I beg to differ. Have you ever tried to call one of those 1-800 numbers while the commercial is still playing? It's
impossible. Thousands of pavlovian simpletons call RIGHT NOW! Just like the ad commands them to.
I've never been enough of a Pavlovian simpleton to try calling those numbers, so I hadn't noticed the busy-signal problem you are talking about. I find it humourous that you complain about the simpletons calling the numbers while at the same time admitting that you were doing the same thing yourself.
As to your second point, the times I've ever been looking to buy a product online (the times during which there is a chance I might have immediately clicked on a banner ad because it actually is what I was looking for), anyway, those times I've always found the actual search engine's own result list more useful than the banner ads. If I want to buy a Foo Widget, I'm doing a web search for "Foo Widget". The result list from the search engine is many times more on-topic than any banner
ads that pop up. I've even seen a banner ad pop up from the very same place that was on the top of the result list anyway. Where am I going with this? Well, that the only times a banner ad would have gotten a clickthrough from me are ALL times in which I'm already looking at the stuff the ad is trying to sell me. The ad is then nothing more than a redundant link that goes to the same URL I would have visited anyway.
I still stand by the idea that clickthrough measurement is a naive way to measure the effectiveness of an ad.
You make an excellent point. The reasoning that web ads are not working is flawed. 1 - An ad banner shows up when you are in the middle of doing SOMETHING ELSE at the time. Even if the ad is effective at making you want to go take a look at the product, it doesn't mean you want to do so RIGHT NOW. Right now you are in the middle of looking at something else. You'll file away the
banner ad for later. After all, a TV ad for a widget isn't going to make you get up and use the phone RIGHT NOW to order one if your favorite show is going to be "right back after these messages..." That doesn't mean you won't go check it out later, when you are in the mood for buying something. Summary: An ad doesn't need to be effective this very second in order to be effective overall in the long run.
Who says TV ads have a better immediate response? You can measure web banner click-throughs, but that's meaningles in comparasins to other media where there's nothing similar to measure. For all they know, the TV ads may be just as ineffective as the web ads are. Most viewers have gotten quite skilled at totally ignoring the commercials on TV. But, since they can't measure anything with TV ads, they are willing to spend the money on them just because they *believe* they are working.
In practice, in the TV medium, the typical interruption advertisement format doesn't result in me wanting to buy the product. It results in me reaching for the remote control to 'surf' for a minute or two until the ad block is over. I think this is fairly typical for a lot of viewers.
If cost was the only concern then I'd have agreed with you. But there's also the desire to not help support those I disagree with. I don't really care about the extra cost of Windows I won't use on a PC, nor do I care about the cost of preinstalled censorware. What I DO care about is that I realize that when consumers have no choice but to buy a company's product, by law, then that company has no accountability at all. (Even worse than a government buerocracy.) In a capitalist system, you vote with your wallet. Forcing you to buy from Microsoft is forcing you to "vote" for Microsoft. Forcing you to buy censorware is forcing you to "vote" in favor of censorware.
You claim that the DMCA protects ISPs from trouble when their users post copyrighted information. You do this right in the middle of a thread about how slashdot had to remove a user's post of copyrighted material to avoid trouble. Can you see the irony here? Sure, Slashdot isn't an ISP, technically, but it has all the same problems ISPs do in this regard, and it is just as unfair to hold Slashdot responsible for users' posts as it is to hold the ISP responsible.
I strongly doubt it. Those sorts of people *would* kill for items of value, but those items would not necessarily have been sneakers if it weren't for the hyper-marketting that inflates their cost up above $100.00, so they become a valuable commodity.
I think you miss the point. I don't think he was trying to claim that the marketters made the thug into the type of person who would murder to take something, but rather that the marketters made someone's sneakers appear so much more valuable than they really are, so that they became coveted at such an insane level. It's more a question of why the thug is killing someone for something as trivial as sneakers, (as opposed to doing it for something else). It's because the marketting hyperinflated the value of the sneakers to the point where they are probably worth more than what's in someone's wallet at any random time.
