I would also add that if a belligerent (such as the U.S.) is not willing to sacrifice the lives of its own troops and civilians, then it has no moral justification for engaging in unilateral warfare.
I'm going to ask why you think that.
If we take other decisions that will kill innocents for what we consider greater goals (for example, mandatory vaccinations, which kill a handful to save millions), we don't demand that the decision makers up their personal stake.
I certainly agree that having a stake in terms of troops and civilians makes it less likely that such actions are approved. But I don't see how it changes the justification. In other words, I agree that it makes for better decision making. I don't think it changes the particular moral justification, which is a separate and unrelated thing.
Indeed, the dishonesty is approving this bombing without stating UPFRONT that innocent men, women and children *will* die.
If we are not willing to acknowledge this before the first shot is fired - absolutely accept that by approving military action, we WILL be responsible for killing innocents - then we have no business approving the action in the first place.
Military action must only take place when the we feel the evil that comes from NOT doing the action outweighs *certainty* that we are directly killing innocents.
Anyone not willing to take *personal* responsibility for those lives when they approved the order should be removed from office or command.
I agree. I'll be surprised if Facebook or other conglomerates that can be their own ad serving agency capture more than 30-50% of the web with the rest either dying, somehow surviving behind a paywall (although I think that will be *exceedingly* rare), or being small hobbyist sites.
I think it's quite possible that the web as we know it may well become one of those historic creative blips that technology just happened to allow for a decade or two. We'll be annoying future generations about how great it was that for a brief moment, but few will have any inclination to visit what it's become.
Are you asking me to be sympathetic to sites that post...
What an odd sentiment. The fact that most non-hobby web sites will die in the next few years is not an occasion for either tears or jeers. It's just the natural technical evolution of the web. The current configuration of millions of independent sites is obviously unsustainable as viewers have made clear by cutting their revenue stream while advertisers have also made it clear that non-obtrusive ads are not worth anything to them.
My only complaint is with those who feel their ought to be independent web content, but that they should haven't to pay for it with obtrusive ads. The price is clear. Pay or not as you will - as long as you don't expect the fact that, until now, everyone else has been paying on your behalf is your natural right.
The only ones I do feel sorry for those are those who do feel that sites are worth the ads. Having a few percent white list sites isn't going to save the sites they love.
A user may have been instructed to do a process a certain way, but no one is sure what the reasoning is for doing it. It may be a valid reason; but that reason was discovered years ago by someone (either retired or dead), forgotten, and has just been done for traditions sake. In cases like this, it's hard to make a case to carry a process like that over to the new system, but it can't just be ignored either.
This, a thousand times. Nothing like finding two pieces of completely inexplicable code and cleaning them up. One speeds up processing by 2%, and you're the hero. The other turns out to have most of code flow of Western civilization running through it, and now you've just brought on the Long Night.
Given how badly paywalls work, I suspect the reality of the commercial market is that almost any site of any worth will have to migrate to Facebook, whose ads are pretty much unblockable.
This is the natural evolution of the Internet. Advertisers slowly made the web very difficult to surf, Ad blockers grew in response. Web sites die from lack of revenue. People drift to where content is still available - Facebook.
Those last two steps are a year or so away. But that's the way it's going. And no, there's no going back. Only an infinitesimal number of ad block user even know what a whitelist is. They'll simply block all ads, good or bad, and won't even understand why all the web sites that they visited gradually closed down. But they'll know Facebook still works, and hey, some of their old sites now show up there!
How could he? His principle objection was that he did not want to become the gatekeeper of what was a "good ad" and what was a "bad ad".
He closed his app because he was unwilling to take responsibility for such a decision, yet was not comfortable with eliminating the revenue stream of all sites, regardless of their ad policies.
Knocking *is* directly related to octane levels, so it's no surprise to find observable correlations there. Also, knocking is not a subtle problem liable to selection bias.
