GIven that his article was about him setting up 10 new proxies and emailing them out, it would seem that, at least for the domains relevant to this discussion, the OP was the owner/administrator and most definitely intended them to be used in that manner. Also, from context, it appears that he was running webproxies, not email proxies. They're generally used as anonymizers, or to circumvent geo-IP techniques, not to spam people.
That's pretty much what I said. The general term is asceticism, and it is present in some religions, some sects of some religions, and some areligious philosophies. There's nothing particularly wrong with asceticism either, as a personal philosophy. I certainly wouldn't classify it as a mental problem. It's just when people try to enforce it at a political level that it becomes problematic (like pretty much any philosophy so enforced).
And, yeah, the whole monastic tradition is pretty much built around asceticism. But Puritanism is the most direct link to the asceticism of Christians in the United States, which is why I brought it up.
That's true, but it's not what the GP said, and not what I was arguing against. He was saying this change could result in a large-scale, irreversible negative change. It can't, not really. It could do damage, but it's going to be purely local damage. And hey, it sounds like the guy is working with the permission of the owners of the local area. If they screw it up, it's their backyard.
Sorry, I don't buy it because While Google may not owe their success to a single website, they owe it to the collection of all websites. Google wouldn't exist without sites that people search for.
So I guess that's the communism defence of Google.
They represent themselves as an unbiased arbiter that just returns search results, most people don't know that they're not.
They are - or at least, to the extent that it's possible to be. Your gripe was exactly that they wouldn't bias their algorithmic method in your favour.
The earth's oceans have on the order of 1,400,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of water. If the earth's ecosystem was so fragile that 100 tonnes of iron in the ocean could have a large scale, negative, and irreversible effect, we're screwed already. Everyone hitting the beach on a hot summer's day would spell the end of mankind.
So possibly you should deal with the massive problem instead of nit-picking small ones. Selective enforcement much? This article is about people betting riled that someone is taking a piss in the pool, while at the other end, something is pitchforking in manure.
They only care about the piss because the guy with the manure's been doing it for the last hundred years. It's not a question of impact, it's a question of novelty.
Asceticism (the belief that pleasure, of which sex and sexuality is a subset, is evil/wrong/unhelpful) is not exclusively a religious philosophy. There are plenty of ascetic atheists.
That's not Christianity; that's Puritanism, which is (or was) a distinct sect within Christianity, heavily influenced by asceticism, which is a non-religious philosophy. Americans probably have a higher correlation between Christianity and Puritansim, as many of their initial settlers were Puritans getting the hell out of England, but it's still a false equivalency. It's like saying that all atheists believe life came about due to extra-terrestrial contact, just because Erich von Däniken is an atheist.
Do you know what recourse I had as a site owner? Zero. Google doesn't have a customer service department. They have an online forum staffed by volunteers who are, quite honestly, arrogant and abusive.
They do have a customer service department. You weren't a customer. You were getting 100% of that Google traffic for free. Google had no moral or legal obligation to direct traffic to your site, and no, you had no justification for complaining when it stopped. Google is not interested in serving you. They are interested primarily in serving their users (the people making the searches) because it's by those users activities that its actual customers pay them. If Google decides that they are going to get more users by dropping your site in the rankings, that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make, and for you to have no recourse is entirely just.
You're just freeloading. Nothing wrong with that, but a freeloader who bitches and whines when they start getting less of what they're already getting for free is just obnoxious.
Watching Microsoft try to implement DNT and being told outright that some advertisers will just ignore it sounds like the boilerroom types threatening to ignore Do Not Call, and indeed some did. Only fines worked, and then not perfectly. Will we get DNT?
That's because Microsoft's approach to DNT was the equivalent of automatically adding everyone with a phoneline to Do Not Call. If that had been the premise of Do Not Call, it would never have got the support of telemarketing, because it would essentially be declaring that industry as illegal.
Advertisers aren't saying they'll ignore DNT; they're saying they'll ignore Microsoft's implementation of DNT because, surprise surprise, Microsoft's offering doesn't follow the standard, which is that DNT should be a reflection of the consumer's decision, not a corporations one.
