Could be 4.7 billion dollars in unreimbursed expenses had something to do with the other incident you mentioned re: American disinterest in Rwandan genocide.
Although it's true you can't put a price on human life, at what point does it become irresponsible to continue trying to support a relationship that's so one sided that you are owed many times your due?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not safe to say that on a global scale, we were doing our part to help out humanity? We were giving more money than any other country. To my knowledge we were giving per per capita than any other country. We were giving a larger portion of our membership dues in relief effort than any other country. And finally, we were giving a larger percent of our GNP than any other country. I'm not sure, but I feel like under no metric could we be called slouches for our efforts globally, even if in some incidents we were not seen as participating as thoroughly as some others might have wanted.
Of course the U.S. has 4.7 billion unpaid expenses on behalf of the U.N. between the years of 1992 and 1995, so I don't think it's unreasonable that given the balance of money owed is 3.7 billion by the U.N. to the U.S. that the U.S. wait till they are reimbursed before paying their dues.
I'm not familiar with the incident you're citing, but I'd like to know what stopped the other nations in the U.N. from acting if the United States failed to do so. The U.N. isn't there as a "request U.S. aid" board. You cannot place fault solely on the U.S. for failing to act when an international council was approached, the fault lies with every member of the U.N. who was capable but failed to act.
"Wherefore art though" actually meant, "Why is it you are." Juliette was lamenting that Romeo belonged to the opposite faction. "Why are you Romeo, and not someone I'm allowed to love."
At least this is how it was explained to me in high school.
Every re-hashing increases the collision rate, so generally for highest security, you use one unbroken hashing algorithm. Yes, using more than one hashing algorithm would reduce the chances that your whole line of defense is invalidated one day, but it increases the chance that a single hole could be found.
Then there's those of us who have taken text-mode game concepts, but modernized them to take advantage of current technology, without defeating the spirit.
What if the original was lost, stolen, or destroyed? You're still allowed to have your backup. Wouldn't an affirmative defense be, "All I have left is my backups, my CD case containing all my originals was stolen?"
If you still have to have your original in order to make use of a backup, then the backup is pointless, no?
The government isn't being a parental entity, except for alcohol, it's not illegal for parents to give cigarettes to their kids.
What laws like these do is make it more difficult for minors to gain access to materials without their parents intervention. If you as a parent decide your child is ok with the content in a mature game, then it's your perogative to purchase it for them. If you realize your kid is already on the edge and don't want him to have access to this stuff, then that's your perogative as a parent, and this makes it easier for you to act accordingly.
I think the principle is the same as totaling a car. When they totaled the car from that same accident, they towed it away and I had to sign the title over to get paid. They paid for it, they now own it.
I mentioned in another comment that I can understand their desire on this front. It'd be easy enough for me to ask Dell to replace a totally good motherboard (they wouldn't ask questions, they profit from the replacement after all), and return me the old one. Then I'd have gotten the insurance company to buy me a new mobo, perhaps as an upgrade to my old one if the original model was no longer produced (in fact, the original model was not available any longer for my laptop, they did have to replace it with a newer one, though I never noticed any difference).
Unfortunately there was no visible damage to the laptop, so I had no photographic evidence that it was broken, and I guess they wanted to make sure I didn't call Dell and ask them to replace and return my (perfectly functional) motherboard, getting them effectively to buy me a new free mobo.
It's common practice in America for insurance companies to lay physical claim to objects which they've paid the full value of. For example, if they total your car (give you the market value of the car before the accident), they will always take the car when they do so. Really, the motherboard is no different, they paid the full replacement value of it, so they wanted it.
Actually I'd like to also point out that the greater danger from fallen gravel is gravel that has bounced once or twice. Before the gravel hits the ground, it's traveling almost the same speed as the truck (and presumably a similar speed to your car), while once it's bounced off the ground once, it's lost a lot of momentum from the bounce (and spin from the bounce), as well as longer exposure to wind resistance.
These factors give it a higher velocity relative to your car, making them more dangerous the longer it's been since they left the truck. Hence, if you were greatly concerned about damage from the gravel, you're less likely to encounter damage if you *are* tailgaiting the truck. Unless it's a very tall truck losing gravel at the top, in which case that may be similar in relative velocity, though most trucks will lose gravel 4-5 feet off the road (at the bottom of their flatbed, or the bottom of their dump truck's rear panel).
