Well probability will be needed for information theory, error correcting codes, and cryptography. I am not sure if that is how detailed this course is going to get though.
As for the layout of memory, I would just guess that they might talk about security and e.g. buffer overflows.
I love the concept, but there is a problem: your prerequisites will exclude the overwhelming majority of non-programmers, and might even exclude a few novice programmers. Probability and how memory is laid out in a computer are the biggest issues here; even many computer science programs do not cover these topics until the second or third year.
Why not just judge the team itself then, and let the immediate manager for that team decide who is valuable? A team will have goals that fit somewhere into the broader organizational goals; individuals on the team can advance those goals in different ways.
Let's say, as an example, that you have two programmers on a team, Alice and Bob. Alice writes large amounts of code, which has few bugs and which works consistently, and she is an expert in the languages and libraries that are used by the team. Bob is not great at writing code and does not have the language expertise that Alice has, but he is great at solving problems and figuring out what code needs to be written. If Bob is not around, Alice produces less because she is not as good at problem solving; if Alice is not around, Bob tries to write the code and does a terrible job. Can you really say that one of these employees is "better" or "more valuable" than the other? What about Catherine, the person who is a mediocre coder and a mediocre problem solver, but who is great at keeping the team's morale up and who can help motivate people to meet deadlines (but who is not officially in a management position, and who maybe lacks the qualifications when it comes to organizing budgets or making tough hiring or firing decisions)?
I think you are confusing "talent" with "confidence." People can be talented without being confident, and I have seen such people shattered by the sort of teaching approach you are proposing. I have been in graduate school for a while now (quite a bit more than two years), and I have seen both sides of this spectrum. On one side, there is a long line of people who abandoned their dreams and who wound up applying a fraction of their talent to whatever mundane corporate job offered the most money. On the other side, there is a long line of people who discovered the true extent of their talent, and who went on to do great things.
The fact that this approach happened to work for you, combined with the fact that (at least in your opinion) you happen to be talented, does not mean that this is an approach that works well for talented people in general, nor does it mean that another approach would not have been equally great or perhaps better for you.
Since you are apparently afraid that I might be a stalker, I won't press you for details. I can only tell you what I have seen, as someone who is in a demanding environment (publish or perish and all that) where it is possible to compare different teaching styles. The fact that you keep dismissing criticism of Via Negativa, by either assuming that when I refer to people abandoning their dreams I must be talking about myself or by pushing "no true Scotsmen" arguments says a lot about you. Perhaps you should go out and see what really happens in top graduate programs in science, math, and engineering disciplines before talking about the virtues of Via Negativa.
I think the more likely explanation is that you read about Via Negativa in a novel and it appealed to your worldview. Get back to us when you have had the chance to see it in action, or perhaps when you can come up with a more concrete example of its results than some vague reference to professional athletes.
Given what I have seen of law enforcement and how they think about civil rights, they may have been preparing an investigation and thus installed some equipment without activating it. You know, the standard CALEA excuse: we are not spying on you, we have not hit the "start spying" button to actually collect information; those wiretapping machines are just so that we do not have to move our equipment there later!
Slashdot is well known and popular because of its users -- people come here to read comments and have discussions, to the point where they need to be reminded to read the articles. Slashdot does not need to pay people to write things, moderate, etc. This is an online community, not some curated experience.
slashdot requires 16 web servers, 7 db servers, 2 db read-only servers, 2 load balancers, and 3 misc systems.
I manage that many computers in my spare time, and unlike the systems I voluntarily deal with, Slashdot only needs a handful of applications to work (you might even say Slashdot only needs one application to work, but I suspect this is divided into several parts). Slashdot has a high load to deal with, but you are not talking about users running arbitrary applications.
If anything, I would say that Slashdot-style websites would be the winners if everyone installed ABP. Websites where the only operating costs are keeping a handful of servers online are websites whose costs can be covered by other means if necessary -- micropayments, merchandising, etc. If that is impossible, then the web needs to start being decentralized, users participating in serving the websites they visit (a P2P revival, built right into your browser).
So yeah, the users support Slashdot, because if we were not commenting on articles and arguing with each other then nobody would visit Slashdot.
Part of the DEA's mission is to ensure that the tobacco industry remains profitable (and other drug-making industries: alcohol, pharmaceuticals, coffee, etc.). The drug war has always been about helping those industries that have friends in high places.
