format to ensure the document appears how it should on all platforms
That's only true if the only "platform" you care about is paper.
you can make a PDF and make sure it appears correctly.
No, you can't! PDFs frequently do NOT display data correctly. For example, one of my PCs has a 240x320 screen. HTML files display perfectly fine, as do (most) Microsoft Word files, but PDFs are almost too painful to be useable.
For another example, an essay split into multiple columns on the same page is NEVER the correct way to view something onscreen. (Just ask yourself "How many HTML pages render in multiple columns?" Only this site, and there's a good reason no one else does)
The Internet is not made of paper. Stop treating online documents as if they were printouts, or as if printing is the only valid way to view it. Save a tree today!
Yet, postscript is actually used as a display language on NeXTStep, and PDF is now a display language on OSX.
All of those are examples of use that is not for human consumption. They are all hidden as implementation details of the application / OS, and that's fine.
PDF and postscript are adequate for internal use, but not as a data-exchange format presented to other applications. The format is too limited, because it only work to convey vector-graphic images. If your application is really supposed to be conveying text, then rendering it to graphic first is both wasteful and restrictive.
HTML, RTF, Microsoft Word DOC, and even ascii are all superior to PDF in many regards. PDF is only a little better than storing each page as a high-resolution GIF.
However, watching TV is public enough that there could be things you are expected to do and not do, although obviously you could ignore all the rules when in private. But, when you apply it to websurfing, 99% of that is done 'in private', or at least with only one person paying attention.
Nope. TV is more private than web viewing. TV is a unidirectional broadcast protocol, while web-viewing is interactive, giving the publisher an avenue to monitor viewer actions. The administrator of the remote server is quite definiately paying attention to how many of her ads you download!
But I don't know what point you're making. I'm just saying, 'watching ads' is not, at this moment in time, part of your social contract, although advertisers would certainly like it to be.
I know for a fact that you cannot expect a technology to work without both design/modeling and actual testing.
True, but since the technology in question has been repeatedly tested over the last 50 years, testing it again doesn't really teach us anything new.
Much of technology development comes from real world tests. If we wait until we have the perfect technology (which we won't even have until we try to use it and discover the faults, and places for improvement),
Fine, but the fact is, we already have all that needed technology.
Keeping humans alive in zero-gravity compartments for a few years is not hard at all. The USSR has already accomplished more than adequate testing. Humans in space don't give any research benefit, because we can already keep humans alive in space.
True- we don't know 100% everything about the long term effects of low-g living, but that doesn't matter: volunteers are plentiful enough that they will risk chronic health problems for the chance at a groundbreaking adventure.
The three fields we must focus on to colonize other worlds are propulsion, robotics/AI, and self-contained ecosystems. Contemporary human spaceflight advances none of those- but it does absorb more than half of NASA's budget, which could otherwise be directed towards some of those worthwhile things.
For example, look at the Biosphere projects, which have all been failures so far. Until we can get a closed-system ecology working, attempted extraplanetary colonization is futile. Yet, those experiments can be conducted in New Mexico at under 1% of the cost of acquiring the same cubic-meters on the ISS. It is foolish to attempt living in a box off-planet before we succeed in living in an equivalent box on-planet!
For another example, look at the robotic Hubble-adjustment mission that was just scrubbed. Semi-autonomous construction robots will be a critical part of any colonization effort, plus they will be enormously profitable on the earth's surface as well. We absolutely should advance that technology before going back to blowing most of the budget on a space station.
In much the same way, 'I will watch your ads' only appears to benefit people who produce or run ads, which is not even 0.01% of the population.
Nope. A quick survey of North America shows more than 90% of the population benefiting. Just in the realm of TV, hundreds of millions of people enjoy free programming because many of them watch the attached ads.
Do they have any formal obligation to continue viewing those ads? No, of course not. But yet, if they stop, commercial sponsorship will dry up and they will be depriving themselves of entertainment they enjoy.
Of course, there have always been freeloaders who either don't watch the ads, or aren't influenced by them (such as by existing outside the target demographic for the sponsoring product). But only in the past 10 years have automated ad-blocking systems advanced to the point where they can threatent the whole business model.
I personally don't think the model is worth saving, but I am outnumbered by those people who do enjoy unpaid television.