A couple of other folks have already mentioned circumstances where you as the driver of the non-gravel truck could be acting as you should yet still be bombarded by the gravel.
I'd like to point out another. Most commonly you'll encounter these trucks on a highway, unless you happen to be driving near a quarry or construction site. There it's perfectly legal to pass such a truck (or be passed by one) in the other lane, where the gravel could fall off the truck, right onto your car, without ever touching the ground, and without you having done anything wrong.
Stay away from Dell too. After I was rear-ended in a car accident, my PCMCIA slot was damaged, but the machine worked fine otherwise.
Of course that damage wasn't covered by my warranty, but the repair was covered by the other guy's insurance company. Their only clause for paying for it was this: any replaced parts needed to be shipped to them by me (I guess they wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to scam them and get myself a new computer).
When I got the repair authorization from Dell, and fronted the $800 cost, I told the tech on the phone that I needed the replaced parts returned to me (the mobo needed to be replaced). He said no problem, I just needed to attach a note to the laptop, and they'd ship the parts back with the repaired laptop.
I attached a note to the laptop to the effect (taped it securely to the back of the screen so it would be seen when the box was opened). After the laptop came back, it didn't have the old mobo, and the bill clearly stated that the mobo had been replaced. But there was no old mobo in the box.
When I called support to ask about it, the first guy I talked to said Dell had a policy of never returning bad parts, but instead they destroy them in an environmentally friendly fashion. I explained I'd been told I could get the parts back, and needed the parts back to get reimbursed for it by insurance, he sent me to level 2. Level 2 said they do have a policy that they'll return those parts, but that I needed to tell the guy who issued my RMA in the first place. I explained I had done so, and he said, "I don't see any note on your RMA for that, you must not have done so, perhaps if you'd attached a note." I explained I had also attached a note, because that's what I was instructed to do by the RMA issuer. He checked the unpacking logs, and said no mention was made of a note.
In the end I ended up talking to about a dozen different people in the returns area, almost every one had a different idea about how I'd have to have made sure I got the parts back, including some who told me that there's a 25% surcharge on getting the parts back (!).
They wouldn't provide a partial or full refund for the work completed, they wouldn't ship me another mobo (I told them I didn't care if it was smashed into 100 pieces), and they didn't care that I was out the costs of this repair without the original parts. I climbed all the way up the supervisor chain to the director of out of warranty repairs, and no one cared, and no one was 1) willing to admit that any mistake had been made on their end (I had a PHOTO of the laptop in the shipping package, with my note attached to it, clearly readable, they claimed I could have done that after the fact), nor 2) willing to take any steps to placate me as an unhappy customer.
So the insurance company wouldn't reimburse me, I spent $800 repairing a laptop that was not really worth that much (guess the insurance company should have totaled it), and it's all Dell's fault. They honestly didn't care.
I thought that we on Slashdot are supposed to intellgent beings, not the kind of L33T D00DZ who have to have obvious humor put in tags, with a liberal helping of:-);-) after everything and topped off with a LOL!!1!11!!
Visual captchas present a significant usability problem for blind users, and audio captchas have proven much easier to defeat in general than visual captchas (some of which are actually quite easily defeated).
Further, even the best visual captchas are easily overridden if the attacker is motivated enough; a common means to perform this action is to get other humans to voluntarily solve the captchas as they are encountered by offering, eg, free porn.
Basically, captchas aren't really the solution to preventing bots (there are no good solutions for this), they only deter casual botters.
An editorial in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, possibly the most authoritative source in the field, pointed out how drug companies spend far more money in marketing than they do in research. Also, drug companies often outsource the pure R&D to little-known laboratories, or buy patents from them, just to re-brand the products. I've been involved in research on levosimendan, created by Finnish Orion Corp., only to be licensed as Simdax® by Abbott Laboratories, Inc.
They're not just wasting money on advertising; it's an investment in their own future. Unless the advertising is being mis-managed, it will result in more profit for the company in the long run than the cost of the advertising. Hence profits for the company is up, and actually costs to puchase the drug can be lowered (not necessarily so for all companies, but at the pharma where I work, this is one of the long term metrics we use for our advertising projects).
