Although no one is ever "forced" to sign a contract, economic reality coupled with a near uniform application of employment practices is making this near impossible.
These contracts are taking the place of actual legislation. If every company makes you sign an agreement that says "I promise not to ever sue for sexual harrassment or I will not get any severance or pension", then in effect, the contracts have negated sexual harrassment laws. You then have to fight your employer in court, at which point the balance of power is very much against you.
I was presented with such an agreement when working for a company (X) that was bought by another larger company (Y). We became a division of the larger company. The agreement said "you may not work for any past, present, or future clients of company X, nor may you work for any past, present, or future companies of company Y, for a period of three years".
I fought like hell to not sign it, and in the end, I was told "we're not putting a gun to your head to sign this, but if you don't sign it, you will no longer be employed with us". It was enough of a threat to sign it. I left the company about 3 months afterward, didn't tell them where I was going, and never heard from them again.
OK, if everyone'e car had one of these devices it would make reconstruction of an accident a bit easier. However what happens if you're in an accident with someone who drives an older car?
Would the other driver be able to introduce your black box into evidence even though he had no such box? So he could say "I swear that I was driving within the speed limits, the black box shows that the other guy was going 5 MPH over the limit, therefore the accident was clearly his fault." You could only prove the speed of the car with the black box, not the other car.
That frightens me because it would only give a biased view of the accident. Maybe I sped up to avoid his speeding car. Maybe I was blindsided so I didn't hit the breaks. But only my black box would be revealed, so I'd be the only one with direct proof against him.
The article posted shows a very clear-cut example of how this technology could be good, and does not give any example of how it could be misused. Heck, by reading the article, you'd agree that a non-consenting blood alcohol test would be a good idea, but that clearly was not permissible in this case. Why would a non-consenting black-box reading be permissible? Why are the two things different?
There may be precedent for this. eBay was able to convince a judge to bar spidering of their site.
There is another legal concept called "Unfair Competition" which links copyright and facts.
Normally, facts cannot be copyrighted. However, this law seems to kick in when one company compiles and publishes time-sesitive information that it has taken from a direct competitor in a way which "free-rides" on the efforts of the competitor. It is usually applied to news organizations, when one newspaper sends a reporter to Iraq and a second newspaper (perhaps an evening edition) uses the "facts" in the first newspaper's article to publish the very same news.
I could see the instantaneous publishing of all competitors' prices as a violation of this legal theory.
This is an obvious falsehood. First, the assertion that all of the several hundred Indian nations that existed in North (and South!) America before the advent of the Europeans shared the same world view is overly simplistic.
This isn't what I meant. I meant individual land ownership. Clearly, since Indians had territorial disputes between tribes, there was a concept of "land control", but within certain tribes, there was no concept of "I own 50 acres and you own 2 acres, and therefore I'm wealthier than you". At least not in the tribes I've read about (those that occupied the area in the Pioneer Valley in Springfield MA).
The point remains; there was no concept of individual land ownership in many American Indian cultures; does that mean that land ownership is an artificially created "right"?
You then say:
Another obvious falsehood. Party B is quite willing to put his own resources into creating a copy of something-- or to pay someone else to create that copy. Party A's something remains intact and in Party A's possession. Party A can still use it. Party B now has something just like Party B's something. Party A does not have a natural right to profit, certainly not off B's hard work in creating a duplicate something.
I understand your point that the artificial scarcity imposed by intellectual property rights doesn't seem fair to you, but the concept of "when someone works to create something, everyone has a right to that work" is equally as unfair, even if it doesn't deprive the creator of his physical work.
You have defined this as a scarcity problem, and the solution becomes obvious to you -- that if I still physically have what I had when I started, then I am not harmed. It certainly makes sense when you look at it that way.
However, reduction of physical possessions isn't the only way to harm someone. It certainly is possible to take something intangible from someone else. I can ruin your reputation. I can sleep with your wife behind your back. I can sneak into your basement at night and sleep in your warm house. I can steal your identity.
In each those cases, you still physically have what you had before the action, but you are in fact harmed in an intangible way.
If you copy the work of another person, yes, he still has his work, but that work is worth less because it is less scarce. The creator of the work has lost control of the work that he himeself has created, just as someone loses control of their reputation when someone slanders them.
You are arguing on a very thin line; you are saying that it is OK if Party B copies Party A's thing because Party A doesn't lose that thing, and Party A has no natural right to profit. But can Party B claim Party A's thing as his own creation? Why not? Party A still has the thing.
The act of creation is valued much more highly in society than the act of copying. Your view of the world makes the two actions equivalent. That is clearly false to me -- creation is much harder to do, much riskier, and should therefore be rewarded.
If everyone is a copier and no one is a creator, it's easy to see that the result would be fewer new works created.
I agree with your point as well. This law was intended to benefit the public by encouraging people to create original works. Allowing people to be paid for their work by preventing others from stealing the "intellectual property" was offered up, and the release of the property into the public domain was the tradeoff.
I think the new "70 years after the author's death or 95 years from the date of publication of an anonymous or corporate work" law is absurd, and clearly is intended to protect corporations and/or multi-generational wealth transfers. I could be profiting from a work my great-great grandfather wrote under current law. How does that encourage the creation of original work?
I also think the original copyright term of 14 years is too short now. What people don't seem to realize is that copyright doesn't just protect the corporations -- it protects us from corporations too. Imagine if the 14 year rule was still in effect; you write a bestselling book, and 14 years later Universal makes it into a multibillion dollar movie and you get nothing from it. That hardly seems right, does it?
I would think a "greater of 40-50 years from publishing or until the death of the creator" law would work well. That would prevent someone from trying to kill J.K. Rowling to release her works to the public, it would allow Kurt Cobain's child to be taken care of for a while, and would allow old musicians to retire in grace. I also don't think that copyrights should be permanently transferrable (like to music companies) in the same way that people can't legally sell their personal services "for life" (i.e. mandated slavery).
I'm not sure I agree what is going on with these guitar tab sites. It is getting a little too close to "copyrighting facts". If a song is copyrighted, should a description of the song be copyrighted too -- isn't that like copyrighting the description of a sporting event?
On the other hand, if there is a demand for these tabs, why shouldn't the author of the tabs -- the songwriter -- be able to profit from it?
Where is the line between a copyrightable item and a fact? I'm not sure.
It would seem that you are saying that "property rights" are sacrosanct. To be held above reason, common sense, the general good of society, and not to be questioned under any circumstances.
No, I'm using the concept of property rights to illustrate that all "rights" are "invented" by someone, so that is an irrelevant argument against intellectual property rights.
Prior to Europeans coming to the US, Indians did not have the concept of "land ownership". Everyone could use the land.
In Feudal Europe, the Kings owned the land. Individuals did not.
Does that mean that land ownership in North America is "invented", and therefore should be ignored? Does that mean that if I want to use your pool, I can, because property rights are an invention perpetuated those who profit from it? Of course it doesn't.
So how can the author of the post I'm replying to claim that "idea that copyright infringement is theft was invented by copyright holders and those who profit from strong copyright protection.", implying that it's a fake concept and therefore should be ignored?
And how can the author portray "profit" in such a one-sided way? Party A creates something. Party B wants to use it for free, in essence "profiting" from the work of Party A, and denying Party A the ability to "profit" from something he created himself.
Why is it evil for the creator of a work to profit, but not evil for the user of that work to profit?
Yes, you're so right -- and property rights were invented by those who profit from owning and selling things. It shouldn't be theft to take something from Walmart either!
Out of 700 service job categories, 550 have the potential to be moved offshore. 78.6% of them. 99% of manufacturing jobs can be outsourced. If you eliminate service jobs, and you eliminate manufacturing jobs, what's left?
Unless you want to either be a plumber, electrician, or flagman just as you're hitting middle age, it might just be time to pay attention to globalization a bit more. The transformation of the US into a third world nation doesn't have to be inevitible.
Sure, the jobs may eventually come back as world economies equalize, but I think that may just take 20-30 years. That's a long time to be unemployed. I'm still waiting for the Chinese, who have had manufacturing for many years, to start importing vast amounts of US goods so the economy over here picks up. Unless you count nuclear secrets, I haven't seen it yet.
