Products that you could once buy from an American manufacturer and you'd know they'd work perfectly for decades could now only be obtained from third-world manufacturers.
You mean, like American cars in the 80s? I used to see quite a few of those clunkers when I first came to the US, and their lack of quality was shocking.
Face it, American products had gone down the shitter a long time before NAFTA. I think this might be the equivalent of the uphill, through the snow, both ways stories old people tell.
Thanks for confirming the badge issue. Now - can we set sponsored users to sit at -6, just like we can control how many points our friends, foes, freaks, fans get?
The point is not the censoring, the point is the signal-to-noise ratio. And the ratio WILL drop once marketers and PR people join the conversation.
I find the evolution of the latest PR-flak kinda interesting: first he completely side-stepped the fact that he was being paid for his posts. He was the definition of an astroturfer. Now he's coming out officially, and contributing to discussions outside his PR mandate. I'm curious to see how he will continue to evolve. I have a strong suspicion that he might be a good indicator of the future of discussions: * PR always posts first, because they're paid to do so * PR is always on message, and posts more than any other single user (again, because they get paid for it) * PR will drive the discussion because of the two previous points.
Whether that's good or bad is still to be seen. But I definitely think that the experts need to be uniquely identified, and we need to have the ability to ignore them.
This is what I'm worried about as well. Slashdot is indeed the community. If the community decides as a whole that there's more marketing than it cares for, the people who make up the community will leave. Who is left? The marketers. And there's no recovering from that.
Now, here are two ways that I can see it work: clearly identify the "experts (and make no mistake, those experts will be PR-monkeys), and let us set our preferences whether we want to see the responses from the "experts". I strongly suspect that part of the deal with the sponsors is that we can't specifically downrate those experts, and they might not even be marked as a special account. Be warned that this might be the downfall of Slashdot - Digg is indeed a very good warning that people don't take kindly to have marketers try to spam genuine conversations.
I'm glad you at least copped to the fact that you're a PR monkey who takes orders from MS. Makes your posts on Google and MS topics no more valuable, but at least it now comes with the equivalent of a "Sponsored by MS" tag.
At least you're learning. Don't be caught flogging Google on one topic, just to evangelize Microsoft for the same thing in the same thread. That said... No webmail? Yeah right. And that desktop mail client... connects to an email server that is administrated by someone other than you. You lost the privacy game a long time ago. If you want privacy, you want end-to-end encryption. Everything else is masturbation.
Yes, and your misunderstanding of what is found in Afghanistan, what China is currently producing 95% of and the reasons behind that production disparity is critical to understanding whether it is a good idea to go to war in Afghanistan. As is your misunderstanding of why the US was funding the mujaheedin to fight the Russians, your misunderstanding of the reason for the Caspian pipe and a geopolitical pincer movement. You don't understand what your arguments are actually about. It's kinda like arguing that flame decals make a car go faster. You might be able to construct grammatically sound sentences, and you might even find some correlation data, but you still come across as clueless.
Oh look, another hit piece from our friendly Microsoft astroturfer. I'm sure you think that Microsoft's cloud services are just fine and dandy, right? That the Windows 7 phone is going to be a model of privacy protection? Or that Bing is not storing any search queries? Pray tell - what exactly is the reason that makes you distrust Google so much more than Windows? I'm sure your boss gave you a script for that. I'm curious to see what it is.
With that in mind, here's what I get for a free from Google (and don't bother playing semantics with ad-revenue): * a 7 GB email address I can access from anywhere in the world. * a competitive smartphone OS that has made smartphones much, much better through competition (something Microsoft never managed to do) * a competitor to Facebook that is forcing Facebook into improving its offering. * a free video upload service that is being tooth and nail by a company that understands why Youtube became popular * a map service that is better than anything I've ever paid money for. * a company that is fighting for competition in the ISP business and for Net Neutrality. Btw, I'm also interested in what your script says about Net Neutrality. Your account is too recent to have posted much on that topic.
Holy crap - you're confusing rare earth elements and rare metals? Dude, stop talking, you don't have a clue. And every single other reason you put up is similarly clueless. Including why the US wanted to bloody the Russians' nose in Afghanistan. Stop linking to wikipedia if you don't know what's even being discussed.