I figure that when push comes to shove, there's money to be made even from "open source" drugs. The so-called generic drugs, although not as profitable as your typical anti-depressant or branded statin, are a good, perfectly open source market for many companies.
AFAIK, all generic drugs are actually drugs that formerly existed on patent, and whose patent has expired. These aren't open source drugs -- which is to say, they were not developed by non-profit organizations, they're the long-term result of the patent system at work.
Personally, I do believe in using "force" on private companies when emergencies arise. This might entail paying a forfeitary fee (kinda like compulsory licensing in music.)
As mentioned elsewhere, this is a surefire way to remove private research from such fields. It's very hard to possess the long-term vision to say, "we cannot violate this patent, and so patients who could have been saved by doing so will die." But violating the patent basically means the Taiwanese government has decided that the burden of the costs of research should be placed on a private organization. If this sort of behavior becomes the norm -- "Patents exist as long as no patient life is on the line," then it will only be government funded research projects that ever produce life saving drugs since these will become the only ones from which a profit can be derived. Although plenty of folks see this perspective as inherrently "evil" on the part of the drug companies, I don't really see many such pundits agreeing to forego their paychecks for an entire year so that their paycheck can be sent to another country's sick. Why, if individuals who hold this stance (not implying you're necessarily one) won't do this, would they expect someone else to?
Not all pharmaceuticals are evil. I believe some are, but I believe the one I work for is not, or I wouldn't be working for it. And I can see the evidence of this within the organization -- in how we approach projects. For example, in which drug projects are flagged for forward advancement, quality of life of patients is a prime consideration. That means that we're not investigating medically meaningless drugs which would be popular, rather we focus on drugs which we feel will make the most positive impact on the world. After Katrina, we donated 200 million doses of our #1 seller to the region (it requires refrigeration, so any existing product in the area would have been spoiled).
Force (of money) is what drug companies use to get (partially connivent) physicians to prescribe one expensive, proprietary drug over a generic one, even if the benefits of the former are unproven.
Could be, though you should be very careful about generalizing in this way. Not all drug companies are the same. It's like saying, "African Americans are thieves," because you saw one shoplifting once. Drug companies, fwiw, cannot actually use money to coerce doctors in any way without violating law. They can send sales reps out and encourage the doctors to use the dr
O.o $27/mo for a single static IP? Good heavens, I'm glad my ISP only charges me $1 per static IP, for a 3000/768 connection at $44/mo, totaling $45/mo.
No offense, but you didn't ask me for large publications, you asked me for any publications, and I listed several I myself subscribe to. You asserted that no such publications existed, and per your request, I (and several others) proved you wrong. FWIW, I'd considered several kid magazines (Zoo Magazine, Ranger Rick, Hilights), but decided not to include these since I think kid magazines should be excluded from consideration of "publications without advertising."
Your points about Consumer Reports objectivity are well received; they would almost certainly lose subscribers if any ads showed up at all.
National Geographic is a fantastic example, though, of how unnecessary advertising is in subscription magazines. This is not a small publication either in distribution, or in the length of the publication itself (it needs to be bound, not simply stapled). The articles in this magazine certainly cost tremendously more to research and produce than the articles in GQ, Cosmo, or Reader's Digest, yet they manage to do it without advertising.
It seems obvious to me that the other mags are purely focused on profit, and not with producing a good periodical. Therefore even a periodical which I found useful that was heavily advertising based, I'd avoid unless it was *necessary* for me to perform some function. Currently no ad-heavy periodicals meet that criteria, so I subscribe to none.
Did you bother to research your claim at all before you asserted it, or did you simply decide that no such publications exist since they haven't advertised at you?
In particular, I'm thinking of Birds & Blooms and Pennsylvania Magazine, which I subscribe to. My wife subscribes to several teacher-oriented publications which are wholly supported by their subscriptions, though I don't have their names since I just put them in her pile when they come (NEA Today seems like it might be one).
Technical folks understand the need for source code, it's the non-technicals who don't. I can explain it to them in a few sentences, at least sufficiently for them to understand the need:
Source code is how the program is written, but to run it needs to be compiled. Compiling is a one-way process, and we can't take the compiled version and make any modifications to it. Therefore in order to make the changes you're requresing, we need to get a copy of the original source before it was compiled.