The thing is, it's not even that hard to stop yourself being tracked online (although, for non-technical users it's probably too much). Don't set your browser to auto-accept cookies, and blackhole the handful of domains used to host tracking elements (facebook, google analytics, omniture, etc). There are even browser addons that automate that for you. I have a lot more trust in a technical solution than in some half-assed social solution that only works if everyone plays nice. Sure, you'll lose some functionality (Facebook "like" buttons on sites and such), but you were getting them for free anyway - if you don't want the company to track you, they shouldn't be obliged to serve you either.
So, your evidence that protestants supported Hitler was that a single protestant, who lived ~400 years before Hitler was born, didn't like Jews either?
It's not a myth; it's an ideal. Some markets are closer to it than others. None will probably ever meet it perfectly.
Sorry again, but the free market is NOT designed. It just happens.
The free market is a description of natural forces, and how those forces can be tapped to provide the best possible outcomes for vendors and consumers. No, the forces weren't designed, but the theories around how they can be used were.
But as you pointed out, for the market to work, all the potential customers must be educated, and there is no incentive (money) to do that.
The incentive to do that should come from the customers. Ideally, they should want to be educated so as to get the best possible deal. In reality, people are far more willing to compromise in order to avoid the effort it takes to be educated. Whether thats a failure of the model, or a failure of the consumer depends on your perspective I guess.
Competition is expensive for the vendors. Competitors in a truly free market (well, not just a free market) would rather eliminate the competition than compete.
Well, yes. That is why the free market has a role for the government enforcing the baseline of the free market. Despite what some people think, the free market described in Wealth of Nations isn't what happens if you take away constraints. It's a description of what needs to be done to produce the free-est possible market.
Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices.
Your second quote puts paid to your first. Nokia was a hardware company. They made good hardware. They should have jumped into Android with both feet. A proven, reliable, popular operating system, that lets vendors customize it, and would have let them concentrate on their strengths - hardware.
The simplest mechanism: vendors are looking for ways to increase their profits. Vendors who label their product get a higher marketshare, or can succesfully sell at a higher price than their competitors. False labelling can and should be prosecuted by the government (the free market doesn't mean the absence of government, it means that the government should only be acting to maintain the basic principles of the market - enforcing contracts, not letting companies off their competitors, lying to consumers, etc).
Fundamentally, the more the people desire something, the more they reward the vendor for providing it, and the greater the incentives are to the vendor for providing it.
Of course, this breaks down in practice because, although people say they want something, when it comes to the crunch, they still purchase whatever's cheaper. Then they call for government involvement, rather than attempting to exercise their own power.
Also true. I wasn't suggesting the US was a free market. I'm just saying people who are blaming the "free market" for the sorry state of the US' consumer rights are picking the wrong target.
The free market requires that consumers must here about this, because the free market relies on an informed consumer. The free market is designed to drive the prices and profits down; that is the entire point of a free market - that multiple vendors compete for the patronage of consumers in a fair manner, by offering the best products for the most attractive price.
If you're not getting that, then you're not in a free market.
iOS is a walled garden - you must get Apple's permission to run applications on it. Mac OSX isn't (yet).
Google, it depends on which of their multitude of services you're using. If you're referring to Android, then no, it doesn't. It has an app store (garden), but doesn't restrict you to only installing apps from that store (no wall)
Facebook, as far as I'm aware, will let you run whatever apps you using their API. They kick them off for TOS violations, which is entirely reasonable. I'm not really sure how you can compare that to applications installed on consumer hardware though.
Amazon, again, has a bunch of services. I assume you're talking about the Kindle. While its easiest to just buy from the amazon store, you can also dump ebooks onto it via USB with no trouble. Again, garden, no wall.
There's nothing special about Retina displays. They're not a new technology or anything like that, it's just a marketing label applied to displays with a certain pixel density. Nobody was competing on PPI before that because the market didn't care. It was only after Apple applied their marketing whammy that people started asking for it.
