Calm down and read what the man has to say. I promise that he's not going to steal your lunch money and give you a wedgie.
No, he is going to sell me a laptop that will not allow me to install unapproved software, make copies of files, watch pornography, watch political cartoons, publish articles that are critical of the government, prevent the police from decrypting my emails, prevent me from removing OS features that are designed to spy on me, report me to my ISP if I am suspect of copyright infringement, and generally thwart and undermine my ability to use my computer the way I want to use it. He is factually wrong about users, although that steps from his general disrespect for the people who use his software (in his view of the world, they are not people; they are exploitable resources, and the fact that he contributed to open source projects has no bearing on that); people do recognize the difference between a PC and the kind of locked down devices that this guy wants (see, for example, the difficulty people have in accepting that a PS3 is a "computer," even if you attach a keyboard and mouse to the system).
The real irony is that this guy is posting his insulting, offensive, shallow diatribe on the Internet (why did he not try to get his message shown on cable TV, if "open is bad" and "closed is good?").
Okay exactly how is not being able to pirate a video game going to limit users in other legal activities.
How about, running a program that is not approved by whatever signing authority is in control of their phone?
The simple way to DRM this is a public private key encryption in which the game is tied to the device
What stops a user from giving copies of the private key to ther people?
As long as the developer can choose not to use that DRM and the apps that are DRMed are marked as such I have no problem with it. Let the market sort it out.
Translation: "Book of Capital, Chapter 1, verse 1: You shall have no gods before the Market, for the Market saved you from the soviets."
I'm calling BS on that one. I think there is entirely too much emphasis on theoretical, and not nearly enough vocational training in the US.
Really, not enough vocation training? What programming languages are taught in CS departments? What operating systems are the students required to use? How many schools are not demanding that their students use MS Word? How many electrical engineers are taught to use Matlab (and don't even try to claim that it is the best language for DSP)?
Vocational training does not mean sending people to a company to learn the exact work that will be done in particular position. The curricula in American schools are driven by what students will see "in the real world" and what skills students need to be "marketable," and not by what will give the students the best understanding of their field. I have pressed this issue at more than one university, and the answers are all basically the same; you would think that professors were taught what to say when they were in graduate school.
Its the core reason why so many companies are complaining about a lack of qualified applicants
No, it is because employers are too cheap and greedy to give new hires on site training. If people actually understood the field they were in, instead of just memorizing formulas, on site training would not be an issue; you would be taking someone who has developed their intellect and who understands how to think like a expert in their field, and showing that person what needs to be done in the job they were hired to do. It's not that a working understanding of the Church-Turing thesis implies that a person is ready to maintain a business critical software system, it is that a person who really understands computer science will not have difficulty with the training they receive once they are employed.
Realistically speaking, theoretical researchy type work...
This is a red herring; nobody is claiming that everyone needs to be prepared to do research level work. We are talking about an understanding of basic, fundamental results in a person's field of expertise. If you do not know what the fundamental theorem of Galois theory is, then you should not have a BS in math. If you do not know the significance of the Entscheidungsproblem, then you should not have a degree in CS. A bachelor's degree should indicate a certain level of expertise in a field, not just that a person has the vocational skills needed to get a job.
For the vast majority of jobs, formulaic approaches are just fine
Sure, until something happens that you and the other people in your profession didn't learn a formula for:
There is also the more philosophical problem with claiming that people are able to make choices in their own interest when they have never been encouraged to think for themselves. Supposedly, in our enlightened capitalist/democratic system, people spend their lives making decisions that advance their own goals; we cannot even pretend that is the case if we do not encourage students to develop their intellect. Courses in philosophy and humanities serve that purpose, and have nothing to do with vocational training (and are generally absent in two year vocational programs).
To put it another way, we cannot blame people for being uneducated if we do not have an education system that goes beyond vocational training. If the general public is a herd of sheep, it is because the education system is failing.
This requires no real theoretical understanding, just practical "how do I make this fit" knowledge.
Until you run out of formulas and you do not have time to get trained to use more formulas. That is how you wind up with the sort of bizarre programs described here:
Given that the Kahn lectures fall squarely in the "memorize formulas" category, I would say that the price is not even right -- that sort of education is detrimental to students, because it fails to develop their intellect. When a corporation needs someone who has memorized some formulas, they pay the person to memorize the formulas -- and I do not think it is unfair to suggest that if Kahn cannot do better than "memorize these formulas," then students should demand payment for spending their time watching the videos.
the teachers unions better cobble together some damn good arguments for why they deserve the compensation and job protections they get, if Kahn offers way better bang for the buck.
