k-mcgrady

You're looking at the wrong parts of Instagram. Instagram Stories and Direct Messaging (both of those = Snapchat minus discover) have really taken off. I think everyone I know has switched away from Snapchat. The main reason being that they were also already on Instagram and it now does what Snapchat does plus non-ephermeral photo sharing. Why be on both in that case?

Even then it doesn't really matter. I'm pretty sure it's now fact that the US broke the United Nations Convention against Torture during the war on terror. I seem to remember the USG even admitting this. Nothing was done. For now the US is powerful enough that it will do what it wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Comma...

As a user of both they've always seemed like two completely different services to me. One is streaming, the other a store. One a social sharing based platform, the other mini-sites for each artist with terrible discovery. Bandcamp would need to change a lot to replace SoundCloud's use case.

NB: Not shitting on Bandcamp, it's great and I use it.

>> he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy

It's hard to believe he can say that with a straight face. Is he supposed to advise on topics he understands that the government doesn't or is he supposed to be a 'yes man'?

>> this should be impossible according to Article 50

I thought it could be stopped at anytime with agreement of all member states. According to Lord Kerr (who devised Article 50):

"It is not irrevocable. You can change your mind while the process is going on.

During that period, if a country were to decide actually we don't want to leave after all, everybody would be very cross about it being a waste of time.

They might try to extract a political price but legally they couldn't insist that you leave."

Can't speak for OP but a lot of people's problem with Brexit isn't just the fact we won't be in the EU anymore but the things that come along with that. There's a lot of stuff our government wants to do that the EU has prevented until now. There's also the 'extreme' element in society feeling they can be more open now (racism, hate crimes, etc.).

Surely it can be stopped by the courts though? They've helped force the UK back slightly on mass surveillance already [0]. I'm sure a challenge will be brought on the basis of freedom of expression (Article 10 ECHR) if any governments move to ban encryption. I mean it's an incredibly obvious impediment to free expression. I know personally if encryption goes I will be self-censoring a hell of a lot more (particularly when it comes to texting more extreme jokes for example).

Of course, with the UK leaving the EU and potentially tearing up the Human Rights Act it might not matter but as for the EU having power to stop this in EU member states I think the courts are the most likely solution.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3245181-C-203-15-amp...

>> I think there should be as many unions as employees like.

I don't know enough to speak to the 'being forced to pay dues' point but having as many unions as employees want defeats the purpose of a union. You need everyone to come together as one to have any power. Have multiple unions and the company can play them off against eachother.

>> To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit. See what he says. If you have any leverage, you can use it. If you don't have any leverage why would the union fare any better?

If people that work on the production line doing unskilled tasks got together and complained about safety and refused to work until it was fixed the company could easily fire them and hire another bunch of people tomorrow. If the union comes to the company with the issue on their behalf the company has to listen because the union members will include skilled workers too and they company can't afford to lose them.

I was just about to mention this. For anyone interested Professor David Nutt[0] was fired from his role as the government's chief drug advisor after claiming ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/30/drugs-advis...

I think the problem isn't that the ideas/reasons for privacy aren't being communicated. It's that a lot of people are seriously worried they will be a victim of a terrorist attack (and the government tells them this invasion of privacy will protect them from that) and when they hear the other side's arguments they are happy to fall back on the 'I've got nothing to hide' argument. Honestly it's a nice mindset to be in so I understand why it's hard to convince them otherwise.

Are unions demonised in the US in a similar vain to socialism? i.e. made out to be an evil that don't work despite working quite well in many, many other countries? I'm seriously curious about this as I'm quite taken aback at the general hate unions are getting ITT.

>> IE It's not "better" when they sell it to someone who isn't Google

It's better in the sense that those companies can probably do much less with purchase histories than Google as they have less total information on me (whereas Google has email, web history, photos, etc. if I allow them).

>> name forgotten

SEPA?

You say it's not possible to imprison someone for an absolute liability offence. You also say it would be hard for a case like this to come to trial. Surely it would still come to trial but the punishment would be something other than prison?

>> But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted.

What the parent and I are saying though is that DJ mixes were a small part of the content in the early days. It wasn't created to host DJ mixes or marketed as that initially. Producers/songwriters/amateurs were the bulk of the content. SoundCloud could have built a decent business by banning copyrighted material and only dealing with original works. There was never any need to get into the messy licensing business.

>> "It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example"

I didn't. I said they had gotten as far as SoundCloud which was close to the right product but not close enough.

>> SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture.

As a user, why should I care? After the redesign the product became abysmal to use. There are major bugs (like reordering spotlight in Chrome) which have been around for years with no fix. That's a paid feature, broken in a major browser for years. There are also still (or at least there were recently) some pages using the old interface. They wasted time building Go instead of fixing the almost great product they already had.

>> You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).