That's sufficient for most people to at least understand the need, if not the technicals. And despite it being slightly inaccurate (we could, after all, reverse compile, or work on the assembly level, but short of performance tweaks, why would you ever do that if the source code was an option?), it gets the message across.
Periodically someone doesn't quite get it still, then I liken it to a Word document and a printout of that word document:
Let's say I need you to make changes to a 400 page {insert complex corporate document type here}. I could either give you a printout of all 400 pages, or I could give you the original Word document. Which is easier to make changes to? The Word doc is like my source code, and the printout is like the compiled version. Yes, we can make changes based on the printout, but it requires a tremendously larger time investment, and is prone to mistakes.
This is largely it for me. Several of my favorite sites have ad services that may take 15-20 seconds to load an ad, and because they are simply they halt the rest of the page from loading or displaying while the ad loads. Because often I'm using such sites as reference sites, and I might click around 6-8 times to get to the information I'm really looking for, even 10 seconds waiting per page per ad adds up real quickly. That's a surefire way to get in my adblock. The other thing that gets on my adblock is ads which interfere with my information consumption in other ways, such as being excessively annoying, having sound, or appearing over content.
Honestly I'm more liberal about what ads I'll view and pay attention to on web pages than I am on TV. I skip almost all TV ads immediately (pvr), and very rarely watch live TV simply because of how annoying advertising is.
I don't buy magazines that are advertising heavy. Why do people spend so much money on those magazines such as GQ which are 75% ads? I prefer small publications which are capable of subsisting on their subscriptions alone, or few relevant ads. I subscribe to several of these, and actually find their content to be more interesting than main stream publications.
Actually, don't most music artists make most of their money from concerts anyhow? My guess is this band is a lot more likely to get live gigs now that their name recognition has gone up a lot. Enough of this and they'll start being able to hold their own concerts.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be 4.7 billion dollars in unreimbursed expenses had something to do with the other incident you mentioned re: American disinterest in Rwandan genocide.
Although it's true you can't put a price on human life, at what point does it become irresponsible to continue trying to support a relationship that's so one sided that you are owed many times your due?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not safe to say that on a global scale, we were doing our part to help out humanity? We were giving more money than any other country. To my knowledge we were giving per per capita than any other country. We were giving a larger portion of our membership dues in relief effort than any other country. And finally, we were giving a larger percent of our GNP than any other country. I'm not sure, but I feel like under no metric could we be called slouches for our efforts globally, even if in some incidents we were not seen as participating as thoroughly as some others might have wanted.
Money owed by U.S. to U.N.: $1bn
9 p3.htm
Money owed by U.N. to U.S.: $4.7bn
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa10319
Of course the U.S. has 4.7 billion unpaid expenses on behalf of the U.N. between the years of 1992 and 1995, so I don't think it's unreasonable that given the balance of money owed is 3.7 billion by the U.N. to the U.S. that the U.S. wait till they are reimbursed before paying their dues.
9 p3.htm
Source: http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa10319
I'm not familiar with the incident you're citing, but I'd like to know what stopped the other nations in the U.N. from acting if the United States failed to do so. The U.N. isn't there as a "request U.S. aid" board. You cannot place fault solely on the U.S. for failing to act when an international council was approached, the fault lies with every member of the U.N. who was capable but failed to act.
"Wherefore art though" actually meant, "Why is it you are." Juliette was lamenting that Romeo belonged to the opposite faction. "Why are you Romeo, and not someone I'm allowed to love."
At least this is how it was explained to me in high school.
As I understand it:
Every re-hashing increases the collision rate, so generally for highest security, you use one unbroken hashing algorithm. Yes, using more than one hashing algorithm would reduce the chances that your whole line of defense is invalidated one day, but it increases the chance that a single hole could be found.
Then there's those of us who have taken text-mode game concepts, but modernized them to take advantage of current technology, without defeating the spirit.
http://lotgd.net/ -- Legend of the Green Dragon.
</shamelessplug>
What if the original was lost, stolen, or destroyed? You're still allowed to have your backup. Wouldn't an affirmative defense be, "All I have left is my backups, my CD case containing all my originals was stolen?"
