I think you're missing the point a little. The reason that popular sites incur punitive bandwidth charges is because the architecture of the web doesn't scale well.
The problem would go away if more people would use proxies, but then proxy servers have privacy issues for a lot of people, and require configuration to use, which rules out another block of users
Of course, torrent based apps scale very well indeed. Currently torrents are only really used as an FTP replacement, but the underlying tech could be generalised to any sort of web app.
All it needs is something to drive adoption. The end of the free web could well be that impetus. We're probably way overdue for a rething of the web infrastructure anyway.
The work isn't going to be a problem - that's how the web got started with enthusiasts doing stuff for free because they wanted to.
For that matter, even USENET might see a resurgence of popularity if the free web dies. Complete with improved spam filters. heh.
Really, the impending death of doubleclick holds no terrors for me:)
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently.
And since market forces are sacred and inviolable, the problem must lie in people having too much freedom, right? If that sounds like sarcasm, you need to read more news.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
Heh. Google, the source of the most restrained ads on the internet is making mega money and expanding like mad. The source of the most annoying and intrusive ad on the internet is crying in his beer and uttering prophecies of doom.
Second, I don't think non-contradiction is on a par with special relativity. It's more like Newtonian mechanics. It's rather old, and extremely robust for everyday use. However just as special relativity and quantum mechanics are special cases where Newtonian mechanics breaks down, so there are areas where classical logic doesn't work so well. In fact one of them is from quantum mechanics, where the particle/wave duality would seem to contradict the observed basis for the law of the excluded middle.
Of course, it's also possible to devise consistent and useful systems of logic that don't use the excluded middle. Fuzzy logic is probably the best known and most useful of these.
I think Jack Kirby's main discontent lay having designed so many of Marvel's most popular characters and then not getting to see any of the money they went on to generate. Technically it may have been work-for-hire, I'm not familiar with the details of the case, but a lot of people thought Jolly Jack got a raw deal there.
So far as I know, his experience of designing intergrated circuits was limited to those cool looking patterns that decorated most of the stuff in Reed Richards' lab. I mean they were really cooling circuits and all, but I'm not aware of any attempts to actually implement them outside of the Baxter Building...
Oh, wait a sec... The OP says Jack Kilby. Sorry, my mistake...
This is a rework of a previous post on the subject. It's still got room
for refinement, but it's a start.
The authors of this document support online advertising, and recognise
and acknowledge the important role of online advertising in funding
many valuable web sites.
However, we also note that the ethical
standards of online advertisers are not always of the highest standard,
and that this regrettable state of affairs has led to widespread blocking
of adverts.
We do not wish to block adverts, since that can deprive
websites of revenue. At the same time, we wish to discourage the abuses
of advertising that have brought online marketing into such disrepute.
We recognise that we have no sanctions to impose save for our
attention. As such we declare that we will block advertisments that we
find not to be ethical. On the other hand, we will support ethical
advertisers by not blocking their offerings.
To aid advertisers
wishing to construct ethical adverts, we have drawn up the followign
list of guidelines.
Static. No movement or animation.
Silent. No music, no SFX.
No decpetion. Nothing that
impersonates a system error message, or otherwise attempts to deceive
people into clickin on it.
No software installed. No auto
downloaded execuables, no browser extensions.
No offensive
content.
No popups, popunders or floaters.
No deliberate wasting of the users time. No entry screens for
sites. No overly large adverts, or layouts where the content is minimal
compared to the advertising.
No cookies. We may or may not
block cookies from an advert, but we reserve the right to block any and
all cookies. Consider web pages as being in the same class as roadside
hoardings. They are there, people will see them. The space has value,
even without tracking data.
No spam. If it is suspected
that a link exists between an advert and unsolicited commercial email,
that advert may be blocked.
As a technical note, ad blocking
software increasingly allows the use of wildcards. Domains, agencies
and IPs that persistently offend risk being blocked in their entierity.
As a general principle, adverts should offer a service. They
should not constitute an impediment to browsing. Any advert that wastes
the users time or computer resources may be blocked.
In all cases
of dispute the final descision lies with the individual user. If this
seems draconian, bear in mind that it remains a better deal than the
alternative, which is the indiscriminate blocking of all advertising.
Regarding the ethics of the content, I can't see how we can draw up
fair rules. Perhaps with some social networking tool we could offer
some guidelines. Apart from that I have nothing better to suggest than
"nothing offensive, nothing deceptive".
