The PTC organized mass form complaints to the FCC to provide the illusion of massive complaints.
Right, and in response the standard Slashdotter asks where the parents are. It makes no sense.
Yes, PARENTS should control what is on the TVs in their houses, not what is broadcast.
Oh, so if we're watching The Muppets Live and suddenly the guest star (say Janet Jackson) pulls out their wang to try to get some publicity to sell her new album, the parents should control it? Alrighty then.
Which of course makes all their employees above reporach.
Of course not, but from a statistical averages perspective it would likely be safer than "Joe's Kids Club".
So, you predict AOL/Time Warner won't exist this time next year?
If this were a 8 year old, this would have been massively detrimental to the organization. It was a 15-17 year old, however, which really doesn't get as much attention, given that there are plenty of kids at that age sexually active, even involved with drugs or other "adult" activities (personally I remember going to parties with ample alcohol at that age, and no one was censoring my BBSing - I was a mini-adult).
The bar really isn't as high for a random AOL employee as it's much less likely that there would be physical contact (I mean this case is a serious aberration). At a school any of the employees could get children alone and take advantage of them, yet few parents would or could know much about the people in the school board's employ (hell I remember once, as a student, a substitute wouldn't give us his name - he was "Mr. P". This was to, in his words, avoid prank calls).
Bah, somehow in my mind I transposed some of the words to be
"I wouldn't pay someone to supervise my kids, let alone someone I didn't know anything about."
So my prior response is diluted, however still holds - It is impossible for a parent to know much more than the superficial over all of the people in a school that may supervise your kids, for instance (the gym teacher...the substitute...the vice principal). Instead you have to rely upon the laws of the land, peer-oversight, and organizational-integrity.
If I set up a club for children claiming I was a nice guy, honest, would you let your kids join without finding out anything more about it? And you have no reason to believe I have an ulterior motive, whereas you know that AOL is just trying to squeeze money out of you, so will be running the cheapest possible service with minimum possible regulation and supervision, hireing people for peanuts and so potentially attracting people who get more than the wage packet out of the job.
This logic is completely illogical.
Firstly if you, Joe Somebody, started a service trying to draw children, I would be incredibly suspicious -- anyone that seeks out contact with children falls garners such suspicion.
AOL, on the other hand, is a large corporation, and exactly as you said it's just one part of their revenue plan - the CEO of AOL didn't decide that he wants to make a "club" for children where he can hang out and pick up girls. Rather a focus group and probably some middle managers decided that they needed a child-safe zone for their members to complete their product features.
Your belief that this means that they would cut every corner really puts your lack of sober analysis completely into question - when large corporations do things that involve children, they usually go way, way, WAY overboard ensuring that nothing could possibly go wrong: Something going wrong with a child due to corporate negligence is tantamount to corporate suicide. In this case it is clear that AOL failed to have enough controls to police the "police" of the AOL forum, but I'll betcha that on paper they do. Going forward this is surely an eye-opener for every other child-servicing online community as well.
It seems the Slashdot crowd is very fast on judging parents
I think it's pretty much to be expected given that the vast, vast, vast majority of Slashdotters are either under-age (and thus jumping at an opportunity to subtly pass judgement on their own parents), or single. The "where's the parents???" line has reappeared in hundreds of threads on Slashdot, and every time it gets moderated up as insightful.
It isn't insightful - it's tired, repetitive, idealistic bullshit, often in direct logical opposition to the story that they're bitching about. A parents group spending their time and effort to try to have age-limits applied on video games? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! Television censored after massive complaints about inappropriate content? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! It's so illogical it really defies comment, but every time these moronic comments get modded Score 5: Insightful (but dumb).
Parents can't watch their children 24/7 and create healthy children, especially in the mid teens, and there has to be some reliance upon the behaviour of others in this giant village that we all live in - It DOES take a village to raise a child, unless you're raising a bush-person.
Oh come on. Talk about the usability innovation of OSX, but don't even dream of talking about anyone ripping off the usability of KDE or Gnome - both of which are wholesale ripoffs of Windows/OSX/BeOS.
Of course I just saw another conversation where a proud KDE user claimed that a disk usage utility, showing files as differently sized rectangles, was stolen from KDE...this despite the fact that such utilities have been around since the 80s.