Of course (as always) someone will build a business around handling the government overhead for you but that'll cost, too.
Seriously, would you actually trust such a business?
As a business owner, your obligation is to the government. You can't transfer that obligation. If you owe the government $200,000, would you trust sending that $200k to some company that promised to pay the government, cross their hearts?
What if that company didn't pay? You're on the hook for the $200k, not that company. Sure, you can sue them, but if they go out of business, you can't collect a dime.
What if that company makes a programming mistake, and that results in you underpaying the government? Who do you think will pay the fines and interest? Here's a hint: you will.
I think that the risk of a private company handling that type of responsibility is too great. I don't think it will fly.
I worked for a company that had physical stores in 7 or 8 states. We would get audited by at least one state per year. The audits were harsh. They went something like this:
"You have shipped 80% taxable goods to a sample of 5 stores, 20% nontaxable, yet your sales breakdown is 78% taxable, 22% nontaxable".
"We think that this means that your clerks ring up taxable goods as nontaxable for the extra 2% of the time".
"Based on that error, you owe us the extra 2% extrapolated across all sales in your stores in this state over the past 6 years (the last time we audited you)."
"Please send us a check for $200,000 within 30 days".
It was brutal.
Now take that and extrapolate it across 50 states, and thousands of municipalities. Sure, they'd only hit the larger taxpayers, but eventually they'd hit the smaller and smaller merchants.
After all, we're talking about states and cities that go after baseball players' salaries, taxing them on 1/50th of their salary if they play in their state/city.
Aggregation is a bad idea, because aggregation implies networks, and networks would definitely require publisher exclusivity.
If you like/., CNN, and eBay, and I like/., Fox, and Yahoo, but Network A had/., Fox, and CNN, and network B had/., eBay and Yahoo, then we'd each have to subscribe to 2 networks and would receive twice as much access as we need. The only way to solve this problem is with fewer networks, which means less competition, which means artificially high prices.
Plus, the networks would also use their leverage against the publishers to pay the lowest rates possible. They would say "if you as a publisher don't like the $50/month that you're making, then your option is to leave our network -- because we don't expect too many people to cancel their subscription over you leaving".
If you subscribed to a network that contained 20 of your favorite sites, including/., and/. left the network, would you drop the network, or would you probably join whatever network/. joined?
True, this what the porn industry is doing, but porn content is more or less interchangable. One Busty Asian Model site is basically the same as the next Busty Asian Model site, but there's only one/.
Micropayments on a page-by-page basis probably won't work. It will put too much thought into the process of clicking on a link. That's not what the internet is about.
Subscriptions won't work either, because few people get enough value from a site to want to pay $10/month to access it. Plus, once your 20 favorite sites start to charge $10/month, how many sites will you subscribe to? Probably not more than one. Then you'll question why you're paying $50/month for broadband so that you can pay $10 to access content.
But I think there's another way.
I publish a website which gets about 10,000 unique visitors per day. It's considered a medium-size content site. Over the course of a month I get about 150,000 different unique visitors.
If I could get each visitor to pay $0.05-$0.10 per month I would be very, very happy as a publisher. I would then gross between $7,500-15,000 per month. That's plenty of money to keep me publishing, and I could then devote my resources 100% towards the site rather than to the job I hold to keep the site going.
Now look at this proposal from the consumer's point of view. How many sites do you regularly use in a typical month? 20? 50? Let's say you use 100 sites in a typical month, and that each one charged you $0.10 per month for unlimited access.
That's $10 more for internet per month.
In the grand scheme of things, $10 for 100 unique content sites isn't all that much. Plus, not all sites on the internet would charge for their content, perhaps some would try and entice visitors with "free" content sites, and then try and sell advertising or products to cover their costs, similar to how things work today.
With such a payment method, there would be tons of people clamoring to create original content. If that content is good, the creator would be rewarded with plenty of visitors willing to pay $0.05-0.10 for access to the content. If it's not that good, the creator will not be rewarded all that much.
Look at a site like Google, which gets tens of millions of unique visitors per month. Would you pay $0.05/month to use Google? Of course you would. If they get 10,000,000 uniques per month, don't you think they could use the extra $500,000 per month?
The problem with trying to make money from each visitor right now is that floor price for what a site can charge in a single payment is realistically about $5. Once you get under that, the fixed costs to process the payment are too high, especially when you figure in things like credit card chargebacks. $5 is more than most users would pay for content from a site, even if you say that the $5 is for an entire year.
I know that if I was not a publisher and there was an easy way for me to pay $0.10 for unlimited access to a site for a month, I'd pay this without even thinking about it.
I'm not buying your argument. The IT field is somewhat of a unique animal because there are so many quantifyable skills -- dozens of programming languages, operating systems, databases, and industries.
When jobs get posted, the ad usually runs like this:
Wanted: programmer. Must know Java using JDBC interface to Oracle 8.1.2 running on Solaris v2.1.2, in conjunction with Bea TP system, 10+ years in the insurance sector doing fixed asset reinsurance in the UK. XML a plus.
You don't usually see that type of ad for other professions. Sure, there's specialization, but not to the degree possible in IT. I think that IT job requirements are insanely narrow. Yes, it helps to hire someone who has done the exact job you're looking for in a previous life, but with a solid foundation 75% of the IT force can perform jobs outside of their direct experience. Yet no manager is going to take the risk, because if they hire someone who fits the description and that person fails, they don't look bad, but if they hire someone nontraditional and that person fails, it can be their head. The reward isn't worth the risk to them.
Addressing your original point, unless someone is going to be doing some very hardcode C programming, and the job is for dedicated C coding projects, why would they need to write a routine to traverse a linked list? Sure, it would be helpful for them to understand the theory behind the question, but why do they need to reinvent the wheel?
I'm looking at a job posting for my own company, for a senior DBA. Look at it:
"This position requires 3 to 7 years of experience in the areas of general database administration, DBA experience in Oracle 8, 8i and 9i releases, and experience with Oracle Parallel Server or Real Application Clusters and Oracle Advanced Replication. The ideal candidate will have 2 to 5 years of programming experience in C, SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Developer or similar, and familiarity with Oracle 8, 8I, 9I and GUI development tools. Strong written and verbal communication skills are required. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics (with Computer Science focus) is required."
We don't use C in this company -- at all!. We don't use GUI development tools either. This job description was likely taken from some HR magazine or something.
If IT hiring was a bit more creative, and the IT profession was a bit less "throw the employee away when the technology changes", we probably wouldn't need H1B employees.
Once, in this country, companies were expected to train their employees to keep their investements up to date. Now, employees are expected to work 60+ hours a week and are supposed to train themselves in their free time. The fruits of this method are just becoming evident; tens of thousands of "obsolete" IT people, and tens of thousands of H1B imports. That's a shitty national policy, something that will derail this country's economy.
I have no precise facts to back this up, but I believe that the internet is slowly contracting -- dying -- because the amount of available information is shrinking. I don't think this is a case of me having the "when I was young, the snow was up to my waist" syndrome either.
I find that when I search for information on topics, I get mostly links to sites to buy products. Or links to sites that don't work anymore. I might get one or two good links, but not often.
For example, I wanted information on police scanners last week. That sounds like a common topic for people to publish information on the internet, right?
A google search brought me, in the top 10 results:
2 links to APBNews.com, a site which has been defunct for a while (I think since 2001). Those were the top 2 "relevant" links.
A couple of local newspaper sites that link to their area police broadcasts.
A couple of places where I could buy scanners. Note, most of these places were selling for full MSRP, so even the merchant links don't really help, since if I buy from them I'll pay more than a store.
One or two amateurish sites devoted to scanning, but with stale information. Some of hese sites offered information if you purchased it from them for $10-20. I'd be better off buying a book.
Now from some of these sites, I was able to piece together some information on the topic, mostly by uusing some information from the merchant sites, and some from the amateur sites, but I was expecting to find a couple of "semi-pro" resources devoted to the topic, a place where I could have most of my questions answered.