Besides, how are politicians supposed to get their cigars? Every president in US history, including the current one, has used tobacco in one form or another.
Ever see what happens when a three-cup-per-day person cannot get their fix? Irritability, sluggishness, etc. Yet here is what I see in offices around the country, even in places like New York City:
The war on drugs has nothing to do with public health, that is just the excuse that politicians use when pressed on the issue. If you look at the reasoning behind the prohibitions on cocaine, heroine, marijuana, and ultimately the Controlled Substances Act, you will see:
Spreadsheets are popular for the following reasons:
They are programs that are not based on assigning values to variables
Users get a visual representation of where values are being assigned and how values are related to each other
The syntax of expressions is familiar, and there is little syntax that users need to learn beyond that
I suspect there are better ways to get all of the above, but that is irrelevant. Does the submitter think that people who use other programming languages do not make such catastrophic mistakes? I think history says otherwise:
When done properly, students know that the criticism isn't of them as people, or of their work in general, but of the specific work that's been presented to the teacher at that point. Done right, the student knows the teacher cares for them and wants the best from them.
In other words, if the student is already confident and highly motivated, they might benefit from this approach. Meanwhile, talented students who are not so confident in their own abilities get to have their hopes, dreams, and motivation shattered, and to wind up wasting their talent because someone told them that they are not really that talented.
Via Negativa is for those aiming to be amongst the best in the world
No, it is for teachers who lack the patience or perhaps ability to deal with students who are not confident and talented. The sort of people who are waiting for the next Einstein to wander into their office and complete a PhD in a year, the people who think their time and knowledge is wasted on anyone else. It is not as though students who benefit from that sort of treatment would not do equally well with teachers who are not so arrogant; if they are exceptionally talented, they only really need a teacher who is not boring them or holding them back.
That is the real issue here: not that Via Negativa fails for the 2% of students that it is good for, but that other methods of teaching are good for a superset of those students.
Going back to the major topic, creative jobs at Apple are for people who are amongst the best at their specialism in the world. Most people would do better to work for a less demanding company.
Really, the best in the world? So, where are Apple's amazing innovations? See, when I think of the best creative minds in the world, I think of people who make revolutionary things. No, a fancy cell phone that uses technologies invented by others is not revolutionary; these are the examples of revolutionary things created by the best creative minds in the world:
Meanwhile, when Apple took GUI, preemptive multitasking, and Siri and berated their engineers until those innovations looked pretty in Apple products. That is not the sort of work that "the best" creative minds are doing, that is just the sort of work that sells well.
At Microsoft, for example, they obviously have a large R&D budget, but continued to promote the same two already successful products (Windows and Office) to the detriment of anything else.
One of the most successful consumer entertainment system out there, and Microsoft is doing it. I will bash Microsoft any day, but to say that their only successful products are Windows and Office is pretty closed-minded.
The results? I have seen whole groups of graduate students run for the hills because their adviser treated them like this. I have seen bright people get so fed up that they give up on a research career and go work in industry. Perfectly capable people can become so demoralized that they forget whatever dreams they had, and turn their attention to getting paid large amounts of money to do boring or destructive work. I call that wasted talent, a result of uncontrolled, dehumanizing elitism that fails to develop a student's skills or abilities.
It is wrong to think that only those who lack talent will fall by the wayside; it is also those who have talent but who are not able to utilize that talent who will be left behind. Sometimes talented people need to be taught how to use their talents, not just berated when they go down the wrong path. I would say that most talented people require that sort of guidance, and that graduate school should be an apprenticeship, something that develops people rather than beating them up.
It is not just about graduate school. One the best undergraduate courses I took was the third year engineering design lab course. I pulled my first all-nighter there, I learned how much caffeine it takes to come to edge of psychosis, and I worked harder than ever before to complete my project. Yet I was proud of what I did, and that course developed my ability as an engineer -- something that no other course before or afterward really did. The instructor for the course did not berate students who were struggling, he met with them, he taught them how to manage an engineering project, and they were able to meet the requirements. When a group missed a deadline, they did not see dismissal or yelling; the instructor would reach out to them and see if they needed help. I was not the only person who came out of that course a better engineer: everyone came out better, regardless of their talents or innate abilities.
