Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases.
Sure, but it's not an account that's connected to anything else. It's trivial to generate thousands of accounts like that.
I'm sure Google keeps the referrer information for URLs that hit the Play store. Just throw out all the ratings that come through the game.
Assuming the game sends a referer header (note the "correct" spelling). They may not be sending an HTTP request at all, in fact I would expect that they aren't.
Allowing anonymous ratings results in rating stuffing. Requiring that an identity be associated with the rating doesn't completely prevent it, of course, but it does reduce it dramatically, especially if the identity in question has a social network, because it makes creating the backstory to substantiate the rating harder.
The social network also facilitates allowing people to easily discover what their friends and acquaintances think of apps, which often provides more information than aggregated ratings by strangers, resulting in a better service.
I'm not saying that you should like it, or agree with it, or change your mind about using it. Just explaining the rationale.
It's related to the reason that so many news sites' comment pages are requiring an identity linkage. Anonymity encourages garbage comments, and requiring people to put their name on what they write makes most of them more thoughtful. Of course this also has the effect of silencing people who have reason to fear that their on-line comments may have negative real-world consequences for them.
There is no perfect solution, but in many contexts requiring an identity for participation seems to improve quality enough that on balance it's a good idea, IMO.
So, then, you would exonerate a person who, by their own hand, murdered thousands of innocent people, just because they give the excuse of "well, it was them or me?"
Is the excuse true? Would failing to kill those thousands have resulted in the person's death? If so, then I'd say the person is despicable but has not committed any crime and doesn't deserve any punishment other than having to live with themselves. The courts would agree, FWIW.
Cowardice is a character flaw that should be punished, not fucking honored.
False dichotomy. Obviously I don't honor cowardice, and I do agree that it's a character flaw but that doesn't mean it should be punished. I think a potty mouth like yours is a character flaw (as well as indicative of poor communication skills and inadequate vocabulary), but another that should not be punished (in most contexts).
I don't believe that you actually live the position you're espousing here. I notice that you choose to hide behind a pseudonym and don't publish your e-mail address. Where's the conviction of your beliefs? Are you a coward who should be punished? Why are you not working to fix the problems that you're demanding others should risk their lives to fix?
The TRUE coward is the man who demands that others suffer for him.
It's a bit of a problem where by being the leading product, promoting your other products - even if inferior - allows you to make those products appear to be more popular, which in turn gets more people using them, which in turn means (at least as I understand the most basic aspects of ranking - I know there's way more variables) that it gets a higher spot.
Perhaps. This really gets into a question of what the ranking algorithm is measuring, and whether or not it does what it's supposed to do. Given that neither of us knows anything about how Google actually does it, that line of discussion is fruitless:-)
I think that the reworked results page is a compromise - Google still gets to put their products / the top results (regardless of overlap) first, but also shows alternatives.
I don't disagree. I'm not sure that it's the best thing for the user, but neither is terrible. At worst it damages Google slightly in exchange for giving regulators some confidence that they don't have to just trust Google and its algorithms. I think it's a reasonable compromise.
But if untouched, I really don't see any reason for Google not to just put their own products at the top, and not even bother mentioning alternatives, except maybe way down the search results.
I see plenty of reason, as long as Google is -- and remains -- a company that is focused on the long run. In the long run, the best thing for Google's ad ranking team is to continue providing the maximum possible value to users and advertisers (both). Some will argue that ads provide no value to users, but to the extent that users click the ads and come away from the process feeling like they achieved their goals, the ads are valuable to the users, which makes them more valuable to advertisers and Google. While it may benefit the team that owns some other Google property to get an artificially-boosted rank, if that choice lowers the overall utility of the search engine to users, even a little bit, then it lowered the value to Google. In addition, bumping a Google property up means bumping a paying advertiser down, which means there's a direct revenue hit from the decision. Now, if the bumped-up property gets the click and generates revenue greater than the loss, that's a good trade... but notice that this is exactly the same evaluation that advertisers must make when deciding how much to bid for ad placement.
Therefore, the most rational choice for Google is to make Google properties compete for position along with all of the others -- perhaps up to and including paying for the ad placement, even if it's money that just moves from one portion of Google's balance sheet to another, but money that is counted against the internal profit/loss statement of the advertised property. Then each team can focus on optimizing its service; the ad team on maximizing user satisfaction and ad revenue (which aren't the same thing, but aren't unrelated either) and the other property on maximizing their utility and their decisions about ad spending.
