Besides all that, there's just the fact that there isn't money to to made from selling music online. Let me rephrase that to be completely accurate: all the money made selling music goes to the label. Not to the artist, not to the online store, but just the label. Companies keep thinking that they're going to make a truckload of money if they release the new online store, but there's no business plan for it yet. For the amount of money the labels demand, and the price consumers are willing to pay, there's just not enough profit margin for a business to be "successful". It reminds me of the 90s when everyone thought they could make money if they had a web site, but they had no business plan.
The only reason Apple is "successful" is because they go ahead and run the store with basically no profit. On its own, the iTMS would probably be a failing venture, but because it's being used for marketing, "breaking even" is good enough.
Not only that, but it's a company that you're already dealing with. You'll have one fewer bill to keep track of, one fewer account to remember, one fewer tech support line to call, and that alone, all other things being equal, will give them an advantage. Plus they can offer bundling deals, like a lot of cable companies are trying to do now with TV, Internet, VOIP.
Very insightful. In fact, there's hardly a point to having a political party that is advocating legal actions, unless those legal actions are under threat. An "anti-theft" party, which thinks it should be illegal to steal car stereos, for example, would be downright stupid. The only reason I can think to start a political party is when you're unhappy with the current laws, or to combat laws that you're afraid might be passed in the future...
Well, you're right and we shouldn't be feeding cows to other cows. However, I'm inclined to say that it might be nice if the unfortunate souls who have the disease, you know.... wouldn't die a horrible death. I know it's rare, and should become more rare if we start showing some sense in raising cattle, but, you know... if they could maybe cure it along the way to finding a cure for another disease, I wouldn't consider it a waste of time.
I tried it, waited about 15 minutes, tried again. Same thing. I don't know what's up, I just assumed it was because you wanted the ad revenue, since that's where you make your money.
I know, I'm not saying the "search pages" are a feature. The person I responding to claimed you could turn off the search pages, and I was saying that AFAIK, you can't. Read one of the other responses and it seems to be someone from OpenDNS claiming that you can, in fact, disable the search pages, but when I tried it, it didn't work.
That's all. I'm not saying you should use the service or not. Just OpenDNS says you can disable the search pages, and it didn't work for me.
Ummm... I'm sorry if I upset you, but I didn't just go posting things without checking. I use the service and have typo-correction turned off. When I enter an invalid domain name, I get the search page. I don't know what to tell you.
OpenDNS is not a solution to this problem those with dynamic IPs, which includes most Earthlink customers (like me). By default, they do exactly the same thing Earthlink does: from their webpage: "...when we can't fix your typo we take you to a page with a set of search results." They do allow you to turn that behavior off on their prefs page, but only if you have a static IP.
Actually, AFAIK, there isn't a way to turn off the "search results" page. If you look for a domain that doesn't exist, it directs you to this page no matter what. The option that you can disable is the "typo protection", which will look for other domains which are close to what you typed.
So if you have typo protection enabled, and you type googl.ecom, it figures out that you meant google.com and directs you there. If it can't figure out the domain you intended, it sends you to their search page. If you disable the typo correction, then it just sends you to the search page immediately.
I don't know, but maybe their default is to track which domain names were requested, but not by whom? After all, if they really don't keep records of who requested the domain name, there wouldn't be a privacy concern.
I have no reason to believe that what I just said is the case, but it's one obvious way that you could reconcile the two statements.
What do you think digital cable is? It's streaming a digital feed over a network. Now, I don't know exactly what protocols and compression they use, and I'm sure they must be doing some QoS stuff behind the scenes so my neighbor's bittorrent doesn't keep me from ordering a movie, but it demonstrates the capability of high-quality streaming. I can get OnDemand HDTV movies over the same line that I could order a theoretical 30Mbps downstream-- don't tell me that video streaming isn't possible.
Plus, HDTV is just now being adopted by normal people (i.e. not "early adopters"). I'm sure it'll be at least 20 years before we see a new standard. Most people haven't even been on the internet for 10 years.