If you still have to have your original in order to make use of a backup, then the backup is pointless, no?
The government isn't being a parental entity, except for alcohol, it's not illegal for parents to give cigarettes to their kids.
What laws like these do is make it more difficult for minors to gain access to materials without their parents intervention. If you as a parent decide your child is ok with the content in a mature game, then it's your perogative to purchase it for them. If you realize your kid is already on the edge and don't want him to have access to this stuff, then that's your perogative as a parent, and this makes it easier for you to act accordingly.
I think the principle is the same as totaling a car. When they totaled the car from that same accident, they towed it away and I had to sign the title over to get paid. They paid for it, they now own it.
I mentioned in another comment that I can understand their desire on this front. It'd be easy enough for me to ask Dell to replace a totally good motherboard (they wouldn't ask questions, they profit from the replacement after all), and return me the old one. Then I'd have gotten the insurance company to buy me a new mobo, perhaps as an upgrade to my old one if the original model was no longer produced (in fact, the original model was not available any longer for my laptop, they did have to replace it with a newer one, though I never noticed any difference).
Unfortunately there was no visible damage to the laptop, so I had no photographic evidence that it was broken, and I guess they wanted to make sure I didn't call Dell and ask them to replace and return my (perfectly functional) motherboard, getting them effectively to buy me a new free mobo.
It's common practice in America for insurance companies to lay physical claim to objects which they've paid the full value of. For example, if they total your car (give you the market value of the car before the accident), they will always take the car when they do so. Really, the motherboard is no different, they paid the full replacement value of it, so they wanted it.
Actually I'd like to also point out that the greater danger from fallen gravel is gravel that has bounced once or twice. Before the gravel hits the ground, it's traveling almost the same speed as the truck (and presumably a similar speed to your car), while once it's bounced off the ground once, it's lost a lot of momentum from the bounce (and spin from the bounce), as well as longer exposure to wind resistance.
These factors give it a higher velocity relative to your car, making them more dangerous the longer it's been since they left the truck. Hence, if you were greatly concerned about damage from the gravel, you're less likely to encounter damage if you *are* tailgaiting the truck. Unless it's a very tall truck losing gravel at the top, in which case that may be similar in relative velocity, though most trucks will lose gravel 4-5 feet off the road (at the bottom of their flatbed, or the bottom of their dump truck's rear panel).
A couple of other folks have already mentioned circumstances where you as the driver of the non-gravel truck could be acting as you should yet still be bombarded by the gravel.
I'd like to point out another. Most commonly you'll encounter these trucks on a highway, unless you happen to be driving near a quarry or construction site. There it's perfectly legal to pass such a truck (or be passed by one) in the other lane, where the gravel could fall off the truck, right onto your car, without ever touching the ground, and without you having done anything wrong.
Stay away from Dell too. After I was rear-ended in a car accident, my PCMCIA slot was damaged, but the machine worked fine otherwise.
Of course that damage wasn't covered by my warranty, but the repair was covered by the other guy's insurance company. Their only clause for paying for it was this: any replaced parts needed to be shipped to them by me (I guess they wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to scam them and get myself a new computer).
When I got the repair authorization from Dell, and fronted the $800 cost, I told the tech on the phone that I needed the replaced parts returned to me (the mobo needed to be replaced). He said no problem, I just needed to attach a note to the laptop, and they'd ship the parts back with the repaired laptop.
I attached a note to the laptop to the effect (taped it securely to the back of the screen so it would be seen when the box was opened). After the laptop came back, it didn't have the old mobo, and the bill clearly stated that the mobo had been replaced. But there was no old mobo in the box.
When I called support to ask about it, the first guy I talked to said Dell had a policy of never returning bad parts, but instead they destroy them in an environmentally friendly fashion. I explained I'd been told I could get the parts back, and needed the parts back to get reimbursed for it by insurance, he sent me to level 2. Level 2 said they do have a policy that they'll return those parts, but that I needed to tell the guy who issued my RMA in the first place. I explained I had done so, and he said, "I don't see any note on your RMA for that, you must not have done so, perhaps if you'd attached a note." I explained I had also attached a note, because that's what I was instructed to do by the RMA issuer. He checked the unpacking logs, and said no mention was made of a note.
