"If a company is so concerned about the cost of running a Web site, then maybe they shouldn't put free content on their Web site. If they want to make money, then charge for subscriptions."
anyone recall the big fuss almost everyone kicked up when slashdot decided to show ads on articles posted?
if companies started introducing subscriptions-only policies for their websites, that would in effect kill the potential exposure their website might have. and as always, the usual unwashed hordes will bitch about so-and-so company selling out and becoming "commercial".
most website have ads, to cover the cost of running the server, not to make a profit. porn sites charge subscriptions to make a profit by selling the content, not to cover the costs of running their servers.
"Blocking pop-up ads is like recording a TV show but pausing during the commercials. The ads are there, but I choose not to see (record) them. The broadcaster is doing its job by airing the ad, and the advertiser is getting the message out to the TV viewers."
i'm under the assumption you'd be at the tv watching the program whilst recording it, hence you'd be watching ads as well. to be honest, the example you have given is a bit ambiguous and since IANAL, i won't attempt to say whether that's right or wrong. but, if you somehow manage to get some gadget to somehow screen out the ads as you watch tv, then i would say that's theft.
"how far am I, as a web site viewer, obligated to go? Many ad sites don't pay out unless the link is actually clicked. Should I click the link? If I don't, am I "stealing" content? Should I be required to buy something from the site? Am I stealing if I don't?"
all you're obligated to do is to look at those ads. whether you click on them or not, is your perogative. if you don't click it, you're not stealing and no, you aren't required to buy anything so as not to be considered a thief. all you have to do is look at the ad.
by disabling pop-ups, you're denying the company the opportunity to even have you look at the ad, and possibly click on the ad.
look at this way: in return for having a 30% discount at blah blah steakhouse, all you have to do is attend a short sales pitch by a salesman about the latest bbq sauce on the market. its only right that you hear out the salesman. whether you buy the bbq sauce or not is up to you. you sure as hell can't just walk out on the salesman before he gets a chance to do his pitch.
this isn't a troll post, but isn't it obvious? the stuff you browse on the web isn't exactly completely free of charge. there're bandwidth costs to be paid, servers to be bought and maintained, and some of the information you read doesn't just appear there; someone had to do research and type it out.
the websites let you browse their sites for free, and all they're asking in return is for you to do you part and look at those ads. some may interest you, most do not. in the cast of the latter, just close the pop-up window and go on. is it that big of an inconvenience? is it too much to ask for? i think not.
in effect, you're "paying" to see the websites' content by seeing those ads. if you disable pop-ups then yes, you are in effect stealing the right to see the content on those websites.
personally, the games in my nokia phone and the built in organizer is all i'll ever need. a year or two ago, a friend of mine passed me a PDA he won in some school competition, and i carried it around for a week or so before i got tired of it.
every once in a while when i need to remind myself to call someone, do something or be somewhere, the organizer in my phone is more than enough. it lets you set the event and its time, and the time you want the reminder alarm to go off.
to be honest, i'm not all that organized a person and i rely mostly on my memory, so that might be a reason why i didn't have much of a use for a PDA. i noticed that most geeks aren't exactly organized, what with the huge pile of papers and other misc items their desks are usually cluttered with. if that's representative of most of slashdot's reader demographic, then most probably the majority of slashdot users don't have a need for PDAs. most just buy it for the cool-gadget factor, in my opinion.
so before you go out and get yourself a PDA, ask yourself if you even have a paper organizer now. if you can live without the organizer, you definitely can do without the PDA, since the latter is just an electronic version of it.
it may finally come to pass that gamers have their console and their word machine and never the twain shall meet
i personally hope that never happens. i don't want to have to buy a separate machine to play games and do mundane stuff like send email and browse the web. i also like playing games on a nice CRT at 100hz instead of a TV at 60hz. besides, dedicated consoles aren't very upgradable.
speaking of TVs, i can browse the web, send email, watch tv, and play games all on the same computer at the moment and i hope that never changes.