The Caspian pipeline is being investigated because people in Europe are tired of being fucked with by Russia and their foreign energy policy. Afghanistan has no special significance other than being in a place where they MIGHT build it. There are plenty of other places with rare metal deposits. Afghanistan does not have enough of those to warrant a full-scale invasion. And finally, the purpose of waging a war in one country is a very bad reason to occupy another. You either drive through, or you make friends. But a pincer movement is not worth the cost of "winning" in a country.
So far, you have one hypothetical reason, one cost-ineffective reason and one highly temporary reason. Neither of which require winning anything in there.
Again - there's no reason to be in Afghanistan. Much better to build a working relationship with the people there, and drive the tanks through when needed.
The real people, in the case of your no-name blog with a significant conspiracy bent, are the Iranian news agencies in every single case. Every single one of your links points back to a story put out by Iranian news agencies, and the refutation of said claims by everyone around. There is no trustworthy source in any of the links.
And the reason no one wins IN Afghanistan is that there is no reason to be in there in the first place. That said, I would have settled for the systematic destruction of Al-Qaeda, instead of the buffonery that took place the first couple of years.
Unlikely. The situation would be the same; the only difference being that instead of trying to protect Israel and Oil resources, we will just protect the Oil. And as lots of others have pointed - Israel is, unfortunately, still one of the best things in and about the Middle East.
I have. Same reason as you - I have a work laptop with Win7 that has IE8 for troubleshooting purposes. Just for kicks, I clicked around google.com, did some searches, clicked around Youtube, watched some videos. Not a single Chrome ad. Not even a link to Chrome in any discernible fashion. You're gonna have to do better than just claiming that, because I just don't see it.
advertising is a different thing though. forcing exclusivity deals to stop advertisers from advertising on other search engines makes other search engines business harder.
If that is true, they deserve to be slapped down for that. I'm still waiting for some sort of proof, other than someone just claiming that.
You want a single thing that wasn't true? I have a nice long post that points out exactly where Mr "I-have-a-proper-first-post-within-seconds-of-the-story-without-being-a-subscriber" flat-out makes up shit about Google: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2556346&cid=38249028. And then he turns around and the exact things that are bad about Google are suddenly good about Microsoft.
As for your comment about XP roadmaps: tell me how many people are using XP and what they paid for it, and I'll show you a Google Gears that less than 1% of that number used, and that no one paid for. So yeah. Don't use free shit that someone else has to pay for in mission-critical areas in your business. Is that really surprising?
So we have: * recently created account - pretty much a day ago or so * first post within seconds of the story * nice, grammatically correct post with internally consistent logic. * flat-out lies about one company * admiration of its competitor * posts pretty much restricted to either bashing one company or praising its direct competitor
Yeah, that's a shill. I'm happy to burn Karma to point this out every time, because Frosty Pisses, goatse and Dr. Bob won't ruin Slashdot. Advertising accounts that hide the fact that they're being paid to lie about one company will.
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right.
You mean, like every business on earth, they use their existing mind share to promote their other products. Unless you actually want to fine Boeing for advertising their regional jets when they're selling their intercontinental jets, you're full of hot air.
They have the most dominant position to do this too - the largest search engine on planet.
Only if you define the planet by Europe and US. Russia isn't so enamored with Google, and China... well, we know about China. You can, of course, always weasel out by arguing that they are still the largest engine on the planet by total users, but now you're just mixing arguments. I'm pretty sure that's not an accident, too.
For years they have scraped smaller websites and then returning their own sites higher in search engine results.
They push Google+ to every that comes to Google.
Yes? Should they hide the fact that they have another product available?
How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that?
By being better? Or, to turn the argument around - the same way that Google ate Altavista's lunch.
They push Chrome to every IE user in a very spammy way, and they always do it in YouTube too.
Another outright fucking lie. Unless you think that telling people that they should upgrade from IE 6 is a terrible sin. In which case, you're just delusional.
Recently all the flight ticket search engines started fearing as Google introduced their own one and embedded the results directly in search results.
Yes. God forbid there's some competition in the flight search engine market.
Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse and I'm good to see that EU is finally doing something about it.
Newsflash: having a large market share is not a monopoly. Furthermore, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. What is illegal is to turn a non-government sanctioned monopoly into a rent-seeking enterprise by limiting external competition.
