I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. [...] I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
What we need is a filter set that removes the evil ads (anything moving, flashing, popping, making sound, etc.) but doesn't block text and static image ads.
Instead of easylist, I'd happily subscribe to an "ethic list".
They may have the right to show ads, as you say. But they have absolutely no right to demand that I view them.
As for Wired, well their site is a horrible, confusing mess even without their ads.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money. If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights".
How will they stop me putting my hand up to block the things I don't want to see?
If advertisers hadn't decided they could freeze my browser for THREE FUCKING MINUTES loading a video ad in a sidebar then I would have kept doing that instead of finding, installing and grokking adblock. But they just HAD to ramp up the unpleasantness, so we had to upgrade our blocking mechanism.
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should/not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole/point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS. Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.
Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.
And finally, a reminder to the/. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.
adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
[...] I, for one, want to be able to support sites that are smart enough to have reasonable ads. (Yes, I currently manually unblock sites using the AdBlock context menu... but this would make it easier.)
Although I like this proposal, I don't understand why it wouldn't be simpler to just have someone do the sorting for those "ad-server lists". What I want is a block-list that blocks the annoying ads (e.g. flash ads that cover the page) but doesn't block un-annoying ads (e.g. demure text-ads). A whole spectrum of lists, depending on people's tastes, could be constructed. Do these kind of "nice blocking" lists already exist?
Amen!
I use to maintain my own blacklist, but I've switched to adBlock plus because I couldn't recreate the same list everywhere all the time and with every upgrade, etc. So now I see no ads, which isn't terrible for me, but I wish I could just block the moving-flashing-noisy-popping-etc ads and keep the text and static image ads so the sites I visit keep their cash flow and so I can be informed of offers that might interest me.
If we had that, the non-intrusive advertisers could win against the evil ones, by virtue of reaching people VS being blocked.
. . . he only got fired, instead of being shot. In countries with a "State News Agency," The press is just another department of the government anyway. Criticizing the government may be hazardous to your health, but the journalists know that, and would never dare to do so.
Canada sounds MUCH more dangerous in your fantasies than in reality.
It's actually quite telling that a country that took a stand so strongly against invading and imposing outside will on a country's freedom is entirely failing at understanding and dealing with the more subtle corruptions of big media and government.
All the countries implied in your post have new leaders now, and therefore subtly different behaviors.
Don't expect something like a country to have a consistent behavior across the board.
Also, I don't think France was against imposing it's will on other countries for most of its history. In fact, they were a big colonial power back in the day. Don't get me wrong, they did good in refusing to fall for the WMD scam, but don't misrepresent their ideals and motivations either.
BTW, I would have thought that after the telco immunity vote, the bailouts, secret copyright treaties, and other such nonsense that the US would be familiar with corporations being entangled in govt.
To be fair, he said "Americans might be unfamiliar with", and he's right. This is neither celebrity gossip nor sports results, and is therefore unfamiliar to a depressingly large amount of depressingly large Americans.
What's your friend describe is a "mise au placard". It's a specific way to fire somebody without really firring him. It's extremely wrong in french for your managing staff motivations when you start to fire people without serious reasons and it's pretty hard to prove and convince every body that some body don't actually do as expected. So you don't fire him but progressively put him in a position where he don't have responsibility, interesting works, no computer, no phone, etc... and you simply wait that he resign by himself. If he resign he isn't cover by the social protection law, so it's cheaper for you, better for you managing staff, etc... The only problem is went you push it to far
Just to be clear, I am a fan of copyright. I think it's a very good idea. However, it needs to be implemented properly, and on days when I'm feeling particularly uncharitable toward the status quo I can be convinced that what we have is worse than nothing at all.
I am familiar with that feeling. The way things are now, the creative flow is hindered by copyrights. It's too much of a good thing, it became toxic.
Grishnakh is pointing out that while the ACLU is rabid about "terrorists' rights", they have a much less aggressive stance on defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication.
I think he's just ACLU-bashing, not comeone with a point. From the "2009 ACLU Legislative Priorities" pdf, I see
Surveillance reform Repeal the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
Restore online freedom Codify binding open Internet principles to discourage public and private online censorship, to assure online privacy and to pursue equal access free from discrimination.
which look a lot like defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication to me. They were on top of that one day one, punctuality is a virtue.
