Knowing an interest that someone has specified sound very compelling, but compare it to advertising in i a magazine or on a webpage. If someone is reading a gardening magazine or gardening webpage you can assume they are interested in gardening, and even better they are most likely actively interested in gardening while they are reading. Thus you get better targetting by simply chosing where to advertise than who to advertise to.
Adsense, iirc, builds on that principle and targets the ads based on the contents of the webpage being read, not a profile built on the consumer. The viewer might, of course, not be in the market but they are interested in the subject at hand at the time they are reading the page.
Still, I can think of some fields where the facebook approach would be better and events or other time limited opportunities would be one of them. If you know there is something the consumer has a high interest in but simply will not be able to decide themselves when to purchase then you're better off targetting by interest.
There is a significant difference tho; with google there is actually a fair chance that the searcher is looking for a product related to the actual search at hand, while with facebook you're basically trying to surreptitiously slip sales in to a largely unrelated activity.
Targetted advertising simply isn't that worthwhile if you cant target it temporally. You may know my interest intimately, but you're not going to sell me anything unless I'm actually in the market for that specific thing at that specific time. At best you can build brand awareness, but there are many ways to do that that are at least as good or better by simply targetting specific venues, mags, etc.
Of course, the same applies even more to passengers and children in particular. It's much harder to ignore physical presences than it is to ignore a voice. And it's even harder to ignore a physically present person that actively tries to direct your attention to something beside the traffic, such as pointing and exclaiming 'look at that!'.
People have biological clocks that vary which they'll tend to fall into if they have no outside cues. These can be up towards 25-26 hours per day. Most people are sensitive enough to daylight to adjust (if you live in a place where daylight is actually a useful cue), some adjust by syncing to a habit.
But for some people the biological clock doesn't sync on day or the yearly variation in solar cycle messes with the sensitivity, nor does the habit work. Instead keeping a stable cycle means having constant jetlag. Forcing an 'acceptable' schedule will shift you out of phase with your biological clock one hour further per day, meaning you'll be constantly tired and the body will desperately try to recuperate and resync during weekends. The constant lack of sleep will often lead to depression and other health issues.
You can try to experience it by figuring out how far your own biological clock can adjust if you shorten your days, ie, see if it can cope with 23 or 22 hour days, and then attempt to sync to, for example, a 21 hour day.
A large variety of easily accessible methods like SSRI antidepressants, numbing agents, etc, will solve that problem in a much more reversible fashion.
Arent 24 volt LED bulbs available and reasonably cheap?
But yes, CFL's are very nice for low energy consumption with LED's just catching up. For those with dark winters there are 60W CFL's available that will really brighten your day.
First-past-post systems like the US or UK tend to be worse than proportional representation so they don't give a completely fair view of representative democracies. When you basically just have to buy two candidates to win each election corruption becomes very cheap. Proportional systems are slightly less susceptible as the population has a chance to get someone who represents them into power and the corruption tends to take a while.
The Swiss system where a number of citizens can call a vote on an issue seems fairly reasonable.
Of course, having more "input", like a popular veto, into the political process may make it more difficult to pass laws, but then again, personally I've gotten to be of the opinion that if you can't pass a law with more than 75% of the population in favour, then just maybe it's a bad law and you shouldn't be passing it. Laws are not an end to themselves (except for the lawyer profession).
The old lose-lose scenario remains, Russia has lots of nukes. Which is why Russia considers a missile defence system in europe intolerable as it would be conceivable to use a european based system to nail ICBMs during boost phase and might render them incapable of retailation against a possible US strike.
So I wouldn't be so sure they won't actually strike. The US has a bad tendency to attack those it percieves as largely defenseless, and should something like the Georgian war be repeated the Russian options would be much more limited if they actually risked a significant engagement with US forces, something which is unlikely to happen as long as MAD stands.
Actually from Apple's point of view it probably does make sense. If they push the envelope of anti-consumer behaviour to dissuade people like this guy it's probably more profitable than honoring warranties. They acted the same way with european minimum warranties, refusing to honor them and forcing it all the way to court despite obviously being in the wrong. But the fine is trivial compared to what the cost of living up to legal obligations in the meantime.
And this case is unlikely to change anything; they'll still make more money by making sure that each customer knows that they will not get anything unless they take it to a lawsuit where they might not have the know-how of this guy and could lose. It'll dissuade nine out of ten or more who will just take it and move on with their lives.
It's going to stop after a revolution. But first we need to have the jackboot firmly across the face for a while; those who vote these things through aren't going to get it until we get 'a strong leader' who starts 'indefinitely detaining' members of the mainstream parties who vote the wrong way.
