I helped make Scatterdot, and would be happy to chat about some of the things we talk about here. We thought this might be a helpful thing for Slack app authors.
A funny thing about the family pack is that for at least one version of OS X, the only differences between the family pack and the single user version were a sticker that said "Family pack" on the front, and the price. The contents of the box were identical.
I think of this as a Kickstarter to pay for a year's worth of comics. These guys keep a schedule of three comics a week, and they're offering to do that in a novel way. They also have some stretch goals as well of things they'll do instead of dealing with advertisers.
It doesn't seem all that novel to me. They're just changing the source of their revenue from ads to Kickstarter.
You could argue that this lets them be freer with their art and writing, since they won't have to worry about offending their advertisers, but has that ever been an issue for them in the past? (The closest thing I can think of would be the Strawberry Shortcake comic, but that wasn't an ad-related issue.)
In some states in the US, it's illegal to ask for id for a credit card purchase. In all states, the credit card companies don't like it. Here's a good set of google answers about the issue:
This is all to say, credit card processing is incredibly complicated. Here's another quote, directly from the federal government [1]:
"MasterCard wants to hear about merchants who break their rules. Send the name and address and an account of what happened to MasterCard International, c/o Radio City Station, P. O. Box 1288, New York, NY 10101. The merchant's bank will get a stiff letter, ordering it to investigate and bring the offending store into line - or pay a $2,000 fine.
Visa enforces the same rules as MasterCard. "When we hear about a violation, we ask the bank that signed the merchant to get together with the merchant and see that the practice is stopped," Visa representative states. To report a merchant, send a letter to the bank that issued your Visa card.
American Express also prohibits merchants from asking for IDs. "All a merchant is supposed to do is take an imprint, make sure the signature matches and swipe the card through the terminal, to get authorization."
re: 1 - For user shared links, Facebook redirects to anonymize the referring profile. I suspect they forgot to do the same for ads, and it was an honest if frustrating mistake.
They didn't use to do this, the only reason they redirect now is so that if a link is deemed a virus of some sort they can easily stop it from spreading, and you can enable a setting so that before visiting every link you get an interstitial that tells you that you are leaving Facebook.
It seems to me that rating agencies should be paid by the institutional investors that buy the bonds, not the banks trying to sell them. That might help the incentives line up better.
Am I crazy? Nobody suggests this, and I think I'm missing something crucial here.
The problem is that the institutional investors buying the bonds are much smaller, and there is no way to keep the information from leaking. Therefore most of those investors won't be willing to pay for the bonds, and the ones that can pay will be paying less money.
That doesn't mean that this model is not viable. But it isn't viable at the kind of margins that the rating agencies would like to remain accustomed to.
Maybe investors could pool resources to start their own rating agency that would be answerable to them, and publish ratings for everyone to use? There has to be a better system.
The problem with that is that the ratings are a public good. Public goods have some counter-intuitive properties. Investors would have every incentive to individually contribute as little to the pool as possible as long as action happened. Economic theory says that one of four things is likely to happen. Those are:
1. The knowledge is worthwhile to a small group (often just one) of investors, who fund it. The memorable phrase for this is "the exploitation of the large by the small." (A practical example of this is OPEC and high oil prices. The complicated negotiations OPEC engages in illustrate the desire of members of the group to contribute as little as possible to provisioning the public good.)
2. An organization exists that investors belong to for some other reason which funds the ratings. (A practical example of this how people belong to AAA for membership benefits, but then AAA lobbies for road improvements.)
3. A coercive organization intervenes and forces the matter. (Virtually all government regulations fall into this category.)
4. The public good is not provisioned. (What happened to investors who wanted trustworthy ratings.)
Read The Logic of Collective Action for the classic introduction to this topic.
This seems somewhat similar to open source software, where there is also a free rider risk. This has not stopped large corporations from contributing to open source software, because there are often strategic advantages stemming from the software's existence and wide distribution.
I'm not sure how this applies to an investor funded rating agency. I don't know that there is any strategic advantage to large firms having accurate bond ratings publicly available, but it would be interesting to hear business models where there would be.
Normally there are transaction barriers that inhibit cooperation in providing public goods. However software has far fewer of those barriers. And so you get a situation where a network of loosely connected people each pursuing individual goals can collectively provision a public good.
I remember running across a footnote in The Logic of Collective Action saying that this was a theoretical possibility, but no example was known of it. (The book was written back in the 1960s.) In any case it is an extremely unusual example.