The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.
Well, I have a certain amount in common with my friends - that's one of the reasons they became friends. They assumption that I will like everything they like may be flawed, but the counter assumption, that there is no commonality in taste, seems equally absurd.
On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.
This is about more than recommendations though. This is about whether to trust a site or product, and about what the processes on your computer do, and potentially about a lot of other stuff as well.
It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how many people would bother to set this up, how often this will change the search results...
Isn't that the beauty of social networking apps though? If they work well, the spread; if they don't they die a horrible death. Even if this only works as a proof-of-concept, I'd say it was still tremendously valuable. We could have knowledge of trojaned downloads propagated across the net in hours, and without requiring naieve users to follow security boards either. Add in a thunderbird plugin and you could validate email links in the same way.
That's aside from the functions it shares with stumbleUpon, orkut, del.icio.us and the rest.
I do, however, take your point about setup - especially as a linux user. Still, with an established network, I can't see any reason that joining outofxed should be any more onerous than getting a gmail invite.
If you base your "SF" novel on currently accepted science only, then how can you do anything other than create a plot set in the present day?
Well, there is a certain amount of extrapolation allowable. For instance there are technologies that are theoretically possible and for which the science exsts, but which are currently beyond our engineering capabilities. A good example, up until just recently anyway, was the space elevator.
Not that the MSF manifest sounds terribly attractive, you understand
Well, it might have something to do with the Windows zealots have sneered at all things *nix for years on end. That does tend to bring about a certain amount of crowing when Redmond, years after trumphantly declaring a technology obsolete, copies it amidst much fanfare and proclaims it to be the Way Forward.
Or are you just saying that we're in no position to criticise, tainted as we are by our collective failure to buy things as promised to shop salesmen?
Yes, actually, but individually not collectively. Fix up your own act first.
Sweet.
So if we take this philosophy to its logical conclusion, I can morally embark on a rampage of murder, rape and theft, and since everyone has some guilty secret (maybe you were rude to your little sister at the age of seven and never apologised) then no one will have the right to criticise. Long Live the Lord or Misrule!
but labeling all marketers or salemen as unethical is not right, no more than if I say "All customers are liars" because some customers have lied to me.
So if a customer changes his or her mind, they should come back to you and apologise? Your morals are very strict, considering your zeal to defend an industry founded on lies.
The customer who and never comes back differs from the advertiser in a number of respects. The customer probably doesn't lie so much as change his or her mind. The customer costs the seller nothing but time, but the adverts would cost the customer time and money. And the public is the universal set, encompassing every motivation and situation imaginable. Marketers however are people who try to make people buy things irrespective of the buyers wants or needs, in return for financial recompense.
I think the last point is the crucial one: if your customer stayed away because someone paid him to inconvenience you, your analogy might actually seem valid.
Don't try and tell me that we brought it upon ourselves by stealing paperclips from the stationary cupboard.
I didn't say that.
Not in so many words, no.
But do you think stealing a few paperclips is ok? Is it more ethical for you to steal from someone else than for them to steal from you?
And you never accused me of being a thief either, did you? Not in so many words, anyway. Just so we're clear on that.
Does stealing in small quantities indicate better ethics, or incompetence at stealing? Is an incompetent thief morally superior to a successful thief?
I assumes this ties in with your supposedly lying customer earlier? "Both sides tell lies, its just that we're better at it because we've been trained". Don't try this at home kids! Lies and deception are best left to trained professionals.
What I objected to, if you would read my post, is when people make a blanket assumption that 'marketers' are liars. I don't justify people who lie or steal, whether they are marketers or not.
So I can't criticise an industry, just because the common practice in that industry is unacceptable. I like that. I work in IT; the next time someone calls for the computer indistry to tighten up standards of debugging I cans say "you can't say that - talk about specific companies".
For that matter, if they talk about my company I can say "I always test my code. You have to point to the programmer who doesn't debug his code".
And then if they point at me, I can sue them. Niiiice...
No, I think I can justify talking about the shortcomings of an induistry as a whole. I accept that there are ehtical marketers, and it's rather unfortunate that they've been tarred with the same brush as their morally challenged counterparts, but that's no reason not to demand that the industry set its house in order, thank you.