If the purpose of copyright was to have an incentive for creating content then it would provide means by which the creators of such content were guaranteed payment or share of any profits.
However, the purpose of copyright is to maintain the cosy relationship between state and publishers and establishing control of channels, guaranteeing profitability for publishers and influence for the state.
Incentives for creation is just an excuse; there is and always has been a vast overproduction of content which ensures that the creator will always be the weak party in a deal, the creator needs the publisher, the publisher rarely needs a specific creator but can shop around among the piles of material by those willing to get screwed.
If it was actually about incentives the duration would be irrelevant, the creators would get paid from an incentive system (for example financed through a tax on the copies produced and sold by publishers) and it would be tuned to deliver the optimum incentive rather than a timeframe that is utterly useless for determining profitability.
Why? Getting in a car and driving on a public road is far more likely to kill you than ignoring every bomb threat. If you got a letter saying you're going to get a car slamming into you some day... would you stop using cars because of that?
Once they have the electronic prescedent they will consider physical mail and media ways to circumvent the 'legitimate' surveillance of the information interchange system. Expect to get it opened.
It's painful that we'll get the slide into totalitarianism in our lifetime. Perhaps it's time to stop fighting it and join up; if we rush it along we can get through the party-with-paramilitary wing stage and grind the populace under the jackboots for a dozen years, then into the total war stage in a dozen years, get a collapse and revolution and then Never Again for another fifty years.
Much as I think humanity would be better off with Monsanto collectively put to rot in prison, to be fair the gengineered plants are usually gengineered to be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant (which, as insects and plants are very different, they tend to be anyway). Gengineering for insect control tends to be along the avenue of making the plants themselves create toxins (bt corn), which doesn't include neonicotinids yet.
So in this particular case they might not be guilty (unlike other cases of bribery, illegal dumping of toxic waste, etc, etc).
Then again, it's not that hard to find quotes with him claiming copying threatens american jobs and that PIPA is a vehicle to deal with that, or the opposition to net neutrality from his stint at Verizon.
Unfortunately I think one gets tainted beyond redemption by even associating with the MPAA not to mention having gotten a paycheck from them. Perhaps he's just saying what his employers want him to, but in that case there would be more appropriate hires with a bit more spine for the ISOC to employ.
I buy more music than ever by using emusic, I just don't buy anything associated with the RIAA corps. On average I spend about four times as much per month these days.
Either way, even if the lies were true, disposable income spent on copyrighted entertainment means more spent on other activities as well as the converse - money spent on copyright cost jobs in other industries.
I'd just gotten the enthusiasm going to use gnome3 but that quickly ended as I discovered that it doesn't seem possible to span graphics cards (for quad screen). I went with xfce, it does what I need.
While gnome shell at least seems the least offensive of the 'new' gui's, and while I'm not opposed to change in itself, I really dont like regressions and the last couple of releases have broken a lot of functionality that used to work well.
Mr. Dotcom is hardly a hero but any money he makes is unlikely to finance the corruption in governments and trade treaties we see. The money he makes isn't going to turn the world into a police state. It may go towards scamming, but scammers do not usually have storm troopers crashing into the homes of private citizens.
Any and all ways that deprive the intellectual monopoly corps of revenue are good. Even if it means creeps like Dotcom get money.
This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.
As there is a vast overproduction of entertainment today the competition is for the consumers time. Thus, any material that is presented for free cuts into the revenue stream of the for-profit production companies, and even worse, entrenches the idea that entertainment might come for free.
Remember, these companies consider basically any time spent not giving them money stealing.
Of course, a tablet is quite awkward compared to a smart phone, yet does not do much more than one if you're comparing them both to a real computer.
For my personal electronics, if it doesn't easily fit in a pocket, I'm not going to lug it around. And at home I've got instant access to real computers at every location I spend a significant amount of time, so with the possible exception of bathroom visits I have yet to find a situation where a pad would be the most appropriate form factor.
The advertisement argument would be sound except the customers in this case is a specific group of people who should be receiving it and who will consult experts to obtain your product and no more. Hopefully the advertising isn't what makes people sick, and while informing them on treatments may be commendable, if the ailment is not severe enough to seek help then that money (socialized or privatized insurance) should be spent on people in enough need to seek help without prompting.
Further, mass production to reduce unit costs and for the free market to work you need actual competition. With a patent monopoly you have no competition, so the only thing marketing achieves is raising demand which lets you increase price. As with all such protected sectors, greed and sloth will easily make your $11 unit into $5500 units as nobody else has an incentive to enter the market and compete with $4999 units as that would be illegal. And just wait until ACTA or the next treaty makes that $55000, as we can expect future grey imports will carry a mandatory death sentence.