Took me a minute in google to find that information. I don't know if or why they don't get involved with that treaty. Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it. Maybe they're understaffed, out of their jurisdiction and over budget. Maybe they're reptilians who pretend to defend civil liberties but they really want to drain your precious bodily fluids.
He's ranting against the ACLU, against foreigners, and against opposing torture. And he's calling that "freedom-loving". If he's pointing out anything, it's his perceptions, and I'm pretty sure he's perceiving that through the lenses at Fox News.
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
I'm guessing you don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV services, then? When you bought your car, did you get it without a radio? And have you been to see a movie lately?
I've stopped watching TV partly because the channels that I paid to get added ads after I first started watching them; You don't have to keep paying for the radio after you purchase the device, so that was not applicable; I've greatly reduced my movie-outings since they started spamming me before the coming attractions, I get the DVD and watch it on compy via VLC so it goes straight to the menu, skipping the crap they put in before that.
during WWII in Germany, you probably would have told everyone to ignore what was being done to 6 million jews
a godwin? Really?
So I guess, by your logic, we should completely ignore anything which abrogates the rights of millions of people as long as there's one other injustice going on
I'm not advocating torture or waterboarding, but when we're talking about a relative handful of people, most of whom are almost certainly guilty
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Advertising can help subsidize the cost of the content, thus allowing people to spend less to receive the same content
The CAN but they DON'T. They tweak the price so the unwashed masses pay as much as they're willing to pay and they cram as much advertising as they can on top of that.
What they don't realise is that they've pushed too far: They're looking for a new angle at which to apply the same pressure.
You are still going to run out of gas eventually, this just means that we don't hurt the environment as much in the process.
Well, it's methane, which is produced naturally by decomposing organic matter (as a waste product of the microorganism doing the biodegradation), so the technology could be applied to renewable sources of methane even though that's probably not economically sound when competing with currently mined deposits of gas.
My uncle used to have goats on his farm, and they were right bastards. Of course, so was he.
He's funny, but he's also insightful, mods! Goats really are infuriating creatures up close. One took a bite out of my shirt once! Of course, they're also delicious themselves...
I'm trying to tag this story "goat" (because I would like an easy way to track goat stories... like the one with the mutant spider silk milking goat created by the US Army, possible future stories about Thor's chariot, etc.) and the gorram web3.suck slashdot system keeps appending a horrible "se" at the end, and I object!
It's not even april 1st, come on/. UI, dont goatse me!:'(
no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Jefferson clearly did not believe in any natural "right" to control one's intellectual works.
He who sells a copy of my work without giving me my dues deprives me of the money paid by the person to get a copy of my work. That person will not buy a second copy from me. That's the clincher. The idea is not diminished by sharing it, but the money pool is diminished by taking from it.
If someone is repeating an idea of yours and giving it away as freely as he took it, not taking money for it, then he's not cheating you, because he's not taking anything away, he's just passing it along. But if he is taking money and not giving you your cut, he's taking money from you that you could have otherwise have made yourself.
It is about their right, and their right is compatible with the best interest of the nation, hence the preamble.
Their right to exploit it for a limited time, yes. Their right to exploit it for the period of time currently guaranteed by law, not so much.
I'm not saying current copyright law is in keeping with the spirit of copyright. The law has been perverted by corporations and is doing more harm than good in its current form.
What I'm saying is that the authors and inventors have rights that have to be protected by government, and that it is in the best interest to society to protect those rights, and to protect them for a limited time. Say, one generation (30 years) or so. The current trend to infinity is an aberration.
advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get readers to pay for those
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
They want to have my cake and eat it too. This is why I can't wait for these businesses to crash and burn.
Slashdot Mirror
I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. [...] I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
What we need is a filter set that removes the evil ads (anything moving, flashing, popping, making sound, etc.) but doesn't block text and static image ads.
Instead of easylist, I'd happily subscribe to an "ethic list".
They may have the right to show ads, as you say. But they have absolutely no right to demand that I view them.
As for Wired, well their site is a horrible, confusing mess even without their ads.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money. If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights".
How will they stop me putting my hand up to block the things I don't want to see?
If advertisers hadn't decided they could freeze my browser for THREE FUCKING MINUTES loading a video ad in a sidebar then I would have kept doing that instead of finding, installing and grokking adblock. But they just HAD to ramp up the unpleasantness, so we had to upgrade our blocking mechanism.
