You do realize that many ad plans are pay-per-click rather than pay-per-view, meaning that, unless you click madly on the ads, you won't get them any money? And, even if you do, you will only earn them pennies? Using a donate button (if one exists) is a far more convenient, efficient (they are getting most of the money, not Google) and effective way to fund sites you like and it ultimately gives people a choice rather than trying to force ads on them.
Ads are almost never a winning proposition for a site -- unless you are high-profile (and can negotiate favourable advertising contracts) and high-traffic, you probably won't be able to recoup your hosting costs from them if you have any amount of content at all. It also leads you to re-engineering your site, such as those sites which split articles onto multiple pages so they can double the amount of ads served. It slows down loading, looks garishly ugly at best, and turns you into a virus vector. It also sets a bad precedent of using JavaScript to load unknown content served from another website, usually without the knowledge or consent of the user.
I honestly don't get why so many people hate this. Advertisements are annoying when they are not helpful. On the other hand, ads are great when they connect you to the product you've been looking for.
First, the flawed premise of that is that you are looking for a product. I know that, in the majority of the time I spend online, I am most definitely not looking to buy or sell anything.
Second, the other problem is that you are relying on advertisements to give you good information about what you want, more than proper research (for instance, technical specs) might. This is ridiculous, since advertisements by their nature tend to lie by omission about what they are advertising and overstate the positive aspects, especially online advertising, where there is even less accountability than in television or radio advertising.
Third, there is the simple fact that you might not want people to know what you are doing. Would you tolerate an unseen entity noting every place you visit in the real world, collecting that information, and... it doesn't even matter what they do with it; the collection itself is bad enough. Even if they are supposedly benevolent, no one should have that information other than you.
Exactly. The boiling frog effect is especially noticeable with DRM in games -- what was once CD checks is now full-blown rootkits which try to wrestle control of your OS away from you. The trouble is that, not only has the DRM become more restrictive, but it's also become more subtle -- the general person will actually be happier, because then they don't have to input a serial number or something similar. Most have no idea what some DRM does and, even if they do, they actually believe the company has a right to take over someone's OS without informing them (except under a vague reference to "data protection" or something similar). The rest are simply so apathetic they can't bring themselves to care.
This is circular logic. If you are the one responsible for creating the laws, are you then allowed to justify arresting people for breaking them "because it's illegal"? You are assuming a fairness which does not exist.
I would (as an optimist) rather say that they have been convinced that a walled garden is good for them -- after all, ideas like "want" become fishy when you factor in propaganda (national or corporate). It also makes it harder to justify things like "the users want this" when you yourself have manipulated users into wanting it in the first place.
One problem with the "filtering out the crap" attitude is that, in some cases, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. Even though we are past the days of Lady Chatterly's Lover, many books are still censored or rejected entirely for themes too controversial or too strange. As well, books written for a niche audience have little chance of ever "making it" through mainstream publishing and with mainstream publishers disliking them for their low marketability. This is why dedicated science fiction and fantasy publishers exist, but this model discourages innovation in fiction. So there are several flaws with the current model of publishing fiction, which is why I like the Doctorow approach (publish for free online, sell paper copies, solicit donations). It won't work when we go more or less full-ebook, but that won't be for decades, so there is plenty of time for authors to try it. Unfortunately, it requires a publisher that won't go crazy over copyright, which rules out most publishers.
I don't see it that way. He is using the low prize value to make the point that this guy was like a dogfighting organizer -- he was pitting people against each other and offering a trivial incentive (other than the huge incentive that, if you did not participate, someone would dig up evidence on you without you having the chance to do the same and to create a sort of Mexican Standoff). He was essentially drawing attention to the dehumanization that went on.
Indeed. Sort of like the situation of employee drug testing, the "well, work for/buy from someone else" excuse simply does not work if they all do it. If it is something so pervasive that it takes over every possible company you could switch to, you are left with very few options. It's simply a "go away, I don't want to deal with it" answer -- one which misses the point that regardless of everything, it simply should not be done.
The complaints are exactly the same as those who complained about Huckleberry Finn for having the word "nigger". Even if the overall sentiment of the book is opposite to certain content, people will hyperfocus on a part of the content to the exclusion of everything else ("this book wants our kids to do drugs and have group sex", even though that's entirely against the drift of the book.) Ultimately, what lies at the heart of this is something very ugly: they expect people to like or dislike things without having experienced them, which goes against not just scientific empiricism but the way we live our lives. It also explains why so many of them have made value judgements about books without having read them or without any idea of what the book is about. According to their flawed logic, since books can "corrupt", you simply can't read books you might dislike. All of this ultimately runs into the "who watches the watchers" problem. Unfortunately, most of these people tend to just hop on bandwagons and blindly believe authority figures about which books are "bad" (for instance, the "Harry Potter will make your kids evil wizards" thing that spread memetically throughout far-Right groups).
