What you talk about is meta-gaming and it only exists in games with enough complexity to allow for it.
Basically, someone finds a strategy that is better than all others, so everyone adopts it. But then it isn't better anymore, because everyone is doing it. It becomes predictable, which allows someone else to find a counter-strategy, which then everyone employs. In your example, grenades would become a standard loadout item. Now there is suddenly room for someone exploiting the fact that, say, nobody packs healing kits anymore (because you can't pack both grenades and healing kits).
Meta-gaming is pretty common in competitive gaming.
While the point is largely true, the submitter is missing the most important point:
So-called "social games" aren't about fun. And they aren't games. The game is just the packaging. These things are basically drugs. Read up on the corporate background of Zynga and what kind of people they employ. They create designer-drugs that are scientifically designed for maximumg addiction potential.
The "fun" and "game" part are just the coating that gets you to try it. Much like a drug that you take for the first time because it promises a good trip or great sex or whatever, but that's just for the first few times. After that, it's the addiction that makes you take it, not the high, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise.
Social games aren't meant to be fun, they are meant to keep you playing (and spending, or creating ad-impressions). The reason we (I'm a game designer) talk about things like "gamification" in the work environment is not that it is fun, but because we've found ways to make people repeatedly do things that they have no intrinsic reason to do and that are not rewarding in themselves.
Question: Do those making such claims have to put up money up-front?
Almost certainly not, and that's where the trouble is.
If, say, anyone claiming a video I uploaded to YouTube had to deposit $10 which gets sent to, say, me as a "sorry for the trouble" if it turns out that his claim is bullshit, I'm very sure the number of copyright notices on YouTube would drop dramatically - but the serious claims would still be made.
The whole idea of the traditional protest is that people had to stand in a particular area to create problems for wherever they were standing. The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.
The whole point of this petition is that they consider the traditional protest to not be effective anymore and want a non-traditional form of protest. Don't forget that the business world is also changing and a strike or blockade at a hosting center has far, far less consequences than at a factory.
Exceeding the TOS of your provider, for example, does not break any laws, only a contract. That's a huge difference - the consequence is you might lose your Internet, not a SWAT team breaking down your door.
Protests can or can not be disruptive. Often, it's a POV matter. Rosa Parks was certainly disruptive to some. Sit-in protests are one well-known form of peaceful, but disruptive protest. Heck, any large demonstration shuts down a couple roads for a few hours. The difference is that protests are not merely disruptive. Shutting down the street is a side-effect or a means to your message. A DDoS, on the other hand, does not carry a message. By itself, it can not be a protest. However, it can be part of a protest.
Legally, I believe the main point is whether these are 10,000 people demonstrating, or 10 people and a botnet. The issue then becomes determining the difference.
I do agree that a DDoS is a kind of blockade the way you could do in RL by getting a couple thousand people to stand around, say, some corporate HQ, blocking roads and exits. But the difference is that in the RL, you really need a few thousand people. On the Internet, a bunch of jerks with a botnet can do it.
Oh how I hate those pointless debate-starter questions. They come off as so amateur.
Thank you !
When I read online articles, the point where the author says "what do you think? post in the comments below" is usually the point where I stop reading because I just realized that the whole article is only there to get the author exposure, clicks, views, comments or whatever other metric he uses to measure "success" (and sell advertisement).
It's the Wikipedia mistake all over again - everyones opinion is equally relevant. Is it? When it comes to politics, religion, fashion or some other "soft!" topic, it might be. But when it comes to science, then no, not every opinion carries the same weight. In fact, opinions don't matter, facts and theories do. And "I think..." is not the start of a theory.
The often mis-applied tragedy of the commons does describe quite well what happened with advertisement:
Since the scarce resource - attention, screen space, however you want to quantify it - is free to the advertiser, it gets overused to the point of destruction. In this case, destruction comes in the form of users fighting back.
