Free as in beer isn't always worth it. Think, white elephant.
Two examples from own life: I "won" a "free" grandfather clock by participating in some intrusive survey and buying discount coupons which I never used. Since I was in college and living on campus the grandfather clock had negative value and I never bothered to collect it.
The second was the time I was bored enough to drive out into the desert and listen to one of those shared time share thingies. That night they were selling shares of timeshares in San Luis Obispo (my home town) and my "free" gift for attending was a couple nights stay in a hotel in downtown San Francisco (where my brother lived at the time).
"Free" stuff often isn't worth it.
(And the obligatory, yes, I was young and very stupid).
WoW will go down in history as a classic game. I would be curious to see a comparison of total man-hours spent enjoying WoW or EVE vs total man-hours spent watching a production of a Shakespeare play. Yes, WoW is a definite candidate. 2nd Life may be one too. (Rogue/NetHack could be another, but its appeal wanes for me year by year.)
Your hours are waaaaaay off. No one plays WoW (and continues to play WoW as per their statistics) for just a hundred hours. No one. I'm not the hardest core WoW player, I don't have any PvP epics or do any raiding and I don't have an epic flying mount, but my hours spent at the game reaching level 70 and what not exceed that by a number that I'm embarrassed to write down in a public forum.
But, hey! If anyone asks me how much time I've put into WoW, I'll say a hundred hours. I'm already approaching that with Disgaea - Afternoon of Shadows and I'm only in the 9th episode.
While gaming may be a medium that doesn't mean that it can't have high quality. The word you are looking for is "Go". Unlike chess and checkers, Go isn't likely to be solved by computer any time soon.
Gaming has been around essentially forever; it will always be around, but only the truly exceptional games will withstand the test of time. Do not worry, someone will invent another one.
I thought Hawking radiation had something to do with the force of gravity at the event horizon No. Hawking radiation is due an application of the uncertainty principle. Nothing can escape from a black hole inside the event horizon, however the exact location of the event horizon cannot be measured precisely and if it is in fact variable within the limits of the uncertainty principle, some mass that was previously inside the black hole could find itself outside the black hole at some instant and could theoretically escape. That escaping mass is called Hawking radiation.
I'm not a physicist either, so I don't know exactly why this experiment would prove the existence of Hawking radiation.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not that it's difficult, they do a pretty good job now, it's that noone has come up with anything better. A decade ago, some guys got together with something called GGI which was intended to be a non-networking X11 replacement. Its main distinguishing feature was that it would be closely tied to the kernel, much like the graphics in Microsoft Windows is tied. Nothing much came of it.
The biggest problem with X11 has always been looks. Always. The core stuff is ugly, difficult to code with, ugly, not integrated into a single desktop environment and did I mention that it's ugly? The KDE guys fixed all of that, though X11 has been pretty decent though not always integrated since X11R4.
My biggest like about X11 is how easy it is to network with. Your server runs locally, your windows can run natively on any machine in the world. Outstanding!
It's not broken, so it really doesn't need any fixing or rewriting for the sake of rewriting and I like my KDE/X11/RedHat workstation at work more than I like my MacBook Pro.
Ah, that makes sense. This was in 1985, when defense spending under President Reagan was at an all-time high and the Defense Systems Group was likely their most profitable division. Federally mandated child-killing airbags, a product of TRW Automotive Parts division, didn't come until a few years later.
They could still have been advertising in part for employees. Hiring was fast and furious through the end of the 80's. I had first contact with them at a job fair and the TRW guy asked me first whether or not I had any personal problems working with the Department of Defense. I found it interesting that another of the companies I talked to that day was under contract with the Nevada Gaming Commission and were staffing up to do the Nevada State Lottery and they did not ask me a similar question. War toys and monopoly government sponsored gambling are both evil, it's just a matter of degree.
And also, who buys enterprise scale software and hardware on the basis of an Ad on a web page. And who buys a hundred million dollar defense system available only to the USG or certain foreign governments? The long defunct TRW Defense Systems Group advertised on TV during the period I worked there. I would guess that they were hunting for new employees to hire and then lay off in a year or so. Perhaps most sadly, I thought the ads were really cool at the time. And let's face it, it rocked for its time. How many people my age have ever had a walled office for several years at age 25 at a huge company? 20 years ago it was possible, at "a company called TRW".
