I'm not sure why you're phrasing this in terms of rights. Facebook doesn't have a "right" to track you, but it is part of their business model and user agreement. You agree to be tracked when you use their service. By extension, you don't have a "right" not to be tracked.
Dude, the issues here aside, I'm *asking* you to correct my perspective and you're still an asshole to me. That doesn't convey care for your neighbor or the best for your countryman. If your words generally fall on deaf ears, maybe it's because your wrap them in insults and condescension.
I get the feeling that I've pissed you off. I'm sorry if I'm done something wrong; I'm honestly just trying to understand why everybody's so angry.
-wall street does *not* exist for the purposes of making money for those who play there
But that's a side effect of any sufficiently-liquid market, isn't it? The *purpose* of the market seems not too relevant to me; you can't realistically expect to control everybody's motivations for participating in the market.
Going another step, why shouldn't "arbitrage" (quotes for the pedantic) be a part of the market? This is a real question; I'm not trying to push a philosophy here. What's so bad about that? Either you want to participate in that kind of market and you do. Or you dislike what it does to the market and you opt out. Who's the victim here?
Maybe the real issue that has people so worked up is that we've put our financial security into the hands of greedy people who make high-risk bets with our money. Well... maybe we shouldn't do that if we don't like it? Maybe those who are comfortable with that can participate in the market and those who aren't should skip it?
It's not that I'm arguing that the market *should* be the way it is, because I don't really know. I just really don't understand the vitriol. I look at HFT and think "they're making a ton of money playing within the rules... um, ok; why is that bad for me?". Really, if it's bad for me and I don't get it, please explain it to me, because I'd like to understand what I'm missing.
I don't particularly *like* HFT but I have a lot of trouble understanding the hate. It's not Wall Street's job to make the world a "better place." It's a *market*. That's it. Trading stocks is speculation, no matter how long you hold the stock.
If you place your entire financial future in the hands of trading algorithms, you live or die by them, regardless of how fast they execute. If you deploy a poor algorithm and your business goes bankrupt... oh well, guess you took a huge risk, didn't have appropriate failsafes in place, and now you're out of business. Why is this a tragedy for everybody else?
From the handbook and other things I've read, I think nobody at Valve is told what to work on... period. They work on whatever they want / think will be valuable. Valve sets the hiring bar so high that this hasn't been a problem. And, even if it was, they do periodic peer reviews that would expose the truly weak links.
It's a really, *really* interesting model. Valve, having had the huge success that is Steam, is in the relatively unique position of having loads of cash and operating in an open-ended market that rewards creativity. I sometimes wonder if it could work in more traditional companies / businesses. I imagine it could work at some place like Microsoft or Goole that's flush with cash (if they weren't public companies, that is). I doubt it would work well at a smaller company whose life depends on executing well on a very narrow strategy.
Advertisers move money to what's effective. If online advertising becomes less effective, they remove money from the ecosystem.
Your search example demonstrates a lack of industry knowledge. That's not the case that DNT impacts. Rather, it's knowing the user visited Nike.com in the last 30 days but didn't buy anything, so maybe you should show them a Nike ad if you get a chance. It's called retargeting or remarketing and it works a lot better than just spamming ads at everybody. It's also typically divorced from the identity of the user himself; he's just a cookie ID to the advertisers. And the knowledge is lost when he clears his cookies.
Yes, exactly! Everybody wants everything for free! Without any downside! Let's do that!
It's just not realistic. If you don't want ads but you want your websites, you have to propose an alternate revenue stream for them. Most people, when given the option, choose ads over subscription; I know I do. And I know the ads I hate the most are the ones that spam me with products I hate. Relevant, targeted advertising is a vastly superior experience (until it creeps people out, that is).
Look, I don't want advertising companies to know everything about me but there's a reasonable middle ground. I see it like frequenting a local restaurant; you don't get creeped out when the waitress recognizes you, asks if you want the usual, and suggests something to go with it. But if she suggested an alternative because the doctor said your cholesterol is too high, THAT's creepy. It's not black and white.
Wha? Education is the only reason we recognize obesity as a problem. It's the only reason we look for solutions and have these discussions.