I entirely agree with what you're saying, and it would be nice if sites had some sort of publicly exposed "adlevel" statement - go to Google and choose to not see adlevel 5 (popup) or adlevel 4 (flash ads), but accepting adlevel 3 (text ads, with no more than 15% of screen space taken by advertisements).
you choose not to adopt a modified analogy that merely removes the criminality
The modified analogy wasn't analogous, at least not with the limited amount of detail provided. Perhaps if someone was handing out free coke to spread brand awareness, and you accepted a bottle and immediately stuck a Pepsi logo on it because you oppose Coke, don't like red, or whatever. Invariably the person giving it out will probably be a little annoyed, they'll feel that you didn't hold up your end of the bargain, and they won't give you another if you ask again.
The only "massive difference" is that you rationalize one but not the other. Both scenarios are actually very similar: It's easy to justify that the real per unit cost is marginal for the producer, and that it's their fundamental business model that is really to blame (if they really wanted my money they could have hired a guard to watch it, those dumb money sucking pigs).
In the case of websites the ads are part and parcel of the delivery of the content, quite evident by the fact that people have to actively use filters to separate the two. They aren't politely saying "Here's an article, now if you would please follow this link to go look at an ad".
As soon as you change your analogy to...
I realize that Slashddotters have some profound difficulty assigning value to non-physical objects, or understanding what the "tragedy of the commons" is, so I don't think any analogy is going to successfully make the point to this crowd.
It's the moralization that is similar - The "I can, therefore I will because it serves my needs best. If you don't like it then do something about it". The only real difference is that stealing a coke out of a pop machine is a crime, and there is the "stick" of justice, while taking content "out of context" is simply an unsustainable practise.
Firstly, your logic that since you paid for cable all of the content should be ad free is hilarious, and pretty much sums up your logic.
What social contract? Since when did "we" have to guarantee poor businesses models based on annoying the crap out of your users with flashing gif and flash ads?
Very simple question: If there was a copy of Adblock that would completely stop loading or displaying any page that contained blocked content, would you use it? Perhaps it could show a NetNanny like "Unapproved Advertising" instead, and you could go looking for an alternative source of the information you seek. This would be a completely moral and completely legitimate opposition to web advertising, and you could go through life happy that you've given the finger to every site that has a "poor business model".
"There are pop-machines nearby that you put some coins into and out comes a pop. I'm not supporting their poor business model so I use `coke extractor 2000' and reach up and pull one out for free. No annoying costs for me."
If a commercial website can't support itself via its audience, that website should die.
Ermmm, the ads are an attempt to support themselves via their audience. You know, some crazy "broken business model" (a term that slashbots love to recite -- "I can steal their stuff, therefore it's a broken business model") sites like Google.
There is no such thing as an implied or "social" contract
There are plenty of social contracts on this planet - when you go to a wedding there are certain expectations of the gift you'll provide reciprically for the invitation. If you come to a dinner party you bring a host guest. The fact that you seem oblivious to them is pretty telling.
the "guilt" that just because someone is giving you something, you ought to pay for it
I don't like most ads, and it drives me absolutely insane when I go to the movies, pay $14, and then am subjected to 15 minutes of ads. On the flip side I really appreciate that I can enjoy a great show like Without a Trace, reciprocating by allowing a few ads to play.
I also realize that ad defeating technologies can only work when the users are in the fringe - if everyone owned a Tivo and everyone skipped network television commercials, network television would have to move to a different business model, or alternately to a proprietary, partner-delivered delivery model that barred things like PVRs (coming soon to a cable near you).
So there are 200 fake blogs among 8,000,000 that were drawn up with malicious code and this is a story?
The story is that blogs are dangerous. Blogs are the tool of the devil, and they will install keyloggers, spy through your webcam, and solicit your children. Blogs are the tools of criminals and miscreants.
Good people should stay away from blogs and instead obtain all of their entertainment and information from the large corporate media outlets.
Your car can make hundreds of miles per hour. This frozen light business is like a New York traffic jam.
Ignoring refraction and light travelling at differing speeds, a quick explanation of one of the "light slowing" experiments sounded like rather than actually slowing light itself for the given medium, they basically gave it the runaround for a long period of time.
For instance imagine the classic experiment every kid thinks of of pointing a laser beam at a mirror, and then before it reflects back put a precisely aligned complementary mirror (you're very quick). Light would now be trapped between then two mirrors. Now if you moved your mirror contraption at 1 km/h, and then after an hour removed the opposite mirror, it would seem that light travelled at 1km/h.
Of course I'm presuming that you're talking about the physical speed of light, rather than c - the measure of the speed of light in a vacuum. In this case the submission and article is talking about the actual speed of light in given conditions.
You're not missing something - you have an excess of something (e.g. bogus facts).
