In fairness, there are lots of reasons why the world isn't as brutal as it once was. Also, some people argue that at least some of that teenage rebellion and angst comes from our culture telling young adults, "You're useless and there's nothing that you can do properly yet. Act like a moron for another few years, and then we'll consider listening to you."
I don't think it's a question of whether they're going through changes. Children go through massive changes throughout their childhood. People go through large physical and emotional changes in their 20s, and again in middle age. We're constantly changing.
The issue that the GP is talking about is that we invented the idea of adolescence-- that is, a state between childhood and adulthood-- in the past hundred years or so. Before that, you were a kid until you were an adult
Whether this is a good or bad concept is up for debate, but most people who think very much about it seem to agree that it's a bad thing. It puts people in a sort of void state of not being a child, but not being an adult; being held responsible, but not really being held responsible; having people expect you to do a lot, but being consistently treated as useless and unhelpful. It's confusing and frustrating, and yet we keep stretching the period out longer and longer (people are now often expected to continue acting like teenagers until they're 25 or 30).
The idea behind stretching it out seems to be that people aren't ready to be adults, and need a probationary period, but the probationary period never seems to be enough. However, you could definitely argue that the reason it's not enough is because it's not actually preparing them very well for being adults.
Yes, I like the idea of decision-making and power being distributed more evenly. The US government was built, in fact, to distribute power. It's just that, over hundreds of years, the power consolidated into the hands of a relative few.
Thanks for the tip. My wish, however, was to be able to block ads in such a way that could signal to the person getting the ad revenue:
That I'm blocking their ads
Which ads I'm blocking
Why I'm blocking them
Under which circumstances my settings would automatically stop blocking them
The big idea here would be to make the system a two-way negotiation rather than a one-way push. The person making revenue from ad placement could then say, "Huh, not only am I not getting click-throughs, but when I put up Flash ads, people retaliate by even blocking my text ads. This is bad for business. No more Flash ads for me."
Unfortunately, there's no way for this to work. I would guess that as soon as the browser said, "I'm blocking your ads," most sites would say, "Well then I'm not sending you anymore content." Still, ad-blocking is a reality, and website might actually be well served to know what their audience's threshold is before they start blocking ads.
I'm a bit surprised at the negativity towards Apple, lately.
Lately? There has been a hell of a lot of love from Apple users since the very beginning, but there has also been some pretty strong hatred from the very beginning too. Apple's trendiness isn't hurting. People are still buying iPods and iPhones and Macbooks. They're all over the fricken place.
The only big thing lately, the big complaint, is about the iPhone app store. Most people don't like how closed it is, and I don't blame them (I'm one of them). However, at least some of the blame probably belongs with AT&T, and most people know that too. If Apple would either open the iPhone or handle the approval process better, I think most of the people who are upset/annoyed would settle down.
Yeah, my main problem with this idea is that it seems like another thing that companies might use to arbitrarily deny support. As in, "Yes, unofficially, I understand this sensor could theoretically give a false positive. However, our policy is that if that sensor is triggered, you're SOL and need to buy a new device."
Do you honestly think that the company (any company, not just Apple) would charge you less if people did not do this? The difference is going to boost their profit margin, and since people already have no problems overpaying for a product, they will see no need to lower the price at all.
It depends on how competitive the market is. Insofar as Apple feels any threat from the Zune, for example, I'm sure they've love to drop their prices on their iPods, keeping the same profit margins, and just make the iPod that much more attractive from a marketing standpoint.
If competition is fierce enough, then companies will tend to drop their prices until their profit margin is pretty minimal. Apple does supposedly have larger profit margins than most PC manufacturers, but not by a ridiculous degree, and it's worth remembering that they're also funding a fair amount of OS development and R&D and such. But they still have to compete with the likes of Dell.
Similarly, Google lives by its search engine, and people at Google know it. There is nothing more important to Google than returning good search results, and if somebody else starts returning better ones Google is in deep trouble.
It might be more true to say, "Google lives by its ads. There is nothing more important to Google than getting people to look at their ads." It makes Google look a little less altruistic and all, but it's true.
But still, it's a good point. Google wants you to look at their ads, and so in a sense, they have to make their pages worth visiting on their own merits. Google doesn't really have an ulterior motive with their search engine besides getting you to visit it. They don't have much interest in pushing you to one product or another once you're there.
