Just go to artists web sites. There's thousands of them. Many give a selection of downloadable music. The web challenges the assumption that we have to have a big intermediary media companies that determine what music is in and what music is not.
I like the Movielink Rental design and think it perfectly suited for tv shows.
The primary reason I would want to download a TV show is because I missed it. Most shows I only want to view once. The autodelete means that the price of the show is less than purchasing a copy of the show.
Quite a few shows are now selling DVDs. So there is the option of purchasing a DVD if you need Buffy the Vampire Slayer in your collection or karate chopping babes.
The biggest problem I have with Movielink for movies is that the download takes too long. I suspect that TV show downloads would be a tad shorter.
Debates on subject of intelligent design really shouldn't forget the role that evolution plays in various new age religions and even some popular philosophies.
The development of evolution as a science led to to a boatload of philosophers who claimed to be able to see the direction of evolution. You will often find new age religions invoking the mysteries of evolution in their world view. Such religions might present mankind as some type of butterfly spirit trying to evolve out out of corrupt corporal state to oneness with Gaia.
Some political philosophies have evoke evolution as a justification of genocide by deciding that they must kill a particular group of people so that the society could evolve.
Some sciences, such as evolutionary psychology, really seem to jump over the edge of science into to the rhealm of theology as they try to explain who and what humans are.
Since there are philosophies and new age religions that try and claim evolution as their own, it is understandable that Christian religions would want a way to tackle the issue.
From a theological standpoint, developing a coherent statement of intelligent design is apropriate. A coherent theology of intelligent design counters claims that evolution is opposed to religion or thta it somehow disproves Christianity. The topic fits well in Sunday school as it encourages people to pursue a healthy combination of science and spirituality.
For that matter, I don't have objections to professors mentioning intelligent design in lectures on evolution as it shows that evolution is not inherently in conflict with the religious beliefs of the students.
IMHO, intelligent does well when it is used to show that science and religion are not necessarily in conflcit.
The problems with intelligent design arise when theologians or philosophers start trying to use or twist evolution their their world view. It is when theologians either start using evolutions to enforce their beliefs, interpret the direction of evolution or mythologize elvolution that we get into trouble. The science of evolution should be left as science, and treated as science.
The theory has been abused by modern philosophers. Hopefully, people can recognize that abuse as a mistake and not repeat the mistakes.
You can also make the argument that Al Quaida is liberal. Their intellectual leaders studied the same revolutionary literature that was popular in the West. Undoutably they are convinced that they are fighting a war of liberation against the evil and corrupt western industrial military complex.
You have a good point. When looking at the political line up of parties in Iraq you see a pile of ideologies with roots in modern liberalism, communism, stalinism, fascism and even a few in classical liberalism. The middle east is filled with divisive rhetoric and a lot of issues to resolve. I don't think it comes down to saying the jihadists are conservatives and the Al Jazeera is the area's liberal saviour. The area has extremely odd mixes of ideologies. Their biggest problem, however, is that some of the groups are resorting to violence to destabilize society. The world is being forced to respond.
You are completely right that a bankruptcy court must clarify the rights owned by SCO.
I agree that SCO claimed to own things it did not. SCO seems to have thought that if they owned a piece of the puzzle, they owned the whole puzzle. IBM made this same mistake when they thought owning the bios gave them the highground in the PC industry.
However, to say that SCO has no IP anywhere seems a bit off. SCO gave a chunk of cash to Novell for a bag of rights. Either Novell engaged in an act of fraud, or SCO bought something that had some economic value.
Yeah, but back then the patent examiners actually did their jobs
I think the point is that once patent mills reached critical mass they swamped the system.
One argument is that patents today are more like the copyrights of yesterday and that companies should file everything as a patent to build a database that could be used to prove prior art. The ubiquity of patent mills might simply be creating a system where the patent system consumes itself as the mills drown out deliberate well thought through inventions.
When companies go bankrupt, their assets generally get sold off...they don't automatically become public domain.
For that matter, one of the good arguments against the current state of Intellectual Property is the market confusion that results at the end of the life cycle of the company that owns the rights to a product or other published works.
On the pro-IP side. The whole point of IP in a capitalistic society is that IP allows people to borrow against IP as an asset. I imagine that bankruptcy courts want to maintain assets. As such I have a hard time imagining the Bankruptcy system declaring IP assets as public domain.