Again you're not understanding what I'm saying. You seem to think of music (or SoundCloud) as only EDM. When SoundCloud started it was largely amateur and indie 'analog' musicians and songwriters (i.e. people playing instruments and writing their own music). None of that needs licensed. Those people, despite not making any money, were paying SoundCloud £9.99 per month to increase their storage space and see listener stats. Obviously I don't know how many but there were badges on the profiles to indicate a paying user and there were a significantly high percentage. There was quite a large community of this type of music around a lot of genres. None of it needed licensed. If you stick to indie artists you don't need to deal with licensing. People doing mixes can use MixCloud which automatically licenses uploads some how.

So, my point is, SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material. It started off very legitimately and had a decent business model. They could have made a nice business out of it but like most SV businesses preferred to sink a load of VC money and 'grow' with no ultimate business model.

Edit:

>> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.

My comment was nothing to do with listeners paying - it was about artists paying. Artists have always been able and willing to pay for spotlight/storage/stats.

>> So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them.

You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. Then you waste time, don't develop the platform, and abandon the indie artists that got you to where you are. You need to take the point in context of the rest of my argument. When Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora exist why would you enter that market when it's not the market that you started in and you have no chance of beating them? Focus on indie music and you have a business where people actually pay money for the service and you become profitable.

>> Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker.

Well that's how music discovery works. You have to go through rubbish to find the gems. If you want pro level stuff every time you should use Spotify/Beatport etc. I've been on SoundCloud since the beginning (since before it even became the go-to place for electronic music) and it was a great way to discover really good songwriters. You have to do some work to find them but that's part of the fun. SoundCloud tried to evolve into something completely different than it began as. Your expectations are a perfect example of how that skewed the public perception of it to the point where you and I believe it is completely different things - in reality it tries to be both but doesn't excel at either.

SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy. From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists. There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels.

But:

- SoundCloud neglected the platform.

- Then they did one of the worst redesigns of any site I've seen (try reordering a track in your spotlight [paid feature] in Chrome. Crashes the tab and has done for years. I need to open another browser to do that.).

- Then it became overrun with major label artists.

- Then they started offering features just to the big artists - various UI/branding options - (forgetting about the artists that got them to where they were).

- Then they did the whole paid streaming mess which they were never going to succeed in. Anybody could have told them that, I really don't believe anyone in that company thought 'Go' would work. I think they just needed to do something.

I'm not sure if they've taken so much money now that this isn't possible anymore but if I were CEO I would take it back to it's roots. Focus on the unsigned artists. Fix the site. Offer a distribution system (like CDBaby/TuneCore) so that SoundCloud can be a one-stop show for unsigned artists. Now you've got paid accounts (for stats/spotlight/unlimited upload space) and a small cut of distribution on all paid platforms.

I don't understand how in a world where more artists are getting big without label help nobody is offering a great platform for them. SoundCloud got very close in the past. BandCamp has gotten close too (although it lacks the social/sharing/viral aspect of SoundCloud). If SoundCloud does end up shutting down it's due to greed and poor management. Instead of focusing on what they do well and what people use them for they've tried to go after the money and they were much too late making that move to get any of it.

My point was you can side-load apps. As for that specific API even the official docs seem a bit confused:

"Except when you use the NEHotspotHelper class, you do not need to obtain entitlements from Apple to use Network Extension classes. However, you still need to enable the Network Extension entitlement via the Developer portal."

Gay rights/climate change aren't great examples. Those are areas Apple can lobby for change and make their own internal changes without breaking the law.

Take something Apple says it stands for - privacy. They will stand up for users to a point but they will not break the law. They will lobby and create technical solutions but they will not deny or disclose a national security letter no matter how BS or immoral the request may be. This is the same thing. By distributing VPN apps they break the law. They can still lobby for change or potentially come up with a technical solution that allows users to bypass the great firewall but does not break Chinese law (although I don't see how that's possible).

You can load your own software on to an iOS device provided you have access to the code. AFAIK iOS dev tools that enable you to load apps onto the device no longer require the $99 annual fee so if you download them you can side-load software.

The Digital Economy Bill in the UK is a first step towards a national firewall. There are also plenty of sites (torrent sites mostly) which ISP's are forced to prevent access to in the UK.

Article 19 protects free expression.

Insignificant number of users/purchasers probably. How many people don't have a smartphone with a music service on it? And out of the people that would prefer a device like the Nano for certain activities (e.g. gym) how many need a new version? I still have the first Nano that had a video camera and it works as well as the day I bought it.

Yes but there's no legitimate party in the UK against environmental policies like this (some other parties might make the deadline sooner but that's as much change as there would be).

Try Duolingo. I use it mostly on the web but they also have really great apps and at least a dozen languages supported.

I remember that (haven't used it in years though). I remember when it launched it was a big deal. I think the big deal here is that any reasonably skilled iOS dev could write this in a few hours. Yelp certainly spent more time and money doing it. So the big deal is the tools have finally reached a point that doing useful AR work isn't difficult.

I've only seen the video but I would guess it's using either Apple or Google's nav system. Also I know we live in a supposed culture of lawsuits but I doubt you're going to have any luck suing here. If you walk onto the road without looking you're an idiot. Especially when you can view the street through the device you're looking at.

I think what OP may have been hinting at (although I may be wrong) was a book/course/blog on what it's like working on a OS project and teaching other people how they can do the same while avoiding common mistakes.