Now, how exactly is Google limiting competition? People are a click away from Bing. A click away from Facebook. None of the data that Google holds is sticky. There is exactly zero cost to switching to a competitor like Bing. Why aren't people doing it? Tell me, why? Because.... they're Google? That's a circular argument.
Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. You start posting the same crap in Facebook and Microsoft stories, and I'll pretend that you actually believe what you're posting.
You couldn't possibly feed your family, if your customers ( or your companies customers ) had the means to just take the benefits of all your efforts without compensating you for them.
I would suggest that if someone finds themselves in a situation where they can't make enough money to feed themselves, they should look into a different business. Or do you somehow agree that everybody who makes an investment into anything has a right to make a profit? Here, I spent 10 grand on polishing a turd. I deserve to have people pay me enough to make my money back. Suddenly doesn't sound so great, does it?
Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product, and I charge $1,000 for use of the software product, because it will save people the expense of producing their own at a cost of 5 years of effort and $500,000 of expense, that I am participating in "rent-seeking" behavior and attempting to manipulate a market ?
Yup. Precisely. Copyright is government enforced monopoly. The behavior to create revenue via monopolies is called rent-seeking. This is basic economics. I'm sorry that these words offend. That's just how it is.
Here's the problem: the copy cat is out of the box. You're not gonna put it back in. The question is, how do you provide an incentive for people to create something that costs $1M, but can be copied exactly for less than a cent? Furthermore, how do you provide that incentive without stealing from what is already in the public domain?
That's the real debate. How do you balance the need to have people recoup their investment into something that is trivial to copy, but don't create an environment that is best compared to the tariff situation in 18th and 19th century Germany? Grandstanding about pirates is not going to help.
Slashdot Mirror
Products that you could once buy from an American manufacturer and you'd know they'd work perfectly for decades could now only be obtained from third-world manufacturers.
You mean, like American cars in the 80s? I used to see quite a few of those clunkers when I first came to the US, and their lack of quality was shocking.
Face it, American products had gone down the shitter a long time before NAFTA. I think this might be the equivalent of the uphill, through the snow, both ways stories old people tell.
Thanks for confirming the badge issue. Now - can we set sponsored users to sit at -6, just like we can control how many points our friends, foes, freaks, fans get?
I don't know. InsightIn140Bytes is getting pretty good mods with his Pro-MS, anti-Google position.
The point is not the censoring, the point is the signal-to-noise ratio. And the ratio WILL drop once marketers and PR people join the conversation.
I find the evolution of the latest PR-flak kinda interesting: first he completely side-stepped the fact that he was being paid for his posts. He was the definition of an astroturfer. Now he's coming out officially, and contributing to discussions outside his PR mandate. I'm curious to see how he will continue to evolve. I have a strong suspicion that he might be a good indicator of the future of discussions:
* PR always posts first, because they're paid to do so
* PR is always on message, and posts more than any other single user (again, because they get paid for it)
* PR will drive the discussion because of the two previous points.
Whether that's good or bad is still to be seen. But I definitely think that the experts need to be uniquely identified, and we need to have the ability to ignore them.
This is what I'm worried about as well. Slashdot is indeed the community. If the community decides as a whole that there's more marketing than it cares for, the people who make up the community will leave. Who is left? The marketers. And there's no recovering from that.
Now, here are two ways that I can see it work: clearly identify the "experts (and make no mistake, those experts will be PR-monkeys), and let us set our preferences whether we want to see the responses from the "experts". I strongly suspect that part of the deal with the sponsors is that we can't specifically downrate those experts, and they might not even be marked as a special account. Be warned that this might be the downfall of Slashdot - Digg is indeed a very good warning that people don't take kindly to have marketers try to spam genuine conversations.
I'm glad you at least copped to the fact that you're a PR monkey who takes orders from MS. Makes your posts on Google and MS topics no more valuable, but at least it now comes with the equivalent of a "Sponsored by MS" tag.
[Citation Needed], Mr. Astroturfer. And please contrast this behavior with that of Microsoft.
At least you're learning. Don't be caught flogging Google on one topic, just to evangelize Microsoft for the same thing in the same thread. That said... No webmail? Yeah right. And that desktop mail client... connects to an email server that is administrated by someone other than you. You lost the privacy game a long time ago. If you want privacy, you want end-to-end encryption. Everything else is masturbation.
