If that's your definition of free, please name one man-made thing that is free.
You can run semantics if you like, but that wasn't the point.
Everyone considers Google and many other web services to be free, but they aren't, they are still a for-profit company and they are making shitloads of money on their search engine. That is why all the rules of commercial enterprises apply to them, including anti-trust rules.
The GP argued the "for free" point as if that would change the laws and rules they need to follow. My point is that it doesn't, because they are a company, not a charity, and anti-trust laws still apply to them. If it were actually "for free" in the sense of a charity giving free food to homeless, I'm fairly sure nobody would apply anti-trust laws just because they happen to be the only charity in the city doing so. And while yes, again the food was paid for by someone else (your semantic point is correct, just irrelevant), the difference between actually giving the food away, and providing a commercial service are important. If, for example, instead of a charity it would be a company that gets paid by the local merchants in order to get the homeless away from their shops, the food would still be free for the homeless, but if that company were to behave anti-competitive, anti-trust laws would apply.
No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.
Yeah, everyone confuses those.
You have the right to speak. I have to right to not listen.
"You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?"
Content creators do not have a right to have their business model work out. Besides, most ads pay per click, not per view these days (though both kinds still exist).
There are many other business models. An online game of mine (BattleMaster) runs entirely on donations, for example. I'm very proud of having been able to run this game for 12 years now, and there has never been a single banner or pop-up ad on the site. Not in the game, not in the wiki, not in the forum. Does it allow me to quit my day job? Nope. Does it pay for its own bills (hosting, etc.)? Absolutely.
There are Freemium models, there are subscription models like The Onion where you get a few free articles and then they ask you to subscribe. And, of course, there is the old "You want something? Pay up and you get it." system. You know, the one that mankind has been using for a few thousand years?
The Internet has been and still is experimenting with various ways of making money. If yours doesn't work out, stop whining and start taking the possibility into consideration that your business model is flawed.
Welcome to the 1%. The 99% meanwhile are exploited by the advertisers. DNT would've been a solution to them, but sadly the capitalist liberal dumbfucks didn't realize that wherever money is involved, asking nicely and hoping for some free market magic doesn't do it. You need to actually create the market force that you want. It's called a law with fines. The fines create the financial incentive to follow the law. Though personally, for known crooks like these, I'd prefer the fines to create the mechanism by which people who don't follow the law are removed from the market through the method of bankruptcy.
Because it has a de facto control of a particular market. If I am the only producer of X within 1000 miles, then I have a monopoly, even if I don't actively stop anyone from setting up their own X factory. Legally, a monopoly does not require 100% market share, but a "controlling" market share, so I would be a legal monopolist even if there's a few tiny X factories within 1000 miles, but when you go into a shop to buy some X, most of them only stock my product.
Your answer is right there in the summary: anti-trust. Do you need to have it spelled out what that means?
for free
No, it doesn't. The fact that you don't pay anything does not always mean it is for free. In this case, someone else pays. It is for free to you. It is not for free. There's a difference that matters.
The people who suffer from something complain about it. Are you trying to say that this surprises you?
The point is not, and never should be, about who complains, but about whether or not the complaint is justified. If you break into my house, it shouldn't matter if I or my neighbours or someone walking the dog notices and calls the cops, should it?
Please stop the "if we just stopped doing anything, the magical invisible hand of the market would sort everything out" nonsense. Few theories in the history of mankind have been more thoroughly debunked. Soccer games work well among friends, and where lots and lots of money is at stakes, you need a referee. Nobody is surprised by that. Dumb people seem surprised that the same holds true for other competitions.
ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.
Is the portal to your parallel universe still open?
Spam still makes up the majority of E-Mail traffic. That you don't see it does not mean the problem has disappeared.
ABP has not made a dent in advertisement, because almost nobody uses it. Remember that we aren't the average Internet user. According to the Mozilla AddOns page, ABP has 14 mio. users. There are about 2.4 billion Internet users. So 0.6% of the Internet users use ABP. And I'm being generous there because most of those 14 mio. will also own a smartphone, iPad or other device where they do not have ABP installed.
DNT is non-mandatory, correct. But it can be made mandatory through legislation, and as a standard feature it is much easier for common people to deploy than ABP etc., and with a default on setting like MS is moving towards, it does something very important and very dangerous: It blows the plausible deniability away for the advertisement companies. That is what all the whining is about - with DNT in place and widely used, they can no longer claim to respect you. The mask will come off. And that could pave the way to more regulation, to the Internet equivalent of the do-not-call lists and such like.
