It's about convenience. Webmail is an easy way to pull in the casual users. Once those casual users start using e-mail more heavily, they'll be looking for more convenient ways to do e-mail. They also use the webmail to upsell to other services as well. This is the way most free e-mail services will be going - it's next to impossible to make money on webmail alone (I know, I co-founded nameplanet.com,
and even at 1.7 million registered users the job of getting enough advertisers was horrendous).
The point is they don't care if you leave, because most likely enough people will pay up to more than make up for the minimal lost ad revenue from losing a few users.
I think that's a bit unfair. Most software shops doesn't use any formal methodologies until they get a reasonable size. It's what allow them to be competitive when working on projects that are small enough that adding overhead isn't needed. If a project is handled by 4-5 people, formalized procedures and thorough documentation may never be required. It is when projects grow that you need to start formalizing how you do your development, in medium sized teams mostly to ensure that you can add or replace resources on a project quickly without a lot of overhead in training. The level of formal procedures and organization needed also depend a lot on what kind of software projects you are working on.
You don't think that there should be any restrictions. Millions of people agree with you, and millions of people disagree with you. That's the problem. The top level domains that were chosen for inclusion may have varying degree of support and a lot of people don't like the choices that were made, but none of them have involved highly controversial policies on who can and cannot register under them.
For the "restricted" domains (.aero,.museum,.coop and.pro) there are no major points of contention for what can and cannot be accepted under them.
For the "unrestricted" domains (.name,.info,.biz), the rules are again pretty clear: As long as you don't violate trademarks etc. you can register, with the additional rule that on.name you are supposed to register a personal name, nickname or fictional character, allthough nobody checks if you really do register a name. Additionally, under.name you have better protection if your name matches a trademark and the domain name you registers matches your name.
Again, there's no controversy, because they don't involve deciding which set of "community standards" or similar should be applied, and the rules doesn't include the extremely vague and controversial criteria of whether a site is sexually explicit or suitable for children.
It's exactly because people can't agree, and some people feel very strongly about it that.kids is a potential problem.
I think.kids., such as the proposed.kids.us will stand a much better chance.
They'll be controversial enough, but at least the controversy is confined to defining what is considered "suitable for children" in one country.
On another note they may be more useful for kids, as if they are country specific, it will make it easier to identify children friendly sites that use the kids own language.
Because many sites that would be considered acceptable for ".kids" in Europe for instance would be considered offensive, obscene and pornographic in the US. And material considered acceptable in the US (such as a picture of two fully dressed adults kissing) would be considered highly offensive, and even illegal in more restrictive countries.
There is no consensus on what is acceptable for kids, and the problem is hardly that tons of pornographers (by Western standards) would register domains in.kids, but that there are no globally accepted standards for what is suitable for kids.
The "highly demanded".kids and.sex are also highly controversial. Who gets to decide the standards? The least restrictive community in the world? The most restrictive community in the world? Politicians? ICANN?
While many people may have legitimate gripes with ICANNs selection of new gTLDs,.kids and.sex were perhaps the two most controversial TLDs you could try for.
US Congress discussing.kids.us is a much more sensible approach, as it limits the scope. The US government already to a great extent has determined what is suitable for kids in the US through various regulation, and setting criteria for a.kids.us may thus be a lot easier than setting criteria for a global ".kids" where whats acceptable in one country would be considered illegal pornography in another.
(ObDisclaimer: I'm co-founded GNR, the company who got.name)
It isn't up to the corporations bylaws to define what a director may or may not do - it is up to laws. In this case California law give a director of a nonprofit nearly unlimited access to the corporations records, because a director can go to jail for certain crimes comitted by the company.
I'm won't speculate about whether Karl Auerbach is right or not about ICANN (I have a conflict of interest there, as I'm involved with.name).
But the above is essential, because what Karl is saying is that he believes that the terms imposed on him, seemingly arbitrarily, are so restrictive that if he signs it it may allow ICANN management to restrict his ability to make any records he obtains available to persons needed to assist him in his legal duties. Duties which he can end up in jail if he don't carry out and there later turns out that ICANN has broken the law.