The question is whether *higher* octane gas than required for an engine (engines can be tuned for high octane gas) improves performance. And the gas manufacturers themselves don't claim that. (In their ads, the benefits are all quite nebulous: "better for your engine")
But it's a pretty widespread belief that high octane gasoline has "subtle" improvements (my in-laws swear they get substantially better mileage, including for the month that I was buying regular gas for their car:-)) or better acceleration, etc.. As I said, the gasoline manufacturers don't make that or other measurable claims.
Yet, because of the general association, it's almost impossible *not* to notice the car performance being better when we think there's "better" fuel in the tank, which is what I was trying to point out.
Honestly, unless your almost inhuman in disregarding your brain, you'll need to have someone fill up your car without telling you the octane, and then record your observations.
We humans are correlation engines, and it would almost be proof of brain abnormality to not find a correlation, regardless of whether it's there or not.
Got this domain "hsa.com" in the *very* early days of the Internet (pre-web). Decided that since we were a Canadian company, I we should have a Canadian domain, and surrendered it and got hsa.on.ca. (we weren't allowed to have hsa.ca, since all our offices were in Ontario...)
A three letter.com address would probably have been the most valuable asset of the company:-).
It'd be too easy for authors to set up an alternative Kindle store, for one thing.
Sure, and your customers can just walk across the street to that other store if you don't want to sell at Walmart.
Except they don't.
The trouble is not the ease of use. Most authors I know offer their goods at half a dozen e-stores. And for all the money that Apple, et al have poured into their bookstores, the customers aren't interested in anything but Amazon. In fact, Amazon is often used by the book stores as a whole to figure out what's being published.
For the *vast* majority of e-book readers, Amazon pretty much defines the book industry. And unfortunately I don't see that changing any time soon. (And if B&N collapses, I see its dominance extending from e-books to books as a whole.)
Simply don't make your books available through those programs
How long is that going to remain an option? There are very few companies that dominate a market that have any compunction about ordering their suppliers to jump through whatever hoops they feel are required to further their interests.
Given Amazon's status in the e-book world, how many non-best-selling authors will choose to kill 95% of their sales in order to stay out of the Library program is Amazon chose to make it mandatory if you wanted to self-publish on Kindle.
Personally, I'm waiting for listing and advertising fees. My guess is that Amazon can make a *lot* more money from would-be authors than they can make from purchasers of self-publishing books.
I prefer C# to Java and have written a few hundred KLOC of both, but quite frankly, unless you have a horrible allergy to boilerplate, or are using cutting edge features, the two *are* similar enough not to warrant moving from one's comfort zone.
99.5% of the code I encounter doesn't use above Java 1.4 or.Net 2.0, so all the nifty language features are pretty much theoretical sizzle on roughly the same steak. And even so, the nifty features often have negative value because they while save the programmer 2-3% of his or her time, the maintainers often end up breaking things because they're not all that familiar with the new hotness in language features.
I do worry that the number of people who can competently handle closures and functional programming is small enough that we're in danger of not being able maintain the whiz-bang code we've written.
For all intents and purposes, Netflix is selling content that they don't have the rights to. They financially benefit in the form of subscriptions, and yet they're not paying for the right to distribute to customers who are consuming the content.
Now, the VPN muddies the legality issue a bit, but it's pretty clear that Netflix's policies are (1) for the present hurting rights purchasers who thought they were buying exclusive rights and (2) in the future will hurt content producers when their foreign rights sell for vastly less than they used to.
It's the sellers to Netflix who should be pressuring Netflix to change their policies or withdrawing their content from Netflix on the basis of devaluing their property.
One other point, the idea that Bell has a financial stake should devalue their opinion seems odd. Bell's obviously taking a financial hit on this, but they paid for rights that have been undermined by Netflix's fairly dubious attitude. However, I'd also expect that the person who's regularly being robbed to be the one shouting most about neighbourhood crime, *because* he has a financial interest in it.
You are talking about more equitable distribution when you *do* sweat, something I have quite some sympathy for. That is completely different from your original post.
(As an aside, perhaps because I would never risk my time or my money for a sliver-thin chance of success, I have very little difficulty with those entrepreneurs who do make it big being heavily rewarded for their risk.)
