Blocking ads does in fact have value, in and of itself. Certainly it has value to me because I prefer an uncluttered web experience free from flashing pixels. It has value to ISPs in terms of reduced bandwidth usage, which can have very significant costs (they are PAYING for the ad bits to be sent to my computer, which translates to increased cost for me). The value to an advertiser for showing me an ad is exactly zero. I will not click. I will not by a Coke or Ford. Advertisers want to know that the money they are spending is going to actually help their brand. By allowing ad impressions to be served to me, I am diluting the value of the ad campaign for the advertiser. By blocking ads, I am in fact increasing the value of every other ad impression served. If all non-clicking people installed ad blocking extensions, and no impressions were wasted on people who will never convert, the value of the ads served will increase significantly. High-value, constrained inventory will drive a competitive marketplace. Advertisers will fight, and pay a premium, for targeted advertising which drives a conversion. That premium, assuming your content attracts the right demographic group, will directly translate into increased revenue for your site. Honestly, you should encourage every non-clicker to install AdBlock. Otherwise, they are hurting both the advertiser's and your bottom lines. Added value for everyone involved.
And yes, ABC might very well be an explicit condemnation of XYZ. And maybe I just don't want what XYZ has to offer. Would I chose to block gasoline (i.e. drive an electric car) explicitly to condemn the oil industry? Maybe. Would I chose to block pop music (i.e. not buy CDs) explicitly to condemn the RIAA? It's all crap I don't want anyway, so no. In either case, someone else makes less money because of my choice. Please explain why should I be forced to consume something which I do not want, simply because it is how someone else makes a little money?
And maybe there is no living to be made by producing professional content on the web under an ad supported model. Insisting that such a model is viable does not make it so. Many Internet sites make large amounts of revenue selling professional content without relying on advertising income. And the consumers are more than willing to pay, even though so much of that content is free. Perhaps we could all takes some lessons from the porn industry.
So to translate, "If you do ABC, you'll destroy revenue model XYZ. I make money using XYZ, so you should stop doing ABC."
Just replace "ABC" with "download MP3s" and "XYZ" with "being the middle man" and you'll have a thread about the RIAA. Use "drive electric cars"/"selling oil" and you've got Exxon.
If someone's product (be it a blog post, a song, or a gallon of gas) is worth paying for, people will. If not, no one will care if it just disappears. Invoke the invisible hands of the free market or whatever, but really we all need to realize that no one is entitled to success simply because they try or something worked yesterday. When XYZ stops working, it's time to find a new business model. Adapt or die.
Regardless, the people who seek out AdBlock and other such tools are the same people that will never click on ads. I know, because I'm one of those people. And I happen to work in the advertising industry too. From my point of view, I'm doing everyone a service by blocking the ad calls. I'm not wasting an impression which would just hurt the click through rate of campaigns. And a crummy CTR will quickly drive the advertisers away.
How can the consumer win if they, now unemployed, are not capabable of affording the goods and services which a corporation wishes to sell? For that matter, how can this be considered a win for the corporations which will suffer from decreased revenue? I cannot see how anyone wins in this situation.
ethics of time travel?
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
And what about the ethics of changing history? There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
I wonder how long they will debate such things before someone goes back and kills, say, Hitler. And I can think of a lot of other bits of history that people of influence might rather erase. (Linux? Never heard of it.)
For some reason I'm reminded of Cold War Russia. I'm seeing our corporate run government employing many of the practices we once label "EVIL". I suppose that now we have the "Digital Curtain" and the "Redmond Wall". First we get a crippled OS that either lets us listen to RIAA approved WMA files *OR* we can debug our latest project, but never both. All because of some "protected" data. Its not a far cry to think that the next step will be information restriction. Imagine an OS that won't let you use non-approved data at all. Now we all know M$ won't give/. a digital signature so I guess we won't have anyplace left to complain. Funny that they will take away our first Amendment rights at the kernel level...
I don't know about you folks, but I always write my passwords down in a safe place, like under my keyboard, on the side of my monitor, and just in case I lose any of these, I have an unencrypted flat file on my Windows desktop called "password.txt"!
You know, the people in power couldn't care less about the grey-goo problem. That's for academics and pessemists. Mega corps and government only care about maintining their stranglehold on power. Consider the idealized nanotech world where we press a button and make whatever we want. Where is the profit? Who owns anything? How can people oppress the weak with the scarcity of material goods? Now then. Do you really think for a single minute that all the greedy COEs and dictators will just roll over and let utopia exist? I think not! Really. I'm willing to bet all the money I'll ever make in the rest of my life that you'll see more regulation to protect our favorite enemy "IP" than you will to protect the innocent from being turned into pudding. I mean, who owns the patent on making stuff with nanobots? It makes the economy to which we are all slaves utterly useless. Well, that's how I see it playing out anyway. One more way to benfit humanity squashed under the foot of greed.
The real problem (at least in the corporate eye) is that they can't MAKE money on privacy. Think about all the demographics they can sell by collecting your information. Actually storing all of that into a database costs money, be in in hard drive space, computer power, or electricity. If it wasn't collected, stored, and processed, they wouldn't spend a dime.
