Corporations as people pervert capitalism to the point that if this goes much further, one would not be able to call our economic system capitalism any more.
"Our devices enabled employers to make their employees work 24/7, but it is our strange American political and cultural systems that have allowed them to do so."
Or you could just say 'No'. So long as people are willing (if not eager) to be tied to work 24/7, companies will be happy to allow them to be.
Yes. At least in the patent sense. Certainly in the design sense. If there was any innovation it was in removing the desktop user interface in favor of something that worked better on a tablet.
Or would you seriously argue that someone skilled in the arts of electronics design wouldn't obviously have thought of something rectangular with rounded corners and a glass screen when designing a tablet?
Well it has worked for years outside the Internet, and it's still working there.
Convincing companies to buy ads with no evidence that they work has worked, yes. But now they can directly determine how many people click on their ads and how many then buy a product, so they can more easily see whether the ads do work.
WTF are you talking about, exactly? Cars are a pretty immense financial outlay.
Not compared to buying a house in San Francisco (according to a quick Google search, a median price of $710,000 for April to June 2012).
I've only ever bought one car that cost more than $7,000, so I could buy a heck of a lot of them for the amount I'd save living somewhere cheaper and driving.
My web sites cost a total of $6 a month, if I remember correctly; certainly it's $10 a month. Technically they come with 'unlimited bandwidth', but practically they would slow to a crawl with too many users.
Back in the early 90s, I was paying $25 a month and the server shared bandwidth over a 56k modem. A couple of years later they upgraded to a direct link comparable to a slow home DSL line today.
So long as you're not hosting video or other big files or bloating every web page with megabytes of Javascript, hosting costs are much lower today than they were back then.
So, you're saying a free market is not the ultimate and final solution for something? Oh, why, but why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate America?
Sites that people won't willingly pay for, be it directly or by clicking on ads, will go bust. Since people don't care enough about those sites to pay for them, no-one will really miss them.
Even today, the best content you'll find is buried on niche web fora.
Most of the experts I know have given up on the web and gone back to email lists; a few dozen messages per day with high signal to noise ratio are much easier to handle than a web forum and the use of email and difficulty of finding the lists keeps out the riff-raff.
There were plenty of free sites on the Internet in the 90s when few people ran ads. Many of the were better than modern sites because they didn't have the desperate need to bring in more users to make more money from those ads.
And that was when a hosting account cost far more for far less than you get for the same price today. Of course every page didn't include a megabyte of Javascript crap to 'Web 2.0'-ise it.
The summary is talking about cost per click. Putting up more ads is unlikely to encourage more people to click on them, since very few people ever click on any ad.
I would conclude it's because they're desperate. When ads fail, advertisers don't give up and find a real job, they make them bigger and more obnoxious.
No-one wants to be plagued with ads when they're looking for information. I think I've intentionally clicked on about three ads in the entire time I've been using the Internet.
Charging should be inductive, video should be WiFi, and audio should be Bluetooth. Then the thing would be hole-free and could be made waterproof.
Ha-ha.
I can barely even get compressed HD video to my laptop from my file server over wi-fi, it's sure as hell not going to be able to send uncompressed HD video to a TV over the same connection. And you really, really, don't want to push video and audio over separate interfaces with all the delights of properly synchronising them at the other end.
Why they couldn't make 2 slightly different UIs beats me.
'cause they want people to develop Metro apps, and developers won't do that if they can't run on desktop Windows. Unless Microsoft pay them lots of money, anyway.
Hence desktop users are lumbered with a crappy tablet interface that makes no sense to them.
Can you imagine sitting in an office where everyone is speaking to their computer and reaching out every few seconds to prod the screen?
Really?
Seriously?
That sounds like my idea of hell. And that would be if voice recognition actually worked; I tried the Google voice search on my Android tablet and the terms it came up with only bore the vaguest resemblance to what I asked for.
Seeing as a lot of the coming Windows 8 PCs shown at Computex and other places do seem to have touch screens, be convertible between laptop/tablet use or have large multitouch gesture trackpads you can use as indirect touch screen.. I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Yeah, we totally want to be sitting at a desk having to reach out and poke the screen with a finger every ten seconds in order to write an Excel spreadsheet. And having to stop every ten minutes to wipe off the fingerprints...