Inevitably, opposition to "bad" books ultimately stems from people like Glenn Beck, whose "9-12 Project" got one teen novel banned from some school libraries. It is especially bad with books for young children that focus any sort of diversity in human relationships -- ultimately, it more or less comes down to homophobia on the part of a minority of parents. Almost inevitably, books such as these are not banned for violence but for political reasons, homophobia (and other dislike of non-heterosexual-monogamous-married-religious relationships and lifestyles), and because they even dare to mention sexuality and relationships in something like a teen novel. The reason why they want to ban these for other students, rather than just their own children, is that it fundamentally comes down to the "bubble". They can't hide real life from their children effectively if they will hear about it from their peers and maybe have a chance of groping their way back toward cultural sanity -- they can't risk the moderating effect others might have on their children. As a result, they try to do everything they can to expand the "bubble" to encompass not just their own children but the children surrounding their own children, sort of like a buffer zone. Much of the time this proves fruitless, but it's effective enough to cause numerous headaches (for instance, the number of Americans who have no idea about what evolution is and blindly hate it). Recognizing this at the root cause (censoring parents and enforced cultural homogeneity) helps to address these issues before they cause problems.
It isn't "will they?" but "should they?" This would mean more or less the death of modding. Plus, I can already see the DRM-ists rubbing their hands together in glee, since most players will have no access to the games they are playing, which can be shut down at any time (I'm looking at you, EA, and your multiplayer-server track record). I see this as a way to make things easy for the developer but to take freedom away from the player and modder.
You're missing the point. If it's easily patchable by the developers, then it becomes more or less a trial/shareware version that can be easily upgraded to a 'full' version.
Furthermore, the comment about "you don't have an option..." seems to indicate that what the commenter is objecting to is that the version is irredeemably "broken" (that is, that there is no quick patch to fix the modifications made), which seems to be to be an egregious error. If you're going to try to get people to pay for your game, don't put out an unfixable, broken version that would force them to redownload the entire game if they wanted to play the "proper" version.
What I find funny is that people act like this is something new when it's not -- it's essentially just an evolution of the old shareware principle that popularized games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D.
Listening to a doctor used to be good advice until "integrative medicine" hit the mainstream -- now real medical schools teach it. Most frightening is "integrative pediatrics".
This could be seen as a good or bad thing (second-guessing doctors). On one hand, it undermines public trust in them (though this is mostly the fault of any medical school foolish enough to graduate an alt-med advocate or a hospital foolish enough to employ them, even as a therapist), but it could lead to more people seeing behind the letters after names into what someone's actual specialization is.
Much of this is due to the law. For instance, much of the USA lacks anti-scab laws, which prevent corporations from hiring replacement workers. Unions in the USA have to fight in a very unfriendly atmosphere and where much of what is standard practice elsewhere is illegal due to laws paid for by companies that are deliberately union-unfriendly.
This. The underlying assumption with this is that gamers will drop everything to play the game to the finish, which is not how it works for most adult and young adult gamers (who are the primary players of RTSs, cRPGs, and other dying and abused genres). With games like Mass Effect, I can take weeks or months before finally completing them due to my drive to grab the best items, complete the quests, etc. DLCs, both official and fan-made tend to increase that time. It's less a case of feeling the burning urge to 'blitz' a game and more completing a quest here or there and taking time to play a bit more on the game. I am the same with turn-based games like Civilization, where games can have a few hundred hours of playtime but last (in the real world) for weeks or months if I can't get much time to play.
Yes, the person who actually did it. What I am advocating is a degree of investigation. To view it in a legal framework, the primary user is being found guilty automatically, without any chance to prove his case. You seem to be advocating finding someone responsible for the sake of finding someone responsible, which is exactly how scapegoats are created and how problems are not solved in any way.
The point I was trying to make is about establishing a reasonable level of security. Sure, it's somewhat reasonable to require encryption, but even then the user should not be automatically responsible for the content of the network; they should have the opportunity to find proof that someone else was. I think my comparison of a home network to a work PC is a good one because, fundamentally, both are potentially accessible by many people and if any of those many people are malicious, the primary user is held responsible most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that many ad plans are pay-per-click rather than pay-per-view, meaning that, unless you click madly on the ads, you won't get them any money? And, even if you do, you will only earn them pennies? Using a donate button (if one exists) is a far more convenient, efficient (they are getting most of the money, not Google) and effective way to fund sites you like and it ultimately gives people a choice rather than trying to force ads on them.
