I remembered the guy's name this morning (Rasputin), and armed with that, google erected
this page which shows the organ in question. Definitely not for those who are prone to an inferiority complex.:)
"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Certitude Cer"ti*tude, n. LL. certitudo, fr. L. certus: cf.
F. certitude. See Certain.
Freedom from doubt; assurance; certainty. --J. H. Newman.
Not to worry. If he could cover it with his hands, it's not all that impressive a tool. No one would faint. If you don't immediately understand what I'm telling you, go google (images) for the obvious. Find whats-his-name of the Russian court; there's pics of what is purported to be his tool in a jar, no kidding. They had it on Yahoo news images last year. Hands wouldn't cover it, even if you folded the thing in half.
Say... If someone believes in the shroud, they also, inescapably, must believe Jesus had a little dick. Does the bible say, "If you can't reach bottom, bang the hell out of the sides" somewhere?
Oh and it's history, not science, that provides the evidence for the Bible. You'd turn to a historian, not a physicist to find out what Julius Caesar did, wouldn't you?
Please, enlighten me as to how historical facts in the bible, presuming they are such, in any way provide surety that the general story of the bible itself is not a work of fiction. Surely you understand that when a work of fiction is written, including information about a real context is much, much easier than making one up out of whole cloth. The more you include, the easier the writing goes. You seem to be arguing that because there are historical facts in the bible, that the bible itself is historical fact, through and through. Is that the case you are trying to make? If so, back it up, if you can. Otherwise your whole approach is massively flawed.
What would be a better word for somebody who believes that there are no gods, then?
In most atheist circles, this is called the "hard atheist position." That is where someone is willing to state "There is no god" and then either make an effort to back the position up, or claim that they can do so. It is a very, very tough argument to make well, as is any argument that purports to define a circumstance where there is little or no data to work from.
Some years back, a very, very old -- literally prehistoric -- type of fish called a "Coelacanth" was pulled up off the coast of Africa. If you had asked a paleontologist any day prior to that one if there were any of these still swimming around, they would have almost to a person told you no, with no small degree of certitude. The very idea seemed absurd. To everyone. If you asked why, they'd (quite reasonably) tell you that the odds against such a fish surviving were awesomely against; very few species do such things; we've never, ever seen one in all our years of sea-faring, fishing, and so on. In other words -- just plain no.
Yet, one day, there one was. Ugly as sin and probably twice as interesting as sin to most paleontologists, at least for a while. I've never run into a paleontologist on slashdot, so I have a fair degree of confidence that they do have an interest in real-life sex. Ahem. Anyway...
That's a good example of why arguing for "knowledge" from indirect information, other experience, and even the current state of general scientific knowledge isn't always such a great idea.
There may be a god or gods. We have no experience here; just as we had never seen a Coleacanth, but then, one day, we did -- so it might go with god, or gods. This is why I tend to view the hard atheist argument as potentially weak, no matter what other experience they draw upon.
On the other hand (and this is a powerful counter argument) we've never seen a live T. Rex, either, nor are we very likely to.:)
That's where I retreat to my confidence approach to life. I have high confidence I'll never see a live T. Rex on Earth, barring genetic engineering, that is. But if I do -- it was only confidence, after all. It won't screw up my worldview at all, it'll just please the heck out of me because it'll make the world that much more interesting.
What if you just believe that you should not take a stance because there is insufficient evidence on both sides? Meaning, based on the available "facts", you consider it meaningless to choose a position. A "committed agnostic", you might call them, would simply be somebody that says "I looked at the evidence on both sides and decided that there wasn't enough of it to form a belief, even a slight one, either for or against".
There is no problem here. A theist is someone with a belief in a god or gods. The position you postulate represents someone who holds no such belief. That is the very definition of an atheist: Someone without a belief in a god or gods. Doesn't matter why they arrived there, the point is, they are there.
So, the question you're asking is "What is your belief concerning the existence of God(s)?" An agnostic would answer simply, "I don't have one". Yes, by your definition, that would make him an atheist, but he would believe even less than an atheist agnostic would.
An atheist "anything" holds no belief in god. Without isn't a term that admits of degree. It means you don't have any. If I am without oranges, I don't have three of them instead of a bushell, for instance. If I say I am without funds, I am telling you I am broke - I don't even have money to buy penny candy. And coming back around, if I say I am without belief (and you may assume with a very high degree of confidence that I am) I don't have any belief that there is a god or gods. Your "committed agnostic" can't have less belief than I do, because I don't have any.
What your agnostic is saying is, emphatically, they hold no belief in god. There are all manner of atheist positions, just as there are all manner of theist positions, but none of them is any more atheist or theist than the next, as far as I am concerned. They can be more or less logical, more or less accurate, more or less annoying, and more or less about a zillion other things. When I talked about atheist agnostics and theist agnostics, I was attempting to make the point that knowledge -- theory, evidence, facts -- isn't involved in the issue of theist/atheist, because we're talking about belief, not knowledge.
Belief is an utterly trivial state of mind; people believe in elves, pyramid healing, phrenology, astrology, luck charms, angels, gods, UFOs, telepathy, life on other planets, the evil eye, voodoo, crystalomancy, big bang, creationism, hollow earth, homeopathy... I could go on, it seems, forever. They enter into active states of belief with solid facts, shreds of facts, complete lack of facts, and everywhere on the continuum those points define. Belief, as far as I am concerned, is the very poster child for retarded intellectual processes. I prefer to avoid it and talk about confidence, which is something that fits the world I see a whole lot better than belief. I try very hard not to ride the belief train at all. Which, of course, makes me a dyed in the wool atheist.:)
Theism and atheism just define if you hold belief in a god or gods.
The question is, "Does the glass contain water?" Not - "How much water is in the glass?" The determination of a theist or atheist position is a conversation starter to me, not the whole shooting match.
All matters of word definitions aside, you seem to be assuming that everybody must either believe that there is a god or believe that there isn't.
Which simply isn't true...
Not at all. I assume that everybody either has a belief in a god or gods, or they don't. Which is true. And which is not at all the same as "beliving there is no god", which is what you said. That is an atheist position that some people take, but it is not the atheist position that all athei
I think you have to look at the word's roots and reasons for existing if the dictionary definition(s) are suspect. This is one case where the dictionary is clearly way out in left field. It's not always as easy to point the finger, the English language can definitely be slippery.