Hey! We got your spy satellite here! The camera's so good it can see freckles on mammary glands on nude beaches from high orbit. Only $400 million and satisfaction guaranteed or your money back! Offer good only while supply lasts, your mileage may vary, state and local restrictions may apply, contact your customer service agent at 1 Space Park for details or click here to arrange an immediate launch date at Vandenberg AFB...
Just for Slashdot, I keep a partition with no ad block enabled. Don't you dare click that link in support of Slashdot, that's Click Fraud(tm) and you'll be sent away to prison as a felon if you happen to live in an area where Click Fraud is considered illegal (see the other posts of mine in a different subthread of this article which respond to that threat). Otherwise, you're just lowering their click through percentage. Granted, it is a noble gesture.
The pay-per-click advertising model offered by Google and Yahoo! and others is broken. It has always been broken and it depends upon stupid[1] advertisers to be successful. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is not a roadblock to success because certain other companies have done, or are doing, the same thing and make tons of money.
If you don't like it, you don't have to do business with them. Oh wait...
I have nothing against advertising in general. I know from first hand experience that it is vital for a competitive market.[2] On the other hand, I do not want to live in a world where advertisers are kings as described in Fred Pohl's Merchant Wars and that seems to be where we're headed.
Sorry, I'm mostly responding to other thoughts I've had to other things I've seen in this thread.
[1] The attacks described in the Business Week article you find if you google "Click Fraud" are certainly not detectable by anyone. See also my response to the guy who linked that at me.
[2] I participated in two successive economic experiments (as a hungry lab rat, I mean undergraduate, in the early 80's) at Caltech which modeled economic behavior. Us lab rats were divided into two groups, buyers and sellers and we were rewarded with real US dollars on the results of our trading. I was a seller both times. In the first experiment we were only allowed to communicate by telephone. Selling prices were not generally available, however the sellers were allowed to see all the prices offered and act accordingly and buyers were made to call a respective seller to make a purchase. I made a "fortune" that night - it was easy to keep prices up as could enforce a tacit cartel. I may have been guilty at one point of calling one of the sellers to raise his price in line with the rest of us:(, I remember that I was thinking it and it's been a long time now. In the second experiment, there were no telephones and offer/bid prices were displayed as in the typical stock exchange, otherwise the rules were unchanged. That was a buyer's market and I came away with less than breaking even as the rules stipulated.
Basically, advertising drives prices down when costs are advertised. Why do you think lawyer's fees are not advertised and paralegals (a most recent compromise) are most strictly controlled?
I've read both of the links you provided before. The Wikipedia entry is one of the reasons I trust Wikipedia to provide biased information. I have several responses.
The Business Week article describes exploitation of a broken business model. Actually it's broken in exactly the same way *AAs have an obsolete and now-broken business model. All of this pay-per-click advertising fails to demonstrate even a rudimentary understanding of how computers and the world wide web actually work.
<diversion>A thought experiment here tailored for Slashdot to illustrate how broken the legal system is right now. It's April 1st and the guys over at Doubleclick have decided to get back at the all the slashdotters who use NoScript and AdBlock. On this day, they've managed to get a photo of the goatse guy doing his thing naked when he was six years old and serve it as the ad on all clicks coming from Slashdot. An unsuspecting person clicks on an ad and at that moment the door is broken down and a team of US Federal Agents storm into the basement and confiscate the guy's mother's computer as evidence. Undeniably there's child pornography on the computer in the browser cache, but who is to blame?</diversion>
I'll accept a definition of "click fraud" as fraud only if the fraud involved lies with the organization selling the advertising (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). Otherwise, it's just human nature at work. Some people whine and complain about broken things and accept them as inevitable, other people fix them and others figure out how to deal with the situation and gain an advantage. Where there is a demand, there will always be a supply. Any law (or idea) that ignores human nature will never work.
My anger is at Blizzard over Chinese gold farmers destroying the World of Warcraft auction house, but I cannot blame the farmers themselves and arresting them wouldn't solve the problem as new farmers from poor countries would replace them.