The drug price doesn't factor in some advertising, it factors in twice what the pharmas spend on R&D. If developing new drugs costs a lot, making sure the potential consumers demand your drug and only your drug and that the doctors will prescribe only that cost heinous amounts of money (not to mention the cost of buying politicians so you can keep the cushy monopoly protection going).
As for macroeconomic effects, imagine if that (largely socialized) money was actually spent paying for R&D.
As far as liability is concerned, it's either socialized and paid for by all producers of pharmaceuticals or it's a pipe dream. Going to go up against a multibillion dollar corporation while dying of the cancer a flawed product gave you? You'll be dead and buried before they run out of ways to postpone the case. Sometimes you might get something out of a class-action (after someone else got nailed by a defect), but a defect insurance is simply the most rational way to offload risk from everyone without making it a lottery.
I suspect a lot of pharma ad budgets also go to things like golf conferences for doctors. Considering they tend to spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research there's a whole lot of marketing going on.
But I agree, the ads should go. Either you have a problem or you dont. If you do, consult a doctor (and don't forget to search the net as you can often complement the doctors experience with others experience).
And frankly, I think the patents should go as well. Considering we get barely 20% of money spent on the pharmas as R&D output it's obvious that monopoly rights can make private corporations even less efficient than government. We'd probably get more research done from having a grant system and small specialized R&D companies and arranging publicly funded trials than we're getting now. Best case we'd get five times the R&D from what we're already spending, or the same at a fifth of the cost. Either way it'd be hard to make the system worse than it is today.
A 'convenient' break up would be very suspicious. However, a known informant is a great asset to have; continue as usual and feed them disinformation. Trick them into unfounded raids, etc, which is probably exactly what they were worried about as they seemed to go quite far in verifying their target.
Perhaps he got a very good deal, but if it's 5 years instead of 60 it won't really matter; I wouldn't bet on the length of the sentence being the biggest issue for someone as widely identified as a snitch as this guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing an interest that someone has specified sound very compelling, but compare it to advertising in i a magazine or on a webpage. If someone is reading a gardening magazine or gardening webpage you can assume they are interested in gardening, and even better they are most likely actively interested in gardening while they are reading. Thus you get better targetting by simply chosing where to advertise than who to advertise to.
Adsense, iirc, builds on that principle and targets the ads based on the contents of the webpage being read, not a profile built on the consumer. The viewer might, of course, not be in the market but they are interested in the subject at hand at the time they are reading the page.
Still, I can think of some fields where the facebook approach would be better and events or other time limited opportunities would be one of them. If you know there is something the consumer has a high interest in but simply will not be able to decide themselves when to purchase then you're better off targetting by interest.
There is a significant difference tho; with google there is actually a fair chance that the searcher is looking for a product related to the actual search at hand, while with facebook you're basically trying to surreptitiously slip sales in to a largely unrelated activity.
Targetted advertising simply isn't that worthwhile if you cant target it temporally. You may know my interest intimately, but you're not going to sell me anything unless I'm actually in the market for that specific thing at that specific time. At best you can build brand awareness, but there are many ways to do that that are at least as good or better by simply targetting specific venues, mags, etc.
Of course, the same applies even more to passengers and children in particular. It's much harder to ignore physical presences than it is to ignore a voice. And it's even harder to ignore a physically present person that actively tries to direct your attention to something beside the traffic, such as pointing and exclaiming 'look at that!'.
People have biological clocks that vary which they'll tend to fall into if they have no outside cues. These can be up towards 25-26 hours per day. Most people are sensitive enough to daylight to adjust (if you live in a place where daylight is actually a useful cue), some adjust by syncing to a habit.
But for some people the biological clock doesn't sync on day or the yearly variation in solar cycle messes with the sensitivity, nor does the habit work. Instead keeping a stable cycle means having constant jetlag. Forcing an 'acceptable' schedule will shift you out of phase with your biological clock one hour further per day, meaning you'll be constantly tired and the body will desperately try to recuperate and resync during weekends. The constant lack of sleep will often lead to depression and other health issues.
You can try to experience it by figuring out how far your own biological clock can adjust if you shorten your days, ie, see if it can cope with 23 or 22 hour days, and then attempt to sync to, for example, a 21 hour day.
A large variety of easily accessible methods like SSRI antidepressants, numbing agents, etc, will solve that problem in a much more reversible fashion.
Arent 24 volt LED bulbs available and reasonably cheap?