The speed of light varies by the material that it travels in, which accounts for magical things like refraction. Refraction allows us to build lenses. If the speed of light was constant, well it'd be a bitch trying to see.
To be fair, their patented technology basically sounds like it could be explained as "parallel processing for specific tasks". It would not be surprizing if Microsoft looked at their designs, decided that they wanted to do it their own way (maybe Alacritech's specific designs are turdular), and now Alacritech is claiming implicit ownership because it offloads processing to a task-specific processor.
I'm too impatient, and too unmotivated, to look through the patent, but if that what Alacritech is using as a foundation for their argument then I hope that Satan tears out of the soil and eats all of their eyeballs and sticks rabid hedgehogs in the empty sockets.
Of course they probably padded their patent application with obvious implementation details that one would naturally do when performing a task such as parallel processing using task specific processors, giving the illusion that it's a highly specific design, but that's just an illusion of specificity.
I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard
I realize that it isn't core to your point, but...MPEG2 is the most portable and cross-platform for a web video? Maybe in DVD players, however it's one of the most license/patent encumbered standards out there, which is why you generally can't play MPEG2 on the desktop unless it's in DVD form and you have the appropriate software/hardware.
I submitted an excellent submission about a patent submarining company preparing to use a vague patent against the PVR industry, using their $100 million JPEG-patent warchest against it, and it was rejected. This was a continuance, with further details, of a story posted in December.
I suspect that a lot of well written, well researched submissions just get tossed in the garbage, while troll laugh-at-Slashdot submissions like this get billing, or editors repost dupe stories that even casual readers can identify from a mile away.
As an aside, I realize that the OP was an AC (and thus theoretically can't be a karma whore), yet the motivation is still there - even as an AC a lot of people will revisit to feel a sense of pride that their post was Score: 5. This is the same reason that Karma: Excellent posters still like seeing mod ups.
Slashdot Mirror
The PTC organized mass form complaints to the FCC to provide the illusion of massive complaints.
Right, and in response the standard Slashdotter asks where the parents are. It makes no sense.
Yes, PARENTS should control what is on the TVs in their houses, not what is broadcast.
Oh, so if we're watching The Muppets Live and suddenly the guest star (say Janet Jackson) pulls out their wang to try to get some publicity to sell her new album, the parents should control it? Alrighty then.
"Censoring BBS access? Wtf? Since when is "freedom to dialup" an adult thing?"
This whole discussion is about a 15-17 year old using a nanny monitored chat room.
unlike a drivers license it actually requires an IQ and SKILL to get and hold onto one
Funny, I thought the two most important requirements to get a private pilot's license is MONEY and TIME.
Which of course makes all their employees above reporach.
Of course not, but from a statistical averages perspective it would likely be safer than "Joe's Kids Club".
So, you predict AOL/Time Warner won't exist this time next year?
If this were a 8 year old, this would have been massively detrimental to the organization. It was a 15-17 year old, however, which really doesn't get as much attention, given that there are plenty of kids at that age sexually active, even involved with drugs or other "adult" activities (personally I remember going to parties with ample alcohol at that age, and no one was censoring my BBSing - I was a mini-adult).
The bar really isn't as high for a random AOL employee as it's much less likely that there would be physical contact (I mean this case is a serious aberration). At a school any of the employees could get children alone and take advantage of them, yet few parents would or could know much about the people in the school board's employ (hell I remember once, as a student, a substitute wouldn't give us his name - he was "Mr. P". This was to, in his words, avoid prank calls).
Bah, somehow in my mind I transposed some of the words to be
"I wouldn't pay someone to supervise my kids, let alone someone I didn't know anything about."
So my prior response is diluted, however still holds - It is impossible for a parent to know much more than the superficial over all of the people in a school that may supervise your kids, for instance (the gym teacher...the substitute...the vice principal). Instead you have to rely upon the laws of the land, peer-oversight, and organizational-integrity.
If I set up a club for children claiming I was a nice guy, honest, would you let your kids join without finding out anything more about it? And you have no reason to believe I have an ulterior motive, whereas you know that AOL is just trying to squeeze money out of you, so will be running the cheapest possible service with minimum possible regulation and supervision, hireing people for peanuts and so potentially attracting people who get more than the wage packet out of the job.
This logic is completely illogical.
Firstly if you, Joe Somebody, started a service trying to draw children, I would be incredibly suspicious -- anyone that seeks out contact with children falls garners such suspicion.
