I'd rather have no one on the road with me. What's your point ?

I absolutely hate driving. No other activity has inclined me towards removing myself from society all together and going off the grid in the wilderness somewhere. I love the ability to drive, I just can't stand the driving itself.

But until someone actually causes an accident and inflicts some sort of harm or injury I respect their right to use the roads and drive a vehicle, even though I fantasize about being a tyrannical dictator that makes a law giving myself exclusive use of the roads when I feel like driving somewhere.

Blood alcohol limits, graduated licensing, road tests, license renewals, hell ... even licenses themselves ... are all preemptive; taking a pessimistic view of people and treating them as a danger and potential criminal by default. If we took the same view towards other day to day activities that we take towards driving we would have curfews and random stops and searches and all sorts of other nanny-state intrusions in the name of keeping people safe. I do understand where the sentiment comes from. 5 minutes of driving is enough to make someone really pessimistic about the driving abilities of the average person, but it's telling that with all our laws and regulations and licensing and testing those idiots are still there causing accidents and being jerks. IMO we should be throwing the book at people who get into accidents due to negligence and recklessness as we do with all other crimes, you know innocent until proven guilty, and stop trying to nanny the hell out of everyone's driving habits.

Why did you interpret my thoughts as endorsing any sort of dishonesty ?

While trust is certainly a factor, I would go even further and say that "marketing" (which is a much wider field than "advertising") serves the purpose of informing people about a solution to a problem.

You're very set in this idea that "an ad is an ad is an ad." I don't think that making an "ad" that is entertaining and offers some sort of value in and of itself has to wear a disguise in any way what-so-ever. You can inform people quite honestly about a product and do so in a way that gets people to care. You don't have to mislead them to be entertaining or informative.

I suppose that product placement could be viewed as "an ad in disguise" but it doesn't have to be. I have no shame in admitting that I would love to drive an Audi because that's what James Bond drives. If they're shit vehicles then it hurts the Bond franchise and people will start to think of that as blatant and crummy product placement. But they've got a reputation for being luxury vehicles that I think is hard earned. If I did have the money to buy one I'd do more research to make sure my impressions are accurate, the real point is that I wouldn't even bother if Bond didn't drive one.

I was intentionally vague, because I'm not here to pitch my web-site or talk about what I do etc. But you did hit on something:

That's a pretty accurate description of what I do. I don't work for anyone or promote one given company. The ads that people are there to see is the content of the site, and it is a subset of what it's trying to sell. But you can't get it on the "manufacturer's" web-site without paying for it. My site provides free samples. Think of people who might go to Costco on Friday just for the samples, and if they really like something in particular they might buy it. The only difference is, people usually don't perceive the content on my site to be an advertisement, and I'm in the very fortunate position where 99.99% of my competitors shove blatant ads and pop-ups down their surfer's throats. People tell me they come to my site because there are no ads.

To an extent, I agree. I hate receiving unsolicited phone calls and I did point that out. I would much rather that I had sought them out as opposed to the other way around. But I guess the reason they won me over was a) they did offer a solution a problem I had at the time, and it was a solution I would not have thought to research on my own and b) it turned out to be an enjoyable conversation. I could have hung up at any time without feeling any guilt nor any obligation to be "polite" (I'm not a very polite person, especially to telemarketers) but I chose not to. So it didn't feel like they "stole my time" at all.

Not necessarily. If the company makes up for the cost of the marketing campaign in sales generated by the campaign, the costs do not have to be passed on to the consumer. And the entire point of the marketing campaign is to increase sales. So there's no reason to increase the prices, especially when companies are competing on prices as well as other factors.

This actually reminds me of another marketing tactic famously employed. When Microsoft released the X-Box they sold it at a loss expecting to make up for it in game sales. That's not an example of advertising but it is an example of a marketing strategy that may tempt you to say "people paid for the X-Box in part by the cost of games", but if they sold more games at the same price than they would have without taking a loss then the price was not necessarily passed back to consumers. I don't think any customers would have felt ripped off by paying less for an X-Box and then buying more games because they wanted to and were satisfied with their product (I'm not saying that's what actually happened, just that that was the intended outcome and was therefore a good idea IMO).