The bankruptcy of SCO will result in others buying up any IP owned by the company and doing whatever with it.
In a computing environment dominated by servers and networking equipment, I am a bit surprised that there isn't more of an effort to move back to machine level code to tweak that extra throughput out of the server.
To an extent, the driver for the higher levels of abstraction was to shield the programmer from the vagaries and peculiarities of individual machines. One could imagine this new world of big servers under the complete control of the programmer could reverse the historical trend to greater abstraction in code back to the machine level.
Perhaps the handling of millions of random events is better served at the abstract level.
I find that using multiple languages helps enforce the n-tiered architecture. One architecture I like is to wrap an Oracle Database in a layer of PL/SQL objects, then to generate the web pages with PHP or Java. PL/SQL seems optimized for scribing business rules. PHP is optimized for generating web pages. Using two languages seems natural.
Having two languages involved forces a cleaner separation of the layers.
In the real world, we often end up interfacing with applications written in a wide variety of languages. Designing web applications with a variety of languages makes the system more robust.
I use cookies for session management and tracking usage in a site.
Spyware abuse generally occurs when a big company (doubleclick, valueclick, etc) want to track your usage between sites. The spyware fears generally arise with third party cookies.
These cookies generally come attached to images. For example the image ad on top of this slashdot page might access cookies that get used to build a profile of my slashdot usage.
Preventing spyware is a matter of blocking third party cookies.
Personally, I can't see any real reason why images (the IMG tag) should be allowed to set cookies.
When the main page sets a cookie, it is almost always to provide service to the end user. When an image sets a cookie, it is almost always so marketers can build profiles. My ideal browser would not allow third party cookies nor would it allow cookies to be set by img tags.
Not to mention the fact that the idea of a multilink really should be client side.
There are client side things that load multiple pages...frames and popups. For that matter, if you want to open two links, you can always right click and select "open in new window" or "add to favorites".
The primary use of multilink functionality will be to show seconary ads alongside primary ads.
You've read too much Slashdot if you dream of mousing while cuddling with your laptop.
The technology of "cuddling with machines" is probably a lot more advanced than any of us care to admit. This type of technology is more the domain of the Leisure Suit Larry crowd than the Dilbert programming crowd...so I am not sure if the jab at the/. crowd is fitting.
It's interesting to see how Amazon's playing the patent game.
We have a large number of patents owned by a company that is just hitting ten and will soon be a teen. The analogy of a teen driving the internet will soon be in order.
Modern business theories teach that you must either dominate the market or die. Making a profit at what you do is not sufficient, you must either have complete control of the market or perish.
If Amazon hires people from modern American business schools, I think it is more likely that they will use their patents to play the S&M business game than it is likely that they will use their patents to prevent abuse of the market.
Great - now NYC can finally declassify its subway maps, even though terrorists could use them to destroy America.
NYC can still protect themselves by obfuscating the data. For example, they could have the maps designed by a committee. Bureaucratic committees are one of the most successful tools for obfuscating data.
If they need the highest level of security, they might considering adding several PhD candidates to the committee. That should make the subway maps to just about everyone.
You need to get your terms straight. Evil is very rarely profitable. It rarely actually produces anything. Evil is powerful, it is the person or group who subverts a company or a market for their personal gain...generally in doing so they make the rest of the world poorer.
In the case of Google, the great example is the legion of SEO-spammers who create millions upon millions of fake web pages to get their ads to the top positions in the search engines.
These people are actually destroying wealth, but they are following Lord Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in their march to dominate the market...just as they are taught by the legions of business gurus.
Evil is only profitable in that it concentrates power in a few hands. It is not profitable in that it destroys wealth and potential.
No one is forcing Western values onto China in this program
Just for the record, the Communist system currently in place in China was developed in the west. It was forced on China in an extremely oppressive fashion (the Cultural Revolution). The Cultural Revolution was not simply about bringing in new ideas, it was a very violent Marxist program designed to completely wipe out China's past.
The post that labels free speech as forcing western values on China is quite amusing. Quite frankly the most likely outcome of supporting free speech is that people are very likely to discuss the cultural values that western style communism tried to drive from their country in the Cultural Revolution. In other words...freedom would allow the Chinese people to be... Chinese.