But a corporate funded "study" is like a comercial saying "eggs are good for you" being paid for by the Egg Farmers of America or a "study" paid by M$ stating that "yup. windows is the best." Really.
Now LACK of privacy costs a lot. It costs the victims everything. And the next time someone gets turned down for a job because they smoked a joint 14 years ago or because their brother's wife's cousin was arrested for writing a computer virus, then maybe people will start to realize privacy isn't just about hiding crime, its about protect ourselves being victimized.
Perhaps a system which implaments Server On Demand(tm)(r) technology would fit here. You need to make a distiction between client and server. In this case, a client a program which retrieves specific data and stores that data for personal use. A server would also retieve data but then offers that data to clients. Servers also store data based on what people want. We've seen that in FreeNet. Nothing new here.
This is how server on demand would work.
A client starts and searchs for a server. It could be a local broadcast, searching a list of last known servers, searching a list of servers from a config file, asking the user for a server address, etc. If no server is found, the client automatically becomes a server. If a server is located, the client can begin to request data. If the server is under heavy load, it will ask a client (meeting certain requirements) to become a server. Of course, clients have a choice, perhaps a little config switch to either allower server status or never allow it. Anyway, the client needs to be worthy of server status. Some criteria might be uptime, bandwidth, available storage space, number of hops, etc. The burdened server would give the invitation. One thing that might be implamented is an automatic server invitation for clients which are located along the same route as more distant clients (say, somewhere in the middle of a 50 hop route based on response times). The middle server would then handle the requests for the more distant clients.
Obviously, we need to maintain a list of the quasi-centralized servers. Clients can maintain their own list of servers. Servers can hold lists of other servers. Search requests are never handed to clients. Only servers are searchable. Therefore, clients may publish available files to server databases. Servers may ignore these if clients do not meet certain guidlines.
We could incorporate a trust level into the server list. Once a client is deemed worthy to be a server, it is trusted. Certain bad events (dropping from the network too often, loosing storage space, etc) could reduce the trust rating. If that rating goes too low, server status is revoked and a new server can be appointed. Good events might raise that trust.
Anyway, that's a bit of my rambling. I'm not a network engineer so I couldn't describe the scalability of this method. It might work or might not. So comments are welcome! ^_^
This is designed to be a pay to play system. Essentially, its like any other monthly service. If I abuse the bandwidth of my ISP, they can terminate my service. In the realm of online games, if someone cheats, the service providers simply terminate the service. That's it. The real problem is how do we define cheating and then determine if someone does cheat. But if the client is just a thin input/output mechanism where the server does all processing, the potential for client hacks is pretty slim.
Slashdot Mirror
Blocking ads does in fact have value, in and of itself. Certainly it has value to me because I prefer an uncluttered web experience free from flashing pixels. It has value to ISPs in terms of reduced bandwidth usage, which can have very significant costs (they are PAYING for the ad bits to be sent to my computer, which translates to increased cost for me). The value to an advertiser for showing me an ad is exactly zero. I will not click. I will not by a Coke or Ford. Advertisers want to know that the money they are spending is going to actually help their brand. By allowing ad impressions to be served to me, I am diluting the value of the ad campaign for the advertiser. By blocking ads, I am in fact increasing the value of every other ad impression served. If all non-clicking people installed ad blocking extensions, and no impressions were wasted on people who will never convert, the value of the ads served will increase significantly. High-value, constrained inventory will drive a competitive marketplace. Advertisers will fight, and pay a premium, for targeted advertising which drives a conversion. That premium, assuming your content attracts the right demographic group, will directly translate into increased revenue for your site. Honestly, you should encourage every non-clicker to install AdBlock. Otherwise, they are hurting both the advertiser's and your bottom lines. Added value for everyone involved.
And yes, ABC might very well be an explicit condemnation of XYZ. And maybe I just don't want what XYZ has to offer. Would I chose to block gasoline (i.e. drive an electric car) explicitly to condemn the oil industry? Maybe. Would I chose to block pop music (i.e. not buy CDs) explicitly to condemn the RIAA? It's all crap I don't want anyway, so no. In either case, someone else makes less money because of my choice. Please explain why should I be forced to consume something which I do not want, simply because it is how someone else makes a little money?
And maybe there is no living to be made by producing professional content on the web under an ad supported model. Insisting that such a model is viable does not make it so. Many Internet sites make large amounts of revenue selling professional content without relying on advertising income. And the consumers are more than willing to pay, even though so much of that content is free. Perhaps we could all takes some lessons from the porn industry.
So to translate, "If you do ABC, you'll destroy revenue model XYZ. I make money using XYZ, so you should stop doing ABC."
Just replace "ABC" with "download MP3s" and "XYZ" with "being the middle man" and you'll have a thread about the RIAA. Use "drive electric cars"/"selling oil" and you've got Exxon.
If someone's product (be it a blog post, a song, or a gallon of gas) is worth paying for, people will. If not, no one will care if it just disappears. Invoke the invisible hands of the free market or whatever, but really we all need to realize that no one is entitled to success simply because they try or something worked yesterday. When XYZ stops working, it's time to find a new business model. Adapt or die.