But yes, CFL's are very nice for low energy consumption with LED's just catching up. For those with dark winters there are 60W CFL's available that will really brighten your day.
First-past-post systems like the US or UK tend to be worse than proportional representation so they don't give a completely fair view of representative democracies. When you basically just have to buy two candidates to win each election corruption becomes very cheap. Proportional systems are slightly less susceptible as the population has a chance to get someone who represents them into power and the corruption tends to take a while.
The Swiss system where a number of citizens can call a vote on an issue seems fairly reasonable.
Of course, having more "input", like a popular veto, into the political process may make it more difficult to pass laws, but then again, personally I've gotten to be of the opinion that if you can't pass a law with more than 75% of the population in favour, then just maybe it's a bad law and you shouldn't be passing it. Laws are not an end to themselves (except for the lawyer profession).
The old lose-lose scenario remains, Russia has lots of nukes. Which is why Russia considers a missile defence system in europe intolerable as it would be conceivable to use a european based system to nail ICBMs during boost phase and might render them incapable of retailation against a possible US strike.
So I wouldn't be so sure they won't actually strike. The US has a bad tendency to attack those it percieves as largely defenseless, and should something like the Georgian war be repeated the Russian options would be much more limited if they actually risked a significant engagement with US forces, something which is unlikely to happen as long as MAD stands.
Actually from Apple's point of view it probably does make sense. If they push the envelope of anti-consumer behaviour to dissuade people like this guy it's probably more profitable than honoring warranties. They acted the same way with european minimum warranties, refusing to honor them and forcing it all the way to court despite obviously being in the wrong. But the fine is trivial compared to what the cost of living up to legal obligations in the meantime.
And this case is unlikely to change anything; they'll still make more money by making sure that each customer knows that they will not get anything unless they take it to a lawsuit where they might not have the know-how of this guy and could lose. It'll dissuade nine out of ten or more who will just take it and move on with their lives.
Put in a 60W spiral flourescent instead. You'll still get the same heat and you'll see the shine of your wellhouse from space.
It's going to stop after a revolution. But first we need to have the jackboot firmly across the face for a while; those who vote these things through aren't going to get it until we get 'a strong leader' who starts 'indefinitely detaining' members of the mainstream parties who vote the wrong way.
It's going to be such fun.
If the purpose of copyright was to have an incentive for creating content then it would provide means by which the creators of such content were guaranteed payment or share of any profits.
However, the purpose of copyright is to maintain the cosy relationship between state and publishers and establishing control of channels, guaranteeing profitability for publishers and influence for the state.
Incentives for creation is just an excuse; there is and always has been a vast overproduction of content which ensures that the creator will always be the weak party in a deal, the creator needs the publisher, the publisher rarely needs a specific creator but can shop around among the piles of material by those willing to get screwed.
If it was actually about incentives the duration would be irrelevant, the creators would get paid from an incentive system (for example financed through a tax on the copies produced and sold by publishers) and it would be tuned to deliver the optimum incentive rather than a timeframe that is utterly useless for determining profitability.
Why? Getting in a car and driving on a public road is far more likely to kill you than ignoring every bomb threat. If you got a letter saying you're going to get a car slamming into you some day... would you stop using cars because of that?
Once they have the electronic prescedent they will consider physical mail and media ways to circumvent the 'legitimate' surveillance of the information interchange system. Expect to get it opened.
It's painful that we'll get the slide into totalitarianism in our lifetime. Perhaps it's time to stop fighting it and join up; if we rush it along we can get through the party-with-paramilitary wing stage and grind the populace under the jackboots for a dozen years, then into the total war stage in a dozen years, get a collapse and revolution and then Never Again for another fifty years.
And hey, totalitarian imagery has it's charm.
Much as I think humanity would be better off with Monsanto collectively put to rot in prison, to be fair the gengineered plants are usually gengineered to be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant (which, as insects and plants are very different, they tend to be anyway). Gengineering for insect control tends to be along the avenue of making the plants themselves create toxins (bt corn), which doesn't include neonicotinids yet.
So in this particular case they might not be guilty (unlike other cases of bribery, illegal dumping of toxic waste, etc, etc).
Then again, it's not that hard to find quotes with him claiming copying threatens american jobs and that PIPA is a vehicle to deal with that, or the opposition to net neutrality from his stint at Verizon.
Unfortunately I think one gets tainted beyond redemption by even associating with the MPAA not to mention having gotten a paycheck from them. Perhaps he's just saying what his employers want him to, but in that case there would be more appropriate hires with a bit more spine for the ISOC to employ.