Because right now, when ad company EvilAds claims that nobody minds their crap, you can not prove them wrong. When they deploy ads in a way that circumvents DNT, their argument falls apart.
The drug business is larger than this and we fight it. Human trafficking and slavery are huge markets, but we don't support them. Heck, by common propaganda, child porn is apparently a gigantic international market, yet I don't see anyone saying it needs to be saved.
Just because it's a huge market does not mean it has a right to exist.
We as a society need to decide if we want something, and to which extend.
We want a certain amount of drugs - the legal ones - and we don't want others. We do not want to disallow any business that moves people from A to B for a fee - tourism is quite welcome in most places - but we don't want certain kinds. Like it or not, as a society we have decided that certain kinds of porn are ok, while others are not.
Same for advertisement. Some is fine and some fucking isn't, get that into your head you fucking parasites.
We have added a technical means to say "do not track me, please". If lots and lots of people prefer it this way, the correct answer is not to circumvent or weaken it. In fact, I personally think that if the industry does not start respecting DNT right now, and stops whining about it, then it should become the law. That is how we beat assholes and egoists back into line in this society.
It will at least give the non coders an appreciation of what is being done.
No, it won't. A simple javascript program is not representative of a complex system design, and it will, on the contrary, make people think that this new MIS they are requesting from the software development department can't be all that much more complex than a bit of jquery.
There's a difference between a not-yet-coder and a non-coder.
I'm not a surfer, mostly because I never tried. I might suck, I might have a talent for it, I don't know. I don't even know if it's something I would like.
So yes, giving people a chance to try it, if they want, and see if they might have a talent for it is a good thing.
And that's where it ends. I am also not a painter, and it's not for lack of trying, but because I simply suck. I spent enough time with artists to understand what I am lacking and that much of it can be trained, but I have neither the desire nor the time nor the energy for all that effort, and even then I would probably be rather mediocre.
So I'm not a surfer, and I'm not a painter - but those are two different kinds of "not" and you shouldn't confuse them. Some people should absolutely not write production code. Simply because their code sucks and they'll cause trouble that other people will have to fix. Making that approach corporate policy is something so unbelievably stupid that only upper management can possibly come up with the idea.
Writing something in some programming language isn't CS101. It's pretty far from it, actually. There isn't all that much science in coding. The science is in compilers, databases, operating systems and other complex systems.
And you really think that writing a few "hello world" programs (oh, sorry, "hello customer", since it's going to be "production" code) will make them understand the actual complexities of a reasonably interesting application?
Sorry, but you don't get to understand how to build an airplane because you once made one out of LEGOs.
It seems you have made a few bad personal experience and judge the world-wide call center industry based on that.
Sure, sometimes the QA sucks, and sometimes it is stellar and most often it will be somewhere inbetween. All of that is far away from the original point, so I'll just stop here.
This was one of the coolest things I found on the Internet since quite a while.
And, despite the RSI-effect and all, it kind of loses something in the various maps, deep zoom, etc. versions. As soon as you can zoom, it doesn't have the scale/size feeling anymore. Something is lost.
That's what I mean by "seeing" -- observing, according to some reference frame, FTL travel.
I don't think that evidence brought back from a trip necessarily counts as an observation in the relativistic sense. But I'd have to get out my copy of The Road to Reality or something to check.
Slashdot Mirror
Details we do not want to burden the unenlightened with. Since hot dogs include buns... think of the children!
I am an Episkoposes of the POEE. Please give me a law so I can prosecute everyone who defiles our sacred number 5.
Please?
Also, anyone who eats hot dogs.
If that's your definition of free, please name one man-made thing that is free.
You can run semantics if you like, but that wasn't the point.
Everyone considers Google and many other web services to be free, but they aren't, they are still a for-profit company and they are making shitloads of money on their search engine. That is why all the rules of commercial enterprises apply to them, including anti-trust rules.