All in all, you are missing the more important factor for eligibility in a social contract: it must be a public activity (as all your successful examples were). They can only work when peer pressure and bystander scrutiny exist to lay informal punishments on infringers.
Walking on the sidewalk = public = enforced compliance from everyone around. Viewing ads on TV / website = private = nobody else knows who the infringers are.
For the record, I'm not blind, I obviously can tell what her point was- and I can also tell that the false statement about "no sig, no verbal, no contract..." in no way supports what she was trying to say.
NO social contracts have those features, yet SOME social contracts are effective and valid. The existence of an obligation to download ads is an orthogonal topic.
There is an oral contract between you and the restaurant in agreement to get food.
Nope. An oral contract would involve the customer verbally promising to pay for the food recieved.
There is a kind of contract made in a restaurant, which is neither oral nor written: an implicit/traditional one. You have to pay in the restaurant, because everyone knows you do- it is conventional and understood by all.
In some jurisdictions, the government has formalized it even further, by creating specific laws criminalizing nonpayment in a restaurant.
For a 3rd thing, the accuracy demanded of the conductor is less than from a computer operator. The music-man has one fairly specific task, while the computer could be assigned any kind of job. Some of those may demand great accuracy. This Raytheon system uses gloves, and will probably record where you squeeze/click at high resolution.
A conductor could carry out her job even if she had no fingers, and just a stick glued to her palm. All she needs to do is provide rythm and impact, or occasionally point at someone. The viewers of her action are intelligent and adaptive humans, not the fairly unforgiving logic of a computer.
Where in "VR" does it say "holding your arms out in mid-air"?
There is a reason none of these VR interfaces never go anywhere. The human body is not designed to hold it's arms suspended in mid-air for extende dperiods of time.
Although that phenomenon is real (it is called gorilla arm syndrome), it doesn't have to be an obstacle to glove-based VR interfaces.
Designers simply have to overcome the ingrained idea that the operator must be reaching towards a viewable surface horizontally beside her, instead of vertically below. There is no reason your digi-gloved hands can't still be giving useful inputs even while they are hanging at waist level, or resting on a desk (possibly with the view area on the table surface itself)
Raytheon employees (well, at least _one_) have already been accidently killed by ray-guns. The devices were intended as EMP-projectors to disable electronics, but even indirect exposure turned out to be majorly carcinogenic.
those of us who bother to use Adblock or any other ad blocking tools aren't likely to be influenced by those advertising techniques anyway. Smart advertisers should know this.
Those of us who install Adblock on our clients' PCs because we're tired of cleaning up spyware all the time are likely to reduce the response-rate of advertising techniques. Smart advertisers should fear this.
However, when you couple that with paying what 5-10 full time employees, it'd never happen.
How can you imagine this site gets the attention of even ONE full-time equivalent?
Just look at the longstanding bugs, the slow rate of submission checking, and the prevalence of blatant dupes.
There are several people who'd I'd buy a series they produced on DVD for $75 for 22hours of entertainment, sight unseen.
Visit Japan in 1982, that kind of production happened then... except, of course, that it was $75 for two hours, at best. Yet, the market survived many years.
To play devil's advocate here, why do you need to block ads on slashdot?
More fundamentally, even in non-subscriber mode, a site like slashdot has a tremendously high mean distance to ad content, if you average across the entire page. Because of all the comments, a typical page can be effectively 50 screens long (or 64000 pixels tall!)
For the significant fraction of viewers who spend most of their time on the comments, the page-top adbar is a distant memory.
Of course, a different page-layout could change this. Ad GIFs could easily be interspersed throughout the comments, or the limit of the number of comments/page could be drastically cut.
If everybody did what you did, slashdot would still need ads because they'd get shortchanged on revenue.
No signature, no verbal promise, no handshake, no nothing.
So what?
Go into a restaurant, sit down and ask for a sandwich. Eat it, and then explain to them that because you didn't sign anything, make a promise, or shake hands, you don't feel an obligation to pay.
The only way to please Windows in this instance is to do a shutdown, remove the drive when the coputer is off,
I hope you're not really wasting your time with that. Yanking a mounted USB device from Windows doesn't really hurt anything- after all, Windows used non-explicit umounting of floppy drives for decades after Mac and Unix had already switched to explicit software detachment.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete...wait LONG time for task manager to get a time slice and run.