I love dogs. On the subject of wilderness, however, Dogs are extremely destructive. Dogs and wilderness do not mix. When you take them into the wilderness they chase all of the wild life away. They pollute streams and intensify the destruction of the wilderness.
Pets are more of a consumer product than they are an introduction to nature.
I've spent most of my life without a dog. Coco showed up on the porch a year and a half ago. I take her on regular walks in the mountains. It is freightening the amount of destruction I see being done by dogs.
In a discussion on the value of pets. Yes, kids and dogs are a great combination. However, pets are about the domination of animals. Taking Coco on trips into the mountains, I am now starting to see the extent to which dogs dominate recreation and the affect that they have on the diminishing nature around us.
In other words, you should only have a dog if you really, really want to have a dog. You should only have a dog if you are wanting a pet to be a primary focus of your recreation time.
You should budget two grand a year for dog care and food, and plan to spend a great deal of time with it.
Coco showed up on my porch because a family with two sons bought a puppy as a consumer product, and found out that dogs are a big hassle.
Both Netscape and MS gave away their browsers dreaming of the marketing potential of networked computers. There really are people who dream of a brave new world run by marketers.
I can imagine a slick salesman selling someone Antivirus-Antivirus software.
What is even more amusing is that many of the antispyware programs are developed by spyware firms. Some are simply trojans for spyware, while others have the admirable goal of protecting the spyware's programs from other spyware programs. "We will keep our competitor's spyware off your computer!!!!"
Quite frankly the whole idea of providing security by adding more and more layers is flawed. Seems to me that the best approach to security is to build security from the ground up.
I'd wager that if I just opened my cookie list and counted I'd count at least twice as many illegitimate cookies as legitimate ones.
That depends on your definition of "illegitimate". If you define all cookies that have anything what-so-ever to do with ecommerce as illegitimate, then you win.
I contend that the majority of cookies are those set by web sites to monitor your actitive within their domain. (how many times you come back, etc.)
Anyway, I decided to look through my cookies folder. For the most part, I simply see a list of the sites I've visited. There were several cookies set by popups that I let past my popup blocker (grrr, I hate popups). If I didn't have a popup blocker then I would have a ton of popup spawned cookies.
Interestingly, most of the questionable cookies were at the very top of the directory as they began with the word "ad." or just had an IP address. Getting past the a's the cookie folder shows sites I remember visiting. Since my directory was listed alphabetically, I thought you might be right. After I got past the "ad." things looked more like I expected.
It looks like a lot of sites use persistent cookies when a session cookie would do. If you defined all persistent cookies as illegitimate, then you would win. However, I consider this question of repeat visits one of the most important questions about web traffic. Basically, the question is how many visits does it take before a person buys something.
In my opinion, the cookies that you need to worry about are the third party cookies that attempt to track your usage from site to site. Pretty much by definition there are fewer of these on your hard drive because one cookie will be used by a large number of advertisements.
The web site that drops a persistant cookie on your hard drive because he wants to see if you come back is an annoyance. The evil people are those who drop one cookie on your drive, then access it from a large number of sites to build a profile of your viewing habits.
Counting the cookies on my drive showed a large number of sites wanting to see how often I return to their site.
Counting cookies, I see only a few of the really evil cookies used by firms trying to make a complete profile of my usage.
I don't dismiss your question. Counting cookies stored on the hard drive does not answer the question you are asking. The real question should be about the number of times third party cookies are accessed in your surfing. My cookie directory is largely a history of sites I've visited, and a reminder that I hate popups. I regret everytime I turn off the popup blocker.
Blocking cookies from third party sites and excluding wicked advertisers from the hosts file are both wise. There is hope that, as the internet evolves, some of the really nasty advertising techniques will wane.
It looks like organizations dedicated to web surfer profiling are waning. The popup merchants and parasitic (spyware) advertisers made out like bandits.
The problem is that cookies are most frequently used for purposes which don't work in favor of the person allowing them on their machine. Cookies are used to track you across websites.
I think you have it backwards. The majority of times, cookies do things that are good for the end user. Cookies allow you to have a customized experience on a site, etc..
For ecommerce to work, a computer has to be able to track a session from product selection through payment. Cookies are the best way to handle such a task.