AOL, on the other hand, is a large corporation, and exactly as you said it's just one part of their revenue plan - the CEO of AOL didn't decide that he wants to make a "club" for children where he can hang out and pick up girls. Rather a focus group and probably some middle managers decided that they needed a child-safe zone for their members to complete their product features.
Your belief that this means that they would cut every corner really puts your lack of sober analysis completely into question - when large corporations do things that involve children, they usually go way, way, WAY overboard ensuring that nothing could possibly go wrong: Something going wrong with a child due to corporate negligence is tantamount to corporate suicide. In this case it is clear that AOL failed to have enough controls to police the "police" of the AOL forum, but I'll betcha that on paper they do. Going forward this is surely an eye-opener for every other child-servicing online community as well.
I wouldn't allow, let alone pay, someone I didn't know anything about to supervise my kids.
Wow. So your kids have never had a babysitter, a coach, or a teacher? What amazing home schooled, super-parented children you must have.
Or more likely you don't have children, and this just provides the opportunity to imagine that if you did you'd be the uber-parent. Right....
It seems the Slashdot crowd is very fast on judging parents
I think it's pretty much to be expected given that the vast, vast, vast majority of Slashdotters are either under-age (and thus jumping at an opportunity to subtly pass judgement on their own parents), or single. The "where's the parents???" line has reappeared in hundreds of threads on Slashdot, and every time it gets moderated up as insightful.
It isn't insightful - it's tired, repetitive, idealistic bullshit, often in direct logical opposition to the story that they're bitching about. A parents group spending their time and effort to try to have age-limits applied on video games? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! Television censored after massive complaints about inappropriate content? WHERE'S THE PARENTS! It's so illogical it really defies comment, but every time these moronic comments get modded Score 5: Insightful (but dumb).
Parents can't watch their children 24/7 and create healthy children, especially in the mid teens, and there has to be some reliance upon the behaviour of others in this giant village that we all live in - It DOES take a village to raise a child, unless you're raising a bush-person.
we got them from KDE and Gnome
Oh come on. Talk about the usability innovation of OSX, but don't even dream of talking about anyone ripping off the usability of KDE or Gnome - both of which are wholesale ripoffs of Windows/OSX/BeOS.
Of course I just saw another conversation where a proud KDE user claimed that a disk usage utility, showing files as differently sized rectangles, was stolen from KDE...this despite the fact that such utilities have been around since the 80s.
I entirely agree with what you're saying, and it would be nice if sites had some sort of publicly exposed "adlevel" statement - go to Google and choose to not see adlevel 5 (popup) or adlevel 4 (flash ads), but accepting adlevel 3 (text ads, with no more than 15% of screen space taken by advertisements).
you choose not to adopt a modified analogy that merely removes the criminality
The modified analogy wasn't analogous, at least not with the limited amount of detail provided. Perhaps if someone was handing out free coke to spread brand awareness, and you accepted a bottle and immediately stuck a Pepsi logo on it because you oppose Coke, don't like red, or whatever. Invariably the person giving it out will probably be a little annoyed, they'll feel that you didn't hold up your end of the bargain, and they won't give you another if you ask again.
Which is a massive difference.
The only "massive difference" is that you rationalize one but not the other. Both scenarios are actually very similar: It's easy to justify that the real per unit cost is marginal for the producer, and that it's their fundamental business model that is really to blame (if they really wanted my money they could have hired a guard to watch it, those dumb money sucking pigs).
In the case of websites the ads are part and parcel of the delivery of the content, quite evident by the fact that people have to actively use filters to separate the two. They aren't politely saying "Here's an article, now if you would please follow this link to go look at an ad".
As soon as you change your analogy to...
I realize that Slashddotters have some profound difficulty assigning value to non-physical objects, or understanding what the "tragedy of the commons" is, so I don't think any analogy is going to successfully make the point to this crowd.
It's the moralization that is similar - The "I can, therefore I will because it serves my needs best. If you don't like it then do something about it". The only real difference is that stealing a coke out of a pop machine is a crime, and there is the "stick" of justice, while taking content "out of context" is simply an unsustainable practise.
Firstly, your logic that since you paid for cable all of the content should be ad free is hilarious, and pretty much sums up your logic.
What social contract? Since when did "we" have to guarantee poor businesses models based on annoying the crap out of your users with flashing gif and flash ads?
Very simple question: If there was a copy of Adblock that would completely stop loading or displaying any page that contained blocked content, would you use it? Perhaps it could show a NetNanny like "Unapproved Advertising" instead, and you could go looking for an alternative source of the information you seek. This would be a completely moral and completely legitimate opposition to web advertising, and you could go through life happy that you've given the finger to every site that has a "poor business model".