In this case, looking in the same 1913 Websters at "theism", they say:
"The belief or acknowledgement of the existence of a god, as opposed to atheism, pantheism, or polytheism." For them to say that the "opposition" is belief in something else (even if that something is a negative proposition), rather than a lack of belief, exceeds my etymological, semantic and linguistic credulity thresholds. Not only have they hashed the definition of atheism, they contradicted themselves when trying to define theism. As they have it, atheism is in the same camp with polytheism. Duh. If the twerp who wrote this had been working for me (I own a literary agency, among other things) they'd be working in the mailroom before they knew what hit them. With someone watching over their shoulder so as to make sure that mail didn't go to Nigeria instead of Niagara Falls.
Anyway... I'm not sure there is an ultimate authority for anything. It seems to me that we work with metaphor refinement at all times, trying to hew as close to reality as we can manage. We're often somewhat "off", we discover some additional info that helps us out, and then we do some adjusting of our attitudes, metaphors, what have you. That's certainly the case for science (in fact, a better layman's description of the confluence of idea, repeatability and falsification in science as "metaphor refinement" might be difficult to come up with.)
A person who is theist agnostic would say "I believe this is so, but I don't actually know -- I lack sufficient facts and/or evidence to make a case for either existance or non-existance."
A committed theist would say "yes, I know this because (whatever ''fact'' set that floats their boat... the world is too complex to be the product of nature rather than "design", He saved my kid brother, my toast had the Virgin Mary on it, I played Black Sabbath backwards at 78 speed when I was on acid, whatever.)"
An atheist agnostic would say: "I don't believe this is so, but I don't know -- I lack sufficient facts and/or evidence to make a case for either existance or non-existance."
A comitted atheist (sometimes called a "hard or hardened atheist") would say "no, because (whatever ''fact'' set floats their boat... the world is too chaotic to be the product of "design" rather than nature, My kid brother drowned, my toast only had butter on it, I played Black Sabbath backwards at 78 speed when I was on acid, whatever.)"
Someone who is operating under the mistaken assumption that an agnostic is magically neither a theist or an athest would simply say "I don't know" in an attempt to sidestep the issue of belief -- which is precisely what "theist" refers to -- belief, not "knowledge." Typical reasons for this are that socially, a lack of belief is frowned upon by the majority, or that the question was not understood by the listener for whatever reason (usually a poor education or poor absorption of education, IMHO, but perhaps that's just my cynical take on your average/median citizen of IQ 100 or less.)
If you're truly trying to talk about knowledge -- as distinct from belief, which does not have to involve knowledge (facts) at all -- then theism and atheism aren't even on the table for discussion. Which leaves god or gods out of the discussion. In that case, the specific question you're asking here is utter nonsense based on the proposed audience if the objective is a definitive and all-inclusive set of answers.
To illustrate the absurdity of how you posed the question: If you ask, "Does god exist", a dictionary writer will respond "Yes. Under G." A dyslexic might answer, "No, I have a cat." The problem is, as always, domain; the domain of interest is that of belief, and that domain is that which the words theist and atheist exist to delineate. The question "Do you believe in a god or gods" is the question "Are you theist, or atheist?" You weren't asking about knowledge, and so the answer of the self-declared agnostic does not pertain.
Dictionary.com and websters.com are reporting Christian usage, not the word's actual meaning. The Webster's definition dates back to (at least) the 1913 edition, a time when religion and other forms of delusion, such as phrenology and fortune telling were a good deal more widespread in US culture than they are today, proportionally speaking. This is a situation that drops their reliability and accuracy, not something that changes the meaning of the term.
This is because the entry is not only wrong, it demonstrates blatent presumption instead of research into etymology. An incompetant dictionary entry (or several) does not, hopefully, suffice to change a word's meaning. If it does, it is nothing to be proud of -- it's just the ebonics of the dictionary writer infesting (degrading, actually) our culture.
At present, these words still hold on to their original meanings, which are crystal clear. If you understand the word, you're either theist, or atheist. No way around it. Sorry.:)
If you insist on using the word incorrectly, then all I need to ask is "do you believe, in any way or to any degree, that there is a god or gods?" Then I'll know where in the solution set you land. You can explain why, of course, but it won't change the binary nature of the domain no matter what you do.
You say:
As for people who don't have any sort of a belief regarding gods (meaning they never thought about the subject or they just don't care)... I don't know if there's a word for that.
There is. It is "atheist." Without a belief in a god or gods. The reason you didn't know this is because your command of English has failed you. Websters has failed you as well. Just be more careful in the future. Don't you know that you can't trust "the man"?:)
Well, I have read both the new and the old testament. As well as the Koran and a few other of humanity's creative efforts.
"The gospels" are not evidence of anything but that a bunch of writings were collected from time periods that may extend back to about the 100's or 200's by our current dating system.
The gospels are a book. And like any book, what they contain is not, in and of itself, of sufficient weight to be taken as evidence of anything.
Tom Clancy writes Hunt for Red October. Warships, US political policy, Soviet warships, naval ranks, 20th-century weapons, the CIA and KGB and tons more are described in this book. They are all reasonable and true references to things that really exist, they accurately imply things that really happened to make those things exist, and so on. But the book is a known work of fiction with entirely ficticious points to make about entirely ficticious people and entirely ficticious situations. The "facts" are in there so the book reads more easily. The same reason that the "facts" are in any work of fiction.
You said:
Have you ever actually read and studied the gospels? If you havent, how can you possibly say your opinion is right when you havent even studied the evidence?
The gospels aren't evidence.
Most people -- myself included -- would welcome actual evidence. That is, Jesus floating down out of the sky, pointing a finger at you and saying "I know you are underfeeding your cat... your punishment will be six months of starvation", which pronouncement is immediately followed by the supernatural stripping of all your body fat so you can start starving now.
This, presumably, after he takes care of the starving folks in Africa and elsewhere by giving them the body fat he took from you. Temporal order being no particular impediment to an omnipotent diety, right?
Lacking evidence of similar undeniable merit, not to mention reproducability (should be no problem, right? Your god is supposed to be omnipotent, omnipresent and infallible as well as ineffable), you'll have to forgive the real scientists around here while we pooh-pooh your supposed "evidence."
The evidence in no way supports your conclusion. So yes -- you're deluded.
Mostly in support of what you appear to be saying:
theist: "belief in a god or gods"
prefix a: "without"
a-theist: "without-belief in a god or gods"
You are either theist -- meaning, you hold a belief in a god or gods -- or you are atheist -- meaning you are without, or do not hold, a belief in a god or gods.
There is in no way a third position you can call "agnostic." Either you hold a belief in a god or gods, or you don't. There is no middle ground.
