Comment IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH (Score 1) 281
Mwahhhahaahaaahaaaa!
-- Eric Schmidt
Mwahhhahaahaaahaaaa!
-- Eric Schmidt
What are they going to do, install a rootkit on my computer to prevent me from downloading stuff? Who thinks up this stuff?
The documents DEMAND that the the press DESTROY SONY!
According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net.
Lucky they had a mole on this inside, or they never could've taken down that criminal mastermind.
Fine. As well they should.
They advertiser can work this out with the website the same way I would have worked it out with the Miami Herald in 1955. Frankly, I'm not sure if that was trusting the newspaper's ad sales department to be not fraudulent when reporting circulation numbers, or if there was an industry group like Nielsen that verified such things or made estimates based on 3rd party polling.
Whatever the method, plenty of ad sales were made, and everyone was happy, and I know it didn't involve 100% tracking of individual readers. Alexa can either adjust the model that they have to account for the growing number of people who block their web bugs, come up with a new process or model entirely, or die in a fire. I don't particularly care. Life went on before all of this big brother tracking shit, and it will go on after it is defeated, or at least marginalized.
No question that it does present a risk, and it's fair to discuss how to mitigate that.
I propose that they can go about it the same way they do in the newspaper industry, it would be fraud for the New York Times or my local free newspaper claim a larger circulation than they really have when negotiate ad sales. I see why no reason why websites wouldn't have to present Alexa type statistics to back up their claim.
Taking out ads on some sketchy Eastern European hosted link farm should be viewed just as skeptically as calling up a Bulgarian local paper and trusting their staff to give you accurate circulation statistics and demographics about their village. i.e don't be xenophobic about it, but realize that there might be some incentive to take advantage of your ad money, and negotiate according to your risk tolerance level.
Download at your own risk indeed. I was curious so I opened a VM with a fresh IE install (no Adblocking) and chose the download.com link for VLC.
Download.com is reputable enough anyway, right? Long history with cnet serving up shareware and all that?
http://i.imgur.com/l8n2ScB.png
WHICH OF THE DAMN DOWNLOAD BUTTONS OPENS ACTUALLY GETS ME VLC?!?!
Obviously I know, but my dad doesn't, and that's why I have no sympathy for online advertisers.
They could just host the ads first party based on CPM statistics like a god damn newspaper, but then they would have to do actual work instead of plugging in some 3rd party malware laden ad engine.
I would have thought the crossover between people who used AdBlock and knew what the hell to do with a
I recently found out (perhaps a bit naively) that there were ads on YouTube, too. It turns out I'd literally been using AdBlock Plus so long that it predated my ever using that site (or at least whenever they introduced ads). Turns out YouTube is a real shit experience when you use it as intended, as I found on my smartphone.
Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread
I'd link to pirate bay if it wasn't down...they showed the top downloads and literally every single one was a commercial movie or game or TV show from a major publisher. The exact same sort of thing that is popular without piracy, only now you don't have to pay for that copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy."
This will be surprising to you I'm sure, but it turns you actually *can't* walk outside in Buffalo, put a finger in the air, and say anything definitive about the weather in Tahiti or Dubai or Moscow or Los Angeles.
Pic related: http://i.imgur.com/lZ7C4nY.jpg
I don't know if wild Slashdot speculation that Microsoft might fundamentally change their business model to something word that everybody would hate is enough of a reason for them to move to an entirely new OS.
I don't know, I have a second browser and a second office suite and some old-school games and some programming tools and some translation tools and still have like 12 gigs left. If I want to watch downloaded videos I stream them from my desktop computer. 32 GB is fine if you're not using it for modern games or to house all your media.
Not quite 15", but the HP stream is a $230 14" laptop with a 32 GB ssd. Windows, office, and the various bundled apps take up about 15 gigs of that. I have the 12" version and speed is fine, you just can't use it for games, and if you want to keep a large collection of music or pictures (or whatever) you need an external drive or SD card.
What would these fired workers possibly say, that these theoretical severance packages don't allow?' "I had a job, and then I lost it," or something to that effect? Big deal, that wouldn't make it to the front page of the Times or even Slashdot. And isn't there some kind of communication tool out there, which allows people to anonymously relate something that happened to them, and then have it widely distributed by computer?
Sure, losing a job to an H1B worker is no fun. This post is imagining something sinister is being hidden in severance packages, but leaves the sinister happening so vague as to meaningless. Either say what it is or shut up.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome