Telecoms are also demanding a share in the profits of any business transaction conducted via telephone. "Companies have been getting a free ride for too long now, using our services to make a profit, and it's time we get our fair share." This follows the announcement by the Wall Street Journal that they will start suing people who make money off of the stock market after perusing the Journal's stock quotes, without giving Murdoch a cut of the profits.
Technically, all you proved is that you had one crappy teacher. Further study is necessary before such sweeping statements can be made with any degree of certainty.
I'm not really talking about the emailed offers from Amazon, but about the potential for these books to poison Amazon search in general, so let's use a different analogy: these books are the equivalent to spamdexing sites, filled with ads, which try to game Google's system and get highly ranked in unrelated searches. There's nothing illegal about either practice, it's up to the company to fix it if they want to keep their product usable, and we users can always go elsewhere if we find it annoying... but that doesn't keep me from finding both practices to be loathsome and unethical.
While I would probably call this particular example fraud, because their Amazon listings apparently do not explain the source of their material, the general principle of repackaging online "open-source" content in hardcover form is legitimate (if it satisfies the appropriate licenses). What intrigues me is the fact that these books are being automatically generated. As artificial intelligence gets better, we're going to start having computers which can generate music, poetry, and maybe even novels or movies which have some commercial value, and they might be able to spit out thousands of works a year, swamping the output of any human artists, and online stores like Amazon or iTunes will have to figure out how to deal with that.
Just because you aren't interested in the books you think it's spam? Who opted in to receive the emails from Amazon? You?
Just because you aren't interested in Viagra you think it's spam? Who opted to have an email account? You?
These aren't a problem if they are a niche offering, but if every search I make on Amazon winds up containing 10 or 20 of these, then that's interfering with Amazon's business and they're going to have to deal with it somehow.
That's why I said you have to have a few big papers doing it at once, to serve as a catalyst; if only one or two small papers do it, then you're right, they will fail.
But believe me, most newspapers in the world want to get paid for online content, and it's hard to imagine that they won't figure out how to do it eventually, when the alternative is going out of business altogether. Instead of sitting around predicting failure, we should try to help direct them towards a model where they can afford to provide content without a complete paywall lockdown. I think, for starters, that the publishers need to be made aware of the ala carte nature of newsreading on the Internet, as others have brought up here: I might be interested in subscribing to my local paper online, but I certainly don't want to subscribe to 10 or 20 different papers just so I can follow online conversations. (Maybe news aggregators are the answer there: pay some company $10 a month, and they give you access to all the major papers, with the blessing of said papers of course.)
Yes, but just about every newspaper in the world with a web presence would like to set up some sort of paywall. You've just explained why no one wants to go first, but if a couple big papers are willing to invest the money into getting the ball rolling, we could see a wave effect where, in the course of a couple of years, all of those "other newspapers on the Internet" will become for-pay as well.
I think you're right: if a website is just a diversion for you, easily replaceable by any other website, then block the ads on it with no guilt at all. Such a website is just a commodity, and supply & demand (particularly supply) have pushed the cost of commodity websites to $0, no matter how much they cost to run.
If a particular website means something to you, and is not replaceable, then we do have to deal with the fact that the website may die if their revenue is cut off. Maybe this won't happen for general-interest sites, which are still visited by lots of people who don't know how to (or don't care to) install an ad-blocker, but for specialized sites, particularly those aimed at tech-saavy users, this could be a problem.
That said, I don't think that's a reason to turn off the adblocker; I think it's a reason to send them cash. Budget a certain amount of money each month or year (if you can afford it of course), and distribute it to the websites you'd like to see stay around, if there are indeed any you care about. Don't think of it as paying a debt, think of it as an investment whose dividends are the survival and additional content the site produces in the future. Maybe this isn't the way we're used to thinking about financial transactions.
Am I right that a banner ad typically brings in $0.01-$0.05 per viewer? It might be interesting to have a Firefox plugin which keeps track of the number of times you visit a given site, and roughly how much they would have made off of you in ads.
Most advertising is malware for the human brain: it attempts to exploit weaknesses in human psychology to get us to do things we would not otherwise do.
Not all advertising is like that-- announcements of new or poorly-known products or sites or services are certainly fair. But most advertising is not informational, it is manipulative.
More than promoted; the early computers practically begged you to program, throwing you instantly into the BASIC interpreter when you turn on the machine (without a cartridge). With the prompt "READY." and that flashing cursor-- who wouldn't be tempted to try a little programming when it's so easy to start?