The same thing will happen here. So long as the Googles and Yahoos are profiting from the system, they will continue. If the advertisers don't like how the system works, they shouldn't use it. If the Googles and Yahoos are to blame, place the blame on them. I will never ever buy something online through an ad and when I've bought on online on the rare occasion, I've done so by typing the URL into the address bar myself. Does that make me guilty of fraud when I've clicked on a URL by accident? Or if I've clicked a sponsored gmail ad (see my earlier post) because I want to see what a specific device is? According to the Wikipedian idiot, yes. The term "click fraud" as embodied by that horrible Wikipedia article must die.
I also believe that the only purpose of serving a web page with a hyperlink is for the express purpose of having someone click on it. Implied licensing, shrinkwrap licensing, click through licensing aren't exactly on the legal high ground. Heh. Since you mention California law and we Californians love warning labels, all ads served to people under jurisdiction of California law must be provided with the warning label: "By clicking on this advertising link, you promise to purchase a product or service from the company serving the ad. Failure to do so may result in charges of fraud leveled against you".
Not that I recommend it - click fraud is probably illegal where you live. "Click fraud" is an offensive term - on the same order as baseline budgeting doublespeak, a 5% increase instead of a baseline 7% increase is not a spending cut.
It's not fraud and there's nothing particularly wrong with it unless you're running a frequent cron job to generate clicks redirected to/dev/null[1]. That's not fraud either. Google supposedly rejects large numbers of clicks from the same IP.
As far as I know, it's not illegal anywhere except in the minds of webmasterworld wankers.
Consider this - imagine a plugin like AdBlock that blocks ads, but at the same time generates clicks for all the ads it's blocking and throws away the results. That still isn't "click fraud". It might be considered a DDOS attack which is illegal, but it is most certainly not fraud.
[1] I wouldn't call that wrong, just wasteful of network resources.
When I'm emailing about something in gmail I will often see related ads and they are often very relevant. Several times I have written an email to someone with a line like "I wonder where I could buy something like X?" and as soon as I send I see an ad up top for a web site that sells just what I am looking for. I've had that experience too. Actually, the ads that showed after send were exactly the answer I was looking for.
There are hilarious failures - like the Minix 3 ads that always show up when I'm reading lkml. Often enough though, the ads shown for a device driver patch lead to where you can purchase the hardware. This seems to be happen more often when it's accompanied by a patch description that makes Andrew Morton happy and guess who he works for...
Thats good advertising. It's part of why Google is worth all those billions of dollars.
Advertising on Slashdot is a chancy business. Never mind the click through rate, if I were an advertiser, I'd be concerned about the likely high percentage of AdBlock users who never see the ads at all.
Laptops are known for giving Linux headaches That's just not fair! Microsoft Windows can't keep up. How often is it the case that either one of Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Vista cannot be installed on any given notebook? Quite often from what I've seen here and over the same basic issue of driver availability. You're guaranteed that the O/S that came preinstalled on it will work and anything else be it Linux or an earlier/later version of Microsoft Windows is a crapshoot.
The "fancy bells and whistles" are frequently buggy and at any rate have an effective manufacturing life measured in months. In the typical case of not having full specs to the hardware, by the time you reverse engineer them there's a newer model with different quirks for sale.
The press, the people who don't know what a clue stick is when it's being bashed on their heads, are doing the QA for Microsoft Windows Vista? Really?
I'm an extremely long time Linux developer and I wouldn't count on the so-called Linux press to potty train my youngest son, let alone QA and debug an O/S.
IP addresses, idiots posting personal info online It could be automated and I once described a method when the USG was stupidly considering mandating network-level age identification. See Tim May's LolitaWatch and my GNU KiddieFind "announced" here http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS8/cud831 (Computer Underground Digest 8.31).
I find little comfort that my passport contains a "please kidnap my children" broadcasting chip inside it. It's only a matter of time before that is successfully exploited.
The only real substance in TFA is the quoted statistics for an increase in pedophilia-related arrests. Which only means that more total people are online over time and they are arresting more people. Kind of the same thing as when Binet, who designed the IQ test, when asked what IQ was said, "What my test measures."
Because the total online population is increasing and it's becoming easier for agents to perform their stings and make arrests as you describe, it could also mean that online pedophilia as a percentage of the whole is decreasing.
Not to mention, that you have to actually LOOK for that type of thing. Heh. And you have to do a lot more than just a plain google search. We BOFH types have won. "Click here for pictures of a hot naked 6 year old female" linked to a photo of the family dog, warez sites that DNS resolve to 127.0.0.1, etc. Been there done that.