This isn't the first time I've experienced this. I search for information on how to remodel my house, but I find that there really is little out there anymore -- just a bunch of small merchant sites, often spammed so that the top 10 search results all redirect to the same merchant.
I believe this is happening because there is little incentive to create fresh, updated content on the internet anymore. Sure, you'll get people creating a website and maybe spending a weekend updating it, but it's really not like the old days, when you could get information on any subject, no matter how obscure, updated daily or even weekly.
I have a feeling that the internet's days as a font of information may be running out, because there is no way to run a quality, high-traffic website for free forever. It may be better than any other source of information, but I believe that soon, people will be heading back to libraries and bookstores for their information, because it just won't be there on the internet. What a shame!
A lot of music stores near me, in predominantly Black neighborhoods, advertise that they sell "mix tapes". When I've been in NYC, I've seen mix tapes to be basically illegally recorded "greatest hits" from various artists, usually the popular songs of the day. These have always seemed fairly illegal to me.
I wonder if the RIAA is going to go after these people, and if this is going to raise an uproar in the Black community; these tapes seem to be part of the culture.
Well generally you don't hire the entire country when you set up shop. Of those who are educated the education system is first-rate, or so I've heard.
Interesting observation. India is apparently adept at using its economic resources by only educating the cream of the crop. That means that more money is available to the smartest people.
Here, in the US, education is more of a right. The education dollars have to educate everyone, not just the best and brightest. Hence, the best and brightest get less education.
Based on the theory that education spurs innovation, is it possible that the US is at a disadvantge because it chooses to "leave no child behind", compared to countries who are satisfied with 60% illiteracy, 80% poverty, but 20% who can beat the pants off anyone from the US?
So many reasons it is impractical
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
I am not a "the earth can recover from anything we throw at it" person. I believe that we should be conserving fuel. However, this car, and the others like it, are not at all practical in the US for the following basic reasons:
1) Although a 1 or 2 seat car might make sense while commuting to and from work, owning a $10k car just to commute to work is impractical. I would need another car if I wanted to drive my friends and family anywhere, or if I wanted to buy anything larger than a toaster oven. Until gasoline costs $1000/gallon, owning two cars, one for commuting, one for other usage, isn't economically realistic.
2) With all the SUVs and 18-wheel trucks on the highways, it would be suicide to drive one of these cars. I doubt that insurers would even insure them because they would be a fatality magnet in an accident.
3) What do you do if you're not 100% in shape, and weigh more than 150 lbs. as a male adult, or are just plain claustrophobic? Driving this car would be worse than a 10-hour coach plane trip in a middle seat between two football players.
I think that if you gave me this car for free, I wouldn't drive it, because of the safety/comfort issues. Add on a price tag surely over $8k, and it's a no-brainer -- only the most environmentally fanatical of people will buy cars like this. And that doesn't add up to enough money for it to be worth the carmakers' effort.
If I wasn't being directly affected by ad blockers, then I wouldn't care, but each ad you block is like preventing money from entering my pocket. Plus, when you come onto my site, you consume resources. That's just the way the internet is. I need to try and recover costs of serving you those pages, and short of converting to a pay-per-view site, advertising is currently the only way I can do that. So ad blocking is not only depriving me of revenue, it's jacking up my overhead because you're still using my site.
If it was just you blocking the ads, it wouldn't be a problem. However, more and more people are using ad blockers, and they're even being integrated into mainstream software like AOL and Mozilla/Netscape. My hosting costs are going up (I'm up to a $250/month account due to the traffic on my site), but my revenue is dropping (the amount I made from non-popups last month was about $90). I make up the difference with popunders -- if there was another less obtrusive option, I'd use it, but there truly are none right now.
If I didn't use popunders, I would either have to go pay-per-view or take my site down. I don't see either option as particularly appealing, nor do I see those options as "in the spirit of the internet". And going pay-per-view is technically a lot harder to manage; I don't think I'd do it if it meant just covering my costs, since the hassles of taking credit card payments far outweighs the few dollars I could earn per month.
Again, each individual ad-blocker is harmless, but when 20, 30, 50 percent of the people out there are doing it, that affects finances tremendously. I'm lucky because I have low expenses, but a lot of sites have shut down because they can't produce quality content for free. If you had a choice of an internet with ads, or no free internet at all which would you pick? You may think I'm just preaching doom and gloom, but if advertising can't support free content sites, then there will be no free content sites.
Most useful sites don't fit into your "low-cost dissemination and support" model of the internet, because while internet costs are still lower than printed media, those costs still exist. Do you think that Slashdot is running on one of those "$7.77/month account" servers? If I had to guess, I'd say that this site is probably running at least $1000-5000 per month just to host, due to its very high traffic.
Although Slashdot probably has few other direct costs, why should the site owners pony up $12-60k/year just so you and I can can air our opinions? Why should anyone risk $5k/month with the goal trying to cover their costs, but nothing more? Investment demands returns, and if you don't think so, then will you please loan me $5k this month for my bills, I promise I'll try really hard to pay you back exactly $5k in 90 days. Not such a good deal, is it?
The dot-com craze brought a lot of great ideas to the public. Although some of them were crap designed to just sell you things, a lot of information brought to the internet during that era was very useful. Many pure content sites are now gone, and others are dying each day. I strongly believe that the amount of free information on the internet is at least 50% of what it was in 2000, and possibly more like 10%.
Don't believe me? Search for a few "informational" type queries on Google. I just searched for "Lawnmower Recommendation". Here are the top 10 links I got back:
1) paid link to Walmart's Lawnmower department.
2) A review of a book called "Lawnmower Blues".
3) A British site that reviews products. They reviewed a couple of mowers which I probably can't get in the US.
4) Epinions.com reviews of lawnmowers. This is something useful.
5) The minutes of Peterborough NH's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
6) The minutes of Torrance CA's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
7) The minutes of Marquette MI's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
8) A site discussing the liability of lawnmower manufacturers.
9) The minutes of San Juan CA's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
10) A site that rated the beer "Lawnmower Ale".
See my point? The internet is already devolving into crap, because there is no money available to pay for content sites. In time, the two pertinent sites from my search will probably go bankrupt, leaving 0 pertinent sites from a fairly common query.
Is this what the internet is about? Is this what you want to see?
Take a look at the sites you have visited this week. How many of them have 0 advertising? Put your money where your mouth is, and don't visit those sites anymore. See what life would be like without them. Now try and tell me that those sites don't deserve to make money from advertising.
And finally, while we're whipping things out here, why not post the site that you're contributing to the internet. Here's mine
You make valid points. I think that we approach things from different angles. We disagree in that I don't agree that the absence of a "sign" is the equivalent of a sign that says "take one" (Your citing of my "freely available" line is a technicality. Assume for a minute that that line wasn't there, so that my site is just like an apple cart sitting on the side of a road with no sign.)
I believe that most people would assume that a vending cart full of apples with no vendor and no sign are not free. I don't think that most people would just walk by and take an apple and feel perfectly justified.
The same goes for a garage sale on someone's front lawn, where the owners have stepped inside and there are no price tags on the items or signs stating "garage sale".
The absence of a "barrier" does not mean that all rights are waived if the situation is something that is inherently commercial in nature. For example, the absence of a price tag in a store does not mean that the item is free.
The presence of advertising on my site gives it that commercial presence. There are no hidden games. I'm not trying to secretly track you, or steal your e-mail address. I am, however, obviously trying to show you advertising, and you are actively trying to block it. That's the action that is at least unethical, and in my opinion, theft. Notice I'm not saying that it is illegal, since laws do not exist that address this point.
You speak of barriers; I contend that the act of blocking the ad is the circumvention of a barrier. The natural state of the site is with advertising. This is the equivalent of cutting the cable wire and splicing yourself into the loop. Remember, you are actually "trespassing" on my site when you access it. I'm not broadcasting to you, you're requesting from me.
I know that it may seem natural to block the ads; I'm taking the position that people need to be educated that what they're doing has consequences, because if everyone blocked ads tomorrow, you would see almost all free content disappear overnight.
