"If you have a point commander, PLEASE make it." - Ambassador G'Kar
I didn't really understand what you were saying. To me saying "Fuck em" is a perfectly valid to thing to say when dealing with a tyrant or tyrannical oligarchy. It makes clear exactly what you think of the oppression you are experiencing & what you'd like to do to said tyrant.
Yeah, I probably should have quoted the AC to whom I was responding, especially since he/she was modded down to -1. I apologize if that caused any confusion. This is the verbatim text of the AC:
if you're not a common thief you have nothing to worry about. how about you stop acting like the law is there to break and that this is some kind of socio-political movement. anyone with half a brain knows that it's about you fucks being a bunch of cheap faggots.
In other words, the AC was saying that because people infringe on the copyrights of others, they bring all of the RIAA's tactics upon themselves, as though that makes the RIAA's tactics good and acceptable. I agree with the "fuck 'em" idea. In my opinion the *AA organizations and their tactics are reprehensible. It was the AC and his/her attempt at an "ends justify the means" rationalization that I was addressing. When I pointed out that I believe this to be an instance of fanboyism, it was an attempt at an explanation for why this AC is so upset over the whole thing and unwilling to participate in anything resembling constructive discussion.
The AC's post is the kind of post that I would normally write off as a troll and would therefore be less inclined to respond to, except that there really are plenty of people who have such shallow black-and-white views on what are actually complex issues that don't have such easily defined "good guys" and "bad guys". I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb at all when I say that people who immediately take such a narrow black-and-white view on the subject of copyright, in spite of evidence to the contrary, are quite likely to use similar decision-making on other subjects (I would speculate that they're more interested in feeling "right", implying someone else was wrong, than they are in deciding what is true, making this a sort of ego-induced tunnel vision). Therefore, copyright is only one example of such an issue and happened to be the subject of discussion, but it's really the mentality behind such viewpoints that I was trying to describe.
Yeah, because what the other guy does always excuses your own unethical behavior and abuse (in my opinion) of the legal system. You want to be sanctimonious and talk about how other people should behave ethically? Try leading by example first, and try convincing the RIAA to do something like that (though apologists like you with your "ends justify the means" pronouncements are not much better and are quite possibly worse).
Again this is an exhibit of what I call fanboyism. I call it that having no certainty as to whether this is what other people mean when they use the word, but it seems to apply. Most Microsoft apologists fit this pattern as well, and it's one of the few viable explanations of why any average person would want to defend and advocate for a company with a marketing budget that could purchase a few small countries. It's the typical "us against them" bullshit where you envision two competing "teams" and you root for your favorite "team" and take their losses personally and celebrate their victories personally. It's pretty nice, except for that little fact that you yourself have done nothing to contribute to either "team" and have never participated in either faction's activities, so really it's your own need to live vicariously and maybe also a need to feel like part of something greater than yourself. It's a shame that with a whole unknown Universe out there, people settle for petty sports teams or corporations/brands or legal contests to fulfill this need to be a part of something greater, but I digress. It's like football fans when they say "we won" instead of "they won" or "my team won" even though I didn't see said fan out there in the field playing the game. I know that the difference may sound like minor semantics but it's actually a reflection of the mentality.
The remedy to this self-limiting mentality is to consider the morality (for lack of a better word) of the long-term consequences and how the implications could affect everyone. From this perspective, the reality is that if the RIAA/MPAA went bankrupt and its leadership decided to disband it tomorrow, life would go on with little or no impact to anyone else and in all likelihood they would not be missed; in this sense they are expendable. Meanwhile, if these kinds of legal tactics and the intimidation/extortion (in my opinion) that they create become more acceptable, it could adversely impact many people including those who have nothing to do with the entertainment industry. It's the kind of thing that could be a detriment to the legal system and the rule of law as a whole; these are things which are not expendable. In the face of these questions, the "evils" of copyright infringement in and of itself are barely a footnote when compared to the damage that can be caused by not correctly reacting to them.
Don't start replies with Uh. It's combative and makes you look like a dink.
Just to make sure I have this right, do you mean to imply that telling people how they should express themselves is not combative and does not make you look like a "dink"? Or is this more of an "it's okay when I do it" situation?
Which is why it was an obvious exaggeration, which is pretty much the case for virtually all ads. I'd rather all ads were a lot more honest (in the case of fast food restaurants it should require random photos of randomly served dishes at regular intervals), but it seems a bit laughable to make such a big deal out of Apple.
I think the only reason why Apple might appear exceptional is because they were required to pull the ads. Normally advertisers use various propaganda techniques to give a certain impression that may be true or false but they do it without actually making verifiably false statements. They might say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste!" instead of "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste after we paid them a large amount of money!" even though both would be true and even though they only asked 10 individuals instead of doing anything remotely like a proper study of a representative sample.
I very much like your idea about fast-food advertisements. I don't think the burgers in the ads are even edible most of the time (lots of plastic or other things you really wouldn't want to eat) although I regret that I don't have a source/reference handy. Advertising in general, or at least the way it is currently done, is something that I believe a more enlightened society would view as either a great evil or at least a corrupting influence. It's a happy smiling face on what is straight up manipulation and the power of its influence is often underestimated. If it were otherwise, then why the need to exaggerate, misrepresent, and selectively omit facts (not just talking about Apple)?
Healthy people who can think for themselves don't need to be constantly told what to eat, what to drink, where to go, what to buy, for whom to vote, etc. They just need to know what their options are, which is a far simpler affair. To give what I hope isn't a bad analogy, it would be more like "client pull" and less like "server push". I consider obsolete or irrelevant any business model that would collapse if this were the norm, no matter how large or widespread it may be.
Which is just a complicated way of saying that people are El-Ay-See-Why (as my old chem teacher said).
The only reason why I don't see it that way is because I believe we are already doing things the hard way, that the effort necessary to be your own person and do your own thinking is far less than what the current mindlessness is costing us. I think laziness (i.e. the promise of less effort, however false) is a part of it but I also think that appeals to laziness are only one measure of the seductiveness of this type of culture. I think another measure of it is the subtle message that you are just fine the way you are (as opposed to being just fine because of what you are becoming), that you should not bother to know yourself, to look for your weaknesses and remedy them, to develop your knowledge and intellect and wisdom, to become tough-minded and not easily deceived.
The consumerist culture has a message that this sort of self-directed (i.e. you do it when no one is looking, because it matters to you) personal development is somehow optional or somehow no longer necessary for a healthy human being. And we wonder why things like depression and alcoholism and suicide are increasing.
Above all, I think most of the problems with this culture and the people in it, especially the fact that I find myself surrounded by idiots who are capable of not being idiots, is caused by a materialist/reductionist/mechanistic view of the world and our place in it. I think that's why people are so willing to meekly accept their roles as mere cogs in a social machine. What I try to point out and argue against is, to put it frankly, a dehumanizing influence. Collectively, we seem to have failed to learn the trick of having an economic model and a political model without also confusing those for the purpose of our existence. What I see everywhere are people who are subservient to systems instead of systems that are subservient to people. This even applies to the people who appear to control the systems, like the CEOs and political heavyweights of the world (not that I have much pity for the sort of person who wants those positions so badly that they are willing to sell themselves to the system to obtain them).
I wonder if the difference is that Lancet is probably not aiming at the general public for their target audience, certainly not to the degree that CNN or Fox News is. If Lancet tried flagrant debate-framing and other propaganda techniques, or the sensationalism/yellow journalism of which Darkness404 wrote, its audience would probably call them on it.
Either way, I appreciate the reminder and take your word for it that there are good, honest publications out there (no sarcasm intended at all). With the number and popularity of all of the bad examples, that is easy to forget from time to time.
Why do people still listen to the media is beyond me. Every single year they come up with something that is either A) addicting and damaging to minds B) corrupting the family/children/society or C) is somehow harmful. Be it rock and roll, cell phones, video games, comic books, etc, the media always comes up with some "studies" to back them up while two months later showing studies that prove just the opposite is true, why haven't people realized that the media has cried wolf far too many times and just tune the crap out?
Because maybe the only real addiction we have is allowing self-appointed "experts" and authorities to do our thinking for us.
What are you talking about? You can uninstall chrome, and you know what I mean by that comment.
