Another big thing is look and feel. I think that Chrome Frame keeps IE's look and feel. So if my mother is slow to learn new applications and she is so used to IE's look and feel but I want her to be more secure and enjoy HTML5 pages without having to worry about which browser she's using or try to learn Chrome than Chrome Frame might be an option for her.
I'm pretty convinced your mother is not really that slow to learn new applications. What she is slow at is adapting to crappy interfaces, which are by and large the standard. We techies have learned to work our way around what is actually a horrible mess and major obstacle to getting any work done - most non-techies haven't. They actually notice just how bad the interface is.
Case in point: Things like the iPad, which were designed with a good user-interface in mind, specifically for non-technical people as the target audience, don't seem to suffer from the "slow to learn" problem.
The natural response from the "government is always bad" people tends to be: "Well, if service A sucks, I vote with my wallet and get service B instead". Thats all fine and dandy if service B exists. You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires, so by necessity certain businesses are going to be near monopolies, either by regulation or by practicality.
It goes beyond that.
Even if you don't have a monopoly, the market will provide a lot less differentiation than the market theorists try to make you believe. That is because we have a meta-monopoly: The stock market. Every major corporation these days is subject to the same analysts and traders. As such, the variations are limited, because the expectations are. In very few markets, for example, can you go an intentionally try to not compete on price and market share, but provide quality products for a subset of potential customers. You simply can't do that in many markets, because analysts will quickly point out that your market growth is limited, you have reached all the customers you can possibly reach, and thus no future growth is to be expected. Which will be followed by demands to expand into other markets.
So even if there are 22 companies, most of the times the actual difference between their offers is tiny.
As you said: A government-run company can apply other standards. For example, NASA has this credo of "loss of human life is inacceptable". A private company could never do that. Well, maybe in public, but behind closed doors, the CEO would be grilled for spending $x million just to reduce the chance of a fatal accident by 1%. Other public companies can put customer satisfaction at the top of their agenda, not as a means to get more market share, but simply because.
How about the money taken in vs the money spent vs the revenue generated?
Please post. Also include the amount of salaries paid and add them to the revenue generated, because that is the economical footprint of a company, not the stock market value.
What you are looking for is efficiency. However, efficiency can be defined in several ways. The private way is how to generate the greatest amount of profit with the least amount of investment. But that is not the only way. A government may want to apply a larger picture. On a national level, the 1000 jobs that you "optimized" away have not vanished, they've gone on unemployment money. If you figure that in, it may well be more efficient to keep them employed in a low-efficiency job than to have them in zero-efficiency unemployment.
An economy is most efficient when it uses its available ressources optimally. The resources of a national economy are limited in the strict sense, i.e. you can not vary them at will, neither up nor down. A company has a different view, it can hire and fire. As such, eliminating jobs can be efficent from a company perspective, because for the company these people disappear. On a national level, we don't generally make people disappear if we don't have jobs for them.
So they figured that by using "high-frequency algorithmic trading" they could keep the profits coming in.
"Profit" in the extended meaning of the word. There is no value being generated at the exchange, only well, duh - exchanged. So the value that they take out of the market ("profit") is something someone else had put in.
Well, at the expense of whom ? How long can this trend be maintained before major problems arise in the economy ?
Welcome to our time traveller from 2005. You may want to read up on the news to find your answers there. The short version: a) everyone else b) about 4 years, which were over in 2009.
The incentive to do the right thing (long term investment into production) is - money. If there is another way to make the same money easier or faster, or make more money or even make more money easier and a lot faster, then a rational participant in the market will do it.
Now, the stock market is a closed system - any buck that the day trader made, someone else had to put in. The stock exchange doesn't generate any value. So if nothing else convinces you, then ask yourself where all these short-term pure trading profits come from. If you still haven't realized after all the bailouts: It's you.
Can't really blame the traders. They ran a highly profitable scam for many years, then it all blew up. They probably couldn't believe their luck when the tax payer stepped up to cover all the losses and didn't even stop the scam. So heck yes do they continue, of course. Who wouldn't?
But that is exactly why the FSF has a great track record in bringing companies into compliance - they give them advance notice, talk with them, their main goal is to bring them into compliance, not to sue.