That is basically the point of the article -- the Kahn academy is not better than a classroom teacher, and it is not a substitute for the guidance of an expert. The Kahn academy is being criticized (and has been repeatedly criticized) for falling into the trap of giving formulaic approaches to problem solving, the typical vocational-minded philosophy on education that has been so destructive to the education system in America (and possibly else, but I am not familiar enough to comment).
What do you think is more important: developing a student's intellect and preparing them to find solutions to problems not covered in the classroom, or having students memorize a bunch of formulas (and this is not just a math thing -- this is a problem in a lot of fields)? That Kahn academy seems to be based on the idea that teaching a student lots of formulas is the goal; if the students encounter problems that were not covered, then they should just watch another video, right? That is the kind of education that students should be paid to participate in -- free is not even a low enough price.
There should be exactly one goal in online education: to improve the quality of education. There is nothing else to discuss until that matter is settled, and it is nowhere near settled. "Transforming education" is only good if the transformation yields better education.
Here in the USA, education has become almost exclusively a matter of vocational training. That has been extremely destructive to education and to the society that education serves (and make no mistake, what is bad for education is bad for society). We spend all our time teaching people formulaic approaches to problems, and almost never take the time to help students develop their intellect or their ability to develop new approaches to the problems they need to solve. If the Kahn academy is not addressing that problem, then it is not addressing the most important issue that faces education here.
To put it another way, look at the state of computer education in schools. Students are taught how to use the prepackaged solutions that their school districts buy, and those students who dare to go beyond "here is how you make the font bigger" are often punished (you know, because they are dangerous hackers who know how to get a terminal opened on a system that is programmed to stop them from writing their own software). Even when we do bother to teach people to write software, we give them formulaic approaches to solving programming problems -- when I TA'd a CS101 course, the students were required to have their programs formatted in a specific way, to write their programs in a specific language, and my personal favorite rule, they were forbidden to use language features that they had not been taught about.
I do not want to discredit online education, since it may very well enable a better approach in some topics (I doubt all -- one cannot really judge a sculpture without being able to see it first hand). However, given that I have not heard anyone express any alternative philosophy on education (it's purpose or how best to carry it out), I have doubts. If someone believes that education is about training people for a job, they are not likely to develop anything other than a vocational training program.
It should not even be a question of "merging." SSO should mean that I receive a certificate that can be used to log in to any website that trusts the SSO service which signed my certificate. It should be something a website can accept without having to do anything more than get the SSO public key.
I've never been made aware of a product due to an ad, never decided to buy something due to an ad, and never decided to buy or get behind some other product/service/person as a result of an ad.
Then you have never been forced to spend your money economically. Quite a bit of furniture in my home was purchased on Craigslist (I am a grad student -- money is not easy to come by), and when my family came over at the beginning of the summer and I needed a grill, I looked at advertisements to find a grill that I could afford. Advertising can be constructive and useful -- when it is not so annoying that you have no choice but to automatically block it.
The problem with advertisers is their greed. What I said in the above paragraph is true for adults, because once you are out living on your own, there are things that you need to buy -- food, clothing, tools, insurance, etc. Advertisers are not content with that, despite the fact that they have a market that will never go away or become obsolete (regardless of new technology, adults will always need goods and services). Thus they started to target children, trying to get the kids to nag their parents for unnecessary things. Despite their success at corrupting children, advertisers were still not satisfied, and in the 1980s they started to perfect ways to trick teenagers into thinking that they were not choosing the music that advertisers were try to sell them (MTV).
Yet despite having successfully corrupted children, despite having successfully corrupted teenage rebelliousness, advertisers were still not satisfied, and we all know what they corrupted next. When they saw the Internet, advertisers saw a chance to corrupt another wonderful thing (I guess some might say that teenage rebellion is not "wonderful"). Websites are viewed by advertisers as a way to get even more money. After all, now they can take over your computer and prevent you from doing what you wanted to do until you looked at, clicked on, or interacted with their advertisements -- what a great system!