In my experience, knowing (or having the ability to know) what you meant does little to nothing to stop people from setting up a straw man that sounds similar to what you were saying and then talking about how wrong you were when they proceed to tear down that straw man. My favorites are when I anticipate this and go out of my way to explicitly clarify what I am saying and what I am not saying and someone proceeds to argue against a claim I was careful not to make. That people can do this and sincerely believe that they are right and that they really told me off is amazing.
An example of my own experiences with people who refuse to really listen to what you're saying and decide to respond to it anyway are here and this one is a particularly good example.
I've repeated on this forum a few times, if anyone wants to posit there [sic] own self-consistent framework I will follow it for the purposes of discussion with that person. My experience with communication is that people do not take this kind of care. As a result they read someone else's words but, instead of learning something new, they simply think of what THEY would be thinking if THEY were using those words. Nobody actually learns anything new (something that wasn't already in their head). Everyone stays stuck in their own head, although they have the illusion of communication because they unknowingly think/say the same things in many many different ways
Google should really be responsible for testing its own links and purging/fixing the latest scam, "referrer redirect" hijacks.
It's a form of attack wherein a hijacked website works correctly... as long as your Referrer string doesn't include certain key words ("Google", "Yahoo", "MSN", etc). The trick being, the website won't know they have been hacked because if they get a notice saying they have, then test their own homepage directly, it still works. If you have a referrer, you get redirected to a drive-by download page (for something like "Windows Antivirus 2009" or similar).
Why is this insidious? Because it gets around a lot of the "known registry", "anti-phishing" plugins.
Google served up the link; they should have a responsibility to do a periodic check that the links they serve aren't going to a bad place, and inform the victim if they've been referrer-redirect hijacked.
That's one thing I don't understand: If I can either refuse to send an HTTP Referrer header or forge it to always point to the site's index page (I use the Firefox RefControl extension but there are others that do the same), certainly Google can do this and avoid that entire set of problems. In fact I've yet to see a good argument for why there even is such a thing as a referrer header or what benefit it's supposed to provide. I can definitely see why advertisers like it, but from the point of view of a user it's useless or nearly useless; if I thought Webmasters needed to know the site I went to before I visited theirs, I would send them an e-mail to tell them.
I wish state governments would start revoking the corporate charter of companies that behave this way, as it is clearly manipulative and costs a great deal of money and wasted time while benefitting no one. As others have pointed out, the telco probably has no interest in actually building a fiber network, they just want to delay this process and make it as expensive as possible because they see this as a threat to their monopoly. They had their opportunity to build it if they wanted to -- the city consulted them first before it decided to build anything. That alone should absolve the city of any further obligation. The telco made their decision when they had every opportunity to make a different one; that's tough shit, let them accept the consequences of that decision.
The goal should be to deliver a high-speed fiber optic network, with or without the telco in question. Petty squabbles like this are probably a big reason why the USA is so far behind many other countries in terms of bandwidth speed and availability. Corporations seriously need to be sent a message (before it's too late, if it is not already) that they are here to serve us, that their interests have the lowest priority when they are at odds with those of the community and that they will be gone the moment they stand in the way of advancement. Any damage that could possibly be done by revoking their corporate charter, seizing their assets and selling them at auction (or however it would be done), and replacing them with a more reasonable provider is nothing in the face of setting such a good example.
Speaking of serch engines... I hope the most ancient cinder of Hell is reserved for the asshole (no doubt in marketing) who decided that the search bar is any sort of replacement for the address bar in a default browser configuration, or that performing a Google/MSN search without first asking the user is the proper way to handle a DNS error. I say this person is no doubt in marketing because driving up ad revenue for major search engines is the only real (as opposed to stated) motive that I can think of.
In connection with my employment I often have to deal with incompetent users who don't understand the difference and many problems are caused by searches taking them to similar-sounding but utterly incorrect Web sites. Unfortunately, in business telling someone to learn how to use a browser before they think of calling you is not an option.
What is the number of people in Texas who believe the moon landing was fake? Some states might have a higher ratio of crazy conspiracy theorists than other states, so I'm just gonna say Texas is one of those states.
When I hear things like whether "the moon landing was a fake" I don't care so much about whether it was genuine or not, or what either belief says about the person who holds it. To me those are trivial distractions, in that no conclusion you reach is going to enlighten you in any way or elevate your knowledge.
To me the fact that these questions would ever arise is symptomatic of a bigger underlying problem. The underlying problem is that we the people have little to no control over the media, no real (practical) way to keep them honest or to check behind them. We generally assume that they are honest because it comforts us, because it's horrifying to think that there may be a huge propaganda machine that can make most people hold any desirable belief, that can repeat anything however many times it takes for it to become "fact", something that "everybody knows". If there is such a machine, what do you think it is going to do, announce itself on CNN? Of course it would have plausible deniability, otherwise it couldn't possibly exist. There are many "facts" that are simply not falsifiable. They could be made that way, but at present we really don't have the sort of transparency that something half as influential as the news media should have. We are asked to take too many things on authority alone, when history has shown that never questioning authority is very dangerous. Even assuming that this fact is not being abused (something of a leap of faith considering that most powers that can be abused ARE in fact abused), this alone sorely needs addressing.
Regarding the "moon landing conspiracy," do you suppose anyone is going to give me personal access to the original moon-landing footage so I can examine it to my satisfaction, run any test on it that I want to run or hire my own experts to do so on my behalf? Do you suppose that even the media mega-corps do this? Generally they don't; they ask the appropriate government agency for a public statement and they are given a statement and some footage intended for public consumption and they are thanked for the privilege. This is not why a "free press" is specifically protected in the Constitution. In fact this does not describe a free press at all; it describes a mouthpiece. Yet, this is how most "news" happens. We really have very few means by which we could either affirm or deny what is reported, and that is the problem. To me this isn't about whether the moon lander videos were fake or genuine; it's about the idea that if they actually were faked, none of us would be able to do anything about it. That's why the conspiracy theorists sound impotent -- because they are -- but so are the rest of us.
Some of you may picture each news organization independently hiring reporters and sending them out to investigate events and draw their own conclusions and report them back in the form of newspapers and TV shows and Web sites. This is not the case. At least in the USA, almost all news comes from the Associated Press. From a business standpoint, the AP makes a lot of sense. Rather than many organizations redundantly sending reporters to all cover the same stories, they pool their resources together and operate as a centralized unit. From a free press standpoint, this is also known as a single point of failure and makes no sense. The economy, political power, and the media have all been increasingly centralized in the last 100 years. There is a direct correlation with this fact and the gradual erosion of freedom and privacy. I would go so far to say that one could not happen without the other.
It's a big mistake to underestimate the power-hungry, to think that they are stupid while we are so smart. This is what the Greeks referred to as hubris. I think they don'
Speaking of data tracking, if you don't want to be considered in the metrics for their site maintenance, make sure you keep doing that.
Personally, I use my Google Analytics data to check screen resolutions and search engine results (aside from basic hit-count). How people reach me and what their capabilities are are very important. If the average user of a site I manage only has 800x600 resolutions, I need to take that into consideration in site maintenance. If they on average have dial-up, I need to consider that too.
Feel free to opt out, but you never gave consent to the data people like Shoppers Drug Mart collect on you either (and you'd be surprised), and no, not with an Optimum card.
If my browser (or the Java/Javascript running on it) were giving out system information like screen resolution and other "capabilities" to any Web site that asks for it, I would replace it with a less "leaky" browser or I would (as needed) continue to use Noscript and tools like it. It's not about whether I think there's any harm in you knowing the resolution of my monitor. It's that you don't have a dire need to know (you'll see the sun tomorrow even if I don't tell you that) and I don't have a dire need to tell you. I know this sounds "Grandpa Simpson" but I used the Web before it was normal for webmasters to rely on such information. Somehow they survived without it, so let's call this what it is: a convenience as opposed to an essential. Maybe if the Internet were a different place I wouldn't feel this way. I doubt that I would have felt this way back when UUCP was new, spam was unknown, etc. but it's certainly not that way now.
You also seem to have made an unstated assumption that I can't adapt my system to see the information that I want to see and that I need a webmaster to do that for me (if I want the data, do you really think that designing the site for a higher resolution is any sort of obstacle?). Really, it'll be alright. It kind of works out because the users who do need you to handle these details for them are the same users who either don't know they are being tracked and disclosing system information or don't know how to prevent it (i.e. they have chosen not to inform themselves or they have chosen not to take action on that information). Frankly, they sound like your target audience more than I do and will probably be much more receptive to the "but all this tracking is for your own good!" argument than I am.