If as you say "you don't think anyone has the answers, that makes you an agnostic" that does not magically lift you from the yes/no domain of the theist/atheist concept.
Either you hold some shred of belief and as a consequence you are by definition theist, or you don't, and you are by definition atheist.
A declaration about who might -- or might not -- have answers is a position that embodies at least part of an explaination of why one might land on one side or the other of the above binary domain. Not a new domain in and of itself that obviates the first, or a state that makes the domain trinary instead of binary.
If you ask someone if they are theist or atheist, and they respond with "agnostic", then what you have discovered is that they don't understand the question. You can reasonably extrapolate that further digging you may undertake may well return other nonsense answers until/unless some successful teaching can be accomplished. Then you just have to look at the situation and decide if it is worth your time.
...today, scientists report that carbon dating of the "Toast of the Virgin Mary" was likely in error. Professor Egon Frushkup said that "previous attempts to date the toast were flawed in that too many of the samples were taken from the crust." Popular urban legends attribute the toast to a 20th-century Ebay hoax; the pope, Pontificus Maximus Jerod XV, has stated that "the Toast is a sign from God which dates from the very first days of Christ."
We would like to thank Professor Frushkup for taking a few minutes out of his 7.0 day worshihp services to speak with 28th Century News.
No. It certainly won't. But it will solve that problem, and I seriously doubt it would cause any new problems, or magnify other current problems, though I'm quite willing to pay attention to any case made otherwise.
To answer your previous point, also no -- when meeting needs and desires is a very inexpensive operation, people won't generally stir themselves to commit crimes to accomplish the same goals. It's too much work, and the risk/benefit ratio is too high.
Case in point: When is the last time a wino tried to rob you to buy a bottle? When is the last time you even heard about such a thing? A bottle of wine is a couple of bucks. You can get one by walking into lots of places and plunking down pocket change. Daily pocket change is fairly easy to obtain, even for a street person. Just beg a little, and most people, including me, will hand over a small amount. I can almost always spare a couple bucks. $100 a night, or more, is not obtainable though such trivial means, and the risk/benefit ratio alters considerably. What average citizen, much less street person, can afford $700.00, or more, a week in entertainment costs?
Tell that to the mother of the 5 yr old girl killed at home while in bed by drug dealers shooting each other in DC
The only reason there are drug turf battles is because of the drug laws. If drugs were legal, inexpensive controlled substances (as they could easily be), there wouldn't be any "turf" to fight over, any more than there is a problem with "alchohol dealer turf battles." There used to be such alchohol turf battles -- and yes, that was when alchohol was illegal. Prohibition. Look it up. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."
The problem here is that drugs are illegal traffic; not drugs themselves. Your government caused this problem, and they also have the ability to fix it. Right now. But they don't want to. Now that is something you should be worrying about.
So go tell the mother of that five year old girl that her kid would still be alive if it weren't for the "mommy laws" (laws that regulate personal choices) that she probably supports, because she's a dumbass, like most of the rest of the population. The legislators are guilty of placing a high demand, hugely profitable and easily serviced marketplace outside the law. The general public is guilty of supporting the legislators in these actions.
"Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public -- or the people they elect."
The definition of "consenting adult" varies depending upon where you are; and it should vary according to the mental maturity of the "child", regardless of age, though I've never heard of such a thing being implemented.
The "child" may already have been quite sexually active with peers and suffer absolutely no injury whatsoever, mental, physical, or social by an interaction with another "child" or an "adult", recorded or not. If you look back in the fifties, it was considered quite a coup for a young girl,15 or so, to collar a 21-year old. They wrote songs about it; that's the way it was. Society's busy little pendulum has swung very far the other way, and that's what most people are influenced by. It'll most likely be quite different (again) in 50 years or so.
The "adult" may be a little ways one side of the "line", and the "child" may be a little ways on the other side of the "line." We had a case like that here in our small town; the "women's resource center" and the local lawfolk absolutely toasted this guy because he had sex with a girl just slightly younger than he was. Both were teenagers. He did some jail time, and he's on the local sexual offender's list for life where ever it is he's moved off to. He ran out of here in grief and shame, no big surprise. I'm reasonably sure that moving to where no one knows you blunts the trauma of being declared a "pedophile" a bit. Though at least we (the locals) knew he'd been dallying with someone who was essentially his age.
We're coming into a time when realistic "child porn" will be technically possible without involving a child. And to some extent -- using young-looking actors -- it is already possible. Other types of "unacceptable behaviour" will become creatable as film representations with the introduction of software along the lines of "Exotiqe's Ani-Porn Construction Set." And again, we're already part way there. A new opportunity for our legislators to prove they're utterly incompetent looms. I look forward to it; nothing goes as well with breakfast as some politician trying to get his foot into his mouth up to his hip.
The problem isn't drinking; the problem is driving while drunk. Likewise, the problem isn't drugs.
What is needed is to drop the entire social underpinning that makes people say "oh, well, I was drunk at the time" as if it was an excuse, and the social echoes of that which pervade almost our entire society.
Being voluntarily incompetent is not an excuse; when you decide to drink, your responsibilities and obligations don't magically dissapear. You may feel like they do, but you're entirely wrong. You made the choice to drink or drug, and so any choices you make while drunk or stoned are just as much your responsibility as if you were cold sober.
Drinking and drugging are activities that need to be approached with great care and consideration, not to mention a little planning (stay home, designate a driver, allow for recovery time, inform anyone who depends on you that you're going to be non compos for a time.) Drugs and alchohol are not the problem.
The problem is that your average citizen is a dumbass who can't understand that the burden of personal responsibility they carry as a member of a society of greater membership that one extends into all realms of action they undertake, no matter what condition they bring upon themselves -- and so they aren't taking care weith those conditions.
The only reasonable exception here is when someone is drugged against their will, or without their knowledge. At that point, the responsibility lands on (or never left) the shoulders of the administrator of the substance.
Doesn't matter, though; the public can't think, the legislature is composed of idiots, and the legal system is flat out broken. Drunk drivers will continue to get off essentially scot-free, when we should be killing them outright.
PPC NT was extremely functional, and was a very stable applications development platform. We ported a huge application -- something considerably more powerful and functional than Photoshop, though quite different in many respects -- without any real trouble. Certainly no more than was posed by going between Windows 95 and NT.
You can say anything you want, but the fact is, the platform was there and just about as stable as any other NT.
Your remark about applications not being available is certainly on-target, but that doesn't have anything in particular to do with MS's ability to put the OS on a particular hardware platform -- cell, in this case.
