Marketing department tells lies about their product. News at 11.
Indeed. I think that prosecuting this company for astro-turfing is pointless and inconsistent. As long as we have such a laissez-faire attitude towards all the lies and misdirection that marketing people have been doing for decades now, going after a handful of astro-turfers does nothing but give people a false-sense of trust in what they read on the net. Never mind the free speech implications that come into play when defining exactly where the line is between valid promotion and astro-turfing. (does giving away a free "review" produce with a promise of future "review" products qualify as illegal, what if the promise is never spelled out? what if its not a give-away, just an open-ended loan, or what if it is 1 year loan and it just so happens that the next review product shows up in exactly one year too?)
Are you that stupid? They HAVE to charge more because they can't classify it as a letter? Thats the dumbest thing I've read in this thread. It has nothing to do with what you call it.. FedEx is simply more expensive to move the same item, because they CHOOSE to charge more.
They are prevented from having a letter class. So they would either have to ship 1lb packages for 45 cents and then lose money on every single one of those or they can charge what it costs for 1lb packages and anything lighter than 1lb still pays the same rate.
because I still don't personally feel comfortable consuming something which I did not pay the artist for.
Do you really think that with all the middlemen still in the loop that listening to 1 minute of commercials per 30 minutes of music is going to generate any significant revenue for the artists? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that any major label music available on spotify is counted as promotional per the artists' contracts with their distributors and that they get exactly 0.0% of all such revenue.
If the service was not socialized then small communicates will either not be served or would have to pay more to send (or even receive) a letter.
That is a common claim. But the evidence does not bear it out. Look at the package delivery services - they don't charge more to deliver to the boonies. They only charge by a rough estimate of the distance of shipping - so shipping from Los Angeles to New York city costs the same as shipping from Los Angeles to Lake Placid, NY.
Honestly, Marvell chips have cost me more grief on Linux installs than all other vendors combined. If this gets mobo vendors to design out Marvell, then I say: "Grand!".
The linux gigabit ethernet driver bites.
The current one - sky2 - frequently dies under heavy loads and seems to rely on an internal watchdog timer to kickstart it back to life within 60 seconds or so, making a gigabit nic no faster than a 10mbps nic on average.
The Marvell provided one - sk98lin - worked until recent kernels changed a couple of structure definitions - I manually tweaked it myself to get it up and running, but jumbo frames don't work (turn them on and it seems to lose any packet larger than the non-jumbo size of ~1500 bytes).
Or perhaps joke fail. I sure didn't think it was hilarious.
Your response is a common and erroneous defensive response.
Just because you did not find a joke to be funny does not mean it was not still a joke. Your post that marvel comics only has one 'L' was not a criticism of the humor in the joke, it was an attempt to correct a perceived error. If you knew it was a joke you would have known the error was intentional and would not have attempted to correct an error that was not really an error at all.
I definitely agree, its just one more piece of the profile that google builds. My recommendation - don't make it easy for them, don't keep cookies and don't "log in" to any of their services.
Wait... fedex costs more because USPS has a monopoly?
No, USPS costs more because USPS has a monopoly - that extra cost is where the hidden tax is.
That ~$7 service from fedex is for packages because they do not have a letter class precisely because of the USPS monopoly.
. You want to know why they ask congress for money? Its to get back what Congress ultimately takes from the USPS because its the only thing besides taxes that makes money in our government system.
You are going to have to back that shit up if you want anyone to believe it. You appear to be claiming that congress takes from USPS revenues in order to fund other parts of the government. Good luck showing that.
Umm, the USPS is self-funded. None of your tax dollars go towards supporting their operation source
That's a little misleading - it hasn't always been that way, so a lot of the USPS infrastructure is tax-payer funded. In addition, they come around every once and a while and ask for money from Congress - they are doing it this year and while I am hazy on the details, I believe they did something similar about a decade ago in order to fix funding problems with their pension system. Plus, they have a monopoly on letter delivery - that's why fedex costs so much more, they have to classify and price it as something other than a letter - so that's an indirect tax by government intervention to prevent a free market.
When you request the location of your package, it just sneers at you and says "Google is your friend."
That's actually true.
Type/paste a tracking number from any of the major shippers into google and it will automagically figure out that is a tracking number and will show you the current status.
You are operating under the assumption that a democracy can't be turned into a dictatorship, or that a democratic society wouldn't engage in ethnic stereotyping if fed enough propaganda.
