That's 'cause you americans are using the word Liberal wrong.
I consider myself a Liberal, which means I'm in favour of small government, low taxes, less legislation, free trade, free assocition, free speech, fiscal conservatism, less government intervention everywhere, and against corporate monopolies.
That's what being a Liberal is where I live - but for some reason that's not what a Liberal in the US is.
Still, when in Rome and all that - what am I in the US? Certainly not what you guys associate with liberals...
Looks fair, at face value. But I wonder if his goal wouldn't be better served by pushing for the electoral college doing their original job and picking a president on the strength of their presumed more informed opinion.
'Course, then you get into a whole other issue, about how democratic that really is. But then, he's already established that he's not very concerned about that part of the process, right?
Huh, around where I live, there's really not much difference between the black metal and goth crowds. The scene's so small, exclusivity's kinda stupid. If we didn't go to each other's parties and clubs, they'd all go bankrupt.
I vaguely knew Varg, he used to hang around int he same RPG/Gamer crowd though I don't claim to have more'n prolly bumped into him at some of the local events. Funny thing though, he was one of those BonJovi poodle rockers in high school - guess he had an adverse reaction to singing in the choir. Yeah, I know, completely off topic. Anyway - the blackmetallers around these parts don't think much of Varg at all.
MS wants consumer lock-in and profits from that lock-in, it's their business model, right? So any time I see anything from MS on this topic, I look for the profit motive first. A possible submarine patent combined with their continued support for epostage paints a nasty picture, don't you think?
Probably true - but then, the US Congress and Senate is hardly the same now as it was in 1776, is it?
Everything always changes - and the connection between the form of government of more than a coupke of generations ago and the current one is more a matter of form than substance, I think. Hell, looking at my own country and the current government/parliament - the form's the same, but it seems to me that actual legislation and government has been outsourced to lobbyists; a big change from just 20 years ago.
How about the Kzinti? Their backstory does include ripping off hi-tech from their more evolved neighbours - while Known Space has plenty of things wrong with it, that's a not-stupid bit of background to the man-kzin wars.
eLance, probably - they've limited the shit bidding where you would be competing against Eastern Europeans willing to bid $5 or what have you. It's a bit expensive to get in though - and more so if you want to move up in the higher tier. But they've cleaned up the act some, setting minimum bids and so on.
That's kind of a non-issue in some cases though - not all the project submitters go with the lowest bidder. The trick is to appear as the most qualified bidder - you really don't wanna work for the assholes who expect to get a month's worth of full-time work from you for $50 anyway.
Argh, yeah - I'm so used to typing Gator/Claria to make sure that Claria don't shed the image problem associated with their Gator spyware, and this time my brain slipped.
Gator/Claria has deep pockets and corporate backing for their attempts to monopolize your desktop though, and have successfully sued people into submission for stating that their behaviour mimics that of other malicious intrusion software.
In other words, they're rich slime who try to pound people into submission with SLAPP suits. And they still want to pretend that them using your computer for their own profit strategy is perfectly all right because of an EULA longer than the river Nile....
It's just so fscking long that it's easier to list the ones who don't.
http://cleanmerchants.com/ has some intersting reading - it's mainly from the point of view of the affiliates who market through making web sites and then get buttfucked by Gator/Claria, WhenU, 180Seek or similar thiefware overwriting their affiliate links at the point of sale.
Still, it should give you an idea. If you want to avoid companies that advertise through thiefware, you have to run off and live as a hermit in Montana.
They don't understand the bit where it says "Congress shall make no law restraining the freedom of speech".
Okay, that's a bit disingenious - they do understand it, they just hope you don't. It's why they try to make it sound as if Congress passing laws dealing with a specific mode of theft of services (spam, spyware, trackerware, thiefware and other commercial malware that does not also violate other laws such as phishing and ID theft) is somehow "Restricting commercial free speech".
No such goddamned thing - it's congress putting the assholes on notice that "You! Yes, you. The laws of theft of service applies to you too."
