Wrong. ICANN itself is a monopoly, but it caters to commercial demands. It wouldn't have to, the answer to why it does probably starts with co- and doesn't end with -operation.
Two, I sold a toolkit / extension for the Unity 3D engine on a "pick your own price" model, where you could buy the same product for anywhere between $10 and $50. Only half the buyers choose the cheapest option. Again, I was honest and open about the why and how, including that the package is absolutely identical at all price levels, and that I choose that model because I understand that $50 is too much for a small hobby developer playing around for his own fun. I ended with "this tool will save you many hours of work, you decide what your hour is worth".
People are willing to spend money. But they also want to get a value in return and they want to feel engaged. Allowing people a free download and then asking for a donation does neither. It gives them the value for nothing and doesn't make them participate in the process.
Because marketing people live in a different world than you. They think that you want things that you don't know that you want and their job is to make you realize it.
Or, to sell you crap you don't need by appealing to lower instincts and manipulation. Same thing, basically.
There's now so much content on the Internet that has adapted to the ads instead of the other way around. The most obvious one are articles spread out over many pages for no other reason than increasing the number of page impressions. But there are many other, less obvious ways. Like the layout of sites dictated by "optimal" banner width and skyscraper dimensions. Text flows optimized to make your eyes pass over the ads a maximum number of times. And others.
Why do we use AdBlock? Because the web without is intolerable. The fuckers who made it so are the ones you should be complaining to.
Ok, that won't help you now that things are the way they are. But here's what you (as the owner of an individual site) can do: Learn! Don't make the same mistake again. Your solution is not more are "higher-value"(*) advertisement. Your solution is less advertisement.
Heck, why is Google Search an online advertisement Goliath? Because the ads are tolerable, they don't distract from the actual task I visit the site for and *gasp* they might actually be relevant. Yes, they do lots of tracking and all that, I didn't say they are perfect. But copy the concept of "less, unobtrusive ads".
It's not just online, btw. - offline advertisement is taking the same route, just slower. There is more of it and it's more distracting (moving, blinking, animated, whatever technology allows). And there is the same counter-movement, though again, slower. But look here: http://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban http://youtu.be/Vta6Cn_dLTE
(*) which is an euphemism for "more obnoxious and/or more tracking"
If this were a standalone product that uses my smartphone or even a small wearable computer for its data processing, I would be totally thrilled and would've probably pre-ordered one already.
But the simple fact that it will share everything I see with a 3rd party is enough to make me not want them. Both for my own privacy and that of others around me.
I will gladly give 10, 20 or 50 bucks to an independent artist to help him making his dream come true, if I share it enough to care.
One, we need more people living a dream. Two, it's not that much that it really hurts me. Three, the chances of being screwed over are considerably lower.
As much as I agree this is bullshit, yours is the dumbest possible argument against it. The parliament better be able to handle problems in parallel and not just sequentially.
This comes up every single time. I think I should keep a copy of my usual response:
This will not happen, period. The CEO making that decision would be kicked out by the board faster than you can say... pretty much anything. That's a death sentence for an international corporation, and in the case of MS, which still relies on vendor-lock-in to keep its market share, doubly so.
MS pulling out of Europe? The result would not be, as you probably think, Europe being all sorry and worried, but MS stock price in free fall. For you americans who can't even find Europe on a map: It is a bigger market than the US, with more population.
The year for Linux on the Desktop has not come and is nowhere near, and the whole Gnome/KDE and Mono crap that people like him pulled when all that users really wanted was something that looked nice and simply worked is the primary reason for that.
We had everything we needed to make a Desktop Linux happen back in 2000 or so. Heck, with stuff like E we were half a decade ahead of everyone else. But no, UI wars, forks, pointless ego-tripping and later embracing MS and looking at the shiney instead of fixing the crap you already have became more important.
That's about the time I gave up on Desktop Linux and moved to OS X. I still run Debian on all my servers, but for the sake of sanity, spare me Linux on a desktop.
I've been running OS X for years. Most of the time, there are one or two terminal windows open, with a bash.
Unix wins over DOS. That's the part that should matter to anyone interested in real software quality. Once winDOS has finally died its much deserved death, we can then focus on replacing Unix with a real operating system.:-)
"evil", like all such statements, is a subjective judgement call.
