Well, I wouldn't want to get an inferior copy of an mp3 I bought because it matched another's "acoustic fingerprint". Using hashes is a much better way to make sure that everyone is getting the file they bought, even though it wastes more space.
eg, if I bought a 192kbit mp3 from Site X, and someone else bought a 128kbit mp3 from Site Y, and they matched by some other means, I'd hate for the 128kbit one to get stored as the 'definitive' version of that song. (Note that it'd be in the parent site's interests to store the lower bitrate version too - less storage and less bandwidth fees!)
I've seen the old airplane graveyard things in the desert but iirc they only have civilian planes. Do they just mothball all these things and put them in storage somewhere in case they're ever needed again? Or are they just scrapped for parts (or sold to 3rd world countries at a discount)?
In no way do I want to disparage the efforts of all people working on various Linux distributions - especially not Ubuntu, who have probably put in more than anyone in recent times - but it seems to me that the mob that has done the most to bring Linux to the masses is Asus with their eeePC laptop.
1) They've put it on a desirable, useful, practical, cheap ultra-portable laptop that people want for its size and neat-ness (and low cost)
2) They've made it simple to use and focused on the core applications and best parts of Linux
3) They've made it open source (well, maybe not by choice) and accessible for developers
4) They've solid millions of them, in a single stroke bringing Linux-to-the-desktop to more users than (I would guess?) ever before.
5) Probably most importantly, they've scared the living SHIT out of Microsoft who are now scurrying around trying to get a lightweight version of XP together to match it, which is almost 100% the opposite of what they're trying to do everywhere else (ie, make people buy Vista).
Definitely true - but I would argue that rendering text over the top of video in a web-based player is several orders of magnitude easier than creating a new patent-free video codec, so that sort of functionality would be pretty easy to add in - in fact, I'd say that once you had the groundwork of video created, getting people to add in features like that would follow pretty quickly, and you'd possibly have a complete and open Flash competitor in the market even sooner!
There appears to be a remarkable resemblance between patent trolls and spammers in that they both appear to like sending things like this out to as many people as they can and just playing the numbers. I'm sure Monster have done this before and either gotten the other entity to just roll over and play dead, but really - they can just spam things like this out to as many people as they want and hope that they can get enough of a percentage of success to make it profitable as its own business process.
Admittedly its more expensive than the near-zero cost of spam, but the principle is the same.
None of my systems have ever come with Flash pre-installed. It's always been an add-on (maybe if you buy a Dell or something with a pre-packaged OS it has Flash in it).
How do you unseat Flash? Unless the codec is efficient enough to be decoded by Javascript, you won't have anything more commonly installed available. If I had unlimited resources and was hugely philanthropic (and/or just wanted to destroy Flash as the de facto standard for web video), I'd do it like this:
1) develop an open source video codec that is a) comparable in quality/bitrate to mpeg4/h264) and b) not encumbered by patents and does not conflict with existing patents (this is almost certainly the hardest part - even starting from scratch chances are you're going to step on someone's patent portfolio)
2) create an open source player plugin for as many browsers on as many platforms as I could find, with some nice basic functionality and published specs so anyone else could create one for their browser/platform of choice.
3) create open source tools for easy encoding/transcoding of existing content to your content (note that this step might require your transcoding tool to be commercial - in order to do this legitimately I'd say you'd need to buy a license to decode things like mpeg4 into a new format). Publish the shit out of your encoding process and let the open source community make free tools. (This step is, I feel, ridiculously important. Video creation is still a bit of a pain in the ass and unless you can make it easy for people to use it, it'll never take off.)
4) create open source DirectShow filters and all the other crap needed to make your video codec work seamlessly on Windows, and distribute as a simple Windows installer. Make sure they're explicitly redistributable as part of the license and let all those codec pack creators help spread the word.
5) parter with, or create, a site with a bunch of video to a) demonstrate how well it works and b) promote it and help foster adoption. There is an assload of excellent Creative Commons content out there to start with.
(Optional) 6) Create a new company providing commercial services for all of the above for companies that want to go the extra mile (bulk encoding services, streaming and distribution, hosting, etc).
I just assumed they meant an earlier version than h.264, like h.263 - though Wikipedia tells me US patent law lasts 20 years and h.263 still has a few years left to go, by the looks. Maybe there's another h.26x on which patent has expired, or patent owners have given up rights to it or something.