All those poor sites that survive thanks to ads are just the collateral damage. Don't point your fingers at people using ad blockers - point them at the advertisers making ads so obnoxious and everywhere that sane people have no other choice but to block them.
If you think that advertisement has its place, how about doing the work yourself? Fork ADB and release a version that displays the first ad on every page but blocks all others, or some other filtering option besides all-or-nothing. Then, watch the advertisers play the whole game again by making that first ad a full screen overlay that contains all the other ads. Wanna bet?
These people are parasites, they don't care for the common good, sanity or a reasonable compromise. If they think they can replace the space characters in articles with micro-ads, they will.
If someone can stay up until 5 AM playing WoW and still end up doing well in school, what's the problem?
self-delusion.
You can do this once or twice, especially if you are young. If you think you can do it regularily, then you are deluding yourself. Sleep-deprivation is a well-researched environmental condition and its detrimental physical and mental effects are undisputed.
However, humans are excellent at convincing themselves of any bullshit they want to believe in. Smoking isn't bad for your health, having fun is a sin, drinking every night is just a social activity, your problems are not your fault, whatever.
Someone with an addiction will rationalize it away and explain all resulting problems with other causes. He's not doing bad in school because of lack of sleep, but because the teachers are bad and the other kids are mean to him. He's not lost his marriage because of his drinking problem, but because his wife was unfaithful. He doesn't enjoy torturing people, it's just that sinners need to be punished. Whatever.
You are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts. Sleep deprivation and its effects are well-documented facts, no matter how much you wish that you can party all night, or play WoW or do whatever and shake it off. You can't. We know this, and wishful thinking doesn't change it.
In contrast, some of the other religions (Judaism, Christendom, Hinduim, Buddhism) seem to have started out as attempts to understand the world and fill out holes of their knowledge...
I strongly recommend a reading of "The Golden Bough" which contains an excellent section on the origin of religion, with more citations than you can shake a stick at. It's anthropology, so it looks at actual human customs, etc., not blog-level speculative thought.
The tl;dr version is: All religion is based in fraud, because it is one of two branches of the solution to the "damn, my magic doesn't really work and people are starting to find out" problem. Given that the shaman (not the prostitute) is the worlds oldest profession (and in many current primitive tribes, still the ONLY one), you would make a huge leap of faith to assume they were all so dumb and ignorant that they didn't notice a basic fact about their own daily activities.
You make a best effort, but a mathematical proof (which is what you allude to) that the plane is demonstrably safe is simply impossible.
What makes you think I allude to any such thing. I work in security, I know that you can not prove some things outside of theory due to the complexities involved. I actually don't care about the method of proving at this point, I'm making an argument about who should be responsible for providing the proof.
And frankly, when you want to, say, bypass the corporate firewall with a dial-up modem straight to the financial database server, it is not the job of the CSO to prove that your setup is insecure, it is your job to prove that your setup is secure. Not mathematically, but the usual "best practice" / "reasonable doubt", etc. standards.
The FAA does not have to prove that mobile devices endanger aircraft electronics. Those whose manufacture or those who want to use those devices on a plane need to prove that it doesn't.
Yes, I know that some people get a heart attack if they can't check their e-mail, FB and Twitter for 20 seconds, but last time I checked, we all agree that "default deny" is the proper firewall policy. So with all security systems. If you don't know something is harmless, you need to treat it as a potential danger, until it is proven to be safe.
And when a mistake can kill a few hundred people, you err on the side of caution. Always.
Children can be traumatized, and it appears years later.
True, but what causes trauma?
Children who are abused or lose their parents early in life certainly get a trauma.
Porn? Show me evidence. Because quite frankly, given the history of mankind, if that were true than 90% of human history the entire race was traumatised. Until the late middle ages only the very rich had more than one sleeping room for the entire (expanded!) family.
The problem to your solution is that you need to legally define "offshoring profits". You see, these systems get set up by lawyers in such a way that they are legal.
The solution, of course, is to pay taxes on revenue, not on profit.
But frankly, taxes are so heavily skewed towards corporations that I've thought about creating a company with the business purpose of running my life, only so that everything I do can be tax-deducted.
Just another proof of what people with brains have been saying for years: The whole "think of the chiiiildren" agenda is stupid. Kids don't get traumatized by porn, they simply don't care about it. Older kids are where it gets interesting. Young kids? Disney is a ton more important to them than weird pictures of naked adults doing weird stuff.
Like in TFA, it's the adults freaking out, not the kids. Maybe we should change the meme to "think of the paaarents".
Those are not mutually exclusive. There is a point where the revolution itself comes to an end, but its consequences often take much longer to establish themselves. The French or American Revolutions are certainly long over, but their impact was long-lasting and many of their consequences did not show up immediately. Same for the industrial revolution, which might be over, but automation still was a big topic in the factories of the 70s.
I agree that the fundamental change has happened. Smaller, faster computers open up new areas, but they don't do paradigm changes. The difference between a world where a "computer" is a woman in a war office doing math calculations by hand and a world where a "computer" is a machine sitting on many office desktops is much larger than the difference between that world and one where the computer has evolved into a notebook.
I would say that the Internet is still part of the revolution - interconnectivity is a major change to the way we use computers. But neither Facebook nor the iPad are revolutionary. Evolutionary, yes. Revolutionary, no.
There's some truth to it. SpaceX is built like an Internet startup - failure is always an option. The "old technology" is from an age when every launch was a national news event and failure was no option.
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
If your life depends on it - would you rather fly a NASA Space Shuttle or a Microsoft Rocket ?
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit, no doubt. Among other things, they have revitalized the "space exploration is cool" meme. And with it the willingness to take risks.
But how about we talk about costs when they've had their first two or three explosions and resulting fallout in costs, publicity, etc.? I'd be mightily surprised if the learning wouldn't go two-way. Old tech learns from SpaceX how to cut costs while SpaceX learns from old tech which costs you shouldn't save on.
What's the point of having a robot car if it can't drive you home from the pub while you go to sleep in the back?
The point is that we are putting a new technology into the space that is already a leading cause of death in our society. Being extraordinarily careful is absolutely the right thing to do. Having strict rules that you can remove step-by-step if everything works as expected is much, much better than starting a free-for-all and facing the music when things go wrong and people die.
The point is that this is a first step, and depending on intial experiences, more steps will follow. Don't expect everything right away.
Sure, give the fat people more excuses, that'll work like charm.
Look, anyone with even a passing interest in obesity has known for at least a decade that the problem is a non-trivial mix of genetic factors, lifestyle and eating habits. In the west, however, where issues such as food supply don't enter the equation, the main problem is psychological. Simplified: In order to stop being a fat pig, you would need to change something in your life. More sport, healthier food, less food, less sugary drinks, whatever it is, it requires mental energy to change. Once you have gone down the road to being fat far enough, your primary source of mental energy is - high-energy food. So you are basically fucked unless you can also change your motivational circuits at the same time. Good luck.
Why am I angry at this article and every other who thinks that things are simple and implies a single causation? Because it plays right into the weakness of those trying to (and failing) get back to being a human being. You know, instead of a big blob of fat tissue with a human core hidden somewhere deep within. An excuse gives you an opportunity to fail without feeling bad about yourself. Which increases the likelihood of failing.
But the facts are that pretty much every(*) obese person is entirely reponsible for their state. I'm not saying it is easy to change, but the causes are a) internal and not external and b) within their control.
(*) unless you have a medical statement from an actual doctor diagnosing one of the very few and very rare actual medical conditions that cause obesity, that includes you. In other words: 99.99% of the obese population.
I still run my own site, like I did 10 years ago. People visit it. FB isn't a threat to me any more than GeoCities used to be. And I'd rather have people post their "woke up today" bullshit to FB than to grisly GeoCities or MySpace pages with blink blink colour scream hurt my eyes all over it.
The Internet just resembles real life - what a surprise. It turns out that WalMart crowds out Mum&Pap shops, but if you have something of your own to offer that can not be easily copied, you still can run a viable business (or hobby).
If you write code strictly on your own, you probably don't need a document, because - if you are a good programmer - you already have a style.
But as soon as you work with a team, you need a document. Reading code written by others, understanding what it does, spotting bugs and a dozen other things are just so much easier if everyone uses the same style and that style makes sense and was written to support good code, not just some arbitrary orderliness desire.
For my main project, our Style Manual is about 3 pages, including examples. Also, we don't fuss over minor details, many guidelines are that exactly - guidelines. Many are "should" rules, because we realize that there are some cases where an exception makes sense.
But yes, it was worth it and it helps. When you have a team, a style guide is very helpful. But like all things, it can be overdone, and if someone whines about whitespaces, for me personally that's the point where it becomes crazy. Heck, your editor probably has a "reindent everything" command. Use that, done.
There is no rational reason Facebook should pocket the money as for them, the message is no different than any of the other billion messages they deliver every day.
For the recipient, however, this is a change. And getting a buck is at least a small compensation for having to deal with a potential spam message. It is, in fact, the only rational advantage of this change for the recipient, given that if you want to hear from people, you have plenty of options of giving them a website, e-mail address, etc. etc.
If FB pockets the money, you know this is just a grab for money. The anti-spam concept of delivery costs (which is at least 15 years old) is intrinsically tied to the recipient receiving the money.
Slashdot Mirror
What you talk about is meta-gaming and it only exists in games with enough complexity to allow for it.
Basically, someone finds a strategy that is better than all others, so everyone adopts it. But then it isn't better anymore, because everyone is doing it. It becomes predictable, which allows someone else to find a counter-strategy, which then everyone employs.
In your example, grenades would become a standard loadout item. Now there is suddenly room for someone exploiting the fact that, say, nobody packs healing kits anymore (because you can't pack both grenades and healing kits).
Meta-gaming is pretty common in competitive gaming.
While the point is largely true, the submitter is missing the most important point:
So-called "social games" aren't about fun. And they aren't games. The game is just the packaging. These things are basically drugs. Read up on the corporate background of Zynga and what kind of people they employ. They create designer-drugs that are scientifically designed for maximumg addiction potential.
The "fun" and "game" part are just the coating that gets you to try it. Much like a drug that you take for the first time because it promises a good trip or great sex or whatever, but that's just for the first few times. After that, it's the addiction that makes you take it, not the high, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise.
Social games aren't meant to be fun, they are meant to keep you playing (and spending, or creating ad-impressions).
The reason we (I'm a game designer) talk about things like "gamification" in the work environment is not that it is fun, but because we've found ways to make people repeatedly do things that they have no intrinsic reason to do and that are not rewarding in themselves.
Question: Do those making such claims have to put up money up-front?
Almost certainly not, and that's where the trouble is.
If, say, anyone claiming a video I uploaded to YouTube had to deposit $10 which gets sent to, say, me as a "sorry for the trouble" if it turns out that his claim is bullshit, I'm very sure the number of copyright notices on YouTube would drop dramatically - but the serious claims would still be made.
The whole idea of the traditional protest is that people had to stand in a particular area to create problems for wherever they were standing. The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.
The whole point of this petition is that they consider the traditional protest to not be effective anymore and want a non-traditional form of protest. Don't forget that the business world is also changing and a strike or blockade at a hosting center has far, far less consequences than at a factory.
You are mixing various things up there.
Exceeding the TOS of your provider, for example, does not break any laws, only a contract. That's a huge difference - the consequence is you might lose your Internet, not a SWAT team breaking down your door.
Protests can or can not be disruptive. Often, it's a POV matter. Rosa Parks was certainly disruptive to some. Sit-in protests are one well-known form of peaceful, but disruptive protest. Heck, any large demonstration shuts down a couple roads for a few hours.
The difference is that protests are not merely disruptive. Shutting down the street is a side-effect or a means to your message. A DDoS, on the other hand, does not carry a message. By itself, it can not be a protest. However, it can be part of a protest.
They do have a point.
Legally, I believe the main point is whether these are 10,000 people demonstrating, or 10 people and a botnet. The issue then becomes determining the difference.
I do agree that a DDoS is a kind of blockade the way you could do in RL by getting a couple thousand people to stand around, say, some corporate HQ, blocking roads and exits. But the difference is that in the RL, you really need a few thousand people. On the Internet, a bunch of jerks with a botnet can do it.
Oh how I hate those pointless debate-starter questions. They come off as so amateur.
Thank you !
When I read online articles, the point where the author says "what do you think? post in the comments below" is usually the point where I stop reading because I just realized that the whole article is only there to get the author exposure, clicks, views, comments or whatever other metric he uses to measure "success" (and sell advertisement).
It's the Wikipedia mistake all over again - everyones opinion is equally relevant. Is it? When it comes to politics, religion, fashion or some other "soft!" topic, it might be. But when it comes to science, then no, not every opinion carries the same weight. In fact, opinions don't matter, facts and theories do. And "I think..." is not the start of a theory.
The often mis-applied tragedy of the commons does describe quite well what happened with advertisement:
Since the scarce resource - attention, screen space, however you want to quantify it - is free to the advertiser, it gets overused to the point of destruction. In this case, destruction comes in the form of users fighting back.
All those poor sites that survive thanks to ads are just the collateral damage. Don't point your fingers at people using ad blockers - point them at the advertisers making ads so obnoxious and everywhere that sane people have no other choice but to block them.
If you think that advertisement has its place, how about doing the work yourself? Fork ADB and release a version that displays the first ad on every page but blocks all others, or some other filtering option besides all-or-nothing. Then, watch the advertisers play the whole game again by making that first ad a full screen overlay that contains all the other ads. Wanna bet?
These people are parasites, they don't care for the common good, sanity or a reasonable compromise. If they think they can replace the space characters in articles with micro-ads, they will.
If someone can stay up until 5 AM playing WoW and still end up doing well in school, what's the problem?
self-delusion.
You can do this once or twice, especially if you are young. If you think you can do it regularily, then you are deluding yourself. Sleep-deprivation is a well-researched environmental condition and its detrimental physical and mental effects are undisputed.
However, humans are excellent at convincing themselves of any bullshit they want to believe in. Smoking isn't bad for your health, having fun is a sin, drinking every night is just a social activity, your problems are not your fault, whatever.
Someone with an addiction will rationalize it away and explain all resulting problems with other causes. He's not doing bad in school because of lack of sleep, but because the teachers are bad and the other kids are mean to him. He's not lost his marriage because of his drinking problem, but because his wife was unfaithful. He doesn't enjoy torturing people, it's just that sinners need to be punished. Whatever.
You are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts.
Sleep deprivation and its effects are well-documented facts, no matter how much you wish that you can party all night, or play WoW or do whatever and shake it off. You can't. We know this, and wishful thinking doesn't change it.
Since he is infallible, it is obviously a feature and not a bug.
Or, being omnipotent, he will simply declare it a feature.
And then he's going to be sued for copyright violation by Bill Gates. :-)
In contrast, some of the other religions (Judaism, Christendom, Hinduim, Buddhism) seem to have started out as attempts to understand the world and fill out holes of their knowledge...
I strongly recommend a reading of "The Golden Bough" which contains an excellent section on the origin of religion, with more citations than you can shake a stick at. It's anthropology, so it looks at actual human customs, etc., not blog-level speculative thought.
The tl;dr version is: All religion is based in fraud, because it is one of two branches of the solution to the "damn, my magic doesn't really work and people are starting to find out" problem. Given that the shaman (not the prostitute) is the worlds oldest profession (and in many current primitive tribes, still the ONLY one), you would make a huge leap of faith to assume they were all so dumb and ignorant that they didn't notice a basic fact about their own daily activities.
You make a best effort, but a mathematical proof (which is what you allude to) that the plane is demonstrably safe is simply impossible.
What makes you think I allude to any such thing. I work in security, I know that you can not prove some things outside of theory due to the complexities involved. I actually don't care about the method of proving at this point, I'm making an argument about who should be responsible for providing the proof.
And frankly, when you want to, say, bypass the corporate firewall with a dial-up modem straight to the financial database server, it is not the job of the CSO to prove that your setup is insecure, it is your job to prove that your setup is secure.
Not mathematically, but the usual "best practice" / "reasonable doubt", etc. standards.
I think you got that backwards.
The FAA does not have to prove that mobile devices endanger aircraft electronics. Those whose manufacture or those who want to use those devices on a plane need to prove that it doesn't.
Yes, I know that some people get a heart attack if they can't check their e-mail, FB and Twitter for 20 seconds, but last time I checked, we all agree that "default deny" is the proper firewall policy. So with all security systems. If you don't know something is harmless, you need to treat it as a potential danger, until it is proven to be safe.
And when a mistake can kill a few hundred people, you err on the side of caution. Always.
With the current tax system - yes. This requires more than just changing one tax, you would have to re-think the entire system.
Children can be traumatized, and it appears years later.
True, but what causes trauma?
Children who are abused or lose their parents early in life certainly get a trauma.
Porn? Show me evidence. Because quite frankly, given the history of mankind, if that were true than 90% of human history the entire race was traumatised. Until the late middle ages only the very rich had more than one sleeping room for the entire (expanded!) family.
The problem to your solution is that you need to legally define "offshoring profits". You see, these systems get set up by lawyers in such a way that they are legal.
The solution, of course, is to pay taxes on revenue, not on profit.
But frankly, taxes are so heavily skewed towards corporations that I've thought about creating a company with the business purpose of running my life, only so that everything I do can be tax-deducted.
Just another proof of what people with brains have been saying for years: The whole "think of the chiiiildren" agenda is stupid. Kids don't get traumatized by porn, they simply don't care about it. Older kids are where it gets interesting. Young kids? Disney is a ton more important to them than weird pictures of naked adults doing weird stuff.
Like in TFA, it's the adults freaking out, not the kids. Maybe we should change the meme to "think of the paaarents".
Those are not mutually exclusive. There is a point where the revolution itself comes to an end, but its consequences often take much longer to establish themselves. The French or American Revolutions are certainly long over, but their impact was long-lasting and many of their consequences did not show up immediately. Same for the industrial revolution, which might be over, but automation still was a big topic in the factories of the 70s.
I agree that the fundamental change has happened. Smaller, faster computers open up new areas, but they don't do paradigm changes. The difference between a world where a "computer" is a woman in a war office doing math calculations by hand and a world where a "computer" is a machine sitting on many office desktops is much larger than the difference between that world and one where the computer has evolved into a notebook.
I would say that the Internet is still part of the revolution - interconnectivity is a major change to the way we use computers. But neither Facebook nor the iPad are revolutionary. Evolutionary, yes. Revolutionary, no.
There's some truth to it. SpaceX is built like an Internet startup - failure is always an option. The "old technology" is from an age when every launch was a national news event and failure was no option.
Read this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
If your life depends on it - would you rather fly a NASA Space Shuttle or a Microsoft Rocket ?
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit, no doubt. Among other things, they have revitalized the "space exploration is cool" meme. And with it the willingness to take risks.