Thus we install ABP, and when we need to buy things, we manually search for advertisements.
The only successful targeted internet ad company that I know of is Amazon.
There is a reason for that: targetted ads creep people out. Amazon can get away with it because people are not surprised to see that Amazon knows what they buy -- it is not more creepy than walking into a hardware store, putting a hammer and some lumber in front of the cashier, and being asked if you also need nails.
On the other hand, when I am reading an email from my mother about Aunt So-and-so's kidney stones, it seems invasive to have advertisements about kidney health show up. It is even worse when those ads start popping up on other websites. Remember the story about Target discovering a teenager's pregnancy before her father? For all the talk about how we do not have privacy, people still seem to expect some amount of privacy, and they still get angry when their privacy is violated.
No, capitalism seeks a steady state -- the optimal strategy for production and consumption (in a game theoretic sense). Prices cannot fall indefinitely; eventually, you either hit a physical limit on how efficiently goods can be produced, or you hit an economic limit, where lower prices would not be competitive or profitable (mature markets).
Also, inflation has nothing to do with costs increasing; inflation means the value of a single unit of currency decreases, but the real cost (inflation adjusted) of goods is determined by economic and physical constraints.
Adblock is great until all of the sites you enjoy for free all go under because their ad revenue couldn't sustain the site.
How about demanding payment for every time an ad is viewed instead of just for clicks? That would take away much of the incentive to make ads annoying, and then people wouldn't be turning to ABP in such great numbers. We should also be developing systems for respecting privacy while still showed targeted advertisements (PIR comes to mind), systems for proving that ads were viewed without revealing who viewed them, and so forth.
To put it another way, when I actually need something, I look at advertisements -- static advertisements that are not based on the content of my email. That's what all web advertising should be: unintrusive, respectful, and constructive.
When we needed a couch, you know what we did? We went to a website that is dedicated to advertising: Craigslist. We found a couch, we bought it, and it worked out great.
What you hate are the ads that have become commonplace on the web, because let's be honest: those are annoying, invasive, and they get worse with each passing year.
Internet adds will be far more useful if we could somehow trust the content in them.
Internet ads would be more useful if they were like newspaper ads -- a short message, maybe a picture, without any animation, without trying to block anyone's view of what they are reading, without tracking your browsing history. The revenue model should be the same as well: pay per view, not per click, because a view of an advertisement is what advertising is about (why should the advertisers get that for free?).
We could even make ads that are targeted to a person's locale, and we could do so in a privacy-respecting manner -- there is both the trivial way (send the browser all local ads plus a default, and have the appropriate one selected offline) and the asymptotically better approach using crypto (i.e. private information retrieval). The only problem, of course, is the amount of money that has been invested in finding more effective ways to invade everyone's privacy, and the fact that the big Internet advertisers do not really care about whether or not they are annoying (which is why ABP should be promoted and installed by default).
Adblock is not the cause of the problem, it is the reaction to the problem -- the problem of an adversarial web where advertisements try to take over your browser, where advertisers are hell-bent on tracking your browsing habits, where your browser can freeze, crash, or otherwise be rendered unusable by some poorly coded advertisement, and where trying to read an article become difficult because of an advertisement that covers the text.
Advertising would have been a fine model for funding websites, if it were based on traditional revenue models (paying for each view of the advertisement, rather than each click) and traditional presentations (based on a person seeing the ad, not based on a person interacting with it). The shortsightedness of website operators who allow invasive and obnoxious ads on their sites combined with the greed of advertisers is what created this situation, and ABP is just the last logical step in the process (i.e. the users for whom the Internet exists fighting back).
Adblock and related software is a natural reaction to the invasive, annoying advertising that became the norm on the web. Nobody wants to have their browsing habits tracked everywhere, nobody wants to have the article they are reading suddenly vanish and get replaced with an advertisement, nobody wants their CPU time wasted on animating an ad. Advertising on the web should have mimicked advertising on paper -- passive, less obnoxious, and easily ignored (at least conciously) -- and the revenue model should have mimicked paper as well. "Get paid for clicks" is the problem here; that's how we got into this horrible situation, and that's why ABP is basically a must for anyone who uses a browser.
There is no tragedy of the commons here, there are just greedy idiots, shortsited website operators, and an Internet that has turned into an adversarial game.