I think one benefit is that community college is non-residential, so that 16-year-olds can transition to more challenging/more relevant classes without having to make the jump to living on their own. I wouldn't be concerned about these students taking classes at Harvard, but I'd wonder how they'd handle the social scene, two years younger than their peers.
If this program becomes widespread, though, are academically ambitious kids going to feel pressured to graduate early (maybe earlier than they feel comfortable with) just to keep up with their peers? That sounds a little dangerous.
Look at Saturn, even if you don't get much detail: seeing that bright spot of light turn into the familiar Saturn shape is really really cool for someone who's never done it before. (I speak from experience! I've seen pictures of Saturn and I've seen that bright dot in the sky, but putting the two together for the first time was pretty amazing.)
You might point out some of the major constellations or brightest stars in the sky, including tips on how to find them in the sky. It doesn't have much to do with science, but it gives students a sense of ownership of the sky which could lead to a burgeoning interest in astronomy later on. I recommend making H.A. Rey's book "The Stars" available; it's an excellent guide to stargazing.
From my perspective, I think delisting the paper editions is more of a threat to Amazon: I shop at Amazon because I know whatever I want to buy, they have it. If that stops being the case, then I'm going to look elsewhere, maybe permanently. They might be on the right end of this dispute, but I think they're going to damage their brand if they keep this up too long.
Seems to me that "there is no global Truth" and "Truth is contextual" is meta-truth.:)
Personally, I see Truth as a many-dimensioned object, which, like a hypercube, we can never fully picture in our minds. Each one views it from a different angle.
But I try not to be dogmatic about it, and I only get grumpy when people (either fundamentalist or atheist) insist that they alone know what Truth is, and everyone else is naive (although I've called people naive in turn, so I'm a bit hypocritical).
It's not the goal of religion to explain *how* the world works (i.e. the rules of the game). Or rather, those people who expect religion to explain how the world works are bound to be disappointed, or labelled as blind fools (cf fundamentalists); I would call that superstition. Even a young-earth creationist can be a productive biologist, as long as he accepts the fact that the Law of Evolution makes useful predictions; whether it does so due to science or because God likes it that way is beside the point, as far as science is concerned.
The problem with fundamentalism isn't WHAT they believe, it's that they try to force you to live your life based on their beliefs. But that's not religion, it's jackassery (which unfortunately exists in all human cultures), and I'd be pleased if people could learn to tell the difference (just as I would hope that I could go abroad as an American and not be personally blamed for Iraq).
What you're saying is you don't care about "Truth", which I completely respect, so long as you don't claim to know it. That is what science is all about: we're studying the Rules of the Game, regardless of the purpose or context of the Game.
Prove to me that this isn't an elaborate holographic simulation you're living in, and then we can talk about "the truth". Truth is the regime of philosophers and theologians; anyone who thinks science is about "truth" is naive.
I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer"
That statement is overly general, to the point of absurdity. As a physicist, I am going to be interested in certain news items which others might not even understand. The same goes for businesspeople, lawyers, and so forth. Similarly, local news is by definition tailored to the consumer: I don't read about traffic fatalities in Bangor, Maine, nor should I.
What you're really arguing, I think, is that there is a certain subset of news which is important for everyone, and I'd agree with that. But the onus lies partially on the consumer as on the news distributor: if television news programs replaced their fluff pieces with solid news, would people watch? Is it really up to the news agencies to candy-coat, trick, or force people into watching news? I think not.
It is a problem, but the solution is to encourage people to see news-reading as an important activity. Part of that solution might be a revamp of high school education to teach people *how* to read/watch/listen to the news and interpret what they hear, and basically what they should do with it. A person can stare at the TV screen and see that the DOW has dropped by 100 points and that a jetliner crashed in Ethiopia, but what good does it do for them to see that if they don't know what to do with the information?
I agree with you but for a different reason: voice recognition and semantic parsing both qualify as command-line. When Geordi says, "Computer, run a level-1 diagnostic", that's a command-line interface. If a user could type "Make all the JPG files in this folder 800x600" into a command-line, then I think that would be very popular. Not that GUI will ever go away, but CLI could become more a part of everyday computer use, provided it becomes more intuitive and/or people learn how to be more precise in their language (e.g. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot.")
Slashdot Mirror
Telecoms are also demanding a share in the profits of any business transaction conducted via telephone. "Companies have been getting a free ride for too long now, using our services to make a profit, and it's time we get our fair share." This follows the announcement by the Wall Street Journal that they will start suing people who make money off of the stock market after perusing the Journal's stock quotes, without giving Murdoch a cut of the profits.