Ads are almost never a winning proposition for a site -- unless you are high-profile (and can negotiate favourable advertising contracts) and high-traffic, you probably won't be able to recoup your hosting costs from them if you have any amount of content at all. It also leads you to re-engineering your site, such as those sites which split articles onto multiple pages so they can double the amount of ads served. It slows down loading, looks garishly ugly at best, and turns you into a virus vector. It also sets a bad precedent of using JavaScript to load unknown content served from another website, usually without the knowledge or consent of the user.
My point is that since the actual decision is between irrelevant ads and relevant ads, I'll take the relevant ones.
Actual decision? There's always the option to choose "no ads".
I honestly don't get why so many people hate this. Advertisements are annoying when they are not helpful. On the other hand, ads are great when they connect you to the product you've been looking for.
First, the flawed premise of that is that you are looking for a product. I know that, in the majority of the time I spend online, I am most definitely not looking to buy or sell anything.
... it doesn't even matter what they do with it; the collection itself is bad enough. Even if they are supposedly benevolent, no one should have that information other than you.
Second, the other problem is that you are relying on advertisements to give you good information about what you want, more than proper research (for instance, technical specs) might. This is ridiculous, since advertisements by their nature tend to lie by omission about what they are advertising and overstate the positive aspects, especially online advertising, where there is even less accountability than in television or radio advertising.
Third, there is the simple fact that you might not want people to know what you are doing. Would you tolerate an unseen entity noting every place you visit in the real world, collecting that information, and
Exactly. The boiling frog effect is especially noticeable with DRM in games -- what was once CD checks is now full-blown rootkits which try to wrestle control of your OS away from you. The trouble is that, not only has the DRM become more restrictive, but it's also become more subtle -- the general person will actually be happier, because then they don't have to input a serial number or something similar. Most have no idea what some DRM does and, even if they do, they actually believe the company has a right to take over someone's OS without informing them (except under a vague reference to "data protection" or something similar). The rest are simply so apathetic they can't bring themselves to care.
This is circular logic. If you are the one responsible for creating the laws, are you then allowed to justify arresting people for breaking them "because it's illegal"? You are assuming a fairness which does not exist.
I would (as an optimist) rather say that they have been convinced that a walled garden is good for them -- after all, ideas like "want" become fishy when you factor in propaganda (national or corporate). It also makes it harder to justify things like "the users want this" when you yourself have manipulated users into wanting it in the first place.
One problem with the "filtering out the crap" attitude is that, in some cases, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. Even though we are past the days of Lady Chatterly's Lover, many books are still censored or rejected entirely for themes too controversial or too strange. As well, books written for a niche audience have little chance of ever "making it" through mainstream publishing and with mainstream publishers disliking them for their low marketability. This is why dedicated science fiction and fantasy publishers exist, but this model discourages innovation in fiction. So there are several flaws with the current model of publishing fiction, which is why I like the Doctorow approach (publish for free online, sell paper copies, solicit donations). It won't work when we go more or less full-ebook, but that won't be for decades, so there is plenty of time for authors to try it. Unfortunately, it requires a publisher that won't go crazy over copyright, which rules out most publishers.
You know, you don't need to use secure.wikimedia.org any more.
A better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria.
I don't see it that way. He is using the low prize value to make the point that this guy was like a dogfighting organizer -- he was pitting people against each other and offering a trivial incentive (other than the huge incentive that, if you did not participate, someone would dig up evidence on you without you having the chance to do the same and to create a sort of Mexican Standoff). He was essentially drawing attention to the dehumanization that went on.
Indeed. Sort of like the situation of employee drug testing, the "well, work for/buy from someone else" excuse simply does not work if they all do it. If it is something so pervasive that it takes over every possible company you could switch to, you are left with very few options. It's simply a "go away, I don't want to deal with it" answer -- one which misses the point that regardless of everything, it simply should not be done.
The complaints are exactly the same as those who complained about Huckleberry Finn for having the word "nigger". Even if the overall sentiment of the book is opposite to certain content, people will hyperfocus on a part of the content to the exclusion of everything else ("this book wants our kids to do drugs and have group sex", even though that's entirely against the drift of the book.) Ultimately, what lies at the heart of this is something very ugly: they expect people to like or dislike things without having experienced them, which goes against not just scientific empiricism but the way we live our lives. It also explains why so many of them have made value judgements about books without having read them or without any idea of what the book is about. According to their flawed logic, since books can "corrupt", you simply can't read books you might dislike. All of this ultimately runs into the "who watches the watchers" problem. Unfortunately, most of these people tend to just hop on bandwagons and blindly believe authority figures about which books are "bad" (for instance, the "Harry Potter will make your kids evil wizards" thing that spread memetically throughout far-Right groups).