Most of that delay is probably the result of VM thrashing, since it's typical for RAM overfollows to precede unresponsive programs. Poor VM tuning may be a legitimate problem, but it is a separate issue from your "non-pre-emptive" allegation.
(under TRUE pre-emption the scheduler would terminate it; under windows it gets politely "asked" to die...)
False. That is irrelevant to "pre-emption". If it weren't a pre-emptive system, you wouldn't even have the opportunity to interact with the scheduler window, because the runaway process would COMPLETELY block all other actions.
If you want to see what a non-preemptive system looks like, install Microsoft Windows 3.0 and see what Control-Alt-Delete does there.
I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
Absolutely not. Linux is actually much stricter than Windows in this regard. Linux will NEVER allow a drive to be removed if something is using it, or even maybe if notthing is using it. And, it requires an above-average level of Unix mastery to discover which process has the thing open, like so:
Move from XFree86 to x.org is yet another major technology move.
No, it completely isn't. The first release of xorg was functionally indistinguishable from the last release of xfree86. The only changes are different names for libraries and config files.
What was The Italian Job if not a mini cooper advertisement?
Wrong. In that case, the product was driven by the plot. The director wanted an indoor car-chase, and the mini-coop was the most plausible way to make it happen. There was no other car with the dimensions needed.
Slashdot Mirror
format to ensure the document appears how it should on all platforms
That's only true if the only "platform" you care about is paper.
you can make a PDF and make sure it appears correctly.
No, you can't! PDFs frequently do NOT display data correctly. For example, one of my PCs has a 240x320 screen. HTML files display perfectly fine, as do (most) Microsoft Word files, but PDFs are almost too painful to be useable.
For another example, an essay split into multiple columns on the same page is NEVER the correct way to view something onscreen. (Just ask yourself "How many HTML pages render in multiple columns?" Only this site, and there's a good reason no one else does)
The Internet is not made of paper. Stop treating online documents as if they were printouts, or as if printing is the only valid way to view it. Save a tree today!
Yet, postscript is actually used as a display language on NeXTStep, and PDF is now a display language on OSX.
All of those are examples of use that is not for human consumption. They are all hidden as implementation details of the application / OS, and that's fine.
PDF and postscript are adequate for internal use, but not as a data-exchange format presented to other applications. The format is too limited, because it only work to convey vector-graphic images. If your application is really supposed to be conveying text, then rendering it to graphic first is both wasteful and restrictive.
HTML, RTF, Microsoft Word DOC, and even ascii are all superior to PDF in many regards. PDF is only a little better than storing each page as a high-resolution GIF.
However, watching TV is public enough that there could be things you are expected to do and not do, although obviously you could ignore all the rules when in private.
But, when you apply it to websurfing, 99% of that is done 'in private', or at least with only one person paying attention.
Nope. TV is more private than web viewing. TV is a unidirectional broadcast protocol, while web-viewing is interactive, giving the publisher an avenue to monitor viewer actions. The administrator of the remote server is quite definiately paying attention to how many of her ads you download!
But I don't know what point you're making. I'm just saying, 'watching ads' is not, at this moment in time, part of your social contract, although advertisers would certainly like it to be.
No, that is not what you said.
one has to assume ultra-fast gigabit internet for this to work, of course...
Sorry, but gigabit ethernet has the same ping as 10 megabit. All latency is bounded by the same elctron velocity.
I know for a fact that you cannot expect a technology to work without both design/modeling and actual testing.
True, but since the technology in question has been repeatedly tested over the last 50 years, testing it again doesn't really teach us anything new.
Much of technology development comes from real world tests. If we wait until we have the perfect technology (which we won't even have until we try to use it and discover the faults, and places for improvement),
Fine, but the fact is, we already have all that needed technology.
Keeping humans alive in zero-gravity compartments for a few years is not hard at all. The USSR has already accomplished more than adequate testing. Humans in space don't give any research benefit, because we can already keep humans alive in space.
True- we don't know 100% everything about the long term effects of low-g living, but that doesn't matter: volunteers are plentiful enough that they will risk chronic health problems for the chance at a groundbreaking adventure.
The three fields we must focus on to colonize other worlds are propulsion, robotics/AI, and self-contained ecosystems. Contemporary human spaceflight advances none of those- but it does absorb more than half of NASA's budget, which could otherwise be directed towards some of those worthwhile things.