Brick-and-mortar stores generally don't feel a need to follow me around on foot and see which other stores I went to. Why do Web site operators assume that they need to know or have any right to know which sites I visited before I was on their site? Note that telling me why they find this information useful does not answer my question. It is much easier for a webmaster to use analytics services, third-party cookies, redirects, javascript bugs, 1x1-pixel images, "http-ping", and referrer headers (etc.) than it is for a brick-and-mortar store to physically follow a person around, but that does not somehow make one more justifiable than the other except that the average person clearly understands one scenario and generally does not understand (and therefore is unprepared to resist) the other. I'm a human being, not a resource to be mined in the name of improving your site or a source of marketing data; companies that don't recognize this fact or find it inconvenient will find me unwilling to participate.
Part of the problem too is that it doesn't just stop with honest webmasters like you who just want to create a better, more usable site (and I don't doubt your sincerity either -- I think you've just bought into a system because there are marginal benefits and because "that's the way things are done"). The same tracking mechanisms that provide the sort of information you want are the same ones that generally erode privacy and it has become very much of an all-or-nothing type of choice. If you don't care about anything
There is a protocol to handle this already, and Twitter could've easily used it instead of randomly handing people whatever username came to mind.
To be honest with you, I'm glad that OpenID or something like it has not taken off. I personally like the "chaotic Internet" where one login credential is entirely separate from another and it's up to me to keep track of them. Keeping up with them is a very tiny burden, I do it gladly, and there are plenty of good tools that make it a breeze. To me, the convenience of a system like OpenID is either non-existant or insignificant, while the privacy implications of not only making it easy to profile my browsing but also of doing most of the profiling work myself are severe. I'm sure that the proponents of OpenID have a long list of reasons why I should not worry about privacy implications, but I'm just not buying it. Once personal data is centralized, it has a nasty tendency to stay that way. That kind of accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data is a marketer's wet dream.
I'm one of those strange people who does things based on principle and a concept of whether this is really the best solution. So, for example, I block trackers like Google-analytics despite any argument or any evidence which demonstrates that it's really rather harmless. Why? Because I never signed any document or made any agreement giving any entity the right to track me and profile me. Personally, I need no other reason to make such tracking as difficult as possible, so I often laugh when I see the subject come up from time to time and I see all of these intricate arguments about what is and is not tracked and why you should or shouldn't worry about it. To me those are needless complications of what is actually a very simple issue. I assume that everyone has the right to privacy and that any entity which tries to reduce a user's privacy (no matter how benign the stated reason may be) without full disclosure and the express consent of that user is acting like an invasive force and that refusing to go along with it is only right and proper. Isn't that so much easier than all of these rationalizations for why we should accept the loss of privacy as though it were some inevitable landmark along the path of human progress? Beware of the motivations of anyone who wants you to believe that; they either have an agenda or a victim mentality and neither one is any good.
So back to OpenID. The advantage: one-stop management of many online accounts. The disadvantage: yet more centralization of private data and an increased ease with which it could be disclosed (intentionally or otherwise). I will be harshly honest -- I think there is something seductive about promises of convenience and reduced effort (especially for things which are already very easy) and I likewise think that there is something cowardly about people who value such promises more than they value their own freedom and privacy. I am not referring to you personally with that sentence, but rather to the large numbers of people who will gladly trade what is priceless in exchange for what has a price and sincerely believe that they have found a bargain.
Is it really fair for the courts to just take something away from you and give it to a rich corporation?
You almost say that as though taking something away from you and giving it to a nearly bankrupt corporation would somehow be more justifiable. I realize you almost certainly don't believe that one is any better than the other (in fact to worry about whether I understand that is to miss my point). All I'm saying is that there is so much undue concern about wealth (usually someone else's) that it tends to infiltrate discussions that it really has nothing to do with.
So this is pretty much like every other social networking site where you have to pick a username?
Yes, Twitter is just one of the most trendy social networking sites right now so people are falling over themselves to act like the squatting of (or competition for) unique IDs in a limited namespace is somehow a new concept. Once you understand the simple concept, the specific application (be it domain names, Twitter usernames, etc) is mere trivia and doesn't really explain anything new but it passes for news. Refer to Henry David Thoreau's take on "the news" to get a better idea of where I'm coming from.
Because Twitter is very trendy right now, in a few months people will probably stop talking about it as though old and well-known concepts are somehow different when applied to the site. Hell, if it's like a lot of trends, then it's possible that in a few months or so many people will not seem to know what you're talking about if you mention it, or they will speak of it like a vague memory.
I should say that I'm all for using Twitter or any other site if you want to and especially if you enjoy it. What I am speaking against is the tendency to make a big deal out of nothing, to attach novelty and significance to events that are actually predictable and trivial.
I have mod points, but I feel obliged to reply instead of moderating. What should Microsoft do? If they go it alone, they are accused of anti-competitive measures through use of proprietary protocols et al. But if they decide to adopt a given standard, the first thing you hear on Slashdot is 'Embrace, extend, extinguish!!'. They can't win.
If they "can't win" that is their problem. Isn't that simple enough?
They have caused so many problems with "embrace and extend" practices that there is a reason why they have little to no credibility in the eyes of some. The more past examples of this behavior there are, the more stupid you're going to feel if you trust them and they do it to you. Isn't that a good thing? How is it bad that other corporations who might try the same thing see that there actually is a price to pay, that abusing things like open standards is not entirely free? I'm sorry but really, how much of a pro-Microsoft bias does it take to make someone fail to consider that maybe they soundly earned any problems that they're having?
The problem with Microsoft is that they don't want to compete in terms of who has the best implementation of an open, agreed-upon standard. They want to avoid competing by doing everything that they can do to ensure that other products are not quite compatible. The realities of business combined with the terribly low knowledgability of the average user are such that this has caused them to be very successful. That does not actually justify anything or make it "ok", however. I would rather not live in a world where everyone blindly trusts an entity that behaves this way. What's wrong with that?
"If you get into bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked". I can't remember the attribution of this quote.
I say that with a full understanding that this is effective business; their profitability and control of the industry speaks well enough for that. No, really -- if I wanted to find out how to be effective in the business world, I would definitely study tactics used by Microsoft and organizations like them. They have quite a genius for it and I acknowledge this freely. I just happen to be more interested in effective systems, interoperability, and truly open standards and open source, in the sense that if the best system available meant Microsoft went bankrupt, I would have the same amount of sympathy for Microsoft as Microsoft has for competitors who have difficulty obtaining marketshare. The idea that you should defend and care about a faceless corporation (any of them, really -- Microsoft just happens to be relevant to the discussion but they are by no means special) as though it had any loyalty to you or personal affection for you is just a silly example of anthropomorphosis (or astroturfing; I can't rule that out since they've done it before. Hey, some marketing practices are inherently deceptive and harm future credibility -- I hope it was worthwhile). Corporations are neither moral nor immoral; they are amoral. To expect an amoral entity to really want to cooperate selflessly with anything resembling a community is naive. To get upset with anyone who points this out is even more so.
Replies that confuse "identifying a corporation and its business practices and calling them what they really are" with "advocating for or against said corporation's products" are indicative of either deliberate straw-man attacks or small-minded men. Don't ask me why I bother to say that; just like with moderators who care more about how something sounds than they care about whether it's true, I get the idea that anyone who can tell the difference does not need me to point it out.
Why should they have to learn to drive? Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where you could just tell the car where to go, and it'd take care of all the details of getting there without any more interaction? I'd love a world where I don't have to put forth one iota of effort to operate a car.
This is a difficult thing for me to try to explain. I very well may fail miserably at it, so I may need to ask some benefit of doubt from you.
I agree that it would be nice to have a car that can drive itself. Not only would it be convenient, but it would eliminate drunk driving and most (maybe even all or nearly all) accidents. I would not be against using it; on the contrary, I think it would be a tremendous boon to society.
The problem that I see is much more abstract. It is not a simple thing to define, but I will try. It's not the action of making things simpler or the desire to do so that I am against. It's the motivation.