A large number of sites use cookies for tracking people within their site. I contend that this type of tracking is extremely valuable to web users and consumers. For example, if I see that no one is interested in a given page, I might pull the page and put something better in its place.
Stores spend a great deal of effort on tracking their advertising efforts...I contend that this is good for consumers. A store might track the result of different ad campaigns. They might spend less on campaigns that are attacting low quality users and spend more on those that attract high quality (visitors that result in sales). This type of tracking is beneficial for consumers as it helps the store optimize their ad spending dollars.
The one and only bad area of cookie usage comes from the big web firms that are trying to build massive data warehouses to track people across web sites. That means that there really is only one major area of cookie abuse.
I despise companies that were developing such technologies. Judging from the stock performance of these dot bombs...their efforts have proven to be a bust. Companies like double click will always continue to exist as long as marketing schools teach that the goal of business is total dominance of the market. My hope is that the market will continue to reject the dot bombs trying to acheive total market domination.
Basically, you have a technology that does good things...like allowing personalization in web sites. The technlogy has been abused by a small number of marketing firms. The market has largely rejected the things these companies were trying to do with the technology...we need to stay vigilant to abusive companies like DoubleClick and ValueClick. Cookie technology itself has proven beneficial to web surfers.
Hi, how's everything way up there above the rest of humanity!
There actually is a tangible aspect to virtual property...the time and effort used to produce the property. The theory of labor pretty much sees the amount of labor needed to produce a good as the major component of the price. The price of gold is largely determined by the amount of effort it takes to get find and get more gold.
The reason virtual property is a bad investment is that the people who define the virtual world can change the rules and change the time needed to create goods. People in power changing the rules happens all the time in the real world too.
BTW, I doubt you will find any investment tool that does not have legions of people telling stories of how they were burned by their investment.
Will you please tell me when I said that security was not an issue. Twice you've tried to stuff these words down my gullet. Could you please tell me when I said that? I said I was disappointed that the first posts were all prohibitions on using a promising technology. That does not say security issues do not exist.
Were you thinking there was some magic fairy dust you could apply to any computer you touched that makes it Automatically Secure?
Men weigh less than air. Therefore there is no way that man can sprinkle fairy dusty on his arse and fly.
There is no way that flying will ever be safe. I doubt that there's been a single year since Wright brother's stunt without a death from people trying to fly. There is not a single airplane at the airport that is exempt from the laws of gravity. So friggin what. I think people have developed technologies that are good enough.
I might be a naive believer in fairy dust, but I guess I am gullible enough to fall on the side of the debate that thinks technology will be able to make internet communications secure enough so people can use it when traveling.
Slashdot Mirror
Just go to artists web sites. There's thousands of them. Many give a selection of downloadable music. The web challenges the assumption that we have to have a big intermediary media companies that determine what music is in and what music is not.
Which begs the question: Is saving that 15 minutes of your life wasted by commericials worth paying $.99 for the show?
As mentioned, ommitting the commercials saves an immediate 25% of the download time.
I like the Movielink Rental design and think it perfectly suited for tv shows.
The primary reason I would want to download a TV show is because I missed it. Most shows I only want to view once. The autodelete means that the price of the show is less than purchasing a copy of the show.
Quite a few shows are now selling DVDs. So there is the option of purchasing a DVD if you need Buffy the Vampire Slayer in your collection or karate chopping babes.
The biggest problem I have with Movielink for movies is that the download takes too long. I suspect that TV show downloads would be a tad shorter.
Debates on subject of intelligent design really shouldn't forget the role that evolution plays in various new age religions and even some popular philosophies.
The development of evolution as a science led to to a boatload of philosophers who claimed to be able to see the direction of evolution. You will often find new age religions invoking the mysteries of evolution in their world view. Such religions might present mankind as some type of butterfly spirit trying to evolve out out of corrupt corporal state to oneness with Gaia.
Some political philosophies have evoke evolution as a justification of genocide by deciding that they must kill a particular group of people so that the society could evolve.
Some sciences, such as evolutionary psychology, really seem to jump over the edge of science into to the rhealm of theology as they try to explain who and what humans are.
Since there are philosophies and new age religions that try and claim evolution as their own, it is understandable that Christian religions would want a way to tackle the issue.
