Is anyone else thinking that we may not have seen Chrome OS if it hadn't been for the upcoming release of Windows 7, twisting Googles's arm into announcing something, anything at all?
Even if you catch a slight glimpse of the ad, it has some value. You can't help but recognise a logo or other identifying aspect. By the time you've recognised it's an ad and flip over, you've probably recognised the company and product too.
TV programs have DVDs, merchandise, product placement, the selling of international rights and so on. They have far more viable ways of generating revenue than websites.
The myth refers to the idea that sites can still make money to cover wages and costs if their ads are blocked. The idea that it's the news site's own fault for using 'outdated' practices and not ones that could make them money.
I thought that was kind of inferred by the way I then proceeded to explain why pretty much every other way of generating revenue isn't viable for most sites.
Yes I am saying it's immoral. It's well known lots of these websites get their revenue from advertising. If the adverts are unintrusive there's little justification for blocking them.
It may not be illegal but that doesn't mean it's moral. You know it's cost them to write and host the material, you know they need advertising revenue to pay for this. Talking about "implied social contracts" doesn't change the fact you are making a moral choice to get the sweat off of someone else's brow without giving them anything in return.
They would be excluded but, providing the chance of a story having an identifying quote is largely random it doesn't matter a huge amount statistically .
There is no way of monetising that will keep geeks happy. It's a myth peddled by people who want to justify the morality of blocking every ad, no matter how unintrusive.
The ways of making money:
Subscription - few people are willing to subscribe to a single site.
advertising - adblock. Only cast iron method of getting around it is by putting ads before videos and not displaying any videos until the ad has played through. But not every news site does videos.
Merchandise - CNN don't sell many DVDs and CNN branded T-shirts are hardly going to fly off the shelves.
Donations - People point to Wiki as an example of this being successful but it simply isn't viable for 99% of sites. If people donate at all they donate once and that's it. Wiki survives because of hard campaining for donations and because it looks good for companies to donate to.
Licencing content - when blogs can rip out all the juicy info from an article and just link to the source at the bottom, this simply isn't viable (that and you're moving the revenue problem downstream)
Only possible solution I could see is a subcription service that covers hundreds of sites. You pay $4.99 a month and the money gets divided up between sites based on page views. However this is a nightmare to set up and get people on board and you may find it's about as successful as regular subscriptions.
I've never experienced any game which has such a hostile community as DOTA. The torrent of abuse you can get from your team mates, even if you're winning, is unreal and to say the experience for noobish types is unpleasant is an understatement.
They're so deadly serious and so intolerant, it spoils a good game. I did stick with it a while and get reasonable with it but I got tired of the abuse hurled around at everyone and gave it up. By contrast Footman Frenzy and Maffarazzo TD are much more tolerable.
I'm getting as many virus alerts through Firefox now as I used to get through IE before I switched, most of them seem to be flash and pdf exploits but I've had a few occur that don't appear to be either.
Yes you could potentially make Firefox safer with noscript etc. but frankly that makes for an incredibly sucky web experience (and you could turn of scripting, flash and activeX in IE too with similar results).
The rise in Firefox targeted (or partially targeted) exploits, in my personal experience, has risen almost in direct proportion to the browser's popularity.
You do not have the right for people to produce content for you free of charge.
Just because you can access their content (with or without their consent), it doesn't give you the right to expect them to work for nothing.
Of course there's no garentee an artist's work will sell. Does that mean you have the right to view it for free because they have the audacity to want compensation for their time?
Replace "artist" with the word "worker". Artists are not some freak breed of people that will work for free. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, all of their best work was commissioned and you had to pay to watch a shakespeare play.
The punishment will serve it's purpose well.
You do not share state secrets, even if your intentions are innocent. You do not treat them so lightly as to absent mindedly give them out. This is an incredibly important message for the government to send out. If you send out a message of "oh you silly sausage, I'll let it go this time" you'll have leaks left right and center. It doesn't matter how innocous the person you're revealing it to seems. Spies go out their ways to be innocuous, or will try to get information from people you've told (which is even worse as it makes the spies much harder to identify).
