Question it on these grounds:"Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers."
Firefox users are a small percentage of web users so blocking those users won't lose website owners much money but by blocking that small percentage of users they'll reap "tremendous financial rewards"? Just thinking about it makes my head hurt!
We're going to block Firefox users because a small handful of them know how to install ad blocker and thereby drive them to our competitors sites and drum up traffic for them instead.
That makes no freakin' sense at all!
Even before I used ad blocker I was using other forms of blacklisting to kill ads (and so is everyone I know, mostly because I'm happy to show them how to do it). And even before the blacklisting I NEVER CLICKED A SINGLE AD!
Ads are annoying, never advertising anything I'm remotely interested in and consume bandwidth needlessly. If I want to buy something, I'll google it and go right to the source. I don't need to be fed your annoying Flash video about winning the "free iPod". I don't care!
It seems the Russian courts aren't any different than the US courts. The judges in the US courts (particularly the higher courts) routinely look for ways to dismiss cases on technicalities like this rather than actually having to decide something. Who would've thought?
It's not just Shakespeare they're talking about here, it's fictional literature in general. And I agree wholeheartedly with them. Good fictional works are about the fundamental ideas and feelings that make us human.
There are far too many engineer-types that have studied nothing but math and physics for their entire lives and end up wandering the planet as near emotionless automatons (I know because I knew a lot of them in school and work with several of them). These are people who saw no "real world value" in fictional movies or works of literature if they were not grounded in the world of science that they knew.
And thats frankly pretty sad. Because most of these people will end up as the kind of "guy in the pits" scientific or engineering workers who do the hardcore number crunching for the guys that have the more well rounded visions. Very few of them ever rise to become the "go to" guy or the team leader because they don't posses the necessary emotional or social skills to effectively manage those positions. They never become the one that comes up with the idea, only the one that works on the ideas of others. They work to make the things that make other peoples lives a better place without ever really living a life of their own. Most of the guys I work with do 12-14 hour days almost every day! Even on weekends! And I can almost guarantee that the team leader goes home after 10 hours every day and rarely (if ever) do you see his face in the office on the weekends. Because he has something more than work in his (or her) life.
The sciences are truly awesome but like everything else in life you can have too much of a good thing. Balance is key.
And that's the purpose of good fictional stories (whether told through literature or movies), they teach us a lot about how to be human. How to have compassion and empathy for others and how to express our emotional connection to other people. And the danger of discounting Shakespeare or Hemingway or the works of Plato as having "no real world value" is that you ignore a lot of what it is to be a part of humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Question it on these grounds:"Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers."
Firefox users are a small percentage of web users so blocking those users won't lose website owners much money but by blocking that small percentage of users they'll reap "tremendous financial rewards"? Just thinking about it makes my head hurt!
We're going to block Firefox users because a small handful of them know how to install ad blocker and thereby drive them to our competitors sites and drum up traffic for them instead. That makes no freakin' sense at all! Even before I used ad blocker I was using other forms of blacklisting to kill ads (and so is everyone I know, mostly because I'm happy to show them how to do it). And even before the blacklisting I NEVER CLICKED A SINGLE AD! Ads are annoying, never advertising anything I'm remotely interested in and consume bandwidth needlessly. If I want to buy something, I'll google it and go right to the source. I don't need to be fed your annoying Flash video about winning the "free iPod". I don't care!
It seems the Russian courts aren't any different than the US courts. The judges in the US courts (particularly the higher courts) routinely look for ways to dismiss cases on technicalities like this rather than actually having to decide something. Who would've thought?
It's not just Shakespeare they're talking about here, it's fictional literature in general. And I agree wholeheartedly with them. Good fictional works are about the fundamental ideas and feelings that make us human.
There are far too many engineer-types that have studied nothing but math and physics for their entire lives and end up wandering the planet as near emotionless automatons (I know because I knew a lot of them in school and work with several of them). These are people who saw no "real world value" in fictional movies or works of literature if they were not grounded in the world of science that they knew.
And thats frankly pretty sad. Because most of these people will end up as the kind of "guy in the pits" scientific or engineering workers who do the hardcore number crunching for the guys that have the more well rounded visions. Very few of them ever rise to become the "go to" guy or the team leader because they don't posses the necessary emotional or social skills to effectively manage those positions. They never become the one that comes up with the idea, only the one that works on the ideas of others. They work to make the things that make other peoples lives a better place without ever really living a life of their own. Most of the guys I work with do 12-14 hour days almost every day! Even on weekends! And I can almost guarantee that the team leader goes home after 10 hours every day and rarely (if ever) do you see his face in the office on the weekends. Because he has something more than work in his (or her) life.
The sciences are truly awesome but like everything else in life you can have too much of a good thing. Balance is key.
And that's the purpose of good fictional stories (whether told through literature or movies), they teach us a lot about how to be human. How to have compassion and empathy for others and how to express our emotional connection to other people. And the danger of discounting Shakespeare or Hemingway or the works of Plato as having "no real world value" is that you ignore a lot of what it is to be a part of humanity.
And some of them are just plain fun!