I don't think it's right to blame others for not being willing to stand up and go to jail.
Do you also think that "I was just following orders" is a legitimate defense for inhuman acts? After all, maybe some of those Auschwitz guards might not have pushed 'undesirables' into the gas chamber if they had not been afraid of prison, so we shouldn't hold them responsible, right?
Depends on the details. If the alternative is getting pushed in yourself, then while I would hope a person would have the moral strength to refuse to commit murder, I'm not going to castigate someone for choosing their own life.
I teach concealed weapon permit classes in my spare time, and this is related to an issue that often comes up in my classes: you have the legal right and, some would argue, a moral obligation to defend the lives of total strangers if you have the capability to do so. However, stepping into a violent confrontation is a huge risk to your life, and it's also a risk to your financial situation and your freedom, because you could end up being prosecuted. So, should you risk your life and your freedom to defend that convenience store clerk? Everyone has to make that decision for themselves. Personally, I would intervene because if I did not I would have a hard time living with myself. Others answer it differently, but I'm not going to criticize their choices.
Getting back to the original topic, I would hope that company executives would be willing to put themselves on the line for freedom, but I'm not going to blame them for trying to work through the system instead. And in the case of Google, at least, this isn't a case of "Well, we can't do it, so we give up." The company is continuing to work the system through lobbying.
One other thing to consider: while we can't see the actual numbers, much less the nature of the requests, the execs in question can. It may well be that they look at what's actually being requested, and why, and think "This is a problem, but it's not really a huge problem... not one that's worth me going to prison." I'm not saying that we should just trust the execs to make these decisions for us, just pointing out that there may actually be good reasons why even execs with heroic inclinations may decide not to pick this fight. Or not. We can't know.
I will applaud those who choose to be valorous, but I'm not going to criticize those who choose discretion. You appear to feel free to make judgments about what others should do with their lives. I think that's immoral, and wrong.
Perhaps you should find a way to insert yourself into a position where you can heroically release the data. Snowden did. It was both more moral and more effective than complaining that unhappy NSA employees didn't do it themselves.
If those alternatives are demonstrably bad, then sure they don't deserve a spot in there. But if they're reasonably good, surely it only helps the user to check further options?
Maybe.
It depends on how Google allocates spots. If Google's own properties compete fairly with the competitors in the ranking algorithm, with no favoritism shown, and if Google's ranking algorithm is good, then this change represents a reduction in utility. If Google artificially bumps their own properties, then it may be an improvement.
I strongly suspect that the former is the case, since it's just the way Google does things. If some team asked the ad ranking team to artificially inflate its position I'm all but certain the response would be "Our data shows that your service is 8.3% less useful to users than service X, so 62.1% of the time your service is ranked below X. If you make your service more useful, then our algorithm will rank you higher."
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google and don't know anything about how ad ranking is done. I do know a bit about how Google culture works, though, and my scenario is totally believable.)
I don't think it's right to blame others for not being willing to stand up and go to jail. I do think people who are willing to do that deserve great acclamation, and would rightly be called heroes. But heroism must be offered, it's unreasonable to expect or demand it.
These companies have little choice but to advocate this new information release as a huge step forward for transparency.
Ah, bullshit - they very much could release the full details, but are afraid of government retaliation.
Given that releasing details could be construed as treason, and almost certainly would be construed as criminal behavior by specific individual decisionmakers (no corporate shield), I don't blame them for being afraid.
go to your vendor, and have them close your ticket immediately with "Using unsupported OS" which is exactly what they'd do.
Unless there's some funky browser-specificity going on (which is common for older webapps, but becoming less so), you should just be able to reproduce the issue on a supported OS and go back to the vendor with that. If you have apps that don't work on Chrome, of course, Chrome OS is a bad choice.
You can also make a new Micky mouse that looks exactly like him, but you can't CALL him Mickey Mouse.
No, the character's visual appearance is also a trademark. If a court determines that your drawing could be confused with a drawing of Mickey Mouse, you're infringing.
For some reason the idea of Hollywood sitting around strip mining books from the 90s without compensating the authors rubs me the wrong way. Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
Are they?
I doubt it. I don't think authors get such a large chunk of the revenue that Hollywood would care all that much. If Hollywood thinks a story will make a successful movie, a fraction of a percent one way or the other isn't going to get them to wait a decade. The author being a pain in the ass about editorial control is probably a bigger issue.