True, I should have qualified that statement with "in most cases". In reality, the vast majority of users will never need more than a handful of EC2 instances, and the sort of gains you can get at the small end from using Amazon's pre-built network is amazing. At the upper end, you'll have enough cash available that investing in that sort of talent and infrastructure in-house might be feasible.
Amazon's offerings are pretty good. And yeah, their persistent use of acronyms is a bit annoying and confusing. It's not so much buzzwords though, as an attempt at branding.
Firstly, if you're just mucking around, it can be cheap. Really cheap. If you're just working on a proof-of-concept, you can possible get a dedicated server for free, as Amazon's prices scale on use, and a test machine isn't going to get a lot of traffic.
Secondly, it can be really fast. Because Amazon's physical hardware is already geographically distributed, you can do the same pretty quickly. If I have a properly setup application, and I decide I want a server physically located in Asia to reduce the latency to customers there, I can have it done in 10 minutes.
Thirdly, its easy. It's got a steep learning curve, but once you're on top of it, backups, disaster recovery, scalability and a whole host of other problems are essentially solved for you.
Sure, there's nothing it can't do that a properly configured and tuned geographically-distributed redundant cluster of linux boxes couldn't, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, faster and easier than running such a cluster.
Those requirements look pretty modest to me. They can all be installed on any half-decent linux distro with a single apt-get install command, or similar. Yeah, your average PHP shared-host won't be able to run it. That's because your average PHP shared-host blows, not because the requirements are particularly exotic. They're all freely available, well-known projects, with well-supported packages.
And trying to build anything more than what it was designed for (ie: a simple, content-based website) on top of Drupal is a lesson in pain. Drupal is incrementally approaching professional frameworks like Rails and Django with each revision, but its doing so slowly, and it is still very much a CMS trying to be a framework.
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GIven that his article was about him setting up 10 new proxies and emailing them out, it would seem that, at least for the domains relevant to this discussion, the OP was the owner/administrator and most definitely intended them to be used in that manner. Also, from context, it appears that he was running webproxies, not email proxies. They're generally used as anonymizers, or to circumvent geo-IP techniques, not to spam people.
That's pretty much what I said. The general term is asceticism, and it is present in some religions, some sects of some religions, and some areligious philosophies. There's nothing particularly wrong with asceticism either, as a personal philosophy. I certainly wouldn't classify it as a mental problem. It's just when people try to enforce it at a political level that it becomes problematic (like pretty much any philosophy so enforced).
And, yeah, the whole monastic tradition is pretty much built around asceticism. But Puritanism is the most direct link to the asceticism of Christians in the United States, which is why I brought it up.
That's true, but it's not what the GP said, and not what I was arguing against. He was saying this change could result in a large-scale, irreversible negative change. It can't, not really. It could do damage, but it's going to be purely local damage. And hey, it sounds like the guy is working with the permission of the owners of the local area. If they screw it up, it's their backyard.
Also, iron doesn't breed like rabbits.
Sorry, I don't buy it because While Google may not owe their success to a single website, they owe it to the collection of all websites. Google wouldn't exist without sites that people search for.
So I guess that's the communism defence of Google.
They represent themselves as an unbiased arbiter that just returns search results, most people don't know that they're not.
They are - or at least, to the extent that it's possible to be. Your gripe was exactly that they wouldn't bias their algorithmic method in your favour.
Yes. Your drift is gross generalizations with poor analogies. Please continue.
The earth's oceans have on the order of 1,400,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of water. If the earth's ecosystem was so fragile that 100 tonnes of iron in the ocean could have a large scale, negative, and irreversible effect, we're screwed already. Everyone hitting the beach on a hot summer's day would spell the end of mankind.
So possibly you should deal with the massive problem instead of nit-picking small ones. Selective enforcement much? This article is about people betting riled that someone is taking a piss in the pool, while at the other end, something is pitchforking in manure.
They only care about the piss because the guy with the manure's been doing it for the last hundred years. It's not a question of impact, it's a question of novelty.
