You no longer need to ask awkward or illegal questions to discriminate. Just google 'em. "I don't want no libertarians! I don't want no republicans or democrats! I don't want no atheists or jews or wiccans! I don't want no avid video gamers! I don't want no single people! I don't want me no people with children working here!
Of course, these companies "blur out information that could raise legal concerns for the employer" and there's certainly no way the employer could expound on that initial information on their own or anything...! *cough*
Real name or not, it only takes a minimal amount of effort for data gatherers to work together or pool data together and derive an identity from you. That's one of the benefits (for the data miners) of having, say, the Facebook connect/like/whatever stuff on EVERY WEB PAGE IN EXISTENCE. Know a couple or so pieces of information about a person (doesn't have to include their name) and you can be pretty certain about who you are zero-ing in on.
Along those lines, I would think that Amazon choosing UPS as their primary service speaks volumes. They deal in bulk where fast and reliable shipping and good customer service is important and their solution is *not* USPS, for a reason.
Even better, let people opt out of USPS service. I literally get NOTHING from the USPS that I want. It's 100% garbage. If you gave me the option of not receiving USPS service *ever* at my address, I would opt into that in a heartbeat.
Frankly, there's no reason not to reduce service to ONE day a week. If it's that important that it gets there quickly, you're not using USPS in the first place. And this is a good compromise for those who are so adamant that they must have some sort of USPS service, just in case their 102 year old aunt wants to send them a post-card from across the country once every year at Christmas.
I get mail six days a week and it is nothing but junk. So much junk, in fact, that it fills an entire plastic sack from a grocery store each week. I never get anything but junk mail. I don't send anything through the USPS and I don't order things unless they're going to be shipped by UPS or FedEX. Any billing is done online. Any communication is done online or on the phone. I receive absolutely zero benefit from the USPS and my life would be better for them not providing me service. I don't need spam once a week, much less six times a week. And I certainly don't care to subsidize a government spam-delivery service.
Yeah, but for the cost of the existing internet service that almost everyone already has, I can put something in email and have it delivered any time any place in the world instantly. Being cheap and good at an outdated service is kind of meaningless. It's like telling me that I can have huge blocks of ice delivered six days a week reliably and cheaply -- which is great if it's 1910 and I don't have a refrigerator . . . but not so much in the 21st century.
I don't see any real benefit of the USPS. Certainly none that justify the expense.
I am in my mid-thirties, and I have never really used the USPS in my entire adult life. If I order something, I get it shipped to me by DHL, UPS, or FedEX. If I want to order something and they only ship by USPS, I don't order from them. If I have something to ship, I use one of those three. If I have important documents that I must send or receive and for some absurd reason, I can't use email and PDF, then I use FedEX. These services are affordable, fast, and reliable.
The only service the USPS has given me in the last fifteen years has been a constant source of spam and that's not worth paying for. I amass piles upon piles of bullshit in the mail that I have to turn around and throw away. I literally get *nothing* in the USPS that I want. And, yet, I get a hand full of junk stuffed in the mailbox outside my front door six days a week.
Now, you *might* be able to argue that the USPS is still necessary for like a dozen people in the country who don't have access to a real courier service and don't have internet access. So, that's fine. Let's reduce the costs by reducing delivery to once per week. If time is of the utmost importance, then you're probably not using the USPS - so anything sent through the USPS can probably wait up to four business days before it's delivered.
Seriously, trust me -- I'm going to be okay if you only deliver a fist-full of stuff that's going to go directly into my garbage can *once* per week. I'll somehow find a way to survive if I don't get a fist-full every 24 hours, six days a week. They're nothing more than a tax-payer subsidized service for businesses to spam you in the physical world. If they need more funding, raise your rates on the spammers who are spamming me.
While I'm one of those constantly aware of and concerned with privacy and government abuses, I don't think that it is enough justification for a company to say "yeah, that service we wanted to provide? Forget it, we're going to just open up the floodgates". In this instance, it seems to be one of the points they're using to distinguish themselves among other social networks. Would you not apply the same logic and argument to, say, LinkedIn? Would you then demand that LinkedIn should not have user names and resume information, because "it could be used by the pending Mecha Hitler to make you disappear to prevent your dissenting opinions from impacting the coming fascist uprising"?
I find the idea of giving my information to a mega corporation that in turn has a lot of dealings with government agencies where I am the ultimate product they're trading with to be very skitchy, but the easy solution is to simply not participate in it. I would certainly have a different opinion if someone introduced legislation to "make that nifty identity service Google+ has been pushing for the last five years a new de-jure service for identifying all internet users, if you want to be allowed to connect to the intarwebs".
