a more revered position will draw better people to it. But there are clearly other factors at play that the authors chose to disregard because they wanted to prove their already established conclusion.

(If it were me I'd be comparing Switzerland, Germany and Sweden and trying to figure what the differences are there)

What they could, and are discussing doing, is defining Hacking as terrorism. I heard this from my own congressman's mouth and that's why this scares me. Because there were a log of Senators and Congressman subscribed to Stratfor and this is exactly the type of incident that might push them to act.

How about this...

Bradley Manning posted two types of information. War Footage and Diplomatic Cables. The War Footage was unpleasant to watch but didn't document anything that wasn't already well known (at least to anyone who paid attention to Iraqi Civilian Casualty Numbers). As such no change has been made by the government.

The second group, diplomatic cables, actually caused harm. The whole point of diplomacy is to avoid war. Manning leaked info (such as state department officials' personal opinion of other world leaders) that made it harder to deal with them. Hence making diplomacy harder and war more likely.

I think the larger point with the Stratfor hack and Manning's actions is it's dumb to release indiscriminately. Good reporting has always involved inside sources but those reporters targeted the actual corruption and only released that.

When I said plan for success I didn't mean PHP can't scale it was related to the lower argument that very few people under 25 uses PHP anymore.

(In truth the benchmarks I've seen show PHP is faster than modern languages)

The point is from a management perspective being able to hire cheap junior programmers is a significant issue. Finding someone young, cheap and experiences in PHP is hard. Even harder if you want the people you hire to be passionate about their job (using yesterday's technology makes you seem like a dinosaur to many)

Trust me I've been on the other side of this. I, to this day, believe 80% of startups would be better off using ASP.NET MVC. But if I were building a startup I wouldn't pick that as my platform. Because the most talented young developers don't want to work with Microsoft technology.

Honestly I'm not even going to bother with your last argument. If being clear cut could automatically cause everyone to agree we wouldn't have political parties, religions and any host of other organizations based around disagreement.

Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’ve been trying for a year to pull myself away from C# and work more in Python yet I still gravitate back to C# for my “serious” projects). I don’t consider the “we have experience in this” argument as terribly valid (why ever move to something new if experience means that much to you).

More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. Assuming you’ll be hiring junior programmers it makes a lot more sense for your experienced co-founders to learn something new then trying to teach your junior programmers something old.

(Look at any programming language that's fallen out of favor in the past and you'll see the salary of coders in that language goes up as the language's popularity goes down)

The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution (“cooler than php” is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them

Biden was knocked out of contention for the Democratic Nomination in 1988 because he copied a speech delivered by British Politician a year earlier (and even went so far as to fudge his own familly history a bit to make the copied lines work)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_presidential_campaign...

Visual Studio Express is a free version Microsoft makes available so it isn't like you have to buy Visual Studio. Here's a good tutorial on writing a quick Windows Phone 7 app using VS Express: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/18/building-a...

Maybe...except people in congress have private lines which they use to communicate to the people they need/want to talk to. The public lines are only used for constituent and other public calls. So really what you'd be doing is blocking their constituents from calling them.

So the congressperson isn't losing any calls they needed to take and the only person being punished is their secretary. In the worse case scenario that congressperson could have a bunch of constituents who object to SOPA and you'd be blocking those calls with your own (which the congressman couldn't care less about if you aren't in their district)

This is not new. Here's someone complaining about the same message in 2009: http://www.nullamatix.com/godaddy-nightmare-express-written-...

It does show bad customer service on GoDaddy's part but it isn't some conspiracy to prevent SOPA protestors from leaving.

I almost think you're kidding here. It's called a popup.

You use Dropbox's already existing functionality to make a copy file. You then compare the changes and if they don't conflict you merge the files (while backing up both just in case of error). If they do conflict you send a message to the tray application which displays a popup showing the conflicts and asking for a choice. This isn't rocket science.