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.
Take a breather there, buddy. I don't know why the /. overlords FAILed to include a link to the adblockplus page relevant to the discussion, but here it is: http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking
Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.
And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.
How many adwriters fought and died for that flag?
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
[...]
I, for one, want to be able to support sites that are smart enough to have reasonable ads. (Yes, I currently manually unblock sites using the AdBlock context menu... but this would make it easier.)
Although I like this proposal, I don't understand why it wouldn't be simpler to just have someone do the sorting for those "ad-server lists". What I want is a block-list that blocks the annoying ads (e.g. flash ads that cover the page) but doesn't block un-annoying ads (e.g. demure text-ads). A whole spectrum of lists, depending on people's tastes, could be constructed. Do these kind of "nice blocking" lists already exist?
Amen!
I use to maintain my own blacklist, but I've switched to adBlock plus because I couldn't recreate the same list everywhere all the time and with every upgrade, etc. So now I see no ads, which isn't terrible for me, but I wish I could just block the moving-flashing-noisy-popping-etc ads and keep the text and static image ads so the sites I visit keep their cash flow and so I can be informed of offers that might interest me.
If we had that, the non-intrusive advertisers could win against the evil ones, by virtue of reaching people VS being blocked.
I was expecting this. "One word, two syllables: demarcation"
Well, as far as "mise au placard" goes, the guy from office space gets -literally- moved to a storage space in an effort to get him to resign.
. . . he only got fired, instead of being shot. In countries with a "State News Agency," The press is just another department of the government anyway. Criticizing the government may be hazardous to your health, but the journalists know that, and would never dare to do so.
Canada sounds MUCH more dangerous in your fantasies than in reality.
It's actually quite telling that a country that took a stand so strongly against invading and imposing outside will on a country's freedom is entirely failing at understanding and dealing with the more subtle corruptions of big media and government.
All the countries implied in your post have new leaders now, and therefore subtly different behaviors.
Don't expect something like a country to have a consistent behavior across the board.
Also, I don't think France was against imposing it's will on other countries for most of its history. In fact, they were a big colonial power back in the day. Don't get me wrong, they did good in refusing to fall for the WMD scam, but don't misrepresent their ideals and motivations either.
BTW, I would have thought that after the telco immunity vote, the bailouts, secret copyright treaties, and other such nonsense that the US would be familiar with corporations being entangled in govt.
To be fair, he said "Americans might be unfamiliar with", and he's right. This is neither celebrity gossip nor sports results, and is therefore unfamiliar to a depressingly large amount of depressingly large Americans.
P.S. Drink Brawndo: It's got electrolytes!
French here
What's your friend describe is a "mise au placard". It's a specific way to fire somebody without really firring him.
It's extremely wrong in french for your managing staff motivations when you start to fire people without serious reasons and it's pretty hard to prove and convince every body that some body don't actually do as expected. So you don't fire him but progressively put him in a position where he don't have responsibility, interesting works, no computer, no phone, etc... and you simply wait that he resign by himself.
If he resign he isn't cover by the social protection law, so it's cheaper for you, better for you managing staff, etc...
The only problem is went you push it to far
Like taking his stapler...
Just to be clear, I am a fan of copyright. I think it's a very good idea. However, it needs to be implemented properly, and on days when I'm feeling particularly uncharitable toward the status quo I can be convinced that what we have is worse than nothing at all.
I am familiar with that feeling. The way things are now, the creative flow is hindered by copyrights. It's too much of a good thing, it became toxic.
Grishnakh is pointing out that while the ACLU is rabid about "terrorists' rights", they have a much less aggressive stance on defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication.
ORLY? http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/internet/index.html
I think he's just ACLU-bashing, not comeone with a point.
From the "2009 ACLU Legislative Priorities" pdf, I see
Repeal the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
Codify binding open Internet principles to discourage public and private
online censorship, to assure online privacy and to pursue equal access free
from discrimination.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 the same day that it was enacted into law. The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work - which relies on confidential communications - could be compromised by the new law.[15] The complaint, captioned Amnesty et al v McConnell and filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, argues that the new spying law violates Americans' rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.
which look a lot like defending the freedoms of Americans, especially when it comes to electronic communication to me. They were on top of that one day one, punctuality is a virtue.