Is it stealing to NOT watch TV commercials? Do I have to watch them instead of going and taking a dump?
No, but it would be stealing if you had a device that stripped the commercials from the program, and sent an e-mail to the advertisers letting them know so that the networks got paid less money.
The difference between TV and the net is that with TV, no one knows if you don't watch the commercials, but with the internet, by blocking the ad the advertiser doesn't know you exist, and the site spends money serving you your content but doesn't get compensated by serving you an ad.
The analogy to not watching TV commercials is ignoring internet ads, not blocking them. There is no way to "block" TV commercials that prevents the TV network from being paid.
In a lot of ways the website is the middleman, almost like a salesman who gets commissions. We get paid for you looking at a page of content which contains an ad. If you look at the page but block the ad, you're taking the content without paying for it. I know that people who block ads don't think of it that way, but that is what is happening in reality.
I sympathize with you, but I know that I'm never going to buy something from a pop-up or pop-under. So I know that by setting Mozilla to disallow pop-ups, I'm making absolutely no change in the revenue of the sites I'm visiting.
That's actually not true -- the act of buying something isn't how the site gets paid, it's the act of the ad showing on your PC. If you block the ad, the site doesn't get paid. Now for each individual user, the amount denied is very small -- perhaps 3/10 of a cent. But as more and more people block the ads, that amount aggregates much higher; if I had 10,000 people visiting the site, each blocking 3/10 of a cent from me, that's $30. Over a month, that's $900. It adds up.
What the hell, Hank had to stop selling "Where's George" stamps, and he's managed to stay up:-)
Hank had to stop because the Feds pointed out to him that it is illegal to advertise on dollar bills. But he's in the exact same boat as me -- his site is twice as large, so he has twice as much server costs, and twice as much dwinding revenue.
The obvious answer is "go subscription-only". I probably could; I would cut down my server costs (since only 10% or so would subscribe). I would increase my revenue. But I don't want to do this because it's not in the spirit of the internet. I don't think the internet should be pay-per-view, especially on a monthly/yearly basis. I think the internet should be a massive font of information, where you can find out the most inane thing you need to know, either for free of for a cost so small that you consider it to be free.
If I went subscription-only, my information would be locked up. If you went to a search engine, you couldn't get it. If you want to know what's behind that subscription curtain, you can't find out without paying the price. I don't like that when I run into it now, so I refuse to buy into that particular business model.
In the physical world, theft is defined as taking something that someone didn't intend you to take. It might be a physical thing (such as taking an apple from a cart), or it might be a virtual thing (such as tapping into a cable line, or ducking under the turnstyle on a subway). There is no room in the definition as to whether it was easy or hard to perform the theft.
People have tried to say that since we are now online, that the old rules don't apply. I don't believe that. People should know right from wrong.
There's no sign on the turnstyle that says "if you circumvent the payment system, you're stealing". There's no sign on the cable wire that says "if you view this cable without paying us, you're stealing". But it is stealing, and people know it.
People tend to ignore or dispute that fact online. Instead of saying "by using a popup blocked I'm denying this site of the revenue it needs to operate", the common response is "I can configure my computer the way I see fit". Instead of saying "I'm getting this music for free using Napster, which means the artist doesn't get paid", the response is "I can share my music if I want to, I wouldn't have bought this CD anyways". Instead of saying "I'm pirating this software which means I get it for free and the software company gets nothing", the response is "It's just warez, if I like it enough I'll probably buy it, and if not then I wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not theft, plus Bill Gates sucks".
But wrong is still wrong, no matter the justification, isn't it?
If the apple-cart guy is plagued by people walking by and stealing apples, does that mean that the people taking the apples are just exercising their choice of an apple delivery mechanism, and that the apple cart owner is using a failed business model since it allows the dispersal of apples without proper payment?
Or are the people taking apples knowingly without paying for them simple theives?
Are you saying that the concept of right and wrong has been replaced by "can be achieved through technology" and "can be prevented with technology"? Because if you are, I think you need to rethink how that would apply to you in your everyday world, like when someone takes your car when you leave it unlocked, or steals your stuff because you didn't arm your lased-enabled alarm.
Wow, did you ever miss out on a free marketing opportunity. If you have a web site that is unique among the billions of web sites out there, I would have liked to learn more about it. It's a shame that you didn't put a URL in your post.
You're right, I should have mentioned it. The site is The Internet Hockey Database. There really is no other site like it, the closest being Eurohockey.net, which is a European wannabee. There isn't even such a resource in print (because a printed version wouldn't have the same impact as an online, continuously updated database)
I agree that excessive popups are a nusiance, and I frequently argue to my ad networks that they should not be permitting sites to bomb people with pops. It's a losing battle though, because having some restraint means leaving money on the table, and most people don't want to do that. I do, however, leave money on the table -- you will get a maximum of 2 popunders on my site until you view either my message forum (which puts a higher load on the server) or you view more than 200 pages -- then you get a third.
When people say "don't sell the popunders, instead sell the regular banners", that's ignoring the fact that you can only sell what people want to buy. Advertisers are interested in popunders right now, because they know they can't be ignored. People have to see them (unless they block them) to close them. Users can be trained to ignore regular banners, so the advertisers feel that regular banners are just wasted money.
The unfortunate problem is that the internet, unlike any other medium, allows you to either block or ignore the advertising in a way that is tangible to the advertiser. If you choose to fast-forward over the TV commercial, the advertiser doesn't know about it, and the show doesn't lose revenue because of it. The advertiser assumes that you saw the ad. Not so with blocking software -- that means that the site doesn't get credit for you, so you consume resources but circumvent the site's source of revenue.
The main problem is that by its definition, advertising is intrusive. You need to hear it or see it. The intrusiveness is probably only going to get worse, which is sad, because if people responded to the unobtrusive advertising things would have been OK.
The other factor is that as a site becomes more popular, it costs more to operate -- technically speaking. You can't serve a million users a day from your old 486. You need a fat pipe and a fast machine. Those don't come cheap.
As far as I can tell, there are only a few options left: pay-per-view sites, very intrusive advertising (like sitting through a commercial), sites that are merely shills for the products that they sell, perhaps a scheme that has ISPs pay the sites when their visitors visit them (which means you pay more to your ISPs). Other than those ideas, I haven't heard anything that is even remotely close to working.
The sad thing is that if I had $0.05 per visitor per month for my site, I could make it so much better because I could work at it full time. I had almost 200,000 uniques [IP based, so it's probably a bit lower] last month, at $0.05 that would be $10,000. Not a bad piece of change. Yet I only made about $1000 before expenses [I get some product commissions and sell my own advertising, which is why the numbers are higher than my previously-quoted $470]. When my expenses are factored in, I basically break even, or maybe make $1-2K per year. That's not much for the 20-30 hours a week I put into it, and isn't much return for the risks that I have (namely my $450/month fixed repeating costs plus my public liability exposure).
If there could be a way to compensate a site for just $0.05 per unique per month, I think that it could work; people usually don't visit more than 100 sites a month, which would be just $5 more. Yet that $0.05 per site would go a long way towards supporting the content-based sites.
And amazingly, I only make $0.006 per unique from advertising including popunders, and only $0.001 per unique from regular banners.
I don't know if you are rememebering the internet as it was before the boom era. Sure, I had a website before advertising came along. I updated it once a month, it was a very static thing. Most sites were like this. The sites were new and innovative at the time because nothing like that had existed, but they were very, very static. You didn't have people developing content on a daily basis.
Once people thought that money could be made on the internet, they started to put some effort into it. But not before then. Spending 20-40 hours a week on a website that you pay someone to host gets pretty old pretty fast.
Remember, it costs money to host a website. I pay $250/month to host my site, and I expect that cost to increase as more people visit the site (I had to go to a larger machine this year because of increased popularity).
I am already seeing less and less "information" on the internet. I frequently search for home improvement techniques. It is a lot harder to find something that is not a sales pitch. That was not the case 2 years ago, when I could find useful information on just about any subject.