You are vastly over-simplfying. For one thing, the fact that government propaganda is given free reign without significant debate means that freedom of expression has already been lost.
You're impressed that they coated the circuit board with black epoxy? The only impressive thing about that is they use so little power that heat transfer isn't an issue.
Indeed. Get back to us when they have a Level 4 product - that's what all the big boys use.
I suspect I have to enter the caveats that the propaganda wings of genocidal maniacs and dictatorships disqualify themselves if they don't follow the laws stating they cannot participate in hate speech.
By virtue of being genocidal maniacs and dictatorships the entire issue of free speech isn't even on the table.
You are a real hoot trying to compare social evolution in ostensibly free democracies with that of "genocidal maniacs and dictatorships" - do you really think you are adding anything at all valuable to the conversation?
TV programs have DVDs, merchandise, product placement, the selling of international rights and so on. They have far more viable ways of generating revenue than websites.
That's disingenuous. Websites have just as much opportunity for all of those approaches as do TV programs. Just because the market for some of them is not as highly developed as it is for TV doesn't mean the option isn't there - at one point TV hadn't exploited those options either.
Frankly you would be a terrible businessman, always looking for excuses to blame the customer for the failure of the business. A savvy businessman is always looking for the opportunities that change brings, not the excuses.
Not if we allow for a (plausible) assumption that they will follow the path of least resistance by using one of the already existing business models.
You can't have it both ways. You wrote, "news providers will be forced to insist on closed plugins that completely control the browsing functionality. " - those closed plugins don't exist today. Their creation is far from the path of least resistance.
Does your browser inform the server it will be blocking all the ads?
Yes it does, by simply not requesting them. How many times have I said that already? Do you really need me to spell out the basic algorithm by which the server is able to connect the dots between requests for advertisements and requests for non-advertisements?
You sir, are a professional ass.
Thanks, such accusations are normal when speaking truth to the wilfully ignorant because ultimately such accusations are the only thing the ignorant have to fall back on when even the most basic technical details have failed them.
Oh, so you're not asking, your web browser is asking. Right. And all those zombies that keep pounding away at port 22, 1433, and 5900 on my firewall are not trying to compromise my network, they're "asking" if they can please talk to a lonely, unpatched host.
Those zombies are looking to take advantage of bugs - when my web browser requests a page it is not exploiting a bug that needs patching, no buffer overflow, no privilege escalation, everything is working as designed on both sides of the transaction.
Fail three times in a row. You are now out.
What you are suggesting is the same as not tipping a waiter, or the same as letting some high-school wash your car for free because the sign said "Free-will donations accepted".
Keeping making those failing analogies - the webserver is quite capable of deciding not to serve content without first serving advertising, in both of your failing analogies that would be the equivalent of announcing that I had no intent to tip or donate before receiving service.
That's 5 fails, 0 successes -- perhaps you will reconsider your misguided righteousness now.
At the moment there is a good-faith understanding that those download a news page might see an ad. If that understanding stops being justified, news providers will be forced to insist on closed plugins that completely control the browsing functionality.
False dichotomy. Maybe news providers will be forced to come up with a different business model instead. Maybe one more suited to the internet instead of television and newspapers. Maybe it is people like you that are holding back progress and development of internet-based businesses because of tunnel-vision that can only see the past and not the present or the future.
It does take more effort (money) to make a website only give content when ads are displayed. Your point is that they need to spend more money to defeat those that want to avoid paying for them.
Cost of doing business. If they want those results, but aren't willing to shoulder the cost, they shouldn't be in business to begin with.
If they start down that road, it is a downward spiral. We both know that the harder they try to force ads, the harder people will try to avoid them.
If it is their belief that ads should be forced upon all of their readers, then the downward spiral is inevitable.
Sounds like you're the kind of guy that takes all of the pennies out of the "Need a penny?" jar...can't blame a guy for trying, right?
Trying and asking are two extremely different things. You fail at analogy.
And it turns out that some blogs do usually break stories before the MSM.
Its kind of sad that almost all of those blogs which "lead the news" are political blogs with big-time political agendas rather than, say, science blogs or something that I can read without being constantly hit over the head with a half-retarded point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't say it wasn't a joke, just that it was a bad one.
Context.
Isn't Linux "me too" tech too?
I'd say it was - obviously it started as a unix reimplementation.
But I think it has well surpassed those pedestrian origins now.