My favorite was a page titled "All the reasons why Bill Clinton is a great President" with a completely empty body. The best part was the responses I got.
Reminds me of these folks [FreeRepublic.com]; a good working definition of "minimal signal-to-noise ratio". (For non-Freepers...) A constant flood of dups, no very good way to sort out the articles you were really interested in though it kept getting somewhat better... sigh.
I got great entertainment out of that site for many years, but the hate directed at anyone anti-neocon (and how otherwise normal-sounding people started frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of Hillary! and her ilk) just became too much. I still have an account - http://www.freerepublic.com/~altair but I think they deleted most of their archives when I was the most active in posting there.
I bought the first Gameboy, and I still have it to this very day. I bought the external battery pack (filled with 4xC NiCad) and the carrying case that looked like a gigantic Gameboy.
It still works. All of it. I have had to replace the batteries in the external battery pack, but that is it. I mean, the damn thing is almost 20 years old. It still turns on just fine. Ah, you guys are talking about the Original GameBoy. My earlier remarks about the lack of toughness of the GBA and GBA SP are -1 irrelevant. Sorry.
I'll still pit my HP 41CV and HP 48g against any other candidate for "toughest electronic device ever". If my GBAs are still working 5 or 6 years from now, right button or not, then I'll consider them.
I was playing a frustrating game on my original Game Boy back in the day, got frustrated and hit it against my head--I broke the internal screen, and it couldn't display games correctly anymore. So it's not that tough... Actually, it is not that tough. Every GBA (non-SP) I've had has eventually had the right button go bad and these were the older made-in-Japan models, not the cheapie made-in-China later models.
Now WonderSwans, they are tough. I've hurled my color WonderSwan repeatedly into the wall when failing to win a broken game (because the game crashed when I won[1]) and not only did it survive, it did better than the wall - broke the plaster board and caused 30-40 thousand yen of damage, more than the unit cost.
[1] A pox on EA Sports (spit) and the Tiger Woods 2008 golf game for PSP. It has the same sort of bugs - you win a difficult challenge or a crucial tournament and the game crashes. I refuse to hurl the PSP into a wall because I know it will break.
Where do they get off thinking they can waste tax payer money on something so stupid? Only one candidate and an astonishingly small percentage of the population agree with you (and me).
Big Brother Obama/McCain/Romney or Big Sister Hillary! have different plans.
It is fair odds that if I put out a couple inquiries I could find PostgreSQL support in Detroit, MI (not a software haven) within 72 hours and based on it's lack of a Marketing and PR campaign the person who shows up at the door will know more about PostgreSQL and how to get it working smoothly than the MySQL counterpart who shows up at my door. PostgreSQL is quality software and the guys who develop it seriously impress me. It really doesn't take a lot of specialized knowledge to support it because they follow standards. Trade books in standard SQL work just fine, in my experience, developing applications with it.
The PostgreSQL source and developers were worth more than a billion US dollars a long time ago, but that's my opinion.
as long as there is no mixup in any of their databases making you a suspect for something you never did. Since when do people ever make mistakes? Sheesh.
For the record, I do not live in Oakland, nor have I ever lived in Oakland, nor do I know exactly where Oakland is except that it's somewhere in the Bay Area that I haven't been since I was a child. And no matter how many times I tell the TSA guys that on my way into the United States, they continue to ask me every time.
But hey! Having people look through my underwear because they think I'm someone else makes me feel so safe!
If Windows cost them $10 before and now costs the full $150 or so, they won't just run to buy legitimate copies. All Microsoft Windows installations in internet cafes in the Philippines are pirated. The economics don't permit them to buy a full license (it's about 6,000 pesos for a single and presumably legitimate Microsoft Windows XP license at Octagon[1]) and still make a profit, the economics also doesn't permit them to go to alternative O/Ses because they need the games to turn any kind of profit[2] at all.
I'm not saying they'll go off and run Linux - they might look until they find another pirated version, or get someone to help them download and burn one. The latter, I believe. Oh well.
[1] Octagon is happy to sell notebooks preinstalled with Linux and no O/S, which I presume means that they cater to the pirate crowd. Their standard Linux boxes have more bang in them than the ones they sell with Microsoft Vista. That's either a good thing or a bad thing.