society and the way people interact with each other probably hasn't change much, and probably won't for the next few hundred years too.
i think the difference is in the culture and the way the economy of america works now. a hundred years ago, there might not have been the equivalent of megacorporations to exploit the loopholes in copyright laws (or any other laws for that matter).
it also is possible honour and honesty might have had held more weight then, than now. i wouldn't consider what disney has been doing as mentioned in the article as very honourable, nor honest.
a copyright law that was drafted a few hundred years ago cannot be relevant today without any change. at present, those laws are badly irrelevant to today's culture. as always, the rich and the powerful are just going to take advantage of the lucrative situation they have in their hands now.
the word "copyright" is quickly becoming a farce, at least in corporate and capitolist america. its sad how this issue has been ignored and cleanly swept under the rug. but as always and as mentioned earlier, the rich and powerful will have the last say.
as i see it, the only way to rectify this situation is to make spam a legally punishable offence. a jail term, a hefty fine, anything! i just want something to be done! everytime i think about all the spammers making a quick buck by killing off email slowly, i get pissed as hell.
the same way DOS attacking a website is a serious offence as it costs a lot of money, spamming is no different from a DOS attack on individual users. those individual users being attacked number by the millions and this is an everyday DOS attack on all of us.
write into a newspaper forum, send a letter to your senator. do SOMETHING. create more awareness and resentment towards spammers; its the only way to get anything done about them. i'm halfway through a letter to my local newspaper as i type this.
i do as well, but for me its worth it, considering the amount of bandwidth i use on average.
there's another plan from my ISP, where you pay about half the price of the unlimited plan, and you get the same upstream and downstream, but only 250megs a month. after you exceed the limit, they would charge you extra for every 5 megs or so (i can't recall the exact figures), but only up to a certain price, after which they stop charging extra.
this isn't intended as a troll post, but with all the recent articles posted on slashdot and other news events, it seems as if capitolism is starting to eat up america.
mine doesn't though....512kbps downstream, 256kbps upstream. unlimited, and i mean really unlimited. last month i downloaded and uploaded over 10gigs and 8gigs respectively.
i honestly think customers should do something, instead of letting the telcos treat them like idiots.
as the first poster (not a troll post!) mentioned, advertising the service as "unlimited" when the truth is the complete opposite is no better than misleading and false advertising. at worst, its blatant lying.
capping your bandwidth is not the same as capping the amount of data you can download.
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
i suspect the weapons facilities or whatever are underground. pictures taken by satellites probably gave them the suspicion that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they need to go and take a look to make sure.
of mobile phones have been making lots of headway lately, and its nice to know that nokia is at the forefront of both technology, and user-friendliness.
that being said, i have noticed that whilst the technology of new phones get better and more advanced the build quality has been plummeting. most, if not all handphones that have come out recently do not usually last more than a year of constant, everyday use. this is definitely in sharp contrast to the phones that motorola, ericsson, and other older players in the mobile phone business used to make.
usually within a year, most handphones would already have failing LCDs, loose or cracked casings, non-responsive buttons, and all this for a phone that costs a few hundred when new.
tired? go take a break. take out the old ericsson or motorola analog phone (or a first generation gsm model) you have stashed somewhere, and compare it with the tiny but fragile nokia/motorola/ericsson you have now. observe the cheap and brittle plastic now used, as opposed to the thick and strong bakelite-like material phones used to be made of. as i recall it, my old ericsson had its innards assembled on a metal chassis, which was then covered with a plastic casing, and it survived many many drops, kicks and falls and came out fine.
i'm currently using a nokia 6150, and i refuse to lay down the cash to buy any of the new phones coming out. firstly, its because i don't actually need or use any of the new spiffy features that most phones come with but are redundant to most people. second but more importantly, i'm not going to pay for a phone that won't even last more than a year of daily use, and probably cost 1/100th of its street price to manufacture.
