So you wouldn't enable it for your account. I use it for certain types of purchases. I do admit it "feels" kind of weird - I typically like to confirm my list of purchases, etc before "checkout" -- but those times when I want to grab something off of the MP3 store it's awfully convenient.
Then let competitors educate consumers. "Did you know that the HTC phone can install viruses on your computer?" As long as they stick entirely to the facts, there's nothing preventing this.
Of course there are consequences. There's a huge PR hit, lost sales, the expense of remediating this -- including the class-action suit that's quite likely to follow. There's also a loss of consumer and business trust. Competitors can capitalize on this very easily, compounding the cost.
This is a self-correcting situation. Government fines not required.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure that the agreement can't compel you do something illegal - such as not comply with FoIA. This would likely fall into that clause that says something similar to "if any one part of this agreement is found to be not binding, all other parts remain in effect".
It would be interesting to see how successful that is as a strategy. Starbucks is definitely example - they charge a premium, but these days you hardly hear about *why* they're charging a premium -- to the point where I think most people assume it's just because it tastes better [to them- I think SB is crap:P]. The problem is that there's never an apples-to-apples comparison: you can't compare SBUX to another coffee company because the other companies are different sizes and often with target different markets (dunkin donuts, etc).
But why does he believe that finding PEOPLE is an issue? This is the INTERNET. You can find published information ABOUT people. But PEOPLE are not abstracted and defined on the Internet.
True, this is outside of my are of expertise. Yet when you have a virtually infinite number of possible failure combinations (when taking it down to the transistor level), it seems that there must come a point where you say "this is what we can reasonably handle".
I can't quite tell if you're serious here - but I'll assume you are...
If the business model a particular artist or other outfit doesn't work out without me shelling out cash or refraining from blocking the ads then that's not my fault - I'll find another distraction or information source that has found a business model that works.
So in other words, "if a particular content creator isn't giving away work for free, I'll find something else". Or is there some new business model you've thought of that is more suitable for your tastes?
It's called supply and demand. When the supply is infinite the cost is nil.
Because quality journalism (and other content) is infinite?
In fact if I had it my way content producers would throw in some cash to attract my eyeballs to their info-goop stream. let's get with the times, people!
See, this is the line that makes me think you're just messin' with us...
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Yes, if the content is good. I could easily see budgeting myself $50 a month to cover favored web sites without any advertisements or third-party tracking. I understand that creation of quality content is not without its costs in both time and infrastructure. I'd much rather part with some small amount of money than have to a) watch ads jumping all over the screen or b) look at small unobtrusive ads connected to a larger ad service that is monitoring my viewing habits.
That also gives me a much more direct means of control over the sites I frequent - if I don't like the direction they take, I can stop paying. A thousand people who cease subscribing at $1/month ($1000 @ $1 ea) will have far more effect than ten thousand people who stop seeing ad imprints ($30/mo @.003 / imprint)
Advertising (from the perspective of content providers) is the business of selling both the attention and viewing habits of their readers. When the attention you're selling is mine, the good content I receive in exchange is a pittance. My attention and privacy is worth more than that to me.
If you're selling something, sell it to me. Don't sell my attention and privacy to a third party leech, and attempt to unilaterally dictate the value of my attention and privacy as the price I must pay in return. Your news article/blog entry is not of sufficient value for me to accept it as payment.
That being said, the best way to make this point is not to adblock -- but to refuse to use the site. If a site does set the price of their article to be my attention/privacy -- then I don't have the right to say "No, that price is not acceptable, but I'm going to take the content anyway." My choice is to accept their terms or walk away from the deal.
If sites would either a) start charging directly for content (I love/.'s per-imprint model, though their subscription page seems to be broken at the moment) or b) start providing their own advertising without giving my data to third party networks, I would be able to spend my time on a much wider range of sites. Hmm, perhaps this is a good thing that I can't then...;)
int x = 1;
int y = 2; // Code proceeds on assumption that x != y
Of course if someone goes in with a debugger and forces x == y, then the code will fail. However, that doesn't mean the scenario is plausible or even possible to begin with.
Sadly, none of the senators reading the report will have enough understanding to realize that simple fact, or even to ask the right questions.
While your post is offtopic to the comment you're replying to, I agree it was an interesting read. However, the entire testimony has one fundamental flaw: it assumes that because a situation can be induced in which no error code is set, that that exact same situation can occur in the absence of being induced.
The entire testimony is built on that unproven assumption, without venturing to explain how it could occur in normal operations.