Asceticism (the belief that pleasure, of which sex and sexuality is a subset, is evil/wrong/unhelpful) is not exclusively a religious philosophy. There are plenty of ascetic atheists.
That's not Christianity; that's Puritanism, which is (or was) a distinct sect within Christianity, heavily influenced by asceticism, which is a non-religious philosophy. Americans probably have a higher correlation between Christianity and Puritansim, as many of their initial settlers were Puritans getting the hell out of England, but it's still a false equivalency. It's like saying that all atheists believe life came about due to extra-terrestrial contact, just because Erich von Däniken is an atheist.
Do you know what recourse I had as a site owner? Zero. Google doesn't have a customer service department. They have an online forum staffed by volunteers who are, quite honestly, arrogant and abusive.
They do have a customer service department. You weren't a customer. You were getting 100% of that Google traffic for free. Google had no moral or legal obligation to direct traffic to your site, and no, you had no justification for complaining when it stopped. Google is not interested in serving you. They are interested primarily in serving their users (the people making the searches) because it's by those users activities that its actual customers pay them. If Google decides that they are going to get more users by dropping your site in the rankings, that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make, and for you to have no recourse is entirely just.
You're just freeloading. Nothing wrong with that, but a freeloader who bitches and whines when they start getting less of what they're already getting for free is just obnoxious.
Watching Microsoft try to implement DNT and being told outright that some advertisers will just ignore it sounds like the boilerroom types threatening to ignore Do Not Call, and indeed some did. Only fines worked, and then not perfectly. Will we get DNT?
That's because Microsoft's approach to DNT was the equivalent of automatically adding everyone with a phoneline to Do Not Call. If that had been the premise of Do Not Call, it would never have got the support of telemarketing, because it would essentially be declaring that industry as illegal.
Advertisers aren't saying they'll ignore DNT; they're saying they'll ignore Microsoft's implementation of DNT because, surprise surprise, Microsoft's offering doesn't follow the standard, which is that DNT should be a reflection of the consumer's decision, not a corporations one.
The thing is, it's not even that hard to stop yourself being tracked online (although, for non-technical users it's probably too much). Don't set your browser to auto-accept cookies, and blackhole the handful of domains used to host tracking elements (facebook, google analytics, omniture, etc). There are even browser addons that automate that for you. I have a lot more trust in a technical solution than in some half-assed social solution that only works if everyone plays nice. Sure, you'll lose some functionality (Facebook "like" buttons on sites and such), but you were getting them for free anyway - if you don't want the company to track you, they shouldn't be obliged to serve you either.
So, your evidence that protestants supported Hitler was that a single protestant, who lived ~400 years before Hitler was born, didn't like Jews either?
That is why the free market is a myth
It's not a myth; it's an ideal. Some markets are closer to it than others. None will probably ever meet it perfectly.
Sorry again, but the free market is NOT designed. It just happens.
The free market is a description of natural forces, and how those forces can be tapped to provide the best possible outcomes for vendors and consumers. No, the forces weren't designed, but the theories around how they can be used were.
But as you pointed out, for the market to work, all the potential customers must be educated, and there is no incentive (money) to do that.
The incentive to do that should come from the customers. Ideally, they should want to be educated so as to get the best possible deal. In reality, people are far more willing to compromise in order to avoid the effort it takes to be educated. Whether thats a failure of the model, or a failure of the consumer depends on your perspective I guess.
Competition is expensive for the vendors. Competitors in a truly free market (well, not just a free market) would rather eliminate the competition than compete.
Well, yes. That is why the free market has a role for the government enforcing the baseline of the free market. Despite what some people think, the free market described in Wealth of Nations isn't what happens if you take away constraints. It's a description of what needs to be done to produce the free-est possible market.
Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices.
Your second quote puts paid to your first. Nokia was a hardware company. They made good hardware. They should have jumped into Android with both feet. A proven, reliable, popular operating system, that lets vendors customize it, and would have let them concentrate on their strengths - hardware.