now admittedly, this is due to a change in consumer habits, in that most people buying a new handphone change it within a year, so i don't really blame the mobile phone companies. however, i would definitely appreciate it if they at least gave those of us who buy phones to actually use and expect those phones to last, the option of doing so. i personally abhor people who throw away their old phones just because its no longer a new model and not in fashion, and go out to buy a new one. and before i forget, has anyone forgotten where all these phones go after we throw them away? yes, they fill up the landfills, further poluting the environment, for most countries that don't have strict recycling laws.
nevermind if it doesn't have bluetooth, a built-in organizer, or any of the new-fangled features. just give me dual or tri band capability, sms, the basic functions like call-forwding, conference calls, and you have a happy and loyal customer. i don't need quick-swap faceplates and number pads because i don't see phones as a fasion accesory. i see them as a tool, so build them that way, thanks. and plain black would do, thank you. i don't need a translucent phone with a full led array flashing away and consuming the battery's power that goes off the first time you drop it.
She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this
i would get really pissed at them for depriving me of the chance at the job, but i wouldn't hold them fully responsible for it. she had a chance at the contract; the contract wasn't taken away from her after being given to her, as a result of the isp screwing up her account.
i think all that will be doled it to her is some compensation, assuming the judge is level-headed enough.
i would think that if people lived longer and thus stopped reproducing or at least reproduced at a slower rate, wouldn't the evolution of those inhabitants in wealthy nations slow down or grind to a stop?
on the other hand, people living in poorer nations would face the tough elements, polution, etc, and they would reproduce and die more often. hence, they were evolve faster and eventually, they might become more advanced biologically than those living in wealthy nations.
it might even come to a point whereby, the people living in poor nations who don't get to tweak their genes become able to live longer naturally than the people in wealthy nations.
eventually, what might happen is you have a bunch of humans who can still live "only" less than a century naturally, and need all sorts of gene therapy and treatment to live as long as "normal" humans who now have a lifespan of say....500 years, without any gene therapy or other forms of unnatural intervention.
what will happen then, is that i believe the situation that the parent poster envisions would flip over, and people in the poorer nations would become the dominant "breed" of humans. perhaps then, the people in poorer nations might even run over and take over the wealthier nations by force, who now can't even produce soldiers to fight back. kinda like the theory of the homo-sapiens invading europe and killing off most of the cro-magnans.
if they could find a way to make you live twice as long without doing all the gene manipulation at the fetal stage, you could always store your sperm (assuming you're a guy) in a sperm bank before going for the treatment.
gone are the days when overclocking was actually an economically viable option to get more performance out of your system for what you pay. these days, overclocking is almost no different from case modding, in that its just for posers to make themselves feel better and have something to show-off.
and is it a good sign that slashdot is continually posting articles pertaining to both case modding and overclocking "breakthroughs"? yes, they overclocked the system to 3.3ghz, but most likely in a few months intel is going to release processors that are just as fast, if not faster. see the pointlessness?
its like posting on article on slashdot about a breakthrough in man-powered vehicles, about how 200 people got together to push a car to more than 200km/h (i refuse to use miles/hour). yea sure, that was fast but is it a breakthrough? currently, the approach to overclocking processors is to up the voltage so the processor can function at a higher clock speed reliably, and then find some way to cool it down sufficiently so it doens't overheat. so they got it colder this time, and faster, via the exact same approach thousands of overclockers have been using all the while.
we'll finally find out where celine dion really came from, won't we? and as usual, canada would be really sorry about all the inconvenience they caused. mmhmm...
Slashdot Mirror
"If a company is so concerned about the cost of running a Web site, then maybe they shouldn't put free content on their Web site. If they want to make money, then charge for subscriptions."
anyone recall the big fuss almost everyone kicked up when slashdot decided to show ads on articles posted?
if companies started introducing subscriptions-only policies for their websites, that would in effect kill the potential exposure their website might have. and as always, the usual unwashed hordes will bitch about so-and-so company selling out and becoming "commercial".
most website have ads, to cover the cost of running the server, not to make a profit. porn sites charge subscriptions to make a profit by selling the content, not to cover the costs of running their servers.
