It is uneconomic to track 1%. Why track someone who does not want to be?
Because if you can track people who aren't being tracked by anyone else, then you gain demographic information about people who avoid tracking, useful for advertisers (exactly what they are usually trying to avoid).
These people are probably technically savvy, and well off, so from the advertisers point of view, worth hassling. They probably avoid or block adverts, but if you can get an advert in their face then that advert will be facing less competition from other adverts.
Even if the direct targeting of privacy nuts isn't worth much, then trying to track them might still be worth it as you can gain a more complete picture of web users. This could give another competitive advantage over the other spammers^Wadvertisers.
I count myself as a privacy nut, and of course I reject all sorts of tracking on line with browser options and extensions. TOR for googling, falsified referrers for nearly everywhere, extensive adblock filters, cookies allowed for 1st party when necessary for functionality only (and still forced to be session cookies), and NoScript to reign in the really aggressive tracking.
A human being CAN NOT EVER focus 100% on a single thing for a prolonged time!
A list of people that concentrate 100% for a prolonged period of time (4 hours at a time)... because their lives count on it.
Right, and if they were actually concentrating 100% then there wouldn't ever be any accidents. As there are accidents, we can conclude that sometimes reality catches up with people.
Are you stupid or trolling. He said nothing about the median.
He's just being a slashdot pedant. Median, mean and mode are technically all types of average (and there's probably more - I have never done a specific stats course), but when people casually say average they pretty much always mean the mean.
As and Irish Catholic I have never been so disgusted with slashdot as I am now.
Religions condition people to react in exactly that way.
Being critical of what human beings have done whilst carrying the flag of religion is not bashing religion..... the problem is that religion has been used as a tool by those seeking to control other human beings for such a long time that religions themselves are utterly corrupt institutions.
I've been trolled and down modded, but when racial slurs and relgion bashing are considered insightful, especially against myself, it may be time to find myself a new site.
Why is it that when you feel you are the recipient of discrimination it is worse than discrimination against others? That is exactly the kind of hypocrisy that appears to be common place amongst the religious. "It's OK to make sweeping statements about $OTHER_RELIGION, just not $OWN_RELIGION".
The slashdot groupthink modding system is starting to turn into a sort of facism in itself.
Considering the number of offtopic mods on this thread that are on interesting, informative and insightful posts, I'm inclined to agree.
That's why contracts with big, faceless, corporations are full of clauses that ultimately allow the corp. to do what they want. They do things like say that the agreement can be changed at any time by VM, and that you agree to be bound by documents other than just the contract, like terms and conditions, acceptable usage policies, etc..
I think VM will have made sure they covered their arses this time, after the Phorm bullshit.
Thanks for replying with an equivalent to "but this one goes to eleven". I've been working on a reply to explain what to you what you clearly don't get, but even then you won't get it, so fuck it.
I'll just say that you need to realise that religion and science are not equivalent. They are based on different world views, religion on faith, science on observation and experiment. Until you realise what the difference means, you won't be ready to learn why I might say your reply is tantamount to "but this one goes to eleven".
The way this government brings in unpleasant legislation follows certain patterns, and I would bet that this plan by Vold^WMandelson is going to fit the model.
What they do is come up with what the goals they want to achieve in private. They know what they come up with, no matter how "good" or "bad", it will come under attack from groups with vested interests and political opposition, and what they want will inevitably get scaled back.
So they come up with their plan, and come up with a version 3 times worse than they want. They leak the extra bad idea to the press (or to a blog this time), and the press and internet go nuts in reaction to the plan. But the politicians can hide behind the fact it was leaked and deny that is their plan at all.
The vitriol generated tells them which parts of the plan will not fly, and which they can deal with with some spin. They announce their revised plan (now at 2x what they want), roll things back a bit (to 1 times) as a token lip service to democracy, and then go on to implement what they wanted in the first place.
We've seen it before, and we'll see it again: this system works for getting unpopular legislation on the books.
The site linked to in this story doesn't appear to support OS's other than windows and mac for streaming video. Maybe (hopefully) I'm not looking hard enough but at first glance their is no linux support. Good thing I have a telescope.
If you mean the link to the NASA TV page doesn't support Linux, viewing the source shows URLs for the video streams.
All the video streams worked for me after saving the file provided by the URL, and opening it with VLC.
I really hope they don't implement the constant stream of advertising as well.