I'm in favor of lessened taxation, but I'm also sane. That sanity makes me realize something: If I had three choices, and I had to rank them in terms of desirability, it would be like this:
Best: no taxing any type of sale.
Not so good: taxing all sales the same.
Worst: lopsided taxation that taxes one type of sale while another type is not taxed. In the world of competition, this means that the taxed type of sale will lose popularity EVEN IF it is actually superiour. I don't want to see internet sales beat bricks-and-mortar sales based on absolutely no real-world merits whatsoever.
And realisticly, removing all sales taxes simply WONT happen, so the compramise of EQUAL taxation is the next best compramise. It's funny that you decry 'sin' taxes used for behavoral engineering without realizing that the current lopsided situation is just that. It's like owning a physical store is a sin.
Firstly, it's not unconstitutional, since he's advocating this at a federal level.
The 'it' I was referring to was not his proposal, but rather his depiction of what he thought would happen in the future without it (paying tax for both the seller's state AND the buyer's state.)
This won't happen. It is unconstitutional. Only the selling location can have sales tax applied. This issue has already been dealt with once with ordering things over the phone. It is illegal for states to apply
taxes to items brought in from other states, because that's a tarrif, and the Constitution forbids inter-state tarrifs.
You are arguing the wrong issue. This is about making the SAME rules apply to business regardless of how they take the order (phone vs internet). If you want to argue against ALL sales taxes, that's fine, but that's another argument entirely,
one that should be applied to ALL transactions the same, not with a special dispensation to just internet sales.
...states cannot collect money from stuff imported from
other states...
Yes, but that's not what they are talking about. They are talking about the state in which the seller is located having a sales tax, not the state in which the buyer is located. The idea is this: Let's say you live near a state boundry, and you nip across state lines and buy something in the neighboring state, then drive back home with it. If it is a brick-and-mortar business then you end up paying sales taxes for the neighboring state in which you bought it. If you do the exact same thing on-line and have them
deliver it to you, then you don't. This is just an attempt to make the online businesses and the physical businesses live by the same rules. I don't see anything wrong with that. If you complain that sales tax is wrong on internet transactions, then it should be equally wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions.
I'm sick of online rules being different than physical rules. If we want to argue that the CDA is unfair because it puts internet speech under more restrictions than traditional speech, then we have to, in all fairness, accept that the sales tax should be the same for both physical and internet sales.
1. This law needs to use a word other than "forward" for what it is trying to describe. SMTP servers automatically "forward" what you send them. Users often automatically "forward" mail from one of their own accounts to another so they don't have to read 6 different e-mail accounts.
2. Why does this law exist especially for e-mail and not for generic mail, both e- and snail-? I'm sick and tired of legislation that assumes as soon as you do something on the internet that it needs more strict rules than it did in it's older low-tech form. Why discriminate against e-mail? If this rule doesn't exist for paper mail, it shouldn't exist for e-mail. Conversely, if it exists for paper mail already, then it should already be illegal for e-mail without needed new legislation.
With the plethora of open source projects out there that have native ports to Windows already, I have to wonder how useful Line would actually be.
Due to the generally more open nature of programming for Linux and Unix in general over Windows, Windows already gets to benefit from the good apps being ported over to it. The makers of Perl, Apache, Gcc, and whatnot aren't trying to create artificial scarcity to force users onto UNIX with them. (As is usual, Microsoft benefits from the goodwill of others without having the common polite decency to reciprocate on occasion. I believe the technical term for this is "mooching".)
Anyway, I have to wonder how much demand for Line there will be when many of the good apps on UNIX are already portable to Windows as it is.
