You are the product (the eyeballs
connected to desire and to a wallet to be emptied)
So what? Companies who do deals with third parties about my behaviour can kiss my ass. I have no compunction about blocking anything whatsoever I don't like to see myself. As one among a legion of open source programmers, I have no qualms about spending hundreds of hours writing, totally for free, software that enables _anyone_ to block any ads at any and every point they would like within the network.
Fuck third parties who make deals about me. I have no responsibility to honour those deals, and neither do you.
What you're talking about is the end to end principle, where the blocking of ads should happen at the end point of the communication, ie the computer running the browser. That's a technical principle, which is useful to preserve the correctness of the communications, because it's too difficult to anticipate all consequences of a change in the network. However, that ship has sailed. The net is already full of boxes that modify TCP/IP content on the fly, compress data, change source and destination IP addresses etc. They do so because it is impractical to
achieve their goals at the end point.
Net neutrality is a political question and is about _broadly_ regulating the behaviour of ISPs within a country. It is about censorship and tiered quality of service models. It is also about letting ISPs keep their part of the network in top shape if they wish.
To some extent, the latter is necessary. For example, when bittorrent users saturate the shared capacity on a subnet, other users can suffer. A standard response now is throttling those users.
Where does advertising stand? It fills the networks, degrades content performance, and uses capacity that could be used for more legitimate traffic.
It makes sense to excise it from an ISP's network as early as possible. Of course it's technically difficult, because advertisers use ugly tricks to burrow themselves onto content, like any parasites. But we should still try, as the payoff is worth it, imho.
Why are they under any obligation to sell you something that does "all it can
do", instead of just what they promised it could do?
Reasonable expectations.
If you buy a car, you have a reasonable expectation of what it can do, like drive on all the roads. It's such a reasonable expectation that you don't need to ask the salesman _specifically_ "can this car drive on all the roads?".
Similarly, if you buy a computer you have some reasonable expectations about what it can do. You don't need to ask "can I run third party software on this computer?". It's a reasonable expectation.
Just a few stories down it was the same about the iDevice margins,
why should it be the user's business whether it costs $200 or $500 to make?
That's a different issue. When profit margins are very high, this is a sign that someone is being exploited. "Where there is smoke there is fire" and all that. Nothing to do with reasonable expectations about a a product.
If it's a gratuitous addition specifically to prevent you from doing something that you otherwise could, then they have. For example, if you buy a book and find out the pages have been glued together, that's unreasonable. If you buy a computer and you find out it could run third party software, but the loading system has been disabled, that's unreasonable.
The line is where it's always been: you buy the product, it's yours, you can do whatever you like with it. It's unreasonable for a manufacturer to try to take those rights away from you.
Our public anonymity could always be punctured
by anyone with enough of an interest - law enforcement, PIs, even plain old
stalkers or nosey neighbors. Public anonymity is inversely proportional to
how interesting you are.
That particular objection is irrelevant. It isn't the fact that some random person's anonymity can be broken by a sufficiently determined attacker with sufficient application of effort. It's the fact that nowadays, everyone's anonymity is being broken on an industrial scale and offered to every potential attacker with no effort required on their part.
The scale is everything. The scale of privacy violations undermines society, which didn't happen before, when only a tiny fraction of people's privacy was being abused.
It has got to stop, and that means no-nonsense legal enforcement of information hoarding prevention. It's easy enough to do. The IRS audits thousands of companies and individuals to make sure they pay their taxes. It would be practical to audit companies' storage and use of their customers' personal data, and make sure it gets deleted completely on a regular schedule.
It's not just the headline. The whole thing is google fanboy trash.
Actually, it's media cult trash. Steve Jobs was hailed as a visionary for the successes resulting from his company's products, and now he's being blamed for the failures resulting from his company's products.
In actual fact, Steve Jobs is just a figurehead, a nice story. What did he really do? Sit around an office, make some phone calls, and do meetings and a few presentations. Pretty much what 90% of office workers do around the world.
You shouldn't believe the hype when he's called a hero, and you shouldn't believe the hype when he's called a villain. It's just media companies using his name to sell pageviews.
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, as the classic Word format is just a memory dump of the objects that happen to be alive during editing.
This is the reason why it's difficult for other word processors to read and write Word, they just don't have the exact same COM object hierarchy in memory. So they can only support a subset of the full "format", but on the other hand they can often read a broken document much better than Word itself because they literally only extract the bits they need.
Ok. What if there was just one foundation, and then a second, secretive, foundation foundation whose purpose is to monitor the foundation's activities in Open Source? We could even build an open source AI that could secretly oversee the second foundation foundation and make executive decisions for human^H^H^H^HOpen Source.
I think that could work. Oh, and we'd have to nuke the Earth, to encourage programmers to free their code and spread it far and wide across the Internet, for free (don't worry, the Internet was designed to be nuke resilient). A bit on the "messy" side, granted, but trust me, I've thought this through.