Perhaps my comment wasn't as clear as I thought it was. I was referring to services where you were actually the client, exclusively, and not a product. Where you pay for the service and are not having advertising shoved in your face or personal details traded behind the scenes to facilitate affordability of the service for you. Current examples being things like books, audiobooks, music, and the movies which aren't just vessels for product placement.
Imagine a social networking service, for example, that wasn't free. You paid a few bucks, but in turn data was not gathered about you and traded behind the scenes and nobody vomited ads all over the interface. Unfortunately, nobody would be willing to pay for that, so it'd be a pretty unsocial social network.
An accurate statement would be "In most forms of media and entertainment, you are the product; not the client". Free isn't necessarily the relevant factor, here. You pay for cable television, yet you are given ads. The customers are the advertisers and you are the product. The network only needs to produce programs good enough and cheap enough to get your eyeballs, to in turn sell as a package deal to the advertisers.
A fur trapper is the radio station, television network, newspaper publication, magazine publication or what have you. The advertiser is the customer that wants to buy a pelt. The content is the bait in the trap to lure the furry animal. You are the furry animal.
My thoughts, exactly. If you listen to radio, you are not the customer -- you're the product. If you watch television, you are not the customer -- you are the product. If you read most magazines (even if you pay for them), you are not a customer -- you're the product. When it comes to media of all kinds, you are the product far more often than you are the client.
That doesn't mean that privacy shouldn't still be valued, even in free services. It should be. But people need to approach it from the mindset that they are trading something valuable (their eyeballs and their personal data) in exchange. It'd be great if there was an alternative to all of these things, for those who would rather pay a few bucks than give up their "soul", so to speak. Unfortunately, the masses do not want to pay for anything, anywhere and catering to the niche who does is usually not so profitable, as a result.
As for their naming policy? It's entirely within their right to determine how they intend to curate the culture of their service and if it means there will be less fake names posting ridiculous crap on the service than are doing so on competing services and it will somehow elevate the general level of discourse compared to the competing services, then have at it. (This is not to endorse required identification for using the internet - only for using a particular service that is offered on a website to people on the internet.)
Of course, as far as a company doing no evil . . . I'm not aware of such a thing.
Didn't Netflix make like more than two billion dollars last quarter, alone? It seems like $300m isn't too unreasonable. Of course it was only $30m several years ago. Netflix wasn't nearly the huge deal it has become (streaming-wise).
What I don't get is - why does Starz have all this content? Why doesn't Netflix just buy the rights to the content from whoever it is that Starz is buying the rights to the content from?
They have one. You just have to log into your gmail account, click the "Feedback" button on the bottom of a page of search results, select a radio button option for what you're reporting, then explain what/why you're reporting something (I think it gives you a text box). I don't think it lets you choose a specific result, though. It just lets you report that a "page" of results has spam.
Yes, it's too many steps. But I don't know of another solution. Having a big button next to each result wouldn't be a better option. Clicking +1 by accident isn't nearly as bad as clicking "report as spam" by accident.
I think that search results should certainly be influenced by what people actually find informative and useful versus how many times links show up in related pages. The inference is more meaningful. However, I don't know that the results of the feelings of all mankind is necessarily the right filter/ordering system, either. Perhaps basing it on a more limited set of social results, like those that you are friends with on Google+? That is, instead of the order of results on my page being derived from a billion people's +1ing, it would be based on the 48 people in my social network.
It's pretty fucking distasteful that Slashdot chose to link to the TMZ photos. Let a dying man have a little dignity and stop acting like fucking bloodthirsty creeps. Fucking sickening.
Why shouldn't he? That hack, John Markoff, has been making bank off of Mitnick for a couple of decades. How he has a career, still, is fucking beyond me.
They don't. You recall the recent incident where cops went into a colo and just started yanking servers, which completely fucked over innocent and uninvolved parties like pinboard.in, reddit and others, yes?
Exactly. The point of stories and incidents like this is to intimidate the population at large. You may have a right to do something, but if it is made difficult enough to do, you just won't bother and the ultimate impact is the same as if you didn't have that right - because everyone is intimidated into not doing it. Very few people care enough about anything to accept the total disruption of their life, possible public accusations (often of really hideous things), massive legal fees, and years tied up in court asserting your rights.
Slashdot Mirror
And be riddled with errors - grammatical, spelling, and technical.
You know, when my parents and grandparents were starting into the job market, they were "employees".
Now we're "resources".
That kind of says it all.
You no longer need to ask awkward or illegal questions to discriminate. Just google 'em. "I don't want no libertarians! I don't want no republicans or democrats! I don't want no atheists or jews or wiccans! I don't want no avid video gamers! I don't want no single people! I don't want me no people with children working here!
