There are now freeipods, freeflatscreens, freedesktops, and more others than I can count. Obviously in a pyramid scheme like this a tiny fraction of participants receive the products, but there is a way to cheat the system (in, as far as I can tell, a completely legitimate and legal way).
If a group of 10 people or so got together and each chose an item they wanted (say I want a flatscreen, a friend wants an iPod, another wants a desktop pc, another wants a PS2), each of us could initiate an account and, with full participation of each of the other members of our "group", all of us would be able to receive one of the items that we wanted.
This only works if people have not yet signed up for the programs as Gratis tends to figure out if people make duplicate registrations.
Well you can keep attacking that straw man argument if you want but it has nothing to do with AdBlock.
If a commmercial web site operator knew that a user had AdBlock installed, they would NOT agree to the terms of that user accessing the website, not only wasting bandwidth but acquiring the content contained on the website (which costs money to produce). Their website, their rules. Nobody is forcing you to go, you can leave at any time -- or you can stay and use unethical methods to make your visit slightly more convenient.
And all of you bitching about it being within your rights to view content how you want, blah blah blah, shut up already. I am addressing the ethical wrongness of AdBlock -- you are stealing bandwidth and content without also viewing the means for which the web site creates enough revenue for the web site to sustain itself.
--
As a side note, observe what happens when you go against slashbot groupthink:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner .
Why was it necessary to praise AdBlock in the writeup considering it would not have made a difference if the user had it installed or not? Even if AdBlock were responsible for preventing a user from getting a virus this time, that's hardly enough to make up for the theft of services and fraud that people who use it commit every day.
Web pages like slashdot are available to you on the following basis: load our advertisements which bring us revenue that allow us to pay for bandwidth, salaries, etc., and we will also make available to your our content, free of charge. Extensions and programs like AdBlock are tantamount to theft; you are acquiring the content but not "paying" for it by loading the advertisements.
If you find a site's ads to be so intrusive as to make the page unviewable, don't go back. I doubt anyone forced you to go there in the first place.
The gist of the blog entry you linked to is "don't watch the news, anything that doesn't directly concern you (and thus, something that you wouldn't have needed to rely on the news to tell you about because you'd find out otehrwise) isn't worth the effort of listening to -- which is great if you don't feel any desire to go out and actually BE productive, and BE one of the people making change happen, because the people who sit back and let things come to them don't solve many problems in our world.
Probably won't happen, since AdBlock is totally unethical. Web pages like slashdot are available to you on the following basis: load our advertisements which bring us revenue that allow us to pay for bandwidth, salaries, etc., and we will also make available to your our content, free of charge. Extensions and programs like AdBlock are tantamount to theft; you are acquiring the content but not "paying" for it by loading the advertisements.
If you find a site's ads to be so intrusive as to make the page unviewable, don't go back. I doubt anyone forced you to go there in the first place.
What's so wrong about people seeking work that pays better than what they had originally? Just because they're of a different ethnicity than you, or they speak a different language, you think we should forbid them from coming here to work?
News flash: People are people, some of us had the fortune of being born and raised in stronger economical and freer political environments, but to act like it's wrong for a person to find a better job somewhere and for a company to hire that person is completely antithetical to what freedom and our capitalistic nation is all about.
My son is a field hockey goalkeeper which, some while ago, lead me to think about things one could do to provide "optical diversions" to favour the goalkeeper.
I don't know what your classes were like, but intentionally sitting in the back is even worse advice if you're in a huge lecture hall (like most first year students will be for all of their classes), and in smaller classes where sitting in the back isn't as much of a big deal, there's more of a likelihood that your professor won't take kindly to you pounding away on your keyboard instead of paying attention to him or her (again, depending on the nature of the class, this may or not be the case).
I'm glad you were able to do so well bringing your laptop to class. However, I've done it before and usually found that it was too easy to get distracted, so I stopped. I've seen other students play full-screen games, carry on AIM conversations, surf ESPN.com, but never anything more productive than having Microsoft Word open ready to take notes (which is, by my estimation, no comparison for actual written notetaking in terms of learning and memorization).
Or better yet, take it with you and surf in class if you're lucky enough to have a 802.11b school (like mine [ucsd.edu]).
Bad advice if you plan on not flunking out before your sophomore year, and/or you want to avoid pissing off the people sitting behind you in the lecture hall who'd rather be able to pay attention without being distracted by your AIM conversations.
Amazon.com is your friend. I saved $40 buying my book from a guy in Taiwan.
Also, use older editions whenever possible (i.e. when you won't have homework assigned from the book). Since, as you and other say, the material never changes, you won't have to worry about reading it from an older copy.