Its too bad you have to be horrible person to bring out the best in people.
It's a good thing that statement is false: you can bring out the best in people without being a horrible person. There is another management style, where a boss works with their employees to develop their skills and help them overcome their weaknesses. You can bring out the best in people without resorting to tyranny:
Well, here's the thing: static, easily ignored, and most importantly, advertisements that never prevent me from reading the page that I am trying read could be tolerated. Google's text-based ads are an example: annoying, but tolerably so.
Unfortunately, web advertisers (and TV advertisers) have proved that they cannot be trusted to keep the annoyance down to a tolerable level. Popups, pop-unders, Java ads, Flash ads, hover ads, autoplay, audio compression (to make things as loud as possible), etc. Websites also have this habit of having more advertisements than actual text, and then they divide their articles into multiple pages just to display even more ads. This is why we started blocking ads: we were too annoyed.
The clear benefit to you is that the website owner can afford to keep the website running
I have my doubts about this. I suspect that if everyone installed ABP tomorrow, the web would adapt -- not just with paywalls.
Which lasted until there were a significant number of non-researchers connected to the Internet, at which point online stores started to appear as well.
The second web was commercialized, with annoying ads (popup, autoplay, with sound, garish, etc.). Part of the reason they were seen as annoying is that they weren't anything you'd be interested in.
No, the ads were annoying because they would slow computers down by eating CPU cycles, they would play music that people were not expected and which was not that good, they would open windows that people did not want or expect, and so forth. These are just as annoying whether or not you are interested in whatever product is being hawked.
Say you've got a general-interest magazine, like Time. What ads are advertisers supposed to show you? For senior diseases? For Corvettes? Show anything, and it's bound to annoy major parts of the audience.
That is the problem with unsolicited advertising: it annoys people. Always. Regardless of whether or not it is something people might actually be interested in. Targeted ads are not any less annoying than any other sort of unsolicited advertising. The only advertisements that do not annoy people are those which people actually seek out -- the sorts of ads that you get when you use Craigslist or Google Shopping.
The current web has it about right: no popups, no autoplay, no sound.
That is not because the advertisers suddenly realized that being annoying is bad, it is because browsers stopped letting them create those things. Now we have hover ads, flash ads, and other annoyances, and browser makers are not stopping advertisers anymore, because they are now in bed with them.
You get shown the stuff that you've shown an interest in.
...and I do not click on it, because it is annoying, because I have no need for whatever is being advertised, and because when I visit a website, it is because I want to see what is on that website, not because I want to go shopping for something else. Which is why I used ABP, and which is why I fast forward through the previews on DVDs, and why I go to the bathroom when there are advertisements on TV. The only advertisements I do not ignore are those that I specifically request, because those are the only ones that are even remotely helpful for me.
See, that is why advertisers were not content to advertise to adults. Adults ignore unsolicited ads. That is why advertisers started targeting children (who nag at their parents to buy what they see advertised to them) and teenagers (who can be tricked into thinking they are not giving in to advertisements; see e.g. MTV).
And people that absolutely can't stand ads (for whatever reason), can still turn them off.
No, people who do not want unsolicited advertisements (maybe I should save on keystrokes and just use the word "spam") cannot simply "turn them off" -- we need to install extra software (ad blocking software), disable Javascript, and take additional precautions to prevent shady companies from tracking us. Even after doing all that, advertisers still fight us; we are in a technological arms race with them, because they simply cannot take "no" for an answer. DNT was meant to give advertisers a way to show that they do actually respect our wishes; it seems that they do not, which is why we need to get back to pushing ABP, NoScript, Ghostery, Tor, and all the other defensive measures that we need just to keep our peace.
The problem with your argument is that you are pushing for an opt-out system, one in which people have to be informed enough, patient enough, and technically capable enough to protect themselves from advertisers. What really need is an opt-in system, so that people who actually want unsolicited adver
If you are only going to allow people to visit your website when it turns a profit for you, why not skip the technological arms race entirely and just use this "new" idea:
Oh, what, you are worried that all those people who run blogs at no cost to their users and without advertising might run you out of business? Sounds like you are the one with an entitlement problem in that case...