However, I think that as everything continues more "Average" users will gravitate towards power users position. Not so much asbe completely entralled by every last detail of a computer, but enough so that perhaps updating hardware without purchasing a whole new system will be a bit more common place.
I don't know-- I used to build my own computers and upgrade them piece-by-piece, but these days it generally seems like a lot of work for little in the way of returns. "Upgrades" often don't end up being all they're cracked up to be. More and more, it seems like the performance boosts are coming from architectural shifts rather than revving up clock frequencies, and so individual upgrades seem less valuable. If you really want a big performance boost, you often have to replace multiple components, which means you're often just as well off replacing the whole thing and getting newer/faster drives and whatever other new features have been introduced in the past year.
Plus, most of us just don't need the little boosts in performance anyway. For most non-gamers, a PC from 5 years ago is fast enough to do most of what they want to do. So it seems to me that, once upon a time, people were more worried about speed because there was a real fear that software coming out next year just wouldn't run on last year's hardware. These days, more and more people (even geeks) are looking to laptops that are light-weight, stylish, and feature rich rather than all-out huge speed-demon upgradable desktop system.
I agree. You know, if someone wants to go back and clean up the film quality, enhance the special effects, etc., then I don't really see it as a big problem. Even if they go pretty far with it, it could be a little bit of a creative act, like a partial remake. I think the analog with music would be that instead of covering a song (which is like a remake) they'd be doing a remix, and insofar as it's understood as such, it's kind of neat.
My objection to Star Wars re-editing is only in that it seems to be aimed at re-writing history. The content has been changed, not just the special effects. Actors have been replaced, and events have been altered, sometimes for the purpose of political correctness. On top of that, there seemed to be an effort on Lucas's part to suppress the originals.
So the complaint shouldn't be against using old art to make new art, but against destroying old art and distorting history for the sake of ego, financial gain, or political correctness.
Because that's called a laptop without a battery and is fuckin' pointless. Sure, it looks cool but once its outdated you throw it away. People don't like that with laptops but they put up with it because its portable.
Most people put up with it with laptops because they just don't care. Most people do exactly what you said, they buy a computer, and once it's outdated, they get a whole new computer.
Uhhhh.... yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the point being made here, that this DRM violates copyright law as surely as sharing on P2P networks. So I don't think anyone wants to sue customers, but it's more of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of another argument why users shouldn't be sued under any circumstances. After all, copyrights in general were intended to protect against large-scale systematic explotiation by commercial entities or other organizations, and not against end-users.
However, I suppose you could argue that someone should sue Microsoft on the same grounds that P2P software makers have been sued. Even if they aren't violating copyright law themselves, they are promoting a technology that is will probably be used to violate copyrights. I don't think they'd win, though.
Unthinking beauracracies evolve into whats best for the "beast" and not whats best for doing its job.
If you look at it evolutionarily, then at least get it right: the bureaucracies will evolve not into what does any particular thing well, or even what is best for itself, but what is most apt at perpetuating its own existence.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
To tone it down a little, I'd say that surely they'd notice that there was a difference insofar as the UI was different. However, it is true that:
They wouldn't care so long as they could figure out how to launch the apps they need within 30 seconds
Even though they could tell the difference, they wouldn't understand what the difference was. There'd be confusion comparable to if you re-skinned Windows and moved the task bar to the top of the screen.
Further, I'd say you could substitute Office with OOo/Evolution, and again, they'd notice the difference. In reality some users would object purely on brand loyalty, and some would be jealous of people who had MS Office because of the fact that it costs $500, and how much money IT spends on you is a status thing. Seriously, I've had users complain that they need the Pro version of Office even though they only ever use Excel, Word, and Outlook.
But, similar to the OS, most users would only care to the degree that it didn't behave the way they'd expect.