This is sort of a good example of why Sun's announcement is good news, assuming they're actually going to make it open and not get sued into oblivion for patent infringement. It's such a pain in the ass trying to figure out what is what in the video world due to all the patent issues surrounding various codecs.
Xiph has a pretty good container format, and a codec comparable divx/xvid Last time I checked the open source Xiph stuff wasn't really comparable to DivX/Xvid - that was a while ago so maybe they've made advances since then, but the last benchmarks I saw showed it was not as good for quality/bitrate.
I have been posting about Dirac in almost every thread on video codecs on Slashdot hoping to raise awareness; the fact that it is truly free and (hopefully) not going to be encumbered by patent rubbish means we might stand a chance of freeing Internet video from the clutches of Adobe/Flash and all the h264/other codec patent holders.
So why is trying making a patent-free h.264 clone worth the time? You are certainly duplicating effort, and we already have solutions.
NIH, perhaps? Too many bored engineers? My first reaction on reading this was "this is awesome news because the more options the better", which is typically my attitude towards most software. That said, the more people working on Dirac, the better - the BBC have done the hard yards and having a pool of awesome Sun engineers working on it and improving it would certainly help matters.
What's required to fix it is a wholesale change in CPU architecture along with mandatory licencing and regulation for anyone who wants to program anything in any language and sell it. (If you put up a dividing wall in your house, you can get the supplies at Home Depot and DIY. If you want to sell a wall-building service to the public, you have to be licenced.) That sounds a lot like trusted computing.
I would take botnets and insecure boxes spamming me with hack attempts any day of the week over trusted computing.
Contested bandwidth is, to me, a direct result of offering unlimited bandwidth.
Users on 'unlimited' plans are accustomed to doing whatever they want, whenever they want. Compare this to users on mobile phone plans who have to pay per time they're connected - they're a lot more careful about using their phone.
I'd rather pay more for uncontested (or less contested) bandwidth than be penalised for using bandwidth at times that others are not using it. In Australia some of our ISPs offer "peak/offpeak" quota arrangements. So you might get 30gb of "peak" downloading, which means you can download that much in a month during the busy ours (say, 9am to 11pm). Then you get another 60gb which you can use "off peak" - at the quiet hours.
Many of my heavy-downloading friends are on plans like this - they find that they can just schedule all their big downloads/torrents in the off-peak hours.
This is interesting because it raises the comparison of Internet/telecoms provision to "basic services" like power and water. Arguably, telecoms is now as important as power and water to the home.
I wonder what is worse - the added bureaucratic overhead of having these services government-owned and managed, or the billions of dollars that get siphoned off when these industries are privatised?
...because they're the ones telling consumers they can download as much as they want with their 'unlimited' plans.
We did all this in Australia years ago; the most common form of Internet we get is on tiered monthly plans (3gb/month, 12gb/month, etc). Our international bandwidth is still (apparently) really expensive, so the volume of data ISPs feel comfortable giving us is relatively small to what I'd expect US ISPs to offer.
All yall other countries need to just play catchup on this issue and stop those douchebags from selling unlimited plans and then acting all surprised when people actually expect them to have no limits. People that use 200gb a month shouldn't be paying the same as people that use 5gb a month, and that should be reflected by ISP pricing.
One of the first things I do on a new Windows install is change the default background color from white to grey. Most of my workmates give me shit about it (as does anyone that uses my home PC, where I have the same setup), but I find it a heap easier to stare at for hours at a time.
When I use someone else's PC with a normal white background it really stands out.
I've wanted to try a default black BG for a while (I use black for terminal/ssh sessions) but as most of my computer use now is web-based I suspect it it won't make that much difference and I'm at the mercy of web designers.
While it might be seen as lame for Yahoo to just capitulate like this, there's no doubt good reasons for them to do it - I assume being on the wrong end of a DMCA suit in the US can be expensive both in terms of lawyer fees and potential fines (?? assuming they can get sued for damages).
If the video creator is sure its not infringing they can just put it up themselves on another service and then they can go head-to-head with Scorpio Music.
Whether its in Yahoo's interests to keep it up is probably a painful number crunching risk analysis excercise ("how much potential revenue are we going to lose by refusing to host this and the possible subsequent bad press, versus how much will we lose if these douchebags try to make a big deal out of this and we end up in court because of it?") - I'm sure its easier for them just to ditch it.