When I see people who (for example) claim that they cannot find a file that they just saved three minutes ago, I refuse to believe this claim. The people who claim things like this make the slightest effort or no effort at all to solve the problem (the immediate problem of finding the file and the "bigger picture" of learning to control the machine). Then they say it's too hard, that they are not nerds or computer experts or what-have-you and they either give up or they make it someone else's problem, often a complete stranger (think tech support). In other words, they are easily defeated by what is honestly a trivial problem. If they really made up their minds to give it everything they've got, to stop at nothing to avoid being so easily defeated, they would find out that not only are they able to do it, but that for the longest time they were making simple things more difficult than they had to be. In the scheme of things, I consider such a revelation to be far, far more valuable (priceless, in fact) than whether a file has the name and the location that you intended.
The truth is, any literate adult who is willing to do it can reach a level of expertise regarding the system. It's amazing how much resentment you can encounter by pointing this out, no matter how gently or diplomatically you say it. I am interested in the truth of the matter and I am not interested in whether people like the truth or not. I am not a "people pleaser" who says only what I think will win for me the approval of others, as I have always seen that as a character flaw (if people can enjoy what you have to say, so much the better, but compromising what is true to get this effect shows a diseased set of priorities). I feel like I am surrounded by an entire generation of people who either don't have the most basic learning, abstract thinking, research, and problem-solving skills or who do have them and think that they should never have to use them. They think they should never have to use them because they have a sort of tunnel vision -- they can see only the immediate problem and they see it as separate from themselves.
The types of problems you have and why you have them is one of the best ways to get to know yourself, to understand your weaknesses and how to overcome and transcend them. There are few sources of personal growth that are more effective. They do not appreciate that; to them, it's just an immediate problem and it's just another inconvenience. Therefore, the idea that they should change anything about themselves during the course of solving the problem is anathema. Please read that carefully, because it is not only true, it also is another way of saying "I am perfect or perfect enough; therefore if there is a problem I should never have to change anything about me, for the problem cannot be with me and therefore the solution cannot involve me either". Not only is this the highest order of arrogance, but it also guarantees that nothing truly good can come out of
I've personally had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client.
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved (I mean, you do get to choose where it goes, it does not just happen) and later has difficulty locating it. Yes, that is unpleasant, but is additional complexity in the file system really the best solution? I am honestly not sure how I feel about that. At the same time I agree that there are "user error" type of problems that better technology can either prevent or mitigate, I also feel like some of the proposed solutions I have heard are borderline ridiculous, that at some point there needs to be a minimum expectation of competence on the part of the user.
Is it really too much to ask of a user that they understand that it is a machine, an inanimate object, and it generally does only what they tell it to do (insert Windows jokes here), and that if they tell it to do something by mistake (like saving a file in an unintended location), the mistake is theirs and not the machine's? If that is too much to ask, then what is a more reasonable standard? How far should we go to accommodate users who, to put it bluntly, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?
It's like that Unix saying, (paraphrase) "Unix doesn't try to stop you from doing something stupid, because that would also stop you from doing something clever". I like that, not because I think it's witty but because in my opinion, it reveals a design philosophy that assumes that maybe this is new to you and you don't understand everything right now, but one day you do wish to understand how the system works and you do wish to achieve a degree of mastery over it. I really believe that just about anyone who really wants to understand something can do so, that gradually getting better and better at something over time is the most natural thing in the world unless you keep telling yourself that it's too hard. That's why I really don't understand these "permanent newbies", the people who can use a system for five years without grasping the basics. They claim that they are not interested in understanding, but it seems like they are strongly interested in not understanding. Is there something to be gained by accommodating this?
My point is that I understand and did take into consideration the things you feel a need to point out, and this could have been known to you by reading my post and yet you still feel a need to point them out. To see me make what amounts to a lesser-of-two-evils comparison, in the sense of "if you really MUST do one or the other, this one is a superior choice" (the "maturity" topic), and then to continue to pretend that by clearly indicating "lesser of two evils" I must really mean that one of them is actually the best possible choice among all choices... well, there's just not much I can do with that. I am no longer dealing with someone who is listening. I feel the same way about your take on useful opinions vs. useless opinions; you talk about this as though there is no possible way to determine which is which and that just isn't the case (if it were the case, you'd have never been able to give an example!). I did not say that "all opinions which are explained are equally valid", so even if I give you 20 reasons why I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster I agree that it does not become an informative, useful opinion. But so what? Did you think you were telling me something I did not know? I know the difference, you know the difference, you know that I know the difference (now that this has been explained to you, twice), so what's the point?
There are people who just want to feel right at all costs. I believe that you are one of them. I have told you (strictly speaking only of your interpretation of what I said) why you are going down the wrong path, and you respond by going farther down that path. I admire your persistence and not being easily dissuaded is a good thing overall, but it is a shame when somebody fails to understand that a good sword is kept in its sheath.
Unless you are the world's greatest telepath, then I am the world's foremost expert on the subject of what I was thinking or what I intended to say or what I meant by it. It kinda comes with being me. You are effectively arguing that I did not really mean what I have told you that I meant on multiple occasions now, and you don't seem to understand why this is useless. You are more than smart enough to understand that, you just don't want to because it would interfere with feeling that I must be wrong and you must be right (like what I mentioned before, I don't think this is a conscious choice -- I think it's a choice about which you can become conscious). I really can't work with that, because I am no longer dealing with someone who is being reasonable. I am now dealing with someone who can use logic and reasoning but does not understand that they are useless if the premises are faulty, and you are hell-bent on the premise that I don't state truly obvious things because I need you to point them out to me. So, I am done with this thread. If that makes you feel that you have won a victory, then by all means please celebrate and enjoy yourself. Life is short and a reason to celebrate is a happy occasion.
I don't yet see it as cynically as you do, though maybe the cynicism is warranted.
Mainframe metaphor or not, this "cloud" concept makes the location of the mainframe less relevant, and that location might change without the user needing it. I think it also makes the location of the user less relevant, if they can access these resources from wherever they are.
The extent of my cynicism is that I see this as one of the best ways yet invented to erode privacy with very little to show for it. Don't get me wrong though; I accept that you don't have much of an expectation of privacy when someone else is storing your data on their equipment for free and using their bandwidth to provide access to it. It is precisely because this is the nature of the arrangement that I question whether this is actually a good idea; and if so, for whom is it good?
To me, a worldwide packet-switched network already makes the location of the server (be it a mainframe or my PC) less relevant. My location as a user is also less relevant because anything I care to access with a browser can be made available by running my own Web server (with SSL and whatever form of authentication is necessary). I would then have the advantage of never having to share my data with third parties and thus I could maintain control over it. Consider that some existing "cloud computing" examples are apps like word processors and spreadsheets (which handle things like business and financial data) and it is easy to see why privacy is an important concern, or should be.
I have observed that one of the main causes of the loss of privacy and the loss of freedom is an excess tendency to let other people do for you the things that you could do for yourself. It's the kind of thing that is usually well-intentioned but sets up a situation that can be easily abused once people start to depend on such a service. Anyone who pays attention and has a little understanding will realize that centralized, easily-abused systems have had a terrible track record in terms of trustworthiness (and by centralized I mean that the "cloud computing" networks could be vast but by design they are controlled by a few entities on behalf of many users).
Bull. Opinions are NOT "Informative", everyone has them. False "information" is not informative and does not deserve the tag unless the point of the post is to illustrate or correct false information.
Just as stating something obvious or a truism or perception shared by many is not, by definition, insightful; stating an opinion is not informative. If stating an opinion counts as informative almost very post qualifies. Regardless of how thought out or explained it is, stating an opinion is at best insightful or interesting.
This is why when I gave a hypothetical example of what I consider to be abuse of moderation in order to make my point, I was careful to describe a process of doing research, sharing findings, and explaining conclusions. Perhaps you interpret this differently than I do, but to me this does not include "false information" (more of a good-faith effort to get it right) and does not include "stating something obvious or a truism". Opinions can be very informative if they are educated opinions with solid foundations. If i tell you that in my opinion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real, that's not so informative. If your doctor evaluates your symptoms and gives you a medical opinion about how to treat them, that is quite informative even though it is within the realm of possibility that another doctor might give a different one.
Sure, posting how much you hate and disagree with someone is the height of maturity.
If you are going to do it, I consider it far more mature to post it and own up to it than to abuse the moderation system in order to express it. Most of the time such abuse is not deliberate and intentional; it's due to an inability to separate your personal feelings about a thing from the objective facts (if you don't understand that, just look at how common ad hominem attacks are, veiled or otherwise).