If you see a link on Slashdot or Fark for an interesting news story on the newspaper for a city you don't live in, the advertisements on the website (their key source of revenue, far and away surpassing paid subscriptions of any kind) will likely not be relevant to you, as they are tailored for local readers. And since you're just flying by, you're going to ignore the ads anyhow.
You will click the link, read the story (and probably not even notice the newspaper that is reporting it), and then click "back" when you're done.
You are not entitled to access the website free of any kind of hinderances like registration -- ESPECIALLY if the likelihood of you clicking on an advertisement is infinitesimally small. The "Boston Picayune", as it were, is not responsible in any way for shelling out for bandwidth and a web staff so that you can read neat news stories without compensating them in any way whatsover.
The phrase "Once in a blue moon" was first noted in 1824 and refers to occurrences that are uncommon, perhaps even rare. Yet, to have two full Moons in the same month is not as uncommon as one might think. In fact, it occurs, on average, about every 32 months. And in the year 1999 it actually occurred twice in three months.
While I'll admit stranger things have happened, I'd still have to hold Mr. Wise 100% responsible until he provides a reasonable explanation of why the people at the check cashing place who knew him well were able to identify, without question, that he was the one that cashed the cashier's check, along with his other various lies, such as the person in the hospital who, mysteriously, the hospital had no record of.
I'll give him points for effort, though. He didn't have to go out and make a web page defending himself, and I'm sure he'll draw a lot of sympathy for being such a family man! Maybe, if he gets a chance, he can also address some of the inconsistencies in his stories.
I suspect you use Firefox, which, for me, didn't show the URL's of the links when I put the cursor over them for some reason. I opened up IE and it worked fine.
Is this test not Firefox friendly? If not, why didn't the story say so? (don't a lot of people on/. use Firefox?)
Well, as per TFA (or at least this part), this system does not necessarily eliminate all anonymity.
There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account.
Actually, there is a system in place to combat this potential problem. This page shows some of the recent instances of possible copyright infringement that will be fixed.
I personally was responsible for pointing out an entry that was copied wholesale from an author's (copyrighted) web page containing electronic versions of his work. I did so after I noticed some of the language was kind of suspect, and Googling some of the phrases found the copyrighted work.
With the massive amounts of traffic Wikipedia gets, and as a result more people like me reading the pages, this problem tends to fix itself rather quickly. The same goes for fears of massive vandalism -- it gets fixed very soon.
Slashdot Mirror
There are now freeipods, freeflatscreens, freedesktops, and more others than I can count. Obviously in a pyramid scheme like this a tiny fraction of participants receive the products, but there is a way to cheat the system (in, as far as I can tell, a completely legitimate and legal way).
If a group of 10 people or so got together and each chose an item they wanted (say I want a flatscreen, a friend wants an iPod, another wants a desktop pc, another wants a PS2), each of us could initiate an account and, with full participation of each of the other members of our "group", all of us would be able to receive one of the items that we wanted.
This only works if people have not yet signed up for the programs as Gratis tends to figure out if people make duplicate registrations.
So...anyone wanna jump on board?
Well you can keep attacking that straw man argument if you want but it has nothing to do with AdBlock.
If a commmercial web site operator knew that a user had AdBlock installed, they would NOT agree to the terms of that user accessing the website, not only wasting bandwidth but acquiring the content contained on the website (which costs money to produce). Their website, their rules. Nobody is forcing you to go, you can leave at any time -- or you can stay and use unethical methods to make your visit slightly more convenient.
And all of you bitching about it being within your rights to view content how you want, blah blah blah, shut up already. I am addressing the ethical wrongness of AdBlock -- you are stealing bandwidth and content without also viewing the means for which the web site creates enough revenue for the web site to sustain itself.
--
As a side note, observe what happens when you go against slashbot groupthink:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner .
Why was it necessary to praise AdBlock in the writeup considering it would not have made a difference if the user had it installed or not? Even if AdBlock were responsible for preventing a user from getting a virus this time, that's hardly enough to make up for the theft of services and fraud that people who use it commit every day.
Web pages like slashdot are available to you on the following basis: load our advertisements which bring us revenue that allow us to pay for bandwidth, salaries, etc., and we will also make available to your our content, free of charge. Extensions and programs like AdBlock are tantamount to theft; you are acquiring the content but not "paying" for it by loading the advertisements.
If you find a site's ads to be so intrusive as to make the page unviewable, don't go back. I doubt anyone forced you to go there in the first place.
The gist of the blog entry you linked to is "don't watch the news, anything that doesn't directly concern you (and thus, something that you wouldn't have needed to rely on the news to tell you about because you'd find out otehrwise) isn't worth the effort of listening to -- which is great if you don't feel any desire to go out and actually BE productive, and BE one of the people making change happen, because the people who sit back and let things come to them don't solve many problems in our world.