You know, once upon a time firemen used to operate on an insurance basis. If you didn't buy insurance from them and your house burned down, they would stand around and toast marshmallows as it burned to the ground. In fact, often, if you didn't buy insurance, they go out one night and make sure a fire did start, by way of persuading the others in their patch of the importance of fire ins
You know, I'd be interested in trying to put together a framework for ethical online advertising. Something that was mutually verifiable, so no one had to trust that anyone was doing their bit.
There are cookies that I'm prepared allow on my machine, (session cookies, some persistent if I know what they're for and they're in cleartext) and some adverts I don't block. I try not to block ads for sites I like anyway, but I always block anything from doubleclick, burstnet and their ilk. I also block anything that flashes, jumps or moves, or that makes noises. Basically anything that wastes my time, bandwidth or disc space gets blocked. Also anything that offends me personally.
That's a lot, but there's still a lot of room to craft an advertisments that will not get blocked. I think that if agencies were to follow these rules then they'd get more adverts viewed.
It's an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I can accpet the advertisinghas a useful function, but unless we can provide some sort of incentive for the marketing boys to play nice, I can't see them ever changing.
Maybe we should start a "I don't block ethical adverts" movement, with links a page where we list acceptable advertising criteria. If the admen get an idea of how big a market segment they're currently alienating, perhaps they'll behave themselves.
So are you saying that the automatic and indescriminate deceptions practiced by advertisers are in some way justified, because we are all, ellegedly, dishonest from time to time and in some small way or other?
Or are you just saying that we're in no position to criticise, tainted as we are by our collective failure to buy things as promised to shop salesmen?
The advertising industry has secured the public distrust by dint of long and dilligent efforts on their part. Don't try and tell me that we brought it upon ourselves by stealing paperclips from the stationary cupboard.
I'm willing to accept that there are ethical marketers in the business. The trouble is, I suppose that it's the ones that don't play fair that get all the publicity.
On the other hand, we hear tales of people who like to break into the homes of others, not to steal, but just for the trill of it. Sadly (for them anyway) they're thieving colleagues get all the publicity. All I know is that I'm not going to leave my door unlocked by choice.
Do Nortel Networks need tracking cookies for their campagne to work?
Is there perhaps a handy guide to telling the ethical marketers from the exploitative scumbags?
You know, ad agencies buy space on billboards without any way to track who looks at them. They don't even know that anyone does. They just buy the space on the grounds that someone might look there. If someday someone invents a billboard that records your personal details, where you've been and where you are going. I daresay the (pardon me) marketing industry will find them very useful.
But in the mean time, they still buy ad space.
Should we believe that they'll stop buying space on the internet just because we refuse to be spied upon?
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it.
And before anyone starts shouting "skr3w teh advertis3rzz teh inatrweb iz fr33!!1", I suggest you people try moving out of your mothers' basements and earning a living for yourselves for a change
So, are you suggesting that everyone who disagrees with you is lazy and immature, or just the ones who do it in l337 speak?
I don't believe that advertisers will stop buying ad space on websites just because we block their cookies, and more than they stop buying space on roadside hoardings just because they can't track the cars that drive past.
Of course, if the internet shrivels up and dies, just because I block cookies, feel free to say "I told you so"
I've done enough web coding to know that there are legitimate uses for cookies.
Of course, for firefox users, you can explain how to permit cookies for your site, and how people can assure themselves that your cookies are above board.
But I suppose that's that's not going to stop spyware programs.
For all these technologies, there are always solutions that place control firmly in the hands of the users. And yet somehow we always end up with a "solution" whereby someone else controls everything.
And when the technology arrives to redress the balance, the people formerly in control cry "foul!"
If preserving user perferences is all these people want, there are lots of ways we could do this. But somehow, I doubt that such is the case.
Is they data inside it in cleartext, or is it encrypted?
I'd habe no problem about allowing a single cookie from a site where there was a good reason. If I knew what it was for, and if I could determine that it didn't keep any more information. And if it wasn't too big. And it was the only one you placed.
Of course, that's no use whatsoever for the people who are running the "bring back cookies" campaign referred to in the original post. But that doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to co-operate where there was a clear need and we could verify what was happening
They make their living by manipulating the public. You work like that, you get to see people as something to be manipulate. As objects
Worse in a way, it encourages the idea that everything in life is about public perception. It's not about the morality of the problem, it's about the publics perceived immorality.
And yeah, some times a perfectly good company or individual gets stuck with a bad name. Most of the time though, its about getting people to stop hating the client so said client can carry on shafting all and sundry without the public throwin rocks at them in the street.