There is no incentive for people to populate a website with a lot of information, and pay to host it, when there is little chance of even being able to break even. I don't believe that millions of websites are being developed to take the place of the sites that are dying left and right.
Slashdot Mirror
Although no one is ever "forced" to sign a contract, economic reality coupled with a near uniform application of employment practices is making this near impossible.
These contracts are taking the place of actual legislation. If every company makes you sign an agreement that says "I promise not to ever sue for sexual harrassment or I will not get any severance or pension", then in effect, the contracts have negated sexual harrassment laws. You then have to fight your employer in court, at which point the balance of power is very much against you.
I was presented with such an agreement when working for a company (X) that was bought by another larger company (Y). We became a division of the larger company. The agreement said "you may not work for any past, present, or future clients of company X, nor may you work for any past, present, or future companies of company Y, for a period of three years".
I fought like hell to not sign it, and in the end, I was told "we're not putting a gun to your head to sign this, but if you don't sign it, you will no longer be employed with us". It was enough of a threat to sign it. I left the company about 3 months afterward, didn't tell them where I was going, and never heard from them again.
OK, if everyone'e car had one of these devices it would make reconstruction of an accident a bit easier. However what happens if you're in an accident with someone who drives an older car?
Would the other driver be able to introduce your black box into evidence even though he had no such box? So he could say "I swear that I was driving within the speed limits, the black box shows that the other guy was going 5 MPH over the limit, therefore the accident was clearly his fault." You could only prove the speed of the car with the black box, not the other car.
That frightens me because it would only give a biased view of the accident. Maybe I sped up to avoid his speeding car. Maybe I was blindsided so I didn't hit the breaks. But only my black box would be revealed, so I'd be the only one with direct proof against him.
The article posted shows a very clear-cut example of how this technology could be good, and does not give any example of how it could be misused. Heck, by reading the article, you'd agree that a non-consenting blood alcohol test would be a good idea, but that clearly was not permissible in this case. Why would a non-consenting black-box reading be permissible? Why are the two things different?
There may be precedent for this. eBay was able to convince a judge to bar spidering of their site.
There is another legal concept called "Unfair Competition" which links copyright and facts.
Normally, facts cannot be copyrighted. However, this law seems to kick in when one company compiles and publishes time-sesitive information that it has taken from a direct competitor in a way which "free-rides" on the efforts of the competitor. It is usually applied to news organizations, when one newspaper sends a reporter to Iraq and a second newspaper (perhaps an evening edition) uses the "facts" in the first newspaper's article to publish the very same news.
I could see the instantaneous publishing of all competitors' prices as a violation of this legal theory.
This is an obvious falsehood. First, the assertion that all of the several hundred Indian nations that existed in North (and South!) America before the advent of the Europeans shared the same world view is overly simplistic.
This isn't what I meant. I meant individual land ownership. Clearly, since Indians had territorial disputes between tribes, there was a concept of "land control", but within certain tribes, there was no concept of "I own 50 acres and you own 2 acres, and therefore I'm wealthier than you". At least not in the tribes I've read about (those that occupied the area in the Pioneer Valley in Springfield MA).
The point remains; there was no concept of individual land ownership in many American Indian cultures; does that mean that land ownership is an artificially created "right"?
You then say:
Another obvious falsehood. Party B is quite willing to put his own resources into creating a copy of something-- or to pay someone else to create that copy. Party A's something remains intact and in Party A's possession. Party A can still use it. Party B now has something just like Party B's something. Party A does not have a natural right to profit, certainly not off B's hard work in creating a duplicate something.
I understand your point that the artificial scarcity imposed by intellectual property rights doesn't seem fair to you, but the concept of "when someone works to create something, everyone has a right to that work" is equally as unfair, even if it doesn't deprive the creator of his physical work.
You have defined this as a scarcity problem, and the solution becomes obvious to you -- that if I still physically have what I had when I started, then I am not harmed. It certainly makes sense when you look at it that way.
However, reduction of physical possessions isn't the only way to harm someone. It certainly is possible to take something intangible from someone else. I can ruin your reputation. I can sleep with your wife behind your back. I can sneak into your basement at night and sleep in your warm house. I can steal your identity.
In each those cases, you still physically have what you had before the action, but you are in fact harmed in an intangible way.
If you copy the work of another person, yes, he still has his work, but that work is worth less because it is less scarce. The creator of the work has lost control of the work that he himeself has created, just as someone loses control of their reputation when someone slanders them.
You are arguing on a very thin line; you are saying that it is OK if Party B copies Party A's thing because Party A doesn't lose that thing, and Party A has no natural right to profit. But can Party B claim Party A's thing as his own creation? Why not? Party A still has the thing.
The act of creation is valued much more highly in society than the act of copying. Your view of the world makes the two actions equivalent. That is clearly false to me -- creation is much harder to do, much riskier, and should therefore be rewarded.
If everyone is a copier and no one is a creator, it's easy to see that the result would be fewer new works created.
I agree with your point as well. This law was intended to benefit the public by encouraging people to create original works. Allowing people to be paid for their work by preventing others from stealing the "intellectual property" was offered up, and the release of the property into the public domain was the tradeoff.
I think the new "70 years after the author's death or 95 years from the date of publication of an anonymous or corporate work" law is absurd, and clearly is intended to protect corporations and/or multi-generational wealth transfers. I could be profiting from a work my great-great grandfather wrote under current law. How does that encourage the creation of original work?
I also think the original copyright term of 14 years is too short now. What people don't seem to realize is that copyright doesn't just protect the corporations -- it protects us from corporations too. Imagine if the 14 year rule was still in effect; you write a bestselling book, and 14 years later Universal makes it into a multibillion dollar movie and you get nothing from it. That hardly seems right, does it?
I would think a "greater of 40-50 years from publishing or until the death of the creator" law would work well. That would prevent someone from trying to kill J.K. Rowling to release her works to the public, it would allow Kurt Cobain's child to be taken care of for a while, and would allow old musicians to retire in grace. I also don't think that copyrights should be permanently transferrable (like to music companies) in the same way that people can't legally sell their personal services "for life" (i.e. mandated slavery).
I'm not sure I agree what is going on with these guitar tab sites. It is getting a little too close to "copyrighting facts". If a song is copyrighted, should a description of the song be copyrighted too -- isn't that like copyrighting the description of a sporting event?
On the other hand, if there is a demand for these tabs, why shouldn't the author of the tabs -- the songwriter -- be able to profit from it?
Where is the line between a copyrightable item and a fact? I'm not sure.
It would seem that you are saying that "property rights" are sacrosanct. To be held above reason, common sense, the general good of society, and not to be questioned under any circumstances.
No, I'm using the concept of property rights to illustrate that all "rights" are "invented" by someone, so that is an irrelevant argument against intellectual property rights.
Prior to Europeans coming to the US, Indians did not have the concept of "land ownership". Everyone could use the land.
In Feudal Europe, the Kings owned the land. Individuals did not.
Does that mean that land ownership in North America is "invented", and therefore should be ignored? Does that mean that if I want to use your pool, I can, because property rights are an invention perpetuated those who profit from it? Of course it doesn't.
So how can the author of the post I'm replying to claim that "idea that copyright infringement is theft was invented by copyright holders and those who profit from strong copyright protection.", implying that it's a fake concept and therefore should be ignored?
And how can the author portray "profit" in such a one-sided way? Party A creates something. Party B wants to use it for free, in essence "profiting" from the work of Party A, and denying Party A the ability to "profit" from something he created himself.
Why is it evil for the creator of a work to profit, but not evil for the user of that work to profit?
Yes, you're so right -- and property rights were invented by those who profit from owning and selling things. It shouldn't be theft to take something from Walmart either!
True, not all jobs can be outsourced, but most of them can be.
According to this column:
http://www.sunfeatures.com/02-02-03.html
Out of 700 service job categories, 550 have the potential to be moved offshore. 78.6% of them. 99% of manufacturing jobs can be outsourced. If you eliminate service jobs, and you eliminate manufacturing jobs, what's left?