Of course, these companies "blur out information that could raise legal concerns for the employer" and there's certainly no way the employer could expound on that initial information on their own or anything...! *cough*
Real name or not, it only takes a minimal amount of effort for data gatherers to work together or pool data together and derive an identity from you. That's one of the benefits (for the data miners) of having, say, the Facebook connect/like/whatever stuff on EVERY WEB PAGE IN EXISTENCE. Know a couple or so pieces of information about a person (doesn't have to include their name) and you can be pretty certain about who you are zero-ing in on.
Only until lobbyists with bigger budgets convince them otherwise.
What are you talking about? Amazon uses UPS.
Along those lines, I would think that Amazon choosing UPS as their primary service speaks volumes. They deal in bulk where fast and reliable shipping and good customer service is important and their solution is *not* USPS, for a reason.
Even better, let people opt out of USPS service. I literally get NOTHING from the USPS that I want. It's 100% garbage. If you gave me the option of not receiving USPS service *ever* at my address, I would opt into that in a heartbeat.
Frankly, there's no reason not to reduce service to ONE day a week. If it's that important that it gets there quickly, you're not using USPS in the first place. And this is a good compromise for those who are so adamant that they must have some sort of USPS service, just in case their 102 year old aunt wants to send them a post-card from across the country once every year at Christmas.
I get mail six days a week and it is nothing but junk. So much junk, in fact, that it fills an entire plastic sack from a grocery store each week. I never get anything but junk mail. I don't send anything through the USPS and I don't order things unless they're going to be shipped by UPS or FedEX. Any billing is done online. Any communication is done online or on the phone. I receive absolutely zero benefit from the USPS and my life would be better for them not providing me service. I don't need spam once a week, much less six times a week. And I certainly don't care to subsidize a government spam-delivery service.
Yeah, but for the cost of the existing internet service that almost everyone already has, I can put something in email and have it delivered any time any place in the world instantly. Being cheap and good at an outdated service is kind of meaningless. It's like telling me that I can have huge blocks of ice delivered six days a week reliably and cheaply -- which is great if it's 1910 and I don't have a refrigerator . . . but not so much in the 21st century.
Somehow, you wound up at Slashdot when you clearly thought you were posting a comment on a Brietbart story.
I don't see any real benefit of the USPS. Certainly none that justify the expense.
I am in my mid-thirties, and I have never really used the USPS in my entire adult life. If I order something, I get it shipped to me by DHL, UPS, or FedEX. If I want to order something and they only ship by USPS, I don't order from them. If I have something to ship, I use one of those three. If I have important documents that I must send or receive and for some absurd reason, I can't use email and PDF, then I use FedEX. These services are affordable, fast, and reliable.
The only service the USPS has given me in the last fifteen years has been a constant source of spam and that's not worth paying for. I amass piles upon piles of bullshit in the mail that I have to turn around and throw away. I literally get *nothing* in the USPS that I want. And, yet, I get a hand full of junk stuffed in the mailbox outside my front door six days a week.
Now, you *might* be able to argue that the USPS is still necessary for like a dozen people in the country who don't have access to a real courier service and don't have internet access. So, that's fine. Let's reduce the costs by reducing delivery to once per week. If time is of the utmost importance, then you're probably not using the USPS - so anything sent through the USPS can probably wait up to four business days before it's delivered.
Seriously, trust me -- I'm going to be okay if you only deliver a fist-full of stuff that's going to go directly into my garbage can *once* per week. I'll somehow find a way to survive if I don't get a fist-full every 24 hours, six days a week. They're nothing more than a tax-payer subsidized service for businesses to spam you in the physical world. If they need more funding, raise your rates on the spammers who are spamming me.
While I'm one of those constantly aware of and concerned with privacy and government abuses, I don't think that it is enough justification for a company to say "yeah, that service we wanted to provide? Forget it, we're going to just open up the floodgates". In this instance, it seems to be one of the points they're using to distinguish themselves among other social networks. Would you not apply the same logic and argument to, say, LinkedIn? Would you then demand that LinkedIn should not have user names and resume information, because "it could be used by the pending Mecha Hitler to make you disappear to prevent your dissenting opinions from impacting the coming fascist uprising"?
I find the idea of giving my information to a mega corporation that in turn has a lot of dealings with government agencies where I am the ultimate product they're trading with to be very skitchy, but the easy solution is to simply not participate in it. I would certainly have a different opinion if someone introduced legislation to "make that nifty identity service Google+ has been pushing for the last five years a new de-jure service for identifying all internet users, if you want to be allowed to connect to the intarwebs".
