And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps - and the telcos are doing just fine.

It's a radical notion, I know, for a customer to pay the cost of a commodity that they use, and for the supplier to charge the customer the cost of that service.

And that's hopefully where the Kickstarter model can help.

1. Crowd-source the funds needed to make a bunch of content.
2. Release the content to the Intertubez with an open licence that allows copying but preserves attribution.
3. Let the tubez do all the work of distribution and the social media do all the work of publicity.
4. Sit back and accumulate fame (but not money) for your work
5. Go back to 1 and leverage your newly increased fame to crowd-source more money for more content. Repeat until rich, dead, or you start charging too much for too low quality product and your audience hates you.

I don't see why this wouldn't work, and it would completely invert the piracy "problem" into a solution.

It's as legit as everything in .co.nz, and we're generally a law-abiding bunch here of hobbits here in New Zealand.

  Australia is the country you're probably thinking of that's entirely populated by criminals.

Spherical cows, obviously.

I'm an xkcd fan, but this chart is just really, really bad science and abysmal health physics. It pervasively confuses the crucial difference between one-time external exposure ("radiation"), and ongoing internal exposure from ingestion of bioaccumulating radioactive isotopes (such as iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137). They're completely different exposure mechanisms and you simply can't compare them directly - except to say that eating or breathing in a radioactive particle is orders of magnitude worse than standing next to that particle and absorbing the radiation through the skin. Inverse square law for the win (or lose, in the human's case).

http://www.orcbs.msu.edu/radiation/programs_guidelines/radmanual/16rm_exposure.htm

Can you explain this maths for those of us who didn't learn in college that 2=3?

Sure, but the military kills people, creates terrorists, and threatens the destruction of all life on earth. That's so much more important and worthwhile than just taking care of our elders and and allowing poor people to have dignity. So we should axe all social programs and put the money into a giant death laser on the Moon; that would ensure Freedom forever.

Arguably, if the entire universe is a market, the "market" does sort everything out, in that everything that exists, exists because the universe allows it to exist.

This of course makes "the market will provide X" indistinguishable from a null statement. Of course the market will provide X; the market is everything that's possible. But at what price will it choose to provide X? "Zero quantity of X for infinity dollars after infinite years" is a perfectly valid solution of the supply/demand equation. And "the market will provide War, Terror, Starvation and Death for 1000 years for 99% of the population, and Bohemian Luxury for a tiny elite" is also a perfectly valid solution.

To subvert a common libertarian example - if someone points a gun at me and says "dig your own grave or die right now", they're not actually taking me out of the market mechanism to do that. They're simply providing a rational choice (dig or die), a service (not immediately shooting me), and a charge (my digging). It's a valid contract, and I have the choice to accept or reject. Obviously if I reject the contract I may die, but - Atlas shrugs - that's life, isn't it? The market as a whole sees no self-interest in my continuing to live unless I provide it with services, and if we get really technical and precise about decoupling every private action from empathy, just *because* someone pulls the trigger on the gun they privately own and control, doesn't mean I'm *necessarily* going to die - I do also have the choice to dodge out of the way, etc, etc. There really is no there there in libertarianism; we can keep playing the "I'm not responsible for your happiness, even though I can logically foresee that the result of my actions will hurt you" game forever.

The problem is that as humans we have actual concrete needs which we would like actual concrete solutions for inside a feasible timeframe, and not just an abstract "well, you'll get that if/when it's possible for whatever price you're willing to pay". And sometimes those solutions require more than just shrugging and assuming someone else will solve them, which is what free market theory boils down to in the end.

Yep, and this quality of monopoly leads directly by logical progression to literal medieval-style feudalism (property-owners consolidate; property-owners rent the use of their property to others who may re-rent it; society devolves on an accelerating spiral into an overclass of owners with all the rights and an underclass of renters at the absolute mercy of the owners, without even the right to purchase the justice of their peers; an optional hierarchy of idle rich monarchs, dukes, barons, etc being possible in between; the decentralisation of violence allowing wars to becoming a common means of settling disputes). All from one little right called "property". Actually, from two things: from nominal ownership of "property" being abstracted and separated from its actual use and upkeep by the people who work it (the renters, serfs or workers); and from this abstract property right being allowed to trump all other actual human rights such as food, safety and justice.

It's fascinating and a little scary how quickly libertarianism deconstructs itself even in theory. The Path to Serfdom, indeed.

The past is prolog; now we each go forth to write our own sequel.

And that attitude towards correctness and security is exactly why we have a Net filled with tens of millions of infected botnet hosts.

A "jab" at violence-porn which creates more media product of exactly the same kind that it claims to mock, and profits exceedingly by it.

Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that's not only "unsubtle", it's exploitation, not satire.

So, just like any writer working on an existing universe, like Marvel, DC, or Star Wars, then.

"Okay, so focus groups this summer show that teen vampires are the new hotness. Write us a six-novel series set on Endor immediately after the destruction of the Second Death Star involving Ewoks, summer school, vampires and flying unicorn ponies. Make Luke Skywalker and Han Solo the main male leads, but you can't give either of them any kind of dramatic arc. But he needs to be dark and brooding and intense. Oh, and since Disney just bought the rights, we'll need you to have Minnie Mouse and the Little Mermaid as competing romantic interests. And we've also got videogame rights, but no guns are allowed, so if you could work in at least two platform-jumping sequences, that would be great. We need to achieve a target audience buy-in of at least 80% with the first book, rising to 95% by the third, and your pay will be scaled accordingly. You've got six weeks; that should be enough to complete the series, right?"

Welcome to the Real World of legacy code and conflicting requirements.

And once again, Welcome to the Cloud (tm). This is what you get when you follow a glib marketing trend which has no fundamental basis in reality.

If you don't have technological means of control over the use of your data, don't expect legal means of control to be worth the electrons they're transmitted with.

The concept of cloud computing isn't, in itself, fatally flawed. But the current stampede into putting everything online in proprietary, obfuscated, gated services without defining sensible encryption and backup protocols is.

And the whole point of terms of service is that they can change.

Welcome to The Cloud (tm). Where your data is our data forever, and our advertisers/governments/sponsors are your new best scary friends.