This is a nitpick, but I'd rather ask if it's in any individual's interest.

I like to differentiate between "marketing" and "advertising." If you'll bare with me for one second: marketing, as I see it, is about trying to develop relationships with customers, present or potential, and provide them a solution to a problem they have. Advertising is one single tool that can be used as part of a marketing campaign.

As long as there is more than a single monopoly providing a given good or service then individuals really do need a way to become informed about alternatives and make decisions. I think that's where marketing comes in. And it doesn't have to be the company jumping in front of you, interrupting what you're trying to do in an attempt to get your attention. If you are, for example, shopping for a laptop you might ask your friends. If they have had a good experience with a given company, that's a form of marketing (marketing isn't trying to make a sale, it's trying to keep customers as well and get them to speak highly about their experiences). If you google "laptops" and read user reviews, maybe even go to a consumer review site, that's also marketing. And a good consumer review site will realize that people are there looking to buy things and instead of shoving ads in their face, will provide affiliate links in appropriate places so when someone decides to check out, say, "Dell Computers" the link they click on will provide a track-back to the consumer review site and the user will never think that they've just earned someone some ad revenue.

I think there are a lot of crappy ads out there and companies that haven't the first clue how to market properly. I also think that advertising is necessary and "good." And us having this debate right now, and using ad block software etc. is also a "good thing" because it's how our opinions get shoved in the faces of advertisers. The good marketers will take notice and respond. They'll realize that making people happy in some way is the whole point of a business and that marketing is about informing choices. Not informing people who don't care, but people who are actively seeking that information.

... is advertising that doesn't come across as advertising.

People who say they loathe advertising in any form actually just loathe the bad advertising; the advertising that detracts from what you're trying to do and immediately screams "this is an advertisement, I'm here to interrupt you in some way in the hope that somehow it will get you to buy something even though I've pissed you off."

A few years ago I received an unepxected phone call on my wife's cellphone from a company offering a CDN service. At first I was really pissed off that this company had reached me in such an inappropriate manner ... but the guy on the other end didn't try to sell me anything and the conversation was unlike any telemarketing call that I had ever received. It was personal and appealed to my geeky curiosity (CDNs were very new at the time, the only companies that were using them were heavy traffic movers like Yahoo, so I wanted to know how it worked), it was offering me a solution to a problem I had at the time and the conversation was very informal. Within a minute or two I was actually asking him questions, and that's how it works. And to top it off when I told the guy I wasn't going to buy from him he chuckled and said "I'm not trying to sign you up today, don't worry." It kept me on the phone. I didn't buy but I was impressed enough that if I had chosen to purchase a CDN service within the next little while I probably would have given them a second look.

I still don't like people phoning me, and I think there are far better ways to reach out to people, but everything that transpired within that phone call was an example of marketing done in the right direction.

I'm self-employed, running a high-traffic web-site that generates money via ad revenue for 11 years now, and the people who visit my web-site have no idea that the entire site is one giant advertisement; in fact, people have complimented and praised me for not having any ads on the site. And yet when fellow webmasters in the same industry as myself share their sales and conversion stats I always get a big smile on my face. Their sites are crawling with blatant advertisements and they need 2 to 5 times the traffic to generate the same revenue. I've never understood how pissing off your customers can be regarded as any form of business model.

I think the best well-known type of advertisement that's going in the right direction is product placement. It can be done poorly, yes and I know I am about to get a bunch of replies from people telling me that they always notice it and it ruins the program etc. But it *CAN* be done in a subtle way that blends with the program and does not detract, to the point where the viewer does not notice or care.