However, spyware/thiefware (Gator/Claria, WhenU, and Spamford in this instance) is even worse - they specifically set out to steal the revenue from other affiliate/content providers/merchants and they also steal the computing resources neccesary to do this from you.
Bayesian filtering and such can to some extent stop spammers. Ad-aware and Spybot can to some extent deal with hijackers. But neither is a solution to corporate interests legally stealing resources from others, is it?
The next spam mail you get in your email, you can send a "Fuck you very much" to the Direct Marketers Association in the USA who spent more money lobbying for an opt-out regime than the rest of us will see in a lifetime.
Their Canadian counterparts in the Canadian Direct Marketer's Association on the other hand has adopted a strong support for opt-in and preferably verifiable/double opt-in as the industry Recommended Best Pratice.
The CDMA understood something the DMA failed to get: in the long run, it's Bad For Business to piss off your potential customers.
Neither Gator nor Whenu or Doubleclick are "from foreign countries". You have a case with CoolWebSearch and Xupiter - but they aren't the most common malware applications that infect people.
It's just like with spam - mortgage spam for american mortgage companies and drug spam for american mail-order drugs aren't foreign-source no matter where the email pretends to originate.
No, you're forgetting one thing: those examples of advertising you bring up are all cleary marked as advertising
Infomercials are labeled as such. Sponsorships are marked as such. No-one has a problem with that. The issue here is that the record companies and media companies are doing an end-run around the law requiring commercial advertising to be disclosed as such.
It wouldn't be an issue if the radio station would disclose "Today's Playlist is brought to you by Sony Music " or whoever is buying their airtime.
You seem to forget that advertising is regulated in that the claims made must be true, and the statements of disclosure must be made. It's as much a Truth In Advertising law as anything.
The bribery element is simply that there is an undisclosed business transaction to gain a competitive advantage taking place. If it was fully disclosed, it wouldn't be bribery, and it wouldn't be in conflict with the Payola laws. But it would be in conflict with the record label's efforts at making the airtime of their products seem a natural result of popularity and quality, instead of a result of pay-for-play advertising.
No-one anywhere has an issue with ads that are labeled as such. But to pick an easy target - payola occupies roughly the same position as the editor of the Washington Post accepting half a mil to write an editorial extolling the virtues of SCO as opposed to the unethical Linux users who undermine SCO's legitimate and ethical extor^H^H^H^H^Hbusiness model.
That's the issue here. Payola laws are simply a block on distortion of markets by hidden advertising.
Crusades. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition.
The Albigensian crusade, where the 'wonderful' quote "Kill them all - God will recognize his own" comes from.
Slavery justified in the name of God.
You misunderstand the problem, which is that any totalitarian regime cannot tolerate any independent thinking as this is a threath to the power structure of said society. Thus independent or "different" thinkers get Gulag'ed, jailed, burned, tortured to confess, what have you.
Or they get Guantamoed.
Yeah, you were on the right track when you invaded Afghanistan, I was cheering your guys from the sideline and crossing my fingers that you'd get the bastards - I was damn happy when my government sent the special forces contigents US Command asked for. I was a bit concerned when your government started dragging people halfway around the world for the express purpose of violating the Geneva Convention on the treatment of captives.
The US Army deserves better. They're the good guys, for crying out loud!
And what's with letting the CIA near people in Abu Ghraib? The Army ought to have smacked the civilian spooks into next week and let their own intelligence people handle it - you know, the real military professionals.
I think a lot of your problem stems from having civilans at the top who think Chain of Command is an inconvenience and somehting they can safely ignore, instead of doing it the right way which is to tell the Pentagon the desired result and let them work out how to do it without stupid-ass interference from civilians on battefield tactics and strategy.
Damn, I'm rambling today - and off topic to boot. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
You're not at the point of Guantamoing internal dissidents, and (most of) the people currently held there probably aren't lily-white innocents. I'm just a tad concerned that the USA seems to be violating their own values in the face of an attack on those very values. The more you become like your despotic and tyrannical enemies, the more you let them win. I really hope you guys step back from the brink on this one - I'd hate to see you waste the greatness of the USA in response to the terrible things done to you that day. If you do, the terrorists will have won - and I really hope you'll see their attack and stop reorganizing along the lines they want you to.