That could include discussing the documents with his lawyer, showing them to government agencies (such as the IRS) that may have a legitimate interest (if there turns out to be issues that put a doubt on ICANNs right to nonprofit status for instance), or having an auditor verify that the ICANN retained auditors have indeed done their job
properly.
All of these are seemingly innocent actions, and it may very well be that if Mr. Auerbach had signed the document provided by Stuart Lynn that ICANN wouldn't have objected to him showing the documents to the above mentioned people. But what if they do, and Auerbach has just signed away his right to?
In that case he has signed away an essential tool of complying with his duties as a director.
So even if ICANN is squeaky clean and just wants to protect sensitive information, I can perfectly understand that Auerbach don't want to take the
risk of taking ICANN management on its word.
I have a small indoor antenna with an electronic booster (we're not allowed to put up an outdoor antenna in my building), and while the signal isn't perfect if the weather is bad, we do get all the channels.
I suspect it has more to do with how well covered your area is.
No, they wanted an XML format for representing math in an application independent way. To quote the W3 consortium webpage: "MathML is a low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication". It is not meant to be concise, readable or easy to write manually. It is meant to be easy to manipulate programmatically, or display. If you don't like that, fine, then MathML isn't meant for you.
As for internal data structure, it is trivial to transform from XML to a list based data structure along the lines of what you suggest. But not all applications want that organization. XML represent a common interchange format - it does not in any way preclude you from storing it however you internally.
Any you're right, XML isn't a silver bullet. But one of the benefits of XML is that it is frequently used. By using XML instead of inventing new formats all the time, I don't have to write umpteen different parsers for use in my applications - I reuse one: an XML parser. XML is simple to parse, and there are well tested tools available I can use.
As a developer, that saves me time I would have otherwise spent developing, debugging, testing and documenting Yet Another Parser.
Further, using XML means that I can use standard tools to search, transform, edit, index etc. the data set, instead of having to invent new ways of dealing with all the different types of data I encounter.
I disagree strongly. For RMS to reach his goal of "freedom", his software projects MUST have utility, otherwise they will not drive people away from proprietary software, and there won't be any freedom involved. RMS most certainly has been the driving force in several large software projects. And yes, other people have been involved too, but that is a testament to how open source works, not to lack of focus on utility on RMS part.
As for dragging this into a discussion on the Hurd, that becomes rather amusing, considering that RMS isn't exactly active on the Hurd mailing lists I've seen. Its a part of GNU, yes, but he's not driving development in any way. So what has Hurds utility or lack of it to do with RMS?
As for compelling features, I can see plenty of compelling features - things that have been anoying me with Linux for years. I know I will consider switching when Hurd is mature enough for me to endure.
The benefit of splitting up the kernel, making it easier to maintain subsystems independently, and to develop replacements for critical kernel components without affecting more than a limited part of the system is something that can have a profound impact on further open source development.
A lot of development that for Linux is maintained as patches and require recompiles can with Hurd be maintained as user space application that won't even require any form of super user privileges on the box.
This may not have a great impact on normal users directly. But it does greatly lower the barrier
to working on whats traditionally been kernel functionality for normal developers, and that will hopefully filter down and be of use to users as well.
Being a free OS isn't compelling in itself. But being a free OS thats easier to customize can be compelling for many people working in the embedded space. And being a free OS that has lots of cool applications providing functionality that would otherwise require recompiling a kernel or doing other tasks a normal users doesn't even know the words for might.
You are assuming that MathML is meant to be typed in by humans. That assumptions is massively flawed. Most use of XML is intended to be easy to parse in an unambiguous way, and to allow the data to be easily interspersed with other notation. Attacking XML for not being readable or concise is about as constructive as attacking assembly code for being verbose - sure it's text, so some people can and will produce it manually, but for most people it's far more productive to use it for exchanging data between programs, allowing your mathematical analysis tools and your web design tools and your browser to work seamlessly together for instance.
