Users can control the ads they see, including Customer Match ads, by opting out of personalized ads or by muting or blocking ads from individual advertisers through Google Ads Settings.
Opt-out rather than opt-in sucks, and it does appear that my browser settings were independent of my Android Google Settings, but the option is there.
I'm ad blocking, so in theory my account ad settings are irrelevant, but belt and suspenders, etc.
Will keep blocking, unless they make all ads non-intrusive and they get the problem of malicious ads fixed effectively and permanently. As neither will be happening...
Even if it did... how are people using ad-blockers even going to find out?
"Please, give us another chance!" banner ads?
That's where the "ad blocking is a boycott" theme kind of breaks down. A boycott is an intentional action which requires a certain amount of effort to maintain. Ad blocking, once you roll it out, requires no effort or even awareness that it exists. Ad blocking is more like getting out of a bad relationship by burning the photo albums, selling the house, moving to another country, and changing your name.
Operating system updates breaking old software is nothing even remotely specific to Apple, and I don't even think Apple is particularly bad about it.
No, that's just a side-effect. The real issue is new pieces of Apple hardware forcing OS/X upgrades because Apple can't be bothered to make iTunes backwards or forwards compatible. I mean, even Windows users have a smoother experience... possibly as a consolation for having to run Windows, but still...
Yeah, I've replaced my share of hard drives in Apples, and the process is rarely fun (excepting the classic Mac Pro--incredibly elegant design there). I had to buy a plunger just for putting an SSD in an iMac!
Times sure have changed... I started using Apple products with the IIe, ran a Mac 512 for years, and I can't bring myself to even consider an Apple product these days.
The current version of iTunes runs on any of the last 4 OS revisions, covering about 4 years and probably 10 years of hardware at a minimum.
At the time, the hardware was 4-5 years old (iBook G4, 3rd gen nano; you do the math).
One nice thing about Macs is, no, it's really not a "fucking pile of grief.
Oh, it was. The OS/X upgrade wasn't free, for one thing. Apple fucked up and sent the french version, because apparently that's the default language they send to Canadians. Eventually got it, and the install was... well, after a couple attempts it worked. Don't get me wrong, it was still easier than installing Windows, but it wasn't fun.
I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
About six months later the hard drive in the iBook croaked. I can assure you that "fucking pile of grief" is exactly the way to describe the process to replace the hard disk in an iBook G4. What kind of psychopath assembles the entire device around the part with the shortest expected lifespan?
Hell, I imagine the same type of behavior is even coming to Linux through systemd.
Most Linux distros have been in a continuously updating state for at least a decade. You do get "major" version bumps periodically which require a bit more clicking, but even those updates are pretty painless... I think the last time I needed manual intervention was 2008-ish. systemd likely won't change anything there, except maybe make the process more brittle for a while until things migrate over.
And there is nothing, literally NOTHING you could possibly do to make them uninstall it.
This.
The thing about ad blockers is that they're fire-and-forget. You install them, and then... nothing. They're low-maintenance and basically transparent. People don't uninstall them because they'll forget they even have them installed within a few days.
And hoping for voluntary whitelisting is a pipe dream.
The best the ad industry can hope for is that they fix the problem before the remaining 80% of people not using ad blockers get around to installing one.
So what you're really complaining about here is a 3rd-party software package (ProTools) not working on a recent operating system release?
No. He's complaining about a new Apple iPhone requiring a gratuitous O/S update of another Apple product.
This same thing happened to my wife a while ago... she got an iPod Nano, which required a new version of iTunes, which required a newer version of OS/X (Jaguar on the iBook, IIRC), which... well, that was a fucking pile of grief for stuff that's supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
Yeah, third party software might have some issues too, but the core problem is that Apple regularly screws over people who work witihin their ecosystem but for whatever reason don't run all the latest stuff.
iFixit just gave Apple's competitor's a month's head start. You don't think that's horrible? If it was your product, what would you think?
Well, in hindsight I imagine that I'd feel pretty dumb giving a piece of hardware intended to give developers a head start on producing software to a company best known for dismantling hardware...
But as for giving a competitor a head start... that doesn't matter much to me, and I doubt it matters much to Apple. Ideas are easy. Bringing an idea to market is the hard part. Apple's use of these NDA's (partcularly after the already announced the product) are more about controlling the marketing message around a product than about preventing competitors from seeing what they're doing.