Unless you want to either be a plumber, electrician, or flagman just as you're hitting middle age, it might just be time to pay attention to globalization a bit more. The transformation of the US into a third world nation doesn't have to be inevitible.
Sure, the jobs may eventually come back as world economies equalize, but I think that may just take 20-30 years. That's a long time to be unemployed. I'm still waiting for the Chinese, who have had manufacturing for many years, to start importing vast amounts of US goods so the economy over here picks up. Unless you count nuclear secrets, I haven't seen it yet.
Of course (as always) someone will build a business around handling the government overhead for you but that'll cost, too.
Seriously, would you actually trust such a business?
As a business owner, your obligation is to the government. You can't transfer that obligation. If you owe the government $200,000, would you trust sending that $200k to some company that promised to pay the government, cross their hearts?
What if that company didn't pay? You're on the hook for the $200k, not that company. Sure, you can sue them, but if they go out of business, you can't collect a dime.
What if that company makes a programming mistake, and that results in you underpaying the government? Who do you think will pay the fines and interest? Here's a hint: you will.
I think that the risk of a private company handling that type of responsibility is too great. I don't think it will fly.
I worked for a company that had physical stores in 7 or 8 states. We would get audited by at least one state per year. The audits were harsh. They went something like this:
"You have shipped 80% taxable goods to a sample of 5 stores, 20% nontaxable, yet your sales breakdown is 78% taxable, 22% nontaxable".
"We think that this means that your clerks ring up taxable goods as nontaxable for the extra 2% of the time".
"Based on that error, you owe us the extra 2% extrapolated across all sales in your stores in this state over the past 6 years (the last time we audited you)."
"Please send us a check for $200,000 within 30 days".
It was brutal.
Now take that and extrapolate it across 50 states, and thousands of municipalities. Sure, they'd only hit the larger taxpayers, but eventually they'd hit the smaller and smaller merchants.
After all, we're talking about states and cities that go after baseball players' salaries, taxing them on 1/50th of their salary if they play in their state/city.
Aggregation is a bad idea, because aggregation implies networks, and networks would definitely require publisher exclusivity.
/., CNN, and eBay, and I like /., Fox, and Yahoo, but Network A had /., Fox, and CNN, and network B had /., eBay and Yahoo, then we'd each have to subscribe to 2 networks and would receive twice as much access as we need. The only way to solve this problem is with fewer networks, which means less competition, which means artificially high prices.
/., and /. left the network, would you drop the network, or would you probably join whatever network /. joined?
/.
If you like
Plus, the networks would also use their leverage against the publishers to pay the lowest rates possible. They would say "if you as a publisher don't like the $50/month that you're making, then your option is to leave our network -- because we don't expect too many people to cancel their subscription over you leaving".
If you subscribed to a network that contained 20 of your favorite sites, including
True, this what the porn industry is doing, but porn content is more or less interchangable. One Busty Asian Model site is basically the same as the next Busty Asian Model site, but there's only one
Ralph
Micropayments on a page-by-page basis probably won't work. It will put too much thought into the process of clicking on a link. That's not what the internet is about.
Subscriptions won't work either, because few people get enough value from a site to want to pay $10/month to access it. Plus, once your 20 favorite sites start to charge $10/month, how many sites will you subscribe to? Probably not more than one. Then you'll question why you're paying $50/month for broadband so that you can pay $10 to access content.
But I think there's another way.
I publish a website which gets about 10,000 unique visitors per day. It's considered a medium-size content site. Over the course of a month I get about 150,000 different unique visitors.
If I could get each visitor to pay $0.05-$0.10 per month I would be very, very happy as a publisher. I would then gross between $7,500-15,000 per month. That's plenty of money to keep me publishing, and I could then devote my resources 100% towards the site rather than to the job I hold to keep the site going.
Now look at this proposal from the consumer's point of view. How many sites do you regularly use in a typical month? 20? 50? Let's say you use 100 sites in a typical month, and that each one charged you $0.10 per month for unlimited access.
That's $10 more for internet per month.
In the grand scheme of things, $10 for 100 unique content sites isn't all that much. Plus, not all sites on the internet would charge for their content, perhaps some would try and entice visitors with "free" content sites, and then try and sell advertising or products to cover their costs, similar to how things work today.
With such a payment method, there would be tons of people clamoring to create original content. If that content is good, the creator would be rewarded with plenty of visitors willing to pay $0.05-0.10 for access to the content. If it's not that good, the creator will not be rewarded all that much.
Look at a site like Google, which gets tens of millions of unique visitors per month. Would you pay $0.05/month to use Google? Of course you would. If they get 10,000,000 uniques per month, don't you think they could use the extra $500,000 per month?
The problem with trying to make money from each visitor right now is that floor price for what a site can charge in a single payment is realistically about $5. Once you get under that, the fixed costs to process the payment are too high, especially when you figure in things like credit card chargebacks. $5 is more than most users would pay for content from a site, even if you say that the $5 is for an entire year.
I know that if I was not a publisher and there was an easy way for me to pay $0.10 for unlimited access to a site for a month, I'd pay this without even thinking about it.
That's what the goal of micropayments should be.
Ralph Slate
The US talent is embarrassingly bad.
I'm not buying your argument. The IT field is somewhat of a unique animal because there are so many quantifyable skills -- dozens of programming languages, operating systems, databases, and industries.
When jobs get posted, the ad usually runs like this:
Wanted: programmer. Must know Java using JDBC interface to Oracle 8.1.2 running on Solaris v2.1.2, in conjunction with Bea TP system, 10+ years in the insurance sector doing fixed asset reinsurance in the UK. XML a plus.
You don't usually see that type of ad for other professions. Sure, there's specialization, but not to the degree possible in IT. I think that IT job requirements are insanely narrow. Yes, it helps to hire someone who has done the exact job you're looking for in a previous life, but with a solid foundation 75% of the IT force can perform jobs outside of their direct experience. Yet no manager is going to take the risk, because if they hire someone who fits the description and that person fails, they don't look bad, but if they hire someone nontraditional and that person fails, it can be their head. The reward isn't worth the risk to them.
Addressing your original point, unless someone is going to be doing some very hardcode C programming, and the job is for dedicated C coding projects, why would they need to write a routine to traverse a linked list? Sure, it would be helpful for them to understand the theory behind the question, but why do they need to reinvent the wheel?
I'm looking at a job posting for my own company, for a senior DBA. Look at it:
"This position requires 3 to 7 years of experience in the areas of general database administration, DBA experience in Oracle 8, 8i and 9i releases, and experience with Oracle Parallel Server or Real Application Clusters and Oracle Advanced Replication. The ideal candidate will have 2 to 5 years of programming experience in C, SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Developer or similar, and familiarity with Oracle 8, 8I, 9I and GUI development tools. Strong written and verbal communication skills are required. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics (with Computer Science focus) is required."
We don't use C in this company -- at all!. We don't use GUI development tools either. This job description was likely taken from some HR magazine or something.
If IT hiring was a bit more creative, and the IT profession was a bit less "throw the employee away when the technology changes", we probably wouldn't need H1B employees.
Once, in this country, companies were expected to train their employees to keep their investements up to date. Now, employees are expected to work 60+ hours a week and are supposed to train themselves in their free time. The fruits of this method are just becoming evident; tens of thousands of "obsolete" IT people, and tens of thousands of H1B imports. That's a shitty national policy, something that will derail this country's economy.
I find that when I search for information on topics, I get mostly links to sites to buy products. Or links to sites that don't work anymore. I might get one or two good links, but not often.
For example, I wanted information on police scanners last week. That sounds like a common topic for people to publish information on the internet, right?
A google search brought me, in the top 10 results:
Now from some of these sites, I was able to piece together some information on the topic, mostly by uusing some information from the merchant sites, and some from the amateur sites, but I was expecting to find a couple of "semi-pro" resources devoted to the topic, a place where I could have most of my questions answered.
This isn't the first time I've experienced this. I search for information on how to remodel my house, but I find that there really is little out there anymore -- just a bunch of small merchant sites, often spammed so that the top 10 search results all redirect to the same merchant.