"Blocking pop-up ads is like recording a TV show but pausing during the commercials. The ads are there, but I choose not to see (record) them. The broadcaster is doing its job by airing the ad, and the advertiser is getting the message out to the TV viewers."
i'm under the assumption you'd be at the tv watching the program whilst recording it, hence you'd be watching ads as well. to be honest, the example you have given is a bit ambiguous and since IANAL, i won't attempt to say whether that's right or wrong. but, if you somehow manage to get some gadget to somehow screen out the ads as you watch tv, then i would say that's theft.
"how far am I, as a web site viewer, obligated to go? Many ad sites don't pay out unless the link is actually clicked. Should I click the link? If I don't, am I "stealing" content? Should I be required to buy something from the site? Am I stealing if I don't?"
all you're obligated to do is to look at those ads. whether you click on them or not, is your perogative. if you don't click it, you're not stealing and no, you aren't required to buy anything so as not to be considered a thief. all you have to do is look at the ad.
by disabling pop-ups, you're denying the company the opportunity to even have you look at the ad, and possibly click on the ad.
look at this way: in return for having a 30% discount at blah blah steakhouse, all you have to do is attend a short sales pitch by a salesman about the latest bbq sauce on the market. its only right that you hear out the salesman. whether you buy the bbq sauce or not is up to you. you sure as hell can't just walk out on the salesman before he gets a chance to do his pitch.
this isn't a troll post, but isn't it obvious? the stuff you browse on the web isn't exactly completely free of charge. there're bandwidth costs to be paid, servers to be bought and maintained, and some of the information you read doesn't just appear there; someone had to do research and type it out.
the websites let you browse their sites for free, and all they're asking in return is for you to do you part and look at those ads. some may interest you, most do not. in the cast of the latter, just close the pop-up window and go on. is it that big of an inconvenience? is it too much to ask for? i think not.
in effect, you're "paying" to see the websites' content by seeing those ads. if you disable pop-ups then yes, you are in effect stealing the right to see the content on those websites.
personally, the games in my nokia phone and the built in organizer is all i'll ever need. a year or two ago, a friend of mine passed me a PDA he won in some school competition, and i carried it around for a week or so before i got tired of it.
every once in a while when i need to remind myself to call someone, do something or be somewhere, the organizer in my phone is more than enough. it lets you set the event and its time, and the time you want the reminder alarm to go off.
to be honest, i'm not all that organized a person and i rely mostly on my memory, so that might be a reason why i didn't have much of a use for a PDA. i noticed that most geeks aren't exactly organized, what with the huge pile of papers and other misc items their desks are usually cluttered with. if that's representative of most of slashdot's reader demographic, then most probably the majority of slashdot users don't have a need for PDAs. most just buy it for the cool-gadget factor, in my opinion.
so before you go out and get yourself a PDA, ask yourself if you even have a paper organizer now. if you can live without the organizer, you definitely can do without the PDA, since the latter is just an electronic version of it.
it may finally come to pass that gamers have their console and their word machine and never the twain shall meet
i personally hope that never happens. i don't want to have to buy a separate machine to play games and do mundane stuff like send email and browse the web. i also like playing games on a nice CRT at 100hz instead of a TV at 60hz. besides, dedicated consoles aren't very upgradable.
speaking of TVs, i can browse the web, send email, watch tv, and play games all on the same computer at the moment and i hope that never changes.
society and the way people interact with each other probably hasn't change much, and probably won't for the next few hundred years too.
i think the difference is in the culture and the way the economy of america works now. a hundred years ago, there might not have been the equivalent of megacorporations to exploit the loopholes in copyright laws (or any other laws for that matter).
