Ads cut into corporate profits, they are an investment, when they pay off with more sales, they are a good investment. When everyone blocks the ads, then they are simply a drain on profits and ought to be eliminated or fixed. Companies are not likely to blindly pay for ads if they are projected to lose them money.

If you think not watching ads will make everything cheaper, that seems unlikely. But if you think not watching ads will get businesses to think of different ways to promote products and stop interrupting your day with their bullshit, that seems more feasible.

100m data points *or less*

here are my answers. Spreadsheets are used in several cases:

1) When you have a small-to-medium-sized dataset (100m data points) and want to do a particular set of calculations or draw a particular set of conclusions from it just once or twice—so that the time invested in writing code in R or something similar is less than the time needed just to bung a few formulas into a spreadsheet and get your results. Once you get into analyses or processes that will be repeated many times, it makes more sense to write code.

2) Similar case, when you need to work with essentially tabular database data, but the operations you're performing (basic filtering, extracting records based on one or two criteria, just handing data from one person to the next) are either so simple or will be repeated so rarely that a MySQL database is overkill and just emailing a file back and forth is easier.

3) When you are working with data as a part of a team, and certain members of the team that are specialists in some areas related to the data, or (for example) members of the team that are doing your data collections, aren't particularly computationally expert. Spreadsheets are hard for laymen, but it's doable—a dozen or two hours of training and people can get a general, flexible grasp of spreadsheets and formulae. It takes a lot longer for someone to become basically proficient with R, MATLAB, MySQL, Python, etc., and you really want those specialists to just be able to do what they do to or with the data, rather than focusing their time and effort on learning computational tools. Spreadsheets are general purpose and have a relatively shallow learning curve relative to lots of other technologies, but they enable fairly sophisticated computation to take place—if inefficiently at times. They're like a lowest-common-denominator of data science.

We use Spreadsheets all the time in what we do, mostly as a transient form. The "heavy hitting" and "production" data takes place largely in MySQL and R, but there are constant temporary/intermediate moments in which data is dumped out as a CSV, touches a bunch of hands that are really not MySQL or R capable, and then is returned in updated form to where in normally lives.

They could offer fiber to everyone in the state of Pennsylvania. (12.7m)

It isn't relevant because I don't accept them as an authoritative source. I take issue with much of their other videos on youtube, I watched about 1 minute of the Part I you linked. It's not really any different than what I've seen before.

If we collectively choose to use our vote to subvert the process, by placing anti-votes instead of votes. Then shame on us and we deserve the results. This is what happens when you use the wrong tool for the wrong job.

(that series didn't contribute to the discussion)

There is this cool new website called YouTube where you can watch videos that various random people publish.

I block all ads using hosts and element hiding. I don't get annoying audio crap in my browser anymore. I'm currently not creating revenue for Slashdot, Wired, etc. but I kind of stopped caring anymore now that I've got what I wanted.

Well we don't get to vote for federal employees, only for elected offices. (hence the name)

The will of the voters should probably trump your perception of fairness.

That said, I would recommend that people not vote for a scofflaw as the leader of the free world.

No, you can technically be President and a felon. But to run for an election in most states you have to be eligible to vote, and felons are usually not eligible.

Hillary might be President before she is convicted, and then she can immediately pardon herself. That would force Congress to go through the motions of impeachment, and that process may not succeed depending on how controversial the Justice Department's case is viewed in the public eye. (yea, I'm pretty cynical these days)

I never have. Nor have I mentioned morality as an issue here.

I sympathize with your frustration. Best we part ways before you project further.

Yes, it's clear that you disagree with something. Not that you've been able to respond to any statements without more than a vague disagreement. If you don't want to answer the arguments, then I guess you don't have to respond. But please don't try to setup a strawman for me to attack, because I won't go for it.

What's so damned special about relationships? If it's about equality, then tell me, why does a childless married couple pay less in tax than a widow with a child who earns the same as the couple? I'd say the widow's relationship to the child matters to society, the couple's relationship doesn't matter to anyone but them.

Why is it legal to discriminate on the basis of marriage?

Why does any government in a secular country have anything at all to do with marriage?

A large proportion of the time it ends with MS sending patches. On Patch Tuesday the damned thing is useless for an hour sometimes. Other times I have to reboot it to make it usable.

Windows: "Quality? Why make a quality product when crap sells so well?"

If you have a contractual arrangement to be paid for clicks or views, and you rip off the other party. It doesn't particularly matter how easy or difficult it is to accomplish the breach of contract. If they catch you, they can make a case against you.

Of course if you base your business around bad technology that is easy to trick, I totally agree you shouldn't be surprised if there is rampant abuse.

Senior SW Engineer/Architect - IANAL