In the end I ended up talking to about a dozen different people in the returns area, almost every one had a different idea about how I'd have to have made sure I got the parts back, including some who told me that there's a 25% surcharge on getting the parts back (!).
They wouldn't provide a partial or full refund for the work completed, they wouldn't ship me another mobo (I told them I didn't care if it was smashed into 100 pieces), and they didn't care that I was out the costs of this repair without the original parts. I climbed all the way up the supervisor chain to the director of out of warranty repairs, and no one cared, and no one was 1) willing to admit that any mistake had been made on their end (I had a PHOTO of the laptop in the shipping package, with my note attached to it, clearly readable, they claimed I could have done that after the fact), nor 2) willing to take any steps to placate me as an unhappy customer.
So the insurance company wouldn't reimburse me, I spent $800 repairing a laptop that was not really worth that much (guess the insurance company should have totaled it), and it's all Dell's fault. They honestly didn't care.
I thought that we on Slashdot are supposed to intellgent beings, not the kind of L33T D00DZ who have to have obvious humor put in tags, with a liberal helping of :-) ;-) after everything and topped off with a LOL!!1!11!!
;-)
You must be new here...
Not to detract from your point, but many Inuit (eskimos) eat whale blubber because it tastes good:
http://www.visi.com/~wick/axe/muktuk.html
Visual captchas present a significant usability problem for blind users, and audio captchas have proven much easier to defeat in general than visual captchas (some of which are actually quite easily defeated).
Further, even the best visual captchas are easily overridden if the attacker is motivated enough; a common means to perform this action is to get other humans to voluntarily solve the captchas as they are encountered by offering, eg, free porn.
Basically, captchas aren't really the solution to preventing bots (there are no good solutions for this), they only deter casual botters.
An editorial in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, possibly the most authoritative source in the field, pointed out how drug companies spend far more money in marketing than they do in research. Also, drug companies often outsource the pure R&D to little-known laboratories, or buy patents from them, just to re-brand the products. I've been involved in research on levosimendan, created by Finnish Orion Corp., only to be licensed as Simdax® by Abbott Laboratories, Inc.
They're not just wasting money on advertising; it's an investment in their own future. Unless the advertising is being mis-managed, it will result in more profit for the company in the long run than the cost of the advertising. Hence profits for the company is up, and actually costs to puchase the drug can be lowered (not necessarily so for all companies, but at the pharma where I work, this is one of the long term metrics we use for our advertising projects).
I figure that when push comes to shove, there's money to be made even from "open source" drugs. The so-called generic drugs, although not as profitable as your typical anti-depressant or branded statin, are a good, perfectly open source market for many companies.
AFAIK, all generic drugs are actually drugs that formerly existed on patent, and whose patent has expired. These aren't open source drugs -- which is to say, they were not developed by non-profit organizations, they're the long-term result of the patent system at work.
Personally, I do believe in using "force" on private companies when emergencies arise. This might entail paying a forfeitary fee (kinda like compulsory licensing in music.)
As mentioned elsewhere, this is a surefire way to remove private research from such fields. It's very hard to possess the long-term vision to say, "we cannot violate this patent, and so patients who could have been saved by doing so will die." But violating the patent basically means the Taiwanese government has decided that the burden of the costs of research should be placed on a private organization. If this sort of behavior becomes the norm -- "Patents exist as long as no patient life is on the line," then it will only be government funded research projects that ever produce life saving drugs since these will become the only ones from which a profit can be derived. Although plenty of folks see this perspective as inherrently "evil" on the part of the drug companies, I don't really see many such pundits agreeing to forego their paychecks for an entire year so that their paycheck can be sent to another country's sick. Why, if individuals who hold this stance (not implying you're necessarily one) won't do this, would they expect someone else to?
Not all pharmaceuticals are evil. I believe some are, but I believe the one I work for is not, or I wouldn't be working for it. And I can see the evidence of this within the organization -- in how we approach projects. For example, in which drug projects are flagged for forward advancement, quality of life of patients is a prime consideration. That means that we're not investigating medically meaningless drugs which would be popular, rather we focus on drugs which we feel will make the most positive impact on the world. After Katrina, we donated 200 million doses of our #1 seller to the region (it requires refrigeration, so any existing product in the area would have been spoiled).