The problem here is not that the Principal was incensed. He had every right to be. The kid was engaging in what amounts to slander. The problem is that the school overstepped its jurisdiction when it tried punishing a completely out of school offense by using its in-school athority over the kid. That's a BIG ethical no-no. If the principal wanted to pursue the matter as an ordinary individual slighted by an ordinary kid, and take whatever legal action such a situation permits (which probably isn't much because the kid is just a kid), then I'd be on his side. As it is, the Principal used his position of authority to engage in bully tactics. If this incident is indicitive of the principal's sense of ethics, I think I might understand why that kid doesn't like him.
Oh, and despite how this article in slashdot is titled, the crux of this case is more about abuse of authority than it is about censorship.
Micropayment wouldn't be bad if it was more technically feasable to do it fairly, but it just isn't. Here's a few things I can think of off the top of my head:
Evil scripting tricks: What about Javascript pop-ups? Is it fair that you will inevitably end up paying for content that you did not want to visit? What about 'stealth URLs' that don't go where they claim they will go?
Can't measure eyeball time: HTTP is a stateless protocol. You can't tell how *long* someone is spending looking at a page that got downloaded to his browser. So you can't tell the difference between an accidental hit that lasts a
mere 5 seconds and someone who stays at the page to read the whole thing. Charging someone the same price either way would be like charging full price to someone who opens a Newsweek at the magazine stand for one second to look at the title page and then puts it back.
Vendorlock: It seems to me that to make the idea really work correctly, you need something inserted into the client software to watch what the end user is really doing (This would solve a lot of the other problems in this list). But do that, and you have the potential for vendorlock abuse. (What? You are using a third party browser? Sorry, you can't see our site, because our micropayment scheme is only implemented for browser foo. Why don't you "upgrade" to browser foo?) Also, putting security in the client inevitably will mean cracked versions of the clients will appear to exploit this security misfeature.
Web caches: Today, web caching is a powerful technique for saving bandwith from large organizations to popular websites. When person A visits a web page, and then person B from behind the same web cache visits the same web page, they see the copy from the cache instead of from visiting the page again. Most large subnets, such as universities and corporations, use a web cache. How would the micropayment scheme work then? Would the owner of the webcache pay the payments (since that's where the website would see the hits coming from) instead of the user browsing the site? Would the owner of the site be getting 'shafted' out of his hit money because the cache is letting many users see the page for the price of one?
Using the web as a book reference: Today, lots of people use web sites as references where they go back to to visit the same page over and over, much like one would use a reference book on a shelf. Would a micropayment scheme be able to tell the difference between a first-time visitor and a visitor who's already seen the site many times? Should it charge the same to both types of hit?
Cookies vs server-side IDs: Where does the context get stored about micropayment accounts? What is the key? IP address - that won't work because people have dynamic IPs. How about with a cookie? That won't work unless people are willing to open up cookies to all sites (not just the one that sent them), and that has security and privacy problems of its own.
Truth in advertising: Do micropayment sites have to tell you that you are about to enter a micropayment area? The amount of money per transaction will be so small, and the transactions so numerous that it will be impractical to check a sort of 'bank statement' to see who you've been paying money to. Less-than-honest people could charge you without you even knowing that their site is a pay site.
Credit Card: I note that the author doesn't like the exorbatant fees banks charge for mundane services that little or no
effort because they are automated (like credit
card fees), yet he is advocating a system that
requires a credit card to work. If you have to pay a third party company ahead of time to do
the micropayments, then why not allow more
'static' forms of payment to them, like cheques?
The retraction had to be made because MS *uses* BSD code in a few places in Windows. If they said that all opensource code is bad they'd be also slamming themselves for using it. Backpedalling to saying "just GPL is bad" is a safer bet for them, because they know they won't be using any GPL code, like they do with BSD code.
They want to rip on only that code which they can't use themselves. (Techincally they *could* use GPL code, if they opend up parts of Windows' source code, but that's not going to happen.)
These hypocrites at MS aren't slamming open code in general, just open code that requires them to reciprocate. Code they can use without giving anything back for it they have no problems with.