Because I think the Guantanamo prison is perhaps the most insidious attack on your culture and nation since the internment camps of WWII - if I had my tinfoil hat with me I'd star wondering just who it was who suggested that it was a good idea in the first place. Because no matter who wins the battle, you lose the war if people start thinking that it's okay to "deal with" the enemies of the State outside of the legal framework.
And man, I will be weeping for you all if that gets to become an acceptable way to deal with people under the War on Terror.
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
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People already do.
It's called self-publishing.
It costs about $10 per copy to have your book printed, bound and shipped with a four-colour cover if you go with some of the better publish-on-demand operations. Of course there are people who try to get you to commit to a print run of 5,000 but that's a whole different discussion - POD means you can have a print run of 1 at a time, whenever someone orders.
If you want to publish without making anything off it, you set the price at cost.
If you want to make a profit, you sell it at a price over that.
The reason why people go with publishing houses is because - with self-publishing, you don't get the benefit of having actual editors assigned from the publisher, you need to hire one yourself. You don't get the benefit of their marketing and distribution network, you have to do it yourself. And you don't get the benefit of the added credibility of the publishing house or imprint - I trust Baen books or Random house to publish stuff that meets their quality standards, and I trust Harlequin books to publish crap that doesn't meet my standards, but certainly their own and that of their market.
But if you want to publish without being beholden to a publisher, it can be done.
It's been a big hit in the direct marketing/mail order industry since its release, and David Ogilvy used it lots - you can see that all through "My life in Advertising" although I suppose that kinda falls in under the whole Madison Avenue label.
Ogilvy and Mathers is a pretty big Madison Avenue agency...
Ah, so you're in the counter-marketing demographic. Thing is, TV advertising isn't all there is to marketing. In fact, advertising is probably the least important factor in marketing a product.
Why do you think the new iPods come in such a wide range of colours and designs? Marketing starts by defining the marketing universe you're trying to reach to sell your product to. The specific media channel is completely irrelevant.
Much as Madison Avenue and other advertising agencies would like to pretend otherwise, most marketing starts at the beginning of the product cycle, not at the beginning of the sales cycle when there's a finished product to bring to market.
No, that's incorrect. Marketers and sales people have been doing this since at least the 19th century. Case in point, P.T. Barnum, who never said that line attributed to him about suckers.
Next up was Albert Lasker, Meyer Lansky and Bruce Barton.
But the guy who had them all beat cold was Claude Hopkins, the author of "Scientific Advertising". That period marks the end of the transition period from guesswork of the early ad men into marketing as practiced today. Depending on how you want to stretch the data, you're off by a century or at a minimum 40 years.
This is research into hooking you more effectively on the first contact - for whatever they have in mind next. Continuity programs are an old device - Benjamin Franklin started the first "Book of the Month" club back before the Revolution.
But they still need to hook you first, right? It's not like they can determine that you fit the profile for their current "widget" and just ship it to you without consulting you and getting you to say "sure!" first.
Actually, that's why the CPM of banner ads dropped from $400 to $4 - because the people footing the bill got results, but not results worth spending that kinda money.
Notice how there's no end in sight for how expensive Pay-per-click keywords can become? That's because advertisers are bidding more on areas where they actually make money, and leaving the other crap behind. Now, if we could just do something about the damn click fraud...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, on behalf of Norway, I thank you!
When can we arrange the formal surrender and transfer of power?
That's 'cause you americans are using the word Liberal wrong.
I consider myself a Liberal, which means I'm in favour of small government, low taxes, less legislation, free trade, free assocition, free speech, fiscal conservatism, less government intervention everywhere, and against corporate monopolies.
That's what being a Liberal is where I live - but for some reason that's not what a Liberal in the US is.
Still, when in Rome and all that - what am I in the US? Certainly not what you guys associate with liberals...