Not when it is at my expense, without my permission, and without providing a clear benefit to me. Tracking my browsing habits without first asking me? Spinning my CPU, eating up my bandwidth (and if I am on a cell connection, that is expensive), and preventing me from reading the articles I wanted to read? If that is how you make money, then I will install ABP and deny you your money.
Often there's only room for one community in a particular space
Indeed; sci.crypt on Usenet comes to mind. Funny how nobody can "lose interest" in "running" sci.crypt, because no single person is responsible for running it.
Maybe the model of the web is just not the right model for an online community. Maybe a peer-to-peer model is better. We could build it right into web browsers if we were willing to, and create a better way to run obscure, low-budget blogs and forums. Of course, we would first need to convince browser makers that the only people whose interests matter is their users, which seems like an uphill battle (after all, if browser makers cared about user interests, DNT would not have been created; we would have just made ABP a standard feature).
Their users are already OK with ads being a tradeoff for free, good content.
No, most users have no idea what is happening, nor that there is a way to stop it. That is one of the things that is being exploited: ignorance.
Let's put it this way: nobody has ever complained about me installing ABP on their computer. I have received thanks from some people, who found that websites were easier to read without the advertisements. These are not people who agreed to a tradeoff; they never knew they were trading anything, they only knew that by paying for Internet service they were getting access to those websites.
It's a great bargain,
No, it's a trap. Bargains are things that people agree to, and no advertiser has actually asked for my agreement in being tracked. Bargains are not opt-out, they are opt-in. Craigslist is where you go for a bargain: you tell Craigslist what you want, and they show you advertising for it (and they don't need to track you around the web to figure out what ads to show you! Amazing!).
at any time I can just turn off JavaScript to not see that ads
This is not true. While keeping Javascript disabled helps with advertising, there are numerous websites that will not render at all without Javascript enabled, and some that create a hover ad and insist that you use Javascript to get rid of it -- thus making reading an article impossible without either enabling Javascript or installing ABP.
The problem with online advertisers is that they do not actually care about whether or not you get a chance to read the page you were trying to read. In fact, they want you to leave that page by clicking on an advertisement. That is why popups became so popular: advertisers found a new way to annoy people, and they did not care about whether or not those people were actually being annoyed, as long as they were clicking on the ads. That is why browsers made popup blocking a default feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Well probability will be needed for information theory, error correcting codes, and cryptography. I am not sure if that is how detailed this course is going to get though.
As for the layout of memory, I would just guess that they might talk about security and e.g. buffer overflows.
I love the concept, but there is a problem: your prerequisites will exclude the overwhelming majority of non-programmers, and might even exclude a few novice programmers. Probability and how memory is laid out in a computer are the biggest issues here; even many computer science programs do not cover these topics until the second or third year.
Why not just judge the team itself then, and let the immediate manager for that team decide who is valuable? A team will have goals that fit somewhere into the broader organizational goals; individuals on the team can advance those goals in different ways.
Let's say, as an example, that you have two programmers on a team, Alice and Bob. Alice writes large amounts of code, which has few bugs and which works consistently, and she is an expert in the languages and libraries that are used by the team. Bob is not great at writing code and does not have the language expertise that Alice has, but he is great at solving problems and figuring out what code needs to be written. If Bob is not around, Alice produces less because she is not as good at problem solving; if Alice is not around, Bob tries to write the code and does a terrible job. Can you really say that one of these employees is "better" or "more valuable" than the other? What about Catherine, the person who is a mediocre coder and a mediocre problem solver, but who is great at keeping the team's morale up and who can help motivate people to meet deadlines (but who is not officially in a management position, and who maybe lacks the qualifications when it comes to organizing budgets or making tough hiring or firing decisions)?
I think you are confusing "talent" with "confidence." People can be talented without being confident, and I have seen such people shattered by the sort of teaching approach you are proposing. I have been in graduate school for a while now (quite a bit more than two years), and I have seen both sides of this spectrum. On one side, there is a long line of people who abandoned their dreams and who wound up applying a fraction of their talent to whatever mundane corporate job offered the most money. On the other side, there is a long line of people who discovered the true extent of their talent, and who went on to do great things.
The fact that this approach happened to work for you, combined with the fact that (at least in your opinion) you happen to be talented, does not mean that this is an approach that works well for talented people in general, nor does it mean that another approach would not have been equally great or perhaps better for you.