Rating agencies seem like an absurd idea altogether. Have they never heard of the perils of having a single point of failure? Much less a single point of failure that's a government-created oligopoly? Yikes.
It seems that businesses are just running on an outdated model developed when information sharing was a lot harder, so only condensed forms like quarterly reports and press releases were feasible. But now that information sharing is a lot easier, shareholders should be demanding more openness from businesses -- yes, today a lot of that information is considered to be a trade secret, but at the same time shareholders need to stop allowing businesses to get away with what's equivalent to deceit through "creative" accounting (e.g. apportioning profits/debts amongst subsidiaries). That's just a textbook example of exploiting information asymmetry. Shareholders should expect more information about the business' books and transactions. There must be some natural equilibrium between being open about transactions and protecting strategic advantages, but right now we have the functional equivalent to price fixing, er, information fixing -- companies don't release relevant information because "no other company does" and shareholders don't expect real operating information either because that's not part of the status quo.
Wouldn't an investment bank that was so confident in the principles behind its analysis that it was willing to list all its transactions in a continuously-updated XML file, despite the risk of copy-cats, seem like a pretty damn good investment? They wouldn't have to divulge their proprietary methods of analysis, just make their holdings public. This would greatly improve the efficiency of markets as investors could use their own proprietary methods to estimate the risk of an entity's portfolio management strategy when deciding whether to invest in it.
And there's definitely historical precedent for this -- the fabled value investor Benjamin Graham didn't go to great lengths to hide his trades, instead he'd use them as examples in his classes, and yeah, people copied him. And he still made boatloads of money.
Well, it's more subtle than that. The big ratings agencies are Fitch, S&P and Moody's. They are competitors for the business of issuers. So each one is incentivized to rate higher than the others, without blatantly being seen to take the piss.
The problem with complete openness is that it encourages short-termism. You see this even with quarterly results, companies that have recently gone public (and thus have minimal reputation) manage from quarter to quarter to quarter and are hugely volatile. Imagine working for a manager who only cares about the share price tomorrow.
The risk of your XML file is not copycats, it's front-running.
Setting aside the question of whether they needed a bailout, which I'm not qualified to answer, Goldman Sachs did receive federal assistance. The best link I can find is a reference to them paying it back:
Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful.
I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to download and install than other plugins.
I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.
They really don't and they really should. Building a plugin architecture where users could decide based on their local laws which technology to use when some may be patent encumbered would be a big win for open source, standards, and freedom on the Internet.
The Mozilla people already stated there is no technical reason they are not supporting H.264. It is idealogical. They are well aware that they could make it pluggable or use the system codecs, they just don't want to.
It seems like we went through this in the 90s with wmv/quicktime/etc. I can't recall why it failed & I'm not sure why it should be better this time around.
I see a lot of VP6 and Sorenson listed there. What we really have today is Flash/Flash/Flash. I'm curious about how much VC-1 use there is in the wild in the large Microsoft/Silverlight streaming video installations.
Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years -- if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges.
When they first implemented it, they got a special license to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily. Mozilla has absolutely distributed the Flash binaries themselves before, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.
There's no "special Flash installer". I think you're talking about the Plugin Finder Service, which is generic and works with any plugin. PFS serves metadata that points the user to the vendor's plugin download page (possibly to a streamlined installer built by the plugin vendor): https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS
The "special Flash updater" detects if the user has Flash installed and is out of date, and only if so, it points them to Adobe's website to download the latest version. This is likely to happen for all widely used plugins. Flash is the first because it's so widely installed. More details here: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-ke...
It's pretty easy to find this all out with a search engine, so I'm beginning to wonder if your "slightly incorrect" claims are deliberate misrepresentations. I'd question your agenda, but honestly I don't care. The facts are available for anybody with a search engine handy.
Sure it's theoretically generic, but is there a single other plugin available through Mozilla's PFS server as an xpi? They have records for the other standard plugins, but those all use native installers. I can't find a dump of their database, and it looks like there's no way to enumerate it through the API.
Gnash and swfdec are available via Debian and Ubuntu's independent PFS servers as an xpi in their Mozilla forks, but not through Mozilla normally since I don't think their UI will present multiple options for one set of <embed> attributes.
The feature exists solely because Flash doesn't ship in the default installs of Windows (or in OEM installs in NPAPI form), or any of the Linux distros (just OS X).
Mozilla are collaborators: they don't have the moral high ground here.