Took me a minute in google to find that information. I don't know if or why they don't get involved with that treaty. Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it. Maybe they're understaffed, out of their jurisdiction and over budget. Maybe they're reptilians who pretend to defend civil liberties but they really want to drain your precious bodily fluids.
He's ranting against the ACLU, against foreigners, and against opposing torture. And he's calling that "freedom-loving". If he's pointing out anything, it's his perceptions, and I'm pretty sure he's perceiving that through the lenses at Fox News.
But to do this with bio gas would be dumb.
Biogas is carbon neutral
The biogas burns cleaner their way: Less nitrous oxides and whatnot, less smog, cleaner air: Good.
I'm guessing you don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV services, then? When you bought your car, did you get it without a radio? And have you been to see a movie lately?
I've stopped watching TV partly because the channels that I paid to get added ads after I first started watching them; You don't have to keep paying for the radio after you purchase the device, so that was not applicable; I've greatly reduced my movie-outings since they started spamming me before the coming attractions, I get the DVD and watch it on compy via VLC so it goes straight to the menu, skipping the crap they put in before that.
He who sells a copy of my work without giving me my dues deprives me of the money paid by the person to get a copy of my work.
So used book stores and libraries are evil?
No, the money for that copy was paid in the first sale, then that copy can have it's own life in the wild.
But a store that would take a book, then reprint it and sell a bunch of copies would be evil. THAT WAS HOW THINGS WERE before copyright laws.
during WWII in Germany, you probably would have told everyone to ignore what was being done to 6 million jews
a godwin? Really?
So I guess, by your logic, we should completely ignore anything which abrogates the rights of millions of people as long as there's one other injustice going on
You're as stupid as they come.
I'm not advocating torture or waterboarding, but when we're talking about a relative handful of people, most of whom are almost certainly guilty
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Advertising can help subsidize the cost of the content, thus allowing people to spend less to receive the same content
The CAN but they DON'T. They tweak the price so the unwashed masses pay as much as they're willing to pay and they cram as much advertising as they can on top of that.
What they don't realise is that they've pushed too far: They're looking for a new angle at which to apply the same pressure.
You are still going to run out of gas eventually, this just means that we don't hurt the environment as much in the process.
Well, it's methane, which is produced naturally by decomposing organic matter (as a waste product of the microorganism doing the biodegradation), so the technology could be applied to renewable sources of methane even though that's probably not economically sound when competing with currently mined deposits of gas.
My uncle used to have goats on his farm, and they were right bastards. Of course, so was he.
He's funny, but he's also insightful, mods! Goats really are infuriating creatures up close. One took a bite out of my shirt once!
Of course, they're also delicious themselves...
Left to their own devices, goats (unlike other ruminants) will eat the plants clear down to the surface
They're rent-a-goats, they won't stay long enough to desertificate the area.
I'm trying to tag this story "goat" (because I would like an easy way to track goat stories... like the one with the mutant spider silk milking goat created by the US Army, possible future stories about Thor's chariot, etc.) and the gorram web3.suck slashdot system keeps appending a horrible "se" at the end, and I object!
It's not even april 1st, come on /. UI, dont goatse me! :'(
no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Jefferson clearly did not believe in any natural "right" to control one's intellectual works.
He who sells a copy of my work without giving me my dues deprives me of the money paid by the person to get a copy of my work. That person will not buy a second copy from me. That's the clincher. The idea is not diminished by sharing it, but the money pool is diminished by taking from it.
If someone is repeating an idea of yours and giving it away as freely as he took it, not taking money for it, then he's not cheating you, because he's not taking anything away, he's just passing it along. But if he is taking money and not giving you your cut, he's taking money from you that you could have otherwise have made yourself.
It is about their right, and their right is compatible with the best interest of the nation, hence the preamble.
Their right to exploit it for a limited time, yes. Their right to exploit it for the period of time currently guaranteed by law, not so much.
I'm not saying current copyright law is in keeping with the spirit of copyright. The law has been perverted by corporations and is doing more harm than good in its current form.
What I'm saying is that the authors and inventors have rights that have to be protected by government, and that it is in the best interest to society to protect those rights, and to protect them for a limited time. Say, one generation (30 years) or so.
The current trend to infinity is an aberration.
advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get readers to pay for those
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
They want to have my cake and eat it too. This is why I can't wait for these businesses to crash and burn.