I don't think advertisers have an inalienable right to anything -- if this battle turns legal, it won't be advertisers suing end users or adblock developers.

But would advertisers sue publishers or content owners if the size and nature of the audience was fundamentally misrepresented? Oh, yeah -- that already happens in the offline media world.

That threat, if it becomes more commonplace, puts pressure on publishers to make sure those ads get seen. And that's where the trouble for end users could occur.

(It's also one reason Google's pay-per-click ad revolution shook things up so much: As an advertiser, you don't care if the ad was seen 10 times or 10 million times as long as you're getting the clickthrough rate you want and ONLY paying for that clickthrough rate. As someone else in the thread said: People who use Adblock don't click on ads, so the pay-per-click model actually helps perpetuate the current state of things by taking pressure off of publishers to deliver raw impression numbers.)

Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.

Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.

If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.

but how often do you need to accelerate from a dead standstill to 60mph, as quickly as possible?

Eight or more times a day, each time I get onto the freeway in the middle of fast traffic. Merging into 70mph traffic when your can can only get to 42mph on the onramp and the odds of getting slammed from behind go up exponentially. Personally I like to be going about 10mph faster than the rest of traffic while I'm merging in, so I can ease off it a little to fit into the most appropriate gap in cars (at 70mph, most cars decelerate down to 55 or 60 a LOT faster than they can accelerate up to 80 or 85.)

8G ipod touch = $200
16G ipad (2nd generation) = $400

My guess is that the ipad mini will split the difference and retail for $300. They may take the difference between the ipod touch ($200) and the ipad 3 ($500) and retail out the ipad mini at $350, but I'm thinking that the Google Nexus 7 retail price is going to pressure the price of the ipad mini to come in at $300.

He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.

Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.

You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.

Civilization Revolutions.
Hate to admit it but I spent an hour Googling to see if it was available on the Android before making my final purchase decision on a phone last week.

The risk isn't worth it to you.

And that's OK -- but that doesn't mean it's a blanket risk assessment for everyone. Failure is always an option, whether you're holding down a desk and a w-2 paycheck or hunting and killing your own food.

This.

Want some incredible results from your software engineers? Here's all the culture you need :
Give them a very quiet place to work, free from distractions, and take away the barriers to success / productivity.
- Too warm? That's a distraction that will destroy any attempts at getting work done that day.
- One or more people having personal discussions loud enough that the dev overhears them? Esp if the chatty people aren't on the dev team? Another day's productivity pissed away.
- It takes a good developer half an hour or so to 'get in the zone' doing heavy / hardcore coding and debugging. If he has to get up and go find food all those balls in the air drop to the ground and he starts over again when he finally gets back from eating. Find out what they eat and have it magically show up at their desk about 11:45am and they will feed their face while they continue being productive. If they're billable that extra hour, then there is nothing on Earth that you could feed them that costs more than that billable hour (but odds are they will be happy with a subway sandwich and a bag of chips.)
- Need to request permission / wait for a signature before doing something routine? Need to wait to have someone else make changes that the developer could make (perfect example : DDL or DML changes in the developer database)? Another day's productivity lost.
- Figure out who the slackers are and cull the herd a little. A small team of shit-hot developers that work well together can deliver rings around a larger team mixed with good / weak players.
- Any meetings that are useless? Don't make them attend. Any meeting with 8+ non-developers in it is probably useless, from the 'does a developer need to be here' perspective.
- Give the heavy hitters more hardware than you can imagine them possibly using - they'll find a way to put four monitors, two servers and two laptops to good use, and anything they don't use they will pass on to someone that can. Nothing says 'I love you' to a good developer than a new tech toy, or a new laptop when their old one is about two years old.

All that 'team-building' crap? Save it. Want a real team-building exercise, send a few of them away to a conference and only give them one car so they have to stick together, give them enough rope to get in trouble together. When they come back they will be an Olympic quality team.

You know I can't do that, Dave.

I couldn't believe it so I went searching. My research supports everything you said.
My previous post was incorrect. The funny thing is that everybody above was making fun of the Yaris' ability to stop at 1G, but based on what I'm finding that's pretty close to the truth. That also surprised me. Two in one day. Ouch.

I read this as 'When I don't know what I'm doing, I hack at it until I get something working and then I document what I did.' Fair enough. At that point you are documenting it at a fairly detailed level (hopefully). This happens when software development is done as 'Art'.
When software development is happening as 'Science', odds are you can at least outline your intent and design before you start coding the solution.

I've done both. Computer Science usually produces better results than Computer Art.

A Toyota Yaris with a much higher deceleration

No way a Yaris could out decelerate a sport-bike (motorcycle.) A decent sport bike will brake right up to the edge of traction, meaning it will decelerate as hard as it accelerates, and no stock vehicle can accelerate as hard as a sport bike (carrier deck catapult launched fighter jets being the single exception.)
Citation
(Note : I said stock. As in walk in to the dealer, buy and drive it off the lot. Funny-car dragsters are not dealer stock vehicles.)

But the OP story was still awesome, using physics to beat a bull-shit traffic ticket. I'm still waiting for someone to use the concept of absolute velocity with respect to the universe to demonstrate that they were traveling within 1% of the same speed of all other vehicles, and that even the officer when sitting at rest was traveling 100x the posted speed limit (when taking into account the velocity of the Earth around the Sun, coupled with the 1000mph rotational speed of the Earth around its axis.)

I think a more appropriate change that I would love to see, is the ability to treat a red light as a stop sign.

In some states, motorcycles can. Citation

Ahhh - I missed the 'you take physical access of my machine for a few minutes without me being present' part.
Yes I agree with you on that part - the minute someone loses physical control of the hardware all bets are off.

I was more interested in how effective the setup I described was against anything I could accidentally run across on the web on my own, while still being the only one touching the keyboard. I prescribe it as the Holy Grail for people that surf indiscriminately, in the wild wild west, but maintain physical control of their box. I was hoping to get either affirmation or a description why I was wrong in that case (and if you're still reading, I'm still interested.)

Impressive. Does that work on against Firefox running NoScript and AdBlock on a Ubuntu boot thumbdrive that doesn't mount the hard drive?
I'm genuinely interested in an honest answer, and if the answer is 'Yes' I'm interested in details, because many on this thread believe that a boot thumbdrive running FireFox or Chrome on Linux is the holy grail (myself included.)