What really is lost if they are in violation of the GPL for a week? The outcome matters. A victory for Free Software is still a victory if it doesn't materialize immediately right now.
but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is
I claim that is largely a myth.
Please show actual evidence of the government being large and wasteful. I mean evidence as in hard numbers, used in proper comparison. All such that I've seen so far were deeply flawed and clearly manipulated. For example, many state-run companies are labeled as "inefficient", and privatization at first seems to prove it. But in almost all cases, a few years down the road you suddenly realize that the state-run company offered secure, adequately paid jobs instead of minimum wage, it invested in sustainable infrastructure instead of short-term growth, and its prices were more long-term realistic than the private competitors who undercut them at first, only to raise them later.
I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone. In all other areas, there are many cases where it looks like it works, but only so long as you don't look too closely. For example, in the privatization concepts of the german train system, all calculations looked great - and completely ignored that the value to be given away had been built up over a hundred years with taxpayers money. As soon as you priced it at a realistic market value, it turned out that the concepts proposed could not possibly provide a sustainable train system. In fact, in the years leading up, the management had already made the company "ready" for going public, and the deterioration of quality, infrastructure and workers' rights was so bad that when bad markets delayed the initial plans, and all the crap slowly floated to the surface prior to instead of - as probably planned - after privatization, public outcry forced even the government party that had pushed for privatization the hardest to put a hold on the plans.
It was government entities that put men into space and on the moon, not private corporations. Sure, today, they can get someone into orbit for a tenth the cost of NASA. It's impressive, but while NASA did it at 10 times the cost, they did it more than 40 years ago. A lot of things in technology have dropped further in price than factor 10 in those 40 years.
So, in summary, please do provide actual hard evidence. To me, the claim that government is large and wasteful is largely (there are small areas of exception) a myth. And worse, a myth that is being spread with bad intentions.
Any attempt to fix current government systems fails to explain why its #1 pre-assumption should be taken as correct: That the government system is fixable.
We all know that there are things that you can repair, and then there are things that are broken far beyond repair. Before going about to fix the government system, one should prove that it is actually fixable, and not simply kaputt.
The mistake that most attempts at fixing the system make is the same one that the security industry has been making for the past 20 years - coming up with solutions for todays actual problems. But the evil guys are already working on tomorrows exploits.
You can not win if all you do is playing catch-up.
You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.
From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.
I know the solution is to go and do it yourself. Thank you, I've held an elected office for several years (and stepped down on my own), I've had enough of politics for life. Anyone who enters that arena with good intentions and manages to keep them has my respect, and if I can, my vote. But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic. My personal choice was to step down just before I became the later, but it was damn close (and as you may have noticed, I did take a good share of disillusion with me).
What is the threshold above which companies are no longer the good guys?
When they are large enough that they are not players in the game anymore, but can change the rules. We don't like people changing the rules, and especially not when they're at the same time playing the game. No matter the intentions, it always smells like doing it in your favor.
Lots of people would lose their gmail, and we'd have to switch to a different search engine. My guess is three weeks until the hole has been filled by competitors.
You DO realize that they openly disclosed (without coercion or prompting) this whole wireless mess, right?
No, they didn't. They only found it out after prompting by the German privacy authorities.
Yes, they didn't try to hide it, some credit for not being outright evil. But it's simply false to facts that they found out on their own and then disclosed without prompting. They were prompted first and then found out.
BP are in a difficult position, drilling for oil is risky and sometimes things go wrong and unpredictably so. That is the nature of the business.
Which means that you have to have a plan for something going wrong before you start doing things. This is not exactly experimental new technology we're talking about, the event space of "unpredictably" is fairly small.
ultimately BP did not want this situation, it is bad for business.
Apparently, they didn't not want it badly enough. I work in the security industry, I know the "tradeoffs" that management is making constantly. Sometimes it is reasonable (spend $1000 to cover a $100 risk? makes no sense), most of the time, especially with unlikely but catastrophic events, it is pure gut decision making. Management regularily risks the company on that kind of risks, because the math is not intuitive anymore.