The police are most likely to behave as you suggest when they either have the wrong address, or the offense involved is one prone to involvement with violence, such as drug cases
I know the media paints a scary picture, but most drug dealers or producers do not turn their homes into fortresses. SWAT deployment should be limited to extreme cases, where there is good reason to believe that the suspects are heavily armed and dangerous. Right now, SWAT assaults are routinely used to execute search and arrest warrants, regardless of there being any suspicion of the suspect being armed. Here are some typical examples of the excessive use of SWAT:
There is no need for SWAT to arrest a man accused of downloading child pornography, and there is certainly no excuse for deploying a SWAT team to arrest someone who is accused of illegally importing orchids. These are not armed robbery suspects or terrorists, and there is no reason to think they would have even put up a fight had the SWAT team not shown up. Yes, by the way, these are typical examples:
The executive branch has zero power to declare laws, although it can regulate
The executive branch has the power, under the Controlled Substances Act, to declare that a drug is illegal to possess or distribute for up to a year without any congressional or democratic process whatsoever -- and the same organization that has been delegated that power, the DEA, is also responsible for enforcing drug laws, which includes such declarations. A ban is not "regulation" by any sane definition of the word, and sending people to prison for possessing a substance is not "regulating" that substance in any way. The executive branch also has the power to overrule recommendations on drug scheduling to create bans that are not supported by regulatory agencies like HHS or the FDA.
This is not about "regulation" -- this is about a law enforcement agency, the DEA, which is part of the executive branch, having both the power to declare a drug illegal and the final say in whether or not drugs will be banned or regulated. That same agency is responsible for enforcing the very laws it can enact.
None of what you wrote negates what I wrote. The bureaucracy is as dependent on the legislature and president as always.
Except that over the past 40 years, more and more power has shifted away from the legislature and towards the executive. That is not "as always" -- it is a modern trend, and it is a trend with immediate and real consequences.
Except that third parties are left at a deliberate disadvantage by those in power, the police invade the homes of unarmed citizens and using grenades and assault rifles, and the executive branch of government has the power to declare laws and then arrest people for violating those laws...
Yes, but the question was why other companies are not like this, and the answer is that for most companies, it is not clear that doing this would be competitive or profitable. Jack Daniels has been working very hard to make themselves seem classy, because they want to compete with high end bourbon and scotch brands (I don't think they have a chance if they continue to make whiskey their traditional way). Most companies are not marketing themselves as "classy," because it would not be profitable for them to do so in the first place -- who wants a "classy lawnmower" or a "classy backhoe?"
Sure, but Jack Daniels has worked for decades to build that image (probably to overcome the "outlaw redneck" image that comes to mind); how would a company like Microsoft pull this off?
"How can we make an algorithm that works in an environment full of enemies that try to mislead it?"
This sounds like it is closely related to secure multiparty computation, where the goal is to correctly compute some function on multiple parties' inputs without revealing those inputs. This has been researched since the 1980s, and there have been numerous results on feasibility and impossibility, as well as several practical systems (including at least one that was used in the real world). It is likely that both approaches can be used to solve the same set of problems, but that the machine learning approach is more natural for some problems and MPC is more natural for others.
I have a mental image of a future without captcha, where we rely on things like HashCash instead -- slowing down spammers, rather than defeating them entirely.
I found that quitting coffee came with headaches and tiredness for a day or two -- not the worst thing in the world (people go through worse with tobacco) but not something to shrug at.
I disagree; D.A.R.E. has been overwhelmingly successful at convincing people of the legitimacy of the war on drugs and the paramilitary police that were created in the name of that war. Hardly anyone questions the fact that we have soldiers (but with "POLICE" or "DEA" written on their uniforms) attacking unarmed civilians just to serve an arrest warrant. Hardly anyone questions the fact that the executive branch of government, through the Attorney General's office, now has the power to make and enforce drug laws, without democratic action. Hardly anyone questions the fact that the DEA, supposedly a law enforcement agency, has so much signals intelligence capability that the dictators of some nations have tried to demand the DEA's help in spying on political opponents.
How many propaganda programs have been so successful at convincing people that this sort of unwinding of a democratic system is the right thing to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Calm down and read what the man has to say. I promise that he's not going to steal your lunch money and give you a wedgie.