Regardless, the people who seek out AdBlock and other such tools are the same people that will never click on ads. I know, because I'm one of those people. And I happen to work in the advertising industry too. From my point of view, I'm doing everyone a service by blocking the ad calls. I'm not wasting an impression which would just hurt the click through rate of campaigns. And a crummy CTR will quickly drive the advertisers away.
How can the consumer win if they, now unemployed, are not capabable of affording the goods and services which a corporation wishes to sell? For that matter, how can this be considered a win for the corporations which will suffer from decreased revenue? I cannot see how anyone wins in this situation.
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
I wonder how long they will debate such things before someone goes back and kills, say, Hitler. And I can think of a lot of other bits of history that people of influence might rather erase. (Linux? Never heard of it.)
Everyone knows Mallett invented time travel. Geez. Kids these days just don't read their history books.
And here I thought the oldest living thing was Dick Clark. Shows how much I know.
-=Mike=-
For some reason I'm reminded of Cold War Russia. I'm seeing our corporate run government employing many of the practices we once label "EVIL". I suppose that now we have the "Digital Curtain" and the "Redmond Wall". First we get a crippled OS that either lets us listen to RIAA approved WMA files *OR* we can debug our latest project, but never both. All because of some "protected" data. Its not a far cry to think that the next step will be information restriction. Imagine an OS that won't let you use non-approved data at all. Now we all know M$ won't give /. a digital signature so I guess we won't have anyplace left to complain. Funny that they will take away our first Amendment rights at the kernel level...
I don't know about you folks, but I always write my passwords down in a safe place, like under my keyboard, on the side of my monitor, and just in case I lose any of these, I have an unencrypted flat file on my Windows desktop called "password.txt"!
You know, the people in power couldn't care less about the grey-goo problem. That's for academics and pessemists. Mega corps and government only care about maintining their stranglehold on power. Consider the idealized nanotech world where we press a button and make whatever we want. Where is the profit? Who owns anything? How can people oppress the weak with the scarcity of material goods? Now then. Do you really think for a single minute that all the greedy COEs and dictators will just roll over and let utopia exist? I think not! Really. I'm willing to bet all the money I'll ever make in the rest of my life that you'll see more regulation to protect our favorite enemy "IP" than you will to protect the innocent from being turned into pudding. I mean, who owns the patent on making stuff with nanobots? It makes the economy to which we are all slaves utterly useless. Well, that's how I see it playing out anyway. One more way to benfit humanity squashed under the foot of greed.
The real problem (at least in the corporate eye) is that they can't MAKE money on privacy. Think about all the demographics they can sell by collecting your information. Actually storing all of that into a database costs money, be in in hard drive space, computer power, or electricity. If it wasn't collected, stored, and processed, they wouldn't spend a dime.
But a corporate funded "study" is like a comercial saying "eggs are good for you" being paid for by the Egg Farmers of America or a "study" paid by M$ stating that "yup. windows is the best." Really.
Now LACK of privacy costs a lot. It costs the victims everything. And the next time someone gets turned down for a job because they smoked a joint 14 years ago or because their brother's wife's cousin was arrested for writing a computer virus, then maybe people will start to realize privacy isn't just about hiding crime, its about protect ourselves being victimized.
This is how server on demand would work. A client starts and searchs for a server. It could be a local broadcast, searching a list of last known servers, searching a list of servers from a config file, asking the user for a server address, etc. If no server is found, the client automatically becomes a server. If a server is located, the client can begin to request data. If the server is under heavy load, it will ask a client (meeting certain requirements) to become a server. Of course, clients have a choice, perhaps a little config switch to either allower server status or never allow it. Anyway, the client needs to be worthy of server status. Some criteria might be uptime, bandwidth, available storage space, number of hops, etc. The burdened server would give the invitation. One thing that might be implamented is an automatic server invitation for clients which are located along the same route as more distant clients (say, somewhere in the middle of a 50 hop route based on response times). The middle server would then handle the requests for the more distant clients.
Obviously, we need to maintain a list of the quasi-centralized servers. Clients can maintain their own list of servers. Servers can hold lists of other servers. Search requests are never handed to clients. Only servers are searchable. Therefore, clients may publish available files to server databases. Servers may ignore these if clients do not meet certain guidlines.
We could incorporate a trust level into the server list. Once a client is deemed worthy to be a server, it is trusted. Certain bad events (dropping from the network too often, loosing storage space, etc) could reduce the trust rating. If that rating goes too low, server status is revoked and a new server can be appointed. Good events might raise that trust.
Anyway, that's a bit of my rambling. I'm not a network engineer so I couldn't describe the scalability of this method. It might work or might not. So comments are welcome! ^_^
This is designed to be a pay to play system. Essentially, its like any other monthly service. If I abuse the bandwidth of my ISP, they can terminate my service. In the realm of online games, if someone cheats, the service providers simply terminate the service. That's it. The real problem is how do we define cheating and then determine if someone does cheat. But if the client is just a thin input/output mechanism where the server does all processing, the potential for client hacks is pretty slim.