Now, perhaps you conflated education with "printing numbers on a cup". I'll go out on a limb and agree that simply printing nutritional info doesn't help (much). But that's not really education; it's an information dump. We need to give people the tools to understand and interact responsibly with their world. That kind of education places an emphasis on comprehension and analytical thinking; it's the only thing that's going to make a long-term impact. Education is how we begin to address the root of the problem.
>The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children
It's not the perfect world solution; it's the only real long-term solution. Most other approaches are just band-aids. I'm not saying it's easy, but I don't think it takes a perfect world to put a greater emphasis on education.
The problem with your argument, IMO, is that you're effectively saying juries are useless. Or that they *should* just be lie detectors. Then what's the point? Don't waste my time if you don't need me. If my job is to do exactly what the judge tells me, then let the judge do it.
As far as I know, the reason we *don't* simply leave it to the judges is to prevent abuse. It is the responsibility of the jury to act as a check on the justice of the law and the judge; otherwise, the jury is irrelevant.
Now, you touch on a couple of related problems, which are 1) people are stupid and 2) the law is way too complex. I don't think either of these have a direct effect on the duty of the jury, but they may impact its ability to function effectively. It seems like we should focus on dealing with those problems instead of neutering a very important check on the justice system.
You're exactly right about jury selection. I was totally disheartened and disillusioned after my first jury selection process a while back. They explicitly told us the judge would give us the relevant portions of law AND instruct us in the interpretation of that law. Apparently, even investigating the relevant law (you know, to understand what it was trying to accomplish...) constitutes jury misconduct. The only area in which they left for any room for personal judgment was lie detection; that's pretty much all they wanted us for.
So when I told them I think some laws are unjust and would not be able to render a verdict I found sufficiently unjust, they basically asked how I would determine that, I told them via my conscience (is there any other way?), and they eventually dismissed me.
I left feeling more-than-ever that our judicial process was more concerned about technicalities and pedantry than actual justice. If we want justice, we need to understand intention and apply reason to a situation, not mechanically apply a list of technicalities.
If there are any lawyers or judges here who would like to offer another perspective on this, I'd love to hear it.
If it's forced, then you're not actually doing it... The story is about waking naturally between sleeps, not waking yourself up on a schedule. It also seems based on going to bed shortly after dusk which, at least for me, is hours before I've trained myself to go to bed.
So you may be among the very few here, but MOST people lose a lot of credibility with me when they say something like this. Exactly how do you think private websites should be funded? Are you currently paying for all the sites you use (that let you pay)? Do you really want to do that? I don't. Anecdotally, the vast majority of people seem totally OK with reasonable advertising in exchange for free access; suggesting it shouldn't be the default implies you either know something I don't (e.g. people want to pay) or simply want your own preferences applied to everybody.
To become infinitely nothing, lesser even, is the most frightening thing in existence.
I don't get this at all (speaking as a Christian, nonetheless). If the world is purely physical, then why is nothingness scary? It won't be painful or miserable or.. anything.
Don't we all know this already? I mean, yes, there are physical limitations, but that's clearly not an acceptable fallback argument for AT&T. The point is that if they say UNLIMITED, it implies that the organization won't place any arbitrary limits on your access, not that they can somehow break the laws of physics. What they're doing is deceptive at best and outright lying at worst.
No, I think the GP is exactly right. Any dogmatic philosophy can be the gasoline. I think China is the most-glaring modern example of a country that has very little tolerance for religion and still manages to commit terrible human rights violations. Religion is just one possible outlet for those who wish to abuse power.
I'm curious what bothers you about the "relatively unobtrusive Google ads". I have a rough hunch a lot of people have a built-in bias against online advertising in general just because it's been so. terrible. in the past and has such a poor reputation in general.
Personally, ads in magazines bother me when I there are so many that I can't find the damn content. But I remember spending a lot of time looking at hardware / PC game ads when I subscribed to a magazine in high school, which I think is evidence for my main point that relevant advertising can actually be effective and even appreciated.
You're forgetting that the issue is perceived value. If the advertiser *thinks* showing you an ad has value, then money will change hands from the advertiser to the site. In the long run, if the advertiser is wrong, they simply stop showing ads in places where they don't work.
>Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
Yes, this is typically known as banner burnout and most advertising systems have a way to cap how frequently a given user is shown an ad. In general, though, they need to have stored a cookie to remember who you are. The great irony of blocking ad cookies is that you look like a nobody to the advertisers. A nobody isn't worth anything special, so you get the cheapest ads in the system, which are usually the obnoxious, carpet-bombed ads.
And the advertiser would LOVE to know that you're not interested in cars so they can avoid wasting their money. Trust me, advertiser are aware of ALL of these issues. Whether they handle them well is a separate issue.
> If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone?
Maybe because they're effectively leeching off of the website? If the site has advertising, it's trying to make money and showing ads is party of the implied contract of visiting the site (unless they have a paid "no-ads" option). You can break your end of that contract with little consequence, but you shouldn't expect the site owners or advertisers to be happy about it.:)
In general, I don't think people are hostile to all advertising. They're hostile to poor, obnoxious, irrelevant advertising. If AdBlock Plus is using its weight to make advertising more user-friendly and effective, that's a long-term win for everybody (unless you'd rather be paying websites directly, which is a truly viable options often available to you now).
Basically what you're saying here is that the rule of law does not work. Only the rule of man (e.g. judges) works. If you were actually right, we could boil our entire legal system down to one rule "don't be a dick" and then rely on judges to do the rest. Obviously that won't work.
Whether intentional or not, I think you've set up a straw man here. What I see him arguing for is a system balanced further away from legalism and more towards common sense. I don't think anybody's saying the rule of law doesn't work; they're saying it's impossible to rely solely on the rule of law and, in fact, trying to do so (what it Curunir_wolf seems to advocate) is a major mistake. No matter what you do, people need to interpret and apply the law; when you take laws at literal face value instead of understanding what they're supposed to do, you get things like robbers suing their victims for injuries sustained during a robbery.
Which is really more just? A perfectly enforced law where you lose your license for going one mph over the limit? Or a randmoly enforced law where you can lose your license because the cop had a bad day? In neither case do you really deserve to lose your license, but in the former at least you know how to avoid those consequences. Accordingly, I will choose the former every time.
You've setup a false choice here. You also state the latter system as if a cop could arbitrarily target, convict, and sentence you. All just legal systems need a defense and appeals process.
As long as we're speaking hypothetically, the latter system does not have to randomly enforced and the cop does not have to be allowed to get away with abuse. I hint at this in my response below: what's important is accountability. Such a system would only work if the cops were held to an incredibly high standard of fairness and conduct (and compensated accordingly). On that note, I think everything cops do while on duty should be recorded and available as evidence, with any evidence of police misconduct taken very seriously. If this were the case, almost nothing would simply the cop's word vs yours and it would require a more concerted conspiracy to abuse the system.
Medievalist had a great response to this, but I have a few points that I'd also like you to see.
First, it's utterly ridiculous to expect laws to start and remain unambiguous. Any half-decent engineer knows there are many ways a once-clear specification can be misunderstood, especially as your system grows and interacts with other systems. People miss cases or simply can't yet conceive of new situations. The goal of the law is what's important; losing site of the goals is what leads to ridiculous lawsuits and the litigation-heavy society we have now.
Second, unambiguous laws are not necessarily just. For example, if you exceed the speed limit by 1 mph, you've technically broken to law, but have you really violated the spirit of the law? I would argue no; I would argue that the spirit is to keep people driving responsibly and safely and I don't think there's a magic speed where everybody drives like that. In a perfect world, I would rather have a subjective law focused on safety and rely on intelligent, upright enforcers to uphold the spirit. It's not a perfect world so we end up somewhere in the middle.
Finally, you're really focusing on the wrong thing. What we need are simple laws with clear goals and accountability for the people who enforce them (at all levels). Unfortunately, effective accountability is a very hard thing to create, but I'm sure we could do a hell of a lot better than we do now.
Slashdot Mirror
And how did you feel about LOST? This is how I'll know the compatibility of our opinions.
I'm not sure why you're phrasing this in terms of rights. Facebook doesn't have a "right" to track you, but it is part of their business model and user agreement. You agree to be tracked when you use their service. By extension, you don't have a "right" not to be tracked.