From the article it looks like they will have iTunes on, and the last time I used that it looked to me like a platform to sell music and shit. Oh, that plays music too.
I dunno why people fawn over iTunes so much... just a few years back it would have been squarely in the adware category!
I purchased one game that was labeled as vista compatible without verifying. Well can't get my money back now.
What kind of backward, third-world country do you live in where there are so few consumer protections that a business can get away with false advertising?
No matter what a shop's "policy" might say about accepting returns on opened products, if they lied, they need to face the consequences. I should think that even a court in Mussolini's Italy would agree with that!
One more question - was the game Windows Vista? I have heard that even Vista isn't Vista compatible....
The online backlash against DRM has gotten a bit excessive,
No, I think it is not enough, as DRM is still common place, and used in ever more subtle and insidious ways. The "on line backlash" needs to get better, and try to educate users as to how widespread this shit is becoming in modern digital products.
especially since the purpose of DRM is entirely admirable: to stop thieves and free riders and to help creators actually get paid for their work.
No, it is about control. It has never been about stopping piracy, it is about controlling a platform. It is about selling the same product multiple times.
It is about the inherent conflict that data is non-tangible, but that businesses want to sell data like it is a physical and limited resource. DRM and legal frameworks enable this bullshit, but ultimately it will break down. There will be cries for people to accept DRM, as if they do there will be good profits to be made in the short term, but sooner or later a critical mass of people will realise how DRM (arbitrary limits) in something they have bought is simply a raw deal.
I don't buy anything with DRM in now as I want to buy products that are as good as technology allows, not as good as some bean counter wants it to be.
This blog entry calls attention to XBox Live, a place where strong DRM is helping to encourage quality games at low prices which make money for their developers. Quoting: 'If I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over the games I make that XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would.
Games at low prices? Bullshit. XBox games are 40UKP a time, and even though I don't follow computer games closely they seem to have been increasing in cost over time across the various generations of consoles. If DRM helped lower the cost, then the platforms with DRM would have broken the increasing price trend.
And the quality is very debatable. There was an article here on/. not long back about how EA spent something like 4 times the amount on marketing a game than it did developing it. How good could a game be with a EA sized budget, but where most of the money was spent on development to make the game good, rather than most of it being spent to tell us how good the game is?
What I have seen of XBox live it doesn't look great: add ons for games tend to have to be paid for, but on the PC equivalent add ons are free. And isn't there some simple bullshit ruse that MS have going on with their XBox credits? Everything is priced in multiples of x, but XBox credits are sold in multiples of y, and x and y aren't multiples of one another, meaning you'll have credit left over a lot of the time. It is a method to encourage people to buy more credit, and allows MS get to sit on the money that backs those odd credits, earning them interest.
The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.
Freedom? I'd imagine that there's plenty of restrictions and pay barriers to over come to be able to publish stuff on an XBox. And there's fuck all freedom for the user - the DRM is meant to stop that. On the XBox the only freedom is to leave it if you don't like Microsoft's methods: take it or leave it is hardly freedom!
Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse. DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.'
People who use copied games are copyright infringers, not thieves - you need to be more honest in your writing.
But why on earth should pirated games have any bearing on other game players? Oh, you're not a player, you're a publisher trying to change people's views on DRM (or at least, that's what you sound like).
The only time DRM can ever be fair is if the user has the keys to the DRM system. And if they have them, there might as well be no DRM system.
how dare they try to provide a service for people to use and actually charge for it. Perhaps the government should provide 'Universal Cloud Service' to everyone for free. (except of course for the taxes they are charged for it to hide the actual cost)
They are welcome to provide these services if they want to, this is just an article to explain to those who will listen why cloud computing is pushed so hard. It is a warning to not become dependant on "the cloud" because you and I probably don't know what it'll become, but it is likely that investors are flocking to "the cloud" in the hopes that they can grab control of anything, and then profit from that control. That probably isn't good for the users of the cloud.
I have pretty much stopped using proprietary software since I noticed how inevitably my interests will conflict with the interests of the proprietary software maker. I will look for open stuff first, and only if there isn't an alternative will I use proprietary stuff, like Google Earth and some games.
Cloud computing is just proprietary computing by another name. It can still be useful, but the control lies with the cloud owner rather than the user.
I use a laptop most of the time, it only has 2, though both at once acts as a 3rd under Linux. Ctrl-click is just easier to press, cos trying to press both at once ain't too easy.
Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond.
Depends on your browsing habits, maybe?