Users who use lots of MS Word features would be annoyed because menu items have moved. I've known users to get pissed off at new versions of MS Office for this reason, though the annoyance is offset by the status symbol thing (getting Office XP while their coworkers have 2000 makes people happy). Users who use Word just to type things up, never using any specific features or even formatting their docs, however, won't care.
Well, except that's not exactly true, because it's usually the people who are most unable to use these apps that are most interested in having the newest/coolest/most expensive version. It's probably the boss's nephew who doesn't do anything who will end up being the first person to "need" the upgrade to Office 2007 Super Ultimate Edition.
F/OSS succeeds or fails based on how much support (of one kind or another) projects get. People don't support projects that they don't know about or that they think are "doomed to fail". People understanding "what's at stake" with open standards (as opposed to Microsoft's standards) would go a long way towards opening doors for F/OSS to be used.
Net neutrality succeeds or fails based on who has the best lobbyists. There aren't enough "people" who understand the issues involved well enough to badger anyone, and that's assuming that our representatives care about people badgering them instead of just listening to lobbyists anyway.
"It's OK to do it because it's OK, and we have to do it because our opponents are doing it," is how you keep from losing.
It's funny, because I was also inclined to tie the issue to something about games. Not so much the difference in graphics, but an awful lot of programmers and general IT people I've met under the age of 30 started learning about computers in order to play video games. Not "to write video games", but to play them.
Remember playing HHGttG? Or Zork? Anyone here remember juggling multiple AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files because different games required different configurations? Sometimes you'd have to load HIMEM.SYS or EMM386, sometimes not? All those configuration issues, needing to know what kind of sound card you had, etc.?
Well think about this: for most people under the age of 20, they've never experienced computers as "something that you need to type commands to get it to work". Just open a terminal window and type a command in front of a 15 year old, and they think you've displayed some great hacking feat. Their games just install and run, so they don't need to know anything about IRQs or hardware or anything. The games just work, like magic. Hell, my grandparents are far from computer literate (last time I talked to them about it, they thought Outlook Express was "the internet), but at least they've used DOS and know how a CLI works.
I'm not complaining exactly, because I'm certainly glad that I don't have to worry about IRQs anymore, but with games being so easy to install and run, we've lost one of the great motivators that would lead kids to learn about technical computer issues.
It certainly is hypocritical, especially if those standards are so new (or so poorly implemented in mainstream browsers such as IE) that a large percentage of folks can't use the new version.
Funny, I'm a bit dyslexic and read that as "poorly implemented mainstream browsers such as IE".
Anyway, some of the problems may be use of new-ish standards, but IE also just renders things incorrectly. I sometimes do a small amount of web design-- just HTML and CSS-- and IE there's a lot of CSS that's been around for years that IE just doesn't render properly. Personally, it always made sense to me to write HTML/CSS more or less according to W3C standards and fix up the browser bugs after the fact, when I basically have the thing working. This means it's more likely to work on Gecko and WebKit/KHTML browsers while you're developing, because they adhere closely to the standards.
Add to that the fact that IE users are in the minority on this site, and you can see why IE would be lower priority. Also, IE is a bit of a moving target, since IE7 will (supposedly) render things very differently from either the correct way or the IE6 way of rendering things.
I'm not advocating that/. ceases supporting IE, but it does make sense, given all this, that IE bugfixes would come later. Also, I'll admit that I can understand why lots of developers want to drop IE support altogether. With as much of a headache as it is, there have been times when, during an angry session of trying to get IE to render properly, I've been tempted to say, "Screw it! If any IE users complain, we'll tell them to get a real browser!" I've always changed the site to account for the IE bugs, at least well enough that the site worked OK, but it still annoys me whenever it comes up.
That's why I said the question is "what are they going to use these lobbyists for?" Lobbyists are like advertisements. Sometimes they lie, sometimes they exaggerate, sometimes they put the facts in a certain light, and sometimes they just tell you the truth. If you're trying to sell something, you should consider using ads. First of all, your competition will be using ads, so you'll want your ads to make you look good. There might be many reasons why you, in fact, are good, but no one will know about it unless you advertise.