The real issue here is that Alpha, MIPS, and definitely PPC were not accepted into the marketplace in any kind of reasonable numbers, and MS made a (most likely perfectly reasonable) decision not to pursue OS development further. Early adopters -- and early supporters, like us -- took a risk and we got burned for taking that risk. But that doesn't mean that there cannot be a situation where a port would take off.
If cell lives up to the hype as typified in the FA, then MS may well decide to indulge themselves in another round of OS building. If they do, it will be huge news, and give the processor a cachet that all the Linux development in the world cannot. Also, if the cell lives up to the hype, we're talking about a whole different level of performance. Some applications -- like ours -- can use every bit of performance that can be provided. Ray tracing is a good example here. Our software, among other things, has an integral ray tracer. No matter how powerful cell is, it is not powerful enough to make non-trivial ray tracing a "no wait" operation. But if it is 100x as powerful as the top of the line x86, it'll sure make a noticable difference. The same thing applies to high resolution (cinema and to some extent HDTV, I mean, not standard video), special effects processing of streams will be much faster too. And that will sell quite a few cell-based machines. If every non-trivial application that is ported shows a considerable speed-up, developers will be motivated to port, because users want performance. What do you think Intel has been making money off all of these years? The user's desire for more performance, that's what. It's really that simple.
I'm certainly not saying that porting is trivial. But I am saying they have done it in the past, and they can do it again in the future. If you want to continue to argue the point, by all means feel free to have the last word -- but you're not going to get me to agree with you. I've seen MS work; I've been deeply involved on three of the ports they've done; and I know they can do it. Furthermore, if the platform appears to be more viable than the older RISC machines, I think they'll almost certainly stick to it longer and work harder on it as well. If there's profit to be made, MS will be looking hard at the situation. Count on it. Microsoft is annoying as hell, but it sure isn't blind or stupid as a corporate entity.
don't give me crap about NT running on Alpha. It ran on 32bit version, and there was a early beta of W2k that ran 64bit native, but the Win32 API and everything else you use on your computer is and always has been x86-only
It's not crap; we produced release versions of our graphics software for Windows on x86, PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha at one point. Shipped some, too. We had machines for all four architectures (still have them, in fact, though the Alpha and PowerPC's are mothballed), development tools, and working Windows OS's on all of them, and they all ran Windows NT, approximately the same version. Perfect, definitely not -- but Windows under x86 isn't perfect either. It worked well, certainly no worse than the x86 versions. We still use one of the MIPS machines as a backup file server. It refuses to die.
Now, I'm no fan of Windows, but if you think MS couldn't port Windows to another architecture beyond x86, you're only fooling yourself. They can any time they want to, they have already, three times that I know of for certain, not counting whatever credit you want to give Windows CE ports, if any, and there you have it. For all I know there may have been ports to 68k archtectures... I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
You have to consider that MS has more money than anyone, and if they decide to go this route, there is no reason to think they cannot do it. I doubt there is any market force, including Sony and the largest governments in the world, that could put a serious roadblock in front of them in this arena.
Actually, it has been done. Long ago, by Pohl Anderson in "Tau Zero", a truly wonderful SF work that turns a space drive accident into about as plausable a "get to-and-through the end of the universe" tale as you're ever likely to read.
If you're an SF fan, FWIW, this recommendation is from an owner of a SF-specialized literary agency and the son of a SF writer popular from the 50's... 70's or so. If the idea of creation-spanning is interesting to you, then read this book; you are very unlikely to regret it.
The social mileau in the book will feel a trifle dated; the science won't.
Yes, providing free stuff in a non free world is a very tough thing to do. Bandwidth costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Maintainance costs money. Administration costs money.
I understand that you want "free" anyway, but I don't have much sympathy for it.
If you really want free stuff, you have to arrange for the infrastructure that carries the free stuff to be free, or as nearly so as possible. Are you doing that?
I host several free sites. Two of them carry a whole bunch of traffic (specifics if you're curious, otherwise, not particularly relevant); others, not so much. Getting the site to pay for itself is not easy, in fact I'd say it is an art. There will be lots of failures. Others will arise, though.
Now, if Google is having severe problems with one kind of fraud or another, the thing I keep in mind is that it's not just the advertiser's revenue stream that is at risk here, it is Google's as well. I expect they'll solve the problem -- they have the best of motivations to do so.
It's not "cake hole", it's "keg hole." You know, where they drive in the bung (what you probably think of as the "cork") You want to say: "Shut your keg hole!"
If you're going to be abusive, at least get it right.:)
You know, you might have some additional data; your web logs could show where those clicks came from, depending on how sophisticated the attack was. Have you done any mining to see where the incoming IP's are from?
Another thing. As you have good stats on ad response from Yahoo and etc, perhaps you should gather those up and present them to Google. Google waits before it pays ad-bearing sites (about 30 days after the close of the advertising month) and during that time, they can and will revise the payment to be made.
The reason that it might be worth your time to do this is that while it is possible for the spammers to obscure the incoming IP's (HTTP_REFERER) that you'll see in your logs, an attack has to come from just one or a relatively few sites -- and Google should know exactly where your clicks came from because while the HTTP_REFERER can be obscured, the ad placement probably can't -- I think that Google has to know where the ad bearing sites are in order to determine which ad to show. If one or just a few sites are providing the majority of your incoming traffic, and that traffic shows an HTTP_REFERER in your logs that isn't the actual referring site, then Google may elect to respond by invalidating the clicks.
If the HTTP_REFERER is not fake in this case, then you may have a pointer right to the problem site. If that's the case, Google may be able to block them from using your ad (I know that the ad-carrier can block any particular ad -- this is just Google enforcing the same thing.)
Even if you're going to skip Google from now on, I'd still pursue the issue. Perhaps you can get your $$$ back, and inflict a financial wound on the attackers. If Google figures out what is going on in your case, they'll probably figure out what is going on in other cases.
There's (probably) another clue for Google once they look into this -- ads are pretty dependable in the sense that they pull a particular percentage of the viewing public. Looking at our ad stats, they're pretty darned steady, really. If your ads show a huge spike, I would think they'd take that into account.
Anyway, I'd encourage you to pursue this. Google's been very good with us; my impression is that they'll try to do the right thing.
Google and crew will deal with the revenue trolls. It's fraud, it's detectable and fairly obvious. The technology is new, doesn't bother me at all. They'll get it handled. That's one smart bunch of folks over at Google. I am not moved to worry about this even a little. And yes, we use Google ads -- and they work extremely well for us.