There are certainly places where that wouldn't be feasible like video editing. But I don't buy the argument that "because you can't do everything you should do nothing". Again I point out this took me a weekend to do with office documents and I didn't work through the night to accomplish it. So you can't really tell me it's out of the grasp of a company that has millions in funding.

How is it not realistic to solve it? Or more to the point how is sharing suppose to realistically work if you don't. If you say you're going to allow people to share files then you have to account for the very common scenario of simultaneous use.

And (as I said below and got downvoted for) it isn't that hard. We use Dropbox for Teams and I back it up with a custom application using components from a company named Aspose. They allow me to read Office file formats and combine files where needed.

If I can do that in a weekend then why shouldn't Dropbox look into doing it?

binary comparisons are great if you aren't looking at shared files but once you get into a situation where two different people can be editing a file at the same time it really helps to know what data you're dealing with rather than just trying to do a straight binary comparison.

You could very well be right about what they're planning but if that's the way they're going it will end up killing them in the end. As someone who administers Dropbox in a team environment the biggest issue is its creation of "Copy" files whenever there are simultaneous edits.

I mean, think about it. If you're using Photoshop and your edits go into a copy file you basically have to re-do that work. There's no easy way to merge changes (I guess if you were working on different layers but still it's difficult).

There are already utilites that allow programs to read PSD files. I used ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php ) in one project and it worked fine for me. Actually, since ImageMagick is licensed under Apache2 my that may very well be what Dropbox is using to accomplish this.

Even if you're an Android fan you have to admit this is a pretty uneducated analysis.

First, he's guessing on the revenue (while conveniently not mentioning how much Apple makes per phone in revenue)

Second, saying "Apple is getting beaten by a license-the-software-to-everyone strategy" is a little ignorant. History is never finished and claiming Microsoft beat Apple in the PC wars ignores the last decade of evidence that things are swinging the other way. You could just as easily make the argument that licensing works at drawing in users but users get so frustrated with incompatibilities that they eventually go to a more integrated solution. Which brings me to...

Finally, surveys have shown the true question of whether Android will crush iOS is in the buyers next phone choice. Do they stay with Android or is their satisfaction level so low that they're driven into Apple's hands? That question won't be answered for years.

I don't mean to discount Android's accomplishments which are significant. But this article about those accomplishments is just silly

Let me say first that I didn't down vote you (I in fact up voted you even though I think your comment was missing the point).

That said your comment misses the point. The article's intention, as far as I can tell, is to point out just how far the Executive Branch has gone in denying U.S. citizens their rights (under both the current and previous administrations). So much so that the argument can easily be made for indefinitely detaining a very high profile White House adviser.

So the post's point was "People's rights are being suspended at the drop of a hat" and your response was "he has rights" which is nonsensical.

Either everything I've ever learned about business is wrong or he is misusing the term business model.

I was always taught a business model is essentially a corporate version of a scientific hypothesis. Meaning it has to be defined and tested in a way that can be repeated by others

(successful business models can fail if the people using them don't execute them properly but that's the equivalent of a scientist not reproducing the environment of an experiment properly)

In the case of Louis C.K. his celebrity filled a very important aspect of the business model which is "the method by which customers are enticed to pay for the goods being delivered". Mr. Wilson tries to gloss over that by saying...

"over time, if their work is good, their audience will grow and the investments they can make and the profits they can make will increase."

But that's not proven by what Louis C.K. did and in fact there's tons of proof on the internet that shows it isn't the case (it isn't hard to find undiscovered talent on the internet). Moreover the situation will only get worse over time. As more people try what Louis C.K. did it will add more noise to the already noisy internet making the true talent that much harder to find.

Companies like record labels originally existed because society needed middle men. People who would pay A&R reps to go to clubs every night and find talent. Then the label would deliver that talent to the masses. If you really want to make the Louis C.K. model into a business model everyone can use the question that needs to be answered is....

"how do you use technology to find the talent and then connect it to people who want to consume it?"

And Louis C.K.'s experiment does nothing to answer that.