You get people how think like that, then the cookie problem becomes "how can I make people think its ok for me to record their every web click, waster their online time and feed them intrusive advertising?" The question of wether something is actually ok is so far from their regular mindset, it never gets considered.
I dunno, there are probably some nice marketers. On the other hand, "by their fruits shall ye know them" and all that...
I really wish they could understand what cookies really are...
They're a tool. Regrettably, they're a tool that has been widely abused by marketers. Remember the day when every ad placed a tracking cookie? When even the companies that had no ad to place had a clear gif that placed a cookie, just so they could know where you'd been?
Remember how your hard drive would buzz as your bowser thrashed with all that tracking data? Remmber how long it ook over dial up?
Don't blame your users, blame the corporate greedheads who cynically abused and over exploited the mechanism and so brought it into disrepute.
Get them to use firefox and allow session cookies. After all, your intranet users pfrobably have internet access. Disabling cookies is a good idea for them
"Bigger Brains Make Smarter People Study" says who, precisely?
And while we're at it, study what?
Re:Will this Dr. Who tackle harsh political issues
on
Dr Who Rolls On
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, some interesting subtext regarding manipulative media and corrupt politicians, just off the top of my head. There's not been much that I saw as a reference to a specific topic, but it satisfied my adult self as well as the inner child.
I've enjoyed nothing
on TV this much since the demise of Bab5.
Watch it. It's good.
It also comes from your knowledge of *exactly* where to cd to to download firefox. That's pretty unreasonable to expect of even knowledgeable users.
At the risk of taking myself way too seriously, why is that unreasonable? We all used to find out these things in the days before the Dominion Of The Web.
We used to get servers and paths from usenet, from magazines, over email, from friends. Heck, sometimes we'd even go and look for them. Exploring ftp servers was fun. Well, for large values of "boredom" anyway. As I recall, mot of them used to put big ls-l.gz files in the top level directory
In conclusion, I really think that Microsoft stops at a pretty reasonable place as far as what software to include with Windows these days. Even if that's only because it's the software that they don't think they could charge for.
Yurr. They bundle all the crap I don't want and won't use (IE, WMPlayer, Microsoft Oxymoronic Frigging Works) and omit anything for which I might have a use.
They call it marketing. I call it a waste of my disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem would go away if more people would use proxies, but then proxy servers have privacy issues for a lot of people, and require configuration to use, which rules out another block of users
Of course, torrent based apps scale very well indeed. Currently torrents are only really used as an FTP replacement, but the underlying tech could be generalised to any sort of web app.
All it needs is something to drive adoption. The end of the free web could well be that impetus. We're probably way overdue for a rething of the web infrastructure anyway.
The work isn't going to be a problem - that's how the web got started with enthusiasts doing stuff for free because they wanted to.
For that matter, even USENET might see a resurgence of popularity if the free web dies. Complete with improved spam filters. heh.
Really, the impending death of doubleclick holds no terrors for me :)
And since market forces are sacred and inviolable, the problem must lie in people having too much freedom, right? If that sounds like sarcasm, you need to read more news.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
Heh. Google, the source of the most restrained ads on the internet is making mega money and expanding like mad. The source of the most annoying and intrusive ad on the internet is crying in his beer and uttering prophecies of doom.
What does your free market tell you about that?
Second, I don't think non-contradiction is on a par with special relativity. It's more like Newtonian mechanics. It's rather old, and extremely robust for everyday use. However just as special relativity and quantum mechanics are special cases where Newtonian mechanics breaks down, so there are areas where classical logic doesn't work so well. In fact one of them is from quantum mechanics, where the particle/wave duality would seem to contradict the observed basis for the law of the excluded middle.
Of course, it's also possible to devise consistent and useful systems of logic that don't use the excluded middle. Fuzzy logic is probably the best known and most useful of these.
That minor quibble aside, spot on.
I guess they reckon this is the only way they'll ever make their OS more secure than Linux.
So far as I know, his experience of designing intergrated circuits was limited to those cool looking patterns that decorated most of the stuff in Reed Richards' lab. I mean they were really cooling circuits and all, but I'm not aware of any attempts to actually implement them outside of the Baxter Building...
Oh, wait a sec... The OP says Jack Kilby. Sorry, my mistake...
What do you reckon?
Well, I have a certain amount in common with my friends - that's one of the reasons they became friends. They assumption that I will like everything they like may be flawed, but the counter assumption, that there is no commonality in taste, seems equally absurd.