I don't know any Google executives in person, but I have to say that all the executives I have met, including the ones who managed in ways I *dramatically* disagreed with, worked very hard indeed.
I am also well aware that not everyone who works hard obtains a corresponding reward. There are many who work harder than I ever will for far more meager returns simply because they never had the educational opportunities that I was blessed with or faced racial/cultural/language challenges that I never will (which is why I *am* a Leftie:-)).
But without exception, all of the successful people I've met over my 50-odd years have worked hard for their success.
Basically. It's all about finding the suckers willing to sweat the most for the masters above them.
I'm certain you back up your sentiment by living "off the economic grid", but my, it's amazing how many others followed this sentiment with "and I should still be able to get all the neat stuff that everyone else sweats for..."
Tyr07, what I was making fun of was the assumption that your ISP *is* the Internet, or in fact has any relation whatsoever to the web sites you choose to patronize.
The idea that paying Comcast should mean that the rest of the Internet world should be willing to work for free on your behalf so boggled me that I had to make fun of it. It has a sort of solipsistic quality that you don't find in most people over 16. "How could hundreds of thousands of individual parties who have no relation to each other NOT coordinate everything to provide a seamless experience for me!"
(I accept ad-blocking is a necessary safety measure, but the level of entitled-ness of "how dare they charge!" (in terms of ad-eyeballs) is eye-opening from anyone who is not 16.)
Um, you realize that if you are browsing their site and using an ad-blocker, you are a net negative to them. So if you get all offended and stop visiting, he's done the business a favor...
For safety reasons, I mooch as well, but I don't try and pretend that I'm doing them a favor while enjoying their content for nothing and letting them pay for the bandwidth I use.
Slashdot Mirror
I would also add that if a belligerent (such as the U.S.) is not willing to sacrifice the lives of its own troops and civilians, then it has no moral justification for engaging in unilateral warfare.
I'm going to ask why you think that.
If we take other decisions that will kill innocents for what we consider greater goals (for example, mandatory vaccinations, which kill a handful to save millions), we don't demand that the decision makers up their personal stake.
I certainly agree that having a stake in terms of troops and civilians makes it less likely that such actions are approved. But I don't see how it changes the justification. In other words, I agree that it makes for better decision making. I don't think it changes the particular moral justification, which is a separate and unrelated thing.
Indeed, the dishonesty is approving this bombing without stating UPFRONT that innocent men, women and children *will* die.
If we are not willing to acknowledge this before the first shot is fired - absolutely accept that by approving military action, we WILL be responsible for killing innocents - then we have no business approving the action in the first place.
Military action must only take place when the we feel the evil that comes from NOT doing the action outweighs *certainty* that we are directly killing innocents.
Anyone not willing to take *personal* responsibility for those lives when they approved the order should be removed from office or command.
I agree. I'll be surprised if Facebook or other conglomerates that can be their own ad serving agency capture more than 30-50% of the web with the rest either dying, somehow surviving behind a paywall (although I think that will be *exceedingly* rare), or being small hobbyist sites.
I think it's quite possible that the web as we know it may well become one of those historic creative blips that technology just happened to allow for a decade or two. We'll be annoying future generations about how great it was that for a brief moment, but few will have any inclination to visit what it's become.
Are you asking me to be sympathetic to sites that post...
What an odd sentiment. The fact that most non-hobby web sites will die in the next few years is not an occasion for either tears or jeers. It's just the natural technical evolution of the web. The current configuration of millions of independent sites is obviously unsustainable as viewers have made clear by cutting their revenue stream while advertisers have also made it clear that non-obtrusive ads are not worth anything to them.
My only complaint is with those who feel their ought to be independent web content, but that they should haven't to pay for it with obtrusive ads. The price is clear. Pay or not as you will - as long as you don't expect the fact that, until now, everyone else has been paying on your behalf is your natural right.
The only ones I do feel sorry for those are those who do feel that sites are worth the ads. Having a few percent white list sites isn't going to save the sites they love.