When I am browsing forums I regularly visit, I ctrl-click in FF on all the new post icons, opening a load of tabs in a short period. I also tend to modify my forum preferences so as many posts as possible are on each page, so each page tends to be rather large.
I find this kills FF for a while - it stops and starts responding, and if not responding and I go to a different workspace then FF will jump workspaces on its own when it does decide to respond again! This is rather irritating, to say the least.
But simple browsing, one page at a time kind of thing, is OK. But then I use NoScript, adblock etc. which get rid of many things that add delays to pages loading/rendering. I guess the regexp that adblock does on pages does actually have a penalty, but it's that or the cost of blocking ads. I'll take the adblock delay, ta very much.
Hmmm, fifty one million, four hundred and eighty six thousand, six hundred and two downloads of NoScript says that possibly some people do think javascript is over rated in some way!
I think Adblock may do more harm than good. With all the major browsers moving towards HTML 5, advertisers will have many more opportunities to inject intrusive advertising into web content with simple CSS commands. We have already seen CSS-layer popups that require JavaScript to be enabled to make them go away -- which then allows the other ads to display.
What currently works with twatty sites that do shit like that is to just turn off the style.
In FF, view, page style, no style.
Well, it's a workaround really, but if they are really trying to cram spam in your face then it's a way to avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is uneconomic to track 1%. Why track someone who does not want to be?
Because if you can track people who aren't being tracked by anyone else, then you gain demographic information about people who avoid tracking, useful for advertisers (exactly what they are usually trying to avoid).
These people are probably technically savvy, and well off, so from the advertisers point of view, worth hassling. They probably avoid or block adverts, but if you can get an advert in their face then that advert will be facing less competition from other adverts.
Even if the direct targeting of privacy nuts isn't worth much, then trying to track them might still be worth it as you can gain a more complete picture of web users. This could give another competitive advantage over the other spammers^Wadvertisers.
I count myself as a privacy nut, and of course I reject all sorts of tracking on line with browser options and extensions. TOR for googling, falsified referrers for nearly everywhere, extensive adblock filters, cookies allowed for 1st party when necessary for functionality only (and still forced to be session cookies), and NoScript to reign in the really aggressive tracking.
A human being CAN NOT EVER focus 100% on a single thing for a prolonged time!
A list of people that concentrate 100% for a prolonged period of time (4 hours at a time)... because their lives count on it.
Right, and if they were actually concentrating 100% then there wouldn't ever be any accidents. As there are accidents, we can conclude that sometimes reality catches up with people.
Are you stupid or trolling. He said nothing about the median.
He's just being a slashdot pedant. Median, mean and mode are technically all types of average (and there's probably more - I have never done a specific stats course), but when people casually say average they pretty much always mean the mean.
As and Irish Catholic I have never been so disgusted with slashdot as I am now.
Religions condition people to react in exactly that way.
Being critical of what human beings have done whilst carrying the flag of religion is not bashing religion..... the problem is that religion has been used as a tool by those seeking to control other human beings for such a long time that religions themselves are utterly corrupt institutions.
I've been trolled and down modded, but when racial slurs and relgion bashing are considered insightful, especially against myself, it may be time to find myself a new site.
Why is it that when you feel you are the recipient of discrimination it is worse than discrimination against others? That is exactly the kind of hypocrisy that appears to be common place amongst the religious. "It's OK to make sweeping statements about $OTHER_RELIGION, just not $OWN_RELIGION".
The slashdot groupthink modding system is starting to turn into a sort of facism in itself.
Considering the number of offtopic mods on this thread that are on interesting, informative and insightful posts, I'm inclined to agree.
That's why contracts with big, faceless, corporations are full of clauses that ultimately allow the corp. to do what they want. They do things like say that the agreement can be changed at any time by VM, and that you agree to be bound by documents other than just the contract, like terms and conditions, acceptable usage policies, etc..
I think VM will have made sure they covered their arses this time, after the Phorm bullshit.
Thanks for replying with an equivalent to "but this one goes to eleven". I've been working on a reply to explain what to you what you clearly don't get, but even then you won't get it, so fuck it.
I'll just say that you need to realise that religion and science are not equivalent. They are based on different world views, religion on faith, science on observation and experiment. Until you realise what the difference means, you won't be ready to learn why I might say your reply is tantamount to "but this one goes to eleven".
Evolution is NOT a belief system. The fact that you state it is shows you genuinely do not understand what science is about.