Yes, and your misunderstanding of what is found in Afghanistan, what China is currently producing 95% of and the reasons behind that production disparity is critical to understanding whether it is a good idea to go to war in Afghanistan. As is your misunderstanding of why the US was funding the mujaheedin to fight the Russians, your misunderstanding of the reason for the Caspian pipe and a geopolitical pincer movement. You don't understand what your arguments are actually about.
It's kinda like arguing that flame decals make a car go faster. You might be able to construct grammatically sound sentences, and you might even find some correlation data, but you still come across as clueless.
Oh look, another hit piece from our friendly Microsoft astroturfer. I'm sure you think that Microsoft's cloud services are just fine and dandy, right? That the Windows 7 phone is going to be a model of privacy protection? Or that Bing is not storing any search queries? Pray tell - what exactly is the reason that makes you distrust Google so much more than Windows? I'm sure your boss gave you a script for that. I'm curious to see what it is.
With that in mind, here's what I get for a free from Google (and don't bother playing semantics with ad-revenue):
* a 7 GB email address I can access from anywhere in the world.
* a competitive smartphone OS that has made smartphones much, much better through competition (something Microsoft never managed to do)
* a competitor to Facebook that is forcing Facebook into improving its offering.
* a free video upload service that is being tooth and nail by a company that understands why Youtube became popular
* a map service that is better than anything I've ever paid money for.
* a company that is fighting for competition in the ISP business and for Net Neutrality. Btw, I'm also interested in what your script says about Net Neutrality. Your account is too recent to have posted much on that topic.
Holy crap - you're confusing rare earth elements and rare metals? Dude, stop talking, you don't have a clue. And every single other reason you put up is similarly clueless. Including why the US wanted to bloody the Russians' nose in Afghanistan. Stop linking to wikipedia if you don't know what's even being discussed.
I thought it was obvious that Israel's human rights record is still better than that of the majority of the countries in the region. http://www.amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2011/middle-east-north-africa if you don't want to take my word for it.
By looking at the per-capita GDP and R&D efforts of the countries in the area. Why, what were you thinking?
The Caspian pipeline is being investigated because people in Europe are tired of being fucked with by Russia and their foreign energy policy. Afghanistan has no special significance other than being in a place where they MIGHT build it.
There are plenty of other places with rare metal deposits. Afghanistan does not have enough of those to warrant a full-scale invasion.
And finally, the purpose of waging a war in one country is a very bad reason to occupy another. You either drive through, or you make friends. But a pincer movement is not worth the cost of "winning" in a country.
So far, you have one hypothetical reason, one cost-ineffective reason and one highly temporary reason. Neither of which require winning anything in there.
Again - there's no reason to be in Afghanistan. Much better to build a working relationship with the people there, and drive the tanks through when needed.
The real people, in the case of your no-name blog with a significant conspiracy bent, are the Iranian news agencies in every single case. Every single one of your links points back to a story put out by Iranian news agencies, and the refutation of said claims by everyone around. There is no trustworthy source in any of the links.
[Citation needed]
And the reason no one wins IN Afghanistan is that there is no reason to be in there in the first place. That said, I would have settled for the systematic destruction of Al-Qaeda, instead of the buffonery that took place the first couple of years.
Unlikely. The situation would be the same; the only difference being that instead of trying to protect Israel and Oil resources, we will just protect the Oil. And as lots of others have pointed - Israel is, unfortunately, still one of the best things in and about the Middle East.
have you actually booted up ie lately?
I have. Same reason as you - I have a work laptop with Win7 that has IE8 for troubleshooting purposes. Just for kicks, I clicked around google.com, did some searches, clicked around Youtube, watched some videos. Not a single Chrome ad. Not even a link to Chrome in any
discernible fashion. You're gonna have to do better than just claiming that, because I just don't see it.
advertising is a different thing though. forcing exclusivity deals to stop advertisers from advertising on other search engines makes other search engines business harder.
If that is true, they deserve to be slapped down for that. I'm still waiting for some sort of proof, other than someone just claiming that.