A user may have been instructed to do a process a certain way, but no one is sure what the reasoning is for doing it. It may be a valid reason; but that reason was discovered years ago by someone (either retired or dead), forgotten, and has just been done for traditions sake. In cases like this, it's hard to make a case to carry a process like that over to the new system, but it can't just be ignored either.
This, a thousand times. Nothing like finding two pieces of completely inexplicable code and cleaning them up. One speeds up processing by 2%, and you're the hero. The other turns out to have most of code flow of Western civilization running through it, and now you've just brought on the Long Night.
Given how badly paywalls work, I suspect the reality of the commercial market is that almost any site of any worth will have to migrate to Facebook, whose ads are pretty much unblockable.
This is the natural evolution of the Internet. Advertisers slowly made the web very difficult to surf, Ad blockers grew in response. Web sites die from lack of revenue. People drift to where content is still available - Facebook.
Those last two steps are a year or so away. But that's the way it's going. And no, there's no going back. Only an infinitesimal number of ad block user even know what a whitelist is. They'll simply block all ads, good or bad, and won't even understand why all the web sites that they visited gradually closed down. But they'll know Facebook still works, and hey, some of their old sites now show up there!
Technical evolution in action.
How could he? His principle objection was that he did not want to become the gatekeeper of what was a "good ad" and what was a "bad ad".
He closed his app because he was unwilling to take responsibility for such a decision, yet was not comfortable with eliminating the revenue stream of all sites, regardless of their ad policies.
Well, I just learned that K, a successor language to J, which is a successor language to APL is alive and well and used on Wall Street.
Knocking *is* directly related to octane levels, so it's no surprise to find observable correlations there. Also, knocking is not a subtle problem liable to selection bias.
The question is whether *higher* octane gas than required for an engine (engines can be tuned for high octane gas) improves performance. And the gas manufacturers themselves don't claim that. (In their ads, the benefits are all quite nebulous: "better for your engine")
But it's a pretty widespread belief that high octane gasoline has "subtle" improvements (my in-laws swear they get substantially better mileage, including for the month that I was buying regular gas for their car :-)) or better acceleration, etc.. As I said, the gasoline manufacturers don't make that or other measurable claims.
Yet, because of the general association, it's almost impossible *not* to notice the car performance being better when we think there's "better" fuel in the tank, which is what I was trying to point out.
Honestly, unless your almost inhuman in disregarding your brain, you'll need to have someone fill up your car without telling you the octane, and then record your observations.
We humans are correlation engines, and it would almost be proof of brain abnormality to not find a correlation, regardless of whether it's there or not.
In 2010 ??
Ow!
At least I let mine go before they had any commercial value.
Got this domain "hsa.com" in the *very* early days of the Internet (pre-web). Decided that since we were a Canadian company, I we should have a Canadian domain, and surrendered it and got hsa.on.ca. (we weren't allowed to have hsa.ca, since all our offices were in Ontario...)
A three letter .com address would probably have been the most valuable asset of the company :-).
It'd be too easy for authors to set up an alternative Kindle store, for one thing.
Sure, and your customers can just walk across the street to that other store if you don't want to sell at Walmart.
Except they don't.
The trouble is not the ease of use. Most authors I know offer their goods at half a dozen e-stores. And for all the money that Apple, et al have poured into their bookstores, the customers aren't interested in anything but Amazon. In fact, Amazon is often used by the book stores as a whole to figure out what's being published.
For the *vast* majority of e-book readers, Amazon pretty much defines the book industry. And unfortunately I don't see that changing any time soon. (And if B&N collapses, I see its dominance extending from e-books to books as a whole.)
Simply don't make your books available through those programs
How long is that going to remain an option? There are very few companies that dominate a market that have any compunction about ordering their suppliers to jump through whatever hoops they feel are required to further their interests.
Given Amazon's status in the e-book world, how many non-best-selling authors will choose to kill 95% of their sales in order to stay out of the Library program is Amazon chose to make it mandatory if you wanted to self-publish on Kindle.
Personally, I'm waiting for listing and advertising fees. My guess is that Amazon can make a *lot* more money from would-be authors than they can make from purchasers of self-publishing books.
