This pointless dilution of the TLD space will be its own destruction.
We're heading towards a future in which TLDs are irrelevant.
1,241 karma · joined July 29, 2011
We're heading towards a future in which TLDs are irrelevant.
I'm not foolish enough to be in the IP business.
I'm only referring to 'alternative' means of acquiring music as a benchmark to elucidate these service issues. I'm not interested in justifying copyright infringement, and I have better things to do than get dragged into that tired old debate.
That would be a viable back up strategy, though. Have a rare copy of a recording? Make it widely available, then if your copy is destroyed, the odds of you being able to acquire an identical copy again are much improved.
I back up my music collection locally, and I have double-redundancy of sorts (it's backed up to a RAID 5 array on a file server, so in theory it could withstand the failure of the original drive and one of the back up drives), but if worst comes to worst I could just acquire everything again.
With a couple of exceptions they're just lossless copies of widely available music recordings...
Alternatively, I can go to a not-so-legitimate website, and be presented with 10+ different versions of the same album (originals, remastered editions, reissues, international releases, vinyl rips, etc.), each of which is typically available in all the popular formats (FLAC, MP3 320kbps, V0, V2, etc.)
I can plump for the FLAC, along with which I will often get high resolution scans of the source material, as well as a LOG file to verify the veracity of the copy. If I want to re-encode it, I'm free to do as I please.
Then to top it off, the legal services have the audacity to charge as much as a physical copy of the CD. I despair...
Perhaps related is the fact ostentatious displays of wealth are generally frowned upon. In the US it seems fashionable for entrepreneurs to become fabulously wealthy, then flaunt their wealth as 'inspiration' to other would-be entrepreneurs. In Britain, if not the rest of Europe, this draws resentment more so than admiration.
I don't suppose there's any harm in loading your children up with trivial knowledge, but I would certainly put more effort into teaching them thinking skills than specific knowledge.
These days, if you have the necessary thinking skills, the sum of human knowledge is within reaching distance. If you know how to research a subject, how to corroborate and verify the veracity of positive claims and theories presented to you, you can find out pretty much everything about anything in a matter of minutes.
I suppose it's the old "give a man a fish" adage applied to knowledge.
[1] I no longer make status updates, upload photos, like pages, create events, etc. Needless to say I've never clicked an ad.
That said, I think this trend is hidden from this dataset because it relates specifically to mass shootings, including only those incidents in which the shooter took the lives of at least four people.
I would hypothesize that each major shooting is followed in the succeeding months by a number of slapdash copycat shootings, in many of which less than four people are killed by the shooter.
The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
National networks are similarly outdated. This is the 21st Century, for crying out loud.
If a bunch of kids can propagate high quality 1080i/720p copies of television broadcasts around the world literally within half an hour of the show airing in its native market, the content owners themselves can manage the same.
Add on the baggage fees, landing fees, priority boarding fees, tax, credit card fees, etc. and the price isn't so impressive.
In most developed countries, real estate prices are artificially inflated by restrictions on the construction of new housing stock.
This is far from a simple case of supply and demand.
Not only that, but a business with questionable security credentials, that has already had one absolutely spectacular security cock-up (referring to the June 2011 incident in which any account could be accessed without a password for four hours)
Never used it, never will.
Someone let me out of this bubble.
Dropbox is obscenely overvalued, and has no place in the future.
People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave irrationally. That's the long and short of it.
That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not consciously take the lives of many others.
There was literally $14bn in investors' pockets that moved to Zuckerberg. That's how it works. They liked the cut of his jib, so they gave him money in exchange for a slice of his business.
If it hadn't gone to Zuckerberg, it could have gone to someone else, perhaps someone more charitable.
> In your parellel universe, there was less money to donate.
Zuckerberg may have created wealth, but he didn't create money. The money supply is controlled.
> No, that's wrong. When considering someone's impact on the world, you only need to consider their impact.
A person's impact on the world is determined by both the things they do, and the things they fail to do. We could argue at length about whether acts of omission ought to carry moral or legal punishments, but they are undeniably part of the overall impact that you have on the world.
> And it also, now, includes giving 500 million dollars to charity, which will probably save at least some lives (doubtful it will have no impact or a negative impact, imo).
My point is that, sure, Zuckerberg is cycling money into charitable causes, but in his absence the very same money may have been cycled in greater quantities, at a greater rate.
That's the bar at which you measure Zuckerberg's character.
You have to look at both acts of commission and omission when you're considering someone's impact on the world.
Zuckerberg is donating an eye-watering amount of money to charity. That's cool, but what about the rest of his wealth? His net worth is something like $14bn last time I checked.
That makes this a donation of around 3.5% of his net worth. No more impressive than someone with $200k of assets donating $7k to charity. In fact, given diminishing marginal returns to wealth, it's considerably less impressive. $500m is nothing to someone with a net worth of $14bn. It's just some digits on a piece of paper.
Consider a parallel universe in which Facebook never existed, and the $14bn that accrued to Zuck through his stake in the business was scattered amongst the many investors from whence it came. Who is to say these investors, between them, would not be donating an average of 3.5% of their net wealth to charity?
I whitewalled my Facebook a long time ago, don't 'like' any pages, and provide minimal personal information only to friends.
I don't use Twitter because I figure, even if I had an account purely to follow people, the individuals/organizations I follow could come back to haunt me. The same applies to YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc.
If everyone had perfect critical thinking skills, misreporting such as this would cause no harm. There would be no need for defamation laws.
A news organization would make an incorrect assertion, and instead of leaping to conclusions, people would interrogate the assertion, evaluate the supporting evidence themselves, and reserve judgment until the facts are clear.
In the meantime, if you can't help but discuss or act on information of questionable accuracy, qualify yourself appropriately. "If Ryan Lanza was the person responsible, he is a monster!", not "Ryan Lanza is a monster!", etc.
Personally I don't think attacking the WBC aligns with the central tenets of the 'Anonymous' movement. Anonymous likes chaos, freedom of speech and expression, causing offense, etc.