The real problem, however, is the second part of your sentence. Yes, it is bad for business. WHAT THE FUCK??? Bad for business? Try talking to the dead fish and birds about "business". Try talking to the fishermen about "bad for business". This goes way beyond business, and that's why a business perspective is not the right way to approach it and that's why a non-business entity should've stepped in on day one and said "we're taking over, you are now under our command, and if you so much as hesitate in doing exactly what we tell you, we'll disband you and spend whatever we can get for the remains to clean this mess up."
Ultimately, Google seem to think that their bottom line is more important than users rights to privacy.
Exactly, and that is why while the actual incidents are very different, the reactions can be compared. We, as society, have found it acceptable to take a business approach to issues that go beyond business.
BP have the expertise and equipment that give the best chances of stemming the flow of oil...
It totally agree they have the ressources and knowledge. But they shouldn't have been left in charge. Their ressources and knowledge should have been put under government control with the clear instruction to put everything they have towards ending that spill, and if someone so much as mentions the word "cost", he'd be made personally liable for it all.
Again, same with Google, I agree with your reasoning there.
You can become unshocked. I wasn't comparing the two events, only the reactions of the/. crowd to the way the corporations involved are allowed to deal with it. So two layers of indirection removed from the actual event.
First good point I found in the replies. Yes, urgency sounds like a good reason. If the catastrophe is still ongoing, then someone needs to step in immediately to make it stop.
No comparison of seriousness was made in my original post, only a comparison of methods.
I don't think that seriousness is a proper metric to apply when deciding which method to apply. Not only is it highly subjective, it also changes over time. There's also the question of where to draw the line on scale that isn't well-defined.
The point was whether we think it's ok to let the one who made the mess be the one in charge of fixing things. It may work if your kid makes a mess in the kitchen, but is it the right approach to a corporate fuckup? Corporations aren't kids, and the main reason for the kitchen cleanup is pedagogic.
It appears that the equation is only in your head. The incidents are very distinct. The corporate reaction isn't, and it's the reaction that is the point here, not the incident.
And yes, one can look at the one without looking at the other. Sure a murder is a lot worse than hitting someone, but they both fall into the physical violence category, and the question of how society deals with physical violence can be asked without going into the details of either case. And yes, the generalization is a valid discussion.
The point is not if an oil spill and a privacy invasion can in any way be compared. I don't think they can, to the point where even statements like "the oil spill was much worse" are not false, but meaningless. However, the question of whether we accept that a corporation that messed something up is the proper entity to be in charge of fixing it should be asked. There was a time in our society when the answer was a clear "no" and the general public expected the government to take over, hang the culprits from the nearest tree (figuratively speaking), clean up the mess and hand them the bill.
The question is what interests are served by letting the offender clean up the crime scene and have a go at undoing the damage.
I'm really looking forward to the comments. When BP lets the oil spill continue day after day, the/. crowd goes asking why we let them handle it at all, after all they're the ones responsible for the mess.
Now Google has a mess, and is doing an internal audit. I'm curious if we will apply the same reasoning, or a different standard. And what justifications we'll see for it.
I'm not a native english speaker, but in my conception, a conspiracy requires some temporal consistency, i.e. it should endure over some time. In this case, the members of the "conspiracy" are constantly changing, and everyone is colluding with everyone else. It doesn't fit the common definition of a conspiracy which is more like a small group of people giggling madly in the corner.
Religion has been used as a perfectly valid excuse for murder since the beginning of times.
Yes, but does that justify it? How long do I have to keep something up before it becomes ok? Is there such a thing?
You are certainly right in your three steps. What I'm doing is going one step further. Most people agree that these religious extremists with their call for murder are perverts. I'm going the step further saying that all the religious people are perverts, it's just that the extremists are so much over the edge that it becomes obvious.
In the literal meaning of the word, all the participants - the website you're visiting, the ad agency, the ad network, their customers - all work together against you. There's no reason to be dramatic, but it's a simple fact that they are all trying to coerce/convince/manipulate/whateveryouwanttocallit to split with some of your money into their direction, which then feeds them all.
Slashdot Mirror
Another big thing is look and feel. I think that Chrome Frame keeps IE's look and feel. So if my mother is slow to learn new applications and she is so used to IE's look and feel but I want her to be more secure and enjoy HTML5 pages without having to worry about which browser she's using or try to learn Chrome than Chrome Frame might be an option for her.