What I was doing in the GP was answering the question the slashdot story poster asked -- where will ads go. That's where I think they'll go. No more, no less. Disagree? Fine, explain yourself. Not talking about the same thing as I am? Also fine, but not relevant to my post.
As for the silly "mod parent down" hysteria... Mod me any way you want, folks. I don't post for "karma" (it's useless anyway, moderation here is completely broken and metamoderation isn't much better -- see my journal) and I read at -1. I'm here because I like the format. Mod me right to -1, and enjoy the experience. It won't mean anything to me unless they fix the system. Heck, compared to slashdot's moderation system, Google is darned near perfect.:)
Disagree. Pay per click isn't the problem. Bad (misleading) ads are the problem; there's no reason to presume that pay per click will die because of these. The advertisers will die, instead. And where's the downside of that?
There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.
If you do follow those basic guidelines, then the ads will bring potential customers by your pages, and some percentage of them will actually purchase your product(s) and/or service(s).
There's no magic to this -- unless you're a fraud right out of the gate anyway.
That's not to say that you can't work the system in such a way as to make it legitimately benefit you. For instance:
Some of my competitors do such a poor job, I decided to put Google ads right on our sales pages so our customers could easily find our competitors. The results they get are so yucky that I consider them to be marketing for us, in a reverse sort of way. There's nothing on our pages that say "go look at how crappy our competitors are, click the ads and then come back" or anything like that... the ads just sit there, advertising software similar to ours... and our sales picked up about 20% over four weeks once we put the ads on. Apparently, our customers are savvy enough to know where they've been -- and how to come back -- when they wander off to look at these other folks. And the funny thing is that we get paid for all this. Now, if our competitors are silly enough to keep advertising a shoddy product, why, I'm simply delighed to host their ads.:)
First of all, we can block window spawning. So popups will probably die. I haven't seen one in ages... I probably won't know when they die, though. They've been dead to me for some time. Firefox, y'know.:)
Secondly, we can block images from any site, including the one we're currently on (Firefox does this too), so these are highly vulnerable to being smushed (a smush industry technical term, sorry), and so ads-as-images will probably die, or at least cut way, way back. I don't see many of these either.
Third, we can block google-style ads (ads sourced using off-site bandwidth) by blocking the source at the reject-this-server level. So google style ads are vulnerable, and could die too... though these are so inoffensive to me that I've never bothered to even try (plus, they're often actually relevant, which puts a different face on matters.) Let's say that rather than likely to die, they are at least still vulnerable to being killed.
That leaves text ads that are sourced from the site we're actually visiting. We want to read the text on the site, so we're not going to block text in general. Doing so selectively is problematic, to say the least; I think you're likely to end up blocking exactly what you want to read if the ads are well-targeted. Google (for instance) could pull this off by supplying the ad stream to the site we're visiting sub-rosa, and then the site has to source the ad using its own bandwidth and server resources, to us. A smart site will move the ads around and they'll really be difficult to distinguish with software that isn't nearly as smart as you are. At that point, you're probably going to see the ad -- there's no good way to distinguish it from the desired reading material if it is well aimed.
So that's where I think we're heading. FWIW, which, as with most crystal ball gazing, probably isn't a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
I remembered the guy's name this morning (Rasputin), and armed with that, google erected this page which shows the organ in question. Definitely not for those who are prone to an inferiority complex. :)
Certitude Cer"ti*tude, n. LL. certitudo, fr. L. certus: cf.
F. certitude. See Certain.
Freedom from doubt; assurance; certainty. --J. H. Newman.
Say... If someone believes in the shroud, they also, inescapably, must believe Jesus had a little dick. Does the bible say, "If you can't reach bottom, bang the hell out of the sides" somewhere?
No wonder he let the romans kill him. :)
Please, enlighten me as to how historical facts in the bible, presuming they are such, in any way provide surety that the general story of the bible itself is not a work of fiction. Surely you understand that when a work of fiction is written, including information about a real context is much, much easier than making one up out of whole cloth. The more you include, the easier the writing goes. You seem to be arguing that because there are historical facts in the bible, that the bible itself is historical fact, through and through. Is that the case you are trying to make? If so, back it up, if you can. Otherwise your whole approach is massively flawed.
In most atheist circles, this is called the "hard atheist position." That is where someone is willing to state "There is no god" and then either make an effort to back the position up, or claim that they can do so. It is a very, very tough argument to make well, as is any argument that purports to define a circumstance where there is little or no data to work from.
Some years back, a very, very old -- literally prehistoric -- type of fish called a "Coelacanth" was pulled up off the coast of Africa. If you had asked a paleontologist any day prior to that one if there were any of these still swimming around, they would have almost to a person told you no, with no small degree of certitude. The very idea seemed absurd. To everyone. If you asked why, they'd (quite reasonably) tell you that the odds against such a fish surviving were awesomely against; very few species do such things; we've never, ever seen one in all our years of sea-faring, fishing, and so on. In other words -- just plain no.
Yet, one day, there one was. Ugly as sin and probably twice as interesting as sin to most paleontologists, at least for a while. I've never run into a paleontologist on slashdot, so I have a fair degree of confidence that they do have an interest in real-life sex. Ahem. Anyway...
That's a good example of why arguing for "knowledge" from indirect information, other experience, and even the current state of general scientific knowledge isn't always such a great idea.
There may be a god or gods. We have no experience here; just as we had never seen a Coleacanth, but then, one day, we did -- so it might go with god, or gods. This is why I tend to view the hard atheist argument as potentially weak, no matter what other experience they draw upon.
On the other hand (and this is a powerful counter argument) we've never seen a live T. Rex, either, nor are we very likely to. :)
That's where I retreat to my confidence approach to life. I have high confidence I'll never see a live T. Rex on Earth, barring genetic engineering, that is. But if I do -- it was only confidence, after all. It won't screw up my worldview at all, it'll just please the heck out of me because it'll make the world that much more interesting.
Don't think so, but let's see.
There is no problem here. A theist is someone with a belief in a god or gods. The position you postulate represents someone who holds no such belief. That is the very definition of an atheist: Someone without a belief in a god or gods. Doesn't matter why they arrived there, the point is, they are there.
An atheist "anything" holds no belief in god. Without isn't a term that admits of degree. It means you don't have any. If I am without oranges, I don't have three of them instead of a bushell, for instance. If I say I am without funds, I am telling you I am broke - I don't even have money to buy penny candy. And coming back around, if I say I am without belief (and you may assume with a very high degree of confidence that I am) I don't have any belief that there is a god or gods. Your "committed agnostic" can't have less belief than I do, because I don't have any.