No, he is going to sell me a laptop that will not allow me to install unapproved software, make copies of files, watch pornography, watch political cartoons, publish articles that are critical of the government, prevent the police from decrypting my emails, prevent me from removing OS features that are designed to spy on me, report me to my ISP if I am suspect of copyright infringement, and generally thwart and undermine my ability to use my computer the way I want to use it. He is factually wrong about users, although that steps from his general disrespect for the people who use his software (in his view of the world, they are not people; they are exploitable resources, and the fact that he contributed to open source projects has no bearing on that); people do recognize the difference between a PC and the kind of locked down devices that this guy wants (see, for example, the difficulty people have in accepting that a PS3 is a "computer," even if you attach a keyboard and mouse to the system).
The real irony is that this guy is posting his insulting, offensive, shallow diatribe on the Internet (why did he not try to get his message shown on cable TV, if "open is bad" and "closed is good?").
Okay exactly how is not being able to pirate a video game going to limit users in other legal activities.
How about, running a program that is not approved by whatever signing authority is in control of their phone?
The simple way to DRM this is a public private key encryption in which the game is tied to the device
What stops a user from giving copies of the private key to ther people?
As long as the developer can choose not to use that DRM and the apps that are DRMed are marked as such I have no problem with it. Let the market sort it out.
Translation: "Book of Capital, Chapter 1, verse 1: You shall have no gods before the Market, for the Market saved you from the soviets."
I'm calling BS on that one. I think there is entirely too much emphasis on theoretical, and not nearly enough vocational training in the US.
Really, not enough vocation training? What programming languages are taught in CS departments? What operating systems are the students required to use? How many schools are not demanding that their students use MS Word? How many electrical engineers are taught to use Matlab (and don't even try to claim that it is the best language for DSP)?
Vocational training does not mean sending people to a company to learn the exact work that will be done in particular position. The curricula in American schools are driven by what students will see "in the real world" and what skills students need to be "marketable," and not by what will give the students the best understanding of their field. I have pressed this issue at more than one university, and the answers are all basically the same; you would think that professors were taught what to say when they were in graduate school.
Its the core reason why so many companies are complaining about a lack of qualified applicants
No, it is because employers are too cheap and greedy to give new hires on site training. If people actually understood the field they were in, instead of just memorizing formulas, on site training would not be an issue; you would be taking someone who has developed their intellect and who understands how to think like a expert in their field, and showing that person what needs to be done in the job they were hired to do. It's not that a working understanding of the Church-Turing thesis implies that a person is ready to maintain a business critical software system, it is that a person who really understands computer science will not have difficulty with the training they receive once they are employed.
Realistically speaking, theoretical researchy type work...
This is a red herring; nobody is claiming that everyone needs to be prepared to do research level work. We are talking about an understanding of basic, fundamental results in a person's field of expertise. If you do not know what the fundamental theorem of Galois theory is, then you should not have a BS in math. If you do not know the significance of the Entscheidungsproblem, then you should not have a degree in CS. A bachelor's degree should indicate a certain level of expertise in a field, not just that a person has the vocational skills needed to get a job.
For the vast majority of jobs, formulaic approaches are just fine
Sure, until something happens that you and the other people in your profession didn't learn a formula for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_potato_famine
There is also the more philosophical problem with claiming that people are able to make choices in their own interest when they have never been encouraged to think for themselves. Supposedly, in our enlightened capitalist/democratic system, people spend their lives making decisions that advance their own goals; we cannot even pretend that is the case if we do not encourage students to develop their intellect. Courses in philosophy and humanities serve that purpose, and have nothing to do with vocational training (and are generally absent in two year vocational programs).
To put it another way, we cannot blame people for being uneducated if we do not have an education system that goes beyond vocational training. If the general public is a herd of sheep, it is because the education system is failing.
This requires no real theoretical understanding, just practical "how do I make this fit" knowledge.
Until you run out of formulas and you do not have time to get trained to use more formulas. That is how you wind up with the sort of bizarre programs described here:
Given that the Kahn lectures fall squarely in the "memorize formulas" category, I would say that the price is not even right -- that sort of education is detrimental to students, because it fails to develop their intellect. When a corporation needs someone who has memorized some formulas, they pay the person to memorize the formulas -- and I do not think it is unfair to suggest that if Kahn cannot do better than "memorize these formulas," then students should demand payment for spending their time watching the videos.
the teachers unions better cobble together some damn good arguments for why they deserve the compensation and job protections they get, if Kahn offers way better bang for the buck.
