Advertisers move money to what's effective. If online advertising becomes less effective, they remove money from the ecosystem.

Your search example demonstrates a lack of industry knowledge. That's not the case that DNT impacts. Rather, it's knowing the user visited Nike.com in the last 30 days but didn't buy anything, so maybe you should show them a Nike ad if you get a chance. It's called retargeting or remarketing and it works a lot better than just spamming ads at everybody. It's also typically divorced from the identity of the user himself; he's just a cookie ID to the advertisers. And the knowledge is lost when he clears his cookies.

Yes, exactly! Everybody wants everything for free! Without any downside! Let's do that!

It's just not realistic. If you don't want ads but you want your websites, you have to propose an alternate revenue stream for them. Most people, when given the option, choose ads over subscription; I know I do. And I know the ads I hate the most are the ones that spam me with products I hate. Relevant, targeted advertising is a vastly superior experience (until it creeps people out, that is).

Look, I don't want advertising companies to know everything about me but there's a reasonable middle ground. I see it like frequenting a local restaurant; you don't get creeped out when the waitress recognizes you, asks if you want the usual, and suggests something to go with it. But if she suggested an alternative because the doctor said your cholesterol is too high, THAT's creepy. It's not black and white.

>Education doesn't work

Wha? Education is the only reason we recognize obesity as a problem. It's the only reason we look for solutions and have these discussions.

Now, perhaps you conflated education with "printing numbers on a cup". I'll go out on a limb and agree that simply printing nutritional info doesn't help (much). But that's not really education; it's an information dump. We need to give people the tools to understand and interact responsibly with their world. That kind of education places an emphasis on comprehension and analytical thinking; it's the only thing that's going to make a long-term impact. Education is how we begin to address the root of the problem.

>The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children

It's not the perfect world solution; it's the only real long-term solution. Most other approaches are just band-aids. I'm not saying it's easy, but I don't think it takes a perfect world to put a greater emphasis on education.

The problem with your argument, IMO, is that you're effectively saying juries are useless. Or that they *should* just be lie detectors. Then what's the point? Don't waste my time if you don't need me. If my job is to do exactly what the judge tells me, then let the judge do it.

As far as I know, the reason we *don't* simply leave it to the judges is to prevent abuse. It is the responsibility of the jury to act as a check on the justice of the law and the judge; otherwise, the jury is irrelevant.

Now, you touch on a couple of related problems, which are 1) people are stupid and 2) the law is way too complex. I don't think either of these have a direct effect on the duty of the jury, but they may impact its ability to function effectively. It seems like we should focus on dealing with those problems instead of neutering a very important check on the justice system.

You're exactly right about jury selection. I was totally disheartened and disillusioned after my first jury selection process a while back. They explicitly told us the judge would give us the relevant portions of law AND instruct us in the interpretation of that law. Apparently, even investigating the relevant law (you know, to understand what it was trying to accomplish...) constitutes jury misconduct. The only area in which they left for any room for personal judgment was lie detection; that's pretty much all they wanted us for.

So when I told them I think some laws are unjust and would not be able to render a verdict I found sufficiently unjust, they basically asked how I would determine that, I told them via my conscience (is there any other way?), and they eventually dismissed me.

I left feeling more-than-ever that our judicial process was more concerned about technicalities and pedantry than actual justice. If we want justice, we need to understand intention and apply reason to a situation, not mechanically apply a list of technicalities.

If there are any lawyers or judges here who would like to offer another perspective on this, I'd love to hear it.

If it's Romney vs Obama in Fall and enough votes are "-1 Romney" and "-1 Obama", then they're both sitting around 0 and a small but enthusiastic third party candidate would actually be in the running. I find it unlikely that the majority of voters actually hate the "other" candidate more than they like their candidate, but it would at least give us some insight into how many people vote that way.

Whoa! Hold on, guys... Can't it be both?

If it's forced, then you're not actually doing it... The story is about waking naturally between sleeps, not waking yourself up on a schedule. It also seems based on going to bed shortly after dusk which, at least for me, is hours before I've trained myself to go to bed.

So you may be among the very few here, but MOST people lose a lot of credibility with me when they say something like this. Exactly how do you think private websites should be funded? Are you currently paying for all the sites you use (that let you pay)? Do you really want to do that? I don't. Anecdotally, the vast majority of people seem totally OK with reasonable advertising in exchange for free access; suggesting it shouldn't be the default implies you either know something I don't (e.g. people want to pay) or simply want your own preferences applied to everybody.

I don't get this at all (speaking as a Christian, nonetheless). If the world is purely physical, then why is nothingness scary? It won't be painful or miserable or.. anything.

Don't we all know this already? I mean, yes, there are physical limitations, but that's clearly not an acceptable fallback argument for AT&T. The point is that if they say UNLIMITED, it implies that the organization won't place any arbitrary limits on your access, not that they can somehow break the laws of physics. What they're doing is deceptive at best and outright lying at worst.

No, I think the GP is exactly right. Any dogmatic philosophy can be the gasoline. I think China is the most-glaring modern example of a country that has very little tolerance for religion and still manages to commit terrible human rights violations. Religion is just one possible outlet for those who wish to abuse power.

I'm curious what bothers you about the "relatively unobtrusive Google ads". I have a rough hunch a lot of people have a built-in bias against online advertising in general just because it's been so. terrible. in the past and has such a poor reputation in general.

Personally, ads in magazines bother me when I there are so many that I can't find the damn content. But I remember spending a lot of time looking at hardware / PC game ads when I subscribed to a magazine in high school, which I think is evidence for my main point that relevant advertising can actually be effective and even appreciated.

You're forgetting that the issue is perceived value. If the advertiser *thinks* showing you an ad has value, then money will change hands from the advertiser to the site. In the long run, if the advertiser is wrong, they simply stop showing ads in places where they don't work.

>Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?

Yes, this is typically known as banner burnout and most advertising systems have a way to cap how frequently a given user is shown an ad. In general, though, they need to have stored a cookie to remember who you are. The great irony of blocking ad cookies is that you look like a nobody to the advertisers. A nobody isn't worth anything special, so you get the cheapest ads in the system, which are usually the obnoxious, carpet-bombed ads.

And the advertiser would LOVE to know that you're not interested in cars so they can avoid wasting their money. Trust me, advertiser are aware of ALL of these issues. Whether they handle them well is a separate issue.

> If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone?

Maybe because they're effectively leeching off of the website? If the site has advertising, it's trying to make money and showing ads is party of the implied contract of visiting the site (unless they have a paid "no-ads" option). You can break your end of that contract with little consequence, but you shouldn't expect the site owners or advertisers to be happy about it. :)

In general, I don't think people are hostile to all advertising. They're hostile to poor, obnoxious, irrelevant advertising. If AdBlock Plus is using its weight to make advertising more user-friendly and effective, that's a long-term win for everybody (unless you'd rather be paying websites directly, which is a truly viable options often available to you now).