I was happy with the internet before ads and would welcome the return of an ads-free internet. The only commercial sites that I have any use for, are vendor sites whose products I already use and therefore need support.
Which means you don't even visit web sites that rely on advertising to cover the content creation and hosting costs. Which means you really have nothing to complain about, right? Right.
When did "customer" become "consumer"?
It didn't. You're just oddly confused (or pretending to be) over who is consuming a web site's content, and who is writing checks to the web site's operator. If you just visit and slurp up content, you're consuming that content. If you're doing business with that web site's operator (say, buying some ad space from them), you're a customer. You know, the one who foots the bill for the service you in turn get.
Keep calling me a consumer and I'll keep blocking your ads
So you're not consuming their content? If you're their "customer" instead, are you writing them a check every month to help defray their hosting and content creation costs? No. Their customers are the people who pay them (advertisers), and you are a consumer of the content that's presented.
I have no problem paying for a subscription (or forums account) for sites which matter to me. All of the truly important information I have found on the Internet has come from small enthusiast-run sites with no advertising, so I'm not too fussed if a majority of ad-sponsored sites either go subscription-only or simply die out.
Shockingly, a whole lot of people are more engaged than you with the wider world, and with subject matter that might newly interest them - perhaps even by the hour - because they aren't laser-focused on one or two topics in life.
There is no right to make a profit.
And you have no right to someone else's hard work while ignoring the terms under which they're offering it to you.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
What color unicorn ponies would like, to go with your new information economy that does everything for you for free? Or are you just expecting people to run datacenters for free, so that it doesn't cost your favorite content people anything (except their own time, and the cost to produce the content you want) to host the servers you want to access? Do you really want every web site that isn't being run by a foundation (which you're hoping OTHER people will fund), someone's tax dollars (not yours, obviously), and high-overhead subscription transactions, to go away? How about this: since you don't care about those web sites, you don't have to visit them and the whole issue goes away. I'm sure you can find an army of like-minded people who produce and fund the delivery of everything you want at no cost to you. Have fun with that.
outweighs your autonomy
"Your autonomy" isn't what pays the hosting bills for that web site content or forum you want to have magically for free. You're not forced to watch ads. Because you're not forced to connect your browser to somebody else's server in order to amuse or inform yourself.
Have you ever studied the 10 plagues visited against the Egyptians for their slavery of the Jewish people?
You mean the fable? The fantastical mythological, supernatural narrative spun by religious authorities in support of their world view? Yeah, that's hard to miss.
Especially the slaughter of every first-born Egyptian child?
What about it? Are you saying that because a tyrant slaughtered a bunch of kids thousands of years ago, that therefore a crazy Islamist and his brother might be excused for blowing the guts out a kid standing next to one of their planted bombs?
The list goes on and on. I'm afraid that slaughtering children for religious sacrifice, even innocent children to teach their parents a lesson, as a long cultural history.
So does hunting down rival tribe members, killing, cooking, and eating them, in some ancient cultures. So?
That doesn't make it "rational", but it's certainly historically well founded.
Well founded? The moral foundation for that sort of stuff couldn't be shakier. It's based on magical thinking routed in ignorance.
So revenge is the motivation?
Hey, I don't mind. I'm cool with that, as long as people are willing to call a spade a spade and not pretend it has anything to do with justice.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Its murder when someone you disagree with kills someone in a way you disapprove of.
Ah, another acute case of moral relativism. Is that painful?
He would not have faced a trial if he hadn't decided that his brother's plan to slaughter some innocent people as a form of political expression was cool idea. You think that's just another world view, just a shoe on another foot. Yeah, everything's OK, because there's always someone who thinks it's OK, right?
No. Setting out to main and kill innocent people, including kids, for the sake of maiming and killing them, is not OK in any rational value system. Irrational value systems are objectively inferior. Acting out, murderously, in the service of an irrational value system, isn't just one more equally valid lifestyle choice. Which you should know, if your own value system was rational. But it doesn't seem to be. Please don't do dangerous things like voting, OK?
That is what the death penalty is, is it not? State-sponsored murder?
No. Looking around a crowd, and setting a shrapnel bomb on the sidewalk next to children
If Tsarnaev were to choose to commit suicide during a life sentence, I suspect he could find a way. Does that assuage your distaste for my motives?
No. What you suspect he might be able to do has nothing to do with your misunderstanding of the word "murder."
The drone did not go into Whitehouse property.
So what? It's illegal to fly any toy RC gadget (let alone the bigger stuff) within 15 miles in every direction of downtown DC. If you're hovering a $20 mall kiosk toy copter four feet above your back yard grass way out in the Virginia or Maryland suburbs, you're eligible for a $10,000 fine and worse.
This idiot was deliberately flying out of a federally run park (oh yeah: flying any RC machine of any kind is now illegal in ALL federally administered parks and lands, which includes millions acres of wilderness, river/ocean coastlines, and more - not just downtown parks and monuments) so that he could take photos of the White House. Think it does seem a little bit reasonable to not be launching flying robots a couple hundred yards from the White House? Sure. But
So, you don't consider the Nobel prize winner for physics and Director Emeritus of Fermilab who gave it that name, Leon Lederman, to be a physicist? Or perhaps you've simply never heard of him.
I consider him exactly what he is: a physicist who regrets having ever used that phrase.
So, all the physicists who call the Higgs bosun "the God Particle" are magical thinkers?
No, that's journalists who call it that. I've yet to ever hear of a physicist who doesn't hate that term.
That's exactly what "Mother Nature" is.
Exactly. People who feel the need to give it a personality aren't any different than any other magical thinker.
The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