Marketing department tells lies about their product. News at 11.
Indeed. I think that prosecuting this company for astro-turfing is pointless and inconsistent. As long as we have such a laissez-faire attitude towards all the lies and misdirection that marketing people have been doing for decades now, going after a handful of astro-turfers does nothing but give people a false-sense of trust in what they read on the net. Never mind the free speech implications that come into play when defining exactly where the line is between valid promotion and astro-turfing. (does giving away a free "review" produce with a promise of future "review" products qualify as illegal, what if the promise is never spelled out? what if its not a give-away, just an open-ended loan, or what if it is 1 year loan and it just so happens that the next review product shows up in exactly one year too?)
Are you that stupid? They HAVE to charge more because they can't classify it as a letter? Thats the dumbest thing I've read in this thread. It has nothing to do with what you call it.. FedEx is simply more expensive to move the same item, because they CHOOSE to charge more.
They are prevented from having a letter class. So they would either have to ship 1lb packages for 45 cents and then lose money on every single one of those or they can charge what it costs for 1lb packages and anything lighter than 1lb still pays the same rate.
Capiche, dipshit?
because I still don't personally feel comfortable consuming something which I did not pay the artist for.
Do you really think that with all the middlemen still in the loop that listening to 1 minute of commercials per 30 minutes of music is going to generate any significant revenue for the artists? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that any major label music available on spotify is counted as promotional per the artists' contracts with their distributors and that they get exactly 0.0% of all such revenue.
If the service was not socialized then small communicates will either not be served or would have to pay more to send (or even receive) a letter.
That is a common claim. But the evidence does not bear it out. Look at the package delivery services - they don't charge more to deliver to the boonies. They only charge by a rough estimate of the distance of shipping - so shipping from Los Angeles to New York city costs the same as shipping from Los Angeles to Lake Placid, NY.
Honestly, Marvell chips have cost me more grief on Linux installs than all other vendors combined. If this gets mobo vendors to design out Marvell, then I say: "Grand!".
The linux gigabit ethernet driver bites.
The current one - sky2 - frequently dies under heavy loads and seems to rely on an internal watchdog timer to kickstart it back to life within 60 seconds or so, making a gigabit nic no faster than a 10mbps nic on average.
The Marvell provided one - sk98lin - worked until recent kernels changed a couple of structure definitions - I manually tweaked it myself to get it up and running, but jumbo frames don't work (turn them on and it seems to lose any packet larger than the non-jumbo size of ~1500 bytes).
s/you/he/g
Or perhaps joke fail. I sure didn't think it was hilarious.
Your response is a common and erroneous defensive response.
Just because you did not find a joke to be funny does not mean it was not still a joke. Your post that marvel comics only has one 'L' was not a criticism of the humor in the joke, it was an attempt to correct a perceived error. If you knew it was a joke you would have known the error was intentional and would not have attempted to correct an error that was not really an error at all.
I definitely agree, its just one more piece of the profile that google builds. My recommendation - don't make it easy for them, don't keep cookies and don't "log in" to any of their services.
Just the first hit that came up in google, there are hundreds more.
Wait... fedex costs more because USPS has a monopoly?
No, USPS costs more because USPS has a monopoly - that extra cost is where the hidden tax is.
That ~$7 service from fedex is for packages because they do not have a letter class precisely because of the USPS monopoly.
. You want to know why they ask congress for money? Its to get back what Congress ultimately takes from the USPS because its the only thing besides taxes that makes money in our government system.
You are going to have to back that shit up if you want anyone to believe it. You appear to be claiming that congress takes from USPS revenues in order to fund other parts of the government. Good luck showing that.
Umm, the USPS is self-funded. None of your tax dollars go towards supporting their operation source
That's a little misleading - it hasn't always been that way, so a lot of the USPS infrastructure is tax-payer funded.
In addition, they come around every once and a while and ask for money from Congress - they are doing it this year and while I am hazy on the details, I believe they did something similar about a decade ago in order to fix funding problems with their pension system. Plus, they have a monopoly on letter delivery - that's why fedex costs so much more, they have to classify and price it as something other than a letter - so that's an indirect tax by government intervention to prevent a free market.
When you request the location of your package, it just sneers at you and says "Google is your friend."
That's actually true.
Type/paste a tracking number from any of the major shippers into google and it will automagically figure out that is a tracking number and will show you the current status.