I believe this is happening because there is little incentive to create fresh, updated content on the internet anymore. Sure, you'll get people creating a website and maybe spending a weekend updating it, but it's really not like the old days, when you could get information on any subject, no matter how obscure, updated daily or even weekly.
I have a feeling that the internet's days as a font of information may be running out, because there is no way to run a quality, high-traffic website for free forever. It may be better than any other source of information, but I believe that soon, people will be heading back to libraries and bookstores for their information, because it just won't be there on the internet. What a shame!
A lot of music stores near me, in predominantly Black neighborhoods, advertise that they sell "mix tapes". When I've been in NYC, I've seen mix tapes to be basically illegally recorded "greatest hits" from various artists, usually the popular songs of the day. These have always seemed fairly illegal to me.
I wonder if the RIAA is going to go after these people, and if this is going to raise an uproar in the Black community; these tapes seem to be part of the culture.
Well generally you don't hire the entire country when you set up shop. Of those who are educated the education system is first-rate, or so I've heard.
Interesting observation. India is apparently adept at using its economic resources by only educating the cream of the crop. That means that more money is available to the smartest people.
Here, in the US, education is more of a right. The education dollars have to educate everyone, not just the best and brightest. Hence, the best and brightest get less education.
Based on the theory that education spurs innovation, is it possible that the US is at a disadvantge because it chooses to "leave no child behind", compared to countries who are satisfied with 60% illiteracy, 80% poverty, but 20% who can beat the pants off anyone from the US?
I am not a "the earth can recover from anything we throw at it" person. I believe that we should be conserving fuel. However, this car, and the others like it, are not at all practical in the US for the following basic reasons:
1) Although a 1 or 2 seat car might make sense while commuting to and from work, owning a $10k car just to commute to work is impractical. I would need another car if I wanted to drive my friends and family anywhere, or if I wanted to buy anything larger than a toaster oven. Until gasoline costs $1000/gallon, owning two cars, one for commuting, one for other usage, isn't economically realistic.
2) With all the SUVs and 18-wheel trucks on the highways, it would be suicide to drive one of these cars. I doubt that insurers would even insure them because they would be a fatality magnet in an accident.
3) What do you do if you're not 100% in shape, and weigh more than 150 lbs. as a male adult, or are just plain claustrophobic? Driving this car would be worse than a 10-hour coach plane trip in a middle seat between two football players.
I think that if you gave me this car for free, I wouldn't drive it, because of the safety/comfort issues. Add on a price tag surely over $8k, and it's a no-brainer -- only the most environmentally fanatical of people will buy cars like this. And that doesn't add up to enough money for it to be worth the carmakers' effort.
If I wasn't being directly affected by ad blockers, then I wouldn't care, but each ad you block is like preventing money from entering my pocket. Plus, when you come onto my site, you consume resources. That's just the way the internet is. I need to try and recover costs of serving you those pages, and short of converting to a pay-per-view site, advertising is currently the only way I can do that. So ad blocking is not only depriving me of revenue, it's jacking up my overhead because you're still using my site.
If it was just you blocking the ads, it wouldn't be a problem. However, more and more people are using ad blockers, and they're even being integrated into mainstream software like AOL and Mozilla/Netscape. My hosting costs are going up (I'm up to a $250/month account due to the traffic on my site), but my revenue is dropping (the amount I made from non-popups last month was about $90). I make up the difference with popunders -- if there was another less obtrusive option, I'd use it, but there truly are none right now.
If I didn't use popunders, I would either have to go pay-per-view or take my site down. I don't see either option as particularly appealing, nor do I see those options as "in the spirit of the internet". And going pay-per-view is technically a lot harder to manage; I don't think I'd do it if it meant just covering my costs, since the hassles of taking credit card payments far outweighs the few dollars I could earn per month.
Again, each individual ad-blocker is harmless, but when 20, 30, 50 percent of the people out there are doing it, that affects finances tremendously. I'm lucky because I have low expenses, but a lot of sites have shut down because they can't produce quality content for free. If you had a choice of an internet with ads, or no free internet at all which would you pick? You may think I'm just preaching doom and gloom, but if advertising can't support free content sites, then there will be no free content sites.
I disagree with you 100%.
Most useful sites don't fit into your "low-cost dissemination and support" model of the internet, because while internet costs are still lower than printed media, those costs still exist. Do you think that Slashdot is running on one of those "$7.77/month account" servers? If I had to guess, I'd say that this site is probably running at least $1000-5000 per month just to host, due to its very high traffic.
Although Slashdot probably has few other direct costs, why should the site owners pony up $12-60k/year just so you and I can can air our opinions? Why should anyone risk $5k/month with the goal trying to cover their costs, but nothing more? Investment demands returns, and if you don't think so, then will you please loan me $5k this month for my bills, I promise I'll try really hard to pay you back exactly $5k in 90 days. Not such a good deal, is it?
The dot-com craze brought a lot of great ideas to the public. Although some of them were crap designed to just sell you things, a lot of information brought to the internet during that era was very useful. Many pure content sites are now gone, and others are dying each day. I strongly believe that the amount of free information on the internet is at least 50% of what it was in 2000, and possibly more like 10%.
Don't believe me? Search for a few "informational" type queries on Google. I just searched for "Lawnmower Recommendation". Here are the top 10 links I got back:
1) paid link to Walmart's Lawnmower department.
2) A review of a book called "Lawnmower Blues".
3) A British site that reviews products. They reviewed a couple of mowers which I probably can't get in the US.
4) Epinions.com reviews of lawnmowers. This is something useful.
5) The minutes of Peterborough NH's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
6) The minutes of Torrance CA's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
7) The minutes of Marquette MI's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
8) A site discussing the liability of lawnmower manufacturers.
9) The minutes of San Juan CA's meeting to discuss the town's purchase of a lawnmower.
10) A site that rated the beer "Lawnmower Ale".
See my point? The internet is already devolving into crap, because there is no money available to pay for content sites. In time, the two pertinent sites from my search will probably go bankrupt, leaving 0 pertinent sites from a fairly common query.
Is this what the internet is about? Is this what you want to see?
Take a look at the sites you have visited this week. How many of them have 0 advertising? Put your money where your mouth is, and don't visit those sites anymore. See what life would be like without them. Now try and tell me that those sites don't deserve to make money from advertising.
And finally, while we're whipping things out here, why not post the site that you're contributing to the internet. Here's mine
You make valid points. I think that we approach things from different angles. We disagree in that I don't agree that the absence of a "sign" is the equivalent of a sign that says "take one" (Your citing of my "freely available" line is a technicality. Assume for a minute that that line wasn't there, so that my site is just like an apple cart sitting on the side of a road with no sign.)
I believe that most people would assume that a vending cart full of apples with no vendor and no sign are not free. I don't think that most people would just walk by and take an apple and feel perfectly justified.
The same goes for a garage sale on someone's front lawn, where the owners have stepped inside and there are no price tags on the items or signs stating "garage sale".
The absence of a "barrier" does not mean that all rights are waived if the situation is something that is inherently commercial in nature. For example, the absence of a price tag in a store does not mean that the item is free.
The presence of advertising on my site gives it that commercial presence. There are no hidden games. I'm not trying to secretly track you, or steal your e-mail address. I am, however, obviously trying to show you advertising, and you are actively trying to block it. That's the action that is at least unethical, and in my opinion, theft. Notice I'm not saying that it is illegal, since laws do not exist that address this point.
You speak of barriers; I contend that the act of blocking the ad is the circumvention of a barrier. The natural state of the site is with advertising. This is the equivalent of cutting the cable wire and splicing yourself into the loop. Remember, you are actually "trespassing" on my site when you access it. I'm not broadcasting to you, you're requesting from me.
I know that it may seem natural to block the ads; I'm taking the position that people need to be educated that what they're doing has consequences, because if everyone blocked ads tomorrow, you would see almost all free content disappear overnight.
Ralph
Is it stealing to NOT watch TV commercials? Do I have to watch them instead of going and taking a dump?