[2] Such as it. Operating profit is on the order of 1 to 10 pesos per hour per seat... on a good day. The evil side of Steve tells me to set up a Linux shop and then report all my competitors to the BSA, but I'm not that evil and it would get me killed.
In short, STFU and get a clue. I believe! I believe! brother Microsoftie. I believe!
Thank God! I'll finally be able to install a real O/S soon on my machines. I'm so sick and tired of machines never crashing it makes me want to hurl. Soon, it's Goodbye Forever to boring Mac OS X and Linux. What kind of stupid O/S never crashes, runs fast and does exactly what you want it to?
If Jesus were around now, He would be running Microsoft Vista SP1. Oh dear God, yes! I believe! I realize how stupid, how completely and totally stupid I've been. I can only beg forgiveness and hope that by purging my machines of alien O/Ses that I will somehow cleanse away the stain on my soul, the stain caused by not recognizing The Greatness of Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
Free as in beer isn't always worth it. Think, white elephant.
Two examples from own life: I "won" a "free" grandfather clock by participating in some intrusive survey and buying discount coupons which I never used. Since I was in college and living on campus the grandfather clock had negative value and I never bothered to collect it.
The second was the time I was bored enough to drive out into the desert and listen to one of those shared time share thingies. That night they were selling shares of timeshares in San Luis Obispo (my home town) and my "free" gift for attending was a couple nights stay in a hotel in downtown San Francisco (where my brother lived at the time).
"Free" stuff often isn't worth it.
(And the obligatory, yes, I was young and very stupid).
Your hours are waaaaaay off. No one plays WoW (and continues to play WoW as per their statistics) for just a hundred hours. No one. I'm not the hardest core WoW player, I don't have any PvP epics or do any raiding and I don't have an epic flying mount, but my hours spent at the game reaching level 70 and what not exceed that by a number that I'm embarrassed to write down in a public forum.
But, hey! If anyone asks me how much time I've put into WoW, I'll say a hundred hours. I'm already approaching that with Disgaea - Afternoon of Shadows and I'm only in the 9th episode.
Gaming has been around essentially forever; it will always be around, but only the truly exceptional games will withstand the test of time. Do not worry, someone will invent another one.
I'm not a physicist either, so I don't know exactly why this experiment would prove the existence of Hawking radiation.
It's not that it's difficult, they do a pretty good job now, it's that noone has come up with anything better. A decade ago, some guys got together with something called GGI which was intended to be a non-networking X11 replacement. Its main distinguishing feature was that it would be closely tied to the kernel, much like the graphics in Microsoft Windows is tied. Nothing much came of it.
The biggest problem with X11 has always been looks. Always. The core stuff is ugly, difficult to code with, ugly, not integrated into a single desktop environment and did I mention that it's ugly? The KDE guys fixed all of that, though X11 has been pretty decent though not always integrated since X11R4.
My biggest like about X11 is how easy it is to network with. Your server runs locally, your windows can run natively on any machine in the world. Outstanding!
It's not broken, so it really doesn't need any fixing or rewriting for the sake of rewriting and I like my KDE/X11/RedHat workstation at work more than I like my MacBook Pro.
Ah, that makes sense. This was in 1985, when defense spending under President Reagan was at an all-time high and the Defense Systems Group was likely their most profitable division. Federally mandated child-killing airbags, a product of TRW Automotive Parts division, didn't come until a few years later.
They could still have been advertising in part for employees. Hiring was fast and furious through the end of the 80's. I had first contact with them at a job fair and the TRW guy asked me first whether or not I had any personal problems working with the Department of Defense. I found it interesting that another of the companies I talked to that day was under contract with the Nevada Gaming Commission and were staffing up to do the Nevada State Lottery and they did not ask me a similar question. War toys and monopoly government sponsored gambling are both evil, it's just a matter of degree.
Hey! We got your spy satellite here! The camera's so good it can see freckles on mammary glands on nude beaches from high orbit. Only $400 million and satisfaction guaranteed or your money back! Offer good only while supply lasts, your mileage may vary, state and local restrictions may apply, contact your customer service agent at 1 Space Park for details or click here to arrange an immediate launch date at Vandenberg AFB
The pay-per-click advertising model offered by Google and Yahoo! and others is broken. It has always been broken and it depends upon stupid[1] advertisers to be successful. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is not a roadblock to success because certain other companies have done, or are doing, the same thing and make tons of money.