You want a single thing that wasn't true? I have a nice long post that points out exactly where Mr "I-have-a-proper-first-post-within-seconds-of-the-story-without-being-a-subscriber" flat-out makes up shit about Google: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2556346&cid=38249028. And then he turns around and the exact things that are bad about Google are suddenly good about Microsoft.
As for your comment about XP roadmaps: tell me how many people are using XP and what they paid for it, and I'll show you a Google Gears that less than 1% of that number used, and that no one paid for. So yeah. Don't use free shit that someone else has to pay for in mission-critical areas in your business. Is that really surprising?
So we have:
* recently created account - pretty much a day ago or so
* first post within seconds of the story
* nice, grammatically correct post with internally consistent logic.
* flat-out lies about one company
* admiration of its competitor
* posts pretty much restricted to either bashing one company or praising its direct competitor
Yeah, that's a shill. I'm happy to burn Karma to point this out every time, because Frosty Pisses, goatse and Dr. Bob won't ruin Slashdot. Advertising accounts that hide the fact that they're being paid to lie about one company will.
Ah, got it. Standard MS astroturfer. Well, that's a mystery that was quickly solved.
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right.
You mean, like every business on earth, they use their existing mind share to promote their other products. Unless you actually want to fine Boeing for advertising their regional jets when they're selling their intercontinental jets, you're full of hot air.
They have the most dominant position to do this too - the largest search engine on planet.
Only if you define the planet by Europe and US. Russia isn't so enamored with Google, and China... well, we know about China. You can, of course, always weasel out by arguing that they are still the largest engine on the planet by total users, but now you're just mixing arguments. I'm pretty sure that's not an accident, too.
For years they have scraped smaller websites and then returning their own sites higher in search engine results.
They push Google+ to every that comes to Google.
Yes? Should they hide the fact that they have another product available?
How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that?
By being better? Or, to turn the argument around - the same way that Google ate Altavista's lunch.
They push Chrome to every IE user in a very spammy way, and they always do it in YouTube too.
Another outright fucking lie. Unless you think that telling people that they should upgrade from IE 6 is a terrible sin. In which case, you're just delusional.
Recently all the flight ticket search engines started fearing as Google introduced their own one and embedded the results directly in search results.
Yes. God forbid there's some competition in the flight search engine market.
Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse and I'm good to see that EU is finally doing something about it.
Newsflash: having a large market share is not a monopoly. Furthermore, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. What is illegal is to turn a non-government sanctioned monopoly into a rent-seeking enterprise by limiting external competition.
Now, how exactly is Google limiting competition? People are a click away from Bing. A click away from Facebook. None of the data that Google holds is sticky. There is exactly zero cost to switching to a competitor like Bing. Why aren't people doing it? Tell me, why? Because.... they're Google? That's a circular argument.
Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. You start posting the same crap in Facebook and Microsoft stories, and I'll pretend that you actually believe what you're posting.
You couldn't possibly feed your family, if your customers ( or your companies customers ) had the means to just take the benefits of all your efforts without compensating you for them.
I would suggest that if someone finds themselves in a situation where they can't make enough money to feed themselves, they should look into a different business. Or do you somehow agree that everybody who makes an investment into anything has a right to make a profit? Here, I spent 10 grand on polishing a turd. I deserve to have people pay me enough to make my money back. Suddenly doesn't sound so great, does it?
Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product, and I charge $1,000 for use of the software product, because it will save people the expense of producing their own at a cost of 5 years of effort and $500,000 of expense, that I am participating in "rent-seeking" behavior and attempting to manipulate a market ?
Yup. Precisely. Copyright is government enforced monopoly. The behavior to create revenue via monopolies is called rent-seeking. This is basic economics. I'm sorry that these words offend. That's just how it is.
Here's the problem: the copy cat is out of the box. You're not gonna put it back in. The question is, how do you provide an incentive for people to create something that costs $1M, but can be copied exactly for less than a cent? Furthermore, how do you provide that incentive without stealing from what is already in the public domain?
That's the real debate. How do you balance the need to have people recoup their investment into something that is trivial to copy, but don't create an environment that is best compared to the tariff situation in 18th and 19th century Germany? Grandstanding about pirates is not going to help.
There's lots of math behind the certainty, and a few experiments that confirm the math. :) And as someone else said - no one understands QM.