That is basically the point of the article -- the Kahn academy is not better than a classroom teacher, and it is not a substitute for the guidance of an expert. The Kahn academy is being criticized (and has been repeatedly criticized) for falling into the trap of giving formulaic approaches to problem solving, the typical vocational-minded philosophy on education that has been so destructive to the education system in America (and possibly else, but I am not familiar enough to comment).
What do you think is more important: developing a student's intellect and preparing them to find solutions to problems not covered in the classroom, or having students memorize a bunch of formulas (and this is not just a math thing -- this is a problem in a lot of fields)? That Kahn academy seems to be based on the idea that teaching a student lots of formulas is the goal; if the students encounter problems that were not covered, then they should just watch another video, right? That is the kind of education that students should be paid to participate in -- free is not even a low enough price.
There should be exactly one goal in online education: to improve the quality of education. There is nothing else to discuss until that matter is settled, and it is nowhere near settled. "Transforming education" is only good if the transformation yields better education.
Here in the USA, education has become almost exclusively a matter of vocational training. That has been extremely destructive to education and to the society that education serves (and make no mistake, what is bad for education is bad for society). We spend all our time teaching people formulaic approaches to problems, and almost never take the time to help students develop their intellect or their ability to develop new approaches to the problems they need to solve. If the Kahn academy is not addressing that problem, then it is not addressing the most important issue that faces education here.
To put it another way, look at the state of computer education in schools. Students are taught how to use the prepackaged solutions that their school districts buy, and those students who dare to go beyond "here is how you make the font bigger" are often punished (you know, because they are dangerous hackers who know how to get a terminal opened on a system that is programmed to stop them from writing their own software). Even when we do bother to teach people to write software, we give them formulaic approaches to solving programming problems -- when I TA'd a CS101 course, the students were required to have their programs formatted in a specific way, to write their programs in a specific language, and my personal favorite rule, they were forbidden to use language features that they had not been taught about.
I do not want to discredit online education, since it may very well enable a better approach in some topics (I doubt all -- one cannot really judge a sculpture without being able to see it first hand). However, given that I have not heard anyone express any alternative philosophy on education (it's purpose or how best to carry it out), I have doubts. If someone believes that education is about training people for a job, they are not likely to develop anything other than a vocational training program.
It should not even be a question of "merging." SSO should mean that I receive a certificate that can be used to log in to any website that trusts the SSO service which signed my certificate. It should be something a website can accept without having to do anything more than get the SSO public key.
I've never been made aware of a product due to an ad, never decided to buy something due to an ad, and never decided to buy or get behind some other product/service/person as a result of an ad.
Then you have never been forced to spend your money economically. Quite a bit of furniture in my home was purchased on Craigslist (I am a grad student -- money is not easy to come by), and when my family came over at the beginning of the summer and I needed a grill, I looked at advertisements to find a grill that I could afford. Advertising can be constructive and useful -- when it is not so annoying that you have no choice but to automatically block it.
The problem with advertisers is their greed. What I said in the above paragraph is true for adults, because once you are out living on your own, there are things that you need to buy -- food, clothing, tools, insurance, etc. Advertisers are not content with that, despite the fact that they have a market that will never go away or become obsolete (regardless of new technology, adults will always need goods and services). Thus they started to target children, trying to get the kids to nag their parents for unnecessary things. Despite their success at corrupting children, advertisers were still not satisfied, and in the 1980s they started to perfect ways to trick teenagers into thinking that they were not choosing the music that advertisers were try to sell them (MTV).
Yet despite having successfully corrupted children, despite having successfully corrupted teenage rebelliousness, advertisers were still not satisfied, and we all know what they corrupted next. When they saw the Internet, advertisers saw a chance to corrupt another wonderful thing (I guess some might say that teenage rebellion is not "wonderful"). Websites are viewed by advertisers as a way to get even more money. After all, now they can take over your computer and prevent you from doing what you wanted to do until you looked at, clicked on, or interacted with their advertisements -- what a great system!
Thus we install ABP, and when we need to buy things, we manually search for advertisements.
The only successful targeted internet ad company that I know of is Amazon.