The nice thing about napster and napster-like services is that they let the starting artist get directly to the listeners without having to
conform to some sleezy producer's idea of what counts as good music. Let the audience decide, and bypass the plastic people in the 'biz. Without napster and napster-like services, there is no mechanism to break-out to a large audience other than through the good-ole-boy network that gets you on the radio. People don't want to buy an album if they have no idea what is going to be on it, so initial 'free sample' airplay is a must-have. The ideal situation would be if there were some good way to ensure that you only get to listen to a new song for a limited time or number of plays and then you have to pay for it to continue. The real problem is that there is NO good technical way to enforce that. Once you let someone play it through audio, they can patchcord that to a recording device. Regardless of how good the data encryption is, at some point it does have to get turned into the actual audio wave pattern to be heard.
The support for the low-end will dissapear - note that the article SAID they want to encourage site designers to REDIRECT people whose browsers are not the version and vendor they are looking for.
VERY BAD IDEA.
Sure, I can agree that it's time to stop bothering to support, for example, Netscape 2.x. But there is a huge difference between not supporting something and actually denying it. A warning saying that the site will probably not work right is enough. Anything more than that and you run into large ethical problems:
It creates a privileged portected revenue stream for the good ole boys at the expense of the up-and-comers - which is NOT good for capitalism. I'm sick and tired of being refused by sites when I happen to be using something other than Netscape or IE. Especially when I go look at the site with those browsers, do a 'view source' and then see that there wasn't a damn thing in there that would have been a problem on say, Lynx or Opera or Konqueror - they just chose to refuse to send me the page at all on the assumption that there couldn't possibly be any other browser other than NS and IE (And some are now going for just IE) - arrogant twits! The right answer is to just send the page anyway, but with a warning message - it might still work, and often times it does.
Javascript is often used to do very annoying things, so some people leave it turned off by default except when visiting certain trusted sites where they turn it on. I'm sick and tired of these sites that assume I'm using an old browser because javascript isn't working. "No, I don't want to upgrade to Netscape 4.0 or higher seeing as how I'm already using Netscape 4.76, idiot!" Encouraging more web designers to make javascript mandatory (so the browser check will work) is irresponsible when javascript is still abused by many sites out there. Give me finer-grain control over javascript features first, THEN think about making it mandatory. (I'd love to be able to allow some features while disabling others. Yes, you may query my browser type, yes you may watch my mouse movements, NO you may not open a new browser window without asking first...)
Slashdot cried when the record companies went after Napster. "Deal with the law-breaking individuals," they said,
"leave the company alone." Now, the record companies and artists are going after the users, and we're still crying.
Why? Are we all hypocrits?
Slashdot is not a person. It's a set of people. SOME slashdotters said 'deal with the lawbreakers not Napster'. SOME slashdotters complain now when record companies go after them. To make your charge of hypocracy stick, you've got to show that there's some overlap between those two subsets of slashdotters, and even then your charge of hypocracy would only apply to those people in the overlapping area.
This is a common fallacy when arguing with people in a group: assuming soladarity where there is none, and calling people hypocrites when different individuals say things that contradict each other.
In space,
nothing is always stable and 100% predictable
Only because it could get affected by an outside body. I'm not sure if that really counts as not being stable. I would call a block sitting on a
table 'stable' even though I could come along and
hit it to knock it off. This is something very different from the meaning of unstable that refers to a system who's balance is precarious so that the tiniest change will grow larger and larger in a feedback loop, so that it is nearly impossible for it to stay the way it is indefinately. (for example, a pencil standing straight up on its point.)
The definition does not mean that the orbit is INSIDE the Earths
That's not what he said. He said inside MARS orbit.
The separation into separate processes, at least as it exists now, hinders these goals.