Informed buyers know that a slow charge time (16 hours or so for the Leaf if I recall) is annoying and unusable.
I think I'm an informed buyer, since I've owned a LEAF for almost two years now. In that time I've never even felt the need to spend $250 to upgrade my slow charger to an L2 charger, because the 20-hour (not 16) slow charge times from completely empty are not, in fact, at all annoying or unusable, at least for my driving patterns.
Look at it this way: my LEAF is normally parked in my garage from 6 PM to about 8 AM. That's 14 hours per day. While parked there it's recharging slowly, recovering about 5 miles of range per hour of charge time, which means that each night will put 70 miles of range into the battery. As long as I never need to drive more than 70 miles per day, my car will always be full when it's time to leave in the morning.
In practice, I also charge while at work, so my battery typically hits full by about 1 AM.
Informed buyers also know that extremely fast charging batteries wear out much faster.
This was thought to be the case, but real-world experience is proving otherwise.
The point is that no one knows. Yeah, everyone knows that the D-Wave device is a rather different approach than "traditional" quantum computers, but that doesn't mean it can't exploit the same effects... until the research determines that it doesn't.
It's also the case that even if it's not actually a quantum computer there may still be some way the concept can be extended to become a useful device, which may be discovered through experimentation. Or maybe it can't. Research is like that.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but don't work on anything remotely as interesting as quantum computing, and don't know much about it.)
Why buy something that isn't demonstratively faster than the old stuff
Research often requires baby steps. If you ignore every new idea whose first (or hundredth!) iteration isn't already better than what we have, you'll ignore every new idea.
The right answer is almost always to communicate and then communicate some more. Use both informal and formal channels, staring with the informal ones so no one is blindsided, but with the formal communication ready to go (so whoever you talk to doesn't have an opportunity to blindside you). In the informal communication, be clear that you are going through formal channels as well, in fact it's probably a good idea to approach the original dev and whoever else is appropriate with something "I have written up this analysis of my findings, but before I submit it I wanted to see if you can help me correct anything I may have misunderstood or if you have any suggestions." That way you're engaging them positively, but setting the expectation that you are going to take it through channels. Be positive and professional, not critical, but be forthright and clear about what you're seeing and your best estimate of what it will take to get to end of job.
If backstabbing and scapegoating is the nature of the company culture, this communication will end badly. But in that case it's going to end badly regardless, and this way at least anyone who looks honestly at what happened will not think less of you. If there's a modicum of honesty and rationality around, you'll come out fine -- and much better than if you just quietly toil away and then fail. You should probably be able to look around and get a pretty good idea in advance which way this is going to go.
And those places would be lower socioeconomic areas with all the attendant health problems....
Not necessarily. I know of one upper-end subdivision (homes in the 500s and up in an area where starter homes are around 120K) that is adjacent to a landfill. From a health perspective, as long as the landfill is managed properly there is no risk. And this particular landfill also takes care to minimize odor, pests, dust and screens the view and noise with a row of trees.
The expensive subdivision was just recently put in, too. Part of the attraction is that the landfill is expected to close in the next 2-3 years, after which it will be capped and then covered with a golf course. People are paying more for the location because of what it will become.
True, but irrelevant. Given the low cost and ready availability of virtually undetectable cameras -- and the understanding that cost and detectability will continue declining -- any expectation that you may have that you're not being recorded when in public is arguably self-delusion. The best strategy is acceptance that public is public and that anything you do in public may be preserved for all time. Given that, desensitization is nothing more or less than convincing your emotions to admit reality.
Except that the registrars for the new domains won't be the existing registrars, they'll be whoever bought the new gTLD -- and most of them were purchased by companies who are not registrars.
That one is, but there are many non-English GTLDs, too, including some that are in non-latin character sets. For example, the first one launched is a Japanese phrase, written in Kanji.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the ratings were never anonymous to begin with. This is a false dichotomy that you're presenting: I have a Google account that is associated with my Android app purchases.
Sure, but it's not an account that's connected to anything else. It's trivial to generate thousands of accounts like that.
I'm sure Google keeps the referrer information for URLs that hit the Play store. Just throw out all the ratings that come through the game.
Assuming the game sends a referer header (note the "correct" spelling). They may not be sending an HTTP request at all, in fact I would expect that they aren't.