Giving out military secrets costs lives. Freedom of information is all well and good until people then use that information too kill (not just in warfare but innocent civilians, political opponents etc.)
File systems are a core part of an OS. The Internet Explorer rulings only apply because the courts ruled that was a separate product. When you buy Windows, part of the cost is going towards the licences for them.
If there was ever a court ruling saying they had to support rival file systems on their own OS it would open the floodgates for insane amounts of nuisance law suits from companies competing again ones with large market shares.
To me the author of the article is deliberately confusing public timetables with transmissions showing the position and expected arrival times of a bus.
If the position and expected arrival time is calculated on the fly, that's more of a service than just pure publically available data. If the condition of this service being provided is that the data is confidential or restricted to licensees. The provided data is processed real time using their equiptment and code. It's one thing to say "at 2:12pm the bus is 5 miles from transponder 2A, 1/5 mile from 4B and 8 miles from 1E" which is pure statistics (albeit collected from private equiptment), but to say "it's just left the anystreet stop and will arrive at noname plaza in 6 minutes in the current traffic conditions", could be seen as editorialising. If you're able to get as much of this information whenever you want, it then goes beyond fair use too.
An extreme argument of what the author is saying could be this: The fact that Michael Jackson died is public fact, a 400 word article going into the detail of how he died is copyrighted and subject to fair use restrictions. The interesting argument that applies here is, if that same news report was machine generated based on a few facts fed into it and the rest padded out through AI, could you copyright that?
and you are still nitpicking, it's obvious from the context I was talking about lithium ion.
Let me put my argument this way:
The mileage a car driven by an internal combustion engine has increased a lot over the last hundred or so years. Changing from steel to lighter aluminium, improving transmissions and making sure the engine uses fuel as well as it can.
There's been a massive improvement since the 1900's but in the last 15 years fuel efficiency in MPG for domestic vehicles has risen by just 5-8% according to BTU statistics.
An internal combustion engine can only get so much energy from so much Petrol/diesel, it's become a dead end. The advancements in efficiency and cost have come from entirely different concepts, driving the cars by electric motors, currently supplied electricity by generators for reasons of infrastructure and battery tech.
Likewise, if you have x amount of a lithium compound it will only store so much power. You may be able to make the cells themselves lighter and more robust through design improvements and tweaking the compound but you're going to reach a point where you're not going to get any lighter.
I was actually using the chemical symbol for Lithium ion hence the space. The dates I gave were correct (if anything the tech for lithium ion was first invented in the 70's) but feel free to nitpick more.
Again, the actual tech isn't changing significantly, the biggest changes are in the casings which have shrunk as charging circuits have been perfected and changes have been made to make the compounds safer and lessen the need for bulky vents. Most of the mass of an old lithium cell came from the thick metal surrounding it. Lithium ion polymer batteries have casings that are little more than foil. There comes a point when you simply can't make the cases any lighter.
Sony produced the first commercial Li- cell in 1991 and the tech was around in the 80's.
Since then, there has been little advancement in battery tech. There's been models a little less likely to explode, models which have thinner casing making them lighter and various attempts to re-jiggle the balance between storage, charge time and cell life but it's all different approaches to the same concept.
Approaching 20 years with only minor improvements in power storage does make me a bit cynical.
The "SMS costs phone networks nothing" thing is a myth.
Yes the standard was designed for messages to be sent without any physical upgrades to the network but it was only designed for a small number of messages, not for the vast number of messages sent today.
Even without the need to update equiptment to increase capacity (as has been done), you still needed to build a central SMS center to handle the messages.
A student who's participated in the protests does not make for an authoritative and unbiased report any more than the state propaganda broadcasts (which also come from 'actual Iranians') do.
Despite what he writes there, Ahmadinejad almost certainly got at least 40% of the vote based on the figures before the election and the alternative they voted for was pretty hard line the last time he was in power, he's not changed much since then. The more liberal attitude may be spreading from Tehran but it's slow at best.