Can anyone
recommend a FWD or AWD car with a simpler interface and adjustble pedals
which would be appropriate for a sub-2 year old child?
There's the Google car. It drives you wherever you want to go. There's no steering wheel or pedals, just a single button marked "I'm feeling lucky". Perfect for toddlers.
It may sound condescending, but really - 6-months old and you're asking about
apps? All the kid wants to do at this age is pound things on the floor and
slobber on them.
Uh, don't take this the wrong way, but I think your 6-month-old *may* have been surfing one too many porn sites late at night, after you're asleep. Better check the browser cache...
Frankly, I don't see the difficulties. If companies like Google et al want to put experimental automatic cars on the road, *they* are the ones who should be legally responsible for everything the car does wrong. Asking the human beings who are being driven to be responsible instead, when they aren't in control, is abusive and exploitative behaviour.
We don't need *new* laws, we need to stop encouraging companies to experiment on live people. If they're worried their car can't handle the realities of the road, maybe they should go back to the drawing board. If they're not worried, then they should put their money where their mouth is and pay the exceedingly rare claims that they think will occur.
Go to Settings/Advanced/Mu and switch the Polish slider from 62% down to the radio box marked 14.89%, then a checkbox marked "Microsoft Experience" will automatically appear on the left. Select it and type Ctrl-Enter.
A dialog window appears: "Are you Sure?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK with the mouse.
A dialog window appears: "Really?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK again.
A dialog window appears: "I don't think so. I can't let you do that." [OK] [Cancel]. Press Cancel.
You should now see the familiar Start button at the bottom of the page. From now on, Clippy will appear every second time you click the left mouse button.
There are two cases:
If this dialog appears: "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel] you must press Cancel to not return to the default E17 mode.
If this dialog appears (about %50 of cases): "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can't handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel], then you must press OK to not return to the default E17 mode.
To return to the default E17 mode, just type Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Yeah, I always liked that idea myself. It's the kind of solution that an
economist would come up with.
Yes, it's something economists came up with. There was a (video) presentation in one of the MIT spam conferences, maybe 2008 or thereabouts, explaining the idea.
And the idea is utter crap, as it completely misses the point that spammers make *other* people pay for the resources being used. They're very good at doing it, that's why spam is such a problem to begin with. Standard economic theory of markets fails completely when dealing with fraud.
Sometimes you just have to hit that override
switch and say either you're praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or I'm making you pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster,
but you're not going to go to bed without praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and that is
final.
Patents shouldn't protect individuals either. We need to get away from this idea of the sole genius who discovers something, that if he hadn't been born it would never have been discovered by anyone.
Newton said it best "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He also _experienced_ this first hand when Leibniz discovered the calculus independently.
You're been living under a rock maybe? TFA said the uncle uses Facebook, and I presume so does the submitter. The spammers only need to figure out who's a friend of whom on Facebook, and they can send targeted mails purporting to be from from one to the other. Private address books are so 90s, Facebook is the modern, single common address book for the whole world.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Companies who do deals with third parties about my behaviour can kiss my ass. I have no compunction about blocking anything whatsoever I don't like to see myself. As one among a legion of open source programmers, I have no qualms about spending hundreds of hours writing, totally for free, software that enables _anyone_ to block any ads at any and every point they would like within the network.
Fuck third parties who make deals about me. I have no responsibility to honour those deals, and neither do you.
What you're talking about is the end to end principle, where the blocking of ads should happen at the end point of the communication, ie the computer running the browser. That's a technical principle, which is useful to preserve the correctness of the communications, because it's too difficult to anticipate all consequences of a change in the network. However, that ship has sailed. The net is already full of boxes that modify TCP/IP content on the fly, compress data, change source and destination IP addresses etc. They do so because it is impractical to achieve their goals at the end point.
Net neutrality is a political question and is about _broadly_ regulating the behaviour of ISPs within a country. It is about censorship and tiered quality of service models. It is also about letting ISPs keep their part of the network in top shape if they wish.
To some extent, the latter is necessary. For example, when bittorrent users saturate the shared capacity on a subnet, other users can suffer. A standard response now is throttling those users.
Where does advertising stand? It fills the networks, degrades content performance, and uses capacity that could be used for more legitimate traffic. It makes sense to excise it from an ISP's network as early as possible. Of course it's technically difficult, because advertisers use ugly tricks to burrow themselves onto content, like any parasites. But we should still try, as the payoff is worth it, imho.
Dammit! Now I don't know the setxkbmap option to turn a search button into a control key!
Quibble: The US has only been at the center of innovation for about 70 years, around the beginning of WWII.
Reasonable expectations.
If you buy a car, you have a reasonable expectation of what it can do, like drive on all the roads. It's such a reasonable expectation that you don't need to ask the salesman _specifically_ "can this car drive on all the roads?".