That doesn't change anything. The original post insinuated that RMS never managed to get anything to "production". gcc has been used for production purposes since long before 2.7.2.
I hope that was meant to be a joke? You fail to see the point completely. For the simple example you gave, sure text will convey the meaning realtively well. The problem starts once you want to present really complex equations, and you'd preferrably want to be able to cut and past to/from various tools.
The problem in presentation alone means that equations published on the web is often being published as images, because presenting it as text can be a nightmare.
Allowing cut and paste of mathematical expressions between different tools (and HTML editors for instance) also isn't an easy task if you don't have a uniform, standarized way of expressing yourself.
Thats all MathML is: A uniform way of expressing maths. XML or not is a secondary issue - XML is useful because it means you don't have to deal with writing your own parser, and because it easily let multiple domain specific data representations coexist in the same document, but
thats just icing on the cake.
Re:It's a kind of intellectual arrogance.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 2
Your paraphrase blatantly misrepresent what I wrote. There is a major difference between making claims about what features and interfaces should and should not be present in a software project, and what knowledge an employee of a company should have about matters that are a) internal to the company, and noone elses business, b) are typically not generally available to everyone in the business and c) are made available to people based on business decisions that neither you or I
know anything about (such as exactly what responsibilities CT has in VA, beyond the content on Slashdot).
You don't know what the decision making process in VA is. You don't know that just because CT said it was his decision that other people wasn't involved. You don't know whether it was a decision he made based on a blanket mandate to do anything, or a decision between a fixed set of alternatives (one of which could very well be "close down Slashdot" for all of what you know).
If you truly believe that what was presented in the IRC forum (and yes I read the log) represents the full, complete, undistorted picture of the entire planning and decision making process in VA,
then you are naive. If VA had let someone who did
know the financial details, or even have access to them, blabber like CT and Hemos did in a public forum without proper notices, legal disclaimers and other crap, the SEC would be all over them, as VA is a public company.
And even if you do own stock in VA you do not have any special rights to say what employees should and should not know. You have a right to bring matters up at the companys general meeting, and to participate in electing board members, but you have no say whatsoever in the daily operations of the company. That is the solely the domain of the elected board and the executive officers of the company.
Welcome to reality.
Board members are required by law in practically any country on the planet to act in accordance with the best of the company, not to act in accordance with the wishes of specific shareholders. If you are a shareholder in VA, and believe that CT and Hemos should know these things, and that it isn't in the best interest of the company if they don't, then your courses of action is to suggest to the board that they should look into it, bring the matter up at a general meeting, or sue the company.
But then it would be up to you to prove that it indeed isn't in VAs best interest that CT and Hemos doesn't know. For what you know the company could have very specific reasons for not involving them, or it could simply be that it isn't their area of responsibility.
And, to comment on your last paragraph, based on publicly available information, you don't have any basis for saying anything about whether or not VA or Slashdot has a clue or not - because very little information is available about how they operate internally. But if you want to think that they don't have a clue, that is of course your right.
Columbus meant to find an alternate route to China. Both India and China was well known to Europeans at the time, but the only route used for trade to China was dangerous due to recurrent wars.
Since China was the only source of a lot of valuable goods (most notably silk), and was considered a rich country after Marco Polos descriptions, it was seen as a worthwhile target.
A common theory is that Columbus knew that he would find "unknown land" (to the powers that be in Europe at the time) to the west, and that he used China just as "bait" to get the ships etc. that he needed.
There are lots of stories about Columbus having maps, and various accounts of what the sources of those maps are. Some say Portuguese or Basque explorers, fishermen or even Portuguese settlers among the Viking on Greenland, others say the Vikings, the Irish (there are accounts of Irish sailing to America as well), the Chinese, Egyptians and more. I've no idea whether there's any actual proof for any of that, though, and won't try to make a guess about it.
Take it easy, think about irony, and read again. The post put "discovered America" in quotes, it then goes on to put the "from the native-americans-don't-count dept.". To me that clearly indicates that the editor in question, while finding the article linked to interesting, did see the irony of someone claiming that Chinese "discovered" America long after America had already been settled.
