As the author you can always re-release the code under MIT but once it's released under MIT corporations can whole sale rip your work off for their own profit. If you keep it closed source or GPL it then you maintain some breathing room from another company just swooping in and monetizing you code for their profit.
On the other hand, if you accept contributions while under a strict license like the AGPL but then decide to go MIT, you'll have to ask each contributor to relicense his or her work or remove that work altogether.
OP, if you see your project switching licenses down the road, you might as well look into CLAs, a whole other can of worms, or just stick with the least restrictive license that achieves your goals. I'd personally use LGPLv3.
I'm still confused on why facebook needs to be an app at all. They should just make the mobile browser version of their website the best way to experience facebook and then have people add the facebook mobile website to their home screen.
btc is backed by the same thing as usd and gold: the collective belief it is worth something.
You can try to gussy it up with arguments like “faith and credit” or “the military” or “you can pay taxes with it” or “has industrial applications”, but that’s not the basement level of determining value.
By early adopters in an MLM scheme. If you have conversations with normal people, generally older people who have more understanding and education of these things, they understand Bitcoin et al are MLM schemes - though the propaganda sure has strong narratives they've been evolving/changing over the years to see what sticks or feels more legitimate; all the while ignoring answering of questions relating to its unavoidable pitfalls.
It's an unnecessary and unreasonable transfers of wealth weighted from late adopters to early adopters.
There's a better way. Bitcoin only gained traction and aligned people primarily due to greed and ability to profit off of others simply because of adoption - furthering the army/mob of HODLers who are then become aligned financially, to promote Bitcoin via mostly propaganda, to 1) to push it until it's back to the price they bought it at, or 2) hoping it skyrockets - only because the majority of people are HODLing with their HODL rally call - to then realize a profit.
So of course there's a collective belief it's worth something - because you keep essentially tricking more people with propaganda to buy into it, making it seem like it has more value than it actually does - because the value it has is speculation; now the rest of society will have to fight the greed and mob of HODLers from regulatory capture, as the current latest adopters don't want to be "holding the bag" at the end when there's finally no one left to buy the bag from them; do you understand how, this is why Bitcoin is also correctly compared to a Ponzi scheme as well? Or you'd be happy being the last person to buy Bitcoin?
Funny thing is, no pro-Bitcoiner is incentivized to create a system that would work just as well - better in fact, being able to then do policy like the Magnitsky Act - where there isn't a wealth transfer simply due to adoption; the incentives aren't aligned to be good for society, it's driven by a selfish mechanism - it's just the next evolution of the Finance Industrial Complex, and that's accessible to all via decentralized, global reach it has. BUY NOW!! GET IN EARLY!!
You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.
Be careful with that; during disconnection of the magnetic part, the pins carrying 20 V on the cable can make momentary connections with other pins on the portion of the connector remaining in the machine; if this happens, the port may never work again (for charging, or for anything else).
How do you figure? Apple has a minority market share in celluar phones in literally every country in the world, and other than the US, doesn't even hit 25% market share.
Microsoft, at its peak, held a worldwide monopoly of over 90% of all desktop computers (I believe it was in the mid 90s).
How is Apple's (not a) monopoly worse than Microsoft?
I suspect parent poster's use of the word monopoly is slightly off here, but they do have somewhat of a point. It's not the wideness of Apple's market share that is in question, it is the depth of the control. Apps can literally go extinct overnight seemingly on a whim (we don't like this type of tech for reason X, or that type for reason Y, etc). The IE situation was an abuse of MS's dominant market position, but the cost of developing a browser and distributing it for free was high enough that MS had to cherry pick one or two areas to bulldozer into. Apple's cost of doing the same is nil, as they don't have to compete, they can just disallow access entirely.
iPhone market share is very close to 50% in the US. You can't have a successful app launch in the US without making your app available on the iPhone. Apples policies affect the entire market, especially in the US.
If they're not already a monopoly in the US, then they might as well be since they have the same market control as a monopoly player. Also, a strict majority market share is not required for a company to be considered a monopoly. It's up to the courts to decide. [1] [2] [3]
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
> In determining whether a competitor possesses monopoly power in a relevant market, courts typically begin by looking at the firm's market share.(18) Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred," they have demanded a dominant market share.
> The plaintiffs, meanwhile, will argue that these alternatives don’t matter. “The fact that they have a [less than] 50 percent market share of smartphones doesn’t mean they don’t have a 100 percent share of the distribution of iPhone apps — which they absolutely do,” says Rifkin.