But I think the real way to do "advertising" is provide a value to the viewer as the advertisement itself. Imagine an hour long infomercial on television that was entertaining and/or informative enough to get you to watch it for it's own sake, with no intention of buying anything. Remember that "punch the monkey" ad that was on every single web-site a decade ago ? Imagine if that had actually been a real game that you could play. No pushy-ness what-ever. Not shoved in your face and not done as a banner / flash ad. Instead, something people genuinely wanted to play, with an entertaining sales pitch as part of it. Good advertising can be done, and occasionally is. We just don't notice because we're too distracted and pissed off at the "BOO!!! HAHAH! THIS IS ADVERTISEMENT! YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!"

I've practiced "magic"/illusion-performance as a hobby for a few years and in reading/studying I've learned that corporations will often hire magicians at trade-shows to pitch new products to retailers. Some of the better magicians have crafted entire 20-minute magic routines around the product they're hired to pitch. It's entertainment and people want to watch it for that purpose alone, but it's also an advertisement.

Reasons to hate the TPP:

"latest attempt by the US at legislative colonisation of sovereign countries' IP laws."

Reasons to love the TPP:

Stick it to neo-religious enviro-nazi "green" hippy fanatics.

World spinning. Can't ... decide ... where .. to ... stand... gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

This response will probably never be read. I tend to get sucked into debates when I have more important things to do so I usually post and disappear. But as I have nothing better to do this particular moment here it goes.

You misunderstood the intention of the book. Rand was exploring the philosophical ideas of individualism pitted against collectivism, and Atlas Shrugged was fiction. The ideas were there to motivate her characters. You need to read her non-fiction for an application of objectivism to the real world.

But individualism vs. collectivism is not the individual vs. society or the species as a whole. You misunderstood her definitions of individualism, altruism and collectivism. Collectivism is the idea that the individual belongs to society, that society is an organism unto itself and that the interests of the human race as a whole supersede the interests of the individual; that the individual has a moral obligation to dedicate his life to the service of society, and if that means giving his life in sacrifice then such demands are occasionally made. Spock actually had the most eloquent way to summarize collectivism: "The interests of the many outweigh the interests of the few."

Rand posited that such an ideology is morally wrong. That's why she chose the word "selfish", to pit her ideas directly in opposition to mainstream altruism. She never cared to demonstrate how rational self interest could appease altruists. She would have shuddered at the notion that any of her ideas were akin to "rational self-interest masquerading as altruism." To Rand, altruism was as close to pure evil as you could get.

For the sake of completeness: individualism is the idea that the individual has the right to exist for his own sake and has no moral obligation or duty to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.

That's really all Rand had to say, in a nutshell. She spent an awful lot of time trying to prove, logically, why individualism is objectively moral (and by extension how a system of morality and ethics could be objectively defined which was something entirely new and, even if you come out disagreeing with her, worth reading for that alone). But all she really had to say is that people are not property, that there's nothing wrong with helping others if you so choose but it's a not a moral duty, and there's a lot wrong with subordinating an individual to the level of a sacrifice in the name of "greater good" or "society." That doesn't mean the individual is necessarily pitted against society or even that society has different interests than the individual (in fact Rand pointed out that all society is is a collection of individuals choosing to coexist, and therefore society can have no interests other than the interests of each and every individual individually).

Anyway my comment was to point out that your examples of "altruistic acts" were not at all examples of what Rand called "altruism." I never meant to equivocate Rand's ideas of rational self-interest as a form of altruism and I'm rather surprised that I was interpreted that way.

Altruism, as far as Rand defined it, was about personal sacrifice for the sake of others. And she defined "sacrifice" as a surrender of a value for a lesser value. It's the difference between spending your life savings to treat your wife's cancer (preserving a personal value) vs. spending your life savings on building a homeless shelter for strangers while your sick wife dies.

Since others responded to the other points raised in your comment I'll leave them.

I agree that for blocking or for network-wide control using HOSTS is a horrible idea.

I also realize that the issue apparently here is blocking only.