Similarly, if you buy a computer you have some reasonable expectations about what it can do. You don't need to ask "can I run third party software on this computer?". It's a reasonable expectation.
That's a different issue. When profit margins are very high, this is a sign that someone is being exploited. "Where there is smoke there is fire" and all that. Nothing to do with reasonable expectations about a a product.
Yes!
No!
If it's a gratuitous addition specifically to prevent you from doing something that you otherwise could, then they have. For example, if you buy a book and find out the pages have been glued together, that's unreasonable. If you buy a computer and you find out it could run third party software, but the loading system has been disabled, that's unreasonable.
Cool. So if you're *right*, where's Linux running on the surface?
The line is where it's always been: you buy the product, it's yours, you can do whatever you like with it. It's unreasonable for a manufacturer to try to take those rights away from you.
That particular objection is irrelevant. It isn't the fact that some random person's anonymity can be broken by a sufficiently determined attacker with sufficient application of effort. It's the fact that nowadays, everyone's anonymity is being broken on an industrial scale and offered to every potential attacker with no effort required on their part.
The scale is everything. The scale of privacy violations undermines society, which didn't happen before, when only a tiny fraction of people's privacy was being abused.
It has got to stop, and that means no-nonsense legal enforcement of information hoarding prevention. It's easy enough to do. The IRS audits thousands of companies and individuals to make sure they pay their taxes. It would be practical to audit companies' storage and use of their customers' personal data, and make sure it gets deleted completely on a regular schedule.
Actually, it's media cult trash. Steve Jobs was hailed as a visionary for the successes resulting from his company's products, and now he's being blamed for the failures resulting from his company's products.
In actual fact, Steve Jobs is just a figurehead, a nice story. What did he really do? Sit around an office, make some phone calls, and do meetings and a few presentations. Pretty much what 90% of office workers do around the world.
You shouldn't believe the hype when he's called a hero, and you shouldn't believe the hype when he's called a villain. It's just media companies using his name to sell pageviews.
This is the reason why it's difficult for other word processors to read and write Word, they just don't have the exact same COM object hierarchy in memory. So they can only support a subset of the full "format", but on the other hand they can often read a broken document much better than Word itself because they literally only extract the bits they need.
I think that could work. Oh, and we'd have to nuke the Earth, to encourage programmers to free their code and spread it far and wide across the Internet, for free (don't worry, the Internet was designed to be nuke resilient). A bit on the "messy" side, granted, but trust me, I've thought this through.
There's the Google car. It drives you wherever you want to go. There's no steering wheel or pedals, just a single button marked "I'm feeling lucky". Perfect for toddlers.
Uh, don't take this the wrong way, but I think your 6-month-old *may* have been surfing one too many porn sites late at night, after you're asleep. Better check the browser cache...
We don't need *new* laws, we need to stop encouraging companies to experiment on live people. If they're worried their car can't handle the realities of the road, maybe they should go back to the drawing board. If they're not worried, then they should put their money where their mouth is and pay the exceedingly rare claims that they think will occur.
Because the SAME window manager might run on your Android phone and there you DO care if your battery drains in 10 minutes?
Go to Settings/Advanced/Mu and switch the Polish slider from 62% down to the radio box marked 14.89%, then a checkbox marked "Microsoft Experience" will automatically appear on the left. Select it and type Ctrl-Enter.
A dialog window appears: "Are you Sure?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK with the mouse.
A dialog window appears: "Really?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK again.
A dialog window appears: "I don't think so. I can't let you do that." [OK] [Cancel]. Press Cancel.
You should now see the familiar Start button at the bottom of the page. From now on, Clippy will appear every second time you click the left mouse button. There are two cases:
If this dialog appears: "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel] you must press Cancel to not return to the default E17 mode.
If this dialog appears (about %50 of cases): "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can't handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel], then you must press OK to not return to the default E17 mode.
To return to the default E17 mode, just type Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Yes, it's something economists came up with. There was a (video) presentation in one of the MIT spam conferences, maybe 2008 or thereabouts, explaining the idea.
And the idea is utter crap, as it completely misses the point that spammers make *other* people pay for the resources being used. They're very good at doing it, that's why spam is such a problem to begin with. Standard economic theory of markets fails completely when dealing with fraud.
RTFA again: he did, her name's Andromeda...
FTFY. (Praise Bob)
Newton said it best "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He also _experienced_ this first hand when Leibniz discovered the calculus independently.
That's SO unfair! Won't somebody think of the Dutch tourism industry?
I'm sorry, am I the only one who thinks he's a bit of a crackpot with his singularity "theory"?
You're been living under a rock maybe? TFA said the uncle uses Facebook, and I presume so does the submitter. The spammers only need to figure out who's a friend of whom on Facebook, and they can send targeted mails purporting to be from from one to the other. Private address books are so 90s, Facebook is the modern, single common address book for the whole world.