it also is possible honour and honesty might have had held more weight then, than now. i wouldn't consider what disney has been doing as mentioned in the article as very honourable, nor honest.
a copyright law that was drafted a few hundred years ago cannot be relevant today without any change. at present, those laws are badly irrelevant to today's culture. as always, the rich and the powerful are just going to take advantage of the lucrative situation they have in their hands now.
the word "copyright" is quickly becoming a farce, at least in corporate and capitolist america. its sad how this issue has been ignored and cleanly swept under the rug. but as always and as mentioned earlier, the rich and powerful will have the last say.
as i see it, the only way to rectify this situation is to make spam a legally punishable offence. a jail term, a hefty fine, anything! i just want something to be done! everytime i think about all the spammers making a quick buck by killing off email slowly, i get pissed as hell.
the same way DOS attacking a website is a serious offence as it costs a lot of money, spamming is no different from a DOS attack on individual users. those individual users being attacked number by the millions and this is an everyday DOS attack on all of us.
write into a newspaper forum, send a letter to your senator. do SOMETHING. create more awareness and resentment towards spammers; its the only way to get anything done about them. i'm halfway through a letter to my local newspaper as i type this.
i do as well, but for me its worth it, considering the amount of bandwidth i use on average.
there's another plan from my ISP, where you pay about half the price of the unlimited plan, and you get the same upstream and downstream, but only 250megs a month. after you exceed the limit, they would charge you extra for every 5 megs or so (i can't recall the exact figures), but only up to a certain price, after which they stop charging extra.
this isn't intended as a troll post, but with all the recent articles posted on slashdot and other news events, it seems as if capitolism is starting to eat up america.
mine doesn't though....512kbps downstream, 256kbps upstream. unlimited, and i mean really unlimited. last month i downloaded and uploaded over 10gigs and 8gigs respectively.
i honestly think customers should do something, instead of letting the telcos treat them like idiots.
as the first poster (not a troll post!) mentioned, advertising the service as "unlimited" when the truth is the complete opposite is no better than misleading and false advertising. at worst, its blatant lying.
capping your bandwidth is not the same as capping the amount of data you can download.
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
two separate issues here.
i suspect the weapons facilities or whatever are underground. pictures taken by satellites probably gave them the suspicion that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they need to go and take a look to make sure.
who's going to choose the 128mb version over the 20gb version? sounds like the former is pretty redundant.
test my shotgun to see how much damage he takes?
of mobile phones have been making lots of headway lately, and its nice to know that nokia is at the forefront of both technology, and user-friendliness.
that being said, i have noticed that whilst the technology of new phones get better and more advanced the build quality has been plummeting. most, if not all handphones that have come out recently do not usually last more than a year of constant, everyday use. this is definitely in sharp contrast to the phones that motorola, ericsson, and other older players in the mobile phone business used to make.
usually within a year, most handphones would already have failing LCDs, loose or cracked casings, non-responsive buttons, and all this for a phone that costs a few hundred when new.
tired? go take a break. take out the old ericsson or motorola analog phone (or a first generation gsm model) you have stashed somewhere, and compare it with the tiny but fragile nokia/motorola/ericsson you have now. observe the cheap and brittle plastic now used, as opposed to the thick and strong bakelite-like material phones used to be made of. as i recall it, my old ericsson had its innards assembled on a metal chassis, which was then covered with a plastic casing, and it survived many many drops, kicks and falls and came out fine.
i'm currently using a nokia 6150, and i refuse to lay down the cash to buy any of the new phones coming out. firstly, its because i don't actually need or use any of the new spiffy features that most phones come with but are redundant to most people. second but more importantly, i'm not going to pay for a phone that won't even last more than a year of daily use, and probably cost 1/100th of its street price to manufacture.