Since you are apparently afraid that I might be a stalker, I won't press you for details. I can only tell you what I have seen, as someone who is in a demanding environment (publish or perish and all that) where it is possible to compare different teaching styles. The fact that you keep dismissing criticism of Via Negativa, by either assuming that when I refer to people abandoning their dreams I must be talking about myself or by pushing "no true Scotsmen" arguments says a lot about you. Perhaps you should go out and see what really happens in top graduate programs in science, math, and engineering disciplines before talking about the virtues of Via Negativa.
I think the more likely explanation is that you read about Via Negativa in a novel and it appealed to your worldview. Get back to us when you have had the chance to see it in action, or perhaps when you can come up with a more concrete example of its results than some vague reference to professional athletes.
Given what I have seen of law enforcement and how they think about civil rights, they may have been preparing an investigation and thus installed some equipment without activating it. You know, the standard CALEA excuse: we are not spying on you, we have not hit the "start spying" button to actually collect information; those wiretapping machines are just so that we do not have to move our equipment there later!
how much have you paid to slashdot today?
Slashdot is well known and popular because of its users -- people come here to read comments and have discussions, to the point where they need to be reminded to read the articles. Slashdot does not need to pay people to write things, moderate, etc. This is an online community, not some curated experience.
slashdot requires 16 web servers, 7 db servers, 2 db read-only servers, 2 load balancers, and 3 misc systems.
I manage that many computers in my spare time, and unlike the systems I voluntarily deal with, Slashdot only needs a handful of applications to work (you might even say Slashdot only needs one application to work, but I suspect this is divided into several parts). Slashdot has a high load to deal with, but you are not talking about users running arbitrary applications.
If anything, I would say that Slashdot-style websites would be the winners if everyone installed ABP. Websites where the only operating costs are keeping a handful of servers online are websites whose costs can be covered by other means if necessary -- micropayments, merchandising, etc. If that is impossible, then the web needs to start being decentralized, users participating in serving the websites they visit (a P2P revival, built right into your browser).
So yeah, the users support Slashdot, because if we were not commenting on articles and arguing with each other then nobody would visit Slashdot.
So does that mean my Adblock Plus/NoScript combo is killing jobs?
Not when the study includes sites like Amazon and Craiglist.
Cocaine and heroin were subject to prohibition policies as early as 1914, under the Harrison Act. Nothing was revived by anyone.
Do you remember how well prohibition worked?
I think you need to switch to the present tense. Prohibition is not over, and the list of prohibited drugs keeps growing.
Part of the DEA's mission is to ensure that the tobacco industry remains profitable (and other drug-making industries: alcohol, pharmaceuticals, coffee, etc.). The drug war has always been about helping those industries that have friends in high places.
Besides, how are politicians supposed to get their cigars? Every president in US history, including the current one, has used tobacco in one form or another.
Hiring any addict has costs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
Ever see what happens when a three-cup-per-day person cannot get their fix? Irritability, sluggishness, etc. Yet here is what I see in offices around the country, even in places like New York City:
http://www.keurig.com/
Yes, we must ensure that those damned addicts stay out of our workplaces...
It is the difference between the government revoking your business license and the government sending a paramilitary team into your house.
I suspect there are better ways to get all of the above, but that is irrelevant. Does the submitter think that people who use other programming languages do not make such catastrophic mistakes? I think history says otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
Bugs can be costly, regardless of whether those bugs are in spreadsheets or Ada programs.
When done properly, students know that the criticism isn't of them as people, or of their work in general, but of the specific work that's been presented to the teacher at that point. Done right, the student knows the teacher cares for them and wants the best from them.
In other words, if the student is already confident and highly motivated, they might benefit from this approach. Meanwhile, talented students who are not so confident in their own abilities get to have their hopes, dreams, and motivation shattered, and to wind up wasting their talent because someone told them that they are not really that talented.
Via Negativa is for those aiming to be amongst the best in the world
No, it is for teachers who lack the patience or perhaps ability to deal with students who are not confident and talented. The sort of people who are waiting for the next Einstein to wander into their office and complete a PhD in a year, the people who think their time and knowledge is wasted on anyone else. It is not as though students who benefit from that sort of treatment would not do equally well with teachers who are not so arrogant; if they are exceptionally talented, they only really need a teacher who is not boring them or holding them back.