The GP argued the "for free" point as if that would change the laws and rules they need to follow. My point is that it doesn't, because they are a company, not a charity, and anti-trust laws still apply to them. If it were actually "for free" in the sense of a charity giving free food to homeless, I'm fairly sure nobody would apply anti-trust laws just because they happen to be the only charity in the city doing so. And while yes, again the food was paid for by someone else (your semantic point is correct, just irrelevant), the difference between actually giving the food away, and providing a commercial service are important. If, for example, instead of a charity it would be a company that gets paid by the local merchants in order to get the homeless away from their shops, the food would still be free for the homeless, but if that company were to behave anti-competitive, anti-trust laws would apply.
No it's just that advertisers are a bunch of assholes who think that free speech = unfettered right to harass everyone even when they're sleeping, eating, screwing, working or taking a dump.
Yeah, everyone confuses those.
You have the right to speak.
I have to right to not listen.
It really is that simple.
"You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?"
Content creators do not have a right to have their business model work out. Besides, most ads pay per click, not per view these days (though both kinds still exist).
There are many other business models. An online game of mine (BattleMaster) runs entirely on donations, for example. I'm very proud of having been able to run this game for 12 years now, and there has never been a single banner or pop-up ad on the site. Not in the game, not in the wiki, not in the forum.
Does it allow me to quit my day job? Nope. Does it pay for its own bills (hosting, etc.)? Absolutely.
There are Freemium models, there are subscription models like The Onion where you get a few free articles and then they ask you to subscribe. And, of course, there is the old "You want something? Pay up and you get it." system. You know, the one that mankind has been using for a few thousand years?
The Internet has been and still is experimenting with various ways of making money. If yours doesn't work out, stop whining and start taking the possibility into consideration that your business model is flawed.
Welcome to the 1%. The 99% meanwhile are exploited by the advertisers. DNT would've been a solution to them, but sadly the capitalist liberal dumbfucks didn't realize that wherever money is involved, asking nicely and hoping for some free market magic doesn't do it. You need to actually create the market force that you want. It's called a law with fines. The fines create the financial incentive to follow the law. Though personally, for known crooks like these, I'd prefer the fines to create the mechanism by which people who don't follow the law are removed from the market through the method of bankruptcy.
Less than 1% of Internet users use AdBlock, NoScript, etc.
That doesn't have the advertisers worried at all. DNT did. That should give us a hint that one of these things was the right approach.
Don't get me wrong, ABP is working great for me and I don't want to miss it. But it is only a solution for me, not for the Internet.
I'm not clear as to how Google is a monopoly.
Because it has a de facto control of a particular market. If I am the only producer of X within 1000 miles, then I have a monopoly, even if I don't actively stop anyone from setting up their own X factory. Legally, a monopoly does not require 100% market share, but a "controlling" market share, so I would be a legal monopolist even if there's a few tiny X factories within 1000 miles, but when you go into a shop to buy some X, most of them only stock my product.
Why
Your answer is right there in the summary: anti-trust. Do you need to have it spelled out what that means?
for free
No, it doesn't. The fact that you don't pay anything does not always mean it is for free. In this case, someone else pays. It is for free to you. It is not for free. There's a difference that matters.
The people who suffer from something complain about it. Are you trying to say that this surprises you?
The point is not, and never should be, about who complains, but about whether or not the complaint is justified. If you break into my house, it shouldn't matter if I or my neighbours or someone walking the dog notices and calls the cops, should it?
Please stop the "if we just stopped doing anything, the magical invisible hand of the market would sort everything out" nonsense. Few theories in the history of mankind have been more thoroughly debunked. Soccer games work well among friends, and where lots and lots of money is at stakes, you need a referee. Nobody is surprised by that. Dumb people seem surprised that the same holds true for other competitions.
ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.
Is the portal to your parallel universe still open?
Spam still makes up the majority of E-Mail traffic. That you don't see it does not mean the problem has disappeared.
ABP has not made a dent in advertisement, because almost nobody uses it. Remember that we aren't the average Internet user. According to the Mozilla AddOns page, ABP has 14 mio. users. There are about 2.4 billion Internet users. So 0.6% of the Internet users use ABP. And I'm being generous there because most of those 14 mio. will also own a smartphone, iPad or other device where they do not have ABP installed.
DNT is non-mandatory, correct. But it can be made mandatory through legislation, and as a standard feature it is much easier for common people to deploy than ABP etc., and with a default on setting like MS is moving towards, it does something very important and very dangerous: It blows the plausible deniability away for the advertisement companies. That is what all the whining is about - with DNT in place and widely used, they can no longer claim to respect you. The mask will come off. And that could pave the way to more regulation, to the Internet equivalent of the do-not-call lists and such like.