I do not believe that getting this right (or a lot closer to "right") is some lofty unattainable standard. I believe that almost everyone who cares to do so can do so, just as you could have given me some benefit of doubt instead of assuming that when I talk about things like "careful research" that I must really mean "false information " and "obvious truisms" or that when I say that treating personal feelings as personal feelings and not as moderation criteria (i.e. using discretion) that I must really mean that making venomous posts is the height of maturity. When you interpret what someone says in the most unfavorable possible way, you can believe that you are shooting fish in a barrel when you proceed to argue against that person; it does not mean that this is actually the case. I say with zero ill will towards you that you are actually helping to make my point for me.
What you describe is not a visionary, googles founders were visionary, visionary implies you are both capable and have a vision.
What you're describing is more like "the way it should be." The GP was talking more about how much the word is thrown around. I would tend to agree with this, with the understanding that I agree regardless of how applicable it is to this particular story.
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"If you have a point commander, PLEASE make it." - Ambassador G'Kar
I didn't really understand what you were saying. To me saying "Fuck em" is a perfectly valid to thing to say when dealing with a tyrant or tyrannical oligarchy. It makes clear exactly what you think of the oppression you are experiencing & what you'd like to do to said tyrant.
Yeah, I probably should have quoted the AC to whom I was responding, especially since he/she was modded down to -1. I apologize if that caused any confusion. This is the verbatim text of the AC:
In other words, the AC was saying that because people infringe on the copyrights of others, they bring all of the RIAA's tactics upon themselves, as though that makes the RIAA's tactics good and acceptable. I agree with the "fuck 'em" idea. In my opinion the *AA organizations and their tactics are reprehensible. It was the AC and his/her attempt at an "ends justify the means" rationalization that I was addressing. When I pointed out that I believe this to be an instance of fanboyism, it was an attempt at an explanation for why this AC is so upset over the whole thing and unwilling to participate in anything resembling constructive discussion.
The AC's post is the kind of post that I would normally write off as a troll and would therefore be less inclined to respond to, except that there really are plenty of people who have such shallow black-and-white views on what are actually complex issues that don't have such easily defined "good guys" and "bad guys". I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb at all when I say that people who immediately take such a narrow black-and-white view on the subject of copyright, in spite of evidence to the contrary, are quite likely to use similar decision-making on other subjects (I would speculate that they're more interested in feeling "right", implying someone else was wrong, than they are in deciding what is true, making this a sort of ego-induced tunnel vision). Therefore, copyright is only one example of such an issue and happened to be the subject of discussion, but it's really the mentality behind such viewpoints that I was trying to describe.
Yeah, because what the other guy does always excuses your own unethical behavior and abuse (in my opinion) of the legal system. You want to be sanctimonious and talk about how other people should behave ethically? Try leading by example first, and try convincing the RIAA to do something like that (though apologists like you with your "ends justify the means" pronouncements are not much better and are quite possibly worse).
Again this is an exhibit of what I call fanboyism. I call it that having no certainty as to whether this is what other people mean when they use the word, but it seems to apply. Most Microsoft apologists fit this pattern as well, and it's one of the few viable explanations of why any average person would want to defend and advocate for a company with a marketing budget that could purchase a few small countries. It's the typical "us against them" bullshit where you envision two competing "teams" and you root for your favorite "team" and take their losses personally and celebrate their victories personally. It's pretty nice, except for that little fact that you yourself have done nothing to contribute to either "team" and have never participated in either faction's activities, so really it's your own need to live vicariously and maybe also a need to feel like part of something greater than yourself. It's a shame that with a whole unknown Universe out there, people settle for petty sports teams or corporations/brands or legal contests to fulfill this need to be a part of something greater, but I digress. It's like football fans when they say "we won" instead of "they won" or "my team won" even though I didn't see said fan out there in the field playing the game. I know that the difference may sound like minor semantics but it's actually a reflection of the mentality.
The remedy to this self-limiting mentality is to consider the morality (for lack of a better word) of the long-term consequences and how the implications could affect everyone. From this perspective, the reality is that if the RIAA/MPAA went bankrupt and its leadership decided to disband it tomorrow, life would go on with little or no impact to anyone else and in all likelihood they would not be missed; in this sense they are expendable. Meanwhile, if these kinds of legal tactics and the intimidation/extortion (in my opinion) that they create become more acceptable, it could adversely impact many people including those who have nothing to do with the entertainment industry. It's the kind of thing that could be a detriment to the legal system and the rule of law as a whole; these are things which are not expendable. In the face of these questions, the "evils" of copyright infringement in and of itself are barely a footnote when compared to the damage that can be caused by not correctly reacting to them.
Just to make sure I have this right, do you mean to imply that telling people how they should express themselves is not combative and does not make you look like a "dink"? Or is this more of an "it's okay when I do it" situation?
I think the only reason why Apple might appear exceptional is because they were required to pull the ads. Normally advertisers use various propaganda techniques to give a certain impression that may be true or false but they do it without actually making verifiably false statements. They might say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste!" instead of "9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X toothpaste after we paid them a large amount of money!" even though both would be true and even though they only asked 10 individuals instead of doing anything remotely like a proper study of a representative sample.
I very much like your idea about fast-food advertisements. I don't think the burgers in the ads are even edible most of the time (lots of plastic or other things you really wouldn't want to eat) although I regret that I don't have a source/reference handy. Advertising in general, or at least the way it is currently done, is something that I believe a more enlightened society would view as either a great evil or at least a corrupting influence. It's a happy smiling face on what is straight up manipulation and the power of its influence is often underestimated. If it were otherwise, then why the need to exaggerate, misrepresent, and selectively omit facts (not just talking about Apple)?
Healthy people who can think for themselves don't need to be constantly told what to eat, what to drink, where to go, what to buy, for whom to vote, etc. They just need to know what their options are, which is a far simpler affair. To give what I hope isn't a bad analogy, it would be more like "client pull" and less like "server push". I consider obsolete or irrelevant any business model that would collapse if this were the norm, no matter how large or widespread it may be.
Which is just a complicated way of saying that people are El-Ay-See-Why (as my old chem teacher said).
The only reason why I don't see it that way is because I believe we are already doing things the hard way, that the effort necessary to be your own person and do your own thinking is far less than what the current mindlessness is costing us. I think laziness (i.e. the promise of less effort, however false) is a part of it but I also think that appeals to laziness are only one measure of the seductiveness of this type of culture. I think another measure of it is the subtle message that you are just fine the way you are (as opposed to being just fine because of what you are becoming), that you should not bother to know yourself, to look for your weaknesses and remedy them, to develop your knowledge and intellect and wisdom, to become tough-minded and not easily deceived.
The consumerist culture has a message that this sort of self-directed (i.e. you do it when no one is looking, because it matters to you) personal development is somehow optional or somehow no longer necessary for a healthy human being. And we wonder why things like depression and alcoholism and suicide are increasing.
Above all, I think most of the problems with this culture and the people in it, especially the fact that I find myself surrounded by idiots who are capable of not being idiots, is caused by a materialist/reductionist/mechanistic view of the world and our place in it. I think that's why people are so willing to meekly accept their roles as mere cogs in a social machine. What I try to point out and argue against is, to put it frankly, a dehumanizing influence. Collectively, we seem to have failed to learn the trick of having an economic model and a political model without also confusing those for the purpose of our existence. What I see everywhere are people who are subservient to systems instead of systems that are subservient to people. This even applies to the people who appear to control the systems, like the CEOs and political heavyweights of the world (not that I have much pity for the sort of person who wants those positions so badly that they are willing to sell themselves to the system to obtain them).
I wonder if the difference is that Lancet is probably not aiming at the general public for their target audience, certainly not to the degree that CNN or Fox News is. If Lancet tried flagrant debate-framing and other propaganda techniques, or the sensationalism/yellow journalism of which Darkness404 wrote, its audience would probably call them on it.
Either way, I appreciate the reminder and take your word for it that there are good, honest publications out there (no sarcasm intended at all). With the number and popularity of all of the bad examples, that is easy to forget from time to time.
Why do people still listen to the media is beyond me. Every single year they come up with something that is either A) addicting and damaging to minds B) corrupting the family/children/society or C) is somehow harmful. Be it rock and roll, cell phones, video games, comic books, etc, the media always comes up with some "studies" to back them up while two months later showing studies that prove just the opposite is true, why haven't people realized that the media has cried wolf far too many times and just tune the crap out?