So a piece of advice for Execs and VPs: don't be too stingy with your folks. Them techie weirdos can turn into rampaging monster at the drop of a hat. Heck, I'll give them free espressos and decent raisses if I were you.:-) I suspect they're more likely to be nice to them so they don't have to worry about finding a replacement and paying them a fair salary, or replacing them with someone else (I assume getting someone in on a visa like that isn't cheap?)
There's a few things like this and I've seen several people attribute them to the iTunes 'stranglehold' on the market.
I think its sort of awesome; we're seeing more variety and more competition in the market now than ever before. Of course that's not saying much when before was more or less == 0, but hey - it's a start.
While I have long been skeptical of the record industries ability to do anything other than try to ream consumers, the fact that they seem finally willing to ditch DRM en masse is certainly giving me some hope for the future.
Not 100% what you're after, but I got to check out Vuzix video eyeware at GDC this year. I think they say their gaming glasses are the equivalent of a 50" screen at 9 feet or something (I don't recall the numbers very well because I'm on the metric system and my brain turns out when people use those ye olde terms).
I tried the glasses in two games - Call of Duty 4 and Flight Simulator X. Both have pretty impressive magic 3d technology where everything gets a nice 3d style.
The glasses for FSX also supported head movements - so I could (for eg) turn my head around and see the tail of my plane, and look up and down around the plane. The movement stuff was pretty quick and responsive.
Visually it was good, not great. I don't know if its good enough for me to shell out money for it. My main issues:
- the image had a bit of flicker that was distracting
- the colours seemed a little washed out - might've just been settings
- the image _seemed_ really small. This was an interesting one - when I put on the glasses, I thought "shit, that's a tiny screen" - but when I thought about it and imagined projecting the same size screen onto a wall in front of me, its actually a pretty big size. I think it just looks smaller because the glasses don't completely cover your eyes - so I could see a heap of stuff in my peripheral vision which I think might've affected it.
- didn't wear them long enough to be sure, but I'm wondering about the comfort level, both physical (ie, wearing big bulky plastic things on your face) and issues with staring at screens 2cm from your eyeballs maybe causing headaches or something.
Overall though, it was certainly cool enough to make me keep an eye on these devices. I suspect in a few versions they'll be pretty damn impressive.
Basically, ARIA just say "you need a license to play any music*", and then the hidden * is ".. the copyright for which is owned by a participating ARIA member".
2) The real question (to my mind) is, is such a license required at all? Format shifting is specifically allowed under Australian copyright law since the Copyright Amendment Bill of 2006, as long as its for "private and domestic use". I assume "domestic" in this context means "inside the home". I haven't read the actual legislation (yet).
3) ARIA will do what they always do - wait until violation is brought to their attention (I assume this happens less and less) or through their active enforcement measures (eg, they, or some other entity, have people wandering around looking for shops that play music that don't have a license sticker in the window).
Since you appear to be in marketing, I'm surprised you aren't aware of the concept that people who do block ads aren't going to follow them anyway. I am not in marketing at all, but I can certainly believe that concept. I suppose though for advertisers the point isn't about following them - its just about getting them displayed so that there's a chance that eyeballs actually see the content and it gets registered in their brain at some level.
Its basically the same principle as spam - show your stuff to as many people as possible and try to get that small percentage of them to buy something they otherwise might not have. Advertising online is (relatively) cheap.
Advertisers won't waste money advertising in places where people aren't interested in their service to begin with, which in my opinion helps them to not waste money. I will occasionally click on a random ad simply to help a website I frequent, but hate ridiculously obtrusive ads, and those are the ones which get blocked in a heartbeat. That's true to an extent - some advertisers just try to get their shit up on as many sites as possible, I assume following the spam principle (eg, "download these awesome MSN icons!" that I see everywhere).
But yep, targeted advertising is certainly much more likely to yield results - in fact its arguably what Google's whole business model is based around, and I suspect many other ad companies are struggling to catch up to compete against them (well, except Doubleclick now:)
Heh I've always wondered about blackjack - years ago John Carmack of id Software wrote a.plan update about how he went and played at some casino (found this site which includes the copy of his update at the time) - it sounded like he walked in, played for a few hours and won $20k (which he donated to the FSF).
I always remembered that; I don't gamble because I don't know the numbers well enough to feel like I'd be doing anything other than having fun (and I'd rather spend my money 'having fun' at the pub or at the movies or something), but I specifically remember that as an example of how just knowing a bunch of stuff about numbers and probability can affect gambling, and that if I'm ever going to get into it I'm going to learn the hell out of the odds before I do anything!