I don't dispute that iFixit broke a contract. I'm saying that there's certain classes of contracts and/or business practices and/or laws that this community doesn't have a lot of respect for, and NDA's are one of them. It's better to avoid them and I think iFixit probably should have, but I doubt most people would find what they did particularly horrible.
Quite frankly the majority of Slashdot seems to be completely down with disregarding all of contract law
The NDA in this case is basically an agreement which forces someone to not share information about their work. In that context, it's fairly understandable that Slashdot might not be keen on it.
And since the reasoning behind this NDA is basically to support a marketing agenda (i.e. that all information about the product be released on an arbitrary window)... yeah, Apple's not going to get a lot of sympathy...
This situation is complicated by the fact that it's a pre-release unit provided to developers who signed NDAs.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that Apple sent a chunk of hardware to a company whos mandate is dismantling chunks of hardware. That's a bit like giving an alcoholic a bottle of whiskey and asking them to only evaluate the packaging...
Well, I avoided talking about other countries as I couldn't comment on their laws either. I assume Canada will probably have similar loopholes or would be handtied by some obscure NAFTA regulation, but I can't imagine the EU not nailing someone.
And the civil issues aren't necessarily trivial; the corporation can't shield individuals from *everything*.
For example, comparable to how medical malpractice works, I could see situations where a professional engineer might have their credentials stripped for this sort of thing.
The amount of compensation could be more than the value of the car.
Even if the cars were modified to meet emission standards, they don't qualify as "lemons", which is pretty much what is necessary to *force* a complete buyback. They function okay, they're not unsafe, etc. They just don't perform as advertised.
Some compensation might happen, but I'd be surprised if on average it amounts to more than a few tanks of fuel...
Not sure how you came to that conclusion given that the same article you linked to lists (all the way down at the bottom) some situations ending in other than just a full buy-back (and ranging all the way down to "fuck all").
Volkswagen needs to replace all models concerned with a brand new compliant car.
Unrealistic.
The existing cars are already able to run in a compliant mode. All VW needs to do is patch them so they're always in that mode rather than only during emission tests.
Mind you, resulting engine performance will suffer and they'll probably get sued for false advertising, end up paying major penalties on top of what the governments are going to hammer them with, and have an uphill battle for future sales which might make them wish they could have just offered everyone brand new cars.
Depends on whether they approach it from a software or a hardware angle.
It they go software and heavily skin Android to give a BB-like experience... not such a good move. If people wanted a BB skin with Android apps, BB wouldn't be in the situation they're in.
If they approach it from a hardware angle, they could do very well, especially with the keyboard phones. But if they do well then they do risk the knock-off manufacturers trying to undercut them.
What happens when you have a little bit more garbage than usual and you can't fit it all in the standard bin?
Places with recycling programs have a worse problem.
Our previous municipality did curbside recycle sorting. We'd put stuff out already separated (although I suspect this wasn't a common practice; we just had extra bins), but they still had to dig through and pull out non-recyclables and handle mixups, plus plastic bags were handled separately, not to mention broken down cardboard boxes.
Our current municipality just wants everything in clear bags, except plastic bags are in a separate bag, and large cardboard gets bundled separately; detailed sorting happens at a different facility. I don't expect we'd ever have a composting program (we're rural), but a single compost bin would be trivial to automate compared to a decent recycling program.
I'm told that pure MDMA is actually fairly safe as illegal drugs go; the problem is with the variability in manufacturing along with mixtures and substitutions means that people using it don't really know what they're taking. Pure cocaine isn't good, but it's going to be a hell of lot healthier than crack cocaine cut with candle wax or something worse.
When you start looking at it statistically, most of the damage "done by" illegal drugs is either going to be because of these kinds of factors as well as the fringe lifestyle that comes with being a drug user more than the actual drugs themselves.
That's not to say that the drugs themselves are good, but a huge amount of harm would be prevented by making cheap, pure, and known-quantity supplies available to users along with a good supply of drug and mental health treatments.
Won't happen soon, of course, but I expect to see it in my lifetime.
The interesting thing and lack of basic reasoning skills comes from the fact that Dr. Richardson apparently can only picture sex robots as being a simulacrum of the female gender.
Yes. If she wants to get wound up about sex robot ethics, she might get more support if she worried about someone selling sex robots that are a simulacrum of pre-pubescent boys.
That would involve something like creating a new company on a foreign stock exchange, having that become the parent company, and sell all non US assets and ALL intellectual property assets to that company.
