Conversely, engineers do not usually appreciate the marketing guys enough and the failure of many tech startups has been the mentality that if they have a good product, then obviously everyone will hear about it and buy it.

That doesn't work in the real world, and even big brands that everyone really has heard of still have to keep putting their name in the public eye so people will think of them when they want to buy their genre of product. Name one big name company who is doing successfully and doesn't advertise? They don't exist because nobody has heard of them.

I am pretty new to the marketing industry, and yea it really is full of people pulling iffy bulls*** to get the sales, but when it comes to the techniques, I have been recently wondering if I've been considering it from the wrong angle the whole time...

Everyone who is here hates seeing these ads, and honestly, we really wish we wouldn't have to pay the CPM to show the ads to you! But the problem is, a lot of people do want to see these ads. We are connecting people who want something with the people who have that to offer. If they were like you and really didn't want the product, they wouldn't have clicked on the ad. If all they wanted was the boobies.... they wouldn't have paid for the membership to Evony... they would have gone to a porn site instead.

Personally, I routinely click on ads on Slashdot to see what the different products are about. Sometimes I've seen cool stuff. That's the real point of advertising.

Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them?? I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.

Overall, all I'm saying is that the industry as a whole is still learning how to adapt. The goal is sales to people who want it, or convincing people they want it. Subterfuge in this is very wrong and I won't condone it, but this technology is actually showing you something that you were obviously interested in at one point. As advertisers find out that it creeps some people out, they'll figure out ways to make it less creepy so we can get the most people to remember "hey, I wanted that" without scaring everyone else off.

Just so everyone doesn't get the completely wrong idea... this place also has a VERY NICE beer selection. Everyone else may be drinking PBR, but you certainly don't have to. I absolutely love this place and I'm not even from New York (yet)!

In an ideal world I would be inclined to agree with you and the previous poster. Unfortunately, I think that these kind of people are actually a required member of society. This guy technically did nothing illegal and I don't think that the cops did anything too wrong either, except that they kept trying to tell him that he legally DID have to do something when he did not.

If people like this agitator did not put together very obvious video tapes like this, then anybody who accidentally ends up in a similar situation wouldn't know their own rights. Nobody who accidentally ends up in a similar situation has a video camera handy, and anyone else trying to tell these stories without video evidence basically has the "screenshot or it didn't happen" ban into the world of anecdotal.

The worst thing that it could be said he did here was waste the time of two police officers. Not a big expense to pay for providing an informative video. I'm not encouraging everyone to do this, but I do have respect for people who do this. And aside from the commentary I love the fact that he was calm and non-confrontational with the officers in all verbal interaction.

s/pakistan/us/g ... hmm, sounds reasonable
s/pakistan/england/g ..... wow it seems you can apply this backwards straw man to anybody

This whole thread is basically a lot of [citation needed] bigotry and idiocy. Every country and every group of people has problems. In general, individual people are good and won't actually hurt anyone. Any sufficiently large group of people that thinks another person or group is an "outsider" are more likely to do violence. Its basically Herd Behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior) and there is a lot of research done into Crowd Psychology.

I'm sorry, but you all just jumped into your own herds.

There are a number of factors to overcome when making singularity porn:

1. once you put it in, it's a real bitch to take it back out
2. nobody has ever successfully pulled out in time
3. they start at sucking and never manage to make it to the sex part
4. Ebony has a trademark on the term "black hole"
5. it's kind of a tease to watch because as much as they constantly approach the "event horizon", they never quite reach it

I'll second that. But also "modern medicine" implies western modern medicine. Eastern medical practices still have quite different approaches to many degrees, and I think a lot could be learned from understanding that approach as well, seeing as it starts with a whole different set of base assumptions.

Yea I became a huge fan of the V5 pens from Pilot. I've never felt so comfortable writing with a widely available pen before.

I like to call this the Wal-Mart approach to hacking. Don't go big... go wide. A ton of small targets have a greater ROI than a select few large products, and also have much less risk involved. And as anyone can see from Wal-Mart's value... it works!

What I find scary is that there isn't a single mention of the fact that if you use these free web-based systems... you are posting your internal company data onto somebody else's servers! Whether you believe in the security of outlook / exchange / insert-other-option-here or not, this should at least be a factor in the decision. If not for purely personal reasons, then often times for legal reasons.

Okay, I have to put a bite in on the Anti-Microsoft plug. I'm sorry, but as much as microsoft products suck, most everything else sucks more for consumer software. Microsoft provides integration between their products, they are supported and fixed. Very few products in other realms come close to that.

Apple's products are better to some degree because they provide reliability through simplicty, but nobody has ANYTHING as good as the office suite that works with the rest of their stack.

OOo? It feels like I'm back in the '90's every time I use it! Seriously, Microsoft Office '95 feels more polished than that! And crashed less too when I was running it on Windows 3.1. Sure I can submit a bug report on Open Office, but it doesn't change the fact that the stuff is still behind the times comparatively.

I agree on the rest of your post, so I'm trying not to be aggressive here, I just get aggravated when everyone just puts Microsoft out there as the big bad evil source of everything sucky. I agree that in the server market, I prefer Linux products and open technologies, but the real money is almost always in mass-market areas and that's where Microsoft does an insanely good job.

I still firmly believe that a better product could dislodge Microsoft, but that product has not shown up yet and it's because of naivete. Software isn't just about the pretty code. It's about usability testing, support services, marketing, integration, distribution, training. I'm sure there are more parts to that, but I'm only a developer, I don't have to manage that part of it most of the time. As far as customers are concerned, those are all equally as important as the product itself and rightfully so. If more groups got their s*** together and developed a full platform for the product like that, it could do well!

A market has begun to develop around professional support for these products. How do I find professional support for Open Office? I look at this: http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.ods - a long, UGLY and hard to play with spreadsheet file! They won't even put up a webpage so i can select my area and they tell me a consultant? This is abominable!

Okay, lunch break is about over, no more time to rant :(

I think Facebook is going to go another route. By maintaining control of the data itself, Facebook is essentially creating a monopoly of the best targeted advertising data ever. Their policies are such that they can broker this data and sell it to the highest bidder. Or display ads to the highest bidder like they do right now. They make a good amount of money straight off of the advertisement bids and I'm sure they have much bigger schemes for reselling the data again. The more they keep their own shtick together the more valuable that particular data becomes and the higher rates they can charge for it. Google makes insane money off of their directed advertising and Facebook has them beat in quality of targeting by far. When it comes down to it, in the long run Facebook will have the deepest pockets all by itself.

I think we are finally beginning to see some of the endings to the technology euphoria that have developed over the past 20 years. As technology and the internet improved and people discovered all of these extra amazing ways to make different processes more efficient, it's becoming more and more obvious that certain processes simply should not be efficient. This includes government ability to collect data as well as corporate ability to do the same. When it's harder to do, it's fine because it doesn't have as strong of an effect and the mere difficult limits its use. The easier it gets the more often it will be abused or over-used because it's possible.

Essentially, just because we can build this network, doesn't mean we should. I'm giving a big nod of the head to the EU over this one.