Allowing anonymous ratings results in rating stuffing. Requiring that an identity be associated with the rating doesn't completely prevent it, of course, but it does reduce it dramatically, especially if the identity in question has a social network, because it makes creating the backstory to substantiate the rating harder.
The social network also facilitates allowing people to easily discover what their friends and acquaintances think of apps, which often provides more information than aggregated ratings by strangers, resulting in a better service.
I'm not saying that you should like it, or agree with it, or change your mind about using it. Just explaining the rationale.
It's related to the reason that so many news sites' comment pages are requiring an identity linkage. Anonymity encourages garbage comments, and requiring people to put their name on what they write makes most of them more thoughtful. Of course this also has the effect of silencing people who have reason to fear that their on-line comments may have negative real-world consequences for them.
There is no perfect solution, but in many contexts requiring an identity for participation seems to improve quality enough that on balance it's a good idea, IMO.
So, then, you would exonerate a person who, by their own hand, murdered thousands of innocent people, just because they give the excuse of "well, it was them or me?"
Is the excuse true? Would failing to kill those thousands have resulted in the person's death? If so, then I'd say the person is despicable but has not committed any crime and doesn't deserve any punishment other than having to live with themselves. The courts would agree, FWIW.
Cowardice is a character flaw that should be punished, not fucking honored.
False dichotomy. Obviously I don't honor cowardice, and I do agree that it's a character flaw but that doesn't mean it should be punished. I think a potty mouth like yours is a character flaw (as well as indicative of poor communication skills and inadequate vocabulary), but another that should not be punished (in most contexts).
I don't believe that you actually live the position you're espousing here. I notice that you choose to hide behind a pseudonym and don't publish your e-mail address. Where's the conviction of your beliefs? Are you a coward who should be punished? Why are you not working to fix the problems that you're demanding others should risk their lives to fix?
The TRUE coward is the man who demands that others suffer for him.
It's a bit of a problem where by being the leading product, promoting your other products - even if inferior - allows you to make those products appear to be more popular, which in turn gets more people using them, which in turn means (at least as I understand the most basic aspects of ranking - I know there's way more variables) that it gets a higher spot.
Perhaps. This really gets into a question of what the ranking algorithm is measuring, and whether or not it does what it's supposed to do. Given that neither of us knows anything about how Google actually does it, that line of discussion is fruitless :-)
I think that the reworked results page is a compromise - Google still gets to put their products / the top results (regardless of overlap) first, but also shows alternatives.
I don't disagree. I'm not sure that it's the best thing for the user, but neither is terrible. At worst it damages Google slightly in exchange for giving regulators some confidence that they don't have to just trust Google and its algorithms. I think it's a reasonable compromise.
But if untouched, I really don't see any reason for Google not to just put their own products at the top, and not even bother mentioning alternatives, except maybe way down the search results.
I see plenty of reason, as long as Google is -- and remains -- a company that is focused on the long run. In the long run, the best thing for Google's ad ranking team is to continue providing the maximum possible value to users and advertisers (both). Some will argue that ads provide no value to users, but to the extent that users click the ads and come away from the process feeling like they achieved their goals, the ads are valuable to the users, which makes them more valuable to advertisers and Google. While it may benefit the team that owns some other Google property to get an artificially-boosted rank, if that choice lowers the overall utility of the search engine to users, even a little bit, then it lowered the value to Google. In addition, bumping a Google property up means bumping a paying advertiser down, which means there's a direct revenue hit from the decision. Now, if the bumped-up property gets the click and generates revenue greater than the loss, that's a good trade... but notice that this is exactly the same evaluation that advertisers must make when deciding how much to bid for ad placement.
Therefore, the most rational choice for Google is to make Google properties compete for position along with all of the others -- perhaps up to and including paying for the ad placement, even if it's money that just moves from one portion of Google's balance sheet to another, but money that is counted against the internal profit/loss statement of the advertised property. Then each team can focus on optimizing its service; the ad team on maximizing user satisfaction and ad revenue (which aren't the same thing, but aren't unrelated either) and the other property on maximizing their utility and their decisions about ad spending.
I don't think it's right to blame others for not being willing to stand up and go to jail.
Do you also think that "I was just following orders" is a legitimate defense for inhuman acts? After all, maybe some of those Auschwitz guards might not have pushed 'undesirables' into the gas chamber if they had not been afraid of prison, so we shouldn't hold them responsible, right?