A similar comparison would be saying your privacy is being "given away' because an application writes a rolling activity log that you can supply to the developer when something crashes. (FYI, BBSSH - in my sig - writes any exceptions, error conditions, and successful connections to the device log - is that a violation of privacy too?)
Melodramatic much? Let's look for a moment at what the company says:
When Toyota was asked by the AP to explain what exactly its recorders do collect, a company statement said Thursday that the devices record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag is deployed in a crash.
The statement said information is captured about vehicle speed, the accelerator's angle, gear shift position, whether the seat belt was used and the angle of the driver's seat.
I understand that a large part of the real issue here is the fact that the data is *not* open -- we do presently have to take this information on trust, which is not acceptable.
Taking them at face value, your complaints about privacy are irrelevant. As a software developer, my ability to debug a critical system failure FAR outweighs your self-righteous indignation over having a five second snapshot of your driving taken for any given point in time. And it's got nothing to do with your trips to Hank's Triple-X After Hours Club -- it's to do with my work, my product, and my livelihood. You're just a casualty of unfortunate code at this point.
And you know that we're talking about the same kinds of modifications how, exactly? If you're not a neurologist who's familiar with the actual product implementation, there's a fair chance you don't.
While I am no neurologist, I've done good bit chunk of research into this while looking into developing something similar in the late 90s. (My development had progressed to the point of working out partnerships with equipment providers.) In the end, I decided against it because there was simply not much publicly available formal study in this area of neurology. Without the necessary medical background (or the funds to hire someone who had that background) I wasn't about to take the risk of doing serious harm out of my ignorance.
The difference here is that we're not talking about putting somebody into an alpha state - which is what watching TV can do. We're talking about directed and repetitive modification intended to cause brainwaves to match a specific series of patterns.
As the simplest example - it has been long proven that it's possible to reduce the chance of seizures via biofeedback of this sort. However, I also recall one series of studies had shown that it was was possible to (unintentionally) induce seizures via improperly applied biofeedback.
In the early 2000s, a guy I knew used a bunny in his flowcharts to represent the internet. It meant about as much as a cloud, but was much cooler about it.
If only THAT trend had caught on. "Dude, don't worry about it... it's all in the bunny." Nobody could say it with a straight face, and we'd never have reached these dire straits.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us use our phones for serious work like remote sysadmin tasks and document editing (to name just two)
Such folks as yourself might be interested in my signature spam :-)
So you wouldn't enable it for your account. I use it for certain types of purchases. I do admit it "feels" kind of weird - I typically like to confirm my list of purchases, etc before "checkout" -- but those times when I want to grab something off of the MP3 store it's awfully convenient.
Jobs gives Jack Bauer and Chuck Norris lessons on "seeing things coming". Duh.
You just have to realize that the general market is not the slashdot crowd.
Next you'll be telling us that we have to start reading the articles.
Then let competitors educate consumers. "Did you know that the HTC phone can install viruses on your computer?" As long as they stick entirely to the facts, there's nothing preventing this.
This is a self-correcting situation. Government fines not required.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure that the agreement can't compel you do something illegal - such as not comply with FoIA. This would likely fall into that clause that says something similar to "if any one part of this agreement is found to be not binding, all other parts remain in effect".
It would be interesting to see how successful that is as a strategy. Starbucks is definitely example - they charge a premium, but these days you hardly hear about *why* they're charging a premium -- to the point where I think most people assume it's just because it tastes better [to them- I think SB is crap :P]. The problem is that there's never an apples-to-apples comparison: you can't compare SBUX to another coffee company because the other companies are different sizes and often with target different markets (dunkin donuts, etc).
But why does he believe that finding PEOPLE is an issue? This is the INTERNET. You can find published information ABOUT people. But PEOPLE are not abstracted and defined on the Internet.
Speak for yourself, human.
Why do that when one can sell them @ $10/3 and keep it as profit to reinvest in the business or (gasp) pay to the owners?
That makes a good deal of sense, and gives me a starting point for some digging. Thanks for the info
True, this is outside of my are of expertise. Yet when you have a virtually infinite number of possible failure combinations (when taking it down to the transistor level), it seems that there must come a point where you say "this is what we can reasonably handle".
it assumes that because a situation can be induced in which no error code is set, that that exact same situation...
I am deeply ashamed by the above pathetic excuse for a sentence, and apologize.
If the business model a particular artist or other outfit doesn't work out without me shelling out cash or refraining from blocking the ads then that's not my fault - I'll find another distraction or information source that has found a business model that works.
So in other words, "if a particular content creator isn't giving away work for free, I'll find something else". Or is there some new business model you've thought of that is more suitable for your tastes?
It's called supply and demand. When the supply is infinite the cost is nil.