Because right now, when ad company EvilAds claims that nobody minds their crap, you can not prove them wrong. When they deploy ads in a way that circumvents DNT, their argument falls apart.
The real problem is that representatives *have no fucking idea what they are talking about on most subjects*
Politicians are Amateurs
Second that. The sheer amount of whining and the sources it comes from is a surefire sign that this is the right approach.
And we need to keep it up. Add the next layer before they can recover from this blow.
Sorry, MS, but Google will have to engage in at least a decade of evilness before they are even in the same league as you.
So what?
The drug business is larger than this and we fight it.
Human trafficking and slavery are huge markets, but we don't support them.
Heck, by common propaganda, child porn is apparently a gigantic international market, yet I don't see anyone saying it needs to be saved.
Just because it's a huge market does not mean it has a right to exist.
We as a society need to decide if we want something, and to which extend.
We want a certain amount of drugs - the legal ones - and we don't want others.
We do not want to disallow any business that moves people from A to B for a fee - tourism is quite welcome in most places - but we don't want certain kinds.
Like it or not, as a society we have decided that certain kinds of porn are ok, while others are not.
Same for advertisement. Some is fine and some fucking isn't, get that into your head you fucking parasites.
We have added a technical means to say "do not track me, please". If lots and lots of people prefer it this way, the correct answer is not to circumvent or weaken it. In fact, I personally think that if the industry does not start respecting DNT right now, and stops whining about it, then it should become the law. That is how we beat assholes and egoists back into line in this society.
It will at least give the non coders an appreciation of what is being done.
No, it won't. A simple javascript program is not representative of a complex system design, and it will, on the contrary, make people think that this new MIS they are requesting from the software development department can't be all that much more complex than a bit of jquery.
There's a difference between a not-yet-coder and a non-coder.
I'm not a surfer, mostly because I never tried. I might suck, I might have a talent for it, I don't know. I don't even know if it's something I would like.
So yes, giving people a chance to try it, if they want, and see if they might have a talent for it is a good thing.
And that's where it ends. I am also not a painter, and it's not for lack of trying, but because I simply suck. I spent enough time with artists to understand what I am lacking and that much of it can be trained, but I have neither the desire nor the time nor the energy for all that effort, and even then I would probably be rather mediocre.
So I'm not a surfer, and I'm not a painter - but those are two different kinds of "not" and you shouldn't confuse them. Some people should absolutely not write production code. Simply because their code sucks and they'll cause trouble that other people will have to fix. Making that approach corporate policy is something so unbelievably stupid that only upper management can possibly come up with the idea.
something along the lines of CS101.
Writing something in some programming language isn't CS101. It's pretty far from it, actually. There isn't all that much science in coding. The science is in compilers, databases, operating systems and other complex systems.
And you really think that writing a few "hello world" programs (oh, sorry, "hello customer", since it's going to be "production" code) will make them understand the actual complexities of a reasonably interesting application?
Sorry, but you don't get to understand how to build an airplane because you once made one out of LEGOs.
Yes, it's insane.
The same people who come up with nonsense like this would scoff at the idea of letting everyone do the books, or run the next marketing campaign.
So why do they think the reverse would work?
Which is why one of the hypothesis on this whole thing is that not relativity is wrong, but our understanding of causality.
That is one of the most fascinating points of physics in a long time.
It seems you have made a few bad personal experience and judge the world-wide call center industry based on that.
Sure, sometimes the QA sucks, and sometimes it is stellar and most often it will be somewhere inbetween. All of that is far away from the original point, so I'll just stop here.
This was one of the coolest things I found on the Internet since quite a while.
And, despite the RSI-effect and all, it kind of loses something in the various maps, deep zoom, etc. versions. As soon as you can zoom, it doesn't have the scale/size feeling anymore. Something is lost.
That's not true.
Many laws have been changed in the history of mankind without disobedience. Civil disobedience is one of many ways in which you can push for a change.
That's what I mean by "seeing" -- observing, according to some reference frame, FTL travel.
I don't think that evidence brought back from a trip necessarily counts as an observation in the relativistic sense. But I'd have to get out my copy of The Road to Reality or something to check.