For example, look at the Biosphere projects, which have all been failures so far. Until we can get a closed-system ecology working, attempted extraplanetary colonization is futile. Yet, those experiments can be conducted in New Mexico at under 1% of the cost of acquiring the same cubic-meters on the ISS. It is foolish to attempt living in a box off-planet before we succeed in living in an equivalent box on-planet!
For another example, look at the robotic Hubble-adjustment mission that was just scrubbed. Semi-autonomous construction robots will be a critical part of any colonization effort, plus they will be enormously profitable on the earth's surface as well. We absolutely should advance that technology before going back to blowing most of the budget on a space station.
In much the same way, 'I will watch your ads' only appears to benefit people who produce or run ads, which is not even 0.01% of the population.
Nope. A quick survey of North America shows more than 90% of the population benefiting. Just in the realm of TV, hundreds of millions of people enjoy free programming because many of them watch the attached ads.
Do they have any formal obligation to continue viewing those ads? No, of course not. But yet, if they stop, commercial sponsorship will dry up and they will be depriving themselves of entertainment they enjoy.
Of course, there have always been freeloaders who either don't watch the ads, or aren't influenced by them (such as by existing outside the target demographic for the sponsoring product). But only in the past 10 years have automated ad-blocking systems advanced to the point where they can threatent the whole business model.
I personally don't think the model is worth saving, but I am outnumbered by those people who do enjoy unpaid television.
All in all, you are missing the more important factor for eligibility in a social contract: it must be a public activity (as all your successful examples were). They can only work when peer pressure and bystander scrutiny exist to lay informal punishments on infringers.
Walking on the sidewalk = public = enforced compliance from everyone around.
Viewing ads on TV / website = private = nobody else knows who the infringers are.
You get a +1 Missing the point in my book.
For the record, I'm not blind, I obviously can tell what her point was- and I can also tell that the false statement about "no sig, no verbal, no contract..." in no way supports what she was trying to say.
NO social contracts have those features, yet SOME social contracts are effective and valid. The existence of an obligation to download ads is an orthogonal topic.
By ordering off of the menu, it is implied that you have read it and seen the price tag printed next to your choice of food.
So you're telling me that if I take a wild guess and order a cheeseburger before they reach me with the menu, I get it for free? Too cool!
There is an oral contract between you and the restaurant in agreement to get food.
Nope. An oral contract would involve the customer verbally promising to pay for the food recieved.
There is a kind of contract made in a restaurant, which is neither oral nor written: an implicit/traditional one. You have to pay in the restaurant, because everyone knows you do- it is conventional and understood by all.
In some jurisdictions, the government has formalized it even further, by creating specific laws criminalizing nonpayment in a restaurant.
For one thing,
For a 3rd thing, the accuracy demanded of the conductor is less than from a computer operator. The music-man has one fairly specific task, while the computer could be assigned any kind of job. Some of those may demand great accuracy. This Raytheon system uses gloves, and will probably record where you squeeze/click at high resolution.
A conductor could carry out her job even if she had no fingers, and just a stick glued to her palm. All she needs to do is provide rythm and impact, or occasionally point at someone. The viewers of her action are intelligent and adaptive humans, not the fairly unforgiving logic of a computer.
Where in "VR" does it say "holding your arms out in mid-air"?
There is a reason none of these VR interfaces never go anywhere. The human body is not designed to hold it's arms suspended in mid-air for extende dperiods of time.
Although that phenomenon is real (it is called gorilla arm syndrome), it doesn't have to be an obstacle to glove-based VR interfaces.
Designers simply have to overcome the ingrained idea that the operator must be reaching towards a viewable surface horizontally beside her, instead of vertically below. There is no reason your digi-gloved hands can't still be giving useful inputs even while they are hanging at waist level, or resting on a desk (possibly with the view area on the table surface itself)
Where's my killer ray gun, Raytheon?
Raytheon employees (well, at least _one_) have already been accidently killed by ray-guns. The devices were intended as EMP-projectors to disable electronics, but even indirect exposure turned out to be majorly carcinogenic.
those of us who bother to use Adblock or any other ad blocking tools aren't likely to be influenced by those advertising techniques anyway. Smart advertisers should know this.
Those of us who install Adblock on our clients' PCs because we're tired of cleaning up spyware all the time are likely to reduce the response-rate of advertising techniques. Smart advertisers should fear this.
