solstice

> The economics of it are pretty straightforward—customers simply don't value most content at what it costs to produce it.

Well, but right now consumers don't even have the option of paying for single pieces of content as their only option usually is to buy the whole subscription to NY Times, etc. (The situation is a little like in the music industry where people had to buy a whole album to be able to listen to the 2-4 really good songs on it.) If it was easier for people to pay/tip for individual pieces of content, good content could amass a significant number of micro donations which in aggregate might become enough to cover the costs incurred in the creation of the content piece.

People are willing to pay if it's made easy. The idea of Flattr (which soundd similar enough to what is proposed here) was that you top up your flattr account with let's say 20 usd and designate a monthly pay-out, let's say 5usd. This means that for the next 4 months flatter will pay out 5$ to creators you flattr, divided by the number of times the user clicked on the flatter button. If the user flattrs a lot of sites, then each site gets sth like 10cts. If they only click a few times, each site gets proportionally more of the 5$. The basic idea is that the user doesnt have to deal with thinking about exact amounts of money ("is this article really worth 50cts? Or should it be 2$?"). They set a monthly limit they are comfortable with spending on online content and it reaches the content creators they like. Unfortunately Flattr didn't really catch on in the USA, I think and is now largely irrelevant and I haven't followed its development since several years. (Anecdotally, it was quite big in the German podcasting scene...)

(Re: micropayments) Sigh... Flattr seemed so promising back in 2011.

Agreed. Similarly, the whole internet of shit phenomenon looks a lot like environmental pollution to me: People cutting corners and shirking responsibilities to increase profit leading to an internet environment infested by botnets and worms...

The image of the Chernobyl liquidators just popped into my mind, each worker only allowed to shovel radiative shit for 90 seconds before having a mandatory time out. Treating content moderators in a similar way seems like a step into the right direction from a mental health perspective

I think there are much more important issues like space: Improperly constructed and maintained landfills (i.e. most of them) leak pollutants into the ground (water) and offgas significant quantities of methane. (No sources handy right now...)

Cool! Now i'll be able to preserve my voice from 20 years ago!

So it saves the "hi, this is John Doe. I'm currently not available. Leave a message after the beep!", correct?

It would be cool if they could dive to a safe depth to wait out storms and then emerge against once the storm's over

I disagree with your first sentence in its sweeping overgeneralization. The second sentence seems somewhat true but there's a reason why eBay failed in China: they ported their English website over without consideration for the idiosyncrasies if the chinese market and netizen.

These two sentence are also not intrinsically linked. Just because there has been protectionism does not mean that the China apps are automatically worse. In fact, a bunch of features of weibo and we chat have found their way to Twitter and WhatsApp. (One example are voice messages which were a core part of wechat from the start. They were important to get people in rural areas or older people to use the app, due to the difficulties of typing Mandarin, especially dialects.)

What an absolutely harrowing, hair-raising tale. Reading this, it's hard for me to fathom the reasons why this guy and the other migrants are willing to subject themselves to this. What courage...

I know that the Chinese language version of WeChat has been capable of doing exactly this for several months already.

I think it was something along the lines of unfair business practices due to public broadcasters being able to use taxpayer money...

Why do the French have such a hard-on for copyright enforcement? (Honest question)

When temperature is measured in electronvolt you know things are serious...

Anecdotal: they work, but slowly. So for large files I use a vpn

The Decentraleyes Firefox extension alleviates this somewhat as it caches popular things like jquery (that are often hosted by Google) locally on your device, making foreign websites load quicker.

With climate change and rising sea levels those coastal areas arent going to be long-term habitable anyway

Highly recommended. Perfect for a flight or train trip

seems that they are trying to replace Google's push API with a websocket-based solution. See https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/1106

I agree. It also seems quite suited for keyboard navgation and editing. It has a linux version and the tutorial is very well made.

Flashfolders for Windows adds a small bar on top of open/save dialogs and makes them sooo much more convenient:

- go directly to currently open explorer window!

- paste path!

- two-click favourite folders

- two-click history

- switch to most recent folder (lasts through restarts)

loads at startup, consumes 2MB of RAM and doesn't slow my 2005 XP laptop down at all

How about django-public-project? The following is from their description at http://django-public-project.readthedocs.org/en/latest/:

Django Public Project (DPP) is a specialised content management system written in Python/Django for building an information website around big projects. It is open source (BSD licence) and can be used by civic groups to monitor the progress of publicly funded projects but also from within governmental institutions itself to bring transparency in the proceeding of a project, inform the interested public about what is going on and thus enhance the acceptance of the project by the different stakeholders.

It is currently being used by the investigative comittee of the Berlin city parliament in order to investigate the massive clusterfk that is the city's new and very disfuntional airport (BER). The source code can be found at: https://github.com/holgerd77/django-public-project

Regarding participation of ordinary citizens, the docs say:

On DPP websites users can comment on nearly everything and connect their comments to various elements of the project. Comments are then shown alongside every connected element. All admin users having activated the “Receive new comment emails” in the admin user settings receive an email after someone sent a comment and can then activate the comment to be shown on the website.

http://django-public-project.readthedocs.org/en/latest/users...