Exactly, I really hope they find people who were engaging in criminal behavior so both sides can move on and continue engaging in the debate if gaming is an appropriate platform for broadcasting feminist agenda.

Well, they were simply waiting for a pretext to start boiling the frog. There is no real competition to Steam in digital, they managed to completely kill off PC game retail, so now they will start implementing draconian measures. Region locks. Always-connected. Limited activations. In-game adds.

Kessler effect is a real problem, putting anything into orbit, especially small and hard to track, is fundamentally bad idea.

What OP should have done is mention jobs in sales. These leeches make more than they deserve without actually having to have any technical skills.

Sure, some of your friends playing kings in-between starving between gigs. Meanwhile I took my BMW out of the garage of my own house, drove it to work, parked it in my reserved spot, sat down in my own office, and checked /. while enjoying the morning coffee.

Almost any programming job is an uphill battle. You always compete with outsourcing and you always chasing new fad technologies. All this pain for no gain.

I understand this is /., but why send this poor kid down this hard road? He already got liberal arts degree, don't advise him to compound his mistakes.

Congratulations, your degree is worthless and since you are not independently wealthy the reality of sunk in.

While you absolutely need technical skills, your written language skills will be valuable in any field that writes reports, papers, or manuals. Therefore, logical path is to become technical writer or double-down on academia and focus on publishing papers.

Short term you are talking about is likely our lifetime. Meanwhile all increased productivity gains will go solely to 1%, just like during past 30 years. What left of middle class doing jobs that could not be automated (e.g. doctors, dentists, social workers) will not see any economical benefit.

Why do you even....
>>> "Cookies blocked everywhere? I don't believe it, you'd never be able to log into anything."
Try wiping your cookies on session or window close. You can accept cookies and not keep them longer than necessary.

>>>"Flash disabled? Well, yes, I have that by default but for security not tracking. "Do not track" is an absolute waste of time. And just because duckduckgo doesn't track you, doesn't mean the sites you land on don't."
The sites will track them only if you let them. Regularly wipe cookies, blacklist via host file or firewall, tracking companies and you will no longer see any "targeted" leotard ads.

You don't realize how big the problem of traditional media retreat to walled gardens is. You think outrage and clickbait are bad now? Well, wait until it is the only game in town, because it is the only way to monetize content creation. That and cat pictures.
 
Do we want this kind of internet for the sake of "purity"?

I 100% agree that we don't need to accept tracking. Still, your analogy is somewhat flawed - robots don't watch TV or subscribe to newspapers, scripts/bots do crawl websites.

I am largely with you, but keep in mind that we don't want Pyrrhic victory. All-time anonymous and add free Internet is not a desirable outcome if it all goes subscriptions and walled gardens.

While I personally block _all_ online advertising (and tracking) via various means, I disagree that intentionally breaking per-click model is a good thing. If the AdNauseam gains adoption, it will likely trigger further escalation in tracking. Advertising pays for significant portion of online content, and vast majority of people have to deal with it. If substantial fraction of people are given tools to block and automate click-spoofing, then new and much more draconian ways to track will be developed.

You think flash cookies are bad? Wait until AdNauseam forces Google to cut anti-NN deal with telecoms in exchange of ISP-level in-stream identifier insertion.