The "don't count" comment is unlikely to be reflect the editors meaning, and more likely to point out that there is a good reason why "discovered America" was put in quotes: America had already been discovered and settled.
Heyerdahl (who btw. now in his eigthies are still active digging up a historic settlement in Russia I believe, and overseeing excavations of pyramids on Sicily, the Canary islands and South America), sailed from Peru in 1947 to Raroia in Polynesia to prove that settlements in the South Pacific could have originated with explorers from South America.
Btw. The movie about Kon-Tiki won an Oscar for best documentary in 1950 I believe.
What you might be thinking about was Ra I and Ra II from 1969, where he tried to prove that South America may have been populated by boat from Africa, since South America is within reach of Morocco by Papyrus boats built after ancient Egyptian design. Ra I almost reached Barbados, and Ra II succeeded.
He also did a fourth voyage on Tigris, a boat built to show that there could have been cultural exchange historically between the old cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt via the see. The voyage wasn't completed because of the Iran/Iraq war.
You're right in linking Heyerdahl to the Easter Island, though, as he did lead an expedition there as well, trying among other things to link his theories of expeditions from South America closer to findings on Easter Island.
Central for Heyerdahl is that he believes that there has been much wider cultural exchanges between ancient cultures than what are known today, and that many cultures had much more extensive sea faring experience than many believe.
That, I assume, is why the headline read 'discovered America' (notice the quotes?). They could of course have said "became the first explorer from a major seafaring nation to return and provide written documentation or maps of the exploration of land unknown to those nations", or something like that. But even though you may manage to get more precise, it's hardly a practical way to deal with it.
Of course thats the way it goes if it fails as a business. My point is that if people find the service useful (to continue the library analogy: Why would you go to the library in the first place if you don't find it useful? Why would you go to the trouble of using earplugs to continue using a particular library, if that library doesn't provide something the others don't?) they should consider the fact that if they aren't an asset to Slashdot financially, they should have no expectations of Slashdot surviving.
In other words: If you like it enough to spend time here, and be one of the small minority that actually post, then you should consider whether that is worth enough to you to either endure the ads or pay for the subscription. If you don't like it enough, then leave - noone are forcing you to visit, and if you're using ad blocking software you are indirectly either making Slashdot fail or making other users pay for your bandwidth usage.
Again, how many sites are actually making a good profit of advertizing alone?
Re:It's a kind of intellectual arrogance.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 2
That's bullshit. I know lots of department heads in various companies who have no financial overview whatsoever. It is common, and normal, in departments where the company see it as more important to deliver on other targets to keep the financial control in the hands of someone else.
As for their duties to create wealth, yes VA does have that duty, as it is a publicly listed company. It does not follow from that that it is CT or Hemos duty to know the financial details of Slashdot. VA is a big company, and unless you know the details of their internal organization, you have no basis for saying what individual employees should and should not know.
It's not that simple. Of non-paid ads, a lot are likely swaps, which means that for every blocked ad that would have been part of a swap there is one less impression available for other thing, including for sale. Swaps are used for advertizing sites, and thus offsetting marketing expense. If they have to reduce the use of swaps because the number of ads viewed in total drop, then they still have to cover the marketing by actually paying for ads. So the end result is by and large the same whether you are blocking a paid ad or a ads that are part of swaps. In other word: The percentage is likely way higher.
Which lucrative field? How many community sites like slashdot can you point to with a massive profit?
Re:It's a kind of intellectual arrogance.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 2
So? Face it, Slashdot is a business. If they don't make money, they'll have to shut down. If you don't make them more money than you cost them in bandwidth, administration, hardware costs etc., either directly by paying or watching ads, or indirectly by writing comments that are interesting enough that you make up for it by drawing other people to slashdot, then you are a liability and they have no reason to try to appease you in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about convenience. Webmail is an easy way to pull in the casual users. Once those casual users start using e-mail more heavily, they'll be looking for more convenient ways to do e-mail. They also use the webmail to upsell to other services as well. This is the way most free e-mail services will be going - it's next to impossible to make money on webmail alone (I know, I co-founded nameplanet.com, and even at 1.7 million registered users the job of getting enough advertisers was horrendous).