No! Whatever concerns you may have about the inconsistent UI's, the fact that they are implemented as seperate processes is GOOD DESIGN. You might argue for having a consistent set of these processes, instead of replacable components that differ, but the fact that the WM, Xserver, and gui toolkit are all independant in memory and runtime is a very good thing, and should be kept that way even if you'd like there to only be one choice of WM, one choice of Xserver, and one choice of gui toolkit.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. There should be a mod category for "Where the hell did that come from?"
I've never been enough of a Pavlovian simpleton to try calling those numbers, so I hadn't noticed the busy-signal problem you are talking about. I find it humourous that you complain about the simpletons calling the numbers while at the same time admitting that you were doing the same thing yourself.
As to your second point, the times I've ever been looking to buy a product online (the times during which there is a chance I might have immediately clicked on a banner ad because it actually is what I was looking for), anyway, those times I've always found the actual search engine's own result list more useful than the banner ads. If I want to buy a Foo Widget, I'm doing a web search for "Foo Widget". The result list from the search engine is many times more on-topic than any banner ads that pop up. I've even seen a banner ad pop up from the very same place that was on the top of the result list anyway. Where am I going with this? Well, that the only times a banner ad would have gotten a clickthrough from me are ALL times in which I'm already looking at the stuff the ad is trying to sell me. The ad is then nothing more than a redundant link that goes to the same URL I would have visited anyway.
I still stand by the idea that clickthrough measurement is a naive way to measure the effectiveness of an ad.
Who says TV ads have a better immediate response? You can measure web banner click-throughs, but that's meaningles in comparasins to other media where there's nothing similar to measure. For all they know, the TV ads may be just as ineffective as the web ads are. Most viewers have gotten quite skilled at totally ignoring the commercials on TV. But, since they can't measure anything with TV ads, they are willing to spend the money on them just because they *believe* they are working.
In practice, in the TV medium, the typical interruption advertisement format doesn't result in me wanting to buy the product. It results in me reaching for the remote control to 'surf' for a minute or two until the ad block is over. I think this is fairly typical for a lot of viewers.
If cost was the only concern then I'd have agreed with you. But there's also the desire to not help support those I disagree with. I don't really care about the extra cost of Windows I won't use on a PC, nor do I care about the cost of preinstalled censorware. What I DO care about is that I realize that when consumers have no choice but to buy a company's product, by law, then that company has no accountability at all. (Even worse than a government buerocracy.) In a capitalist system, you vote with your wallet. Forcing you to buy from Microsoft is forcing you to "vote" for Microsoft. Forcing you to buy censorware is forcing you to "vote" in favor of censorware.
You claim that the DMCA protects ISPs from trouble when their users post copyrighted information. You do this right in the middle of a thread about how slashdot had to remove a user's post of copyrighted material to avoid trouble. Can you see the irony here? Sure, Slashdot isn't an ISP, technically, but it has all the same problems ISPs do in this regard, and it is just as unfair to hold Slashdot responsible for users' posts as it is to hold the ISP responsible.
I strongly doubt it. Those sorts of people *would* kill for items of value, but those items would not necessarily have been sneakers if it weren't for the hyper-marketting that inflates their cost up above $100.00, so they become a valuable commodity.
I think you miss the point. I don't think he was trying to claim that the marketters made the thug into the type of person who would murder to take something, but rather that the marketters made someone's sneakers appear so much more valuable than they really are, so that they became coveted at such an insane level. It's more a question of why the thug is killing someone for something as trivial as sneakers, (as opposed to doing it for something else). It's because the marketting hyperinflated the value of the sneakers to the point where they are probably worth more than what's in someone's wallet at any random time.
And realisticly, removing all sales taxes simply WONT happen, so the compramise of EQUAL taxation is the next best compramise. It's funny that you decry 'sin' taxes used for behavoral engineering without realizing that the current lopsided situation is just that. It's like owning a physical store is a sin.
The 'it' I was referring to was not his proposal, but rather his depiction of what he thought would happen in the future without it (paying tax for both the seller's state AND the buyer's state.)