That can change, though, as their portfolio grows. For example, if Youtube starts offering ad-supported TV shows, then it becomes a competitor to Hulu. Will Google do anything to skew search results involving Youtube and Hulu? Let's hope not.
Microsoft always do this with search engines. They seem to start from the assumption that any query represents a user problem, for which there exists a Microsoft based solution. Looked at that way, a search engine becomes an exercise in derailing the users interest, and redirecting into more profitable channels.
That seems like a very interesting way of looking at it. Seriously. I see it in a different way that isn't incompatible with yours, but stresses the issue differently. I'd say something like:
Microsoft has shown a consistent pattern of behavior over the years, that it isn't satisfied to produce any of their products for the revenue generated by that product. Instead they look to have every one of their products reenforce all of their other products.
Pretty much every one of their products interlock with MS-only standards, formats, protocols, etc. They have a put a tremendous investment in over the years into vendor lock-in and incompatibility. With every product they introduce, if you want to know why they're introducing that product, you should ask yourself, "How can Microsoft possibly use this product to promote all of their other products?"
For search engines, there is an unfortunate obvious answer: skewing results towards their own products. I don't think it's too paranoid to expect Microsoft to do this to the extent that they believe they can get away with it.
Yeah, when you get down to it, Firefox is just Google's other unofficial browser. AFAIK an awful lot of Firefox's funding comes from Google anyway, and Firefox still uses Google by default. It doesn't hurt Google for users to have lots of options in browsers, just so long as they all use Google for their search bar.
Yeah, I'd like to set something like that in my browser, not just for my own ad-blocking, but I almost want to notify the websites: I am blocking your ads because they're big, slow-loading flash ads. Give me static images or text and I won't block them.
Or what I almost, not really but *almost* want to be able to do is do it on a per-site basis. To be able to send the message to one website, "I'll accept animated GIFs because your site is awesome, but I won't load Flash files for any reason," and tell another website, "Meh, you kind of rot but I just happened across your site by accident. No ad revenue for you." Of course, it would require a lot of work to set that up, even if I had the opportunity to do it.
And yes, I suppose I could send website emails, but I'd just be one nutjob sending an email, and I wouldn't think it'd do much. What I mean is, it'd be nice if we could all register our frustration in a simple, quick way that would be quantifiable to webmasters, maybe it would improve the situation. Like if someone could look at a set of numbers and say, "Look, if we use Flash, then 40% of our visitors will just block all of our ads, but if we use static images that only take up 14% of the display area, then only 20% will block those images," then maybe websites would actually be less annoying about ads.
Last I heard, Chrome was supposed to support both Theora and h264. I think it's the only browser doing that-- Firefox is Theora only, Safari is "whatever Quicktime supports" which doesn't include Theora unless you install the codec. I'm not sure what Opera is doing, though.
Well I don't think that's quite right, either. You have to choose between a poorer-quality codec with no hardware support and a widely-supported codec with better quality but requires a licensing fee.
Yeah, it's likely that they want the company's IP, too. Go back and look at the whole HTML 5 and Theora debate. Apparently Google is paying some kind of licensing fee for h264 for both YouTube and Chrome, probably for Android and ChromeOS too if they're providing support. Theora is an open source version of On2's codec that is both old and doesn't have any hardware support.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to guess that Google wants to open up On2's most recent codecs and try to push other companies to support it. That way they could use the same video formats for all their products without paying additional licensing fees. Plus, they can move YouTube to using HTML5's "video" tag without having to keep a Theora copy to support Firefox/Linux and a h264 copy to support Safari/iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs. Think of what they'll save on transcoding and storage.
And the scratching... that is just pathetic. I thought at first that it make a wall into a touch surface. Capable of detecting the POSITION.
Well I wonder if it couldn't be adapted to give you positional data. Attach two sensors to the wall, and assuming the wall is uniform density and the system is calibrated properly....?
But anyway, it's still kind of inventive. Not because it allows you to do anything wildly new, but because it's like a touchscreen/gestural interface that can be put almost anywhere very cheaply. It seems like it would be very durable and unlikely to break or malfunction. Sometimes something like this leads to some very practical applications.
But yeah, I'm not sure I'd call it "mind-blowing". I think augmented reality has a lot of potential, but this demonstration hasn't shown anything I haven't already imagined.
Another thing that might have made it less of a problem: if the consumers were given an option and saw benefit from watching the ads.