It's nice in theory, but I suspect a foreign sale of MS would probably hit a very, very solid "contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States" wall. Granted, it might depend on where they decided to set up shop (the EU, maybe).
It's pretty much the definition of "master key" that if a master key exists for your lock, then your lock is compromised.
How much of a problem that is in practice depends on a whole whack of risk factors, but in order to make the TSA screening process any riskier, I think you'd have to outsource it to the prison system.
Simply put, if things stop coming to Netflix, so will the viewers. We aren't locked in to 2 year contracts, so we can come and go as we please. Maybe, Netflix, you should continue to court us.
You sound like believe this is something Netflix is doing on purpose. Given the business environment they're operating in and how content licensing works, it's just as likely that someone in the industry is jerking them around.
Slashdot Mirror
From the announcement:
Opt-out rather than opt-in sucks, and it does appear that my browser settings were independent of my Android Google Settings, but the option is there.
I'm ad blocking, so in theory my account ad settings are irrelevant, but belt and suspenders, etc.
Even if it did... how are people using ad-blockers even going to find out?
"Please, give us another chance!" banner ads?
That's where the "ad blocking is a boycott" theme kind of breaks down. A boycott is an intentional action which requires a certain amount of effort to maintain. Ad blocking, once you roll it out, requires no effort or even awareness that it exists. Ad blocking is more like getting out of a bad relationship by burning the photo albums, selling the house, moving to another country, and changing your name.
No, that's just a side-effect. The real issue is new pieces of Apple hardware forcing OS/X upgrades because Apple can't be bothered to make iTunes backwards or forwards compatible. I mean, even Windows users have a smoother experience... possibly as a consolation for having to run Windows, but still...
Times sure have changed... I started using Apple products with the IIe, ran a Mac 512 for years, and I can't bring myself to even consider an Apple product these days.
At the time, the hardware was 4-5 years old (iBook G4, 3rd gen nano; you do the math).
Oh, it was. The OS/X upgrade wasn't free, for one thing. Apple fucked up and sent the french version, because apparently that's the default language they send to Canadians. Eventually got it, and the install was... well, after a couple attempts it worked. Don't get me wrong, it was still easier than installing Windows, but it wasn't fun.
I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
About six months later the hard drive in the iBook croaked. I can assure you that "fucking pile of grief" is exactly the way to describe the process to replace the hard disk in an iBook G4. What kind of psychopath assembles the entire device around the part with the shortest expected lifespan?
Most Linux distros have been in a continuously updating state for at least a decade. You do get "major" version bumps periodically which require a bit more clicking, but even those updates are pretty painless... I think the last time I needed manual intervention was 2008-ish. systemd likely won't change anything there, except maybe make the process more brittle for a while until things migrate over.
This.
The thing about ad blockers is that they're fire-and-forget. You install them, and then... nothing. They're low-maintenance and basically transparent. People don't uninstall them because they'll forget they even have them installed within a few days.
And hoping for voluntary whitelisting is a pipe dream.
The best the ad industry can hope for is that they fix the problem before the remaining 80% of people not using ad blockers get around to installing one.
No. He's complaining about a new Apple iPhone requiring a gratuitous O/S update of another Apple product.
This same thing happened to my wife a while ago... she got an iPod Nano, which required a new version of iTunes, which required a newer version of OS/X (Jaguar on the iBook, IIRC), which... well, that was a fucking pile of grief for stuff that's supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
Yeah, third party software might have some issues too, but the core problem is that Apple regularly screws over people who work witihin their ecosystem but for whatever reason don't run all the latest stuff.
Well, in hindsight I imagine that I'd feel pretty dumb giving a piece of hardware intended to give developers a head start on producing software to a company best known for dismantling hardware...
But as for giving a competitor a head start... that doesn't matter much to me, and I doubt it matters much to Apple. Ideas are easy. Bringing an idea to market is the hard part. Apple's use of these NDA's (partcularly after the already announced the product) are more about controlling the marketing message around a product than about preventing competitors from seeing what they're doing.
IANAL, nor do I pretend to be.
I don't dispute that iFixit broke a contract. I'm saying that there's certain classes of contracts and/or business practices and/or laws that this community doesn't have a lot of respect for, and NDA's are one of them. It's better to avoid them and I think iFixit probably should have, but I doubt most people would find what they did particularly horrible.
The NDA in this case is basically an agreement which forces someone to not share information about their work. In that context, it's fairly understandable that Slashdot might not be keen on it.