I'm pretty convinced your mother is not really that slow to learn new applications. What she is slow at is adapting to crappy interfaces, which are by and large the standard. We techies have learned to work our way around what is actually a horrible mess and major obstacle to getting any work done - most non-techies haven't. They actually notice just how bad the interface is.
Case in point: Things like the iPad, which were designed with a good user-interface in mind, specifically for non-technical people as the target audience, don't seem to suffer from the "slow to learn" problem.
I'll wait for the second or third iteration. Never buy a Microsoft product at version 1, nobody here could probably forgotten that, right?
The natural response from the "government is always bad" people tends to be: "Well, if service A sucks, I vote with my wallet and get service B instead". Thats all fine and dandy if service B exists. You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires, so by necessity certain businesses are going to be near monopolies, either by regulation or by practicality.
It goes beyond that.
Even if you don't have a monopoly, the market will provide a lot less differentiation than the market theorists try to make you believe. That is because we have a meta-monopoly: The stock market. Every major corporation these days is subject to the same analysts and traders. As such, the variations are limited, because the expectations are. In very few markets, for example, can you go an intentionally try to not compete on price and market share, but provide quality products for a subset of potential customers. You simply can't do that in many markets, because analysts will quickly point out that your market growth is limited, you have reached all the customers you can possibly reach, and thus no future growth is to be expected. Which will be followed by demands to expand into other markets.
So even if there are 22 companies, most of the times the actual difference between their offers is tiny.
As you said: A government-run company can apply other standards. For example, NASA has this credo of "loss of human life is inacceptable". A private company could never do that. Well, maybe in public, but behind closed doors, the CEO would be grilled for spending $x million just to reduce the chance of a fatal accident by 1%. Other public companies can put customer satisfaction at the top of their agenda, not as a means to get more market share, but simply because.
How about the money taken in vs the money spent vs the revenue generated?
Please post.
Also include the amount of salaries paid and add them to the revenue generated, because that is the economical footprint of a company, not the stock market value.
What you are looking for is efficiency. However, efficiency can be defined in several ways. The private way is how to generate the greatest amount of profit with the least amount of investment. But that is not the only way. A government may want to apply a larger picture. On a national level, the 1000 jobs that you "optimized" away have not vanished, they've gone on unemployment money. If you figure that in, it may well be more efficient to keep them employed in a low-efficiency job than to have them in zero-efficiency unemployment.
An economy is most efficient when it uses its available ressources optimally. The resources of a national economy are limited in the strict sense, i.e. you can not vary them at will, neither up nor down. A company has a different view, it can hire and fire. As such, eliminating jobs can be efficent from a company perspective, because for the company these people disappear. On a national level, we don't generally make people disappear if we don't have jobs for them.
So they figured that by using "high-frequency algorithmic trading" they could keep the profits coming in.
"Profit" in the extended meaning of the word. There is no value being generated at the exchange, only well, duh - exchanged. So the value that they take out of the market ("profit") is something someone else had put in.
Well, at the expense of whom ? How long can this trend be maintained before major problems arise in the economy ?
Welcome to our time traveller from 2005. You may want to read up on the news to find your answers there. The short version:
a) everyone else
b) about 4 years, which were over in 2009.
It's a fundamental flaw.
The incentive to do the right thing (long term investment into production) is - money. If there is another way to make the same money easier or faster, or make more money or even make more money easier and a lot faster, then a rational participant in the market will do it.
Now, the stock market is a closed system - any buck that the day trader made, someone else had to put in. The stock exchange doesn't generate any value. So if nothing else convinces you, then ask yourself where all these short-term pure trading profits come from. If you still haven't realized after all the bailouts: It's you.
Can't really blame the traders. They ran a highly profitable scam for many years, then it all blew up. They probably couldn't believe their luck when the tax payer stepped up to cover all the losses and didn't even stop the scam. So heck yes do they continue, of course. Who wouldn't?
Telecommunication
But that is exactly why the FSF has a great track record in bringing companies into compliance - they give them advance notice, talk with them, their main goal is to bring them into compliance, not to sue.