From a theological standpoint, developing a coherent statement of intelligent design is apropriate. A coherent theology of intelligent design counters claims that evolution is opposed to religion or thta it somehow disproves Christianity. The topic fits well in Sunday school as it encourages people to pursue a healthy combination of science and spirituality.
For that matter, I don't have objections to professors mentioning intelligent design in lectures on evolution as it shows that evolution is not inherently in conflict with the religious beliefs of the students.
IMHO, intelligent does well when it is used to show that science and religion are not necessarily in conflcit.
The problems with intelligent design arise when theologians or philosophers start trying to use or twist evolution their their world view. It is when theologians either start using evolutions to enforce their beliefs, interpret the direction of evolution or mythologize elvolution that we get into trouble. The science of evolution should be left as science, and treated as science.
The theory has been abused by modern philosophers. Hopefully, people can recognize that abuse as a mistake and not repeat the mistakes.
You can also make the argument that Al Quaida is liberal. Their intellectual leaders studied the same revolutionary literature that was popular in the West. Undoutably they are convinced that they are fighting a war of liberation against the evil and corrupt western industrial military complex.
You have a good point. When looking at the political line up of parties in Iraq you see a pile of ideologies with roots in modern liberalism, communism, stalinism, fascism and even a few in classical liberalism. The middle east is filled with divisive rhetoric and a lot of issues to resolve. I don't think it comes down to saying the jihadists are conservatives and the Al Jazeera is the area's liberal saviour. The area has extremely odd mixes of ideologies. Their biggest problem, however, is that some of the groups are resorting to violence to destabilize society. The world is being forced to respond.
You are completely right that a bankruptcy court must clarify the rights owned by SCO.
I agree that SCO claimed to own things it did not. SCO seems to have thought that if they owned a piece of the puzzle, they owned the whole puzzle. IBM made this same mistake when they thought owning the bios gave them the highground in the PC industry.
However, to say that SCO has no IP anywhere seems a bit off. SCO gave a chunk of cash to Novell for a bag of rights. Either Novell engaged in an act of fraud, or SCO bought something that had some economic value.
I think the point is that once patent mills reached critical mass they swamped the system.
One argument is that patents today are more like the copyrights of yesterday and that companies should file everything as a patent to build a database that could be used to prove prior art. The ubiquity of patent mills might simply be creating a system where the patent system consumes itself as the mills drown out deliberate well thought through inventions.
When companies go bankrupt, their assets generally get sold off...they don't automatically become public domain.
For that matter, one of the good arguments against the current state of Intellectual Property is the market confusion that results at the end of the life cycle of the company that owns the rights to a product or other published works.
On the pro-IP side. The whole point of IP in a capitalistic society is that IP allows people to borrow against IP as an asset. I imagine that bankruptcy courts want to maintain assets. As such I have a hard time imagining the Bankruptcy system declaring IP assets as public domain.
The bankruptcy of SCO will result in others buying up any IP owned by the company and doing whatever with it.
In a computing environment dominated by servers and networking equipment, I am a bit surprised that there isn't more of an effort to move back to machine level code to tweak that extra throughput out of the server.
To an extent, the driver for the higher levels of abstraction was to shield the programmer from the vagaries and peculiarities of individual machines. One could imagine this new world of big servers under the complete control of the programmer could reverse the historical trend to greater abstraction in code back to the machine level.
Perhaps the handling of millions of random events is better served at the abstract level.
I find that using multiple languages helps enforce the n-tiered architecture. One architecture I like is to wrap an Oracle Database in a layer of PL/SQL objects, then to generate the web pages with PHP or Java. PL/SQL seems optimized for scribing business rules. PHP is optimized for generating web pages. Using two languages seems natural.
Having two languages involved forces a cleaner separation of the layers.
In the real world, we often end up interfacing with applications written in a wide variety of languages. Designing web applications with a variety of languages makes the system more robust.
The theory of labor would set the price of software somewhere below the cost of writing the software yourself.
With a good OSS layer available, the cost of "writing software" should be going down...which might be why big software companies nervous.
I use cookies for session management and tracking usage in a site.
Spyware abuse generally occurs when a big company (doubleclick, valueclick, etc) want to track your usage between sites. The spyware fears generally arise with third party cookies.
These cookies generally come attached to images. For example the image ad on top of this slashdot page might access cookies that get used to build a profile of my slashdot usage.