What your agnostic is saying is, emphatically, they hold no belief in god. There are all manner of atheist positions, just as there are all manner of theist positions, but none of them is any more atheist or theist than the next, as far as I am concerned. They can be more or less logical, more or less accurate, more or less annoying, and more or less about a zillion other things. When I talked about atheist agnostics and theist agnostics, I was attempting to make the point that knowledge -- theory, evidence, facts -- isn't involved in the issue of theist/atheist, because we're talking about belief, not knowledge.
Belief is an utterly trivial state of mind; people believe in elves, pyramid healing, phrenology, astrology, luck charms, angels, gods, UFOs, telepathy, life on other planets, the evil eye, voodoo, crystalomancy, big bang, creationism, hollow earth, homeopathy... I could go on, it seems, forever. They enter into active states of belief with solid facts, shreds of facts, complete lack of facts, and everywhere on the continuum those points define. Belief, as far as I am concerned, is the very poster child for retarded intellectual processes. I prefer to avoid it and talk about confidence, which is something that fits the world I see a whole lot better than belief. I try very hard not to ride the belief train at all. Which, of course, makes me a dyed in the wool atheist. :)
Theism and atheism just define if you hold belief in a god or gods.
The question is, "Does the glass contain water?" Not - "How much water is in the glass?" The determination of a theist or atheist position is a conversation starter to me, not the whole shooting match.
Not at all. I assume that everybody either has a belief in a god or gods, or they don't. Which is true. And which is not at all the same as "beliving there is no god", which is what you said. That is an atheist position that some people take, but it is not the atheist position that all athei
In this case, looking in the same 1913 Websters at "theism", they say:
"The belief or acknowledgement of the existence of a god, as opposed to atheism, pantheism, or polytheism." For them to say that the "opposition" is belief in something else (even if that something is a negative proposition), rather than a lack of belief, exceeds my etymological, semantic and linguistic credulity thresholds. Not only have they hashed the definition of atheism, they contradicted themselves when trying to define theism. As they have it, atheism is in the same camp with polytheism. Duh. If the twerp who wrote this had been working for me (I own a literary agency, among other things) they'd be working in the mailroom before they knew what hit them. With someone watching over their shoulder so as to make sure that mail didn't go to Nigeria instead of Niagara Falls.
Anyway... I'm not sure there is an ultimate authority for anything. It seems to me that we work with metaphor refinement at all times, trying to hew as close to reality as we can manage. We're often somewhat "off", we discover some additional info that helps us out, and then we do some adjusting of our attitudes, metaphors, what have you. That's certainly the case for science (in fact, a better layman's description of the confluence of idea, repeatability and falsification in science as "metaphor refinement" might be difficult to come up with.)
A person who is theist agnostic would say "I believe this is so, but I don't actually know -- I lack sufficient facts and/or evidence to make a case for either existance or non-existance."
A committed theist would say "yes, I know this because (whatever ''fact'' set that floats their boat... the world is too complex to be the product of nature rather than "design", He saved my kid brother, my toast had the Virgin Mary on it, I played Black Sabbath backwards at 78 speed when I was on acid, whatever.)"
An atheist agnostic would say: "I don't believe this is so, but I don't know -- I lack sufficient facts and/or evidence to make a case for either existance or non-existance."
A comitted atheist (sometimes called a "hard or hardened atheist") would say "no, because (whatever ''fact'' set floats their boat... the world is too chaotic to be the product of "design" rather than nature, My kid brother drowned, my toast only had butter on it, I played Black Sabbath backwards at 78 speed when I was on acid, whatever.)"
Someone who is operating under the mistaken assumption that an agnostic is magically neither a theist or an athest would simply say "I don't know" in an attempt to sidestep the issue of belief -- which is precisely what "theist" refers to -- belief, not "knowledge." Typical reasons for this are that socially, a lack of belief is frowned upon by the majority, or that the question was not understood by the listener for whatever reason (usually a poor education or poor absorption of education, IMHO, but perhaps that's just my cynical take on your average/median citizen of IQ 100 or less.)
If you're truly trying to talk about knowledge -- as distinct from belief, which does not have to involve knowledge (facts) at all -- then theism and atheism aren't even on the table for discussion. Which leaves god or gods out of the discussion. In that case, the specific question you're asking here is utter nonsense based on the proposed audience if the objective is a definitive and all-inclusive set of answers.
To illustrate the absurdity of how you posed the question: If you ask, "Does god exist", a dictionary writer will respond "Yes. Under G." A dyslexic might answer, "No, I have a cat." The problem is, as always, domain; the domain of interest is that of belief, and that domain is that which the words theist and atheist exist to delineate. The question "Do you believe in a god or gods" is the question "Are you theist, or atheist?" You weren't asking about knowledge, and so the answer of the self-declared agnostic does not pertain.
This is because the entry is not only wrong, it demonstrates blatent presumption instead of research into etymology. An incompetant dictionary entry (or several) does not, hopefully, suffice to change a word's meaning. If it does, it is nothing to be proud of -- it's just the ebonics of the dictionary writer infesting (degrading, actually) our culture.
At present, these words still hold on to their original meanings, which are crystal clear. If you understand the word, you're either theist, or atheist. No way around it. Sorry. :)
If you insist on using the word incorrectly, then all I need to ask is "do you believe, in any way or to any degree, that there is a god or gods?" Then I'll know where in the solution set you land. You can explain why, of course, but it won't change the binary nature of the domain no matter what you do.
You say:
There is. It is "atheist." Without a belief in a god or gods. The reason you didn't know this is because your command of English has failed you. Websters has failed you as well. Just be more careful in the future. Don't you know that you can't trust "the man"? :)
Well, I have read both the new and the old testament. As well as the Koran and a few other of humanity's creative efforts.
"The gospels" are not evidence of anything but that a bunch of writings were collected from time periods that may extend back to about the 100's or 200's by our current dating system.
The gospels are a book. And like any book, what they contain is not, in and of itself, of sufficient weight to be taken as evidence of anything.
Tom Clancy writes Hunt for Red October. Warships, US political policy, Soviet warships, naval ranks, 20th-century weapons, the CIA and KGB and tons more are described in this book. They are all reasonable and true references to things that really exist, they accurately imply things that really happened to make those things exist, and so on. But the book is a known work of fiction with entirely ficticious points to make about entirely ficticious people and entirely ficticious situations. The "facts" are in there so the book reads more easily. The same reason that the "facts" are in any work of fiction.
You said:
The gospels aren't evidence.