The simplest mechanism: vendors are looking for ways to increase their profits. Vendors who label their product get a higher marketshare, or can succesfully sell at a higher price than their competitors. False labelling can and should be prosecuted by the government (the free market doesn't mean the absence of government, it means that the government should only be acting to maintain the basic principles of the market - enforcing contracts, not letting companies off their competitors, lying to consumers, etc).
Fundamentally, the more the people desire something, the more they reward the vendor for providing it, and the greater the incentives are to the vendor for providing it.
Of course, this breaks down in practice because, although people say they want something, when it comes to the crunch, they still purchase whatever's cheaper. Then they call for government involvement, rather than attempting to exercise their own power.
Also true. I wasn't suggesting the US was a free market. I'm just saying people who are blaming the "free market" for the sorry state of the US' consumer rights are picking the wrong target.
The free market requires that consumers must here about this, because the free market relies on an informed consumer. The free market is designed to drive the prices and profits down; that is the entire point of a free market - that multiple vendors compete for the patronage of consumers in a fair manner, by offering the best products for the most attractive price.
If you're not getting that, then you're not in a free market.
No, actually I don't.
iOS is a walled garden - you must get Apple's permission to run applications on it. Mac OSX isn't (yet).
Google, it depends on which of their multitude of services you're using. If you're referring to Android, then no, it doesn't. It has an app store (garden), but doesn't restrict you to only installing apps from that store (no wall)
Facebook, as far as I'm aware, will let you run whatever apps you using their API. They kick them off for TOS violations, which is entirely reasonable. I'm not really sure how you can compare that to applications installed on consumer hardware though.
Amazon, again, has a bunch of services. I assume you're talking about the Kindle. While its easiest to just buy from the amazon store, you can also dump ebooks onto it via USB with no trouble. Again, garden, no wall.
Apple is the only one with a walled garden.
There's nothing special about Retina displays. They're not a new technology or anything like that, it's just a marketing label applied to displays with a certain pixel density. Nobody was competing on PPI before that because the market didn't care. It was only after Apple applied their marketing whammy that people started asking for it.
People who care already know there's something really important there. What they may not know is the precise building/street layout.
For all those people running Linux at home, yes. I hardly think that's critical mass for a popular adoption though.
True, I should have qualified that statement with "in most cases". In reality, the vast majority of users will never need more than a handful of EC2 instances, and the sort of gains you can get at the small end from using Amazon's pre-built network is amazing. At the upper end, you'll have enough cash available that investing in that sort of talent and infrastructure in-house might be feasible.
Amazon's offerings are pretty good. And yeah, their persistent use of acronyms is a bit annoying and confusing. It's not so much buzzwords though, as an attempt at branding.
Firstly, if you're just mucking around, it can be cheap. Really cheap. If you're just working on a proof-of-concept, you can possible get a dedicated server for free, as Amazon's prices scale on use, and a test machine isn't going to get a lot of traffic.
Secondly, it can be really fast. Because Amazon's physical hardware is already geographically distributed, you can do the same pretty quickly. If I have a properly setup application, and I decide I want a server physically located in Asia to reduce the latency to customers there, I can have it done in 10 minutes.
Thirdly, its easy. It's got a steep learning curve, but once you're on top of it, backups, disaster recovery, scalability and a whole host of other problems are essentially solved for you.
Sure, there's nothing it can't do that a properly configured and tuned geographically-distributed redundant cluster of linux boxes couldn't, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, faster and easier than running such a cluster.
They do; or at least, many do. The GPs point was that SUVs are essentially trucks with a prettier body.
Those requirements look pretty modest to me. They can all be installed on any half-decent linux distro with a single apt-get install command, or similar. Yeah, your average PHP shared-host won't be able to run it. That's because your average PHP shared-host blows, not because the requirements are particularly exotic. They're all freely available, well-known projects, with well-supported packages.
And trying to build anything more than what it was designed for (ie: a simple, content-based website) on top of Drupal is a lesson in pain. Drupal is incrementally approaching professional frameworks like Rails and Django with each revision, but its doing so slowly, and it is still very much a CMS trying to be a framework.