And since the reasoning behind this NDA is basically to support a marketing agenda (i.e. that all information about the product be released on an arbitrary window)... yeah, Apple's not going to get a lot of sympathy...
The situation is further complicated by the fact that Apple sent a chunk of hardware to a company whos mandate is dismantling chunks of hardware. That's a bit like giving an alcoholic a bottle of whiskey and asking them to only evaluate the packaging...
Well, I avoided talking about other countries as I couldn't comment on their laws either. I assume Canada will probably have similar loopholes or would be handtied by some obscure NAFTA regulation, but I can't imagine the EU not nailing someone.
And the civil issues aren't necessarily trivial; the corporation can't shield individuals from *everything*.
For example, comparable to how medical malpractice works, I could see situations where a professional engineer might have their credentials stripped for this sort of thing.
Even if the cars were modified to meet emission standards, they don't qualify as "lemons", which is pretty much what is necessary to *force* a complete buyback. They function okay, they're not unsafe, etc. They just don't perform as advertised.
Some compensation might happen, but I'd be surprised if on average it amounts to more than a few tanks of fuel...
Not sure how you came to that conclusion given that the same article you linked to lists (all the way down at the bottom) some situations ending in other than just a full buy-back (and ranging all the way down to "fuck all").
Unrealistic.
The existing cars are already able to run in a compliant mode. All VW needs to do is patch them so they're always in that mode rather than only during emission tests.
Mind you, resulting engine performance will suffer and they'll probably get sued for false advertising, end up paying major penalties on top of what the governments are going to hammer them with, and have an uphill battle for future sales which might make them wish they could have just offered everyone brand new cars.
Depends on whether they approach it from a software or a hardware angle.
It they go software and heavily skin Android to give a BB-like experience... not such a good move. If people wanted a BB skin with Android apps, BB wouldn't be in the situation they're in.
If they approach it from a hardware angle, they could do very well, especially with the keyboard phones. But if they do well then they do risk the knock-off manufacturers trying to undercut them.
Places with recycling programs have a worse problem.
Our previous municipality did curbside recycle sorting. We'd put stuff out already separated (although I suspect this wasn't a common practice; we just had extra bins), but they still had to dig through and pull out non-recyclables and handle mixups, plus plastic bags were handled separately, not to mention broken down cardboard boxes.
Our current municipality just wants everything in clear bags, except plastic bags are in a separate bag, and large cardboard gets bundled separately; detailed sorting happens at a different facility. I don't expect we'd ever have a composting program (we're rural), but a single compost bin would be trivial to automate compared to a decent recycling program.
I'm told that pure MDMA is actually fairly safe as illegal drugs go; the problem is with the variability in manufacturing along with mixtures and substitutions means that people using it don't really know what they're taking. Pure cocaine isn't good, but it's going to be a hell of lot healthier than crack cocaine cut with candle wax or something worse.
When you start looking at it statistically, most of the damage "done by" illegal drugs is either going to be because of these kinds of factors as well as the fringe lifestyle that comes with being a drug user more than the actual drugs themselves.
That's not to say that the drugs themselves are good, but a huge amount of harm would be prevented by making cheap, pure, and known-quantity supplies available to users along with a good supply of drug and mental health treatments.
Won't happen soon, of course, but I expect to see it in my lifetime.
Yes. If she wants to get wound up about sex robot ethics, she might get more support if she worried about someone selling sex robots that are a simulacrum of pre-pubescent boys.
Yeah, Finland, Ireland, etc... I still think it wouldn't pass a "national interest" smell test, but it wouldn't be as much of a slam dunk as China.
It's nice in theory, but I suspect a foreign sale of MS would probably hit a very, very solid "contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States" wall. Granted, it might depend on where they decided to set up shop (the EU, maybe).
It's pretty much the definition of "master key" that if a master key exists for your lock, then your lock is compromised.
How much of a problem that is in practice depends on a whole whack of risk factors, but in order to make the TSA screening process any riskier, I think you'd have to outsource it to the prison system.
I think you meant "gold rush", but damned if "golf rush" isn't a more apt description of this rash of venture-capital funded app companies...
Well, in their defence, in this case they've only been accused of engaging in shady, unethical, and downright illegal business practices.
It's going to take a few years before it's proven, assuming nothing unfortunate happens to the complainant...
You sound like believe this is something Netflix is doing on purpose. Given the business environment they're operating in and how content licensing works, it's just as likely that someone in the industry is jerking them around.