What really is lost if they are in violation of the GPL for a week? The outcome matters. A victory for Free Software is still a victory if it doesn't materialize immediately right now.
but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is
I claim that is largely a myth.
Please show actual evidence of the government being large and wasteful. I mean evidence as in hard numbers, used in proper comparison. All such that I've seen so far were deeply flawed and clearly manipulated. For example, many state-run companies are labeled as "inefficient", and privatization at first seems to prove it. But in almost all cases, a few years down the road you suddenly realize that the state-run company offered secure, adequately paid jobs instead of minimum wage, it invested in sustainable infrastructure instead of short-term growth, and its prices were more long-term realistic than the private competitors who undercut them at first, only to raise them later.
I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone. In all other areas, there are many cases where it looks like it works, but only so long as you don't look too closely. For example, in the privatization concepts of the german train system, all calculations looked great - and completely ignored that the value to be given away had been built up over a hundred years with taxpayers money. As soon as you priced it at a realistic market value, it turned out that the concepts proposed could not possibly provide a sustainable train system. In fact, in the years leading up, the management had already made the company "ready" for going public, and the deterioration of quality, infrastructure and workers' rights was so bad that when bad markets delayed the initial plans, and all the crap slowly floated to the surface prior to instead of - as probably planned - after privatization, public outcry forced even the government party that had pushed for privatization the hardest to put a hold on the plans.
It was government entities that put men into space and on the moon, not private corporations. Sure, today, they can get someone into orbit for a tenth the cost of NASA. It's impressive, but while NASA did it at 10 times the cost, they did it more than 40 years ago. A lot of things in technology have dropped further in price than factor 10 in those 40 years.
So, in summary, please do provide actual hard evidence. To me, the claim that government is large and wasteful is largely (there are small areas of exception) a myth. And worse, a myth that is being spread with bad intentions.
Any attempt to fix current government systems fails to explain why its #1 pre-assumption should be taken as correct: That the government system is fixable.
We all know that there are things that you can repair, and then there are things that are broken far beyond repair. Before going about to fix the government system, one should prove that it is actually fixable, and not simply kaputt.
The mistake that most attempts at fixing the system make is the same one that the security industry has been making for the past 20 years - coming up with solutions for todays actual problems. But the evil guys are already working on tomorrows exploits.
You can not win if all you do is playing catch-up.
You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.
From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.
I know the solution is to go and do it yourself. Thank you, I've held an elected office for several years (and stepped down on my own), I've had enough of politics for life. Anyone who enters that arena with good intentions and manages to keep them has my respect, and if I can, my vote.
But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic. My personal choice was to step down just before I became the later, but it was damn close (and as you may have noticed, I did take a good share of disillusion with me).
What is the threshold above which companies are no longer the good guys?
When they are large enough that they are not players in the game anymore, but can change the rules. We don't like people changing the rules, and especially not when they're at the same time playing the game. No matter the intentions, it always smells like doing it in your favor.
Lots of people would lose their gmail, and we'd have to switch to a different search engine. My guess is three weeks until the hole has been filled by competitors.
You were saying?
I'm pretty sure if BP could put the oil pouring out of the well "on hold" while they did their "internal audit" no one would care.
Excellent point. Thanks.
You DO realize that they openly disclosed (without coercion or prompting) this whole wireless mess, right?
No, they didn't. They only found it out after prompting by the German privacy authorities.
Yes, they didn't try to hide it, some credit for not being outright evil. But it's simply false to facts that they found out on their own and then disclosed without prompting. They were prompted first and then found out.
BP are in a difficult position, drilling for oil is risky and sometimes things go wrong and unpredictably so. That is the nature of the business.
Which means that you have to have a plan for something going wrong before you start doing things. This is not exactly experimental new technology we're talking about, the event space of "unpredictably" is fairly small.
ultimately BP did not want this situation, it is bad for business.
Apparently, they didn't not want it badly enough. I work in the security industry, I know the "tradeoffs" that management is making constantly. Sometimes it is reasonable (spend $1000 to cover a $100 risk? makes no sense), most of the time, especially with unlikely but catastrophic events, it is pure gut decision making. Management regularily risks the company on that kind of risks, because the math is not intuitive anymore.