This won't happen. It is unconstitutional. Only the selling location can have sales tax applied. This issue has already been dealt with once with ordering things over the phone. It is illegal for states to apply taxes to items brought in from other states, because that's a tarrif, and the Constitution forbids inter-state tarrifs.
You are arguing the wrong issue. This is about making the SAME rules apply to business regardless of how they take the order (phone vs internet). If you want to argue against ALL sales taxes, that's fine, but that's another argument entirely, one that should be applied to ALL transactions the same, not with a special dispensation to just internet sales.
Yes, but that's not what they are talking about. They are talking about the state in which the seller is located having a sales tax, not the state in which the buyer is located. The idea is this: Let's say you live near a state boundry, and you nip across state lines and buy something in the neighboring state, then drive back home with it. If it is a brick-and-mortar business then you end up paying sales taxes for the neighboring state in which you bought it. If you do the exact same thing on-line and have them deliver it to you, then you don't. This is just an attempt to make the online businesses and the physical businesses live by the same rules. I don't see anything wrong with that. If you complain that sales tax is wrong on internet transactions, then it should be equally wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions.
I'm sick of online rules being different than physical rules. If we want to argue that the CDA is unfair because it puts internet speech under more restrictions than traditional speech, then we have to, in all fairness, accept that the sales tax should be the same for both physical and internet sales.
2. Why does this law exist especially for e-mail and not for generic mail, both e- and snail-? I'm sick and tired of legislation that assumes as soon as you do something on the internet that it needs more strict rules than it did in it's older low-tech form. Why discriminate against e-mail? If this rule doesn't exist for paper mail, it shouldn't exist for e-mail. Conversely, if it exists for paper mail already, then it should already be illegal for e-mail without needed new legislation.
Due to the generally more open nature of programming for Linux and Unix in general over Windows, Windows already gets to benefit from the good apps being ported over to it. The makers of Perl, Apache, Gcc, and whatnot aren't trying to create artificial scarcity to force users onto UNIX with them. (As is usual, Microsoft benefits from the goodwill of others without having the common polite decency to reciprocate on occasion. I believe the technical term for this is "mooching".)
Anyway, I have to wonder how much demand for Line there will be when many of the good apps on UNIX are already portable to Windows as it is.
Oh, and despite how this article in slashdot is titled, the crux of this case is more about abuse of authority than it is about censorship.
Big deal. Doesn't change my point one bit.
The issue of whether or not GPL code can be sold for profit has already been decided. Many Linux distros out there are already doing it.
Redhat, Caldera, Suse, Debian, et all *already* sell GPL code for profit. The issue is already settled.
They want to rip on only that code which they can't use themselves. (Techincally they *could* use GPL code, if they opend up parts of Windows' source code, but that's not going to happen.)
These hypocrites at MS aren't slamming open code in general, just open code that requires them to reciprocate. Code they can use without giving anything back for it they have no problems with.
The nice thing about napster and napster-like services is that they let the starting artist get directly to the listeners without having to conform to some sleezy producer's idea of what counts as good music. Let the audience decide, and bypass the plastic people in the 'biz. Without napster and napster-like services, there is no mechanism to break-out to a large audience other than through the good-ole-boy network that gets you on the radio. People don't want to buy an album if they have no idea what is going to be on it, so initial 'free sample' airplay is a must-have. The ideal situation would be if there were some good way to ensure that you only get to listen to a new song for a limited time or number of plays and then you have to pay for it to continue. The real problem is that there is NO good technical way to enforce that. Once you let someone play it through audio, they can patchcord that to a recording device. Regardless of how good the data encryption is, at some point it does have to get turned into the actual audio wave pattern to be heard.
The support for the low-end will dissapear - note that the article SAID they want to encourage site designers to REDIRECT people whose browsers are not the version and vendor they are looking for. VERY BAD IDEA.