But with that said, what about independent developers running their own web application on their machine ? If you're a web developer and you do your coding locally, it makes sense to use your host file to send a domain like dev.example.com to 127.0.0.1.

Again, I know it looks like Windows 8 won't interfere with that. But it's still an example of a legitimate reason someone might rely on the hosts file, and why it could be a major PITA to have it messed with by the OS. Or is there a better way that I'm missing ? ( (and running your own DNS server, even locally, and especially on a Windows machine, seems way overkill and no where near "better" IMO).

The problem with HOSTS files were they needed to be synchronized, distributed and maintained. Yes, it's a hold over to pre-DNS. But for a single machine who needs to set up certain private domains locally it seems the best option.

If this is more of that "democracy" bullshit, let me remind you once again: Hitler was elected democratically!

Sorry for Godwin'ing the argument, but I'm using it to make a point. You can attack religious freedom, for example, by pointing out that some religions practice various forms of abuse, but that's just a red herring; it's package dealing. It evades all logical argument by drawing a correlation between what you are trying to attack with something that no one would dare want to come across as defending. It's actually extremely cowardly and demonstrates a lack of willingness to persuade by instead appealing to emotions.

As for the strongest argument in favour of "state's rights" I would think it's that people are better represented by those more closely associated and concerned with their locales and rationalities. The USA is a big place and the entire earth even bigger. There are certain, inalienable individual rights that ought be respected and upheld across jurisdiction (I don't care where my rights are being infringed upon if it's wrong it's wrong), but as for the vast majority of laws and regulations affecting day to day life the more local the government the better represented the citizens of that locale. So of course it extends to "county rights" and "municipal rights." In fact, for an extremely relevant example I would think the strongest recent argument in favour of states rights would be drug laws, and how many states have legalized medical marijuana only to have their laws superseded by the federal government.

Furthermore, I submit that slavery is an extremely poor argument for state's rights ("most powerful" ? please) and I only ever hear that from the opposition, given that rights extend to all equally. No one has the right to infringe on the rights of others. Therefore states have no "right" to enforce and protect the institution of slavery. No reasonable person could put forth slavery as a valid argument in favour of "rights." So stop trying to lump one group in with another in order to win an argument without having to argue in the first place. It's lazy and cowardly and slashdotters ought to expect more from individuals priding themselves on being intelligent.

True story: a friend of mine was pursuing his PHD in CS. During that time he was a TA in an object oriented programming course. He was responsible for grading lab-work (done in Java) and was telling me about various assignments he would have to mark. He told me that many of these students would find rather creative ways to complete the assignment without using any object oriented principles what-so-ever. What he was handed was akin to scripts inside a single main() method.

The punchline is: when he graded those assignments a zero, the students would complain to the professor who would explain to my friend that those assignments were deserving of 10/10 because they compiled and ran.

A university-level course that is supposed to be teaching object oriented principles, in this particular case, had as it's only criteria that the software compiles and runs. It does not matter if the student walks out of the class even knowing what object oriented programming is.

I think THAT kind of thing is what really fuels the "you don't need a degree" crowd. It's an example of how Universities are giving away degrees, and when everyone has a degree they cease to be valuable commodities.

That's a selfish idea if I've ever heard one ;)

I am absolutely convinced that the majority of Rand's opponents have never read a single of her books. Rand was once asked to clarify the whole "selfish" controversy on a talk show in the 70's and she said, paraphrasing: "How about I use a different word: self-esteem, would you be more comfortable with that?"

What most people miss is that Rand was just as much against pop-philosophies that she called "altruist" as she was promoting an alternative, particularly the ideas contained within "altruist philosophies" of using selfishness as a scapegoat for all of humanity's ills. Because she saw that most of the prevailing philosophies were not just advocating for benevolence and kindness but were teaching people that they were essentially worthless and needed to submit themselves entirely to something greater than themselves. As evidence I submit any story where the main protagonist achieves hero status by killing himself at the end to save others.

