From my experience, subscription services are merely the carrot they try to entice you with to get out from under the deluge of ads you would otherwise see.

Yes, the typical /.er will kill ads using a variety of methods ( hosts file, any number of addons or dropping them at the firewall / proxy ), the majority of those on the net will not.

Besides, it's only a matter of time before the subscription users start seeing ads again. They'll start off small but will be right back to full on annoying soon enough. Too much money left on the table otherwise. Cable TV comes to mind here. Sometimes I think there are more commercials than actual content depending on the channel.

I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.

There's a vague sort of notion about what "IoT" is supposed to be, cobbled together from some mixture of analogies to SCADA and industrial control systems and science fiction; but it is broad and ill formed enough that all sorts of things that can connect to a network in some way, and any and all software associated with them, can be covered without stretching the truth too hard.

Plus, until the various squabbling factions decide how to actually make the 'things' interact usefully with each other(the current preference seems to be 'appoint either Google or Apple as Feudal Oligarch', with 'don't even bother, everything you buy will have its own terrible app!' as the runner up), the 'internet' bit is really just being used as a convenient remote access to the control panel(and for monetizing users, of course), which is much less hairy and challenging than actual interactions among things in some conveniently configurable and/or emergent-without-being-pathological way.

Any guesses about how many existing 'embedded system that connects to the internet in some fashion' projects were dubbed 'internet of things' in order to bring this new buzzphrase to prominence?

Yeah, yeah, I know, at some point the scale and pervasiveness of embedded connectivity may reach a point where it is different in kind, not just degree, from past use; but I submit that we aren't there yet by a nontrivial margin. For the moment, "IOT" seems to mean 'has a terrible smartphone app' or 'last model, you connected to the serial port to configure the system; when we revised the hardware it turned out that adding ethernet would be cheap and lots of customers wanted it, so we added it.'

Such delightful ambiguity. Would "they" happen to be the laws, or the government?

Then what the fuck do we even have it for?

// exception was found
// beyond here be dragons, run
// make your escape now
goto blah;
^^ code master

Leech.

Let's be clear here ... fuck yeah.

I don't surf little private vanity sites, I hit major news agencies, and sites owned by large corporations.

Let me be perfectly clear: I don't give a crap about the revenue of large corporations. Not now, not ever.

You think I should give a shit if Dice gets ad revenue? Or cnn? or google? Or Microsoft? Of Ziff Davis? Or Facebook? Or Twitter?

Fuck that.

They don't owe me a damned thing, and I don't owe them anything -- but until they find a technology solution to stop me, too damned bad.

I'm still going to block as many advertising and analytics companies as I can, using as many plugins as I can find. In every browser I use.

The sites I read aren't in any danger of going under because I don't give them ad views -- and even if they were, I still don't trust the companies involved.

But blocking Facebook and Twitter and the big ad/a analytics companies? If you think I give a crap about that, you're sadly mistaken.

So you go ahead and be a well behaved little consumer, me, I'll continue to not give a crap about the revenue of large corporations.

What exactly would you propose to add? This isn't a matter of implementing new functionality, but rather removing fundamental misfeatures. Any change to address this issue is going to end up breaking existing applications which depend on the original input behavior.

Oh how about a new protocol extension that allows one designated program to receive all keyboard inputs regardless of any other grabs. The X11 server can keep on pretending that the other grabbers still have such a grab.

Look: X11 works on Windows even though windows can apparently REALLY gab the keyboard. X11 will we are told work on Wayland too despite the fact that wayland can apparently REALLY grab they keyboard. Do you really think it couldn't be extended to do that itself?

Not planned, but given the choice of making an important phone call and looking like an idiot, or suffering some big disadvantage because that phone call cannot be made, most people would prefer looking like an idiot for five minutes.

I'm curious... At this point do we just expect everything to be 100% free? Or do we think money fairies give companies the capital to pay for bandwidth and processing power?

Hey, there will always be people who don't block ads. Some sites have subscriptions, which people are free to use.

But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.

I will allow a site which serves its own advertising to show ads as long as they're not overly intrusive. But doubleclick, discus, scrorecard reasearch, quantcast, facebook, twitter -- and literally hundreds of other shit sites I have no interest in, well -- that's not my problem.

I'm visiting your website. Unless you lock me out via subscription (in which case I'll ignore your site), I do not owe you ad revenue, and I sure as shit don't owe the 20 other sites embedded in your website anything.

Honestly, if you eventually go out of business ... that is not my problem. Protecting myself from marketers and malware is my problem, and quite frankly, Flash gets reported as loading up malware pretty regularly. I've treated it as malware for over a decade now.

But let's not act like I owe you something. And let's certainly not act like just because you collect your money from a bunch of shady assholes that I owe them anything.

Crippleware on Windows always used to amuse me. Oh you've disabled the button because I haven't paid? [poke]...[poke]... There now it's enabled again. Oh, you forgot to check if it should be enabled when processing the click event? Tough.

Sometimes I was far more subtle. I'd start slowly cycling the background color, one RGB increment at a time...

insane != abstract

you don't get to redefine words as their opposite meaning and expect to sound logically coherent

"i'm going to redefine 'wet' as 'dry' and continue talking about climatology and expect people to still take me seriously..."

okay, crackpot

i'm not willing to entertain the mental gymnastics whereby moderation is defined as an extreme

you're nuts dude