MSNBC:
“As I thought more about it and talked to other people, I realized that this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook,” he wrote.
So of course he thought that the right way was to collect all 100 million and put them up for download. What an imbecile.
CityNews on new restrictions for young drivers in the Province of Ontario:
Drivers 21-years-old or younger caught with alcohol in their system will face an immediate 24-hour licence suspension, a 30-day licence suspension and a fine up to $500.
Of course, we could just teach kids that drinking in excess and driving is a stupid thing to do—but, hey, that would mean actually doing the job of a parent. Instead, let’s simply make it a crime to drink a beer1.
From MSNBC:
Bethany and her parents couldn’t afford the fees, so Bethany decided to remove the words and music form her video and run it as a “silent movie” instead.
She should have posted a video dressed as Chaplin and giving these idiots the finger for three minutes. Disgusting.
The Guardian:
The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.
Making people pay or register to access your content causes a loss of readership 1. Big surprise.
But let’s look at this from a different perspective. Let’s assume the Times had a million readers before the paywall went up, in which case a 90 percent drop would mean that they now have around 100,000. Let’s also assume that the Times used to sell ads and rake in a $10CPM fee (which is probably high—but it doesn’t matter).
If every one of those readers read one page, they would generate $10,000 in advertising. If every one of the 100,000 “paywall” users forks $1 to buy access for one day, they generate $100,000 in fees. In other words, it would take ten times as much usage from ten times as many people in order to generate the same revenue without the paywall.
Now, I’m no big fan of paywalls, but maybe these people have realized that newspapers are in the business of selling content and not eyeballs?
This blog doesn’t get a lot of comments, which suits me fine—I prefer quality of discussion over quantity of words.
However, comments are moderated and, inevitably, the following happens:
The reason why moderation is on is simply to weed out spam. Generally speaking, I let any comment through, regardless of whether they agree with what I say or not—if I only wanted people to agree with me, I wouldn’t allow comments to start with. In fact, the system is set so that, unless I decide otherwise, once a user’s first comment has been allowed, future comments will be published without any further moderation. Basically, I just want to make sure you’re not trying to sell me Viagra. And who knows, in twenty years I may change that rule, too.
So if you post a comment and it doesn’t immediately show up, please refrain from writing me and accusing me of trying to silence your Very Important Opinion™. I may be simply busy, on the phone, out, or maybe I’m just sitting on the can and need a little time to myself. Remember, my house, my rules. Thank you.
Monty Wildenius:
David and I did however make a small mistake in that the shareholder agreement only said that “MySQL software” should be kept under an open source license. This allowed the MySQL management in 2006 to release Merlin, the MySQL monitor, as a closed source product, by claiming “this was not based on the MySQL server code”. So even if we, the founders, managed to keep the MySQL server free, MySQL AB was only an “open source company” until 2006.
Oops.
PCWorld:
The Motorola Droid X launched Thursday and is already sold out, exceeding Verizon’s demand expectations. The carrier had said that there would be no Droid X shortage, but the initial online stock of the hot Android smartphone is now exhausted, with the next shipping date pushed back to July 23.
Obviously, people buy phones because they’re open.
Jason Garrett-Glaser:
Now the best video encoder in the world — the undisputed winner of the 2010 MSU encoder comparison and the magic behind video systems by Google, Facebook, Avail Media, Vudu, Hulu, and many more – is available for everyone to use, even commercial software vendors. No longer do commercial application developers need to rely on overpriced and inferior competitors.
The proposed license fee is $1 per copy, which is reasonable, with a minimum of 10,000 copies, which is a kick in the face to small independent developers who might be benefiting from using x264 in their commercial projects. And these fees are on top of licensing fees that you will have to pay to MPEG-LA, though those don’t kick in until you’ve produced at least 100,000 units.
If you develop on iPhone, you’re probably better off waiting for Apple to reintroduce the encoding frameworks that they yanked out of iOS 4 (likely because they weren’t finalized yet), or you can just bundle an ffmpeg binary with your project and circumvent the licensing problems altogether.
Kotaku:
“For me, there is no feeling of admiration or no excitement whatsoever,” Miyazaki said about the iPad. “It’s disgusting. On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying.”
I suspect I won’t be touching my iPad for a while.
Newsweek
Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.
I’d like to offer a simple reason why this is the case: creativity is risky. A parent can steer their child towards a “safe” profession like medicine or law and be reasonably assured of a good, prosperous future. But technology-, art- and science-oriented professions are much more prone to extremes of success and failure that our society is not equipped to handle well. Similarly, in the business world, CEOs are not rewarded for taking risks: although companies usually benefit by genial risk taking, the person who takes the risk is often ostracized because investors are focused on short-term profit.
Examples of this are all around us: you don’t need to be a financial genius to see the amount of crap that floods our movie theatres to realize what rare gems the likes of Pixar are—particularly when you consider that Steve Jobs had to sink millions into it before it started turning a profit. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Lloyd Braun, the ABC executive who got canned for greenlighting what was, at the time, the most expensive series pilot ever produced by the network. The show? Oh, just a little something called Lost.