The unfortunate fact is that, in American politics, lobbyists work much the same way. Congress doesn't know about anything until someone hires good lobbyists to do the "advertising" for it. They don't need to lie, but they will need to inform and convince, or else all the "grass roots" campaigns are just pissing in the wind. If you don't like the game, and you just want to take your toys and go home, don't be surprised if it becomes illegal to run any OS other than the latest version of Windows, any office suite other than Office, citing "security" and "protection of IP" as reasons.
Damn strait. I want Digital Rights, and I wand the Windows Geniune Advantige. I don't want to be at a disadvantage because Linux isn't a Geniune Windows!
They make things (like the Microsoft letters, or the Swiftboat ads, etc.) that are specifically designed to look like they are coming "from the people" when they in fact are not...[snip]...If someone hires a high-priced specialist, it seems reasonable to assume that they want the specialist's services, doesn't it?
Sure, it means they want to use the specialists for something, but for what? Would it be so bad if someone organized "grass roots" campaigns that were pro-OSS, pro-net-neutrality, etc. I mean, there are real grass-roots efforts, so even if these guys blew it a little out of proportion, it wouldn't exactly be false.
The way I look at it is, lobbyists are there. There's no doubt that Microsoft is lobbying Congress to make laws that would favor Microsoft and hurt Google, and if Google needs to hire a lobbyist in order to make their voice heard, that doesn't seem unethical to me, as long as their voice is an ethical one.
...and what's the point of deleting your Amazon cookies anyway, if you're going to shop there? You aren't going to be anonymous in any case.
Really, I'm all in favor of blocking cookies. I hate getting cookies from doubleclick.com when clearly I've never visited the site. I hate going to a random site and finding that it's given me a cookie for no reason that I can figure out. However, if you go to a site regularly, log in anyway, and like the services that they're providing by giving you a cookie, the go ahead and keep the damn cookie.
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Besides all that, there's just the fact that there isn't money to to made from selling music online. Let me rephrase that to be completely accurate: all the money made selling music goes to the label. Not to the artist, not to the online store, but just the label. Companies keep thinking that they're going to make a truckload of money if they release the new online store, but there's no business plan for it yet. For the amount of money the labels demand, and the price consumers are willing to pay, there's just not enough profit margin for a business to be "successful". It reminds me of the 90s when everyone thought they could make money if they had a web site, but they had no business plan.
The only reason Apple is "successful" is because they go ahead and run the store with basically no profit. On its own, the iTMS would probably be a failing venture, but because it's being used for marketing, "breaking even" is good enough.
Not only that, but it's a company that you're already dealing with. You'll have one fewer bill to keep track of, one fewer account to remember, one fewer tech support line to call, and that alone, all other things being equal, will give them an advantage. Plus they can offer bundling deals, like a lot of cable companies are trying to do now with TV, Internet, VOIP.
And people wonder why Google is hiring lobbyists.
Very insightful. In fact, there's hardly a point to having a political party that is advocating legal actions, unless those legal actions are under threat. An "anti-theft" party, which thinks it should be illegal to steal car stereos, for example, would be downright stupid. The only reason I can think to start a political party is when you're unhappy with the current laws, or to combat laws that you're afraid might be passed in the future...
Well, you're right and we shouldn't be feeding cows to other cows. However, I'm inclined to say that it might be nice if the unfortunate souls who have the disease, you know.... wouldn't die a horrible death. I know it's rare, and should become more rare if we start showing some sense in raising cattle, but, you know... if they could maybe cure it along the way to finding a cure for another disease, I wouldn't consider it a waste of time.
I tried it, waited about 15 minutes, tried again. Same thing. I don't know what's up, I just assumed it was because you wanted the ad revenue, since that's where you make your money.