The real problem, however, is the second part of your sentence. Yes, it is bad for business. WHAT THE FUCK??? Bad for business? Try talking to the dead fish and birds about "business". Try talking to the fishermen about "bad for business". This goes way beyond business, and that's why a business perspective is not the right way to approach it and that's why a non-business entity should've stepped in on day one and said "we're taking over, you are now under our command, and if you so much as hesitate in doing exactly what we tell you, we'll disband you and spend whatever we can get for the remains to clean this mess up."
Ultimately, Google seem to think that their bottom line is more important than users rights to privacy.
Exactly, and that is why while the actual incidents are very different, the reactions can be compared. We, as society, have found it acceptable to take a business approach to issues that go beyond business.
BP have the expertise and equipment that give the best chances of stemming the flow of oil...
It totally agree they have the ressources and knowledge. But they shouldn't have been left in charge. Their ressources and knowledge should have been put under government control with the clear instruction to put everything they have towards ending that spill, and if someone so much as mentions the word "cost", he'd be made personally liable for it all.
Again, same with Google, I agree with your reasoning there.
You can become unshocked. I wasn't comparing the two events, only the reactions of the /. crowd to the way the corporations involved are allowed to deal with it. So two layers of indirection removed from the actual event.
First good point I found in the replies. Yes, urgency sounds like a good reason. If the catastrophe is still ongoing, then someone needs to step in immediately to make it stop.
No comparison of seriousness was made in my original post, only a comparison of methods.
I don't think that seriousness is a proper metric to apply when deciding which method to apply. Not only is it highly subjective, it also changes over time. There's also the question of where to draw the line on scale that isn't well-defined.
The incidents are dramatically different.
But the incidents weren't the point at all.
The point was whether we think it's ok to let the one who made the mess be the one in charge of fixing things. It may work if your kid makes a mess in the kitchen, but is it the right approach to a corporate fuckup? Corporations aren't kids, and the main reason for the kitchen cleanup is pedagogic.
It appears that the equation is only in your head. The incidents are very distinct. The corporate reaction isn't, and it's the reaction that is the point here, not the incident.
And yes, one can look at the one without looking at the other. Sure a murder is a lot worse than hitting someone, but they both fall into the physical violence category, and the question of how society deals with physical violence can be asked without going into the details of either case. And yes, the generalization is a valid discussion.
The point is not if an oil spill and a privacy invasion can in any way be compared. I don't think they can, to the point where even statements like "the oil spill was much worse" are not false, but meaningless. However, the question of whether we accept that a corporation that messed something up is the proper entity to be in charge of fixing it should be asked. There was a time in our society when the answer was a clear "no" and the general public expected the government to take over, hang the culprits from the nearest tree (figuratively speaking), clean up the mess and hand them the bill.
The question is what interests are served by letting the offender clean up the crime scene and have a go at undoing the damage.
I'm really looking forward to the comments. When BP lets the oil spill continue day after day, the /. crowd goes asking why we let them handle it at all, after all they're the ones responsible for the mess.
Now Google has a mess, and is doing an internal audit. I'm curious if we will apply the same reasoning, or a different standard. And what justifications we'll see for it.
I'm not a native english speaker, but in my conception, a conspiracy requires some temporal consistency, i.e. it should endure over some time. In this case, the members of the "conspiracy" are constantly changing, and everyone is colluding with everyone else. It doesn't fit the common definition of a conspiracy which is more like a small group of people giggling madly in the corner.
But that's just words. Call it whatever you want.
Religion has been used as a perfectly valid excuse for murder since the beginning of times.
Yes, but does that justify it? How long do I have to keep something up before it becomes ok? Is there such a thing?
You are certainly right in your three steps. What I'm doing is going one step further. Most people agree that these religious extremists with their call for murder are perverts. I'm going the step further saying that all the religious people are perverts, it's just that the extremists are so much over the edge that it becomes obvious.
conspire != conspiracy
In the literal meaning of the word, all the participants - the website you're visiting, the ad agency, the ad network, their customers - all work together against you. There's no reason to be dramatic, but it's a simple fact that they are all trying to coerce/convince/manipulate/whateveryouwanttocallit to split with some of your money into their direction, which then feeds them all.