You kind of hit the nail on the head without even realizing it. To care about your family, your society, your country, your environment is a selfish act because you are acting for your own individual preservation. It is selfish to love someone because their existence, their virtues, their company gives you personal, selfish joy. It is rational to want your family, your friends and your peers to flourish and prosper because it means a higher standard of living, not just for them but for everyone, yourself included. And Rand promoted rational self-interest (and clarified that all the time: source).

It's altruist philosophies that have equivocated the idea of having your own selfish interests at heart with being incompatible with the interests of others. Rand was very careful to clarify this and the fact that so many people openly attack her using a complete lack of understanding of what she meant when she promoted the idea of selfishness as a virtue is as close to proof as you can get that these people have never actually studied anything she wrote.

It's funny because people who come across as entitled to me are the ones who hold the exact ideas that Rand was so strongly against: altruists.

The ideas of social responsibility, duty, innate obligations to "society", "greater good" are the ideas that hold that is reasonable expect individuals to think and act pro-actively in certain ways for the benefit of others. The demand that an individual love everyone equally is making a claim to an individual's most deepest and intimate emotions. That's a sense of entitlement if I've ever heard one.

This is not Rand's definition of the word "liberty" but it is one that I think she would have liked: "Liberty, in a political context, is an environment in which all relationships are consensual."

Here's quote of Rand's on the subject of conflicting interests:

"When one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man’s self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept 'rational' is omitted from the context of 'values,' 'desires,' 'self-interest' and ethics." - Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Rand advocated for the complete separation of economy and state for the same reasons as a separation of church and state is necessary. She saw it as two sides of the same coin.

If it is wrong to dictate to an individual what he/she can think it is equally wrong to dictate to an individual what he/she can eat. There are also a lot of overlaps. Just as individual chooses what to think he/she also chooses who to associate with and trade with and under what circumstances. If individuals require the freedom think and act in order to make decisions regarding their life then that extends into producing the material means of survival: producing material goods for consumption and trade.

In other words: if politics involves itself in what is proper to worship and believe in then the result is telling us what to think. Conversely if politics involves itself in production and trade the result is telling us who we can trade with, what prices we must accept for goods we produced, what kind of toilet we can put in our own bathrooms and what kinds of food to eat.

If it helps you, stop thinking about "corporate welfare" and think of your own, because all trade is a two-way street. Keep in mind that the government doesn't just regulate the banking sector at the moment, it's basically nationalized. Yes, private banks still exist but every single loan and transaction occurs with government-issued fiat currency, which means they're setting terms on every single transaction that occurs during their jurisdiction. Not just between banks and consumers but between little Joey and Mrs. Potter when they trade $5 for a lawn mow. People don't seem to get that. That is the most fundamental hardcore regulation of the economy you can possibly have... the central bank gets to decide, by meddling with the supply of currency, what your savings are worth, what interest rates for loans will be, the value of what people who have bad loans will collect and so forth. It's even thought by one popular school of economics to be the cause of the boom/bust cycle.

Prices are determined by the law of supply vs. demand. As supply of fossil fuel decreases the costs will rise and that will leave people very hungry for energy. People are already complaining about rising energy costs and fossil fuel is still relatively extremely cheap.

So long as "we all agree" that fossil fuel is not inexhaustible, then it's pretty much common sense that there is going to be a massive market for alternatives in the future.

I have nothing at all against investing in those alternatives. I just don't see the point in using tax money to do so. Not only do I think it's unnecessary but I think it's counter-productive; which is to say if anything is going to prevent alternatives from coming to market it's going to be government intervention that keeps new energy start-ups out of the market as a favour to the giants who lobby and buy politicians. One can even argue that direct funding of alternative research by government is potentially dangerous to the emergence of "viable alternatives" because tax money doesn't generally have a way of finding itself in the pockets of those who are competent and capable of building, producing, marketing and distributing things on their own. Instead it finds it's way into the pockets of those are really good at getting things from government.