I know, I'm not saying the "search pages" are a feature. The person I responding to claimed you could turn off the search pages, and I was saying that AFAIK, you can't. Read one of the other responses and it seems to be someone from OpenDNS claiming that you can, in fact, disable the search pages, but when I tried it, it didn't work.
That's all. I'm not saying you should use the service or not. Just OpenDNS says you can disable the search pages, and it didn't work for me.
Ummm... I'm sorry if I upset you, but I didn't just go posting things without checking. I use the service and have typo-correction turned off. When I enter an invalid domain name, I get the search page. I don't know what to tell you.
OpenDNS is not a solution to this problem those with dynamic IPs, which includes most Earthlink customers (like me). By default, they do exactly the same thing Earthlink does: from their webpage: "...when we can't fix your typo we take you to a page with a set of search results." They do allow you to turn that behavior off on their prefs page, but only if you have a static IP.
Actually, AFAIK, there isn't a way to turn off the "search results" page. If you look for a domain that doesn't exist, it directs you to this page no matter what. The option that you can disable is the "typo protection", which will look for other domains which are close to what you typed.
So if you have typo protection enabled, and you type googl.ecom, it figures out that you meant google.com and directs you there. If it can't figure out the domain you intended, it sends you to their search page. If you disable the typo correction, then it just sends you to the search page immediately.
I don't know, but maybe their default is to track which domain names were requested, but not by whom? After all, if they really don't keep records of who requested the domain name, there wouldn't be a privacy concern.
I have no reason to believe that what I just said is the case, but it's one obvious way that you could reconcile the two statements.
What do you think digital cable is? It's streaming a digital feed over a network. Now, I don't know exactly what protocols and compression they use, and I'm sure they must be doing some QoS stuff behind the scenes so my neighbor's bittorrent doesn't keep me from ordering a movie, but it demonstrates the capability of high-quality streaming. I can get OnDemand HDTV movies over the same line that I could order a theoretical 30Mbps downstream-- don't tell me that video streaming isn't possible.
Plus, HDTV is just now being adopted by normal people (i.e. not "early adopters"). I'm sure it'll be at least 20 years before we see a new standard. Most people haven't even been on the internet for 10 years.
However, I think that as everything continues more "Average" users will gravitate towards power users position. Not so much asbe completely entralled by every last detail of a computer, but enough so that perhaps updating hardware without purchasing a whole new system will be a bit more common place.
I don't know-- I used to build my own computers and upgrade them piece-by-piece, but these days it generally seems like a lot of work for little in the way of returns. "Upgrades" often don't end up being all they're cracked up to be. More and more, it seems like the performance boosts are coming from architectural shifts rather than revving up clock frequencies, and so individual upgrades seem less valuable. If you really want a big performance boost, you often have to replace multiple components, which means you're often just as well off replacing the whole thing and getting newer/faster drives and whatever other new features have been introduced in the past year.
Plus, most of us just don't need the little boosts in performance anyway. For most non-gamers, a PC from 5 years ago is fast enough to do most of what they want to do. So it seems to me that, once upon a time, people were more worried about speed because there was a real fear that software coming out next year just wouldn't run on last year's hardware. These days, more and more people (even geeks) are looking to laptops that are light-weight, stylish, and feature rich rather than all-out huge speed-demon upgradable desktop system.
I agree. You know, if someone wants to go back and clean up the film quality, enhance the special effects, etc., then I don't really see it as a big problem. Even if they go pretty far with it, it could be a little bit of a creative act, like a partial remake. I think the analog with music would be that instead of covering a song (which is like a remake) they'd be doing a remix, and insofar as it's understood as such, it's kind of neat.
My objection to Star Wars re-editing is only in that it seems to be aimed at re-writing history. The content has been changed, not just the special effects. Actors have been replaced, and events have been altered, sometimes for the purpose of political correctness. On top of that, there seemed to be an effort on Lucas's part to suppress the originals.