On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.
This is about more than recommendations though. This is about whether to trust a site or product, and about what the processes on your computer do, and potentially about a lot of other stuff as well.
It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how many people would bother to set this up, how often this will change the search results...
Isn't that the beauty of social networking apps though? If they work well, the spread; if they don't they die a horrible death. Even if this only works as a proof-of-concept, I'd say it was still tremendously valuable. We could have knowledge of trojaned downloads propagated across the net in hours, and without requiring naieve users to follow security boards either. Add in a thunderbird plugin and you could validate email links in the same way.
That's aside from the functions it shares with stumbleUpon, orkut, del.icio.us and the rest.
I do, however, take your point about setup - especially as a linux user. Still, with an established network, I can't see any reason that joining outofxed should be any more onerous than getting a gmail invite.
Well, there is a certain amount of extrapolation allowable. For instance there are technologies that are theoretically possible and for which the science exsts, but which are currently beyond our engineering capabilities. A good example, up until just recently anyway, was the space elevator.
Not that the MSF manifest sounds terribly attractive, you understand
Yep, that'd do it for me :)
Sweet.
So if we take this philosophy to its logical conclusion, I can morally embark on a rampage of murder, rape and theft, and since everyone has some guilty secret (maybe you were rude to your little sister at the age of seven and never apologised) then no one will have the right to criticise. Long Live the Lord or Misrule!
So if a customer changes his or her mind, they should come back to you and apologise? Your morals are very strict, considering your zeal to defend an industry founded on lies.
The customer who and never comes back differs from the advertiser in a number of respects. The customer probably doesn't lie so much as change his or her mind. The customer costs the seller nothing but time, but the adverts would cost the customer time and money. And the public is the universal set, encompassing every motivation and situation imaginable. Marketers however are people who try to make people buy things irrespective of the buyers wants or needs, in return for financial recompense.
I think the last point is the crucial one: if your customer stayed away because someone paid him to inconvenience you, your analogy might actually seem valid.
Not in so many words, no.
And you never accused me of being a thief either, did you? Not in so many words, anyway. Just so we're clear on that.
I assumes this ties in with your supposedly lying customer earlier? "Both sides tell lies, its just that we're better at it because we've been trained". Don't try this at home kids! Lies and deception are best left to trained professionals.
So I can't criticise an industry, just because the common practice in that industry is unacceptable. I like that. I work in IT; the next time someone calls for the computer indistry to tighten up standards of debugging I cans say "you can't say that - talk about specific companies".
For that matter, if they talk about my company I can say "I always test my code. You have to point to the programmer who doesn't debug his code".
And then if they point at me, I can sue them. Niiiice...
No, I think I can justify talking about the shortcomings of an induistry as a whole. I accept that there are ehtical marketers, and it's rather unfortunate that they've been tarred with the same brush as their morally challenged counterparts, but that's no reason not to demand that the industry set its house in order, thank you.
You know, once upon a time firemen used to operate on an insurance basis. If you didn't buy insurance from them and your house burned down, they would stand around and toast marshmallows as it burned to the ground. In fact, often, if you didn't buy insurance, they go out one night and make sure a fire did start, by way of persuading the others in their patch of the importance of fire ins
There are cookies that I'm prepared allow on my machine, (session cookies, some persistent if I know what they're for and they're in cleartext) and some adverts I don't block. I try not to block ads for sites I like anyway, but I always block anything from doubleclick, burstnet and their ilk. I also block anything that flashes, jumps or moves, or that makes noises. Basically anything that wastes my time, bandwidth or disc space gets blocked. Also anything that offends me personally.
That's a lot, but there's still a lot of room to craft an advertisments that will not get blocked. I think that if agencies were to follow these rules then they'd get more adverts viewed.
It's an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I can accpet the advertisinghas a useful function, but unless we can provide some sort of incentive for the marketing boys to play nice, I can't see them ever changing.
Maybe we should start a "I don't block ethical adverts" movement, with links a page where we list acceptable advertising criteria. If the admen get an idea of how big a market segment they're currently alienating, perhaps they'll behave themselves.
Or are you just saying that we're in no position to criticise, tainted as we are by our collective failure to buy things as promised to shop salesmen?
The advertising industry has secured the public distrust by dint of long and dilligent efforts on their part. Don't try and tell me that we brought it upon ourselves by stealing paperclips from the stationary cupboard.