now admittedly, this is due to a change in consumer habits, in that most people buying a new handphone change it within a year, so i don't really blame the mobile phone companies. however, i would definitely appreciate it if they at least gave those of us who buy phones to actually use and expect those phones to last, the option of doing so. i personally abhor people who throw away their old phones just because its no longer a new model and not in fashion, and go out to buy a new one. and before i forget, has anyone forgotten where all these phones go after we throw them away? yes, they fill up the landfills, further poluting the environment, for most countries that don't have strict recycling laws.
nevermind if it doesn't have bluetooth, a built-in organizer, or any of the new-fangled features. just give me dual or tri band capability, sms, the basic functions like call-forwding, conference calls, and you have a happy and loyal customer. i don't need quick-swap faceplates and number pads because i don't see phones as a fasion accesory. i see them as a tool, so build them that way, thanks. and plain black would do, thank you. i don't need a translucent phone with a full led array flashing away and consuming the battery's power that goes off the first time you drop it.
c'mon. lets see some REAL phones!
fuck you. oh yes you.
She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this
i would get really pissed at them for depriving me of the chance at the job, but i wouldn't hold them fully responsible for it. she had a chance at the contract; the contract wasn't taken away from her after being given to her, as a result of the isp screwing up her account.
i think all that will be doled it to her is some compensation, assuming the judge is level-headed enough.
well but i do see a flip side to that.
i would think that if people lived longer and thus stopped reproducing or at least reproduced at a slower rate, wouldn't the evolution of those inhabitants in wealthy nations slow down or grind to a stop?
on the other hand, people living in poorer nations would face the tough elements, polution, etc, and they would reproduce and die more often. hence, they were evolve faster and eventually, they might become more advanced biologically than those living in wealthy nations.
it might even come to a point whereby, the people living in poor nations who don't get to tweak their genes become able to live longer naturally than the people in wealthy nations.
eventually, what might happen is you have a bunch of humans who can still live "only" less than a century naturally, and need all sorts of gene therapy and treatment to live as long as "normal" humans who now have a lifespan of say....500 years, without any gene therapy or other forms of unnatural intervention.
what will happen then, is that i believe the situation that the parent poster envisions would flip over, and people in the poorer nations would become the dominant "breed" of humans. perhaps then, the people in poorer nations might even run over and take over the wealthier nations by force, who now can't even produce soldiers to fight back. kinda like the theory of the homo-sapiens invading europe and killing off most of the cro-magnans.
if they could find a way to make you live twice as long without doing all the gene manipulation at the fetal stage, you could always store your sperm (assuming you're a guy) in a sperm bank before going for the treatment.
not that i'd want to have kids though.
overclocking is pointless cos the speed increase you get isn't worth the effort and money.
there ya go
oh fp we meet again. i truly love you. oh i do. may we dance under the moonlight yet again and make love naked in the sea. *sob*
oh fp i love you. i really do. *sniff*
gone are the days when overclocking was actually an economically viable option to get more performance out of your system for what you pay. these days, overclocking is almost no different from case modding, in that its just for posers to make themselves feel better and have something to show-off.
and is it a good sign that slashdot is continually posting articles pertaining to both case modding and overclocking "breakthroughs"? yes, they overclocked the system to 3.3ghz, but most likely in a few months intel is going to release processors that are just as fast, if not faster. see the pointlessness?
its like posting on article on slashdot about a breakthrough in man-powered vehicles, about how 200 people got together to push a car to more than 200km/h (i refuse to use miles/hour). yea sure, that was fast but is it a breakthrough? currently, the approach to overclocking processors is to up the voltage so the processor can function at a higher clock speed reliably, and then find some way to cool it down sufficiently so it doens't overheat. so they got it colder this time, and faster, via the exact same approach thousands of overclockers have been using all the while.
is this really news-worthy on slashdot?
we'll finally find out where celine dion really came from, won't we? and as usual, canada would be really sorry about all the inconvenience they caused. mmhmm...
kthxbye~!
yes her bondage catsuit she's got on looks spanky alright but the question is, how does she change her tampon?