So the complaint shouldn't be against using old art to make new art, but against destroying old art and distorting history for the sake of ego, financial gain, or political correctness.
Because that's called a laptop without a battery and is fuckin' pointless. Sure, it looks cool but once its outdated you throw it away. People don't like that with laptops but they put up with it because its portable.
Most people put up with it with laptops because they just don't care. Most people do exactly what you said, they buy a computer, and once it's outdated, they get a whole new computer.
Uhhhh.... yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the point being made here, that this DRM violates copyright law as surely as sharing on P2P networks. So I don't think anyone wants to sue customers, but it's more of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of another argument why users shouldn't be sued under any circumstances. After all, copyrights in general were intended to protect against large-scale systematic explotiation by commercial entities or other organizations, and not against end-users.
However, I suppose you could argue that someone should sue Microsoft on the same grounds that P2P software makers have been sued. Even if they aren't violating copyright law themselves, they are promoting a technology that is will probably be used to violate copyrights. I don't think they'd win, though.
Unthinking beauracracies evolve into whats best for the "beast" and not whats best for doing its job.
If you look at it evolutionarily, then at least get it right: the bureaucracies will evolve not into what does any particular thing well, or even what is best for itself, but what is most apt at perpetuating its own existence.
I gather you're joking, but these people still need to be able to make spreadsheets and read other people's word-processing documents.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
To tone it down a little, I'd say that surely they'd notice that there was a difference insofar as the UI was different. However, it is true that:
Further, I'd say you could substitute Office with OOo/Evolution, and again, they'd notice the difference. In reality some users would object purely on brand loyalty, and some would be jealous of people who had MS Office because of the fact that it costs $500, and how much money IT spends on you is a status thing. Seriously, I've had users complain that they need the Pro version of Office even though they only ever use Excel, Word, and Outlook.
But, similar to the OS, most users would only care to the degree that it didn't behave the way they'd expect.
Users who use lots of MS Word features would be annoyed because menu items have moved. I've known users to get pissed off at new versions of MS Office for this reason, though the annoyance is offset by the status symbol thing (getting Office XP while their coworkers have 2000 makes people happy). Users who use Word just to type things up, never using any specific features or even formatting their docs, however, won't care.
Well, except that's not exactly true, because it's usually the people who are most unable to use these apps that are most interested in having the newest/coolest/most expensive version. It's probably the boss's nephew who doesn't do anything who will end up being the first person to "need" the upgrade to Office 2007 Super Ultimate Edition.
F/OSS succeeds or fails based on how much support (of one kind or another) projects get. People don't support projects that they don't know about or that they think are "doomed to fail". People understanding "what's at stake" with open standards (as opposed to Microsoft's standards) would go a long way towards opening doors for F/OSS to be used.
Net neutrality succeeds or fails based on who has the best lobbyists. There aren't enough "people" who understand the issues involved well enough to badger anyone, and that's assuming that our representatives care about people badgering them instead of just listening to lobbyists anyway.
"It's OK to do it because it's OK, and we have to do it because our opponents are doing it," is how you keep from losing.
It's funny, because I was also inclined to tie the issue to something about games. Not so much the difference in graphics, but an awful lot of programmers and general IT people I've met under the age of 30 started learning about computers in order to play video games. Not "to write video games", but to play them.
Remember playing HHGttG? Or Zork? Anyone here remember juggling multiple AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files because different games required different configurations? Sometimes you'd have to load HIMEM.SYS or EMM386, sometimes not? All those configuration issues, needing to know what kind of sound card you had, etc.?
Well think about this: for most people under the age of 20, they've never experienced computers as "something that you need to type commands to get it to work". Just open a terminal window and type a command in front of a 15 year old, and they think you've displayed some great hacking feat. Their games just install and run, so they don't need to know anything about IRQs or hardware or anything. The games just work, like magic. Hell, my grandparents are far from computer literate (last time I talked to them about it, they thought Outlook Express was "the internet), but at least they've used DOS and know how a CLI works.
