ABP used to be great, then they sold out, and now they're basically a protection racket. Once again, we the users are not the customers, we're the product. I've long jumped ship to one of the forks (AdBlock Edge, in case anyone cares).

It was obvious that turning it into a "nice ads you have there, would be a pity..." game would land them in trouble sooner or later, so my sympathies are very limited. Especially once you dig through the connections between the various companies belonging to the same corporate network and realize that magically, their own or ally companies are all on the whitelist.

To the publishers, meanwhile: If your business model is threatened by users telling you to fuck off because you've become obnoxious, then maybe the problem is in your business model, isn't it?

And you're going to do that how, exactly? Skill is not as easy to measure as your average MMORPG makes you believe. And almost every way to take a measurement can be gamed. Skill is also a very vague word. Skill in what, exactly, just for starters.

There's a lot that goes into making a successful magazine, and the recipe is so unknown that the best publishing houses have come up with in the past 50 years is to simply do field-tests - start the magazine and after some months decide whether to continue or pull the plug.

From the summary it sounds as if the staff reacted explicitly to the BS - by making it clear they don't want to work for someone who thinks throwing BS around in internal mails is in any way a meaningful contribution.

That's not the ethically questionable part. You could argue that they brought it upon themselves by not worshipping the right god in the right way or something. It's a weak argument, but it can be made.

But it also wiped out all the animals in existence (except 2 of each species), creatures who by the alleged gods own design were not responsible. That's a lot of collateral damage that barely gets a mentioning, but from an ethical perspective I think we pretty much agree that punishment on innocents is a big no-no and capital punishment doubly so.

In a book filled to the brim with instructions to kill people, from individuals to whole tribes, including god-commands to kill all the men, rape the women and enslave the children, a natural catastrophy is the worst you can think of?

Did you miss I was talking about ethics and not death count? Three people dying in a landslide is a tragedy, but one of them slaughtering the other brutally and eating his heart is certain ethically quite worse even though fewer people die.

True, they're out in the open, preaching, not hiding in basements.

The above is a fantastic example of just how arbitrary our ethics are. It's not just the bible - things ten times worse than what any game or movie show happen in real life and we accept them as "collateral damage". The same as 50,000 years ago, our attitude depends a lot more on who does to whom than it does on what is being done.

First understand your position in the company and whose turf you're going to piss on if you make a move like that. You don't want your efforts to fail because you rubbed some manager the wrong way and he sabotages everything just because he can.

Secondly, make sure your system is really better in all regards, especially the failure cases. People leaving the company or getting ill for a long time? Password sharing (no matter what your policy says, people are doing it, especially bosses and secretaries)? Password recovery?

Third, make sure of user acceptance. People don't like change, and if the new system is not considerably more easy to use than the old one, you will face resistance.

Fourth, pack all of that research into a presentation and make your case. Good luck, you'll need it.

From my experience, #1 is the most important. Also take into account decision factors you may not know about. I've had a real-world experience where we (the security department) wanted to introduce an identity management system and were totally stonewalled. Three months later the company was sold - management already knew it would happen and they didn't want to commit to anything major or expensive just before the sale.

Because no process is flawless. 3 out of 1.2 mio. Heck, in a lot of touristic areas, the percentage of brick-and-mortar stores that are scams is higher.

Good summary of most of the commercial activity on the Internet today.

Probably there is. The fact alone that it happens here, but not everywhere else with nuclear reactors, or even everywhere else with old-style soviet nuclear reactors is a pretty good evidence. Strong enough that "it's not the result of his really big unique event" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be proven, not the other way around.

Trees don't not decay because something irradiated them once. The actor in tree decay is not the tree, it's the microbes and fungi etc.

Bullshit. If you enter the zone, you're given radiometers. We know the effect of radiation on the human body. We know that there is still radiation in the zone. That is the risk that is really there right now.

Doing it through "wisdom of the crowd" will lead to positive reinforcement loops, resulting in news biased in the direction of what most people already believed anyways. This self-reinforcement will make these news irrelevant.

Who wouldn't want a news stream that thinks porn stars and manga characters are right up there in importance with world politics and science, but local events and locations are not notable enough to be mentioned?

For all its goods, WP has many downsides as well and in a news stream, they would come out more strongly and more visibly, because they wouldn't be hidden under layers of administrative control, aggressive editing and irrelevance.

Because you can't see radiation? Or even most of its effects?

That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets, but even that needs narration or you won't realize that this tree hasn't fallen yesterday, but in 1986 or whenever.

Please, that's just saying you shot the guy that most people looked at. It doesn't make them responsible for you pulling the trigger.

Before Google appeared, nobody was even aware that linking to another website made you a participant in a consensus vote. Many people still don't see it that way.