Preventing spyware is a matter of blocking third party cookies.
Personally, I can't see any real reason why images (the IMG tag) should be allowed to set cookies.
When the main page sets a cookie, it is almost always to provide service to the end user. When an image sets a cookie, it is almost always so marketers can build profiles. My ideal browser would not allow third party cookies nor would it allow cookies to be set by img tags.
There are client side things that load multiple pages...frames and popups. For that matter, if you want to open two links, you can always right click and select "open in new window" or "add to favorites".
The primary use of multilink functionality will be to show seconary ads alongside primary ads.
The technology of "cuddling with machines" is probably a lot more advanced than any of us care to admit. This type of technology is more the domain of the Leisure Suit Larry crowd than the Dilbert programming crowd...so I am not sure if the jab at the /. crowd is fitting.
Modern business theories teach that you must either dominate the market or die. Making a profit at what you do is not sufficient, you must either have complete control of the market or perish.
If Amazon hires people from modern American business schools, I think it is more likely that they will use their patents to play the S&M business game than it is likely that they will use their patents to prevent abuse of the market.
NYC can still protect themselves by obfuscating the data. For example, they could have the maps designed by a committee. Bureaucratic committees are one of the most successful tools for obfuscating data.
If they need the highest level of security, they might considering adding several PhD candidates to the committee. That should make the subway maps to just about everyone.
You need to get your terms straight. Evil is very rarely profitable. It rarely actually produces anything. Evil is powerful, it is the person or group who subverts a company or a market for their personal gain...generally in doing so they make the rest of the world poorer.
In the case of Google, the great example is the legion of SEO-spammers who create millions upon millions of fake web pages to get their ads to the top positions in the search engines.
These people are actually destroying wealth, but they are following Lord Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in their march to dominate the market...just as they are taught by the legions of business gurus.
Evil is only profitable in that it concentrates power in a few hands. It is not profitable in that it destroys wealth and potential.
Just for the record, the Communist system currently in place in China was developed in the west. It was forced on China in an extremely oppressive fashion (the Cultural Revolution). The Cultural Revolution was not simply about bringing in new ideas, it was a very violent Marxist program designed to completely wipe out China's past.
The post that labels free speech as forcing western values on China is quite amusing. Quite frankly the most likely outcome of supporting free speech is that people are very likely to discuss the cultural values that western style communism tried to drive from their country in the Cultural Revolution. In other words...freedom would allow the Chinese people to be ... Chinese.
I love dogs. On the subject of wilderness, however, Dogs are extremely destructive. Dogs and wilderness do not mix. When you take them into the wilderness they chase all of the wild life away. They pollute streams and intensify the destruction of the wilderness.
Pets are more of a consumer product than they are an introduction to nature.
I've spent most of my life without a dog. Coco showed up on the porch a year and a half ago. I take her on regular walks in the mountains. It is freightening the amount of destruction I see being done by dogs.
In a discussion on the value of pets. Yes, kids and dogs are a great combination. However, pets are about the domination of animals. Taking Coco on trips into the mountains, I am now starting to see the extent to which dogs dominate recreation and the affect that they have on the diminishing nature around us.
In other words, you should only have a dog if you really, really want to have a dog. You should only have a dog if you are wanting a pet to be a primary focus of your recreation time.
You should budget two grand a year for dog care and food, and plan to spend a great deal of time with it.
Coco showed up on my porch because a family with two sons bought a puppy as a consumer product, and found out that dogs are a big hassle.
Both Netscape and MS gave away their browsers dreaming of the marketing potential of networked computers. There really are people who dream of a brave new world run by marketers.
What is even more amusing is that many of the antispyware programs are developed by spyware firms. Some are simply trojans for spyware, while others have the admirable goal of protecting the spyware's programs from other spyware programs. "We will keep our competitor's spyware off your computer!!!!"
Quite frankly the whole idea of providing security by adding more and more layers is flawed. Seems to me that the best approach to security is to build security from the ground up.
That depends on your definition of "illegitimate". If you define all cookies that have anything what-so-ever to do with ecommerce as illegitimate, then you win.
I contend that the majority of cookies are those set by web sites to monitor your actitive within their domain. (how many times you come back, etc.)