I'm not complaining exactly, because I'm certainly glad that I don't have to worry about IRQs anymore, but with games being so easy to install and run, we've lost one of the great motivators that would lead kids to learn about technical computer issues.
It certainly is hypocritical, especially if those standards are so new (or so poorly implemented in mainstream browsers such as IE) that a large percentage of folks can't use the new version.
Funny, I'm a bit dyslexic and read that as "poorly implemented mainstream browsers such as IE".
Anyway, some of the problems may be use of new-ish standards, but IE also just renders things incorrectly. I sometimes do a small amount of web design-- just HTML and CSS-- and IE there's a lot of CSS that's been around for years that IE just doesn't render properly. Personally, it always made sense to me to write HTML/CSS more or less according to W3C standards and fix up the browser bugs after the fact, when I basically have the thing working. This means it's more likely to work on Gecko and WebKit/KHTML browsers while you're developing, because they adhere closely to the standards.
Add to that the fact that IE users are in the minority on this site, and you can see why IE would be lower priority. Also, IE is a bit of a moving target, since IE7 will (supposedly) render things very differently from either the correct way or the IE6 way of rendering things.
I'm not advocating that /. ceases supporting IE, but it does make sense, given all this, that IE bugfixes would come later. Also, I'll admit that I can understand why lots of developers want to drop IE support altogether. With as much of a headache as it is, there have been times when, during an angry session of trying to get IE to render properly, I've been tempted to say, "Screw it! If any IE users complain, we'll tell them to get a real browser!" I've always changed the site to account for the IE bugs, at least well enough that the site worked OK, but it still annoys me whenever it comes up.
That's why I said the question is "what are they going to use these lobbyists for?" Lobbyists are like advertisements. Sometimes they lie, sometimes they exaggerate, sometimes they put the facts in a certain light, and sometimes they just tell you the truth. If you're trying to sell something, you should consider using ads. First of all, your competition will be using ads, so you'll want your ads to make you look good. There might be many reasons why you, in fact, are good, but no one will know about it unless you advertise.
The unfortunate fact is that, in American politics, lobbyists work much the same way. Congress doesn't know about anything until someone hires good lobbyists to do the "advertising" for it. They don't need to lie, but they will need to inform and convince, or else all the "grass roots" campaigns are just pissing in the wind. If you don't like the game, and you just want to take your toys and go home, don't be surprised if it becomes illegal to run any OS other than the latest version of Windows, any office suite other than Office, citing "security" and "protection of IP" as reasons.
Damn strait. I want Digital Rights, and I wand the Windows Geniune Advantige. I don't want to be at a disadvantage because Linux isn't a Geniune Windows!
They make things (like the Microsoft letters, or the Swiftboat ads, etc.) that are specifically designed to look like they are coming "from the people" when they in fact are not...[snip]...If someone hires a high-priced specialist, it seems reasonable to assume that they want the specialist's services, doesn't it?
Sure, it means they want to use the specialists for something, but for what? Would it be so bad if someone organized "grass roots" campaigns that were pro-OSS, pro-net-neutrality, etc. I mean, there are real grass-roots efforts, so even if these guys blew it a little out of proportion, it wouldn't exactly be false.
The way I look at it is, lobbyists are there. There's no doubt that Microsoft is lobbying Congress to make laws that would favor Microsoft and hurt Google, and if Google needs to hire a lobbyist in order to make their voice heard, that doesn't seem unethical to me, as long as their voice is an ethical one.
...and what's the point of deleting your Amazon cookies anyway, if you're going to shop there? You aren't going to be anonymous in any case.
Really, I'm all in favor of blocking cookies. I hate getting cookies from doubleclick.com when clearly I've never visited the site. I hate going to a random site and finding that it's given me a cookie for no reason that I can figure out. However, if you go to a site regularly, log in anyway, and like the services that they're providing by giving you a cookie, the go ahead and keep the damn cookie.