It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than giving up and letting the bad guys do as they will with my machine.
On the other hand, we hear tales of people who like to break into the homes of others, not to steal, but just for the trill of it. Sadly (for them anyway) they're thieving colleagues get all the publicity. All I know is that I'm not going to leave my door unlocked by choice.
Do Nortel Networks need tracking cookies for their campagne to work?
You know, ad agencies buy space on billboards without any way to track who looks at them. They don't even know that anyone does. They just buy the space on the grounds that someone might look there. If someday someone invents a billboard that records your personal details, where you've been and where you are going. I daresay the (pardon me) marketing industry will find them very useful.
But in the mean time, they still buy ad space.
Should we believe that they'll stop buying space on the internet just because we refuse to be spied upon? I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it.
So, are you suggesting that everyone who disagrees with you is lazy and immature, or just the ones who do it in l337 speak?
I don't believe that advertisers will stop buying ad space on websites just because we block their cookies, and more than they stop buying space on roadside hoardings just because they can't track the cars that drive past.
Of course, if the internet shrivels up and dies, just because I block cookies, feel free to say "I told you so"
I've done enough web coding to know that there are legitimate uses for cookies.
Of course, for firefox users, you can explain how to permit cookies for your site, and how people can assure themselves that your cookies are above board.
But I suppose that's that's not going to stop spyware programs.
For all these technologies, there are always solutions that place control firmly in the hands of the users. And yet somehow we always end up with a "solution" whereby someone else controls everything.
And when the technology arrives to redress the balance, the people formerly in control cry "foul!"
If preserving user perferences is all these people want, there are lots of ways we could do this. But somehow, I doubt that such is the case.
Is they data inside it in cleartext, or is it encrypted?
I'd habe no problem about allowing a single cookie from a site where there was a good reason. If I knew what it was for, and if I could determine that it didn't keep any more information. And if it wasn't too big. And it was the only one you placed.
Of course, that's no use whatsoever for the people who are running the "bring back cookies" campaign referred to in the original post. But that doesn't mean people wouldn't be willing to co-operate where there was a clear need and we could verify what was happening
Now I feel so inconsiderate for making it harder for the sods to spy on me.
But hey, at least they're using their disk space and not mine.
And as an added bonus, I can block web bugs and clear gifs and I only have the site I visit knowing I've been there.
So what was your point again?
Worse in a way, it encourages the idea that everything in life is about public perception. It's not about the morality of the problem, it's about the publics perceived immorality.
And yeah, some times a perfectly good company or individual gets stuck with a bad name. Most of the time though, its about getting people to stop hating the client so said client can carry on shafting all and sundry without the public throwin rocks at them in the street.
You get people how think like that, then the cookie problem becomes "how can I make people think its ok for me to record their every web click, waster their online time and feed them intrusive advertising?" The question of wether something is actually ok is so far from their regular mindset, it never gets considered.
I dunno, there are probably some nice marketers. On the other hand, "by their fruits shall ye know them" and all that...
They're a tool. Regrettably, they're a tool that has been widely abused by marketers. Remember the day when every ad placed a tracking cookie? When even the companies that had no ad to place had a clear gif that placed a cookie, just so they could know where you'd been?
Remember how your hard drive would buzz as your bowser thrashed with all that tracking data? Remmber how long it ook over dial up?
Don't blame your users, blame the corporate greedheads who cynically abused and over exploited the mechanism and so brought it into disrepute.
Get them to use firefox and allow session cookies. After all, your intranet users pfrobably have internet access. Disabling cookies is a good idea for them
And while we're at it, study what?
I've enjoyed nothing on TV this much since the demise of Bab5. Watch it. It's good.
At the risk of taking myself way too seriously, why is that unreasonable? We all used to find out these things in the days before the Dominion Of The Web.
We used to get servers and paths from usenet, from magazines, over email, from friends. Heck, sometimes we'd even go and look for them. Exploring ftp servers was fun. Well, for large values of "boredom" anyway. As I recall, mot of them used to put big ls-l.gz files in the top level directory
In conclusion, I really think that Microsoft stops at a pretty reasonable place as far as what software to include with Windows these days. Even if that's only because it's the software that they don't think they could charge for.
Yurr. They bundle all the crap I don't want and won't use (IE, WMPlayer, Microsoft Oxymoronic Frigging Works) and omit anything for which I might have a use.
They call it marketing. I call it a waste of my disk space.