Because maybe the only real addiction we have is allowing self-appointed "experts" and authorities to do our thinking for us.
What are you talking about? You can uninstall chrome, and you know what I mean by that comment.
In my experience, knowing (or having the ability to know) what you meant does little to nothing to stop people from setting up a straw man that sounds similar to what you were saying and then talking about how wrong you were when they proceed to tear down that straw man. My favorites are when I anticipate this and go out of my way to explicitly clarify what I am saying and what I am not saying and someone proceeds to argue against a claim I was careful not to make. That people can do this and sincerely believe that they are right and that they really told me off is amazing.
An example of my own experiences with people who refuse to really listen to what you're saying and decide to respond to it anyway are here and this one is a particularly good example.
This is from http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1171, which is a completely unrelated discussion. Yet, I believe this paragraph applies:
Translation: Microsoft will lock you into their platform with while external integrators give you the illusion of choice.
Why not? It works for political parties ...
Google should really be responsible for testing its own links and purging/fixing the latest scam, "referrer redirect" hijacks.
It's a form of attack wherein a hijacked website works correctly... as long as your Referrer string doesn't include certain key words ("Google", "Yahoo", "MSN", etc). The trick being, the website won't know they have been hacked because if they get a notice saying they have, then test their own homepage directly, it still works. If you have a referrer, you get redirected to a drive-by download page (for something like "Windows Antivirus 2009" or similar).
Why is this insidious? Because it gets around a lot of the "known registry", "anti-phishing" plugins.
Google served up the link; they should have a responsibility to do a periodic check that the links they serve aren't going to a bad place, and inform the victim if they've been referrer-redirect hijacked.
That's one thing I don't understand: If I can either refuse to send an HTTP Referrer header or forge it to always point to the site's index page (I use the Firefox RefControl extension but there are others that do the same), certainly Google can do this and avoid that entire set of problems. In fact I've yet to see a good argument for why there even is such a thing as a referrer header or what benefit it's supposed to provide. I can definitely see why advertisers like it, but from the point of view of a user it's useless or nearly useless; if I thought Webmasters needed to know the site I went to before I visited theirs, I would send them an e-mail to tell them.
From Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter 1:
18. All warfare is based on deception.
I wish state governments would start revoking the corporate charter of companies that behave this way, as it is clearly manipulative and costs a great deal of money and wasted time while benefitting no one. As others have pointed out, the telco probably has no interest in actually building a fiber network, they just want to delay this process and make it as expensive as possible because they see this as a threat to their monopoly. They had their opportunity to build it if they wanted to -- the city consulted them first before it decided to build anything. That alone should absolve the city of any further obligation. The telco made their decision when they had every opportunity to make a different one; that's tough shit, let them accept the consequences of that decision.
The goal should be to deliver a high-speed fiber optic network, with or without the telco in question. Petty squabbles like this are probably a big reason why the USA is so far behind many other countries in terms of bandwidth speed and availability. Corporations seriously need to be sent a message (before it's too late, if it is not already) that they are here to serve us, that their interests have the lowest priority when they are at odds with those of the community and that they will be gone the moment they stand in the way of advancement. Any damage that could possibly be done by revoking their corporate charter, seizing their assets and selling them at auction (or however it would be done), and replacing them with a more reasonable provider is nothing in the face of setting such a good example.
Speaking of serch engines... I hope the most ancient cinder of Hell is reserved for the asshole (no doubt in marketing) who decided that the search bar is any sort of replacement for the address bar in a default browser configuration, or that performing a Google/MSN search without first asking the user is the proper way to handle a DNS error. I say this person is no doubt in marketing because driving up ad revenue for major search engines is the only real (as opposed to stated) motive that I can think of.
In connection with my employment I often have to deal with incompetent users who don't understand the difference and many problems are caused by searches taking them to similar-sounding but utterly incorrect Web sites. Unfortunately, in business telling someone to learn how to use a browser before they think of calling you is not an option.
When I hear things like whether "the moon landing was a fake" I don't care so much about whether it was genuine or not, or what either belief says about the person who holds it. To me those are trivial distractions, in that no conclusion you reach is going to enlighten you in any way or elevate your knowledge.
To me the fact that these questions would ever arise is symptomatic of a bigger underlying problem. The underlying problem is that we the people have little to no control over the media, no real (practical) way to keep them honest or to check behind them. We generally assume that they are honest because it comforts us, because it's horrifying to think that there may be a huge propaganda machine that can make most people hold any desirable belief, that can repeat anything however many times it takes for it to become "fact", something that "everybody knows". If there is such a machine, what do you think it is going to do, announce itself on CNN? Of course it would have plausible deniability, otherwise it couldn't possibly exist. There are many "facts" that are simply not falsifiable. They could be made that way, but at present we really don't have the sort of transparency that something half as influential as the news media should have. We are asked to take too many things on authority alone, when history has shown that never questioning authority is very dangerous. Even assuming that this fact is not being abused (something of a leap of faith considering that most powers that can be abused ARE in fact abused), this alone sorely needs addressing.
Regarding the "moon landing conspiracy," do you suppose anyone is going to give me personal access to the original moon-landing footage so I can examine it to my satisfaction, run any test on it that I want to run or hire my own experts to do so on my behalf? Do you suppose that even the media mega-corps do this? Generally they don't; they ask the appropriate government agency for a public statement and they are given a statement and some footage intended for public consumption and they are thanked for the privilege. This is not why a "free press" is specifically protected in the Constitution. In fact this does not describe a free press at all; it describes a mouthpiece. Yet, this is how most "news" happens. We really have very few means by which we could either affirm or deny what is reported, and that is the problem. To me this isn't about whether the moon lander videos were fake or genuine; it's about the idea that if they actually were faked, none of us would be able to do anything about it. That's why the conspiracy theorists sound impotent -- because they are -- but so are the rest of us.
Some of you may picture each news organization independently hiring reporters and sending them out to investigate events and draw their own conclusions and report them back in the form of newspapers and TV shows and Web sites. This is not the case. At least in the USA, almost all news comes from the Associated Press. From a business standpoint, the AP makes a lot of sense. Rather than many organizations redundantly sending reporters to all cover the same stories, they pool their resources together and operate as a centralized unit. From a free press standpoint, this is also known as a single point of failure and makes no sense. The economy, political power, and the media have all been increasingly centralized in the last 100 years. There is a direct correlation with this fact and the gradual erosion of freedom and privacy. I would go so far to say that one could not happen without the other.
It's a big mistake to underestimate the power-hungry, to think that they are stupid while we are so smart. This is what the Greeks referred to as hubris. I think they don'
Speaking of data tracking, if you don't want to be considered in the metrics for their site maintenance, make sure you keep doing that.
Personally, I use my Google Analytics data to check screen resolutions and search engine results (aside from basic hit-count). How people reach me and what their capabilities are are very important. If the average user of a site I manage only has 800x600 resolutions, I need to take that into consideration in site maintenance. If they on average have dial-up, I need to consider that too.
Feel free to opt out, but you never gave consent to the data people like Shoppers Drug Mart collect on you either (and you'd be surprised), and no, not with an Optimum card.
If my browser (or the Java/Javascript running on it) were giving out system information like screen resolution and other "capabilities" to any Web site that asks for it, I would replace it with a less "leaky" browser or I would (as needed) continue to use Noscript and tools like it. It's not about whether I think there's any harm in you knowing the resolution of my monitor. It's that you don't have a dire need to know (you'll see the sun tomorrow even if I don't tell you that) and I don't have a dire need to tell you. I know this sounds "Grandpa Simpson" but I used the Web before it was normal for webmasters to rely on such information. Somehow they survived without it, so let's call this what it is: a convenience as opposed to an essential. Maybe if the Internet were a different place I wouldn't feel this way. I doubt that I would have felt this way back when UUCP was new, spam was unknown, etc. but it's certainly not that way now.
You also seem to have made an unstated assumption that I can't adapt my system to see the information that I want to see and that I need a webmaster to do that for me (if I want the data, do you really think that designing the site for a higher resolution is any sort of obstacle?). Really, it'll be alright. It kind of works out because the users who do need you to handle these details for them are the same users who either don't know they are being tracked and disclosing system information or don't know how to prevent it (i.e. they have chosen not to inform themselves or they have chosen not to take action on that information). Frankly, they sound like your target audience more than I do and will probably be much more receptive to the "but all this tracking is for your own good!" argument than I am.