Technically, all you proved is that you had one crappy teacher. Further study is necessary before such sweeping statements can be made with any degree of certainty.
They should just call Pluto an "honorary planet", give it a plaque and a gold watch, and be done with it.
I'm not really talking about the emailed offers from Amazon, but about the potential for these books to poison Amazon search in general, so let's use a different analogy: these books are the equivalent to spamdexing sites, filled with ads, which try to game Google's system and get highly ranked in unrelated searches. There's nothing illegal about either practice, it's up to the company to fix it if they want to keep their product usable, and we users can always go elsewhere if we find it annoying... but that doesn't keep me from finding both practices to be loathsome and unethical.
While I would probably call this particular example fraud, because their Amazon listings apparently do not explain the source of their material, the general principle of repackaging online "open-source" content in hardcover form is legitimate (if it satisfies the appropriate licenses). What intrigues me is the fact that these books are being automatically generated. As artificial intelligence gets better, we're going to start having computers which can generate music, poetry, and maybe even novels or movies which have some commercial value, and they might be able to spit out thousands of works a year, swamping the output of any human artists, and online stores like Amazon or iTunes will have to figure out how to deal with that.
Just because you aren't interested in the books you think it's spam? Who opted in to receive the emails from Amazon? You?
Just because you aren't interested in Viagra you think it's spam? Who opted to have an email account? You?
These aren't a problem if they are a niche offering, but if every search I make on Amazon winds up containing 10 or 20 of these, then that's interfering with Amazon's business and they're going to have to deal with it somehow.
That's why I said you have to have a few big papers doing it at once, to serve as a catalyst; if only one or two small papers do it, then you're right, they will fail.
But believe me, most newspapers in the world want to get paid for online content, and it's hard to imagine that they won't figure out how to do it eventually, when the alternative is going out of business altogether. Instead of sitting around predicting failure, we should try to help direct them towards a model where they can afford to provide content without a complete paywall lockdown. I think, for starters, that the publishers need to be made aware of the ala carte nature of newsreading on the Internet, as others have brought up here: I might be interested in subscribing to my local paper online, but I certainly don't want to subscribe to 10 or 20 different papers just so I can follow online conversations. (Maybe news aggregators are the answer there: pay some company $10 a month, and they give you access to all the major papers, with the blessing of said papers of course.)
Yes, but just about every newspaper in the world with a web presence would like to set up some sort of paywall. You've just explained why no one wants to go first, but if a couple big papers are willing to invest the money into getting the ball rolling, we could see a wave effect where, in the course of a couple of years, all of those "other newspapers on the Internet" will become for-pay as well.
I think you're right: if a website is just a diversion for you, easily replaceable by any other website, then block the ads on it with no guilt at all. Such a website is just a commodity, and supply & demand (particularly supply) have pushed the cost of commodity websites to $0, no matter how much they cost to run.
If a particular website means something to you, and is not replaceable, then we do have to deal with the fact that the website may die if their revenue is cut off. Maybe this won't happen for general-interest sites, which are still visited by lots of people who don't know how to (or don't care to) install an ad-blocker, but for specialized sites, particularly those aimed at tech-saavy users, this could be a problem.
That said, I don't think that's a reason to turn off the adblocker; I think it's a reason to send them cash. Budget a certain amount of money each month or year (if you can afford it of course), and distribute it to the websites you'd like to see stay around, if there are indeed any you care about. Don't think of it as paying a debt, think of it as an investment whose dividends are the survival and additional content the site produces in the future. Maybe this isn't the way we're used to thinking about financial transactions.
Am I right that a banner ad typically brings in $0.01-$0.05 per viewer? It might be interesting to have a Firefox plugin which keeps track of the number of times you visit a given site, and roughly how much they would have made off of you in ads.
Most advertising is malware for the human brain: it attempts to exploit weaknesses in human psychology to get us to do things we would not otherwise do.
Not all advertising is like that-- announcements of new or poorly-known products or sites or services are certainly fair. But most advertising is not informational, it is manipulative.
Even better, before reading the message the computer would first say, 'It's not my fault.'
This is still an option in OSX. I remember "It's not my fault" from OS9, but I'm pretty sure it was customizable then (as it is now as well).
More than promoted; the early computers practically begged you to program, throwing you instantly into the BASIC interpreter when you turn on the machine (without a cartridge). With the prompt "READY." and that flashing cursor-- who wouldn't be tempted to try a little programming when it's so easy to start?
