fnid2

There's not really any other option within the current environment of quarterly reports. We have to think with more vision.

The best solution would be to stop using oil as an energy source now with any purpose except to get us over the hump. We don't even yet know how to get over the hump, realistically. The options are solar, wind, and gravity and all of those options require so much energy that we could exhaust remaining supplies making them productive enough to satisfy us all. It will take a lot of solar panels to cover the sahara, connect it to the grid, etc.

In the meantime, we're powering inefficient combustion engines and growing corn to, you guessed it... power inefficient combustion engines...

Until Facebook negotiates plans with the cell phone providers that sneak apps onto your phone which relay your location to facebook even without your approval...

It's basically a commercial for the water repellent shoes. Of course it is, those shoes are SOOO water repellent, you can actually walk on water with them!

We store oil and we find more places to extract it. Furthermore, as consumption leads to higher prices, we will produce more efficient and productive ways to extract it.

I think it's bubble-nomics. People sign up for services for the same irrational reasons they buy stocks -- they perceive a future value.

Two largest populations and growing. Shared land mass. Declining resources -- many of which are only in China. Water is running out. Energy. There's a possibility it may be contained to an economic war, let's hope. They are more advanced and conscious societies than the west, so they may have the intellectual aptitude to avoid violence, but when people get hungry and thirsty, they get more aggressive -- naturally.

Production is declining, but consumption is increasing, so it could be less than 30 years. I also believe that oil will be come more valuable as a pharmaceutical base, for fertilizer, and plastics than for energy. We'll have other sources of energy that we will use to extract the oil, so the 1:1 rule may not apply. As long as the energy costs to extract it are lower than its value for all uses, it'll still be extracted.

Could it be possible, that a collaboration between two organizations, one entering the bid or ask at 0.01 and another quickly buying it or selling it could be arranged such that the particular trade could go through and could trigger lots of stop losses?

You can submit a trade at any amount. During high volume episodes, you'll see trades go through that are vastly "out of whack" so to speak.

It could be a mistake or it could be a strategically planned incident to cause this.

By my math, it doesn't really take a huge amount of money to move a stock in a particular direction. If you spend a couple million buying a stock at high asks, then the value of the underlying market cap of the company could climb by billions in a single day.

There are companies who trade large orders in the millions of shares over long periods of time to avoid pushing the stock too hard in the short term. If you wanted to push the stock hard in one direction, knowing you'll reverse that action with more money, it could be, and actually is lucrative. Companies do it all the time. This one was more noticeable, but not out of the realm of possibility.

Yeah, I thought about that, or what if HN isn't around. There is http://www.longbets.org This is the perfect bet for there.

If alexa isn't around, we can substitute the most popular website ranking website.

I'll take the top 5 metric charity bet. I bet that by May 7, 2015, Facebook will not be in the top 5 sites as ranked by Alexa.

I think it's an easy metric free of dispute. In 5 years, we may argue, "What is a social network?"

But I highly doubt facebook will be in the top 5.

I choose my high school as the recipient of your money when I win. :) I'll be back here in 5 years to see who the winner is. Adding an item to my calendar now. Will respond to this post with the identity of the recipient institution.

No, now... You're putting words into my mouth. I have known for years that people would complain about facebook's privacy violations and their pressure to make money would cause a user revolt. I've also said they will change their privacy policies to the worst interest of their users.

Don't discount the validity of that prediction simply because I did not put a time stamp on it.

Many people have said, and probably will say soon, that facebook will always be around and always be part of our lives and as integral to it as television. Those predictions are bad predictions, yet people argue them.

I did put some date based predictions in another comment above, what is your prediction?

It's much easier to predict what will happen than it is to predict when.

For example, I can make the following predictions:

  Facebook will collapse
  India and China will erupt into violent war
  We will experience a water crisis
  Oil will run out  (that one is actually easier, about 3 decades)
  Iran will be invaded
  

These are all fairly obvious predictions. Sometimes math can be used to zero in on dates, but for most of us around here, we simply do not have enough information to calculate exact dates. We can only speculate.

The article is analyzing the future of facebook, saying today, that it will not be around at some point, which is contrary to many current opinions.