Inevitably, opposition to "bad" books ultimately stems from people like Glenn Beck, whose "9-12 Project" got one teen novel banned from some school libraries. It is especially bad with books for young children that focus any sort of diversity in human relationships -- ultimately, it more or less comes down to homophobia on the part of a minority of parents. Almost inevitably, books such as these are not banned for violence but for political reasons, homophobia (and other dislike of non-heterosexual-monogamous-married-religious relationships and lifestyles), and because they even dare to mention sexuality and relationships in something like a teen novel. The reason why they want to ban these for other students, rather than just their own children, is that it fundamentally comes down to the "bubble". They can't hide real life from their children effectively if they will hear about it from their peers and maybe have a chance of groping their way back toward cultural sanity -- they can't risk the moderating effect others might have on their children. As a result, they try to do everything they can to expand the "bubble" to encompass not just their own children but the children surrounding their own children, sort of like a buffer zone. Much of the time this proves fruitless, but it's effective enough to cause numerous headaches (for instance, the number of Americans who have no idea about what evolution is and blindly hate it). Recognizing this at the root cause (censoring parents and enforced cultural homogeneity) helps to address these issues before they cause problems.
It isn't "will they?" but "should they?" This would mean more or less the death of modding. Plus, I can already see the DRM-ists rubbing their hands together in glee, since most players will have no access to the games they are playing, which can be shut down at any time (I'm looking at you, EA, and your multiplayer-server track record). I see this as a way to make things easy for the developer but to take freedom away from the player and modder.
You're missing the point. If it's easily patchable by the developers, then it becomes more or less a trial/shareware version that can be easily upgraded to a 'full' version.
Furthermore, the comment about "you don't have an option..." seems to indicate that what the commenter is objecting to is that the version is irredeemably "broken" (that is, that there is no quick patch to fix the modifications made), which seems to be to be an egregious error. If you're going to try to get people to pay for your game, don't put out an unfixable, broken version that would force them to redownload the entire game if they wanted to play the "proper" version.
What I find funny is that people act like this is something new when it's not -- it's essentially just an evolution of the old shareware principle that popularized games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D.
That's missing Windows 2000, which wasn't exactly a "skip" release.
www.certification.tn uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.
So Firefox definitely does find something fishy about it, though this might be completely unrelated.
Listening to a doctor used to be good advice until "integrative medicine" hit the mainstream -- now real medical schools teach it. Most frightening is "integrative pediatrics".
This could be seen as a good or bad thing (second-guessing doctors). On one hand, it undermines public trust in them (though this is mostly the fault of any medical school foolish enough to graduate an alt-med advocate or a hospital foolish enough to employ them, even as a therapist), but it could lead to more people seeing behind the letters after names into what someone's actual specialization is.
You must be joking. The whole summary is that this was 'leaked' from WikiLeaks -- hence, that it was an 'original' that had not yet been redacted.
We have an apple.slashdot.org. Why not a facebook.slashdot.org? Then we could filter out stories from it and be a lot happier.
Much of this is due to the law. For instance, much of the USA lacks anti-scab laws, which prevent corporations from hiring replacement workers. Unions in the USA have to fight in a very unfriendly atmosphere and where much of what is standard practice elsewhere is illegal due to laws paid for by companies that are deliberately union-unfriendly.
This. The underlying assumption with this is that gamers will drop everything to play the game to the finish, which is not how it works for most adult and young adult gamers (who are the primary players of RTSs, cRPGs, and other dying and abused genres). With games like Mass Effect, I can take weeks or months before finally completing them due to my drive to grab the best items, complete the quests, etc. DLCs, both official and fan-made tend to increase that time. It's less a case of feeling the burning urge to 'blitz' a game and more completing a quest here or there and taking time to play a bit more on the game. I am the same with turn-based games like Civilization, where games can have a few hundred hours of playtime but last (in the real world) for weeks or months if I can't get much time to play.
someone has to be held responsible
Yes, the person who actually did it. What I am advocating is a degree of investigation. To view it in a legal framework, the primary user is being found guilty automatically, without any chance to prove his case. You seem to be advocating finding someone responsible for the sake of finding someone responsible, which is exactly how scapegoats are created and how problems are not solved in any way.
Both work great without having to install a driver on Linux, since they are supported by libSANE.
That name seems very appropriate right now.
The point I was trying to make is about establishing a reasonable level of security. Sure, it's somewhat reasonable to require encryption, but even then the user should not be automatically responsible for the content of the network; they should have the opportunity to find proof that someone else was. I think my comparison of a home network to a work PC is a good one because, fundamentally, both are potentially accessible by many people and if any of those many people are malicious, the primary user is held responsible most of the time.