I can't help but laugh at the differences.

Slashdot-linked Register article...

Compared with Phil's article...

This is all anyone needed to say about this story.

I don't know why people think it's so impossible. It's only about as strange as liberal gun owners... of which there are millions.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that people have opinions on more than one thing, at the very same time.

What's funny is this is what Facebook mastered, and everyone seems to hate them for it. They can make huge revenues with relatively few advertisements because they have amazingly great targeting.

It's simple, really. People pay more for ads that work. One way you do that is by having your ads shown only to the right people in the first place. That targeting only works through an engine that knows things about you... like Facebook.

It's also why Facebook hasn't and won't sell off their user data. Their exclusive access to that data is their big competitive advantage, the crown jewels, and it's something Google desperately wants.

Sites often use ad brokers to erase the difference between what the site operator and the ad buyer say is happening in the way of impressions and clicks. Without a neutral broker in the middle to serve the ads and handle redirected clicks associated with those ads, neither side can trust stats from the other.

Also, small sites can't bring in new advertising clients, because they're not Google or the New York Times. That's part of why ad networks exist in the first place.

I think it's an interesting question. Most of the sites people use are ad supported, and if total blocking is becoming more prevalent, everyone is going to need a replacement.

As a user, I use the nuclear option for ad blocking and whitelist sites I use every day. But that's me going out of my way to be fair about it. People aren't going to do that. It works out well for me because most of the good sites worth visiting frequently don't do the horrible auto-play videos or serve up malware, anyway (the AV still checks).

I don't pretend to have a better idea that would work for everyone, but I think it's a discussion we'll be revisiting more often in the future.

Well played.

We should get around to using that by the time the Enterprise D is first leaving dry dock, yeah?

The context of the sentence was feeling bad for him. Any indication that the OP thought the willingness to drop data is prima facie evidence of diminished capacity exists only in your own mind.

You took it out of context, poorly, for an excuse to state your mind. You got called on it. Suck it up and move on.

He wasn't in the best frame of mind because he was having serious psychological issues related to gender identity disorder, sexuality in a "don't ask, don't tell" military, and a handful of other issues. He was looking at a possible discharge from service.

Lay off the rhetoric, it's making you jumpy.

Yeah I really have no problem with this. Everyone gets broken into eventually. Actually noticing that it happened, what precautions you've taken, and how you handle it with your customers, is how I judge your company and service.

Evernote seems to have done what you should do in a situation like this.

I get a little aggravated with the, "games cost $100 million dollars to make and you pay too little" bullshit too.

We see good games made and sold that turn massive profit on small budgets, all the time. Yes, it's hard work. No, you can't do that every three months.

So they spend $90million of the budget on marketing... and then bitch that they're only getting $60 per title plus $50 annual subscriptions plus DLC revenues.

Make good shit. Make fewer games, with fewer people. If it's good you won't have to spend 90% of your budget on advertising. If you want to go the, "pump out another shitty madden title" route with 10 titles, all year long, then don't be surprised that you have to spend $90 million on advertising. And don't then bitch that you're not getting enough money. And don't try to remedy that with bullshit like always-on DRM and microtransactions.

Yeah, much to do about nothing. Most of the people in the Code.org video I saw were, in fact, programmers. Some of them were famous ones, some were not.

So yeah when you see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberk, Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Gabe Newell, etc you might think they haven't written a lot of production code recently, but they're faces you'd know, and they threw in plenty of people that are probably sitting at their machines writing code as we speak.

And either way, it didn't hurt anyone to have any of them. Many of the "learn to program" sites didn't have much in the way of marketing, so this is something. We're going to bitch about it?

If there's a middle step here, I guess it's "wires". But there's really no need for question marks in that old-as-time equation. ;)

Oh damn, now we need a legislative working group for a bill to shield people from copyright suits.

Maybe call 'em... the Justice League?

The article says that it was constructed with the help of a taxidermist. I doubt there was much in the way of rot going on, but it would probably smell funny (like plastic and glue).