I personally vote with my money for computers the way I believe they should be - Unix based and well-designed so that I can focus on my actual work and not the overhead. Like many techies that aren't students anymore, my scare resource is time, not money. If I can pay money to free up time, I'll gladly do it.
Am I supporting an evil empire? I don't see it that way. I don't think they're pure good, either. They're a business. One that is providing me with something I find worth paying for. When they stop doing that, I will stop giving them money.
In my youth, I was curious about pretty much every non-mainstream opinion, so I checked them out, either by reading or by meeting with people from the far-left to the far-right of the political spectrum, as well as conspiracy theories, esoteric stuff - well, and of course lots of science and techie things.
In the political area, one thing stuck out so much that I remember it still. No matter if they were left, right, center or just strange, every movement that had some experience in dealing with the police had the same advice: When dealing with the police, here are the two things that you need to do:
1. ask for a lawyer 2. shut up
They aren't kidding when they say that anything you say can and will be used against you. Get a lawyer and talk to him, and him alone. And that is whenever you are dealing with the police, no matter if you are the suspect or not.
Now over the years, I've had quite a bit of friendly contact with the local police force, both privately and professionally (I work in IT security. Sooner or later, you get to deal with the police.)
Still, as a guideline to remember, I think it's pretty good.
France isn't far from here. I don't see it falling apart. And Switzerland won't suffer, either.
The "everyone will leave, omg! Sky falling!" Is pure propaganda, nothing else. Doesn't happen. At most, some of the parasites will leave because they're not welcome anymore. If you have something useful to offer to the world, money is not your only motivation.
Parent deserves more than +5. I've worked with the highest levels of management and there is so much magical thinking at these levels, it puts any witch coven to shame.
Just one example: In many sectors, there is the unquestioned belief that only X amounts of companies can survive in the market. So the CEOs main job is to make sure his company is in the top X. If he's at X+1 or X+2, he risks being canned. No matter if the company is successful, profitable, whatever - doesn't matter because higher ups believe in that mantra.
You are mistaking the occasion for the cause. Common mistake in history, and one of the worst.
WW1 didn't start because of an assassination. The powers involved were pretty much thirsting for a war and that event simply gave them the opportunity to finally start one.
Same with the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and the turn of internal US politics into whatever you want to call today's sorry state of affairs. It has little to do with 9/11 in a causative sense.
That's a nice theoretical issue, and I do in fact agree that the US courts tend towards arrogance when it comes to jurisdiction. Nevertheless, nothing will be changed in time for this particular case, so the facts as they are today are what matters.
The ISP has the right to monitor your traffic because you signed an agreement that says they are allowed to, and are allowed to take action.
There are limits to what you can legally sign away.
For example, in my country you can not legally sign a contract that allows someone else to kill and eat you. It's still murder. Yes, there was an actual court case to try this.
Likewise, if wiretapping laws make it illegal to monitor traffic, then they need to allow for such an exception or it's still wiretapping.
Now I'm fairly confident the lawmakers aren't so stupid that they didn't think of including that exception into the law, but still, in general, just because you sign something doesn't mean it's legal. There's a lot of rights you can not sign away and a lot of contracts that are invalid.
Everyone should draw a crappy picture in paint, host it on something free like google sites, and spread links that bring people to a second page that says "You don't have permission to click this link" with a link to the picture itself. Then bring copyright complaints to all the ISPs of all the people who inevitably click that and hence download your copyrighted crap without permission. Flood the fuckers.
That's not a stupid idea.
What is the procedure for filing a complaint under this system? I'd really love to write a script and post it in github for everyone to copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. ICANN itself is a monopoly, but it caters to commercial demands. It wouldn't have to, the answer to why it does probably starts with co- and doesn't end with -operation.
They are right and this is so obvious that anyone who disagrees should be shot as an act of mercy.
Then again, the DNS was basically fucked when they handed it to ICANN. Some things should not be run according to market dynamics.
Your mistake was making it available for free, asking for donations and not offering anything in exchange.
I have two different experiences with voluntary payments, both very positive.
One, I've been running an online game for 12 years now where you can donate and in return you get an in-game title and an additional character slot. Nothing that provides in-game benefits and it's mostly for vanity. But it is something. As you can check yourself because I am transparent with it all, players are donating a few hundred Euros every month and have been for years.