You are operating under the assumption that a democracy can't be turned into a dictatorship, or that a democratic society wouldn't engage in ethnic stereotyping if fed enough propaganda.
You are vastly over-simplfying. For one thing, the fact that government propaganda is given free reign without significant debate means that freedom of expression has already been lost.
You're impressed that they coated the circuit board with black epoxy? The only impressive thing about that is they use so little power that heat transfer isn't an issue.
Indeed. Get back to us when they have a Level 4 product - that's what all the big boys use.
I suspect I have to enter the caveats that the propaganda wings of genocidal maniacs and dictatorships disqualify themselves if they don't follow the laws stating they cannot participate in hate speech.
By virtue of being genocidal maniacs and dictatorships the entire issue of free speech isn't even on the table.
You are a real hoot trying to compare social evolution in ostensibly free democracies with that of "genocidal maniacs and dictatorships" - do you really think you are adding anything at all valuable to the conversation?
TV programs have DVDs, merchandise, product placement, the selling of international rights and so on. They have far more viable ways of generating revenue than websites.
That's disingenuous. Websites have just as much opportunity for all of those approaches as do TV programs. Just because the market for some of them is not as highly developed as it is for TV doesn't mean the option isn't there - at one point TV hadn't exploited those options either.
Frankly you would be a terrible businessman, always looking for excuses to blame the customer for the failure of the business. A savvy businessman is always looking for the opportunities that change brings, not the excuses.
Not if we allow for a (plausible) assumption that they will follow the path of least resistance by using one of the already existing business models.
You can't have it both ways. You wrote, "news providers will be forced to insist on closed plugins that completely control the browsing functionality. " - those closed plugins don't exist today. Their creation is far from the path of least resistance.
Does your browser inform the server it will be blocking all the ads?
Yes it does, by simply not requesting them. How many times have I said that already? Do you really need me to spell out the basic algorithm by which the server is able to connect the dots between requests for advertisements and requests for non-advertisements?
You sir, are a professional ass.
Thanks, such accusations are normal when speaking truth to the wilfully ignorant because ultimately such accusations are the only thing the ignorant have to fall back on when even the most basic technical details have failed them.
Oh, so you're not asking, your web browser is asking. Right. And all those zombies that keep pounding away at port 22, 1433, and 5900 on my firewall are not trying to compromise my network, they're "asking" if they can please talk to a lonely, unpatched host.
Those zombies are looking to take advantage of bugs - when my web browser requests a page it is not exploiting a bug that needs patching, no buffer overflow, no privilege escalation, everything is working as designed on both sides of the transaction.
Fail three times in a row. You are now out.
What you are suggesting is the same as not tipping a waiter, or the same as letting some high-school wash your car for free because the sign said "Free-will donations accepted".
Keeping making those failing analogies - the webserver is quite capable of deciding not to serve content without first serving advertising, in both of your failing analogies that would be the equivalent of announcing that I had no intent to tip or donate before receiving service.
That's 5 fails, 0 successes -- perhaps you will reconsider your misguided righteousness now.
How do you ask?
My web browser asks their web server for a web page. The web server decides how to respond to that request.
Apparently you fail at basic web technology too.
At the moment there is a good-faith understanding that those download a news page might see an ad. If that understanding stops being justified, news providers will be forced to insist on closed plugins that completely control the browsing functionality.
False dichotomy. Maybe news providers will be forced to come up with a different business model instead. Maybe one more suited to the internet instead of television and newspapers. Maybe it is people like you that are holding back progress and development of internet-based businesses because of tunnel-vision that can only see the past and not the present or the future.
It does take more effort (money) to make a website only give content when ads are displayed. Your point is that they need to spend more money to defeat those that want to avoid paying for them.
Cost of doing business. If they want those results, but aren't willing to shoulder the cost, they shouldn't be in business to begin with.
If they start down that road, it is a downward spiral. We both know that the harder they try to force ads, the harder people will try to avoid them.
If it is their belief that ads should be forced upon all of their readers, then the downward spiral is inevitable.
Sounds like you're the kind of guy that takes all of the pennies out of the "Need a penny?" jar...can't blame a guy for trying, right?
Trying and asking are two extremely different things. You fail at analogy.
And it turns out that some blogs do usually break stories before the MSM.
Its kind of sad that almost all of those blogs which "lead the news" are political blogs with big-time political agendas rather than, say, science blogs or something that I can read without being constantly hit over the head with a half-retarded point of view.