Really? So - we're burning down c2i then?
Looks fair, at face value. But I wonder if his goal wouldn't be better served by pushing for the electoral college doing their original job and picking a president on the strength of their presumed more informed opinion.
'Course, then you get into a whole other issue, about how democratic that really is. But then, he's already established that he's not very concerned about that part of the process, right?
You wouldn't happen to be near Iowa somewhere, would you? Just taking a wild guess at who does that kind of customer data gathering...
Huh, around where I live, there's really not much difference between the black metal and goth crowds. The scene's so small, exclusivity's kinda stupid. If we didn't go to each other's parties and clubs, they'd all go bankrupt.
I vaguely knew Varg, he used to hang around int he same RPG/Gamer crowd though I don't claim to have more'n prolly bumped into him at some of the local events. Funny thing though, he was one of those BonJovi poodle rockers in high school - guess he had an adverse reaction to singing in the choir. Yeah, I know, completely off topic. Anyway - the blackmetallers around these parts don't think much of Varg at all.
MS has always worked on "Some Evil Plan To Take Over Email" - remember epostage?
:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/02/technology/02sp am.html
1 8_0_1_0_C
If not, here's a reminder
And some comments from a guy I trust:
http://www.talkbiz.net/ramblings/comments.php?id=
MS wants consumer lock-in and profits from that lock-in, it's their business model, right? So any time I see anything from MS on this topic, I look for the profit motive first. A possible submarine patent combined with their continued support for epostage paints a nasty picture, don't you think?
Probably true - but then, the US Congress and Senate is hardly the same now as it was in 1776, is it?
Everything always changes - and the connection between the form of government of more than a coupke of generations ago and the current one is more a matter of form than substance, I think. Hell, looking at my own country and the current government/parliament - the form's the same, but it seems to me that actual legislation and government has been outsourced to lobbyists; a big change from just 20 years ago.
Try Iceland. The Parliament has been running for a gen-u-wine millenium. You ought to recheck your facts every now and then...
How about the Kzinti? Their backstory does include ripping off hi-tech from their more evolved neighbours - while Known Space has plenty of things wrong with it, that's a not-stupid bit of background to the man-kzin wars.
Interesting - I tried looking for the book on Amazon but got buggerall as a result. Is it still in print somewhere?
eLance, probably - they've limited the shit bidding where you would be competing against Eastern Europeans willing to bid $5 or what have you. It's a bit expensive to get in though - and more so if you want to move up in the higher tier. But they've cleaned up the act some, setting minimum bids and so on.
That's kind of a non-issue in some cases though - not all the project submitters go with the lowest bidder. The trick is to appear as the most qualified bidder - you really don't wanna work for the assholes who expect to get a month's worth of full-time work from you for $50 anyway.
Scriptlance and Rentacoder can also be good.
Argh, yeah - I'm so used to typing Gator/Claria to make sure that Claria don't shed the image problem associated with their Gator spyware, and this time my brain slipped.
Gator/Claria has deep pockets and corporate backing for their attempts to monopolize your desktop though, and have successfully sued people into submission for stating that their behaviour mimics that of other malicious intrusion software.
In other words, they're rich slime who try to pound people into submission with SLAPP suits. And they still want to pretend that them using your computer for their own profit strategy is perfectly all right because of an EULA longer than the river Nile....
Actually, you can get that list.
It's just so fscking long that it's easier to list the ones who don't.
http://cleanmerchants.com/ has some intersting reading - it's mainly from the point of view of the affiliates who market through making web sites and then get buttfucked by Gator/Claria, WhenU, 180Seek or similar thiefware overwriting their affiliate links at the point of sale.
Still, it should give you an idea. If you want to avoid companies that advertise through thiefware, you have to run off and live as a hermit in Montana.
They don't understand the bit where it says "Congress shall make no law restraining the freedom of speech".