But I say the media will start to discuss an inflection point in Facebook before the end of the summer. They'll talk about how its oldest users are leaving, but its still getting new members. It will talk about a decline in the length of the average lifetime of a facebook account. It will say fewer people are logging in as much. Fewer new apps are being developed. Again, all by the end of the summer.

By the end of this year, we'll start to see lots of "will xyz.com replace facebook?" Apple could launch a social network. Bloggers/journalists will ask, "When will apple create a social network?" They'll start to point out growth in other social networks, they'll talk about where the facebookers are going. All this by the end of 2010.

By the end of 2011, facebook will be passe among the internet elite. The oprahs of the real world will start saying you can interact with them somewhere other than facebook. Commercials on TV will mention some other network instead of mentioning their facebook page like they do now.

By the end of 2012, the blogosphere will be talking about what mark did wrong, why people thought it was different, why it was the same, lessons the new start up social networks can learn from his mistakes.

By the end of 2013, facebook will be a distant memory...

I don't believe it is and here's why. It's easy to link to your facebook profile. If you create an orkut profile, you can add a link to your facebook profile there and simply stop using facebook.

Eventually, it'll get too costly to maintain the infrastructure to support facebook or the customers -- that is, the advertisers -- will think another ad network is hotter and people will forget about facebook.

You could say, "But all my messages are in there. All my photos and my farm..."

But I'm a techie and I have had computer hard drives fail and take my life with them. Within a week, I forgot all about it. Sure, I wish I had that awesome paper I wrote for some class or another or the code for some program I wrote in high school that drew pretty pictures with mathematical formulas, but I'm okay with out it and life goes on.

And life will go on without facebook. Life goes on without myspace and linked in and friendster and...

Looks like we are pretty much on the same page then.

You gotta understand, for hackers, most things are binary: black or white. Either facebook is great, or they are evil and the switch just got flipped.

Hackers are trend setters on the web. Watch them.

As a consultant to the dot-com industry around the turn of the century, I traveled a lot. I took a lot of long cab rides from airports to downtowns. I talked to lots of cabbies. At some point, I knew the end was near. I knew the end was near when cabbies started asking me if it was a good idea to invest in some particular technology stock or another. Why are cabbies investing in Juniper Networks?

Recently, I started another side business. One of my cousins who knows almost nothing about technology came to me and said, "Let me tell you something. I know how you can get your business started and I want to tell you about it."

At this point, I was already skeptical, but she continued... "There's this thing on the internet called Facebook and millions of people use it and you can make millions of dollars there..."

Oh no, I thought.

But I knew the end was near for facebook. I've known for quite some time. Years in fact. I can't explain to them why I don't join facebook anymore than I could explain to those cabbies why they shouldn't put their money in to Juniper Networks or pets.com. Decisions like that can't be rationalized to those who see a bright future in their bets.

But history tells us a lot and history moves very fast on the internet. Facebook is not sticky. Share prices are not sticky. Users can leave and investors can sell -- and they do. And they will.

Facebook will fall far and it could, and I suspect is falling fast.

Perhaps, but I've always been a little ahead of the curve. ;)

Seriously though, it'd be impossible for anyone outside facebook to provide any hard proof of their utilization. From the outside, it's all speculation.

What is your estimate on FB's future? Here's my prediction: Facebook users revolt. Another social network evolves, or an existing one becomes the dominant, perhaps orkut or ning, or foursquare. I'm not sure I'm just an observer, but I think within the two to three year mark, facebook will be about as popular among the "in crowd" as myspace is right now and we'll be talking about some other network in 10 posts to the front page of HN.

Facebook will try to get someone to buy them for maybe a couple hundred million. Tons of investors will be angry. Mark will be declared the egomaniac who didn't know when to quit and he'll struggle for the rest of his life to find another successful project.

Just a gut feeling. I've... we've known something like this was coming for a long time. Remember, MarkZ is a bit of an egomaniac. Have you seen what happens to egomaniacs when their world starts to crumble around them? Not to get overly dramatic, but you know the Russians gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a lot of money.

You know, in startup land, we tend to think the world works differently than the world works. Mark's investors are probably putting a huge amount of pressure on him right now and the activity on the web over the past few weeks has sent FB users leaving in droves.

