Clickbait is now the dominant business model for most of the internet, as far as I can tell. People don't really give a damn about debunking, they just hit the "Share" button and pass it on to the echo chamber of their $group_of_friends who echo it back to each other and agree wildly with each other.

It's pretty much the evolution of the chain letter -> MMF/forwarded urban myths -> google finds people just like me -> FaceTwitterInterest helps even more - BuzzFeed,Upworthy,et. al generate content from the echo chamber.

apt-get install breastmilk

The following extra packages will be installed:
antibodies lipids fluids newdiaper nutrients

The following extra packages will be purged:
olddiaper poo pee

Is it relevant to Slashdot's audience? No. Perhaps Bennett should go peddle his wares at sites where people care about racism and/or breastfeeding. What if Bennett tried shopping this post to engadget, Linux News or other popular tech/gadget/science blogs? He'd be told to go away and come back with something relevant.

If you buy that the survey methodology is relevant, you need to read a lot more about making relevant surveys. The world is awash in "studies" like this one, that would have trouble getting through a high school science fair.

"Bennett Haselton writes"

Yep. Checks out. But I don't believe it.

I also don't understand the point of this post. Is Slashdot hoping to get picked up on HuffPo and on a bunch of mommy blogger sites? I don't really see how Bennett's keyboard diarrhea this week is anything remotely related to "News for Nerds".

Thanks for standing up and taking the blame!

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/m...

By making them go outside and play instead of sitting in front of the TV/computer/tablet.

Cable TV provided so little value for the money all I've noticed is the thousands of dollars I've saved over the years. With Netflix, Amazon Prime and an antenna, I've not really missed anything of value.

I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop when the last bastion of why anyone would pay for cable -- live sports -- starts to have an effective streaming model that Joe Sixpack can easily use. The current model with blackouts and IP restrictions that require VPNs and other nonsense throw up too many barriers for many to figure out. Drop those barriers and many people lose the last reason they have cable, since it's largely disposable "reality" series filling the 400 channels that are received, and the quality stuff can be found by other means.

Read on for the rest ....

We Can Only Hope

Hate the game.

I'll wager that Ballmer doesn't actually know much about his taxes. He pays someone (or, more likely, a group of someones) to figure out his tax return. Their job is to make sure he pays what he owes and not a penny more. I make considerably less than Ballmer but I also employ an accountant to do my tax return versus doing it myself. I expect her to advise me on how to pay the correct amount. I'm not looking to get audited or get sent to jail for tax fraud, but on the same token I have many other uses for my own money that don't involve paying taxes. My wife runs her own business and also uses the same accountant, who advises her on what deductions she can take and which ones she cannot.

I would personally like to see the US tax code vastly simplified. Much like trying to debug horribly written spaghetti code, the sheer complexity and length of it (IIRC it is will over 30K printed pages at this point) makes effective auditing difficult, if not impossible. As others have mentioned, the "fairness" comes into question when people (including corporations, because they are people, too!) of enormous wealth are lowering their rates considerably using these strategies. I think everyone on some level knows that some level of taxation is required to pay for roads, court systems and other services we like here in the first world -- but people get pissed off when they see anyone (rich or poor) who seems to be abusing the system -- from welfare fraud all the way up to billion dollar tax dodges.

"user-specific" = "we are going to sell aggregated data"

"on behalf of a third party" = "we are going to get direct ad sales up and running soon"

#3 is just hysterical ... if they get acquired, they lose the right to any such thing as they become a wholly owned subsidiary, subject to whatever policies the parent company deems fit. As if it hasn't already happened about a billion times by startups who did one thing, then were bought up and summarily dismantled. Ello makes a false assumption that people give a damn about their product. An acquiring company may see it as a way to get a seasoned dev/qe team and shutter the service entirely. The examples of plucky startups that got pulled into the Apple/Google/Microsoft/$GINORMOUS_COMPANY orbit and summarily forgotten or dissolved is pretty big.

I've received a few recall notices over the years for the cars I own. I followed the instructions on the form, made an appointment with the dealer, dropped the car off, then they did their thing. I never had to pay a dime.

You might be confusing a recall with a technical service bulletin. They are not the same, although a TSB can turn into a recall in certain cases -- and that happened in one case, for which I was refunded the money I'd paid for the service. All the recall notices I've received have had language on them to this effect, that if you repaired the car on your own dime (and can product a receipt) that they will reimburse you.

And if you buy a used car, it's probably worth the time to check for recalls. It's a similar situation for any consumer product you might pick up off Craigslist or from a private sale. We have a couple of kids and children's products are also notorious for this, since there's quite a "hand me down" / "cash sale" market that exists when your kids outgrow something and you don't need it any more.

I live in the Boston metro area about 25 miles away from the broadcast towers and I get ABC, CBS, NBC, CW, FOX, two PBS and a couple independents. There are a couple Spanish channels and a shopping channel. There are subchannels on each so it ends up being something like 25 channels available. Some of them run reruns and old movies, for sure, but I get first run of anything on broadcast (goes into the TiVo), plus PBS has a lot of decent programming.

We also have Netflix and Amazon Prime but if you do your homework using sites like antennapoint.com and antennaweb.com you can get an antenna that's correctly sized and point it in the right direction, in addition to getting a rough idea of what you should be able to receive from your location.

TiVo and Nielsen have had a relationship for some time, beginning around 2004. It's an opt-in system, so you would have been contacted by TiVo/Nielsen to allow monitoring of your recording and watching habits. Before the DVR, Nielsen used surveys and electronic systems from a segment of the population to generate data.

http://adage.com/article/digit...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Up till now, the TV Nielsens have been ruling the roost when it comes to how many people are watching something. Now with tracking added that includes online content on something of an equal basis, the real TV customers (the people who pay for ads) will know what the product (the viewers being shown advertising) is actually doing. This being Slashdot, people are no doubt running to the store to pay for a roll of tinfoil with a Bitcoin, but it's really not the Orwellian nightmare that you might expect. Imagine if there had been this richness of data for some shows like Firefly that were floundering in the TV ratings, yet were developing a following based on online views -- the audience was following the new episodes, but lagging the broadcast by a few months as they caught up.

I expect that many shows which got mishandled on broadcast yet had some redeeming value and a loyal (young, target demographic market) who aren't showing up on TV lists (because they don't own one) are going to now be more represented -- and that's going to lead to better programming for the people who like that. Perhaps the "sit in front of the TV" market will be eclipsed by the "sit in front of the tablet/smartphone" market as that becomes the way people consume television.

It might also clearly show what many of the cable providers keep denying but don't want to admit -- there's a tremendous market for (effectively) a la carte television that's being consumed right now. They can keep denying it, but it's going to be very hard for them to have leverage in deals with (especially) sports leagues when the Nielsen numbers show that it would be a great business decision to provide an app rather than going through cable to reach a larger audience who is young, hip and spends money.