Depends on the details. If the alternative is getting pushed in yourself, then while I would hope a person would have the moral strength to refuse to commit murder, I'm not going to castigate someone for choosing their own life.
I teach concealed weapon permit classes in my spare time, and this is related to an issue that often comes up in my classes: you have the legal right and, some would argue, a moral obligation to defend the lives of total strangers if you have the capability to do so. However, stepping into a violent confrontation is a huge risk to your life, and it's also a risk to your financial situation and your freedom, because you could end up being prosecuted. So, should you risk your life and your freedom to defend that convenience store clerk? Everyone has to make that decision for themselves. Personally, I would intervene because if I did not I would have a hard time living with myself. Others answer it differently, but I'm not going to criticize their choices.
Getting back to the original topic, I would hope that company executives would be willing to put themselves on the line for freedom, but I'm not going to blame them for trying to work through the system instead. And in the case of Google, at least, this isn't a case of "Well, we can't do it, so we give up." The company is continuing to work the system through lobbying.
One other thing to consider: while we can't see the actual numbers, much less the nature of the requests, the execs in question can. It may well be that they look at what's actually being requested, and why, and think "This is a problem, but it's not really a huge problem... not one that's worth me going to prison." I'm not saying that we should just trust the execs to make these decisions for us, just pointing out that there may actually be good reasons why even execs with heroic inclinations may decide not to pick this fight. Or not. We can't know.
I will applaud those who choose to be valorous, but I'm not going to criticize those who choose discretion. You appear to feel free to make judgments about what others should do with their lives. I think that's immoral, and wrong.
Perhaps you should find a way to insert yourself into a position where you can heroically release the data. Snowden did. It was both more moral and more effective than complaining that unhappy NSA employees didn't do it themselves.
If those alternatives are demonstrably bad, then sure they don't deserve a spot in there. But if they're reasonably good, surely it only helps the user to check further options?
Maybe.
It depends on how Google allocates spots. If Google's own properties compete fairly with the competitors in the ranking algorithm, with no favoritism shown, and if Google's ranking algorithm is good, then this change represents a reduction in utility. If Google artificially bumps their own properties, then it may be an improvement.
I strongly suspect that the former is the case, since it's just the way Google does things. If some team asked the ad ranking team to artificially inflate its position I'm all but certain the response would be "Our data shows that your service is 8.3% less useful to users than service X, so 62.1% of the time your service is ranked below X. If you make your service more useful, then our algorithm will rank you higher."
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google and don't know anything about how ad ranking is done. I do know a bit about how Google culture works, though, and my scenario is totally believable.)
I don't think it's right to blame others for not being willing to stand up and go to jail. I do think people who are willing to do that deserve great acclamation, and would rightly be called heroes. But heroism must be offered, it's unreasonable to expect or demand it.
These companies have little choice but to advocate this new information release as a huge step forward for transparency.
Ah, bullshit - they very much could release the full details, but are afraid of government retaliation.
Given that releasing details could be construed as treason, and almost certainly would be construed as criminal behavior by specific individual decisionmakers (no corporate shield), I don't blame them for being afraid.
I don't know this gameshow but wouldn't playing for a tie put you closer to losing if the other guy isn't doing the same?
You play to tie assuming the other guy is playing to maximize his winnings. You bet so that if both of you get the correct answer, you tie.
go to your vendor, and have them close your ticket immediately with "Using unsupported OS" which is exactly what they'd do.
Unless there's some funky browser-specificity going on (which is common for older webapps, but becoming less so), you should just be able to reproduce the issue on a supported OS and go back to the vendor with that. If you have apps that don't work on Chrome, of course, Chrome OS is a bad choice.
Health care ended up being tied to employment because there was a wage freeze during WWII, but a loophole let employers add benefits.
I read that it was before WWII, that depression-era legislation freezing wages led to employers adding benefits to attract workers.
You can also make a new Micky mouse that looks exactly like him, but you can't CALL him Mickey Mouse.
No, the character's visual appearance is also a trademark. If a court determines that your drawing could be confused with a drawing of Mickey Mouse, you're infringing.
For some reason the idea of Hollywood sitting around strip mining books from the 90s without compensating the authors rubs me the wrong way. Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
Are they?
I doubt it. I don't think authors get such a large chunk of the revenue that Hollywood would care all that much. If Hollywood thinks a story will make a successful movie, a fraction of a percent one way or the other isn't going to get them to wait a decade. The author being a pain in the ass about editorial control is probably a bigger issue.