The point is they don't care if you leave, because most likely enough people will pay up to more than make up for the minimal lost ad revenue from losing a few users.
I think that's a bit unfair. Most software shops doesn't use any formal methodologies until they get a reasonable size. It's what allow them to be competitive when working on projects that are small enough that adding overhead isn't needed. If a project is handled by 4-5 people, formalized procedures and thorough documentation may never be required. It is when projects grow that you need to start formalizing how you do your development, in medium sized teams mostly to ensure that you can add or replace resources on a project quickly without a lot of overhead in training. The level of formal procedures and organization needed also depend a lot on what kind of software projects you are working on.
For the "restricted" domains (.aero, .museum, .coop and .pro) there are no major points of contention for what can and cannot be accepted under them.
For the "unrestricted" domains (.name, .info, .biz), the rules are again pretty clear: As long as you don't violate trademarks etc. you can register, with the additional rule that on .name you are supposed to register a personal name, nickname or fictional character, allthough nobody checks if you really do register a name. Additionally, under .name you have better protection if your name matches a trademark and the domain name you registers matches your name.
Again, there's no controversy, because they don't involve deciding which set of "community standards" or similar should be applied, and the rules doesn't include the extremely vague and controversial criteria of whether a site is sexually explicit or suitable for children.
It's exactly because people can't agree, and some people feel very strongly about it that .kids is a potential problem.
I think .kids., such as the proposed .kids.us will stand a much better chance.
They'll be controversial enough, but at least the controversy is confined to defining what is considered "suitable for children" in one country.
On another note they may be more useful for kids, as if they are country specific, it will make it easier to identify children friendly sites that use the kids own language.
There is no consensus on what is acceptable for kids, and the problem is hardly that tons of pornographers (by Western standards) would register domains in .kids, but that there are no globally accepted standards for what is suitable for kids.
While many people may have legitimate gripes with ICANNs selection of new gTLDs, .kids and .sex were perhaps the two most controversial TLDs you could try for.
US Congress discussing .kids.us is a much more sensible approach, as it limits the scope. The US government already to a great extent has determined what is suitable for kids in the US through various regulation, and setting criteria for a .kids.us may thus be a lot easier than setting criteria for a global ".kids" where whats acceptable in one country would be considered illegal pornography in another.
(ObDisclaimer: I'm co-founded GNR, the company who got .name)
I'm won't speculate about whether Karl Auerbach is right or not about ICANN (I have a conflict of interest there, as I'm involved with .name).
But the above is essential, because what Karl is saying is that he believes that the terms imposed on him, seemingly arbitrarily, are so restrictive that if he signs it it may allow ICANN management to restrict his ability to make any records he obtains available to persons needed to assist him in his legal duties. Duties which he can end up in jail if he don't carry out and there later turns out that ICANN has broken the law.
That could include discussing the documents with his lawyer, showing them to government agencies (such as the IRS) that may have a legitimate interest (if there turns out to be issues that put a doubt on ICANNs right to nonprofit status for instance), or having an auditor verify that the ICANN retained auditors have indeed done their job properly.
All of these are seemingly innocent actions, and it may very well be that if Mr. Auerbach had signed the document provided by Stuart Lynn that ICANN wouldn't have objected to him showing the documents to the above mentioned people. But what if they do, and Auerbach has just signed away his right to?
In that case he has signed away an essential tool of complying with his duties as a director.
So even if ICANN is squeaky clean and just wants to protect sensitive information, I can perfectly understand that Auerbach don't want to take the risk of taking ICANN management on its word.
I suspect it has more to do with how well covered your area is.
As for internal data structure, it is trivial to transform from XML to a list based data structure along the lines of what you suggest. But not all applications want that organization. XML represent a common interchange format - it does not in any way preclude you from storing it however you internally.