Dude, the issues here aside, I'm *asking* you to correct my perspective and you're still an asshole to me. That doesn't convey care for your neighbor or the best for your countryman. If your words generally fall on deaf ears, maybe it's because your wrap them in insults and condescension.
I get the feeling that I've pissed you off. I'm sorry if I'm done something wrong; I'm honestly just trying to understand why everybody's so angry.
-wall street does *not* exist for the purposes of making money for those who play there
But that's a side effect of any sufficiently-liquid market, isn't it? The *purpose* of the market seems not too relevant to me; you can't realistically expect to control everybody's motivations for participating in the market.
Going another step, why shouldn't "arbitrage" (quotes for the pedantic) be a part of the market? This is a real question; I'm not trying to push a philosophy here. What's so bad about that? Either you want to participate in that kind of market and you do. Or you dislike what it does to the market and you opt out. Who's the victim here?
Maybe the real issue that has people so worked up is that we've put our financial security into the hands of greedy people who make high-risk bets with our money. Well... maybe we shouldn't do that if we don't like it? Maybe those who are comfortable with that can participate in the market and those who aren't should skip it?
It's not that I'm arguing that the market *should* be the way it is, because I don't really know. I just really don't understand the vitriol. I look at HFT and think "they're making a ton of money playing within the rules... um, ok; why is that bad for me?". Really, if it's bad for me and I don't get it, please explain it to me, because I'd like to understand what I'm missing.
I don't particularly *like* HFT but I have a lot of trouble understanding the hate. It's not Wall Street's job to make the world a "better place." It's a *market*. That's it. Trading stocks is speculation, no matter how long you hold the stock.
If you place your entire financial future in the hands of trading algorithms, you live or die by them, regardless of how fast they execute. If you deploy a poor algorithm and your business goes bankrupt... oh well, guess you took a huge risk, didn't have appropriate failsafes in place, and now you're out of business. Why is this a tragedy for everybody else?
If you're curious, you can actually read the Valve Employee Handbook at their site:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
From the handbook and other things I've read, I think nobody at Valve is told what to work on... period. They work on whatever they want / think will be valuable. Valve sets the hiring bar so high that this hasn't been a problem. And, even if it was, they do periodic peer reviews that would expose the truly weak links.
It's a really, *really* interesting model. Valve, having had the huge success that is Steam, is in the relatively unique position of having loads of cash and operating in an open-ended market that rewards creativity. I sometimes wonder if it could work in more traditional companies / businesses. I imagine it could work at some place like Microsoft or Goole that's flush with cash (if they weren't public companies, that is). I doubt it would work well at a smaller company whose life depends on executing well on a very narrow strategy.
Advertisers move money to what's effective. If online advertising becomes less effective, they remove money from the ecosystem.
Your search example demonstrates a lack of industry knowledge. That's not the case that DNT impacts. Rather, it's knowing the user visited Nike.com in the last 30 days but didn't buy anything, so maybe you should show them a Nike ad if you get a chance. It's called retargeting or remarketing and it works a lot better than just spamming ads at everybody. It's also typically divorced from the identity of the user himself; he's just a cookie ID to the advertisers. And the knowledge is lost when he clears his cookies.
Yes, exactly! Everybody wants everything for free! Without any downside! Let's do that!
It's just not realistic. If you don't want ads but you want your websites, you have to propose an alternate revenue stream for them. Most people, when given the option, choose ads over subscription; I know I do. And I know the ads I hate the most are the ones that spam me with products I hate. Relevant, targeted advertising is a vastly superior experience (until it creeps people out, that is).
Look, I don't want advertising companies to know everything about me but there's a reasonable middle ground. I see it like frequenting a local restaurant; you don't get creeped out when the waitress recognizes you, asks if you want the usual, and suggests something to go with it. But if she suggested an alternative because the doctor said your cholesterol is too high, THAT's creepy. It's not black and white.
>Education doesn't work
Wha? Education is the only reason we recognize obesity as a problem. It's the only reason we look for solutions and have these discussions.