You throw around ignorance and personal attacks but the only ignorance is to assume the situation is as simple as "the people are rising to oust the dictator in order to install the people's choice who will bring in a new age of freedom" which is the image being thrown around in lots of places.
The protests are taking place in Tehran, mostly by Tehran citizens. It's the most liberal part of the country by far. It doesn't matter if there are old, young, male, female and so on. The demographic is still incredibly limited on range.
Would you expect demonstrations on gay rights that take place in San Francisco to be representative of the views of the bible belt states?
Could we beam broadband internet into Iran? Yes. Could they send anything back? No.
However, everyone assumes that we 'should' be doing this and helping the revolution so they can experience 'freedom'.
For one thing, this isn't a popular uprising. It's taking place in a liberal city and is mostly students (although not entirely). Polls taken beforehand that were trustworthy indicate that Ahmadinejad could've expected between 40-50% of the vote in the election. That means he has a whole lot of supporters out there.
How do you think these supporters would feel if the opposition not only got brought into power on the basis of 'liberal' protesters who didn't represent them, but they were helped and organised through American help? Even if it wasn't state sanctioned, they'll still see it as America behind it.
All this to get a president into power who isn't that much better than the current one in terms of how liberal he is.
Brown and Obama have taken a strictly hands off approach for a reason. It's best at the moment to hope the situation resolves itself without excessive bloodshed. Too much pushing will at best, make a good portion of the country think we're meddling, at worst, it'll push the two entrenched sides into a bloody civil war.
It's currently Iran's problem and it should be up to the Iranian people to resolve it, not for the outside to decide what they think is best for them.
They black out anything which reveals personal details of the person (addresses and phone numbers) claiming the expenses and details of the people they are purchasing off of.
It wouldn't exactly be fair for you to wake up one morning with 1000 press outside your house because you sold something on ebay and it was claimed for, revealing your name and address.
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone else thinking that we may not have seen Chrome OS if it hadn't been for the upcoming release of Windows 7, twisting Googles's arm into announcing something, anything at all?
Even if you catch a slight glimpse of the ad, it has some value. You can't help but recognise a logo or other identifying aspect. By the time you've recognised it's an ad and flip over, you've probably recognised the company and product too.
TV programs have DVDs, merchandise, product placement, the selling of international rights and so on. They have far more viable ways of generating revenue than websites.
The myth refers to the idea that sites can still make money to cover wages and costs if their ads are blocked. The idea that it's the news site's own fault for using 'outdated' practices and not ones that could make them money.
I thought that was kind of inferred by the way I then proceeded to explain why pretty much every other way of generating revenue isn't viable for most sites.
Yes I am saying it's immoral. It's well known lots of these websites get their revenue from advertising. If the adverts are unintrusive there's little justification for blocking them.
It may not be illegal but that doesn't mean it's moral. You know it's cost them to write and host the material, you know they need advertising revenue to pay for this. Talking about "implied social contracts" doesn't change the fact you are making a moral choice to get the sweat off of someone else's brow without giving them anything in return.
They would be excluded but, providing the chance of a story having an identifying quote is largely random it doesn't matter a huge amount statistically .
There is no way of monetising that will keep geeks happy. It's a myth peddled by people who want to justify the morality of blocking every ad, no matter how unintrusive.
The ways of making money:
Subscription - few people are willing to subscribe to a single site.
advertising - adblock. Only cast iron method of getting around it is by putting ads before videos and not displaying any videos until the ad has played through. But not every news site does videos.
Merchandise - CNN don't sell many DVDs and CNN branded T-shirts are hardly going to fly off the shelves.
Donations - People point to Wiki as an example of this being successful but it simply isn't viable for 99% of sites. If people donate at all they donate once and that's it. Wiki survives because of hard campaining for donations and because it looks good for companies to donate to.
Licencing content - when blogs can rip out all the juicy info from an article and just link to the source at the bottom, this simply isn't viable (that and you're moving the revenue problem downstream)
Only possible solution I could see is a subcription service that covers hundreds of sites. You pay $4.99 a month and the money gets divided up between sites based on page views. However this is a nightmare to set up and get people on board and you may find it's about as successful as regular subscriptions.