Any you're right, XML isn't a silver bullet. But one of the benefits of XML is that it is frequently used. By using XML instead of inventing new formats all the time, I don't have to write umpteen different parsers for use in my applications - I reuse one: an XML parser. XML is simple to parse, and there are well tested tools available I can use.
As a developer, that saves me time I would have otherwise spent developing, debugging, testing and documenting Yet Another Parser.
Further, using XML means that I can use standard tools to search, transform, edit, index etc. the data set, instead of having to invent new ways of dealing with all the different types of data I encounter.
As for dragging this into a discussion on the Hurd, that becomes rather amusing, considering that RMS isn't exactly active on the Hurd mailing lists I've seen. Its a part of GNU, yes, but he's not driving development in any way. So what has Hurds utility or lack of it to do with RMS?
As for compelling features, I can see plenty of compelling features - things that have been anoying me with Linux for years. I know I will consider switching when Hurd is mature enough for me to endure.
The benefit of splitting up the kernel, making it easier to maintain subsystems independently, and to develop replacements for critical kernel components without affecting more than a limited part of the system is something that can have a profound impact on further open source development.
A lot of development that for Linux is maintained as patches and require recompiles can with Hurd be maintained as user space application that won't even require any form of super user privileges on the box.
This may not have a great impact on normal users directly. But it does greatly lower the barrier to working on whats traditionally been kernel functionality for normal developers, and that will hopefully filter down and be of use to users as well.
Being a free OS isn't compelling in itself. But being a free OS thats easier to customize can be compelling for many people working in the embedded space. And being a free OS that has lots of cool applications providing functionality that would otherwise require recompiling a kernel or doing other tasks a normal users doesn't even know the words for might.
That doesn't change anything. The original post insinuated that RMS never managed to get anything to "production". gcc has been used for production purposes since long before 2.7.2.
I guess that's why my copy of GCC suddenly stopped working, then...
The problem in presentation alone means that equations published on the web is often being published as images, because presenting it as text can be a nightmare.
Allowing cut and paste of mathematical expressions between different tools (and HTML editors for instance) also isn't an easy task if you don't have a uniform, standarized way of expressing yourself.
Thats all MathML is: A uniform way of expressing maths. XML or not is a secondary issue - XML is useful because it means you don't have to deal with writing your own parser, and because it easily let multiple domain specific data representations coexist in the same document, but thats just icing on the cake.
You don't know what the decision making process in VA is. You don't know that just because CT said it was his decision that other people wasn't involved. You don't know whether it was a decision he made based on a blanket mandate to do anything, or a decision between a fixed set of alternatives (one of which could very well be "close down Slashdot" for all of what you know).
If you truly believe that what was presented in the IRC forum (and yes I read the log) represents the full, complete, undistorted picture of the entire planning and decision making process in VA, then you are naive. If VA had let someone who did know the financial details, or even have access to them, blabber like CT and Hemos did in a public forum without proper notices, legal disclaimers and other crap, the SEC would be all over them, as VA is a public company.
And even if you do own stock in VA you do not have any special rights to say what employees should and should not know. You have a right to bring matters up at the companys general meeting, and to participate in electing board members, but you have no say whatsoever in the daily operations of the company. That is the solely the domain of the elected board and the executive officers of the company.
Welcome to reality.
Board members are required by law in practically any country on the planet to act in accordance with the best of the company, not to act in accordance with the wishes of specific shareholders. If you are a shareholder in VA, and believe that CT and Hemos should know these things, and that it isn't in the best interest of the company if they don't, then your courses of action is to suggest to the board that they should look into it, bring the matter up at a general meeting, or sue the company.
But then it would be up to you to prove that it indeed isn't in VAs best interest that CT and Hemos doesn't know. For what you know the company could have very specific reasons for not involving them, or it could simply be that it isn't their area of responsibility.