Force (of money) is what drug companies use to get (partially connivent) physicians to prescribe one expensive, proprietary drug over a generic one, even if the benefits of the former are unproven.
Could be, though you should be very careful about generalizing in this way. Not all drug companies are the same. It's like saying, "African Americans are thieves," because you saw one shoplifting once. Drug companies, fwiw, cannot actually use money to coerce doctors in any way without violating law. They can send sales reps out and encourage the doctors to use the dr
O.o $27/mo for a single static IP? Good heavens, I'm glad my ISP only charges me $1 per static IP, for a 3000/768 connection at $44/mo, totaling $45/mo.
No offense, but you didn't ask me for large publications, you asked me for any publications, and I listed several I myself subscribe to. You asserted that no such publications existed, and per your request, I (and several others) proved you wrong. FWIW, I'd considered several kid magazines (Zoo Magazine, Ranger Rick, Hilights), but decided not to include these since I think kid magazines should be excluded from consideration of "publications without advertising."
Your points about Consumer Reports objectivity are well received; they would almost certainly lose subscribers if any ads showed up at all.
National Geographic is a fantastic example, though, of how unnecessary advertising is in subscription magazines. This is not a small publication either in distribution, or in the length of the publication itself (it needs to be bound, not simply stapled). The articles in this magazine certainly cost tremendously more to research and produce than the articles in GQ, Cosmo, or Reader's Digest, yet they manage to do it without advertising.
It seems obvious to me that the other mags are purely focused on profit, and not with producing a good periodical. Therefore even a periodical which I found useful that was heavily advertising based, I'd avoid unless it was *necessary* for me to perform some function. Currently no ad-heavy periodicals meet that criteria, so I subscribe to none.
Did you bother to research your claim at all before you asserted it, or did you simply decide that no such publications exist since they haven't advertised at you?
In particular, I'm thinking of Birds & Blooms and Pennsylvania Magazine, which I subscribe to. My wife subscribes to several teacher-oriented publications which are wholly supported by their subscriptions, though I don't have their names since I just put them in her pile when they come (NEA Today seems like it might be one).
Technical folks understand the need for source code, it's the non-technicals who don't. I can explain it to them in a few sentences, at least sufficiently for them to understand the need:
Source code is how the program is written, but to run it needs to be compiled. Compiling is a one-way process, and we can't take the compiled version and make any modifications to it. Therefore in order to make the changes you're requresing, we need to get a copy of the original source before it was compiled.
That's sufficient for most people to at least understand the need, if not the technicals. And despite it being slightly inaccurate (we could, after all, reverse compile, or work on the assembly level, but short of performance tweaks, why would you ever do that if the source code was an option?), it gets the message across.
Periodically someone doesn't quite get it still, then I liken it to a Word document and a printout of that word document:
Let's say I need you to make changes to a 400 page {insert complex corporate document type here}. I could either give you a printout of all 400 pages, or I could give you the original Word document. Which is easier to make changes to? The Word doc is like my source code, and the printout is like the compiled version. Yes, we can make changes based on the printout, but it requires a tremendously larger time investment, and is prone to mistakes.
This is largely it for me. Several of my favorite sites have ad services that may take 15-20 seconds to load an ad, and because they are simply they halt the rest of the page from loading or displaying while the ad loads. Because often I'm using such sites as reference sites, and I might click around 6-8 times to get to the information I'm really looking for, even 10 seconds waiting per page per ad adds up real quickly. That's a surefire way to get in my adblock. The other thing that gets on my adblock is ads which interfere with my information consumption in other ways, such as being excessively annoying, having sound, or appearing over content.
Honestly I'm more liberal about what ads I'll view and pay attention to on web pages than I am on TV. I skip almost all TV ads immediately (pvr), and very rarely watch live TV simply because of how annoying advertising is.
I don't buy magazines that are advertising heavy. Why do people spend so much money on those magazines such as GQ which are 75% ads? I prefer small publications which are capable of subsisting on their subscriptions alone, or few relevant ads. I subscribe to several of these, and actually find their content to be more interesting than main stream publications.
Actually, don't most music artists make most of their money from concerts anyhow? My guess is this band is a lot more likely to get live gigs now that their name recognition has gone up a lot. Enough of this and they'll start being able to hold their own concerts.