Two, I sold a toolkit / extension for the Unity 3D engine on a "pick your own price" model, where you could buy the same product for anywhere between $10 and $50. Only half the buyers choose the cheapest option. Again, I was honest and open about the why and how, including that the package is absolutely identical at all price levels, and that I choose that model because I understand that $50 is too much for a small hobby developer playing around for his own fun. I ended with "this tool will save you many hours of work, you decide what your hour is worth".
People are willing to spend money. But they also want to get a value in return and they want to feel engaged. Allowing people a free download and then asking for a donation does neither. It gives them the value for nothing and doesn't make them participate in the process.
Mod parent up.
I'm also running several sites and I hate advertisement. I'm very proud of the fact that all my sites are ad-free.
Then i realized exactly that without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist.
Yes, but which parts?
Quantity doesn't equal quality. I'd rather have half the Internet if it were the better half.
so why not honestly ask the readers ?
Because marketing people live in a different world than you. They think that you want things that you don't know that you want and their job is to make you realize it.
Or, to sell you crap you don't need by appealing to lower instincts and manipulation. Same thing, basically.
AdBlock won't help you against the current tracking schemes that have been coming to market for the past year or so. They will get you.
I signed an NDA, so I can't go into details. But they will almost certainly (70-90% are usual rates) even with AdBlock, Ghostery and NoScript.
I'd like to add one more:
They influence the content.
There's now so much content on the Internet that has adapted to the ads instead of the other way around. The most obvious one are articles spread out over many pages for no other reason than increasing the number of page impressions. But there are many other, less obvious ways. Like the layout of sites dictated by "optimal" banner width and skyscraper dimensions. Text flows optimized to make your eyes pass over the ads a maximum number of times. And others.
They should've wondered this before.
Why do we use AdBlock? Because the web without is intolerable. The fuckers who made it so are the ones you should be complaining to.
Ok, that won't help you now that things are the way they are. But here's what you (as the owner of an individual site) can do: Learn! Don't make the same mistake again. Your solution is not more are "higher-value"(*) advertisement. Your solution is less advertisement.
Heck, why is Google Search an online advertisement Goliath? Because the ads are tolerable, they don't distract from the actual task I visit the site for and *gasp* they might actually be relevant. Yes, they do lots of tracking and all that, I didn't say they are perfect. But copy the concept of "less, unobtrusive ads".
It's not just online, btw. - offline advertisement is taking the same route, just slower. There is more of it and it's more distracting (moving, blinking, animated, whatever technology allows). And there is the same counter-movement, though again, slower. But look here:
http://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban
http://youtu.be/Vta6Cn_dLTE
(*) which is an euphemism for "more obnoxious and/or more tracking"
I'm so with the parent on this one.
If this were a standalone product that uses my smartphone or even a small wearable computer for its data processing, I would be totally thrilled and would've probably pre-ordered one already.
But the simple fact that it will share everything I see with a 3rd party is enough to make me not want them. Both for my own privacy and that of others around me.
It is.
I will gladly give 10, 20 or 50 bucks to an independent artist to help him making his dream come true, if I share it enough to care.
One, we need more people living a dream.
Two, it's not that much that it really hurts me.
Three, the chances of being screwed over are considerably lower.
As much as I agree this is bullshit, yours is the dumbest possible argument against it. The parliament better be able to handle problems in parallel and not just sequentially.
He has . He's made sure that he actually has weapons of mass destruction.
Would Bush have invaded Iraq if it could've resulted in a nuke going off above Jerusalem? I very much doubt it.
omg...
This comes up every single time. I think I should keep a copy of my usual response:
This will not happen, period. The CEO making that decision would be kicked out by the board faster than you can say ... pretty much anything. That's a death sentence for an international corporation, and in the case of MS, which still relies on vendor-lock-in to keep its market share, doubly so.
MS pulling out of Europe? The result would not be, as you probably think, Europe being all sorry and worried, but MS stock price in free fall. For you americans who can't even find Europe on a map: It is a bigger market than the US, with more population.
And sometimes I want to talk to non-Apple users, you know?
*nod*
The year for Linux on the Desktop has not come and is nowhere near, and the whole Gnome/KDE and Mono crap that people like him pulled when all that users really wanted was something that looked nice and simply worked is the primary reason for that.