Probably won't happen, since AdBlock is totally unethical. Web pages like slashdot are available to you on the following basis: load our advertisements which bring us revenue that allow us to pay for bandwidth, salaries, etc., and we will also make available to your our content, free of charge. Extensions and programs like AdBlock are tantamount to theft; you are acquiring the content but not "paying" for it by loading the advertisements.
If you find a site's ads to be so intrusive as to make the page unviewable, don't go back. I doubt anyone forced you to go there in the first place.
What's so wrong about people seeking work that pays better than what they had originally? Just because they're of a different ethnicity than you, or they speak a different language, you think we should forbid them from coming here to work?
News flash: People are people, some of us had the fortune of being born and raised in stronger economical and freer political environments, but to act like it's wrong for a person to find a better job somewhere and for a company to hire that person is completely antithetical to what freedom and our capitalistic nation is all about.
Ice hockey goaltenders have this down to an art.
I don't know what your classes were like, but intentionally sitting in the back is even worse advice if you're in a huge lecture hall (like most first year students will be for all of their classes), and in smaller classes where sitting in the back isn't as much of a big deal, there's more of a likelihood that your professor won't take kindly to you pounding away on your keyboard instead of paying attention to him or her (again, depending on the nature of the class, this may or not be the case).
I'm glad you were able to do so well bringing your laptop to class. However, I've done it before and usually found that it was too easy to get distracted, so I stopped. I've seen other students play full-screen games, carry on AIM conversations, surf ESPN.com, but never anything more productive than having Microsoft Word open ready to take notes (which is, by my estimation, no comparison for actual written notetaking in terms of learning and memorization).
Bad advice if you plan on not flunking out before your sophomore year, and/or you want to avoid pissing off the people sitting behind you in the lecture hall who'd rather be able to pay attention without being distracted by your AIM conversations.
Amazon.com is your friend. I saved $40 buying my book from a guy in Taiwan.
Also, use older editions whenever possible (i.e. when you won't have homework assigned from the book). Since, as you and other say, the material never changes, you won't have to worry about reading it from an older copy.
If you see a link on Slashdot or Fark for an interesting news story on the newspaper for a city you don't live in, the advertisements on the website (their key source of revenue, far and away surpassing paid subscriptions of any kind) will likely not be relevant to you, as they are tailored for local readers. And since you're just flying by, you're going to ignore the ads anyhow.
You will click the link, read the story (and probably not even notice the newspaper that is reporting it), and then click "back" when you're done.
You are not entitled to access the website free of any kind of hinderances like registration -- ESPECIALLY if the likelihood of you clicking on an advertisement is infinitesimally small. The "Boston Picayune", as it were, is not responsible in any way for shelling out for bandwidth and a web staff so that you can read neat news stories without compensating them in any way whatsover.
From TFA:
The phrase "Once in a blue moon" was first noted in 1824 and refers to occurrences that are uncommon, perhaps even rare. Yet, to have two full Moons in the same month is not as uncommon as one might think. In fact, it occurs, on average, about every 32 months. And in the year 1999 it actually occurred twice in three months.
While I'll admit stranger things have happened, I'd still have to hold Mr. Wise 100% responsible until he provides a reasonable explanation of why the people at the check cashing place who knew him well were able to identify, without question, that he was the one that cashed the cashier's check, along with his other various lies, such as the person in the hospital who, mysteriously, the hospital had no record of.
I'll give him points for effort, though. He didn't have to go out and make a web page defending himself, and I'm sure he'll draw a lot of sympathy for being such a family man! Maybe, if he gets a chance, he can also address some of the inconsistencies in his stories.
I suspect you use Firefox, which, for me, didn't show the URL's of the links when I put the cursor over them for some reason. I opened up IE and it worked fine.
/. use Firefox?)
Is this test not Firefox friendly? If not, why didn't the story say so? (don't a lot of people on
Well, as per TFA (or at least this part), this system does not necessarily eliminate all anonymity.
There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account.
Actually, there is a system in place to combat this potential problem. This page shows some of the recent instances of possible copyright infringement that will be fixed.
I personally was responsible for pointing out an entry that was copied wholesale from an author's (copyrighted) web page containing electronic versions of his work. I did so after I noticed some of the language was kind of suspect, and Googling some of the phrases found the copyrighted work.
With the massive amounts of traffic Wikipedia gets, and as a result more people like me reading the pages, this problem tends to fix itself rather quickly. The same goes for fears of massive vandalism -- it gets fixed very soon.