Okay, that's a bit disingenious - they do understand it, they just hope you don't. It's why they try to make it sound as if Congress passing laws dealing with a specific mode of theft of services (spam, spyware, trackerware, thiefware and other commercial malware that does not also violate other laws such as phishing and ID theft) is somehow "Restricting commercial free speech".
No such goddamned thing - it's congress putting the assholes on notice that "You! Yes, you. The laws of theft of service applies to you too."
However, spyware/thiefware (Gator/Claria, WhenU, and Spamford in this instance) is even worse - they specifically set out to steal the revenue from other affiliate/content providers/merchants and they also steal the computing resources neccesary to do this from you.
Bayesian filtering and such can to some extent stop spammers. Ad-aware and Spybot can to some extent deal with hijackers. But neither is a solution to corporate interests legally stealing resources from others, is it?
The next spam mail you get in your email, you can send a "Fuck you very much" to the Direct Marketers Association in the USA who spent more money lobbying for an opt-out regime than the rest of us will see in a lifetime.
Their Canadian counterparts in the Canadian Direct Marketer's Association on the other hand has adopted a strong support for opt-in and preferably verifiable/double opt-in as the industry Recommended Best Pratice.
The CDMA understood something the DMA failed to get: in the long run, it's Bad For Business to piss off your potential customers.
When will Gator and WhenU be similarily restrained?
Neither Gator nor Whenu or Doubleclick are "from foreign countries". You have a case with CoolWebSearch and Xupiter - but they aren't the most common malware applications that infect people.
It's just like with spam - mortgage spam for american mortgage companies and drug spam for american mail-order drugs aren't foreign-source no matter where the email pretends to originate.
No, you're forgetting one thing: those examples of advertising you bring up are all cleary marked as advertising
Infomercials are labeled as such. Sponsorships are marked as such. No-one has a problem with that. The issue here is that the record companies and media companies are doing an end-run around the law requiring commercial advertising to be disclosed as such.
It wouldn't be an issue if the radio station would disclose "Today's Playlist is brought to you by Sony Music " or whoever is buying their airtime.
You seem to forget that advertising is regulated in that the claims made must be true, and the statements of disclosure must be made. It's as much a Truth In Advertising law as anything.
The bribery element is simply that there is an undisclosed business transaction to gain a competitive advantage taking place. If it was fully disclosed, it wouldn't be bribery, and it wouldn't be in conflict with the Payola laws. But it would be in conflict with the record label's efforts at making the airtime of their products seem a natural result of popularity and quality, instead of a result of pay-for-play advertising.
No-one anywhere has an issue with ads that are labeled as such. But to pick an easy target - payola occupies roughly the same position as the editor of the Washington Post accepting half a mil to write an editorial extolling the virtues of SCO as opposed to the unethical Linux users who undermine SCO's legitimate and ethical extor^H^H^H^H^Hbusiness model.
That's the issue here. Payola laws are simply a block on distortion of markets by hidden advertising.
Crusades. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition.
The Albigensian crusade, where the 'wonderful' quote "Kill them all - God will recognize his own" comes from.
Slavery justified in the name of God.
You misunderstand the problem, which is that any totalitarian regime cannot tolerate any independent thinking as this is a threath to the power structure of said society. Thus independent or "different" thinkers get Gulag'ed, jailed, burned, tortured to confess, what have you.
Or they get Guantamoed.
Yeah, you were on the right track when you invaded Afghanistan, I was cheering your guys from the sideline and crossing my fingers that you'd get the bastards - I was damn happy when my government sent the special forces contigents US Command asked for. I was a bit concerned when your government started dragging people halfway around the world for the express purpose of violating the Geneva Convention on the treatment of captives.
The US Army deserves better. They're the good guys, for crying out loud!
And what's with letting the CIA near people in Abu Ghraib? The Army ought to have smacked the civilian spooks into next week and let their own intelligence people handle it - you know, the real military professionals.
I think a lot of your problem stems from having civilans at the top who think Chain of Command is an inconvenience and somehting they can safely ignore, instead of doing it the right way which is to tell the Pentagon the desired result and let them work out how to do it without stupid-ass interference from civilians on battefield tactics and strategy.