(I seem to recall some mention of the casino staff asking him to leave because he was winning so much so fast, but maybe I imagined that)
I like advertising - it keeps websites like Slashdot free to use.
I work for companies that are dependent on advertising to make revenue. I'd prefer to keep those websites free, and advertising is the best way to do this.
I try not to be a hypocrite, so I don't block ads. If a website has horribly obtrusive ads, I simply stop visiting it, but I have pretty high tolerance for it now. I either tune them out or just deal with it, because the comparatively minor inconvenience is often well worth the benefit of having free access to content/services.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I wouldn't want to get an inferior copy of an mp3 I bought because it matched another's "acoustic fingerprint". Using hashes is a much better way to make sure that everyone is getting the file they bought, even though it wastes more space.
eg, if I bought a 192kbit mp3 from Site X, and someone else bought a 128kbit mp3 from Site Y, and they matched by some other means, I'd hate for the 128kbit one to get stored as the 'definitive' version of that song. (Note that it'd be in the parent site's interests to store the lower bitrate version too - less storage and less bandwidth fees!)
I've seen the old airplane graveyard things in the desert but iirc they only have civilian planes. Do they just mothball all these things and put them in storage somewhere in case they're ever needed again? Or are they just scrapped for parts (or sold to 3rd world countries at a discount)?
In no way do I want to disparage the efforts of all people working on various Linux distributions - especially not Ubuntu, who have probably put in more than anyone in recent times - but it seems to me that the mob that has done the most to bring Linux to the masses is Asus with their eeePC laptop.
1) They've put it on a desirable, useful, practical, cheap ultra-portable laptop that people want for its size and neat-ness (and low cost)
2) They've made it simple to use and focused on the core applications and best parts of Linux
3) They've made it open source (well, maybe not by choice) and accessible for developers
4) They've solid millions of them, in a single stroke bringing Linux-to-the-desktop to more users than (I would guess?) ever before.
5) Probably most importantly, they've scared the living SHIT out of Microsoft who are now scurrying around trying to get a lightweight version of XP together to match it, which is almost 100% the opposite of what they're trying to do everywhere else (ie, make people buy Vista).
Definitely true - but I would argue that rendering text over the top of video in a web-based player is several orders of magnitude easier than creating a new patent-free video codec, so that sort of functionality would be pretty easy to add in - in fact, I'd say that once you had the groundwork of video created, getting people to add in features like that would follow pretty quickly, and you'd possibly have a complete and open Flash competitor in the market even sooner!
There appears to be a remarkable resemblance between patent trolls and spammers in that they both appear to like sending things like this out to as many people as they can and just playing the numbers. I'm sure Monster have done this before and either gotten the other entity to just roll over and play dead, but really - they can just spam things like this out to as many people as they want and hope that they can get enough of a percentage of success to make it profitable as its own business process.
Admittedly its more expensive than the near-zero cost of spam, but the principle is the same.
None of my systems have ever come with Flash pre-installed. It's always been an add-on (maybe if you buy a Dell or something with a pre-packaged OS it has Flash in it).
1) develop an open source video codec that is a) comparable in quality/bitrate to mpeg4/h264) and b) not encumbered by patents and does not conflict with existing patents (this is almost certainly the hardest part - even starting from scratch chances are you're going to step on someone's patent portfolio)
2) create an open source player plugin for as many browsers on as many platforms as I could find, with some nice basic functionality and published specs so anyone else could create one for their browser/platform of choice.
3) create open source tools for easy encoding/transcoding of existing content to your content (note that this step might require your transcoding tool to be commercial - in order to do this legitimately I'd say you'd need to buy a license to decode things like mpeg4 into a new format). Publish the shit out of your encoding process and let the open source community make free tools. (This step is, I feel, ridiculously important. Video creation is still a bit of a pain in the ass and unless you can make it easy for people to use it, it'll never take off.)
4) create open source DirectShow filters and all the other crap needed to make your video codec work seamlessly on Windows, and distribute as a simple Windows installer. Make sure they're explicitly redistributable as part of the license and let all those codec pack creators help spread the word.
5) parter with, or create, a site with a bunch of video to a) demonstrate how well it works and b) promote it and help foster adoption. There is an assload of excellent Creative Commons content out there to start with.
