Slashdot has said that I can opt out of ads. Which I don't bother doing since I have adblock, but... If it starts charing $0.17 a page, then I'll stop visiting. Other useful sites I may stick around with $0.17 a page (and it has to be per page, not per third party script/gif).

People cut the cord from cable companies which used to be considered unthinkable. So I think people will be able to wean themselves away from fluff web sites too.

But think of it this way, I'm already paying over $50/month to get on the web. Why should I be told that I have to pay extra or view ads just to click on a link to some bozo's blog? Worse, why should advertisers be allowed to STEAL my bandwidth and time by piggybacking on my ISP? Broadcast over the airwaves is fine with me, as long as I can look away from the TV and go get a sandwich; but borrowing my internet to show me an ad that I can't skip, that's just immoral.

Any fool can write buggy programs, but it takes a Senior Solutions Architect to really fuck things up.

A lot of these new languages are highly specialized languages. It's like everyone who has a special need and a hatred of general purpose languages thinks they'll just write a new language and solve the problem. Ie, there is no point whatsoever to have an language for developing IoT because we've already have such languages for decades, yet people are creating these new pointless languages.

I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).

The web site owners don't know about any of this, they have farmed out their design to third parties and after signing a contract to an ad provider/server they wash their hands of responsibility (as long as they get revenue). The third parties don't want this idea because then it would be too easy to block them, as in loss of revenue.

I see things sort of analoguous to shaving microseconds off of financial transactions. There's someone in the middle making money without being either producer or consumer and providing no real world value of any sort. Sort of like leeches but not as cuddly.

I still haven't gone to the effort to block these on my TV. But normally it was 4 or 5 seconds before I could skip them, which was usually before you even knew what the ad was about. But the last week I've seen a few that refuse to let me skip the ads, AND the ads were entirely unrelated to the content as well. Screw em. Let youtube go back to being free with no one making money from them, hobbyists only with no youtube pros. Sorry PewDiePie, you need a real job.

Right, and human organ traffickers are stuck between a rock and hard place too but it's not my responsibility to help them out. So if advertisers can't make money without cheating then maybe they need to find a new career, and it's not our responsibility to put up with their tricks.

Also better if users learn to just stop going to web sites that they don't need to. If a site bombards you with ads, then rather than just turn on adblock there, just leave the site permanently and with prejudice. If it's your favorite blog site, then send an email complaining about how bad the ads are with the hope that someone gets the hint (it is not your job to provide charity to fund someone's hobby). This is analogous to people becoming fed up with cable companies and cutting the cord.

Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.

Then don't you feel jaunty and stupid at the same time? Although with enough jaunty then you might not care anymore.

Oh, what's the selling price? *checks wallet*

In the real world you can learn but you are most often prevented from putting the learning into practice. After 30 years programming, I still spend 95% of my time dealing with other people's code and "maintenance". The opportunity to do things the right way usually was passed years before I joined.

Actually real engineering disciplines screw up too and for some of the same reasons as software. Quick and dirty hacks in hardware driven by unrealistic deadlines from upper management, last minute bandaids applied because it's too expensive to redesign, confusing document control, lack of knowledge transfer if someone leaves the team, etc.

Also remember that the list is about open source software. Some of the things that are wrong there aren't wrong with proprietary software or internal tools, distributed teams have different requirements from teams that are all in the same aisle (ie, open source is greatly improved if there's a web based source code control browser, but that loses importance if everyone on the team already has a license of a the source code control system's GUI tool).

Open Source also means lots of college students or recent grads, full of excitement to get stuff done but without the real world experience to know how to go about it; and full of hobbyists who start off strong then slow down and stop; etc. For example, hobbyist has only a home PC with Windows, and for budget/time reasons does not want to bother with portability to hundreds of different types of systems; or the hobbyist is the sort who thinks Microsoft Visual Something is a really good state of the art tool and bases the entire project on that.

That's not the real list, follow the link to the link.
http://spot.livejournal.com/30...

I didn't want it transparent, I just wanted the phones unaccessible so that the users could do something useful with their time instead of staring at the phones.

It's not as bad as it could be. While charging it seems to be efficient, as good as wired charging at least. Most of that efficiency is not from the induction charging but rather from better design of power supply, so you're relying on the manufacturers actually paying attention to efficiency. What's hard to determine is what is the power leakage when the system is not used. Is it better than a wall wart (remember people, unplug those when not in use), how much power is used to detect if there's a phone or not, will manufacturers even bother to turn off power if no phone is detected, yada yada.

The QI literature is 99% about convenience, that's their end-consumer marketing spiel, and the 1% time that they pay attention to efficiency is hard to track down. This is all amazingly consumer oriented (as in "buy me", "consume me", "be the first on your block", "stop thinking for yourself").