HN used to be full of FB fans, API fans, technical fans look how that has turned in just a couple weeks...

If you were facebook and you saw your subscriber base growing and growing, then plateau, then start to decline rapidly -- uncontrollably, what would you do? What would you do if you knew that your worth was dropping just like that.

Imagine having millions of dollars in the stock market today when this mess happened. You'd be sick right now. That money won't come back. Facebook's users won't come back and Mark's chances of keeping his paper billions is evaporating right before his eyes...

I can see it. I can feel it. The writing is on the proverbial facebook wall.

In this case, Google is even worse because you don't even have to use google to be tracked by their systems. You can avoid facebook's privacy violations by not using facebook, but you can't avoid google's privacy violations even if you don't use google. You have to explicitly block their ad servers to do that and they have lots and relatively noone knows how to do it.

They will keep it forever and ever. It takes a long time to make millions of dollars off an address list.

That's exactly right, except the investors are also the customer and they have to be satisfied as well.

Facebook's usage is starting to decline, so they have to do everything they can -- while they still have users -- to maximize the value of their graph for the investors who are going to do whatever they have to with that graph to salvage what is left of a crumbling social network.

People on facebook right now are going to be getting spammed for years and years and years, in the mail, on their birthdays, to their cell phones...

You have no idea the lengths to which people will go to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars...

It amazes me that you ever had faith in facebook. Why did you think facebook would be different than other social networks? Did you think facebook would be around forever? Did you think all the work, energy, and time you put into facebook wouldn't simply evaporate?

Imagine if you had invested all the time you put into facebook into your own life. Making your life better. Making the physical world around you better.

That's what saddens me the most about facebook. All the hours that are going to evaporate. All the productivity there could have been.

Facebook is like a battery that stores everyone's labor and we are all about to collectively chuck that battery in the trash. Well, not "we all"... I never signed up because I knew this is how it would turn out.

Not to pour salt in the wound. Quite the contrary. It's more like a caring hug when it all falls apart.

The font in that document is really hard to read at times. Pixelated and blurry. And the little tool bar at the bottom popping up all the the time is annoying.

That said, I applaud the effort and see it as a HUGE step forward from the old flash version.

No need to pay for the API, just the trades you make with it -- which could get expensive.

Interactive brokers has an API for their software. It's fairly easy to use.

http://interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=programInterface...

They say it right on the web page and I'll repeat it here: Try it with paper trading first! Bugs in these kinds of algorithms are costly.

In many cases, you are breaking your contract with the ISP. Read almost any residential contract and it says the subscriber agrees not to run servers for example. My ISP in california even blocked port 80 upstream.

Limiting the ability to share movies online is not an infringement of free speech.

I can't imagine where you got that I was saying that. The goal of patents is to allow innovators to share their ideas, while still protecting their ability to profit from the idea.

The goal of patents is to reduce the risk of competitors taking profits for an idea without investing the R&D in the idea.

You'll have to provide a reference, because this one disagrees, saying (on page 3):

  Shipping rates vary by type of commodity 
  Each cargo owner pays a different rate 

http://www.cunninghamreport.com/uploads/backup_docs/585-Port...

CSX has pricing rates by commodity http://www.csx.com/?fuseaction=customers.pricing_lists

It's obvious to anyone who has shipped almost anything that costs are different by size and weight and scale.

I don't know if it is clearly positive for the system as a whole, because if telecoms can charge more, and generate more revenue from existing infrastructure, then they can get on to newer, fatter, and longer pipes.

Right now, they are basically stuck paying for all the copper they bought. They can't buy new fiber. They can't install new towers, etc...

Personally, I think it'd be great to have a public wireless grid, but think of the privacy issues. The government could have much easier access to our emails.

But back to your point, the toll roads I travel on charge more for semi-trucks than they charge for passenger vehicles.

I understand the thought that the public is investing in these wires, so they own them, but the public invests in all sorts of industries, including pharmaceuticals (via the NIH), vehicles (buying GM), mortgages (fannie may, aig), but yet they don't regulate what gm charges for cars or Pfizer charges for their drugs.

I wonder why we believe it is okay for the govt to meddle in some areas and not others? Where and how do we draw the line?