(Optional) 6) Create a new company providing commercial services for all of the above for companies that want to go the extra mile (bulk encoding services, streaming and distribution, hosting, etc).
All non-trivial steps!
I just assumed they meant an earlier version than h.264, like h.263 - though Wikipedia tells me US patent law lasts 20 years and h.263 still has a few years left to go, by the looks. Maybe there's another h.26x on which patent has expired, or patent owners have given up rights to it or something.
This is sort of a good example of why Sun's announcement is good news, assuming they're actually going to make it open and not get sued into oblivion for patent infringement. It's such a pain in the ass trying to figure out what is what in the video world due to all the patent issues surrounding various codecs.
I have been posting about Dirac in almost every thread on video codecs on Slashdot hoping to raise awareness; the fact that it is truly free and (hopefully) not going to be encumbered by patent rubbish means we might stand a chance of freeing Internet video from the clutches of Adobe/Flash and all the h264/other codec patent holders. So why is trying making a patent-free h.264 clone worth the time? You are certainly duplicating effort, and we already have solutions.
NIH, perhaps? Too many bored engineers? My first reaction on reading this was "this is awesome news because the more options the better", which is typically my attitude towards most software. That said, the more people working on Dirac, the better - the BBC have done the hard yards and having a pool of awesome Sun engineers working on it and improving it would certainly help matters.
Support the EFF so they can keep stomping stuff like this!
I would take botnets and insecure boxes spamming me with hack attempts any day of the week over trusted computing.
Users on 'unlimited' plans are accustomed to doing whatever they want, whenever they want. Compare this to users on mobile phone plans who have to pay per time they're connected - they're a lot more careful about using their phone. I'd rather pay more for uncontested (or less contested) bandwidth than be penalised for using bandwidth at times that others are not using it. In Australia some of our ISPs offer "peak/offpeak" quota arrangements. So you might get 30gb of "peak" downloading, which means you can download that much in a month during the busy ours (say, 9am to 11pm). Then you get another 60gb which you can use "off peak" - at the quiet hours.
Many of my heavy-downloading friends are on plans like this - they find that they can just schedule all their big downloads/torrents in the off-peak hours.
This is interesting because it raises the comparison of Internet/telecoms provision to "basic services" like power and water. Arguably, telecoms is now as important as power and water to the home.
I wonder what is worse - the added bureaucratic overhead of having these services government-owned and managed, or the billions of dollars that get siphoned off when these industries are privatised?
...because they're the ones telling consumers they can download as much as they want with their 'unlimited' plans.
We did all this in Australia years ago; the most common form of Internet we get is on tiered monthly plans (3gb/month, 12gb/month, etc). Our international bandwidth is still (apparently) really expensive, so the volume of data ISPs feel comfortable giving us is relatively small to what I'd expect US ISPs to offer.
All yall other countries need to just play catchup on this issue and stop those douchebags from selling unlimited plans and then acting all surprised when people actually expect them to have no limits. People that use 200gb a month shouldn't be paying the same as people that use 5gb a month, and that should be reflected by ISP pricing.
One of the first things I do on a new Windows install is change the default background color from white to grey. Most of my workmates give me shit about it (as does anyone that uses my home PC, where I have the same setup), but I find it a heap easier to stare at for hours at a time.
When I use someone else's PC with a normal white background it really stands out.
I've wanted to try a default black BG for a while (I use black for terminal/ssh sessions) but as most of my computer use now is web-based I suspect it it won't make that much difference and I'm at the mercy of web designers.
While it might be seen as lame for Yahoo to just capitulate like this, there's no doubt good reasons for them to do it - I assume being on the wrong end of a DMCA suit in the US can be expensive both in terms of lawyer fees and potential fines (?? assuming they can get sued for damages).
If the video creator is sure its not infringing they can just put it up themselves on another service and then they can go head-to-head with Scorpio Music.
Whether its in Yahoo's interests to keep it up is probably a painful number crunching risk analysis excercise ("how much potential revenue are we going to lose by refusing to host this and the possible subsequent bad press, versus how much will we lose if these douchebags try to make a big deal out of this and we end up in court because of it?") - I'm sure its easier for them just to ditch it.
... in a few months: "China Blocks Access to English Wikipedia"
There's a few things like this and I've seen several people attribute them to the iTunes 'stranglehold' on the market.