Because quality journalism (and other content) is infinite?
In fact if I had it my way content producers would throw in some cash to attract my eyeballs to their info-goop stream. let's get with the times, people!
See, this is the line that makes me think you're just messin' with us...
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Yes, if the content is good. I could easily see budgeting myself $50 a month to cover favored web sites without any advertisements or third-party tracking. I understand that creation of quality content is not without its costs in both time and infrastructure. I'd much rather part with some small amount of money than have to a) watch ads jumping all over the screen or b) look at small unobtrusive ads connected to a larger ad service that is monitoring my viewing habits.
That also gives me a much more direct means of control over the sites I frequent - if I don't like the direction they take, I can stop paying. A thousand people who cease subscribing at $1/month ($1000 @ $1 ea) will have far more effect than ten thousand people who stop seeing ad imprints ($30/mo @ .003 / imprint)
Advertising (from the perspective of content providers) is the business of selling both the attention and viewing habits of their readers. When the attention you're selling is mine, the good content I receive in exchange is a pittance. My attention and privacy is worth more than that to me.
If you're selling something, sell it to me. Don't sell my attention and privacy to a third party leech, and attempt to unilaterally dictate the value of my attention and privacy as the price I must pay in return. Your news article/blog entry is not of sufficient value for me to accept it as payment.
That being said, the best way to make this point is not to adblock -- but to refuse to use the site. If a site does set the price of their article to be my attention/privacy -- then I don't have the right to say "No, that price is not acceptable, but I'm going to take the content anyway." My choice is to accept their terms or walk away from the deal.
If sites would either a) start charging directly for content (I love /.'s per-imprint model, though their subscription page seems to be broken at the moment) or b) start providing their own advertising without giving my data to third party networks, I would be able to spend my time on a much wider range of sites. Hmm, perhaps this is a good thing that I can't then... ;)
Indeed. "Cross-platform" for an extremely narrow definition of "platform".
int x = 1;
// Code proceeds on assumption that x != y
int y = 2;
Of course if someone goes in with a debugger and forces x == y, then the code will fail. However, that doesn't mean the scenario is plausible or even possible to begin with.
Sadly, none of the senators reading the report will have enough understanding to realize that simple fact, or even to ask the right questions.
The entire testimony is built on that unproven assumption, without venturing to explain how it could occur in normal operations.
A similar comparison would be saying your privacy is being "given away' because an application writes a rolling activity log that you can supply to the developer when something crashes. (FYI, BBSSH - in my sig - writes any exceptions, error conditions, and successful connections to the device log - is that a violation of privacy too?)
When Toyota was asked by the AP to explain what exactly its recorders do collect, a company statement said Thursday that the devices record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag is deployed in a crash. The statement said information is captured about vehicle speed, the accelerator's angle, gear shift position, whether the seat belt was used and the angle of the driver's seat.
I understand that a large part of the real issue here is the fact that the data is *not* open -- we do presently have to take this information on trust, which is not acceptable.
Taking them at face value, your complaints about privacy are irrelevant. As a software developer, my ability to debug a critical system failure FAR outweighs your self-righteous indignation over having a five second snapshot of your driving taken for any given point in time. And it's got nothing to do with your trips to Hank's Triple-X After Hours Club -- it's to do with my work, my product, and my livelihood. You're just a casualty of unfortunate code at this point.
I've tried to answer that in reply to the first respondent to my original comment
It does have valid meaning, but it also is getting used well beyond that meaning. That's the point it which it became irritating....
Perhaps you should read my prior comments in reply to the person comparing this to watching television, just above.
While I am no neurologist, I've done good bit chunk of research into this while looking into developing something similar in the late 90s. (My development had progressed to the point of working out partnerships with equipment providers.) In the end, I decided against it because there was simply not much publicly available formal study in this area of neurology. Without the necessary medical background (or the funds to hire someone who had that background) I wasn't about to take the risk of doing serious harm out of my ignorance.
The difference here is that we're not talking about putting somebody into an alpha state - which is what watching TV can do. We're talking about directed and repetitive modification intended to cause brainwaves to match a specific series of patterns.
As the simplest example - it has been long proven that it's possible to reduce the chance of seizures via biofeedback of this sort. However, I also recall one series of studies had shown that it was was possible to (unintentionally) induce seizures via improperly applied biofeedback.
In the early 2000s, a guy I knew used a bunny in his flowcharts to represent the internet. It meant about as much as a cloud, but was much cooler about it.
If only THAT trend had caught on. "Dude, don't worry about it... it's all in the bunny." Nobody could say it with a straight face, and we'd never have reached these dire straits.