Brick-and-mortar stores generally don't feel a need to follow me around on foot and see which other stores I went to. Why do Web site operators assume that they need to know or have any right to know which sites I visited before I was on their site? Note that telling me why they find this information useful does not answer my question. It is much easier for a webmaster to use analytics services, third-party cookies, redirects, javascript bugs, 1x1-pixel images, "http-ping", and referrer headers (etc.) than it is for a brick-and-mortar store to physically follow a person around, but that does not somehow make one more justifiable than the other except that the average person clearly understands one scenario and generally does not understand (and therefore is unprepared to resist) the other. I'm a human being, not a resource to be mined in the name of improving your site or a source of marketing data; companies that don't recognize this fact or find it inconvenient will find me unwilling to participate.
Part of the problem too is that it doesn't just stop with honest webmasters like you who just want to create a better, more usable site (and I don't doubt your sincerity either -- I think you've just bought into a system because there are marginal benefits and because "that's the way things are done"). The same tracking mechanisms that provide the sort of information you want are the same ones that generally erode privacy and it has become very much of an all-or-nothing type of choice. If you don't care about anything
There is a protocol to handle this already, and Twitter could've easily used it instead of randomly handing people whatever username came to mind.
To be honest with you, I'm glad that OpenID or something like it has not taken off. I personally like the "chaotic Internet" where one login credential is entirely separate from another and it's up to me to keep track of them. Keeping up with them is a very tiny burden, I do it gladly, and there are plenty of good tools that make it a breeze. To me, the convenience of a system like OpenID is either non-existant or insignificant, while the privacy implications of not only making it easy to profile my browsing but also of doing most of the profiling work myself are severe. I'm sure that the proponents of OpenID have a long list of reasons why I should not worry about privacy implications, but I'm just not buying it. Once personal data is centralized, it has a nasty tendency to stay that way. That kind of accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data is a marketer's wet dream.
I'm one of those strange people who does things based on principle and a concept of whether this is really the best solution. So, for example, I block trackers like Google-analytics despite any argument or any evidence which demonstrates that it's really rather harmless. Why? Because I never signed any document or made any agreement giving any entity the right to track me and profile me. Personally, I need no other reason to make such tracking as difficult as possible, so I often laugh when I see the subject come up from time to time and I see all of these intricate arguments about what is and is not tracked and why you should or shouldn't worry about it. To me those are needless complications of what is actually a very simple issue. I assume that everyone has the right to privacy and that any entity which tries to reduce a user's privacy (no matter how benign the stated reason may be) without full disclosure and the express consent of that user is acting like an invasive force and that refusing to go along with it is only right and proper. Isn't that so much easier than all of these rationalizations for why we should accept the loss of privacy as though it were some inevitable landmark along the path of human progress? Beware of the motivations of anyone who wants you to believe that; they either have an agenda or a victim mentality and neither one is any good.
So back to OpenID. The advantage: one-stop management of many online accounts. The disadvantage: yet more centralization of private data and an increased ease with which it could be disclosed (intentionally or otherwise). I will be harshly honest -- I think there is something seductive about promises of convenience and reduced effort (especially for things which are already very easy) and I likewise think that there is something cowardly about people who value such promises more than they value their own freedom and privacy. I am not referring to you personally with that sentence, but rather to the large numbers of people who will gladly trade what is priceless in exchange for what has a price and sincerely believe that they have found a bargain.
You almost say that as though taking something away from you and giving it to a nearly bankrupt corporation would somehow be more justifiable. I realize you almost certainly don't believe that one is any better than the other (in fact to worry about whether I understand that is to miss my point). All I'm saying is that there is so much undue concern about wealth (usually someone else's) that it tends to infiltrate discussions that it really has nothing to do with.
So this is pretty much like every other social networking site where you have to pick a username?
Yes, Twitter is just one of the most trendy social networking sites right now so people are falling over themselves to act like the squatting of (or competition for) unique IDs in a limited namespace is somehow a new concept. Once you understand the simple concept, the specific application (be it domain names, Twitter usernames, etc) is mere trivia and doesn't really explain anything new but it passes for news. Refer to Henry David Thoreau's take on "the news" to get a better idea of where I'm coming from.
Because Twitter is very trendy right now, in a few months people will probably stop talking about it as though old and well-known concepts are somehow different when applied to the site. Hell, if it's like a lot of trends, then it's possible that in a few months or so many people will not seem to know what you're talking about if you mention it, or they will speak of it like a vague memory.
I should say that I'm all for using Twitter or any other site if you want to and especially if you enjoy it. What I am speaking against is the tendency to make a big deal out of nothing, to attach novelty and significance to events that are actually predictable and trivial.
If they "can't win" that is their problem. Isn't that simple enough?
They have caused so many problems with "embrace and extend" practices that there is a reason why they have little to no credibility in the eyes of some. The more past examples of this behavior there are, the more stupid you're going to feel if you trust them and they do it to you. Isn't that a good thing? How is it bad that other corporations who might try the same thing see that there actually is a price to pay, that abusing things like open standards is not entirely free? I'm sorry but really, how much of a pro-Microsoft bias does it take to make someone fail to consider that maybe they soundly earned any problems that they're having?
The problem with Microsoft is that they don't want to compete in terms of who has the best implementation of an open, agreed-upon standard. They want to avoid competing by doing everything that they can do to ensure that other products are not quite compatible. The realities of business combined with the terribly low knowledgability of the average user are such that this has caused them to be very successful. That does not actually justify anything or make it "ok", however. I would rather not live in a world where everyone blindly trusts an entity that behaves this way. What's wrong with that?
"If you get into bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked". I can't remember the attribution of this quote.
I say that with a full understanding that this is effective business; their profitability and control of the industry speaks well enough for that. No, really -- if I wanted to find out how to be effective in the business world, I would definitely study tactics used by Microsoft and organizations like them. They have quite a genius for it and I acknowledge this freely. I just happen to be more interested in effective systems, interoperability, and truly open standards and open source, in the sense that if the best system available meant Microsoft went bankrupt, I would have the same amount of sympathy for Microsoft as Microsoft has for competitors who have difficulty obtaining marketshare. The idea that you should defend and care about a faceless corporation (any of them, really -- Microsoft just happens to be relevant to the discussion but they are by no means special) as though it had any loyalty to you or personal affection for you is just a silly example of anthropomorphosis (or astroturfing; I can't rule that out since they've done it before. Hey, some marketing practices are inherently deceptive and harm future credibility -- I hope it was worthwhile). Corporations are neither moral nor immoral; they are amoral. To expect an amoral entity to really want to cooperate selflessly with anything resembling a community is naive. To get upset with anyone who points this out is even more so.
Replies that confuse "identifying a corporation and its business practices and calling them what they really are" with "advocating for or against said corporation's products" are indicative of either deliberate straw-man attacks or small-minded men. Don't ask me why I bother to say that; just like with moderators who care more about how something sounds than they care about whether it's true, I get the idea that anyone who can tell the difference does not need me to point it out.
This is a difficult thing for me to try to explain. I very well may fail miserably at it, so I may need to ask some benefit of doubt from you.
I agree that it would be nice to have a car that can drive itself. Not only would it be convenient, but it would eliminate drunk driving and most (maybe even all or nearly all) accidents. I would not be against using it; on the contrary, I think it would be a tremendous boon to society.
The problem that I see is much more abstract. It is not a simple thing to define, but I will try. It's not the action of making things simpler or the desire to do so that I am against. It's the motivation.
When I see people who (for example) claim that they cannot find a file that they just saved three minutes ago, I refuse to believe this claim. The people who claim things like this make the slightest effort or no effort at all to solve the problem (the immediate problem of finding the file and the "bigger picture" of learning to control the machine). Then they say it's too hard, that they are not nerds or computer experts or what-have-you and they either give up or they make it someone else's problem, often a complete stranger (think tech support). In other words, they are easily defeated by what is honestly a trivial problem. If they really made up their minds to give it everything they've got, to stop at nothing to avoid being so easily defeated, they would find out that not only are they able to do it, but that for the longest time they were making simple things more difficult than they had to be. In the scheme of things, I consider such a revelation to be far, far more valuable (priceless, in fact) than whether a file has the name and the location that you intended.
