I stopped reading his predictions column after he said he was going to stop doing them, five years running. Glad to see he's still at it though, but I really feel like I've moved on.

Oh, and... fuck orthodoxies.

First and foremost, you don't need to be outside of the scientific consensus to have an extreme viewpoint. You don't need bad data to propose bad solutions. People are doing it absolutely every day. And this notion that scientific consensus means anything, and that no new information is allowed through those hallowed halls is equally troubling. Not arguing that every idiot with a microphone should be allowed to speak. Just saying that the scientific consensus has been dead wrong, more than a few times in the last 500 years. We need to be open to new and iconoclastic ideas. We'll be worse for the ware if we dismiss everything as crazy and/or uninformed.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe it. ICANN has a vetting process that's supposed to prevent hobbyists from getting tld's.
So, either he's guilty of fraud, and he is a hobbyist... or he's full of shit. I don't really see any room for a middle ground here.

The thing I'm wondering about is what happens to the people who did order the domains? What happens to the registry when the company behind it completely disappears?

So I looked it up. They're located in Manhattan. One of the most expensive places to operate on earth. If $25,000 a year is prohibitively expensive, as far as business costs go... where are they renting their office space? Have you seen what office space costs in Manhattan? Anywhere in NYC? They couldn't even rent a place in Brooklyn for $25,000 a year.

And what about salaries? They have to pay people. Do you honestly mean to tell me that the entire staff costs less than $25,000 a year? Shit dude, how are they pulling that one off? Are they running the whole company with interns? My guess: No, probably not.

What about marketing? This is the first I've ever heard of these guys, so I'm guessing that they haven't done any. But if you look at their "partners" section, there's some muscle there. There has to revenue.

Anyway, I suppose my point is, that they're completely full of shit.
They're trying to pull a fast one, and they're asking you to believe a story that either paints them as utterly incompetent, or impossibly small.

I'm not buying any of it.

But I remember when there were no streaming options. Then we had Netflix, and Hulu, and you guys complained that large portions of what you actually want to stream aren't represented. The studios heard, and gave you more option. Now you dipshits are complaining about how there are too many channels to subscribe to. Pardon me for a little while I play this tiny violin.

Streaming has never been better.
There have never been more big label and small deal options than there are now.

Sometimes you just need to pull your head out of the shit pile and enjoy the roses for what they are.

One major streaming monopoly isn't good for anyone.
Now, at least, they're competing on the merits.

And the golden age of television continues.

How is it fair for your money to lose 30% or more of it's value every few years? It happened with Gox, it just happened again. There is no parallel in history with the dollar. That would be like the US losing 30% of it's GDP inasmuch as a couple of days. It's never happened. Generally, if the US loses 2% of GDP, it takes years to recover. We just got out of a decade long recession from losing 1.5% of GDP on growth figures. If you were living on bitcoin right now, you would be dead. I'm not dissuading your from the idea that bitcoin is awesome, or that bitcoin is the revolutionary future and whatnot, but any sober observer would look at this and have to comment on the volatility problem that bitcoin has, and the one it's always had. Even the community is talking about it again.

Failing? According to who? Relative to Bitcoin, the dollar is incredibly stable. It's never lost 30% of its value in a week.

Why did this need to be researched? We've known about this as long as we've had the technology.

That's interesting. Reminds me of Robert X. Cringely's strategy for defeating phishing. Much the same idea. I'm all for it.

I just love the way everyone's talking about this, as though it's shocking, and somehow unexpected. But this is economics 101. When the consumer demand exists for any given product, and the marketplace does not supply it, channels will rise in order to attempt to address the market need. The way this goes in history is pretty straightforward. First, one or two products show up. Then, you have a lot of copycats that offer the same or similar products as the market expands. Then, the market contracts and corrects, solidifying the businesses of the players who fill the need and make the most reasonable business decisions.

We're at an awkward moment in streaming. The market is exploding with platforms and venues at the moment. The consolidation and correction phase has not hit yet. But it will. Just give it time.

You know, I've given internet marketers a chance to explain themselves. An opportunity to prove they're not complete morons who not only don't understand their product, but their customer. I've been patient with them as they introduce new and ever more obnoxious and invasive advertising techniques that are heavily lauded, but that don't actually work. I've read their blogs. I've commented on their forums. I've tried to speak reason to power. And now... I'm done.

As I've explained to these intrepid idiots in the marketing industry for the last decade, people block ads because they're a blight. They're implemented poorly. They often contain malware which largely goes unpoliced, and they diminish the reading experience on pretty much any site they're on. If you're on a website, and the ads don't completely destroy both the credibility and quality of the host site, you're probably on buzzfeed. Nearly everywhere else, you're going to notice this nonsense.

The war on adblockers is a lost cause. Breaking adblockers is not going to result in higher clickthrough rates. It never has, in the entire time it's been around. If a user LOVES your website, they might whitelist you. Short of that, they'll bounce and get your content from somewhere else. Calling attention to and requesting a modification in the software a user runs is a violation of user rights. Period. Plain and simple. And it raises suspicions about the host site, bringing to the user's mind the other invasive practices a site might be engaged in, and the handling of their personal data in general. If you wouldn't demand to look in someone's underwear drawer when selling them a newspaper, you shouldn't engage in the ongoing harassment of your users in this way. There is no moral difference.

Asking users who are taking aggressive steps not to see ads will only result in lower documented clickthrough rates. It'll result in more bounce traffic. It'll result in fewer people showing an interest in your site, and less exposure over social media. Mind you, a lot of people that have never clicked on an ad in their lives think nothing of sharing your article with their network of followers. If you track the engagement numbers on sites that behave in this way, you'll see a downward trend overall in their engagement numbers -- resulting, ironically, in fewer ad impressions, and fewer clicks.

I don't know if there's anything to do about it. If the industry wants to sit there and gnaw off its own leg, they're welcome to do it. And I'm sure they will. Like I said in the beginning of this rant, they're not exactly the brightest bulbs to begin with.

Well, that could be interesting. I wonder what agile might look like if you're not using a tool like JIRA or Redmine to track the items in your sprint. How would you do it without version control or issue tracking?

I don't know about that. Waterfall can really leave a mark on the production process. The cold, top down order of the thing. If you're working in waterfall, or reverse waterfall, you know it. It may not be the most efficient system there is, but it's implemented consistently, and it gives you something to fall back on. Agile on the other hand is 12 simple ideas that together, are impossible to implement the same way twice. You always get the feeling that the team you're on is "learning" Agile, no matter how long they've been working with it, and that can drive you nuts. Personally, I've always been driven by order and efficiency. To that end, Agile's a crapshoot. And it all depends on the managers and the stakeholders. Either they get it, or they don't. My feeling is that most of the time, we as developers would be served better by simply taking the basics out of agile. Sprints, retrospectives, and just use those, without trying to focus on the pieces everybody always gets wrong.