Touchscreens are used on devices which can't support a keyboard or mouse because they're the least bad alternative. They're stupid as hell on a desktop.
Solutions to the energy crisis aside, food and water are still major concerns, and we can't infinitely increase the amount of farming, because we'll also need to increase our living spaces; however, this is unless we go full Tokyo and build above and below ourselves and learn to live in cramped situations.
Everything comes down to ready supply of cheap energy. If we have that, nothing much matters.
With cheap energy you can grow food indoors without any farm land. With cheap energy you can build huge skyscrapers where everyone has more living space than they do today. With cheap energy you can dig up all the materials you want, recycle what you can't find, and ship more down from space if you really have to.
Which is probably why so many on the left hate cheap energy so much.
This is why I call the birth control pill the greatest boon to mankind since the smallpox vaccine.
Except it means that the sensible people have few or no kids while the nutty cultists continue to have dozens. Doesn't take long for that to result in a world of nutty cultists and few sensible people.
so the "fire in a crowded" theater guy should retain his anonymity?
If they had, they wouldn't have ended up in court in a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
You do realise that the 'fire in a crowded theater' argument was an attempt to justify government censorship of political speech by anti-draft activists in WWI?
You think that employees of a company which wants to track everything you do anywhere on the web would support the concept of anonymity?
The odd part is that the last Youtube story I remember reading here was about how they were giving the option to block out faces in videos to provide anonymity for contentious uploads.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations as people pervert capitalism to the point that if this goes much further, one would not be able to call our economic system capitalism any more.
You're at least a century too late on that one.
"Our devices enabled employers to make their employees work 24/7, but it is our strange American political and cultural systems that have allowed them to do so."
Or you could just say 'No'. So long as people are willing (if not eager) to be tied to work 24/7, companies will be happy to allow them to be.
Users don't want everything tied to a single identifier, particularly one controlled by Microsoft, Google, Facebook or some other company.
So you're saying the iPad was not innovative?
Yes. At least in the patent sense. Certainly in the design sense. If there was any innovation it was in removing the desktop user interface in favor of something that worked better on a tablet.
Or would you seriously argue that someone skilled in the arts of electronics design wouldn't obviously have thought of something rectangular with rounded corners and a glass screen when designing a tablet?
Isn't that why we have patents? To give innovators an exclusive period of time.
The key word being 'innovators'.
Well it has worked for years outside the Internet, and it's still working there.
Convincing companies to buy ads with no evidence that they work has worked, yes. But now they can directly determine how many people click on their ads and how many then buy a product, so they can more easily see whether the ads do work.
I don't remember Microsoft ever being quite as evil as Apple now are.
WTF are you talking about, exactly? Cars are a pretty immense financial outlay.
Not compared to buying a house in San Francisco (according to a quick Google search, a median price of $710,000 for April to June 2012).
I've only ever bought one car that cost more than $7,000, so I could buy a heck of a lot of them for the amount I'd save living somewhere cheaper and driving.
My web sites cost a total of $6 a month, if I remember correctly; certainly it's $10 a month. Technically they come with 'unlimited bandwidth', but practically they would slow to a crawl with too many users.
Back in the early 90s, I was paying $25 a month and the server shared bandwidth over a 56k modem. A couple of years later they upgraded to a direct link comparable to a slow home DSL line today.
So long as you're not hosting video or other big files or bloating every web page with megabytes of Javascript, hosting costs are much lower today than they were back then.
So, you're saying a free market is not the ultimate and final solution for something?
Oh, why, but why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate America?
Sites that people won't willingly pay for, be it directly or by clicking on ads, will go bust. Since people don't care enough about those sites to pay for them, no-one will really miss them.
Well, that's what advertisers tell you when they're trying to convince you to buy ads with no objective evidence that they work.
Even today, the best content you'll find is buried on niche web fora.
Most of the experts I know have given up on the web and gone back to email lists; a few dozen messages per day with high signal to noise ratio are much easier to handle than a web forum and the use of email and difficulty of finding the lists keeps out the riff-raff.