We had everything we needed to make a Desktop Linux happen back in 2000 or so. Heck, with stuff like E we were half a decade ahead of everyone else. But no, UI wars, forks, pointless ego-tripping and later embracing MS and looking at the shiney instead of fixing the crap you already have became more important.
That's about the time I gave up on Desktop Linux and moved to OS X. I still run Debian on all my servers, but for the sake of sanity, spare me Linux on a desktop.
This.
I've been running OS X for years. Most of the time, there are one or two terminal windows open, with a bash.
Unix wins over DOS. That's the part that should matter to anyone interested in real software quality. Once winDOS has finally died its much deserved death, we can then focus on replacing Unix with a real operating system. :-)
"evil", like all such statements, is a subjective judgement call.
I personally vote with my money for computers the way I believe they should be - Unix based and well-designed so that I can focus on my actual work and not the overhead. Like many techies that aren't students anymore, my scare resource is time, not money. If I can pay money to free up time, I'll gladly do it.
Am I supporting an evil empire? I don't see it that way. I don't think they're pure good, either. They're a business. One that is providing me with something I find worth paying for. When they stop doing that, I will stop giving them money.
In my youth, I was curious about pretty much every non-mainstream opinion, so I checked them out, either by reading or by meeting with people from the far-left to the far-right of the political spectrum, as well as conspiracy theories, esoteric stuff - well, and of course lots of science and techie things.
In the political area, one thing stuck out so much that I remember it still. No matter if they were left, right, center or just strange, every movement that had some experience in dealing with the police had the same advice: When dealing with the police, here are the two things that you need to do:
1. ask for a lawyer
2. shut up
They aren't kidding when they say that anything you say can and will be used against you. Get a lawyer and talk to him, and him alone. And that is whenever you are dealing with the police, no matter if you are the suspect or not.
Now over the years, I've had quite a bit of friendly contact with the local police force, both privately and professionally (I work in IT security. Sooner or later, you get to deal with the police.)
Still, as a guideline to remember, I think it's pretty good.
France isn't far from here. I don't see it falling apart. And Switzerland won't suffer, either.
The "everyone will leave, omg! Sky falling!" Is pure propaganda, nothing else. Doesn't happen. At most, some of the parasites will leave because they're not welcome anymore. If you have something useful to offer to the world, money is not your only motivation.
Parent deserves more than +5. I've worked with the highest levels of management and there is so much magical thinking at these levels, it puts any witch coven to shame.
Just one example: In many sectors, there is the unquestioned belief that only X amounts of companies can survive in the market. So the CEOs main job is to make sure his company is in the top X. If he's at X+1 or X+2, he risks being canned. No matter if the company is successful, profitable, whatever - doesn't matter because higher ups believe in that mantra.
You are mistaking the occasion for the cause. Common mistake in history, and one of the worst.
WW1 didn't start because of an assassination. The powers involved were pretty much thirsting for a war and that event simply gave them the opportunity to finally start one.
Same with the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and the turn of internal US politics into whatever you want to call today's sorry state of affairs. It has little to do with 9/11 in a causative sense.
That's a nice theoretical issue, and I do in fact agree that the US courts tend towards arrogance when it comes to jurisdiction. Nevertheless, nothing will be changed in time for this particular case, so the facts as they are today are what matters.
The ISP has the right to monitor your traffic because you signed an agreement that says they are allowed to, and are allowed to take action.
There are limits to what you can legally sign away.
For example, in my country you can not legally sign a contract that allows someone else to kill and eat you. It's still murder. Yes, there was an actual court case to try this.
Likewise, if wiretapping laws make it illegal to monitor traffic, then they need to allow for such an exception or it's still wiretapping.
Now I'm fairly confident the lawmakers aren't so stupid that they didn't think of including that exception into the law, but still, in general, just because you sign something doesn't mean it's legal. There's a lot of rights you can not sign away and a lot of contracts that are invalid.
Everyone should draw a crappy picture in paint, host it on something free like google sites, and spread links that bring people to a second page that says "You don't have permission to click this link" with a link to the picture itself. Then bring copyright complaints to all the ISPs of all the people who inevitably click that and hence download your copyrighted crap without permission. Flood the fuckers.
That's not a stupid idea.
What is the procedure for filing a complaint under this system? I'd really love to write a script and post it in github for everyone to copy.