At least as safe as you can be in a place where most appliances aren't grounded...
Libel is written, slander is verbal
I've never experienced any game which has such a hostile community as DOTA. The torrent of abuse you can get from your team mates, even if you're winning, is unreal and to say the experience for noobish types is unpleasant is an understatement.
They're so deadly serious and so intolerant, it spoils a good game. I did stick with it a while and get reasonable with it but I got tired of the abuse hurled around at everyone and gave it up. By contrast Footman Frenzy and Maffarazzo TD are much more tolerable.
I'm getting as many virus alerts through Firefox now as I used to get through IE before I switched, most of them seem to be flash and pdf exploits but I've had a few occur that don't appear to be either. Yes you could potentially make Firefox safer with noscript etc. but frankly that makes for an incredibly sucky web experience (and you could turn of scripting, flash and activeX in IE too with similar results). The rise in Firefox targeted (or partially targeted) exploits, in my personal experience, has risen almost in direct proportion to the browser's popularity.
You do not have the right for people to produce content for you free of charge. Just because you can access their content (with or without their consent), it doesn't give you the right to expect them to work for nothing. Of course there's no garentee an artist's work will sell. Does that mean you have the right to view it for free because they have the audacity to want compensation for their time? Replace "artist" with the word "worker". Artists are not some freak breed of people that will work for free. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, all of their best work was commissioned and you had to pay to watch a shakespeare play.
Most of Da Vinci's great works were commissioned or sold. He would not have been able to live like he did if he wasn't very well paid for his work.
The punishment will serve it's purpose well. You do not share state secrets, even if your intentions are innocent. You do not treat them so lightly as to absent mindedly give them out. This is an incredibly important message for the government to send out. If you send out a message of "oh you silly sausage, I'll let it go this time" you'll have leaks left right and center. It doesn't matter how innocous the person you're revealing it to seems. Spies go out their ways to be innocuous, or will try to get information from people you've told (which is even worse as it makes the spies much harder to identify). Giving out military secrets costs lives. Freedom of information is all well and good until people then use that information too kill (not just in warfare but innocent civilians, political opponents etc.)
File systems are a core part of an OS. The Internet Explorer rulings only apply because the courts ruled that was a separate product. When you buy Windows, part of the cost is going towards the licences for them. If there was ever a court ruling saying they had to support rival file systems on their own OS it would open the floodgates for insane amounts of nuisance law suits from companies competing again ones with large market shares.
To me the author of the article is deliberately confusing public timetables with transmissions showing the position and expected arrival times of a bus.
If the position and expected arrival time is calculated on the fly, that's more of a service than just pure publically available data. If the condition of this service being provided is that the data is confidential or restricted to licensees. The provided data is processed real time using their equiptment and code. It's one thing to say "at 2:12pm the bus is 5 miles from transponder 2A, 1/5 mile from 4B and 8 miles from 1E" which is pure statistics (albeit collected from private equiptment), but to say "it's just left the anystreet stop and will arrive at noname plaza in 6 minutes in the current traffic conditions", could be seen as editorialising. If you're able to get as much of this information whenever you want, it then goes beyond fair use too.
An extreme argument of what the author is saying could be this: The fact that Michael Jackson died is public fact, a 400 word article going into the detail of how he died is copyrighted and subject to fair use restrictions. The interesting argument that applies here is, if that same news report was machine generated based on a few facts fed into it and the rest padded out through AI, could you copyright that?
and you are still nitpicking, it's obvious from the context I was talking about lithium ion.
Let me put my argument this way:
The mileage a car driven by an internal combustion engine has increased a lot over the last hundred or so years. Changing from steel to lighter aluminium, improving transmissions and making sure the engine uses fuel as well as it can.
There's been a massive improvement since the 1900's but in the last 15 years fuel efficiency in MPG for domestic vehicles has risen by just 5-8% according to BTU statistics.