For example, if the publisher said from the outset, "Agree to have these ads placed in your game, and the game is now free to you, entirely ad supported," then that seems fine. Or even if there's a partial-credit, like you can get the ad-supported version of the game for 50% off.
But paying full price for a game only to have ads pop up unexpectedly seems like an intrusion to me. Especially so if I've already bought a game, and it's not until a later update that ads get added in. Once I've bought the game, our transaction is complete. You don't get to modify the arrangement and continue making money by selling my eyeball time to advertisers.
Correction: Read: "We are still committed to forcing ads on you and will wait for you to forget about this incident before trying again. If we keep cramming this stuff down your throats, eventually you'll swallow."
Oh, then I did misunderstand. I probably wouldn't have used the word "hijack" to describe Bell's servers giving an improper response to a DNS query, unless that query was actually directed elsewhere. But maybe that's just me.
The question of definition is less about what you state above and more about how important it is to have the argument strongly passed off as your own position.
No, the question is how intentional your misrepresentation of my argument is. But, wow, look at how quickly you want to change the subject again to pedantic redefinitions of common terms. It's almost as though you don't have any ideas or arguments relevant to the topic we're discussing, and you're more interested in childish pissing contests.
Yes, I understand how you get DNS servers through DHCP. If it's only Bell choosing how their own DNS servers respond, then it doesn't seem like much of a problem.
However, the summary talks about "hijacking" DNS queries. The summary is pretty light on details, and it doesn't link to other articles, so I'm not sure what it means by "hijacking", but I was guessing from the wording and tone of the article that they were intercepting DNS queries to other DNS servers. If that's not the case, then personally I find the summary misleading. But maybe I'm just wrong.
No, this is the kind of mistake that newbies to the informal fallacies make. The person is simply disclosing their view of your position.
Not if you're willfully choosing a position that I am not taking for the purpose of setting up a weaker opponent to your own arguments.
I never argued anything like "We should throw away structural consistency and do formatting word-by-word." Either you're intentionally mischaracterizing my position, or you have some serious trouble with your reading comprehension.
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In fairness, there are lots of reasons why the world isn't as brutal as it once was. Also, some people argue that at least some of that teenage rebellion and angst comes from our culture telling young adults, "You're useless and there's nothing that you can do properly yet. Act like a moron for another few years, and then we'll consider listening to you."
I don't think it's a question of whether they're going through changes. Children go through massive changes throughout their childhood. People go through large physical and emotional changes in their 20s, and again in middle age. We're constantly changing.
The issue that the GP is talking about is that we invented the idea of adolescence-- that is, a state between childhood and adulthood-- in the past hundred years or so. Before that, you were a kid until you were an adult
Whether this is a good or bad concept is up for debate, but most people who think very much about it seem to agree that it's a bad thing. It puts people in a sort of void state of not being a child, but not being an adult; being held responsible, but not really being held responsible; having people expect you to do a lot, but being consistently treated as useless and unhelpful. It's confusing and frustrating, and yet we keep stretching the period out longer and longer (people are now often expected to continue acting like teenagers until they're 25 or 30).
The idea behind stretching it out seems to be that people aren't ready to be adults, and need a probationary period, but the probationary period never seems to be enough. However, you could definitely argue that the reason it's not enough is because it's not actually preparing them very well for being adults.
I thought it was because it's less filling?
Yes, I like the idea of decision-making and power being distributed more evenly. The US government was built, in fact, to distribute power. It's just that, over hundreds of years, the power consolidated into the hands of a relative few.
Thanks for the tip. My wish, however, was to be able to block ads in such a way that could signal to the person getting the ad revenue:
The big idea here would be to make the system a two-way negotiation rather than a one-way push. The person making revenue from ad placement could then say, "Huh, not only am I not getting click-throughs, but when I put up Flash ads, people retaliate by even blocking my text ads. This is bad for business. No more Flash ads for me."
Unfortunately, there's no way for this to work. I would guess that as soon as the browser said, "I'm blocking your ads," most sites would say, "Well then I'm not sending you anymore content." Still, ad-blocking is a reality, and website might actually be well served to know what their audience's threshold is before they start blocking ads.
I'm a bit surprised at the negativity towards Apple, lately.
Lately? There has been a hell of a lot of love from Apple users since the very beginning, but there has also been some pretty strong hatred from the very beginning too. Apple's trendiness isn't hurting. People are still buying iPods and iPhones and Macbooks. They're all over the fricken place.