I buy more music than ever by using emusic, I just don't buy anything associated with the RIAA corps. On average I spend about four times as much per month these days.
Either way, even if the lies were true, disposable income spent on copyrighted entertainment means more spent on other activities as well as the converse - money spent on copyright cost jobs in other industries.
I'd just gotten the enthusiasm going to use gnome3 but that quickly ended as I discovered that it doesn't seem possible to span graphics cards (for quad screen). I went with xfce, it does what I need.
While gnome shell at least seems the least offensive of the 'new' gui's, and while I'm not opposed to change in itself, I really dont like regressions and the last couple of releases have broken a lot of functionality that used to work well.
Mr. Dotcom is hardly a hero but any money he makes is unlikely to finance the corruption in governments and trade treaties we see. The money he makes isn't going to turn the world into a police state. It may go towards scamming, but scammers do not usually have storm troopers crashing into the homes of private citizens.
Any and all ways that deprive the intellectual monopoly corps of revenue are good. Even if it means creeps like Dotcom get money.
This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.
As there is a vast overproduction of entertainment today the competition is for the consumers time. Thus, any material that is presented for free cuts into the revenue stream of the for-profit production companies, and even worse, entrenches the idea that entertainment might come for free.
Remember, these companies consider basically any time spent not giving them money stealing.
So, would you accept digital copies of movies as payment for your day job? Maybe 5000 copies of a movie on iTunes a year?
Oh, wait, you can't sell those. Seems they're worth exactly as much as a photocopy of a dollar bill...
Of course, a tablet is quite awkward compared to a smart phone, yet does not do much more than one if you're comparing them both to a real computer.
For my personal electronics, if it doesn't easily fit in a pocket, I'm not going to lug it around. And at home I've got instant access to real computers at every location I spend a significant amount of time, so with the possible exception of bathroom visits I have yet to find a situation where a pad would be the most appropriate form factor.
The advertisement argument would be sound except the customers in this case is a specific group of people who should be receiving it and who will consult experts to obtain your product and no more. Hopefully the advertising isn't what makes people sick, and while informing them on treatments may be commendable, if the ailment is not severe enough to seek help then that money (socialized or privatized insurance) should be spent on people in enough need to seek help without prompting.
Further, mass production to reduce unit costs and for the free market to work you need actual competition. With a patent monopoly you have no competition, so the only thing marketing achieves is raising demand which lets you increase price. As with all such protected sectors, greed and sloth will easily make your $11 unit into $5500 units as nobody else has an incentive to enter the market and compete with $4999 units as that would be illegal. And just wait until ACTA or the next treaty makes that $55000, as we can expect future grey imports will carry a mandatory death sentence.
The drug price doesn't factor in some advertising, it factors in twice what the pharmas spend on R&D. If developing new drugs costs a lot, making sure the potential consumers demand your drug and only your drug and that the doctors will prescribe only that cost heinous amounts of money (not to mention the cost of buying politicians so you can keep the cushy monopoly protection going).
As for macroeconomic effects, imagine if that (largely socialized) money was actually spent paying for R&D.
As far as liability is concerned, it's either socialized and paid for by all producers of pharmaceuticals or it's a pipe dream. Going to go up against a multibillion dollar corporation while dying of the cancer a flawed product gave you? You'll be dead and buried before they run out of ways to postpone the case. Sometimes you might get something out of a class-action (after someone else got nailed by a defect), but a defect insurance is simply the most rational way to offload risk from everyone without making it a lottery.
I suspect a lot of pharma ad budgets also go to things like golf conferences for doctors. Considering they tend to spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research there's a whole lot of marketing going on.
But I agree, the ads should go. Either you have a problem or you dont. If you do, consult a doctor (and don't forget to search the net as you can often complement the doctors experience with others experience).
And frankly, I think the patents should go as well. Considering we get barely 20% of money spent on the pharmas as R&D output it's obvious that monopoly rights can make private corporations even less efficient than government. We'd probably get more research done from having a grant system and small specialized R&D companies and arranging publicly funded trials than we're getting now. Best case we'd get five times the R&D from what we're already spending, or the same at a fifth of the cost. Either way it'd be hard to make the system worse than it is today.
A 'convenient' break up would be very suspicious. However, a known informant is a great asset to have; continue as usual and feed them disinformation. Trick them into unfounded raids, etc, which is probably exactly what they were worried about as they seemed to go quite far in verifying their target.
Perhaps he got a very good deal, but if it's 5 years instead of 60 it won't really matter; I wouldn't bet on the length of the sentence being the biggest issue for someone as widely identified as a snitch as this guy.