To date we have only Google's word that the only thing they will do with your Plus data is serve you ads.
Well, Google's word plus the annual privacy audits mandated by the FTC consent decree that came out of the Buzz fiasco.
Correction: The audit is biennial, not annual.
To date we have only Google's word that the only thing they will do with your Plus data is serve you ads.
Well, Google's word plus the annual privacy audits mandated by the FTC consent decree that came out of the Buzz fiasco.
Informed buyers know that a slow charge time (16 hours or so for the Leaf if I recall) is annoying and unusable.
I think I'm an informed buyer, since I've owned a LEAF for almost two years now. In that time I've never even felt the need to spend $250 to upgrade my slow charger to an L2 charger, because the 20-hour (not 16) slow charge times from completely empty are not, in fact, at all annoying or unusable, at least for my driving patterns.
Look at it this way: my LEAF is normally parked in my garage from 6 PM to about 8 AM. That's 14 hours per day. While parked there it's recharging slowly, recovering about 5 miles of range per hour of charge time, which means that each night will put 70 miles of range into the battery. As long as I never need to drive more than 70 miles per day, my car will always be full when it's time to leave in the morning.
In practice, I also charge while at work, so my battery typically hits full by about 1 AM.
Informed buyers also know that extremely fast charging batteries wear out much faster.
This was thought to be the case, but real-world experience is proving otherwise.
LMOL...the difference is they're suppose to know.
The point is that no one knows. Yeah, everyone knows that the D-Wave device is a rather different approach than "traditional" quantum computers, but that doesn't mean it can't exploit the same effects... until the research determines that it doesn't.
It's also the case that even if it's not actually a quantum computer there may still be some way the concept can be extended to become a useful device, which may be discovered through experimentation. Or maybe it can't. Research is like that.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but don't work on anything remotely as interesting as quantum computing, and don't know much about it.)
Why buy something that isn't demonstratively faster than the old stuff
Research often requires baby steps. If you ignore every new idea whose first (or hundredth!) iteration isn't already better than what we have, you'll ignore every new idea.
+1
The right answer is almost always to communicate and then communicate some more. Use both informal and formal channels, staring with the informal ones so no one is blindsided, but with the formal communication ready to go (so whoever you talk to doesn't have an opportunity to blindside you). In the informal communication, be clear that you are going through formal channels as well, in fact it's probably a good idea to approach the original dev and whoever else is appropriate with something "I have written up this analysis of my findings, but before I submit it I wanted to see if you can help me correct anything I may have misunderstood or if you have any suggestions." That way you're engaging them positively, but setting the expectation that you are going to take it through channels. Be positive and professional, not critical, but be forthright and clear about what you're seeing and your best estimate of what it will take to get to end of job.
If backstabbing and scapegoating is the nature of the company culture, this communication will end badly. But in that case it's going to end badly regardless, and this way at least anyone who looks honestly at what happened will not think less of you. If there's a modicum of honesty and rationality around, you'll come out fine -- and much better than if you just quietly toil away and then fail. You should probably be able to look around and get a pretty good idea in advance which way this is going to go.
Also, make sure you have something else lined up.
https://www.123securityproduct...
And those places would be lower socioeconomic areas with all the attendant health problems....
Not necessarily. I know of one upper-end subdivision (homes in the 500s and up in an area where starter homes are around 120K) that is adjacent to a landfill. From a health perspective, as long as the landfill is managed properly there is no risk. And this particular landfill also takes care to minimize odor, pests, dust and screens the view and noise with a row of trees.
The expensive subdivision was just recently put in, too. Part of the attraction is that the landfill is expected to close in the next 2-3 years, after which it will be capped and then covered with a golf course. People are paying more for the location because of what it will become.
True, but irrelevant. Given the low cost and ready availability of virtually undetectable cameras -- and the understanding that cost and detectability will continue declining -- any expectation that you may have that you're not being recorded when in public is arguably self-delusion. The best strategy is acceptance that public is public and that anything you do in public may be preserved for all time. Given that, desensitization is nothing more or less than convincing your emotions to admit reality.
Except that the registrars for the new domains won't be the existing registrars, they'll be whoever bought the new gTLD -- and most of them were purchased by companies who are not registrars.
And it's pretty Anglo-centric too.
That one is, but there are many non-English GTLDs, too, including some that are in non-latin character sets. For example, the first one launched is a Japanese phrase, written in Kanji.