Most people -- myself included -- would welcome actual evidence. That is, Jesus floating down out of the sky, pointing a finger at you and saying "I know you are underfeeding your cat... your punishment will be six months of starvation", which pronouncement is immediately followed by the supernatural stripping of all your body fat so you can start starving now.
This, presumably, after he takes care of the starving folks in Africa and elsewhere by giving them the body fat he took from you. Temporal order being no particular impediment to an omnipotent diety, right?
Lacking evidence of similar undeniable merit, not to mention reproducability (should be no problem, right? Your god is supposed to be omnipotent, omnipresent and infallible as well as ineffable), you'll have to forgive the real scientists around here while we pooh-pooh your supposed "evidence."
The evidence in no way supports your conclusion. So yes -- you're deluded.
You are either theist -- meaning, you hold a belief in a god or gods -- or you are atheist -- meaning you are without, or do not hold, a belief in a god or gods.
There is in no way a third position you can call "agnostic." Either you hold a belief in a god or gods, or you don't. There is no middle ground.
If as you say "you don't think anyone has the answers, that makes you an agnostic" that does not magically lift you from the yes/no domain of the theist/atheist concept.
Either you hold some shred of belief and as a consequence you are by definition theist, or you don't, and you are by definition atheist. A declaration about who might -- or might not -- have answers is a position that embodies at least part of an explaination of why one might land on one side or the other of the above binary domain. Not a new domain in and of itself that obviates the first, or a state that makes the domain trinary instead of binary.
If you ask someone if they are theist or atheist, and they respond with "agnostic", then what you have discovered is that they don't understand the question. You can reasonably extrapolate that further digging you may undertake may well return other nonsense answers until/unless some successful teaching can be accomplished. Then you just have to look at the situation and decide if it is worth your time.
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To answer your previous point, also no -- when meeting needs and desires is a very inexpensive operation, people won't generally stir themselves to commit crimes to accomplish the same goals. It's too much work, and the risk/benefit ratio is too high.
Case in point: When is the last time a wino tried to rob you to buy a bottle? When is the last time you even heard about such a thing? A bottle of wine is a couple of bucks. You can get one by walking into lots of places and plunking down pocket change. Daily pocket change is fairly easy to obtain, even for a street person. Just beg a little, and most people, including me, will hand over a small amount. I can almost always spare a couple bucks. $100 a night, or more, is not obtainable though such trivial means, and the risk/benefit ratio alters considerably. What average citizen, much less street person, can afford $700.00, or more, a week in entertainment costs?
The only reason there are drug turf battles is because of the drug laws. If drugs were legal, inexpensive controlled substances (as they could easily be), there wouldn't be any "turf" to fight over, any more than there is a problem with "alchohol dealer turf battles." There used to be such alchohol turf battles -- and yes, that was when alchohol was illegal. Prohibition. Look it up. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."
The problem here is that drugs are illegal traffic; not drugs themselves. Your government caused this problem, and they also have the ability to fix it. Right now. But they don't want to. Now that is something you should be worrying about.
So go tell the mother of that five year old girl that her kid would still be alive if it weren't for the "mommy laws" (laws that regulate personal choices) that she probably supports, because she's a dumbass, like most of the rest of the population. The legislators are guilty of placing a high demand, hugely profitable and easily serviced marketplace outside the law. The general public is guilty of supporting the legislators in these actions.
"Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public -- or the people they elect."
What is needed is to drop the entire social underpinning that makes people say "oh, well, I was drunk at the time" as if it was an excuse, and the social echoes of that which pervade almost our entire society.
Being voluntarily incompetent is not an excuse; when you decide to drink, your responsibilities and obligations don't magically dissapear. You may feel like they do, but you're entirely wrong. You made the choice to drink or drug, and so any choices you make while drunk or stoned are just as much your responsibility as if you were cold sober.
Drinking and drugging are activities that need to be approached with great care and consideration, not to mention a little planning (stay home, designate a driver, allow for recovery time, inform anyone who depends on you that you're going to be non compos for a time.) Drugs and alchohol are not the problem.
The problem is that your average citizen is a dumbass who can't understand that the burden of personal responsibility they carry as a member of a society of greater membership that one extends into all realms of action they undertake, no matter what condition they bring upon themselves -- and so they aren't taking care weith those conditions.
The only reasonable exception here is when someone is drugged against their will, or without their knowledge. At that point, the responsibility lands on (or never left) the shoulders of the administrator of the substance.
Doesn't matter, though; the public can't think, the legislature is composed of idiots, and the legal system is flat out broken. Drunk drivers will continue to get off essentially scot-free, when we should be killing them outright.
Pffft.
You can say anything you want, but the fact is, the platform was there and just about as stable as any other NT.
Your remark about applications not being available is certainly on-target, but that doesn't have anything in particular to do with MS's ability to put the OS on a particular hardware platform -- cell, in this case.
The real issue here is that Alpha, MIPS, and definitely PPC were not accepted into the marketplace in any kind of reasonable numbers, and MS made a (most likely perfectly reasonable) decision not to pursue OS development further. Early adopters -- and early supporters, like us -- took a risk and we got burned for taking that risk. But that doesn't mean that there cannot be a situation where a port would take off.
If cell lives up to the hype as typified in the FA, then MS may well decide to indulge themselves in another round of OS building. If they do, it will be huge news, and give the processor a cachet that all the Linux development in the world cannot. Also, if the cell lives up to the hype, we're talking about a whole different level of performance. Some applications -- like ours -- can use every bit of performance that can be provided. Ray tracing is a good example here. Our software, among other things, has an integral ray tracer. No matter how powerful cell is, it is not powerful enough to make non-trivial ray tracing a "no wait" operation. But if it is 100x as powerful as the top of the line x86, it'll sure make a noticable difference. The same thing applies to high resolution (cinema and to some extent HDTV, I mean, not standard video), special effects processing of streams will be much faster too. And that will sell quite a few cell-based machines. If every non-trivial application that is ported shows a considerable speed-up, developers will be motivated to port, because users want performance. What do you think Intel has been making money off all of these years? The user's desire for more performance, that's what. It's really that simple.
I'm certainly not saying that porting is trivial. But I am saying they have done it in the past, and they can do it again in the future. If you want to continue to argue the point, by all means feel free to have the last word -- but you're not going to get me to agree with you. I've seen MS work; I've been deeply involved on three of the ports they've done; and I know they can do it. Furthermore, if the platform appears to be more viable than the older RISC machines, I think they'll almost certainly stick to it longer and work harder on it as well. If there's profit to be made, MS will be looking hard at the situation. Count on it. Microsoft is annoying as hell, but it sure isn't blind or stupid as a corporate entity.