If you don't like it, you don't have to do business with them. Oh wait
I have nothing against advertising in general. I know from first hand experience that it is vital for a competitive market.[2] On the other hand, I do not want to live in a world where advertisers are kings as described in Fred Pohl's Merchant Wars and that seems to be where we're headed.
Sorry, I'm mostly responding to other thoughts I've had to other things I've seen in this thread.
[1] The attacks described in the Business Week article you find if you google "Click Fraud" are certainly not detectable by anyone. See also my response to the guy who linked that at me.
[2] I participated in two successive economic experiments (as a hungry lab rat, I mean undergraduate, in the early 80's) at Caltech which modeled economic behavior. Us lab rats were divided into two groups, buyers and sellers and we were rewarded with real US dollars on the results of our trading. I was a seller both times. In the first experiment we were only allowed to communicate by telephone. Selling prices were not generally available, however the sellers were allowed to see all the prices offered and act accordingly and buyers were made to call a respective seller to make a purchase. I made a "fortune" that night - it was easy to keep prices up as could enforce a tacit cartel. I may have been guilty at one point of calling one of the sellers to raise his price in line with the rest of us
Basically, advertising drives prices down when costs are advertised. Why do you think lawyer's fees are not advertised and paralegals (a most recent compromise) are most strictly controlled?
I've read both of the links you provided before. The Wikipedia entry is one of the reasons I trust Wikipedia to provide biased information. I have several responses.
The Business Week article describes exploitation of a broken business model. Actually it's broken in exactly the same way *AAs have an obsolete and now-broken business model. All of this pay-per-click advertising fails to demonstrate even a rudimentary understanding of how computers and the world wide web actually work.
<diversion>A thought experiment here tailored for Slashdot to illustrate how broken the legal system is right now. It's April 1st and the guys over at Doubleclick have decided to get back at the all the slashdotters who use NoScript and AdBlock. On this day, they've managed to get a photo of the goatse guy doing his thing naked when he was six years old and serve it as the ad on all clicks coming from Slashdot. An unsuspecting person clicks on an ad and at that moment the door is broken down and a team of US Federal Agents storm into the basement and confiscate the guy's mother's computer as evidence. Undeniably there's child pornography on the computer in the browser cache, but who is to blame?</diversion>
I'll accept a definition of "click fraud" as fraud only if the fraud involved lies with the organization selling the advertising (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). Otherwise, it's just human nature at work. Some people whine and complain about broken things and accept them as inevitable, other people fix them and others figure out how to deal with the situation and gain an advantage. Where there is a demand, there will always be a supply. Any law (or idea) that ignores human nature will never work.
My anger is at Blizzard over Chinese gold farmers destroying the World of Warcraft auction house, but I cannot blame the farmers themselves and arresting them wouldn't solve the problem as new farmers from poor countries would replace them.
The same thing will happen here. So long as the Googles and Yahoos are profiting from the system, they will continue. If the advertisers don't like how the system works, they shouldn't use it. If the Googles and Yahoos are to blame, place the blame on them. I will never ever buy something online through an ad and when I've bought on online on the rare occasion, I've done so by typing the URL into the address bar myself. Does that make me guilty of fraud when I've clicked on a URL by accident? Or if I've clicked a sponsored gmail ad (see my earlier post) because I want to see what a specific device is? According to the Wikipedian idiot, yes. The term "click fraud" as embodied by that horrible Wikipedia article must die.
I also believe that the only purpose of serving a web page with a hyperlink is for the express purpose of having someone click on it. Implied licensing, shrinkwrap licensing, click through licensing aren't exactly on the legal high ground. Heh. Since you mention California law and we Californians love warning labels, all ads served to people under jurisdiction of California law must be provided with the warning label: "By clicking on this advertising link, you promise to purchase a product or service from the company serving the ad. Failure to do so may result in charges of fraud leveled against you".
It's not fraud and there's nothing particularly wrong with it unless you're running a frequent cron job to generate clicks redirected to
As far as I know, it's not illegal anywhere except in the minds of webmasterworld wankers.
Consider this - imagine a plugin like AdBlock that blocks ads, but at the same time generates clicks for all the ads it's blocking and throws away the results. That still isn't "click fraud". It might be considered a DDOS attack which is illegal, but it is most certainly not fraud.
[1] I wouldn't call that wrong, just wasteful of network resources.