The truth is, any literate adult who is willing to do it can reach a level of expertise regarding the system. It's amazing how much resentment you can encounter by pointing this out, no matter how gently or diplomatically you say it. I am interested in the truth of the matter and I am not interested in whether people like the truth or not. I am not a "people pleaser" who says only what I think will win for me the approval of others, as I have always seen that as a character flaw (if people can enjoy what you have to say, so much the better, but compromising what is true to get this effect shows a diseased set of priorities). I feel like I am surrounded by an entire generation of people who either don't have the most basic learning, abstract thinking, research, and problem-solving skills or who do have them and think that they should never have to use them. They think they should never have to use them because they have a sort of tunnel vision -- they can see only the immediate problem and they see it as separate from themselves.
The types of problems you have and why you have them is one of the best ways to get to know yourself, to understand your weaknesses and how to overcome and transcend them. There are few sources of personal growth that are more effective. They do not appreciate that; to them, it's just an immediate problem and it's just another inconvenience. Therefore, the idea that they should change anything about themselves during the course of solving the problem is anathema. Please read that carefully, because it is not only true, it also is another way of saying "I am perfect or perfect enough; therefore if there is a problem I should never have to change anything about me, for the problem cannot be with me and therefore the solution cannot involve me either". Not only is this the highest order of arrogance, but it also guarantees that nothing truly good can come out of
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved (I mean, you do get to choose where it goes, it does not just happen) and later has difficulty locating it. Yes, that is unpleasant, but is additional complexity in the file system really the best solution? I am honestly not sure how I feel about that. At the same time I agree that there are "user error" type of problems that better technology can either prevent or mitigate, I also feel like some of the proposed solutions I have heard are borderline ridiculous, that at some point there needs to be a minimum expectation of competence on the part of the user.
Is it really too much to ask of a user that they understand that it is a machine, an inanimate object, and it generally does only what they tell it to do (insert Windows jokes here), and that if they tell it to do something by mistake (like saving a file in an unintended location), the mistake is theirs and not the machine's? If that is too much to ask, then what is a more reasonable standard? How far should we go to accommodate users who, to put it bluntly, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?
It's like that Unix saying, (paraphrase) "Unix doesn't try to stop you from doing something stupid, because that would also stop you from doing something clever". I like that, not because I think it's witty but because in my opinion, it reveals a design philosophy that assumes that maybe this is new to you and you don't understand everything right now, but one day you do wish to understand how the system works and you do wish to achieve a degree of mastery over it. I really believe that just about anyone who really wants to understand something can do so, that gradually getting better and better at something over time is the most natural thing in the world unless you keep telling yourself that it's too hard. That's why I really don't understand these "permanent newbies", the people who can use a system for five years without grasping the basics. They claim that they are not interested in understanding, but it seems like they are strongly interested in not understanding. Is there something to be gained by accommodating this?
My point is that I understand and did take into consideration the things you feel a need to point out, and this could have been known to you by reading my post and yet you still feel a need to point them out. To see me make what amounts to a lesser-of-two-evils comparison, in the sense of "if you really MUST do one or the other, this one is a superior choice" (the "maturity" topic), and then to continue to pretend that by clearly indicating "lesser of two evils" I must really mean that one of them is actually the best possible choice among all choices ... well, there's just not much I can do with that. I am no longer dealing with someone who is listening. I feel the same way about your take on useful opinions vs. useless opinions; you talk about this as though there is no possible way to determine which is which and that just isn't the case (if it were the case, you'd have never been able to give an example!). I did not say that "all opinions which are explained are equally valid", so even if I give you 20 reasons why I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster I agree that it does not become an informative, useful opinion. But so what? Did you think you were telling me something I did not know? I know the difference, you know the difference, you know that I know the difference (now that this has been explained to you, twice), so what's the point?
There are people who just want to feel right at all costs. I believe that you are one of them. I have told you (strictly speaking only of your interpretation of what I said) why you are going down the wrong path, and you respond by going farther down that path. I admire your persistence and not being easily dissuaded is a good thing overall, but it is a shame when somebody fails to understand that a good sword is kept in its sheath.
Unless you are the world's greatest telepath, then I am the world's foremost expert on the subject of what I was thinking or what I intended to say or what I meant by it. It kinda comes with being me. You are effectively arguing that I did not really mean what I have told you that I meant on multiple occasions now, and you don't seem to understand why this is useless. You are more than smart enough to understand that, you just don't want to because it would interfere with feeling that I must be wrong and you must be right (like what I mentioned before, I don't think this is a conscious choice -- I think it's a choice about which you can become conscious). I really can't work with that, because I am no longer dealing with someone who is being reasonable. I am now dealing with someone who can use logic and reasoning but does not understand that they are useless if the premises are faulty, and you are hell-bent on the premise that I don't state truly obvious things because I need you to point them out to me. So, I am done with this thread. If that makes you feel that you have won a victory, then by all means please celebrate and enjoy yourself. Life is short and a reason to celebrate is a happy occasion.
I don't yet see it as cynically as you do, though maybe the cynicism is warranted.
Mainframe metaphor or not, this "cloud" concept makes the location of the mainframe less relevant, and that location might change without the user needing it. I think it also makes the location of the user less relevant, if they can access these resources from wherever they are.
The extent of my cynicism is that I see this as one of the best ways yet invented to erode privacy with very little to show for it. Don't get me wrong though; I accept that you don't have much of an expectation of privacy when someone else is storing your data on their equipment for free and using their bandwidth to provide access to it. It is precisely because this is the nature of the arrangement that I question whether this is actually a good idea; and if so, for whom is it good?
To me, a worldwide packet-switched network already makes the location of the server (be it a mainframe or my PC) less relevant. My location as a user is also less relevant because anything I care to access with a browser can be made available by running my own Web server (with SSL and whatever form of authentication is necessary). I would then have the advantage of never having to share my data with third parties and thus I could maintain control over it. Consider that some existing "cloud computing" examples are apps like word processors and spreadsheets (which handle things like business and financial data) and it is easy to see why privacy is an important concern, or should be.
I have observed that one of the main causes of the loss of privacy and the loss of freedom is an excess tendency to let other people do for you the things that you could do for yourself. It's the kind of thing that is usually well-intentioned but sets up a situation that can be easily abused once people start to depend on such a service. Anyone who pays attention and has a little understanding will realize that centralized, easily-abused systems have had a terrible track record in terms of trustworthiness (and by centralized I mean that the "cloud computing" networks could be vast but by design they are controlled by a few entities on behalf of many users).
This is why when I gave a hypothetical example of what I consider to be abuse of moderation in order to make my point, I was careful to describe a process of doing research, sharing findings, and explaining conclusions. Perhaps you interpret this differently than I do, but to me this does not include "false information" (more of a good-faith effort to get it right) and does not include "stating something obvious or a truism". Opinions can be very informative if they are educated opinions with solid foundations. If i tell you that in my opinion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real, that's not so informative. If your doctor evaluates your symptoms and gives you a medical opinion about how to treat them, that is quite informative even though it is within the realm of possibility that another doctor might give a different one.
If you are going to do it, I consider it far more mature to post it and own up to it than to abuse the moderation system in order to express it. Most of the time such abuse is not deliberate and intentional; it's due to an inability to separate your personal feelings about a thing from the objective facts (if you don't understand that, just look at how common ad hominem attacks are, veiled or otherwise).
I do not believe that getting this right (or a lot closer to "right") is some lofty unattainable standard. I believe that almost everyone who cares to do so can do so, just as you could have given me some benefit of doubt instead of assuming that when I talk about things like "careful research" that I must really mean "false information " and "obvious truisms" or that when I say that treating personal feelings as personal feelings and not as moderation criteria (i.e. using discretion) that I must really mean that making venomous posts is the height of maturity. When you interpret what someone says in the most unfavorable possible way, you can believe that you are shooting fish in a barrel when you proceed to argue against that person; it does not mean that this is actually the case. I say with zero ill will towards you that you are actually helping to make my point for me.
"I'd like a job as a visionary"
What you describe is not a visionary, googles founders were visionary, visionary implies you are both capable and have a vision.
What you're describing is more like "the way it should be." The GP was talking more about how much the word is thrown around. I would tend to agree with this, with the understanding that I agree regardless of how applicable it is to this particular story.