The only big thing lately, the big complaint, is about the iPhone app store. Most people don't like how closed it is, and I don't blame them (I'm one of them). However, at least some of the blame probably belongs with AT&T, and most people know that too. If Apple would either open the iPhone or handle the approval process better, I think most of the people who are upset/annoyed would settle down.
Yeah, my main problem with this idea is that it seems like another thing that companies might use to arbitrarily deny support. As in, "Yes, unofficially, I understand this sensor could theoretically give a false positive. However, our policy is that if that sensor is triggered, you're SOL and need to buy a new device."
Do you honestly think that the company (any company, not just Apple) would charge you less if people did not do this? The difference is going to boost their profit margin, and since people already have no problems overpaying for a product, they will see no need to lower the price at all.
It depends on how competitive the market is. Insofar as Apple feels any threat from the Zune, for example, I'm sure they've love to drop their prices on their iPods, keeping the same profit margins, and just make the iPod that much more attractive from a marketing standpoint.
If competition is fierce enough, then companies will tend to drop their prices until their profit margin is pretty minimal. Apple does supposedly have larger profit margins than most PC manufacturers, but not by a ridiculous degree, and it's worth remembering that they're also funding a fair amount of OS development and R&D and such. But they still have to compete with the likes of Dell.
Similarly, Google lives by its search engine, and people at Google know it. There is nothing more important to Google than returning good search results, and if somebody else starts returning better ones Google is in deep trouble.
It might be more true to say, "Google lives by its ads. There is nothing more important to Google than getting people to look at their ads." It makes Google look a little less altruistic and all, but it's true.
But still, it's a good point. Google wants you to look at their ads, and so in a sense, they have to make their pages worth visiting on their own merits. Google doesn't really have an ulterior motive with their search engine besides getting you to visit it. They don't have much interest in pushing you to one product or another once you're there.
That can change, though, as their portfolio grows. For example, if Youtube starts offering ad-supported TV shows, then it becomes a competitor to Hulu. Will Google do anything to skew search results involving Youtube and Hulu? Let's hope not.
Microsoft always do this with search engines. They seem to start from the assumption that any query represents a user problem, for which there exists a Microsoft based solution. Looked at that way, a search engine becomes an exercise in derailing the users interest, and redirecting into more profitable channels.
That seems like a very interesting way of looking at it. Seriously. I see it in a different way that isn't incompatible with yours, but stresses the issue differently. I'd say something like:
Microsoft has shown a consistent pattern of behavior over the years, that it isn't satisfied to produce any of their products for the revenue generated by that product. Instead they look to have every one of their products reenforce all of their other products.
Pretty much every one of their products interlock with MS-only standards, formats, protocols, etc. They have a put a tremendous investment in over the years into vendor lock-in and incompatibility. With every product they introduce, if you want to know why they're introducing that product, you should ask yourself, "How can Microsoft possibly use this product to promote all of their other products?"
For search engines, there is an unfortunate obvious answer: skewing results towards their own products. I don't think it's too paranoid to expect Microsoft to do this to the extent that they believe they can get away with it.
Yeah, when you get down to it, Firefox is just Google's other unofficial browser. AFAIK an awful lot of Firefox's funding comes from Google anyway, and Firefox still uses Google by default. It doesn't hurt Google for users to have lots of options in browsers, just so long as they all use Google for their search bar.
Yeah, I'd like to set something like that in my browser, not just for my own ad-blocking, but I almost want to notify the websites: I am blocking your ads because they're big, slow-loading flash ads. Give me static images or text and I won't block them.
Or what I almost, not really but *almost* want to be able to do is do it on a per-site basis. To be able to send the message to one website, "I'll accept animated GIFs because your site is awesome, but I won't load Flash files for any reason," and tell another website, "Meh, you kind of rot but I just happened across your site by accident. No ad revenue for you." Of course, it would require a lot of work to set that up, even if I had the opportunity to do it.
And yes, I suppose I could send website emails, but I'd just be one nutjob sending an email, and I wouldn't think it'd do much. What I mean is, it'd be nice if we could all register our frustration in a simple, quick way that would be quantifiable to webmasters, maybe it would improve the situation. Like if someone could look at a set of numbers and say, "Look, if we use Flash, then 40% of our visitors will just block all of our ads, but if we use static images that only take up 14% of the display area, then only 20% will block those images," then maybe websites would actually be less annoying about ads.