There are hilarious failures - like the Minix 3 ads that always show up when I'm reading lkml. Often enough though, the ads shown for a device driver patch lead to where you can purchase the hardware. This seems to be happen more often when it's accompanied by a patch description that makes Andrew Morton happy and guess who he works for
Advertising on Slashdot is a chancy business. Never mind the click through rate, if I were an advertiser, I'd be concerned about the likely high percentage of AdBlock users who never see the ads at all.
The "fancy bells and whistles" are frequently buggy and at any rate have an effective manufacturing life measured in months. In the typical case of not having full specs to the hardware, by the time you reverse engineer them there's a newer model with different quirks for sale.
The press, the people who don't know what a clue stick is when it's being bashed on their heads, are doing the QA for Microsoft Windows Vista? Really?
I'm an extremely long time Linux developer and I wouldn't count on the so-called Linux press to potty train my youngest son, let alone QA and debug an O/S.
I find little comfort that my passport contains a "please kidnap my children" broadcasting chip inside it. It's only a matter of time before that is successfully exploited. The only real substance in TFA is the quoted statistics for an increase in pedophilia-related arrests. Which only means that more total people are online over time and they are arresting more people. Kind of the same thing as when Binet, who designed the IQ test, when asked what IQ was said, "What my test measures."
Because the total online population is increasing and it's becoming easier for agents to perform their stings and make arrests as you describe, it could also mean that online pedophilia as a percentage of the whole is decreasing.
My favorite was a page titled "All the reasons why Bill Clinton is a great President" with a completely empty body. The best part was the responses I got.
I got great entertainment out of that site for many years, but the hate directed at anyone anti-neocon (and how otherwise normal-sounding people started frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of Hillary! and her ilk) just became too much. I still have an account - http://www.freerepublic.com/~altair but I think they deleted most of their archives when I was the most active in posting there.
It still works. All of it. I have had to replace the batteries in the external battery pack, but that is it. I mean, the damn thing is almost 20 years old. It still turns on just fine. Ah, you guys are talking about the Original GameBoy. My earlier remarks about the lack of toughness of the GBA and GBA SP are -1 irrelevant. Sorry.
I'll still pit my HP 41CV and HP 48g against any other candidate for "toughest electronic device ever". If my GBAs are still working 5 or 6 years from now, right button or not, then I'll consider them.
Now WonderSwans, they are tough. I've hurled my color WonderSwan repeatedly into the wall when failing to win a broken game (because the game crashed when I won[1]) and not only did it survive, it did better than the wall - broke the plaster board and caused 30-40 thousand yen of damage, more than the unit cost.
[1] A pox on EA Sports (spit) and the Tiger Woods 2008 golf game for PSP. It has the same sort of bugs - you win a difficult challenge or a crucial tournament and the game crashes. I refuse to hurl the PSP into a wall because I know it will break.
Big Brother Obama/McCain/Romney or Big Sister Hillary! have different plans.
The PostgreSQL source and developers were worth more than a billion US dollars a long time ago, but that's my opinion.
For the record, I do not live in Oakland, nor have I ever lived in Oakland, nor do I know exactly where Oakland is except that it's somewhere in the Bay Area that I haven't been since I was a child. And no matter how many times I tell the TSA guys that on my way into the United States, they continue to ask me every time.
But hey! Having people look through my underwear because they think I'm someone else makes me feel so safe!
[1] Octagon is happy to sell notebooks preinstalled with Linux and no O/S, which I presume means that they cater to the pirate crowd. Their standard Linux boxes have more bang in them than the ones they sell with Microsoft Vista. That's either a good thing or a bad thing.
[2] Such as it. Operating profit is on the order of 1 to 10 pesos per hour per seat
Thank God! I'll finally be able to install a real O/S soon on my machines. I'm so sick and tired of machines never crashing it makes me want to hurl. Soon, it's Goodbye Forever to boring Mac OS X and Linux. What kind of stupid O/S never crashes, runs fast and does exactly what you want it to?
If Jesus were around now, He would be running Microsoft Vista SP1. Oh dear God, yes! I believe! I realize how stupid, how completely and totally stupid I've been. I can only beg forgiveness and hope that by purging my machines of alien O/Ses that I will somehow cleanse away the stain on my soul, the stain caused by not recognizing The Greatness of Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 earlier.