Anyway, I decided to look through my cookies folder. For the most part, I simply see a list of the sites I've visited. There were several cookies set by popups that I let past my popup blocker (grrr, I hate popups). If I didn't have a popup blocker then I would have a ton of popup spawned cookies.
Interestingly, most of the questionable cookies were at the very top of the directory as they began with the word "ad." or just had an IP address. Getting past the a's the cookie folder shows sites I remember visiting. Since my directory was listed alphabetically, I thought you might be right. After I got past the "ad." things looked more like I expected.
It looks like a lot of sites use persistent cookies when a session cookie would do. If you defined all persistent cookies as illegitimate, then you would win. However, I consider this question of repeat visits one of the most important questions about web traffic. Basically, the question is how many visits does it take before a person buys something.
In my opinion, the cookies that you need to worry about are the third party cookies that attempt to track your usage from site to site. Pretty much by definition there are fewer of these on your hard drive because one cookie will be used by a large number of advertisements.
The web site that drops a persistant cookie on your hard drive because he wants to see if you come back is an annoyance. The evil people are those who drop one cookie on your drive, then access it from a large number of sites to build a profile of your viewing habits.
Counting the cookies on my drive showed a large number of sites wanting to see how often I return to their site.
Counting cookies, I see only a few of the really evil cookies used by firms trying to make a complete profile of my usage.
I don't dismiss your question. Counting cookies stored on the hard drive does not answer the question you are asking. The real question should be about the number of times third party cookies are accessed in your surfing. My cookie directory is largely a history of sites I've visited, and a reminder that I hate popups. I regret everytime I turn off the popup blocker.
Blocking cookies from third party sites and excluding wicked advertisers from the hosts file are both wise. There is hope that, as the internet evolves, some of the really nasty advertising techniques will wane.
It looks like organizations dedicated to web surfer profiling are waning. The popup merchants and parasitic (spyware) advertisers made out like bandits.
I think you have it backwards. The majority of times, cookies do things that are good for the end user. Cookies allow you to have a customized experience on a site, etc..
For ecommerce to work, a computer has to be able to track a session from product selection through payment. Cookies are the best way to handle such a task.
A large number of sites use cookies for tracking people within their site. I contend that this type of tracking is extremely valuable to web users and consumers. For example, if I see that no one is interested in a given page, I might pull the page and put something better in its place.
Stores spend a great deal of effort on tracking their advertising efforts...I contend that this is good for consumers. A store might track the result of different ad campaigns. They might spend less on campaigns that are attacting low quality users and spend more on those that attract high quality (visitors that result in sales). This type of tracking is beneficial for consumers as it helps the store optimize their ad spending dollars.
The one and only bad area of cookie usage comes from the big web firms that are trying to build massive data warehouses to track people across web sites. That means that there really is only one major area of cookie abuse.
I despise companies that were developing such technologies. Judging from the stock performance of these dot bombs...their efforts have proven to be a bust. Companies like double click will always continue to exist as long as marketing schools teach that the goal of business is total dominance of the market. My hope is that the market will continue to reject the dot bombs trying to acheive total market domination.
Basically, you have a technology that does good things...like allowing personalization in web sites. The technlogy has been abused by a small number of marketing firms. The market has largely rejected the things these companies were trying to do with the technology...we need to stay vigilant to abusive companies like DoubleClick and ValueClick. Cookie technology itself has proven beneficial to web surfers.
Hi, how's everything way up there above the rest of humanity!
There actually is a tangible aspect to virtual property...the time and effort used to produce the property. The theory of labor pretty much sees the amount of labor needed to produce a good as the major component of the price. The price of gold is largely determined by the amount of effort it takes to get find and get more gold.
The reason virtual property is a bad investment is that the people who define the virtual world can change the rules and change the time needed to create goods. People in power changing the rules happens all the time in the real world too.
BTW, I doubt you will find any investment tool that does not have legions of people telling stories of how they were burned by their investment.
There is no way that flying will ever be safe. I doubt that there's been a single year since Wright brother's stunt without a death from people trying to fly. There is not a single airplane at the airport that is exempt from the laws of gravity. So friggin what. I think people have developed technologies that are good enough.
I might be a naive believer in fairy dust, but I guess I am gullible enough to fall on the side of the debate that thinks technology will be able to make internet communications secure enough so people can use it when traveling.