That is the real issue here: not that Via Negativa fails for the 2% of students that it is good for, but that other methods of teaching are good for a superset of those students.
Going back to the major topic, creative jobs at Apple are for people who are amongst the best at their specialism in the world. Most people would do better to work for a less demanding company.
Really, the best in the world? So, where are Apple's amazing innovations? See, when I think of the best creative minds in the world, I think of people who make revolutionary things. No, a fancy cell phone that uses technologies invented by others is not revolutionary; these are the examples of revolutionary things created by the best creative minds in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_cryptography
Meanwhile, when Apple took GUI, preemptive multitasking, and Siri and berated their engineers until those innovations looked pretty in Apple products. That is not the sort of work that "the best" creative minds are doing, that is just the sort of work that sells well.
At Microsoft, for example, they obviously have a large R&D budget, but continued to promote the same two already successful products (Windows and Office) to the detriment of anything else.
Really, only Windows and Office? What about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox
One of the most successful consumer entertainment system out there, and Microsoft is doing it. I will bash Microsoft any day, but to say that their only successful products are Windows and Office is pretty closed-minded.
the proof is in the results
The results? I have seen whole groups of graduate students run for the hills because their adviser treated them like this. I have seen bright people get so fed up that they give up on a research career and go work in industry. Perfectly capable people can become so demoralized that they forget whatever dreams they had, and turn their attention to getting paid large amounts of money to do boring or destructive work. I call that wasted talent, a result of uncontrolled, dehumanizing elitism that fails to develop a student's skills or abilities.
It is wrong to think that only those who lack talent will fall by the wayside; it is also those who have talent but who are not able to utilize that talent who will be left behind. Sometimes talented people need to be taught how to use their talents, not just berated when they go down the wrong path. I would say that most talented people require that sort of guidance, and that graduate school should be an apprenticeship, something that develops people rather than beating them up.
It is not just about graduate school. One the best undergraduate courses I took was the third year engineering design lab course. I pulled my first all-nighter there, I learned how much caffeine it takes to come to edge of psychosis, and I worked harder than ever before to complete my project. Yet I was proud of what I did, and that course developed my ability as an engineer -- something that no other course before or afterward really did. The instructor for the course did not berate students who were struggling, he met with them, he taught them how to manage an engineering project, and they were able to meet the requirements. When a group missed a deadline, they did not see dismissal or yelling; the instructor would reach out to them and see if they needed help. I was not the only person who came out of that course a better engineer: everyone came out better, regardless of their talents or innate abilities.
Its too bad you have to be horrible person to bring out the best in people.
It's a good thing that statement is false: you can bring out the best in people without being a horrible person. There is another management style, where a boss works with their employees to develop their skills and help them overcome their weaknesses. You can bring out the best in people without resorting to tyranny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner
Unfortunately, web advertisers (and TV advertisers) have proved that they cannot be trusted to keep the annoyance down to a tolerable level. Popups, pop-unders, Java ads, Flash ads, hover ads, autoplay, audio compression (to make things as loud as possible), etc. Websites also have this habit of having more advertisements than actual text, and then they divide their articles into multiple pages just to display even more ads. This is why we started blocking ads: we were too annoyed.
The clear benefit to you is that the website owner can afford to keep the website running
I have my doubts about this. I suspect that if everyone installed ABP tomorrow, the web would adapt -- not just with paywalls.
The first web was just mostly .edu site.
Which lasted until there were a significant number of non-researchers connected to the Internet, at which point online stores started to appear as well.
The second web was commercialized, with annoying ads (popup, autoplay, with sound, garish, etc.). Part of the reason they were seen as annoying is that they weren't anything you'd be interested in.
No, the ads were annoying because they would slow computers down by eating CPU cycles, they would play music that people were not expected and which was not that good, they would open windows that people did not want or expect, and so forth. These are just as annoying whether or not you are interested in whatever product is being hawked.
Say you've got a general-interest magazine, like Time. What ads are advertisers supposed to show you? For senior diseases? For Corvettes? Show anything, and it's bound to annoy major parts of the audience.