There is a reason for that: targetted ads creep people out. Amazon can get away with it because people are not surprised to see that Amazon knows what they buy -- it is not more creepy than walking into a hardware store, putting a hammer and some lumber in front of the cashier, and being asked if you also need nails.
On the other hand, when I am reading an email from my mother about Aunt So-and-so's kidney stones, it seems invasive to have advertisements about kidney health show up. It is even worse when those ads start popping up on other websites. Remember the story about Target discovering a teenager's pregnancy before her father? For all the talk about how we do not have privacy, people still seem to expect some amount of privacy, and they still get angry when their privacy is violated.
No, capitalism seeks a steady state -- the optimal strategy for production and consumption (in a game theoretic sense). Prices cannot fall indefinitely; eventually, you either hit a physical limit on how efficiently goods can be produced, or you hit an economic limit, where lower prices would not be competitive or profitable (mature markets).
Also, inflation has nothing to do with costs increasing; inflation means the value of a single unit of currency decreases, but the real cost (inflation adjusted) of goods is determined by economic and physical constraints.
Adblock is great until all of the sites you enjoy for free all go under because their ad revenue couldn't sustain the site.
How about demanding payment for every time an ad is viewed instead of just for clicks? That would take away much of the incentive to make ads annoying, and then people wouldn't be turning to ABP in such great numbers. We should also be developing systems for respecting privacy while still showed targeted advertisements (PIR comes to mind), systems for proving that ads were viewed without revealing who viewed them, and so forth.
To put it another way, when I actually need something, I look at advertisements -- static advertisements that are not based on the content of my email. That's what all web advertising should be: unintrusive, respectful, and constructive.
When we needed a couch, you know what we did? We went to a website that is dedicated to advertising: Craigslist. We found a couch, we bought it, and it worked out great.
What you hate are the ads that have become commonplace on the web, because let's be honest: those are annoying, invasive, and they get worse with each passing year.
Internet adds will be far more useful if we could somehow trust the content in them.
Internet ads would be more useful if they were like newspaper ads -- a short message, maybe a picture, without any animation, without trying to block anyone's view of what they are reading, without tracking your browsing history. The revenue model should be the same as well: pay per view, not per click, because a view of an advertisement is what advertising is about (why should the advertisers get that for free?).
We could even make ads that are targeted to a person's locale, and we could do so in a privacy-respecting manner -- there is both the trivial way (send the browser all local ads plus a default, and have the appropriate one selected offline) and the asymptotically better approach using crypto (i.e. private information retrieval). The only problem, of course, is the amount of money that has been invested in finding more effective ways to invade everyone's privacy, and the fact that the big Internet advertisers do not really care about whether or not they are annoying (which is why ABP should be promoted and installed by default).
Adblock is not the cause of the problem, it is the reaction to the problem -- the problem of an adversarial web where advertisements try to take over your browser, where advertisers are hell-bent on tracking your browsing habits, where your browser can freeze, crash, or otherwise be rendered unusable by some poorly coded advertisement, and where trying to read an article become difficult because of an advertisement that covers the text.
Advertising would have been a fine model for funding websites, if it were based on traditional revenue models (paying for each view of the advertisement, rather than each click) and traditional presentations (based on a person seeing the ad, not based on a person interacting with it). The shortsightedness of website operators who allow invasive and obnoxious ads on their sites combined with the greed of advertisers is what created this situation, and ABP is just the last logical step in the process (i.e. the users for whom the Internet exists fighting back).
Adblock and related software is a natural reaction to the invasive, annoying advertising that became the norm on the web. Nobody wants to have their browsing habits tracked everywhere, nobody wants to have the article they are reading suddenly vanish and get replaced with an advertisement, nobody wants their CPU time wasted on animating an ad. Advertising on the web should have mimicked advertising on paper -- passive, less obnoxious, and easily ignored (at least conciously) -- and the revenue model should have mimicked paper as well. "Get paid for clicks" is the problem here; that's how we got into this horrible situation, and that's why ABP is basically a must for anyone who uses a browser.
There is no tragedy of the commons here, there are just greedy idiots, shortsited website operators, and an Internet that has turned into an adversarial game.
See, I agree with you -- but most corporate managers and leaders only think in terms of money.