I think one benefit is that community college is non-residential, so that 16-year-olds can transition to more challenging/more relevant classes without having to make the jump to living on their own. I wouldn't be concerned about these students taking classes at Harvard, but I'd wonder how they'd handle the social scene, two years younger than their peers.
If this program becomes widespread, though, are academically ambitious kids going to feel pressured to graduate early (maybe earlier than they feel comfortable with) just to keep up with their peers? That sounds a little dangerous.
And then there will be that one time when the company actually needs something new, and there is nobody to steal from....
Look at Saturn, even if you don't get much detail: seeing that bright spot of light turn into the familiar Saturn shape is really really cool for someone who's never done it before. (I speak from experience! I've seen pictures of Saturn and I've seen that bright dot in the sky, but putting the two together for the first time was pretty amazing.)
You might point out some of the major constellations or brightest stars in the sky, including tips on how to find them in the sky. It doesn't have much to do with science, but it gives students a sense of ownership of the sky which could lead to a burgeoning interest in astronomy later on. I recommend making H.A. Rey's book "The Stars" available; it's an excellent guide to stargazing.
I find it hilarious that someone rated me "Insightful" just there... but I thank you. :)
Wow, talk about having a stick up one's butt.
From my perspective, I think delisting the paper editions is more of a threat to Amazon: I shop at Amazon because I know whatever I want to buy, they have it. If that stops being the case, then I'm going to look elsewhere, maybe permanently. They might be on the right end of this dispute, but I think they're going to damage their brand if they keep this up too long.
Seems to me that "there is no global Truth" and "Truth is contextual" is meta-truth. :)
Personally, I see Truth as a many-dimensioned object, which, like a hypercube, we can never fully picture in our minds. Each one views it from a different angle.
But I try not to be dogmatic about it, and I only get grumpy when people (either fundamentalist or atheist) insist that they alone know what Truth is, and everyone else is naive (although I've called people naive in turn, so I'm a bit hypocritical).
It's not the goal of religion to explain *how* the world works (i.e. the rules of the game). Or rather, those people who expect religion to explain how the world works are bound to be disappointed, or labelled as blind fools (cf fundamentalists); I would call that superstition. Even a young-earth creationist can be a productive biologist, as long as he accepts the fact that the Law of Evolution makes useful predictions; whether it does so due to science or because God likes it that way is beside the point, as far as science is concerned.
The problem with fundamentalism isn't WHAT they believe, it's that they try to force you to live your life based on their beliefs. But that's not religion, it's jackassery (which unfortunately exists in all human cultures), and I'd be pleased if people could learn to tell the difference (just as I would hope that I could go abroad as an American and not be personally blamed for Iraq).
What you're saying is you don't care about "Truth", which I completely respect, so long as you don't claim to know it. That is what science is all about: we're studying the Rules of the Game, regardless of the purpose or context of the Game.
Whether they belong in the same category or not is in fact a matter of belief. And senses fail people ALL the time.
Prove to me that this isn't an elaborate holographic simulation you're living in, and then we can talk about "the truth". Truth is the regime of philosophers and theologians; anyone who thinks science is about "truth" is naive.
I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer"
That statement is overly general, to the point of absurdity. As a physicist, I am going to be interested in certain news items which others might not even understand. The same goes for businesspeople, lawyers, and so forth. Similarly, local news is by definition tailored to the consumer: I don't read about traffic fatalities in Bangor, Maine, nor should I.
What you're really arguing, I think, is that there is a certain subset of news which is important for everyone, and I'd agree with that. But the onus lies partially on the consumer as on the news distributor: if television news programs replaced their fluff pieces with solid news, would people watch? Is it really up to the news agencies to candy-coat, trick, or force people into watching news? I think not.
It is a problem, but the solution is to encourage people to see news-reading as an important activity. Part of that solution might be a revamp of high school education to teach people *how* to read/watch/listen to the news and interpret what they hear, and basically what they should do with it. A person can stare at the TV screen and see that the DOW has dropped by 100 points and that a jetliner crashed in Ethiopia, but what good does it do for them to see that if they don't know what to do with the information?
CLI is not the past. CLI is the future.
I agree with you but for a different reason: voice recognition and semantic parsing both qualify as command-line. When Geordi says, "Computer, run a level-1 diagnostic", that's a command-line interface. If a user could type "Make all the JPG files in this folder 800x600" into a command-line, then I think that would be very popular. Not that GUI will ever go away, but CLI could become more a part of everyday computer use, provided it becomes more intuitive and/or people learn how to be more precise in their language (e.g. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot.")