Now, perhaps you conflated education with "printing numbers on a cup". I'll go out on a limb and agree that simply printing nutritional info doesn't help (much). But that's not really education; it's an information dump. We need to give people the tools to understand and interact responsibly with their world. That kind of education places an emphasis on comprehension and analytical thinking; it's the only thing that's going to make a long-term impact. Education is how we begin to address the root of the problem.
>The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children
It's not the perfect world solution; it's the only real long-term solution. Most other approaches are just band-aids. I'm not saying it's easy, but I don't think it takes a perfect world to put a greater emphasis on education.
The problem with your argument, IMO, is that you're effectively saying juries are useless. Or that they *should* just be lie detectors. Then what's the point? Don't waste my time if you don't need me. If my job is to do exactly what the judge tells me, then let the judge do it.
As far as I know, the reason we *don't* simply leave it to the judges is to prevent abuse. It is the responsibility of the jury to act as a check on the justice of the law and the judge; otherwise, the jury is irrelevant.
Now, you touch on a couple of related problems, which are 1) people are stupid and 2) the law is way too complex. I don't think either of these have a direct effect on the duty of the jury, but they may impact its ability to function effectively. It seems like we should focus on dealing with those problems instead of neutering a very important check on the justice system.
You're exactly right about jury selection. I was totally disheartened and disillusioned after my first jury selection process a while back. They explicitly told us the judge would give us the relevant portions of law AND instruct us in the interpretation of that law. Apparently, even investigating the relevant law (you know, to understand what it was trying to accomplish...) constitutes jury misconduct. The only area in which they left for any room for personal judgment was lie detection; that's pretty much all they wanted us for.
So when I told them I think some laws are unjust and would not be able to render a verdict I found sufficiently unjust, they basically asked how I would determine that, I told them via my conscience (is there any other way?), and they eventually dismissed me.
I left feeling more-than-ever that our judicial process was more concerned about technicalities and pedantry than actual justice. If we want justice, we need to understand intention and apply reason to a situation, not mechanically apply a list of technicalities.
If there are any lawyers or judges here who would like to offer another perspective on this, I'd love to hear it.
Whoa! Hold on, guys... Can't it be both?
I've been forced to do "segmented sleep"
If it's forced, then you're not actually doing it... The story is about waking naturally between sleeps, not waking yourself up on a schedule. It also seems based on going to bed shortly after dusk which, at least for me, is hours before I've trained myself to go to bed.
Adblocking should be the default.
So you may be among the very few here, but MOST people lose a lot of credibility with me when they say something like this. Exactly how do you think private websites should be funded? Are you currently paying for all the sites you use (that let you pay)? Do you really want to do that? I don't. Anecdotally, the vast majority of people seem totally OK with reasonable advertising in exchange for free access; suggesting it shouldn't be the default implies you either know something I don't (e.g. people want to pay) or simply want your own preferences applied to everybody.
To become infinitely nothing, lesser even, is the most frightening thing in existence.
I don't get this at all (speaking as a Christian, nonetheless). If the world is purely physical, then why is nothingness scary? It won't be painful or miserable or.. anything.
Don't we all know this already? I mean, yes, there are physical limitations, but that's clearly not an acceptable fallback argument for AT&T. The point is that if they say UNLIMITED, it implies that the organization won't place any arbitrary limits on your access, not that they can somehow break the laws of physics. What they're doing is deceptive at best and outright lying at worst.
No, I think the GP is exactly right. Any dogmatic philosophy can be the gasoline. I think China is the most-glaring modern example of a country that has very little tolerance for religion and still manages to commit terrible human rights violations. Religion is just one possible outlet for those who wish to abuse power.
I'm curious what bothers you about the "relatively unobtrusive Google ads". I have a rough hunch a lot of people have a built-in bias against online advertising in general just because it's been so. terrible. in the past and has such a poor reputation in general.
Personally, ads in magazines bother me when I there are so many that I can't find the damn content. But I remember spending a lot of time looking at hardware / PC game ads when I subscribed to a magazine in high school, which I think is evidence for my main point that relevant advertising can actually be effective and even appreciated.
You're forgetting that the issue is perceived value. If the advertiser *thinks* showing you an ad has value, then money will change hands from the advertiser to the site. In the long run, if the advertiser is wrong, they simply stop showing ads in places where they don't work.
>Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
Yes, this is typically known as banner burnout and most advertising systems have a way to cap how frequently a given user is shown an ad. In general, though, they need to have stored a cookie to remember who you are. The great irony of blocking ad cookies is that you look like a nobody to the advertisers. A nobody isn't worth anything special, so you get the cheapest ads in the system, which are usually the obnoxious, carpet-bombed ads.
And the advertiser would LOVE to know that you're not interested in cars so they can avoid wasting their money. Trust me, advertiser are aware of ALL of these issues. Whether they handle them well is a separate issue.
> If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone?
Maybe because they're effectively leeching off of the website? If the site has advertising, it's trying to make money and showing ads is party of the implied contract of visiting the site (unless they have a paid "no-ads" option). You can break your end of that contract with little consequence, but you shouldn't expect the site owners or advertisers to be happy about it. :)
In general, I don't think people are hostile to all advertising. They're hostile to poor, obnoxious, irrelevant advertising. If AdBlock Plus is using its weight to make advertising more user-friendly and effective, that's a long-term win for everybody (unless you'd rather be paying websites directly, which is a truly viable options often available to you now).
Whether good or bad, the type and structure of the data stored can definitely hint at the proprietary stuff they're doing with it.
Basically what you're saying here is that the rule of law does not work. Only the rule of man (e.g. judges) works. If you were actually right, we could boil our entire legal system down to one rule "don't be a dick" and then rely on judges to do the rest. Obviously that won't work.
Whether intentional or not, I think you've set up a straw man here. What I see him arguing for is a system balanced further away from legalism and more towards common sense. I don't think anybody's saying the rule of law doesn't work; they're saying it's impossible to rely solely on the rule of law and, in fact, trying to do so (what it Curunir_wolf seems to advocate) is a major mistake. No matter what you do, people need to interpret and apply the law; when you take laws at literal face value instead of understanding what they're supposed to do, you get things like robbers suing their victims for injuries sustained during a robbery.
Which is really more just? A perfectly enforced law where you lose your license for going one mph over the limit? Or a randmoly enforced law where you can lose your license because the cop had a bad day? In neither case do you really deserve to lose your license, but in the former at least you know how to avoid those consequences. Accordingly, I will choose the former every time.
You've setup a false choice here. You also state the latter system as if a cop could arbitrarily target, convict, and sentence you. All just legal systems need a defense and appeals process.
As long as we're speaking hypothetically, the latter system does not have to randomly enforced and the cop does not have to be allowed to get away with abuse. I hint at this in my response below: what's important is accountability. Such a system would only work if the cops were held to an incredibly high standard of fairness and conduct (and compensated accordingly). On that note, I think everything cops do while on duty should be recorded and available as evidence, with any evidence of police misconduct taken very seriously. If this were the case, almost nothing would simply the cop's word vs yours and it would require a more concerted conspiracy to abuse the system.
Great post! I'd also like to read your thoughts on my response to Curunir_wolf, if you're so-inclined.
Medievalist had a great response to this, but I have a few points that I'd also like you to see.
First, it's utterly ridiculous to expect laws to start and remain unambiguous. Any half-decent engineer knows there are many ways a once-clear specification can be misunderstood, especially as your system grows and interacts with other systems. People miss cases or simply can't yet conceive of new situations. The goal of the law is what's important; losing site of the goals is what leads to ridiculous lawsuits and the litigation-heavy society we have now.
Second, unambiguous laws are not necessarily just. For example, if you exceed the speed limit by 1 mph, you've technically broken to law, but have you really violated the spirit of the law? I would argue no; I would argue that the spirit is to keep people driving responsibly and safely and I don't think there's a magic speed where everybody drives like that. In a perfect world, I would rather have a subjective law focused on safety and rely on intelligent, upright enforcers to uphold the spirit. It's not a perfect world so we end up somewhere in the middle.
Finally, you're really focusing on the wrong thing. What we need are simple laws with clear goals and accountability for the people who enforce them (at all levels). Unfortunately, effective accountability is a very hard thing to create, but I'm sure we could do a hell of a lot better than we do now.
you're = Conjunction (you and are)
Oh, the delicious ironing!