But how about we talk about costs when they've had their first two or three explosions and resulting fallout in costs, publicity, etc.?
I'd be mightily surprised if the learning wouldn't go two-way. Old tech learns from SpaceX how to cut costs while SpaceX learns from old tech which costs you shouldn't save on.
What's the point of having a robot car if it can't drive you home from the pub while you go to sleep in the back?
The point is that we are putting a new technology into the space that is already a leading cause of death in our society. Being extraordinarily careful is absolutely the right thing to do. Having strict rules that you can remove step-by-step if everything works as expected is much, much better than starting a free-for-all and facing the music when things go wrong and people die.
The point is that this is a first step, and depending on intial experiences, more steps will follow. Don't expect everything right away.
Sure, give the fat people more excuses, that'll work like charm.
Look, anyone with even a passing interest in obesity has known for at least a decade that the problem is a non-trivial mix of genetic factors, lifestyle and eating habits. In the west, however, where issues such as food supply don't enter the equation, the main problem is psychological. Simplified: In order to stop being a fat pig, you would need to change something in your life. More sport, healthier food, less food, less sugary drinks, whatever it is, it requires mental energy to change. Once you have gone down the road to being fat far enough, your primary source of mental energy is - high-energy food. So you are basically fucked unless you can also change your motivational circuits at the same time. Good luck.
Why am I angry at this article and every other who thinks that things are simple and implies a single causation? Because it plays right into the weakness of those trying to (and failing) get back to being a human being. You know, instead of a big blob of fat tissue with a human core hidden somewhere deep within.
An excuse gives you an opportunity to fail without feeling bad about yourself. Which increases the likelihood of failing.
But the facts are that pretty much every(*) obese person is entirely reponsible for their state. I'm not saying it is easy to change, but the causes are a) internal and not external and b) within their control.
(*) unless you have a medical statement from an actual doctor diagnosing one of the very few and very rare actual medical conditions that cause obesity, that includes you. In other words: 99.99% of the obese population.
I still run my own site, like I did 10 years ago. People visit it. FB isn't a threat to me any more than GeoCities used to be. And I'd rather have people post their "woke up today" bullshit to FB than to grisly GeoCities or MySpace pages with blink blink colour scream hurt my eyes all over it.
The Internet just resembles real life - what a surprise. It turns out that WalMart crowds out Mum&Pap shops, but if you have something of your own to offer that can not be easily copied, you still can run a viable business (or hobby).
If you write code strictly on your own, you probably don't need a document, because - if you are a good programmer - you already have a style.
But as soon as you work with a team, you need a document. Reading code written by others, understanding what it does, spotting bugs and a dozen other things are just so much easier if everyone uses the same style and that style makes sense and was written to support good code, not just some arbitrary orderliness desire.
For my main project, our Style Manual is about 3 pages, including examples. Also, we don't fuss over minor details, many guidelines are that exactly - guidelines. Many are "should" rules, because we realize that there are some cases where an exception makes sense.
But yes, it was worth it and it helps. When you have a team, a style guide is very helpful. But like all things, it can be overdone, and if someone whines about whitespaces, for me personally that's the point where it becomes crazy. Heck, your editor probably has a "reindent everything" command. Use that, done.
The really interesting question is this:
Who pockets the $1?
Facebook? Or the recipient?
There is no rational reason Facebook should pocket the money as for them, the message is no different than any of the other billion messages they deliver every day.
For the recipient, however, this is a change. And getting a buck is at least a small compensation for having to deal with a potential spam message. It is, in fact, the only rational advantage of this change for the recipient, given that if you want to hear from people, you have plenty of options of giving them a website, e-mail address, etc. etc.
If FB pockets the money, you know this is just a grab for money.
The anti-spam concept of delivery costs (which is at least 15 years old) is intrinsically tied to the recipient receiving the money.
That's actually very easy:
"Sorry, I don't use windows. Can't help you."