An internal combustion engine can only get so much energy from so much Petrol/diesel, it's become a dead end. The advancements in efficiency and cost have come from entirely different concepts, driving the cars by electric motors, currently supplied electricity by generators for reasons of infrastructure and battery tech.
Likewise, if you have x amount of a lithium compound it will only store so much power. You may be able to make the cells themselves lighter and more robust through design improvements and tweaking the compound but you're going to reach a point where you're not going to get any lighter.
I was actually using the chemical symbol for Lithium ion hence the space. The dates I gave were correct (if anything the tech for lithium ion was first invented in the 70's) but feel free to nitpick more.
Again, the actual tech isn't changing significantly, the biggest changes are in the casings which have shrunk as charging circuits have been perfected and changes have been made to make the compounds safer and lessen the need for bulky vents. Most of the mass of an old lithium cell came from the thick metal surrounding it. Lithium ion polymer batteries have casings that are little more than foil. There comes a point when you simply can't make the cases any lighter.
Sony produced the first commercial Li- cell in 1991 and the tech was around in the 80's.
Since then, there has been little advancement in battery tech. There's been models a little less likely to explode, models which have thinner casing making them lighter and various attempts to re-jiggle the balance between storage, charge time and cell life but it's all different approaches to the same concept.
Approaching 20 years with only minor improvements in power storage does make me a bit cynical.
"it expects these batteries to be on the market within a few years"
Just like those ultra efficient, cheap, solar panels we've been promised 'next year' each year for the last decade.
The "SMS costs phone networks nothing" thing is a myth.
Yes the standard was designed for messages to be sent without any physical upgrades to the network but it was only designed for a small number of messages, not for the vast number of messages sent today.
Even without the need to update equiptment to increase capacity (as has been done), you still needed to build a central SMS center to handle the messages.
A student who's participated in the protests does not make for an authoritative and unbiased report any more than the state propaganda broadcasts (which also come from 'actual Iranians') do.
Despite what he writes there, Ahmadinejad almost certainly got at least 40% of the vote based on the figures before the election and the alternative they voted for was pretty hard line the last time he was in power, he's not changed much since then. The more liberal attitude may be spreading from Tehran but it's slow at best.
You throw around ignorance and personal attacks but the only ignorance is to assume the situation is as simple as "the people are rising to oust the dictator in order to install the people's choice who will bring in a new age of freedom" which is the image being thrown around in lots of places.
The protests are taking place in Tehran, mostly by Tehran citizens. It's the most liberal part of the country by far. It doesn't matter if there are old, young, male, female and so on. The demographic is still incredibly limited on range.
Would you expect demonstrations on gay rights that take place in San Francisco to be representative of the views of the bible belt states?
Could we beam broadband internet into Iran? Yes. Could they send anything back? No.
However, everyone assumes that we 'should' be doing this and helping the revolution so they can experience 'freedom'.
For one thing, this isn't a popular uprising. It's taking place in a liberal city and is mostly students (although not entirely). Polls taken beforehand that were trustworthy indicate that Ahmadinejad could've expected between 40-50% of the vote in the election. That means he has a whole lot of supporters out there.
How do you think these supporters would feel if the opposition not only got brought into power on the basis of 'liberal' protesters who didn't represent them, but they were helped and organised through American help? Even if it wasn't state sanctioned, they'll still see it as America behind it.
All this to get a president into power who isn't that much better than the current one in terms of how liberal he is.
Brown and Obama have taken a strictly hands off approach for a reason. It's best at the moment to hope the situation resolves itself without excessive bloodshed. Too much pushing will at best, make a good portion of the country think we're meddling, at worst, it'll push the two entrenched sides into a bloody civil war.
It's currently Iran's problem and it should be up to the Iranian people to resolve it, not for the outside to decide what they think is best for them.
They black out anything which reveals personal details of the person (addresses and phone numbers) claiming the expenses and details of the people they are purchasing off of.
It wouldn't exactly be fair for you to wake up one morning with 1000 press outside your house because you sold something on ebay and it was claimed for, revealing your name and address.