It's not crap; we produced release versions of our graphics software for Windows on x86, PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha at one point. Shipped some, too. We had machines for all four architectures (still have them, in fact, though the Alpha and PowerPC's are mothballed), development tools, and working Windows OS's on all of them, and they all ran Windows NT, approximately the same version. Perfect, definitely not -- but Windows under x86 isn't perfect either. It worked well, certainly no worse than the x86 versions. We still use one of the MIPS machines as a backup file server. It refuses to die.
Now, I'm no fan of Windows, but if you think MS couldn't port Windows to another architecture beyond x86, you're only fooling yourself. They can any time they want to, they have already, three times that I know of for certain, not counting whatever credit you want to give Windows CE ports, if any, and there you have it. For all I know there may have been ports to 68k archtectures... I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
You have to consider that MS has more money than anyone, and if they decide to go this route, there is no reason to think they cannot do it. I doubt there is any market force, including Sony and the largest governments in the world, that could put a serious roadblock in front of them in this arena.
If you're an SF fan, FWIW, this recommendation is from an owner of a SF-specialized literary agency and the son of a SF writer popular from the 50's... 70's or so. If the idea of creation-spanning is interesting to you, then read this book; you are very unlikely to regret it.
The social mileau in the book will feel a trifle dated; the science won't.
I understand that you want "free" anyway, but I don't have much sympathy for it.
If you really want free stuff, you have to arrange for the infrastructure that carries the free stuff to be free, or as nearly so as possible. Are you doing that?
I host several free sites. Two of them carry a whole bunch of traffic (specifics if you're curious, otherwise, not particularly relevant); others, not so much. Getting the site to pay for itself is not easy, in fact I'd say it is an art. There will be lots of failures. Others will arise, though.
Now, if Google is having severe problems with one kind of fraud or another, the thing I keep in mind is that it's not just the advertiser's revenue stream that is at risk here, it is Google's as well. I expect they'll solve the problem -- they have the best of motivations to do so.
If you're going to be abusive, at least get it right. :)
Another thing. As you have good stats on ad response from Yahoo and etc, perhaps you should gather those up and present them to Google. Google waits before it pays ad-bearing sites (about 30 days after the close of the advertising month) and during that time, they can and will revise the payment to be made.
The reason that it might be worth your time to do this is that while it is possible for the spammers to obscure the incoming IP's (HTTP_REFERER) that you'll see in your logs, an attack has to come from just one or a relatively few sites -- and Google should know exactly where your clicks came from because while the HTTP_REFERER can be obscured, the ad placement probably can't -- I think that Google has to know where the ad bearing sites are in order to determine which ad to show. If one or just a few sites are providing the majority of your incoming traffic, and that traffic shows an HTTP_REFERER in your logs that isn't the actual referring site, then Google may elect to respond by invalidating the clicks.
If the HTTP_REFERER is not fake in this case, then you may have a pointer right to the problem site. If that's the case, Google may be able to block them from using your ad (I know that the ad-carrier can block any particular ad -- this is just Google enforcing the same thing.)
Even if you're going to skip Google from now on, I'd still pursue the issue. Perhaps you can get your $$$ back, and inflict a financial wound on the attackers. If Google figures out what is going on in your case, they'll probably figure out what is going on in other cases.
There's (probably) another clue for Google once they look into this -- ads are pretty dependable in the sense that they pull a particular percentage of the viewing public. Looking at our ad stats, they're pretty darned steady, really. If your ads show a huge spike, I would think they'd take that into account.
Anyway, I'd encourage you to pursue this. Google's been very good with us; my impression is that they'll try to do the right thing.
What I was doing in the GP was answering the question the slashdot story poster asked -- where will ads go. That's where I think they'll go. No more, no less. Disagree? Fine, explain yourself. Not talking about the same thing as I am? Also fine, but not relevant to my post.
As for the silly "mod parent down" hysteria... Mod me any way you want, folks. I don't post for "karma" (it's useless anyway, moderation here is completely broken and metamoderation isn't much better -- see my journal) and I read at -1. I'm here because I like the format. Mod me right to -1, and enjoy the experience. It won't mean anything to me unless they fix the system. Heck, compared to slashdot's moderation system, Google is darned near perfect. :)
There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.
If you do follow those basic guidelines, then the ads will bring potential customers by your pages, and some percentage of them will actually purchase your product(s) and/or service(s).
There's no magic to this -- unless you're a fraud right out of the gate anyway.
That's not to say that you can't work the system in such a way as to make it legitimately benefit you. For instance:
Some of my competitors do such a poor job, I decided to put Google ads right on our sales pages so our customers could easily find our competitors. The results they get are so yucky that I consider them to be marketing for us, in a reverse sort of way. There's nothing on our pages that say "go look at how crappy our competitors are, click the ads and then come back" or anything like that... the ads just sit there, advertising software similar to ours... and our sales picked up about 20% over four weeks once we put the ads on. Apparently, our customers are savvy enough to know where they've been -- and how to come back -- when they wander off to look at these other folks. And the funny thing is that we get paid for all this. Now, if our competitors are silly enough to keep advertising a shoddy product, why, I'm simply delighed to host their ads. :)
Secondly, we can block images from any site, including the one we're currently on (Firefox does this too), so these are highly vulnerable to being smushed (a smush industry technical term, sorry), and so ads-as-images will probably die, or at least cut way, way back. I don't see many of these either.
Third, we can block google-style ads (ads sourced using off-site bandwidth) by blocking the source at the reject-this-server level. So google style ads are vulnerable, and could die too... though these are so inoffensive to me that I've never bothered to even try (plus, they're often actually relevant, which puts a different face on matters.) Let's say that rather than likely to die, they are at least still vulnerable to being killed.
That leaves text ads that are sourced from the site we're actually visiting. We want to read the text on the site, so we're not going to block text in general. Doing so selectively is problematic, to say the least; I think you're likely to end up blocking exactly what you want to read if the ads are well-targeted. Google (for instance) could pull this off by supplying the ad stream to the site we're visiting sub-rosa, and then the site has to source the ad using its own bandwidth and server resources, to us. A smart site will move the ads around and they'll really be difficult to distinguish with software that isn't nearly as smart as you are. At that point, you're probably going to see the ad -- there's no good way to distinguish it from the desired reading material if it is well aimed.
So that's where I think we're heading. FWIW, which, as with most crystal ball gazing, probably isn't a lot.