And, to comment on your last paragraph, based on publicly available information, you don't have any basis for saying anything about whether or not VA or Slashdot has a clue or not - because very little information is available about how they operate internally. But if you want to think that they don't have a clue, that is of course your right.
Since China was the only source of a lot of valuable goods (most notably silk), and was considered a rich country after Marco Polos descriptions, it was seen as a worthwhile target.
A common theory is that Columbus knew that he would find "unknown land" (to the powers that be in Europe at the time) to the west, and that he used China just as "bait" to get the ships etc. that he needed.
There are lots of stories about Columbus having maps, and various accounts of what the sources of those maps are. Some say Portuguese or Basque explorers, fishermen or even Portuguese settlers among the Viking on Greenland, others say the Vikings, the Irish (there are accounts of Irish sailing to America as well), the Chinese, Egyptians and more. I've no idea whether there's any actual proof for any of that, though, and won't try to make a guess about it.
The "don't count" comment is unlikely to be reflect the editors meaning, and more likely to point out that there is a good reason why "discovered America" was put in quotes: America had already been discovered and settled.
Take a look at the homepage of the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo.
Heyerdahl (who btw. now in his eigthies are still active digging up a historic settlement in Russia I believe, and overseeing excavations of pyramids on Sicily, the Canary islands and South America), sailed from Peru in 1947 to Raroia in Polynesia to prove that settlements in the South Pacific could have originated with explorers from South America.
Btw. The movie about Kon-Tiki won an Oscar for best documentary in 1950 I believe.
What you might be thinking about was Ra I and Ra II from 1969, where he tried to prove that South America may have been populated by boat from Africa, since South America is within reach of Morocco by Papyrus boats built after ancient Egyptian design. Ra I almost reached Barbados, and Ra II succeeded.
He also did a fourth voyage on Tigris, a boat built to show that there could have been cultural exchange historically between the old cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt via the see. The voyage wasn't completed because of the Iran/Iraq war.
You're right in linking Heyerdahl to the Easter Island, though, as he did lead an expedition there as well, trying among other things to link his theories of expeditions from South America closer to findings on Easter Island.
Central for Heyerdahl is that he believes that there has been much wider cultural exchanges between ancient cultures than what are known today, and that many cultures had much more extensive sea faring experience than many believe.
That, I assume, is why the headline read 'discovered America' (notice the quotes?). They could of course have said "became the first explorer from a major seafaring nation to return and provide written documentation or maps of the exploration of land unknown to those nations", or something like that. But even though you may manage to get more precise, it's hardly a practical way to deal with it.
In other words: If you like it enough to spend time here, and be one of the small minority that actually post, then you should consider whether that is worth enough to you to either endure the ads or pay for the subscription. If you don't like it enough, then leave - noone are forcing you to visit, and if you're using ad blocking software you are indirectly either making Slashdot fail or making other users pay for your bandwidth usage.
Again, how many sites are actually making a good profit of advertizing alone?
As for their duties to create wealth, yes VA does have that duty, as it is a publicly listed company. It does not follow from that that it is CT or Hemos duty to know the financial details of Slashdot. VA is a big company, and unless you know the details of their internal organization, you have no basis for saying what individual employees should and should not know.
It's not that simple. Of non-paid ads, a lot are likely swaps, which means that for every blocked ad that would have been part of a swap there is one less impression available for other thing, including for sale. Swaps are used for advertizing sites, and thus offsetting marketing expense. If they have to reduce the use of swaps because the number of ads viewed in total drop, then they still have to cover the marketing by actually paying for ads. So the end result is by and large the same whether you are blocking a paid ad or a ads that are part of swaps. In other word: The percentage is likely way higher.
Which lucrative field? How many community sites like slashdot can you point to with a massive profit?
So? Face it, Slashdot is a business. If they don't make money, they'll have to shut down. If you don't make them more money than you cost them in bandwidth, administration, hardware costs etc., either directly by paying or watching ads, or indirectly by writing comments that are interesting enough that you make up for it by drawing other people to slashdot, then you are a liability and they have no reason to try to appease you in any way.