Damn, I'm rambling today - and off topic to boot. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
You're not at the point of Guantamoing internal dissidents, and (most of) the people currently held there probably aren't lily-white innocents. I'm just a tad concerned that the USA seems to be violating their own values in the face of an attack on those very values. The more you become like your despotic and tyrannical enemies, the more you let them win. I really hope you guys step back from the brink on this one - I'd hate to see you waste the greatness of the USA in response to the terrible things done to you that day. If you do, the terrorists will have won - and I really hope you'll see their attack and stop reorganizing along the lines they want you to.
Because I think the Guantanamo prison is perhaps the most insidious attack on your culture and nation since the internment camps of WWII - if I had my tinfoil hat with me I'd star wondering just who it was who suggested that it was a good idea in the first place. Because no matter who wins the battle, you lose the war if people start thinking that it's okay to "deal with" the enemies of the State outside of the legal framework.
And man, I will be weeping for you all if that gets to become an acceptable way to deal with people under the War on Terror.
People already do.
It's called self-publishing.
It costs about $10 per copy to have your book printed, bound and shipped with a four-colour cover if you go with some of the better publish-on-demand operations. Of course there are people who try to get you to commit to a print run of 5,000 but that's a whole different discussion - POD means you can have a print run of 1 at a time, whenever someone orders.
If you want to publish without making anything off it, you set the price at cost.
If you want to make a profit, you sell it at a price over that.
The reason why people go with publishing houses is because - with self-publishing, you don't get the benefit of having actual editors assigned from the publisher, you need to hire one yourself. You don't get the benefit of their marketing and distribution network, you have to do it yourself. And you don't get the benefit of the added credibility of the publishing house or imprint - I trust Baen books or Random house to publish stuff that meets their quality standards, and I trust Harlequin books to publish crap that doesn't meet my standards, but certainly their own and that of their market.
But if you want to publish without being beholden to a publisher, it can be done.
Depends on which marketing industry you think of.
It's been a big hit in the direct marketing/mail order industry since its release, and David Ogilvy used it lots - you can see that all through "My life in Advertising" although I suppose that kinda falls in under the whole Madison Avenue label.
Ogilvy and Mathers is a pretty big Madison Avenue agency...
Ah, so you're in the counter-marketing demographic. Thing is, TV advertising isn't all there is to marketing. In fact, advertising is probably the least important factor in marketing a product.
Why do you think the new iPods come in such a wide range of colours and designs? Marketing starts by defining the marketing universe you're trying to reach to sell your product to. The specific media channel is completely irrelevant.
Much as Madison Avenue and other advertising agencies would like to pretend otherwise, most marketing starts at the beginning of the product cycle, not at the beginning of the sales cycle when there's a finished product to bring to market.
No, that's incorrect. Marketers and sales people have been doing this since at least the 19th century. Case in point, P.T. Barnum, who never said that line attributed to him about suckers.
Next up was Albert Lasker, Meyer Lansky and Bruce Barton.
But the guy who had them all beat cold was Claude Hopkins, the author of "Scientific Advertising". That period marks the end of the transition period from guesswork of the early ad men into marketing as practiced today. Depending on how you want to stretch the data, you're off by a century or at a minimum 40 years.
Yeah, but they still have to hook you on it first
6 &cid=10565621
This is research into hooking you more effectively on the first contact - for whatever they have in mind next. Continuity programs are an old device - Benjamin Franklin started the first "Book of the Month" club back before the Revolution.
But they still need to hook you first, right? It's not like they can determine that you fit the profile for their current "widget" and just ship it to you without consulting you and getting you to say "sure!" first.
Yet, anyway.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12591
Actually, that's why the CPM of banner ads dropped from $400 to $4 - because the people footing the bill got results, but not results worth spending that kinda money.
Notice how there's no end in sight for how expensive Pay-per-click keywords can become? That's because advertisers are bidding more on areas where they actually make money, and leaving the other crap behind. Now, if we could just do something about the damn click fraud...