I think its sort of awesome; we're seeing more variety and more competition in the market now than ever before. Of course that's not saying much when before was more or less == 0, but hey - it's a start.
While I have long been skeptical of the record industries ability to do anything other than try to ream consumers, the fact that they seem finally willing to ditch DRM en masse is certainly giving me some hope for the future.
Not 100% what you're after, but I got to check out Vuzix video eyeware at GDC this year. I think they say their gaming glasses are the equivalent of a 50" screen at 9 feet or something (I don't recall the numbers very well because I'm on the metric system and my brain turns out when people use those ye olde terms).
I tried the glasses in two games - Call of Duty 4 and Flight Simulator X. Both have pretty impressive magic 3d technology where everything gets a nice 3d style.
The glasses for FSX also supported head movements - so I could (for eg) turn my head around and see the tail of my plane, and look up and down around the plane. The movement stuff was pretty quick and responsive.
Visually it was good, not great. I don't know if its good enough for me to shell out money for it. My main issues:
- the image had a bit of flicker that was distracting
- the colours seemed a little washed out - might've just been settings
- the image _seemed_ really small. This was an interesting one - when I put on the glasses, I thought "shit, that's a tiny screen" - but when I thought about it and imagined projecting the same size screen onto a wall in front of me, its actually a pretty big size. I think it just looks smaller because the glasses don't completely cover your eyes - so I could see a heap of stuff in my peripheral vision which I think might've affected it.
- didn't wear them long enough to be sure, but I'm wondering about the comfort level, both physical (ie, wearing big bulky plastic things on your face) and issues with staring at screens 2cm from your eyeballs maybe causing headaches or something.
Overall though, it was certainly cool enough to make me keep an eye on these devices. I suspect in a few versions they'll be pretty damn impressive.
1) Who do you pay?
You need to look at the list of participating ARIA members
Basically, ARIA just say "you need a license to play any music*", and then the hidden * is ".. the copyright for which is owned by a participating ARIA member".
2) The real question (to my mind) is, is such a license required at all? Format shifting is specifically allowed under Australian copyright law since the Copyright Amendment Bill of 2006, as long as its for "private and domestic use". I assume "domestic" in this context means "inside the home". I haven't read the actual legislation (yet).
3) ARIA will do what they always do - wait until violation is brought to their attention (I assume this happens less and less) or through their active enforcement measures (eg, they, or some other entity, have people wandering around looking for shops that play music that don't have a license sticker in the window).
haha thanks! Good find; I had a quick look but couldn't see it anywhere.
Its basically the same principle as spam - show your stuff to as many people as possible and try to get that small percentage of them to buy something they otherwise might not have. Advertising online is (relatively) cheap. Advertisers won't waste money advertising in places where people aren't interested in their service to begin with, which in my opinion helps them to not waste money. I will occasionally click on a random ad simply to help a website I frequent, but hate ridiculously obtrusive ads, and those are the ones which get blocked in a heartbeat. That's true to an extent - some advertisers just try to get their shit up on as many sites as possible, I assume following the spam principle (eg, "download these awesome MSN icons!" that I see everywhere).
But yep, targeted advertising is certainly much more likely to yield results - in fact its arguably what Google's whole business model is based around, and I suspect many other ad companies are struggling to catch up to compete against them (well, except Doubleclick now
Heh I've always wondered about blackjack - years ago John Carmack of id Software wrote a .plan update about how he went and played at some casino (found this site which includes the copy of his update at the time) - it sounded like he walked in, played for a few hours and won $20k (which he donated to the FSF).
I always remembered that; I don't gamble because I don't know the numbers well enough to feel like I'd be doing anything other than having fun (and I'd rather spend my money 'having fun' at the pub or at the movies or something), but I specifically remember that as an example of how just knowing a bunch of stuff about numbers and probability can affect gambling, and that if I'm ever going to get into it I'm going to learn the hell out of the odds before I do anything!
(I seem to recall some mention of the casino staff asking him to leave because he was winning so much so fast, but maybe I imagined that)
I like advertising - it keeps websites like Slashdot free to use.
I work for companies that are dependent on advertising to make revenue. I'd prefer to keep those websites free, and advertising is the best way to do this.
I try not to be a hypocrite, so I don't block ads. If a website has horribly obtrusive ads, I simply stop visiting it, but I have pretty high tolerance for it now. I either tune them out or just deal with it, because the comparatively minor inconvenience is often well worth the benefit of having free access to content/services.