Sorry if I'm just pushing us off-topic.
Last I heard, Chrome was supposed to support both Theora and h264. I think it's the only browser doing that-- Firefox is Theora only, Safari is "whatever Quicktime supports" which doesn't include Theora unless you install the codec. I'm not sure what Opera is doing, though.
Well I don't think that's quite right, either. You have to choose between a poorer-quality codec with no hardware support and a widely-supported codec with better quality but requires a licensing fee.
Yeah, it's likely that they want the company's IP, too. Go back and look at the whole HTML 5 and Theora debate. Apparently Google is paying some kind of licensing fee for h264 for both YouTube and Chrome, probably for Android and ChromeOS too if they're providing support. Theora is an open source version of On2's codec that is both old and doesn't have any hardware support.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to guess that Google wants to open up On2's most recent codecs and try to push other companies to support it. That way they could use the same video formats for all their products without paying additional licensing fees. Plus, they can move YouTube to using HTML5's "video" tag without having to keep a Theora copy to support Firefox/Linux and a h264 copy to support Safari/iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs. Think of what they'll save on transcoding and storage.
And the scratching... that is just pathetic. I thought at first that it make a wall into a touch surface. Capable of detecting the POSITION.
Well I wonder if it couldn't be adapted to give you positional data. Attach two sensors to the wall, and assuming the wall is uniform density and the system is calibrated properly....?
But anyway, it's still kind of inventive. Not because it allows you to do anything wildly new, but because it's like a touchscreen/gestural interface that can be put almost anywhere very cheaply. It seems like it would be very durable and unlikely to break or malfunction. Sometimes something like this leads to some very practical applications.
But yeah, I'm not sure I'd call it "mind-blowing". I think augmented reality has a lot of potential, but this demonstration hasn't shown anything I haven't already imagined.
My lack of response is that I don't see the point with arguing against irrational, spurious, and pedantic arguments.
Another thing that might have made it less of a problem: if the consumers were given an option and saw benefit from watching the ads.
For example, if the publisher said from the outset, "Agree to have these ads placed in your game, and the game is now free to you, entirely ad supported," then that seems fine. Or even if there's a partial-credit, like you can get the ad-supported version of the game for 50% off.
But paying full price for a game only to have ads pop up unexpectedly seems like an intrusion to me. Especially so if I've already bought a game, and it's not until a later update that ads get added in. Once I've bought the game, our transaction is complete. You don't get to modify the arrangement and continue making money by selling my eyeball time to advertisers.
Correction: Read: "We are still committed to forcing ads on you and will wait for you to forget about this incident before trying again. If we keep cramming this stuff down your throats, eventually you'll swallow."
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe "Bell's DNS servers suck"?
Oh, then I did misunderstand. I probably wouldn't have used the word "hijack" to describe Bell's servers giving an improper response to a DNS query, unless that query was actually directed elsewhere. But maybe that's just me.
The question of definition is less about what you state above and more about how important it is to have the argument strongly passed off as your own position.
No, the question is how intentional your misrepresentation of my argument is. But, wow, look at how quickly you want to change the subject again to pedantic redefinitions of common terms. It's almost as though you don't have any ideas or arguments relevant to the topic we're discussing, and you're more interested in childish pissing contests.
That is unlikely. I think it would require deep packet inspection to work.
You can't just redirect the DNS ports to another server? You may be right. I just wouldn't expect it to be all that complicated.
Yes, I understand how you get DNS servers through DHCP. If it's only Bell choosing how their own DNS servers respond, then it doesn't seem like much of a problem.
However, the summary talks about "hijacking" DNS queries. The summary is pretty light on details, and it doesn't link to other articles, so I'm not sure what it means by "hijacking", but I was guessing from the wording and tone of the article that they were intercepting DNS queries to other DNS servers. If that's not the case, then personally I find the summary misleading. But maybe I'm just wrong.
No, this is the kind of mistake that newbies to the informal fallacies make. The person is simply disclosing their view of your position.
Not if you're willfully choosing a position that I am not taking for the purpose of setting up a weaker opponent to your own arguments.
I never argued anything like "We should throw away structural consistency and do formatting word-by-word." Either you're intentionally mischaracterizing my position, or you have some serious trouble with your reading comprehension.