That is the problem with unsolicited advertising: it annoys people. Always. Regardless of whether or not it is something people might actually be interested in. Targeted ads are not any less annoying than any other sort of unsolicited advertising. The only advertisements that do not annoy people are those which people actually seek out -- the sorts of ads that you get when you use Craigslist or Google Shopping.
The current web has it about right: no popups, no autoplay, no sound.
That is not because the advertisers suddenly realized that being annoying is bad, it is because browsers stopped letting them create those things. Now we have hover ads, flash ads, and other annoyances, and browser makers are not stopping advertisers anymore, because they are now in bed with them.
You get shown the stuff that you've shown an interest in.
See, that is why advertisers were not content to advertise to adults. Adults ignore unsolicited ads. That is why advertisers started targeting children (who nag at their parents to buy what they see advertised to them) and teenagers (who can be tricked into thinking they are not giving in to advertisements; see e.g. MTV).
And people that absolutely can't stand ads (for whatever reason), can still turn them off.
No, people who do not want unsolicited advertisements (maybe I should save on keystrokes and just use the word "spam") cannot simply "turn them off" -- we need to install extra software (ad blocking software), disable Javascript, and take additional precautions to prevent shady companies from tracking us. Even after doing all that, advertisers still fight us; we are in a technological arms race with them, because they simply cannot take "no" for an answer. DNT was meant to give advertisers a way to show that they do actually respect our wishes; it seems that they do not, which is why we need to get back to pushing ABP, NoScript, Ghostery, Tor, and all the other defensive measures that we need just to keep our peace.
The problem with your argument is that you are pushing for an opt-out system, one in which people have to be informed enough, patient enough, and technically capable enough to protect themselves from advertisers. What really need is an opt-in system, so that people who actually want unsolicited adver
If you are only going to allow people to visit your website when it turns a profit for you, why not skip the technological arms race entirely and just use this "new" idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall
Oh, what, you are worried that all those people who run blogs at no cost to their users and without advertising might run you out of business? Sounds like you are the one with an entitlement problem in that case...
If somebody wants to try to make money
Not when it is at my expense, without my permission, and without providing a clear benefit to me. Tracking my browsing habits without first asking me? Spinning my CPU, eating up my bandwidth (and if I am on a cell connection, that is expensive ), and preventing me from reading the articles I wanted to read? If that is how you make money, then I will install ABP and deny you your money.
Often there's only room for one community in a particular space
Indeed; sci.crypt on Usenet comes to mind. Funny how nobody can "lose interest" in "running" sci.crypt, because no single person is responsible for running it.
Maybe the model of the web is just not the right model for an online community. Maybe a peer-to-peer model is better. We could build it right into web browsers if we were willing to, and create a better way to run obscure, low-budget blogs and forums. Of course, we would first need to convince browser makers that the only people whose interests matter is their users, which seems like an uphill battle (after all, if browser makers cared about user interests, DNT would not have been created; we would have just made ABP a standard feature).
Their users are already OK with ads being a tradeoff for free, good content.
No, most users have no idea what is happening, nor that there is a way to stop it. That is one of the things that is being exploited: ignorance.
Let's put it this way: nobody has ever complained about me installing ABP on their computer. I have received thanks from some people, who found that websites were easier to read without the advertisements. These are not people who agreed to a tradeoff; they never knew they were trading anything, they only knew that by paying for Internet service they were getting access to those websites.
It's a great bargain,
No, it's a trap. Bargains are things that people agree to, and no advertiser has actually asked for my agreement in being tracked. Bargains are not opt-out, they are opt-in. Craigslist is where you go for a bargain: you tell Craigslist what you want, and they show you advertising for it (and they don't need to track you around the web to figure out what ads to show you! Amazing!).
at any time I can just turn off JavaScript to not see that ads
This is not true. While keeping Javascript disabled helps with advertising, there are numerous websites that will not render at all without Javascript enabled, and some that create a hover ad and insist that you use Javascript to get rid of it -- thus making reading an article impossible without either enabling Javascript or installing ABP.
The problem with online advertisers is that they do not actually care about whether or not you get a chance to read the page you were trying to read. In fact, they want you to leave that page by clicking on an advertisement. That is why popups became so popular: advertisers found a new way to annoy people, and they did not care about whether or not those people were actually being annoyed, as long as they were clicking on the ads. That is why browsers made popup blocking a default feature.