The way this government brings in unpleasant legislation follows certain patterns, and I would bet that this plan by Vold^WMandelson is going to fit the model.
What they do is come up with what the goals they want to achieve in private. They know what they come up with, no matter how "good" or "bad", it will come under attack from groups with vested interests and political opposition, and what they want will inevitably get scaled back.
So they come up with their plan, and come up with a version 3 times worse than they want. They leak the extra bad idea to the press (or to a blog this time), and the press and internet go nuts in reaction to the plan. But the politicians can hide behind the fact it was leaked and deny that is their plan at all.
The vitriol generated tells them which parts of the plan will not fly, and which they can deal with with some spin. They announce their revised plan (now at 2x what they want), roll things back a bit (to 1 times) as a token lip service to democracy, and then go on to implement what they wanted in the first place.
We've seen it before, and we'll see it again: this system works for getting unpopular legislation on the books.
The site linked to in this story doesn't appear to support OS's other than windows and mac for streaming video.
Maybe (hopefully) I'm not looking hard enough but at first glance their is no linux support.
Good thing I have a telescope.
If you mean the link to the NASA TV page doesn't support Linux, viewing the source shows URLs for the video streams.
All the video streams worked for me after saving the file provided by the URL, and opening it with VLC.
Channels
*Public Channel
Live Events, Mission Coverage
http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram
http://www.nasa.gov/qtl/151335main_NASA_TV_QT.qtl
*Media Channel
Video file, other resources
http://www.nasa.gov/145590main_Digital_Media.asx
*Education Channel
For students and teachers
http://www.nasa.gov/145588main_Digital_Edu.asx
http://www.nasa.gov/ram/145589main_Digital_Edu.ram
*Live Space Station Video
Earth Views and More (Details)
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx
*Mission Audio
(may be silent at times)
http://www.nasa.gov/178952main_Mission_Audio_UP.asx
Because some of the people who live in and have shaped a country of war-mongers and religious fanatics have mod points.
They've used one on you too (off topic). Wonder if they'll waste one on me as well?
tl;dr
I really hope they don't implement the constant stream of advertising as well.
From the article it looks like they will have iTunes on, and the last time I used that it looked to me like a platform to sell music and shit. Oh, that plays music too.
I dunno why people fawn over iTunes so much... just a few years back it would have been squarely in the adware category!
I purchased one game that was labeled as vista compatible without verifying. Well can't get my money back now.
What kind of backward, third-world country do you live in where there are so few consumer protections that a business can get away with false advertising?
No matter what a shop's "policy" might say about accepting returns on opened products, if they lied, they need to face the consequences. I should think that even a court in Mussolini's Italy would agree with that!
One more question - was the game Windows Vista? I have heard that even Vista isn't Vista compatible....
The online backlash against DRM has gotten a bit excessive,
No, I think it is not enough, as DRM is still common place, and used in ever more subtle and insidious ways. The "on line backlash" needs to get better, and try to educate users as to how widespread this shit is becoming in modern digital products.
especially since the purpose of DRM is entirely admirable: to stop thieves and free riders and to help creators actually get paid for their work.
No, it is about control. It has never been about stopping piracy, it is about controlling a platform. It is about selling the same product multiple times.
It is about the inherent conflict that data is non-tangible, but that businesses want to sell data like it is a physical and limited resource. DRM and legal frameworks enable this bullshit, but ultimately it will break down. There will be cries for people to accept DRM, as if they do there will be good profits to be made in the short term, but sooner or later a critical mass of people will realise how DRM (arbitrary limits) in something they have bought is simply a raw deal.
I don't buy anything with DRM in now as I want to buy products that are as good as technology allows, not as good as some bean counter wants it to be.
This blog entry calls attention to XBox Live, a place where strong DRM is helping to encourage quality games at low prices which make money for their developers. Quoting: 'If I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over the games I make that XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would.
Games at low prices? Bullshit. XBox games are 40UKP a time, and even though I don't follow computer games closely they seem to have been increasing in cost over time across the various generations of consoles. If DRM helped lower the cost, then the platforms with DRM would have broken the increasing price trend.
And the quality is very debatable. There was an article here on /. not long back about how EA spent something like 4 times the amount on marketing a game than it did developing it. How good could a game be with a EA sized budget, but where most of the money was spent on development to make the game good, rather than most of it being spent to tell us how good the game is?