Perhaps my comment wasn't as clear as I thought it was. I was referring to services where you were actually the client, exclusively, and not a product. Where you pay for the service and are not having advertising shoved in your face or personal details traded behind the scenes to facilitate affordability of the service for you. Current examples being things like books, audiobooks, music, and the movies which aren't just vessels for product placement.
Imagine a social networking service, for example, that wasn't free. You paid a few bucks, but in turn data was not gathered about you and traded behind the scenes and nobody vomited ads all over the interface. Unfortunately, nobody would be willing to pay for that, so it'd be a pretty unsocial social network.
An accurate statement would be "In most forms of media and entertainment, you are the product; not the client". Free isn't necessarily the relevant factor, here. You pay for cable television, yet you are given ads. The customers are the advertisers and you are the product. The network only needs to produce programs good enough and cheap enough to get your eyeballs, to in turn sell as a package deal to the advertisers.
A fur trapper is the radio station, television network, newspaper publication, magazine publication or what have you. The advertiser is the customer that wants to buy a pelt. The content is the bait in the trap to lure the furry animal. You are the furry animal.
My thoughts, exactly. If you listen to radio, you are not the customer -- you're the product. If you watch television, you are not the customer -- you are the product. If you read most magazines (even if you pay for them), you are not a customer -- you're the product. When it comes to media of all kinds, you are the product far more often than you are the client.
That doesn't mean that privacy shouldn't still be valued, even in free services. It should be. But people need to approach it from the mindset that they are trading something valuable (their eyeballs and their personal data) in exchange. It'd be great if there was an alternative to all of these things, for those who would rather pay a few bucks than give up their "soul", so to speak. Unfortunately, the masses do not want to pay for anything, anywhere and catering to the niche who does is usually not so profitable, as a result.
As for their naming policy? It's entirely within their right to determine how they intend to curate the culture of their service and if it means there will be less fake names posting ridiculous crap on the service than are doing so on competing services and it will somehow elevate the general level of discourse compared to the competing services, then have at it. (This is not to endorse required identification for using the internet - only for using a particular service that is offered on a website to people on the internet.)
Of course, as far as a company doing no evil . . . I'm not aware of such a thing.
Didn't Netflix make like more than two billion dollars last quarter, alone? It seems like $300m isn't too unreasonable. Of course it was only $30m several years ago. Netflix wasn't nearly the huge deal it has become (streaming-wise).
What I don't get is - why does Starz have all this content? Why doesn't Netflix just buy the rights to the content from whoever it is that Starz is buying the rights to the content from?
Netflix has been doing great and I've been of the mind that they could charge me triple what they do now and I'd still feel like it was a great deal.
Unfortunately, it seems like 50% of the content is from Starz. If they're going to lose all of that, there's less reason for me to remain subscribed.
If this occurs, I'm sure we'll see torrent traffic rise, again.
$150k clearly goes a lot farther in your fantasy world than in reality.
They have one. You just have to log into your gmail account, click the "Feedback" button on the bottom of a page of search results, select a radio button option for what you're reporting, then explain what/why you're reporting something (I think it gives you a text box). I don't think it lets you choose a specific result, though. It just lets you report that a "page" of results has spam.
Yes, it's too many steps. But I don't know of another solution. Having a big button next to each result wouldn't be a better option. Clicking +1 by accident isn't nearly as bad as clicking "report as spam" by accident.
I think that search results should certainly be influenced by what people actually find informative and useful versus how many times links show up in related pages. The inference is more meaningful. However, I don't know that the results of the feelings of all mankind is necessarily the right filter/ordering system, either. Perhaps basing it on a more limited set of social results, like those that you are friends with on Google+? That is, instead of the order of results on my page being derived from a billion people's +1ing, it would be based on the 48 people in my social network.
That might suck, too, of course.
It's pretty fucking distasteful that Slashdot chose to link to the TMZ photos. Let a dying man have a little dignity and stop acting like fucking bloodthirsty creeps. Fucking sickening.
Why shouldn't he? That hack, John Markoff, has been making bank off of Mitnick for a couple of decades. How he has a career, still, is fucking beyond me.
They don't. You recall the recent incident where cops went into a colo and just started yanking servers, which completely fucked over innocent and uninvolved parties like pinboard.in, reddit and others, yes?
Exactly. The point of stories and incidents like this is to intimidate the population at large. You may have a right to do something, but if it is made difficult enough to do, you just won't bother and the ultimate impact is the same as if you didn't have that right - because everyone is intimidated into not doing it. Very few people care enough about anything to accept the total disruption of their life, possible public accusations (often of really hideous things), massive legal fees, and years tied up in court asserting your rights.