> “The fact that they have a [less than] 50 percent market share of smartphones doesn’t mean they don’t have a 100 percent share of the distribution of iPhone apps — which they absolutely do,”
Yes, that's true, but it's not a particularly meaningful or insightful statement. That's defining the market in terms of the answer you want. Any company has a 100% market share if you define the market as "things that only that company can do".
"The fact that they have a [less than] 50 percent market share of operating systems doesn't mean [Microsoft doesn't] have a 100 percent share of Windows -- which they absolutely do", says Captain Obvious.
The question is, has there been a detrimental effect for customers?
Practically, I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as Rifkin wants it to be, because (at least to me), the drawbacks of a single-vendor app store (of which there are a significant quantity) have to be weighed against the benefits of a single-vendor app store (of which there are a significant quantity).
> the benefits of a single-vendor app store (of which there are a significant quantity).
I'd say the great majority of those benefits are going to Apple.
There's nothing that Apple does in their app store that a third party app store owner couldn't do. Anyone can curate apps.
As a customer of the Apple app store, I've absolutely experienced the detrimental effects of Apple's behavior. For one thing, I can't build software for my own device because Apple is too concerned about losing control. There are also whole categories of software that I simply cannot have because Apple won't let them be sold in their store.
They already lost the anti-trust case to decide if they can be sued again by customers. I hope they lose the next one too.
This is why all account numbers should end in a 6 to 12 digit checksum verification, to protect against human input error. If this bank had implemented this simple precaution then the entire situation would have never occurred.
This system already exists and is called the IBAN (although it has only two checksum digits, mod 97). I thought it was used for all bank transfers in the EU now, but apparently the old system is still in use in the UK.
Almost all the UK banks still use sort code and account for transfers, even though the accounts have IBANs.
It is often possible to perform foreign transfers using destination IBANs, but they seem to prefer (or require) the traditional approach for UK Sterling transfers.
I can understand why they retain the old system, but it would be useful if they in addition offered the ability to specify the target via IBAN for domestic transfers, since they already do for transfers to the rest of the EU.
Even when doing a SWIFT transfer, the IBAN (if one has it) is useful.
I do not understand why they retain the old system? What possible good effect can this have?
Japan has the same system of sort/branch codes and account number, but when I enter those here the recipient name is automatically filled out, making incorrect transfers pretty much impossible (unless, I guess, your mis-entered transfer to Mr. Sato is transferred to a different Mr. Sato instead)
It's baked into various systems, protocols and conventions? Sweden and other EU countries which didn't adopt the Euro also retain their traditional account numbering systems
A part of the Eurozone transition was that all local systems were replaced by SEPA SCT/SDD, which are inherently IBAN based. But SCT/SDD only apply to Euro transfers, and so in non-eurozone locales the existing infrastructure and nomenclature is retained
> Japan has the same system of sort/branch codes and account number, but when I enter those here the recipient name is automatically filled out, making incorrect transfers pretty much impossible (unless, I guess, your mis-entered transfer to Mr. Sato is transferred to a different Mr. Sato instead)
There is a Confirmation of Payee system coming soon in the UK (which most of the large banks have, unfortunately, delayed). It works slightly differently: it will compare the name, but not _generally_ tell you the name of the recipient because that comes with privacy concerns
It was actually the "same" account number at a different Barclays branch. The account-holder may even have been largely unaware that the sort-code was a critical part of the unique identifier for his Barclays account.
Yeah, so the problem is that the account number plus short code had no checksum validation. This is the banks fault for implementing a rubbish account system. A proper system would look more like this sudo code:
where 1234567890 is the account number, 1234 is the short code, and then 6 characters are typed in at the end are a checksum.
The short code is unique. So if you type in the correct checksum but not the correct short-code the fully-qualified unique identifier does not pass the validation step. Like-wise, if you type in the correct short-code but not the checksum then the unique identifier also does not pass the validation step. Thus, the user is protected against typing in an incorrect short code.
UK Sort Code + Account Numbers _do_ have check digits (Its not precisely a check digit as such: they have rules that they have to obey to be valid). Because of the age of the system, there isn't one _consistent_ rule for all sort code and account numbers, but instead a document listing the various methods and a couple of tables saying which rule(s) to apply and how
In most cases the sort code is included in the checksum
6 digits are far, far too extreme from a usability perspective. We have IBANs as world wide unique account identifiers. They are very unwieldy with up to 34 digits, depending on country. And only 2 of them are checksum digits. Most mistakes are one or two wromg digits or missing/extra digits and that can be caught with 2 properly designed checksum digits.