What I have seen of XBox live it doesn't look great: add ons for games tend to have to be paid for, but on the PC equivalent add ons are free. And isn't there some simple bullshit ruse that MS have going on with their XBox credits? Everything is priced in multiples of x, but XBox credits are sold in multiples of y, and x and y aren't multiples of one another, meaning you'll have credit left over a lot of the time. It is a method to encourage people to buy more credit, and allows MS get to sit on the money that backs those odd credits, earning them interest.
The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.
Freedom? I'd imagine that there's plenty of restrictions and pay barriers to over come to be able to publish stuff on an XBox. And there's fuck all freedom for the user - the DRM is meant to stop that. On the XBox the only freedom is to leave it if you don't like Microsoft's methods: take it or leave it is hardly freedom!
Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse. DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.'
People who use copied games are copyright infringers, not thieves - you need to be more honest in your writing.
But why on earth should pirated games have any bearing on other game players? Oh, you're not a player, you're a publisher trying to change people's views on DRM (or at least, that's what you sound like).
The only time DRM can ever be fair is if the user has the keys to the DRM system. And if they have them, there might as well be no DRM system.
how dare they try to provide a service for people to use and actually charge for it. Perhaps the government should provide 'Universal Cloud Service' to everyone for free. (except of course for the taxes they are charged for it to hide the actual cost)
They are welcome to provide these services if they want to, this is just an article to explain to those who will listen why cloud computing is pushed so hard. It is a warning to not become dependant on "the cloud" because you and I probably don't know what it'll become, but it is likely that investors are flocking to "the cloud" in the hopes that they can grab control of anything, and then profit from that control. That probably isn't good for the users of the cloud.
I have pretty much stopped using proprietary software since I noticed how inevitably my interests will conflict with the interests of the proprietary software maker. I will look for open stuff first, and only if there isn't an alternative will I use proprietary stuff, like Google Earth and some games.
Cloud computing is just proprietary computing by another name. It can still be useful, but the control lies with the cloud owner rather than the user.
Mod parent up +1 understated
I use a laptop most of the time, it only has 2, though both at once acts as a 3rd under Linux. Ctrl-click is just easier to press, cos trying to press both at once ain't too easy.
Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond.
Depends on your browsing habits, maybe?
When I am browsing forums I regularly visit, I ctrl-click in FF on all the new post icons, opening a load of tabs in a short period. I also tend to modify my forum preferences so as many posts as possible are on each page, so each page tends to be rather large.
I find this kills FF for a while - it stops and starts responding, and if not responding and I go to a different workspace then FF will jump workspaces on its own when it does decide to respond again! This is rather irritating, to say the least.
But simple browsing, one page at a time kind of thing, is OK. But then I use NoScript, adblock etc. which get rid of many things that add delays to pages loading/rendering. I guess the regexp that adblock does on pages does actually have a penalty, but it's that or the cost of blocking ads. I'll take the adblock delay, ta very much.
I'm very sorry but no one gives a fuck because most people to get so incredibly anal-retentive when it comes to things like this.
Ahhh, are you not making any money off of your shitty 'blog? It must be those dirty advert-pirates, stealing your articles.
I bet you still call Javascript internet cancer. Cool, meanwhile no one else gives a fuck. Have a nice day!!!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
Hmmm, fifty one million, four hundred and eighty six thousand, six hundred and two downloads of NoScript says that possibly some people do think javascript is over rated in some way!
You kids these days. I have been using ad-blocking software since before the iPod was an itch in Steve Jobs' ball sack!
Lawn 'n that.
I think Adblock may do more harm than good. With all the major browsers moving towards HTML 5, advertisers will have many more opportunities to inject intrusive advertising into web content with simple CSS commands. We have already seen CSS-layer popups that require JavaScript to be enabled to make them go away -- which then allows the other ads to display.
What currently works with twatty sites that do shit like that is to just turn off the style.
In FF, view, page style, no style.
Well, it's a workaround really, but if they are really trying to cram spam in your face then it's a way to avoid it.
He made himself clear: he can get by with just commercial TV.
I wonder what influenced that decision.....
*I* *c*o*n*q*u*e*r*. Now that's a reference.
(like things between the new and old testimate.)
The word you are looking for there is testicle. The new and old testicle.
It's easy to remember, the whole bible is a load of bollocks.
I couldn't find your ~ tag. I hope you're kidding.
Don't advocate that fucking stupid idea!