No, but it would be stealing if you had a device that stripped the commercials from the program, and sent an e-mail to the advertisers letting them know so that the networks got paid less money.
The difference between TV and the net is that with TV, no one knows if you don't watch the commercials, but with the internet, by blocking the ad the advertiser doesn't know you exist, and the site spends money serving you your content but doesn't get compensated by serving you an ad.
The analogy to not watching TV commercials is ignoring internet ads, not blocking them. There is no way to "block" TV commercials that prevents the TV network from being paid.
In a lot of ways the website is the middleman, almost like a salesman who gets commissions. We get paid for you looking at a page of content which contains an ad. If you look at the page but block the ad, you're taking the content without paying for it. I know that people who block ads don't think of it that way, but that is what is happening in reality.
I sympathize with you, but I know that I'm never going to buy something from a pop-up or pop-under. So I know that by setting Mozilla to disallow pop-ups, I'm making absolutely no change in the revenue of the sites I'm visiting.
:-)
That's actually not true -- the act of buying something isn't how the site gets paid, it's the act of the ad showing on your PC. If you block the ad, the site doesn't get paid. Now for each individual user, the amount denied is very small -- perhaps 3/10 of a cent. But as more and more people block the ads, that amount aggregates much higher; if I had 10,000 people visiting the site, each blocking 3/10 of a cent from me, that's $30. Over a month, that's $900. It adds up.
What the hell, Hank had to stop selling "Where's George" stamps, and he's managed to stay up
Hank had to stop because the Feds pointed out to him that it is illegal to advertise on dollar bills. But he's in the exact same boat as me -- his site is twice as large, so he has twice as much server costs, and twice as much dwinding revenue.
The obvious answer is "go subscription-only". I probably could; I would cut down my server costs (since only 10% or so would subscribe). I would increase my revenue. But I don't want to do this because it's not in the spirit of the internet. I don't think the internet should be pay-per-view, especially on a monthly/yearly basis. I think the internet should be a massive font of information, where you can find out the most inane thing you need to know, either for free of for a cost so small that you consider it to be free.
If I went subscription-only, my information would be locked up. If you went to a search engine, you couldn't get it. If you want to know what's behind that subscription curtain, you can't find out without paying the price. I don't like that when I run into it now, so I refuse to buy into that particular business model.
We have differing opinions.
In the physical world, theft is defined as taking something that someone didn't intend you to take. It might be a physical thing (such as taking an apple from a cart), or it might be a virtual thing (such as tapping into a cable line, or ducking under the turnstyle on a subway). There is no room in the definition as to whether it was easy or hard to perform the theft.
People have tried to say that since we are now online, that the old rules don't apply. I don't believe that. People should know right from wrong.
There's no sign on the turnstyle that says "if you circumvent the payment system, you're stealing". There's no sign on the cable wire that says "if you view this cable without paying us, you're stealing". But it is stealing, and people know it.
People tend to ignore or dispute that fact online. Instead of saying "by using a popup blocked I'm denying this site of the revenue it needs to operate", the common response is "I can configure my computer the way I see fit". Instead of saying "I'm getting this music for free using Napster, which means the artist doesn't get paid", the response is "I can share my music if I want to, I wouldn't have bought this CD anyways". Instead of saying "I'm pirating this software which means I get it for free and the software company gets nothing", the response is "It's just warez, if I like it enough I'll probably buy it, and if not then I wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not theft, plus Bill Gates sucks".
But wrong is still wrong, no matter the justification, isn't it?
If the apple-cart guy is plagued by people walking by and stealing apples, does that mean that the people taking the apples are just exercising their choice of an apple delivery mechanism, and that the apple cart owner is using a failed business model since it allows the dispersal of apples without proper payment?
Or are the people taking apples knowingly without paying for them simple theives?
Are you saying that the concept of right and wrong has been replaced by "can be achieved through technology" and "can be prevented with technology"? Because if you are, I think you need to rethink how that would apply to you in your everyday world, like when someone takes your car when you leave it unlocked, or steals your stuff because you didn't arm your lased-enabled alarm.
Wow, did you ever miss out on a free marketing opportunity. If you have a web site that is unique among the billions of web sites out there, I would have liked to learn more about it. It's a shame that you didn't put a URL in your post.
You're right, I should have mentioned it. The site is The Internet Hockey Database. There really is no other site like it, the closest being Eurohockey.net, which is a European wannabee. There isn't even such a resource in print (because a printed version wouldn't have the same impact as an online, continuously updated database)
I agree that excessive popups are a nusiance, and I frequently argue to my ad networks that they should not be permitting sites to bomb people with pops. It's a losing battle though, because having some restraint means leaving money on the table, and most people don't want to do that. I do, however, leave money on the table -- you will get a maximum of 2 popunders on my site until you view either my message forum (which puts a higher load on the server) or you view more than 200 pages -- then you get a third.
When people say "don't sell the popunders, instead sell the regular banners", that's ignoring the fact that you can only sell what people want to buy. Advertisers are interested in popunders right now, because they know they can't be ignored. People have to see them (unless they block them) to close them. Users can be trained to ignore regular banners, so the advertisers feel that regular banners are just wasted money.
The unfortunate problem is that the internet, unlike any other medium, allows you to either block or ignore the advertising in a way that is tangible to the advertiser. If you choose to fast-forward over the TV commercial, the advertiser doesn't know about it, and the show doesn't lose revenue because of it. The advertiser assumes that you saw the ad. Not so with blocking software -- that means that the site doesn't get credit for you, so you consume resources but circumvent the site's source of revenue.
The main problem is that by its definition, advertising is intrusive. You need to hear it or see it. The intrusiveness is probably only going to get worse, which is sad, because if people responded to the unobtrusive advertising things would have been OK.
The other factor is that as a site becomes more popular, it costs more to operate -- technically speaking. You can't serve a million users a day from your old 486. You need a fat pipe and a fast machine. Those don't come cheap.
As far as I can tell, there are only a few options left: pay-per-view sites, very intrusive advertising (like sitting through a commercial), sites that are merely shills for the products that they sell, perhaps a scheme that has ISPs pay the sites when their visitors visit them (which means you pay more to your ISPs). Other than those ideas, I haven't heard anything that is even remotely close to working.
The sad thing is that if I had $0.05 per visitor per month for my site, I could make it so much better because I could work at it full time. I had almost 200,000 uniques [IP based, so it's probably a bit lower] last month, at $0.05 that would be $10,000. Not a bad piece of change. Yet I only made about $1000 before expenses [I get some product commissions and sell my own advertising, which is why the numbers are higher than my previously-quoted $470]. When my expenses are factored in, I basically break even, or maybe make $1-2K per year. That's not much for the 20-30 hours a week I put into it, and isn't much return for the risks that I have (namely my $450/month fixed repeating costs plus my public liability exposure).
If there could be a way to compensate a site for just $0.05 per unique per month, I think that it could work; people usually don't visit more than 100 sites a month, which would be just $5 more. Yet that $0.05 per site would go a long way towards supporting the content-based sites.
And amazingly, I only make $0.006 per unique from advertising including popunders, and only $0.001 per unique from regular banners.
I don't know if you are rememebering the internet as it was before the boom era. Sure, I had a website before advertising came along. I updated it once a month, it was a very static thing. Most sites were like this. The sites were new and innovative at the time because nothing like that had existed, but they were very, very static. You didn't have people developing content on a daily basis.
Once people thought that money could be made on the internet, they started to put some effort into it. But not before then. Spending 20-40 hours a week on a website that you pay someone to host gets pretty old pretty fast.
Remember, it costs money to host a website. I pay $250/month to host my site, and I expect that cost to increase as more people visit the site (I had to go to a larger machine this year because of increased popularity).
I am already seeing less and less "information" on the internet. I frequently search for home improvement techniques. It is a lot harder to find something that is not a sales pitch. That was not the case 2 years ago, when I could find useful information on just about any subject.
There is no incentive for people to populate a website with a lot of information, and pay to host it, when there is little chance of even being able to break even. I don't believe that millions of websites are being developed to take the place of the sites that are dying left and right.