"There are pop-machines nearby that you put some coins into and out comes a pop. I'm not supporting their poor business model so I use `coke extractor 2000' and reach up and pull one out for free. No annoying costs for me."
Ugh...if you go to a dinner party you bring a host GIFT.
If a commercial website can't support itself via its audience, that website should die.
Ermmm, the ads are an attempt to support themselves via their audience. You know, some crazy "broken business model" (a term that slashbots love to recite -- "I can steal their stuff, therefore it's a broken business model") sites like Google.
There is no such thing as an implied or "social" contract
There are plenty of social contracts on this planet - when you go to a wedding there are certain expectations of the gift you'll provide reciprically for the invitation. If you come to a dinner party you bring a host guest. The fact that you seem oblivious to them is pretty telling.
the "guilt" that just because someone is giving you something, you ought to pay for it
I don't like most ads, and it drives me absolutely insane when I go to the movies, pay $14, and then am subjected to 15 minutes of ads. On the flip side I really appreciate that I can enjoy a great show like Without a Trace, reciprocating by allowing a few ads to play.
I also realize that ad defeating technologies can only work when the users are in the fringe - if everyone owned a Tivo and everyone skipped network television commercials, network television would have to move to a different business model, or alternately to a proprietary, partner-delivered delivery model that barred things like PVRs (coming soon to a cable near you).
So there are 200 fake blogs among 8,000,000 that were drawn up with malicious code and this is a story?
The story is that blogs are dangerous. Blogs are the tool of the devil, and they will install keyloggers, spy through your webcam, and solicit your children. Blogs are the tools of criminals and miscreants.
Good people should stay away from blogs and instead obtain all of their entertainment and information from the large corporate media outlets.
Your car can make hundreds of miles per hour. This frozen light business is like a New York traffic jam.
Ignoring refraction and light travelling at differing speeds, a quick explanation of one of the "light slowing" experiments sounded like rather than actually slowing light itself for the given medium, they basically gave it the runaround for a long period of time.
For instance imagine the classic experiment every kid thinks of of pointing a laser beam at a mirror, and then before it reflects back put a precisely aligned complementary mirror (you're very quick). Light would now be trapped between then two mirrors. Now if you moved your mirror contraption at 1 km/h, and then after an hour removed the opposite mirror, it would seem that light travelled at 1km/h.
Of course I'm presuming that you're talking about the physical speed of light, rather than c - the measure of the speed of light in a vacuum. In this case the submission and article is talking about the actual speed of light in given conditions.
You're not missing something - you have an excess of something (e.g. bogus facts).
The speed of light varies by the material that it travels in, which accounts for magical things like refraction. Refraction allows us to build lenses. If the speed of light was constant, well it'd be a bitch trying to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
To be fair, their patented technology basically sounds like it could be explained as "parallel processing for specific tasks". It would not be surprizing if Microsoft looked at their designs, decided that they wanted to do it their own way (maybe Alacritech's specific designs are turdular), and now Alacritech is claiming implicit ownership because it offloads processing to a task-specific processor.
I'm too impatient, and too unmotivated, to look through the patent, but if that what Alacritech is using as a foundation for their argument then I hope that Satan tears out of the soil and eats all of their eyeballs and sticks rabid hedgehogs in the empty sockets.
Of course they probably padded their patent application with obvious implementation details that one would naturally do when performing a task such as parallel processing using task specific processors, giving the illusion that it's a highly specific design, but that's just an illusion of specificity.
I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard
I realize that it isn't core to your point, but...MPEG2 is the most portable and cross-platform for a web video? Maybe in DVD players, however it's one of the most license/patent encumbered standards out there, which is why you generally can't play MPEG2 on the desktop unless it's in DVD form and you have the appropriate software/hardware.
I submitted an excellent submission about a patent submarining company preparing to use a vague patent against the PVR industry, using their $100 million JPEG-patent warchest against it, and it was rejected. This was a continuance, with further details, of a story posted in December.
I suspect that a lot of well written, well researched submissions just get tossed in the garbage, while troll laugh-at-Slashdot submissions like this get billing, or editors repost dupe stories that even casual readers can identify from a mile away.
As an aside, I realize that the OP was an AC (and thus theoretically can't be a karma whore), yet the motivation is still there - even as an AC a lot of people will revisit to feel a sense of pride that their post was Score: 5. This is the same reason that Karma: Excellent posters still like seeing mod ups.