I prefer C# to Java and have written a few hundred KLOC of both, but quite frankly, unless you have a horrible allergy to boilerplate, or are using cutting edge features, the two *are* similar enough not to warrant moving from one's comfort zone.
99.5% of the code I encounter doesn't use above Java 1.4 or .Net 2.0, so all the nifty language features are pretty much theoretical sizzle on roughly the same steak. And even so, the nifty features often have negative value because they while save the programmer 2-3% of his or her time, the maintainers often end up breaking things because they're not all that familiar with the new hotness in language features.
I do worry that the number of people who can competently handle closures and functional programming is small enough that we're in danger of not being able maintain the whiz-bang code we've written.
I'd define 'learn' as be able to read 90% of the code that's out there. And yes, I can easily see C++ taking years by that standard.
"Yes, our code *does* overload the 'space' character, I thought you said you knew C++!" :-).
For all intents and purposes, Netflix is selling content that they don't have the rights to. They financially benefit in the form of subscriptions, and yet they're not paying for the right to distribute to customers who are consuming the content.
Now, the VPN muddies the legality issue a bit, but it's pretty clear that Netflix's policies are (1) for the present hurting rights purchasers who thought they were buying exclusive rights and (2) in the future will hurt content producers when their foreign rights sell for vastly less than they used to.
It's the sellers to Netflix who should be pressuring Netflix to change their policies or withdrawing their content from Netflix on the basis of devaluing their property.
One other point, the idea that Bell has a financial stake should devalue their opinion seems odd. Bell's obviously taking a financial hit on this, but they paid for rights that have been undermined by Netflix's fairly dubious attitude. However, I'd also expect that the person who's regularly being robbed to be the one shouting most about neighbourhood crime, *because* he has a financial interest in it.
It seems common sense.
It's about sharing the spoils
You are talking about more equitable distribution when you *do* sweat, something I have quite some sympathy for. That is completely different from your original post.
(As an aside, perhaps because I would never risk my time or my money for a sliver-thin chance of success, I have very little difficulty with those entrepreneurs who do make it big being heavily rewarded for their risk.)
I don't know any Google executives in person, but I have to say that all the executives I have met, including the ones who managed in ways I *dramatically* disagreed with, worked very hard indeed.
I am also well aware that not everyone who works hard obtains a corresponding reward. There are many who work harder than I ever will for far more meager returns simply because they never had the educational opportunities that I was blessed with or faced racial/cultural/language challenges that I never will (which is why I *am* a Leftie :-)).
But without exception, all of the successful people I've met over my 50-odd years have worked hard for their success.
Basically. It's all about finding the suckers willing to sweat the most for the masters above them.
I'm certain you back up your sentiment by living "off the economic grid", but my, it's amazing how many others followed this sentiment with "and I should still be able to get all the neat stuff that everyone else sweats for..."
Well, no disagreeing with you there. However, it is somewhat removed from your original point.
Tyr07, what I was making fun of was the assumption that your ISP *is* the Internet, or in fact has any relation whatsoever to the web sites you choose to patronize.
The idea that paying Comcast should mean that the rest of the Internet world should be willing to work for free on your behalf so boggled me that I had to make fun of it. It has a sort of solipsistic quality that you don't find in most people over 16. "How could hundreds of thousands of individual parties who have no relation to each other NOT coordinate everything to provide a seamless experience for me!"
Entitled much?
After all, you are going to *them*.
(I accept ad-blocking is a necessary safety measure, but the level of entitled-ness of "how dare they charge!" (in terms of ad-eyeballs) is eye-opening from anyone who is not 16.)
Um, you realize that if you are browsing their site and using an ad-blocker, you are a net negative to them. So if you get all offended and stop visiting, he's done the business a favor...
For safety reasons, I mooch as well, but I don't try and pretend that I'm doing them a favor while enjoying their content for nothing and letting them pay for the bandwidth I use.
I know, it's so annoying. I pay for a taxi to the store, and then they expect me to pay for product in the store!.
They want me to pay twice!
Ridiculous, right?