However, when you couple that with paying what 5-10 full time employees, it'd never happen.
How can you imagine this site gets the attention of even ONE full-time equivalent?
Just look at the longstanding bugs, the slow rate of submission checking, and the prevalence of blatant dupes.
There are several people who'd I'd buy a series they produced on DVD for $75 for 22hours of entertainment, sight unseen.
Visit Japan in 1982, that kind of production happened then... except, of course, that it was $75 for two hours, at best. Yet, the market survived many years.
To play devil's advocate here, why do you need to block ads on slashdot?
More fundamentally, even in non-subscriber mode, a site like slashdot has a tremendously high mean distance to ad content, if you average across the entire page. Because of all the comments, a typical page can be effectively 50 screens long (or 64000 pixels tall!)
For the significant fraction of viewers who spend most of their time on the comments, the page-top adbar is a distant memory.
Of course, a different page-layout could change this. Ad GIFs could easily be interspersed throughout the comments, or the limit of the number of comments/page could be drastically cut.
If everybody did what you did, slashdot would still need ads because they'd get shortchanged on revenue.
Uh, if everyone did that, more ads wouldn't help!
But content providers also have the right to select which user agents they will properly support.
But, do they also have the right to have clients who sent in falsified user-agent strings arrested for fraud?
If no, then they're basically powerless. If yes, then law's supposed protections of reverse-engineered compatibility are meaningless.
No signature, no verbal promise, no handshake, no nothing.
So what?
Go into a restaurant, sit down and ask for a sandwich. Eat it, and then explain to them that because you didn't sign anything, make a promise, or shake hands, you don't feel an obligation to pay.
Could you please give me an example within the last 500 years of any nation in the West justifying war on a religion basis?
The entire conquest of North and South America.
"Theft" is not just limited to physical property. A girl stole my heart once, but I wasn't even slightly tempted to have her arrested for it!
Metaphor is not reality.
Unless you are a zombie or cyborg, the line about your heart being stolen is emphatically untrue.
I don't know - how many times will it take until the people who claim that "it's not theft" learn English?
Are you still abusing your life-partner?
The only way to please Windows in this instance is to do a shutdown, remove the drive when the coputer is off,
I hope you're not really wasting your time with that. Yanking a mounted USB device from Windows doesn't really hurt anything- after all, Windows used non-explicit umounting of floppy drives for decades after Mac and Unix had already switched to explicit software detachment.
Most of that delay is probably the result of VM thrashing, since it's typical for RAM overfollows to precede unresponsive programs. Poor VM tuning may be a legitimate problem, but it is a separate issue from your "non-pre-emptive" allegation.
(under TRUE pre-emption the scheduler would terminate it; under windows it gets politely "asked" to die...)
False. That is irrelevant to "pre-emption". If it weren't a pre-emptive system, you wouldn't even have the opportunity to interact with the scheduler window, because the runaway process would COMPLETELY block all other actions.
If you want to see what a non-preemptive system looks like, install Microsoft Windows 3.0 and see what Control-Alt-Delete does there.
I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
Absolutely not. Linux is actually much stricter than Windows in this regard. Linux will NEVER allow a drive to be removed if something is using it, or even maybe if notthing is using it. And, it requires an above-average level of Unix mastery to discover which process has the thing open, like so:
umount:
fedora:~# lsof | grep
famd 11501 User 34r REG 8,5 105274 819965
fedora:~# kill 11501
fedora:~# umount
umount:
fedora:~# lsof | grep
famd 11501 User 34r REG 8,5 105274 819965
fedora:~# kill -9 11501
fedora:~# umount
If OS X does otherwise, then it must have shifted away from its Unix(tm) heritage.
Move from XFree86 to x.org is yet another major technology move.
No, it completely isn't. The first release of xorg was functionally indistinguishable from the last release of xfree86. The only changes are different names for libraries and config files.
What was The Italian Job if not a mini cooper advertisement?
Wrong. In that case, the product was driven by the plot. The director wanted an indoor car-chase, and the mini-coop was the most plausible way to make it happen. There was no other car with the dimensions needed.
May as well call True Lies a Harrier advertisement...
It's one thing to eat a hearty turkey and gain some benefit
Be sure to shoot the turkey with your ray-gun first. Cooking it will double the healing level.