The police are most likely to behave as you suggest when they either have the wrong address, or the offense involved is one prone to involvement with violence, such as drug cases
I know the media paints a scary picture, but most drug dealers or producers do not turn their homes into fortresses. SWAT deployment should be limited to extreme cases, where there is good reason to believe that the suspects are heavily armed and dangerous. Right now, SWAT assaults are routinely used to execute search and arrest warrants, regardless of there being any suspicion of the suspect being armed. Here are some typical examples of the excessive use of SWAT:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/
http://www.ktsm.com/news/las-cruces-coach-accused-child-porn-passed-background-checks
There is no need for SWAT to arrest a man accused of downloading child pornography, and there is certainly no excuse for deploying a SWAT team to arrest someone who is accused of illegally importing orchids. These are not armed robbery suspects or terrorists, and there is no reason to think they would have even put up a fight had the SWAT team not shown up. Yes, by the way, these are typical examples:
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america
The executive branch has zero power to declare laws, although it can regulate
The executive branch has the power, under the Controlled Substances Act, to declare that a drug is illegal to possess or distribute for up to a year without any congressional or democratic process whatsoever -- and the same organization that has been delegated that power, the DEA, is also responsible for enforcing drug laws, which includes such declarations. A ban is not "regulation" by any sane definition of the word, and sending people to prison for possessing a substance is not "regulating" that substance in any way. The executive branch also has the power to overrule recommendations on drug scheduling to create bans that are not supported by regulatory agencies like HHS or the FDA.
This is not about "regulation" -- this is about a law enforcement agency, the DEA, which is part of the executive branch, having both the power to declare a drug illegal and the final say in whether or not drugs will be banned or regulated. That same agency is responsible for enforcing the very laws it can enact.
None of what you wrote negates what I wrote. The bureaucracy is as dependent on the legislature and president as always.
Except that over the past 40 years, more and more power has shifted away from the legislature and towards the executive. That is not "as always" -- it is a modern trend, and it is a trend with immediate and real consequences.
Except that third parties are left at a deliberate disadvantage by those in power, the police invade the homes of unarmed citizens and using grenades and assault rifles, and the executive branch of government has the power to declare laws and then arrest people for violating those laws...
Yes, but the question was why other companies are not like this, and the answer is that for most companies, it is not clear that doing this would be competitive or profitable. Jack Daniels has been working very hard to make themselves seem classy, because they want to compete with high end bourbon and scotch brands (I don't think they have a chance if they continue to make whiskey their traditional way). Most companies are not marketing themselves as "classy," because it would not be profitable for them to do so in the first place -- who wants a "classy lawnmower" or a "classy backhoe?"
Sure, but Jack Daniels has worked for decades to build that image (probably to overcome the "outlaw redneck" image that comes to mind); how would a company like Microsoft pull this off?
That's classy.
Why can't more companies act this way towards one another?
It's not profitable (or at least it is not immediately obvious why doing so would be profitable).
"How can we make an algorithm that works in an environment full of enemies that try to mislead it?"
This sounds like it is closely related to secure multiparty computation, where the goal is to correctly compute some function on multiple parties' inputs without revealing those inputs. This has been researched since the 1980s, and there have been numerous results on feasibility and impossibility, as well as several practical systems (including at least one that was used in the real world). It is likely that both approaches can be used to solve the same set of problems, but that the machine learning approach is more natural for some problems and MPC is more natural for others.
I have a mental image of a future without captcha, where we rely on things like HashCash instead -- slowing down spammers, rather than defeating them entirely.
I found that quitting coffee came with headaches and tiredness for a day or two -- not the worst thing in the world (people go through worse with tobacco) but not something to shrug at.
I disagree; D.A.R.E. has been overwhelmingly successful at convincing people of the legitimacy of the war on drugs and the paramilitary police that were created in the name of that war. Hardly anyone questions the fact that we have soldiers (but with "POLICE" or "DEA" written on their uniforms) attacking unarmed civilians just to serve an arrest warrant. Hardly anyone questions the fact that the executive branch of government, through the Attorney General's office, now has the power to make and enforce drug laws, without democratic action. Hardly anyone questions the fact that the DEA, supposedly a law enforcement agency, has so much signals intelligence capability that the dictators of some nations have tried to demand the DEA's help in spying on political opponents.
How many propaganda programs have been so successful at convincing people that this sort of unwinding of a democratic system is the right thing to do?