There were plenty of free sites on the Internet in the 90s when few people ran ads. Many of the were better than modern sites because they didn't have the desperate need to bring in more users to make more money from those ads.
And that was when a hosting account cost far more for far less than you get for the same price today. Of course every page didn't include a megabyte of Javascript crap to 'Web 2.0'-ise it.
The summary is talking about cost per click. Putting up more ads is unlikely to encourage more people to click on them, since very few people ever click on any ad.
Google's unobtrusive text ads are out. Solution: really big ads that get in your face before you can get to the content. These sorts of ads have become much more popular recently and I can only conclude it's because they work.
I would conclude it's because they're desperate. When ads fail, advertisers don't give up and find a real job, they make them bigger and more obnoxious.
No-one wants to be plagued with ads when they're looking for information. I think I've intentionally clicked on about three ads in the entire time I've been using the Internet.
Charging should be inductive, video should be WiFi, and audio should be Bluetooth. Then the thing would be hole-free and could be made waterproof.
Ha-ha.
I can barely even get compressed HD video to my laptop from my file server over wi-fi, it's sure as hell not going to be able to send uncompressed HD video to a TV over the same connection. And you really, really, don't want to push video and audio over separate interfaces with all the delights of properly synchronising them at the other end.
Why they couldn't make 2 slightly different UIs beats me.
'cause they want people to develop Metro apps, and developers won't do that if they can't run on desktop Windows. Unless Microsoft pay them lots of money, anyway.
Hence desktop users are lumbered with a crappy tablet interface that makes no sense to them.
Can you imagine sitting in an office where everyone is speaking to their computer and reaching out every few seconds to prod the screen?
Really?
Seriously?
That sounds like my idea of hell. And that would be if voice recognition actually worked; I tried the Google voice search on my Android tablet and the terms it came up with only bore the vaguest resemblance to what I asked for.
Seeing as a lot of the coming Windows 8 PCs shown at Computex and other places do seem to have touch screens, be convertible between laptop/tablet use or have large multitouch gesture trackpads you can use as indirect touch screen.. I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Yeah, we totally want to be sitting at a desk having to reach out and poke the screen with a finger every ten seconds in order to write an Excel spreadsheet. And having to stop every ten minutes to wipe off the fingerprints...
Touchscreens are used on devices which can't support a keyboard or mouse because they're the least bad alternative. They're stupid as hell on a desktop.
Solutions to the energy crisis aside, food and water are still major concerns, and we can't infinitely increase the amount of farming, because we'll also need to increase our living spaces; however, this is unless we go full Tokyo and build above and below ourselves and learn to live in cramped situations.
Everything comes down to ready supply of cheap energy. If we have that, nothing much matters.
With cheap energy you can grow food indoors without any farm land. With cheap energy you can build huge skyscrapers where everyone has more living space than they do today. With cheap energy you can dig up all the materials you want, recycle what you can't find, and ship more down from space if you really have to.
Which is probably why so many on the left hate cheap energy so much.
This is why I call the birth control pill the greatest boon to mankind since the smallpox vaccine.
Except it means that the sensible people have few or no kids while the nutty cultists continue to have dozens. Doesn't take long for that to result in a world of nutty cultists and few sensible people.
The problem with the slippery slope arguement is that people think it applies to everything. there are outlieing cases.
Yes.
Very, very rarely, when a government starts banning something, they don't continue to ban everything else on that slope.
But 99% of the time, they're just boiling the frog.
so the "fire in a crowded" theater guy should retain his anonymity?
If they had, they wouldn't have ended up in court in a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
You do realise that the 'fire in a crowded theater' argument was an attempt to justify government censorship of political speech by anti-draft activists in WWI?
No, didn't think so.
You think that employees of a company which wants to track everything you do anywhere on the web would support the concept of anonymity?
The odd part is that the last Youtube story I remember reading here was about how they were giving the option to block out faces in videos to provide anonymity for contentious uploads.
Yes, because trolling is NEVER done via proxy...
And everyone has a static IP.
IP blocking, other than mass-blocking of services/countries which exist primarily for spamming, is for retards.