It sounds like you're disappointed that 3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators.

Everyone else has already made good points, so I'll stick to what no one else has said:

I think it's important to realize that they aren't the Star Trek replicators that a lot of enthusiast want to act like they are. They're tools, like a milling machine or a table saw. To make the best of them you have to learn to use them, learn what they're capable of, and what they're good for.

The projects I'm most proud of are the ones that just use some 3D printed parts with other materials where those other materials make more sense than 3D printed parts. Unfortunately a lot of what you'll see people building is 100% 3D printed and so it's hard to get a sense of how genuinely useful it is to be able to make small custom plastic parts for a project.

The fact that so many people think 3D printers are replicators means that a lot of parts you'll find online are garbage and essentially unprintable. 3D printers work best when you're designing parts that could have been extruded, and then there's some tricks you can use to get non-extruded shapes, but if you go at it thinking you'll be able to print literally any shape then you're going to be disappointed with a lot of failures.

Cost can be very cheap, like the model I have is down to $140 on eBay now. ...and it's not really all that much different from more expensive printers. They're all melting plastic and shoving it through a nozzle to smear it against an existing part. Indeed, just the other day I saw a $500 printer someone bought and was surprised to see that its design addresses none of the most problematic aspects of the design of my $140 printer. For the most part, the more expensive printers are just designed to look better in order to justify their price.

3D printers are great if you like to build stuff and want another way to produce parts for your projects, and I'd definitely better off having one because it lets me build things I'd never have been able to build without it, but if you're just expecting a replicator, then I would recommend that you don't buy one because you will be disappointed. They're a tool, not a device for consumers to use to consume.

Also, what people say about them paying for themselves, that's basically untrue. You're going to spend so much more time building stuff that any savings you might get by printing stuff rather than buying it will be eaten up by what you spend to create projects you wouldn't have created if you didn't have the printer.

> You'll only get 0ms latency with a picture tube and nobody does that anymore...

I do.

> I think your latency quotes are excessive

I can't say what the real value is either, but it's definitely a problem whatever it is.

> I'm pretty sure that I don't experience anything as bad as that.

To the extent people play emulators well, it's because they've learned to cope with the lag. If you're a skilled player and you go straight from playing Super Mario World on a CRT television with a real SNES to playing it on an emulator on a computer, you find yourself running head-on into enemies and dying when you intended to jump over them, because when you see that it is time to jump, it's too late. You have to learn to do everything 100 ms sooner than you normally would.

If you've not played on a real SNES in a long time, then you'll just think that you didn't jump soon enough and next time you'll jump sooner and after a while you'll have developed all of your skill with that 100 ms lag, and if you switch to a real SNES on a CRT television you'll find that you do everything too soon.

It is a real problem, and it's exactly why I didn't buy these retro consoles. If they were real re-creations of the hardware I would have been interested, but I'm not paying a lot of money just to get an emulator. There are better choices in the form of other companies building clone NES and SNES systems that aren't emulators and so they don't have a lag problem. ...and you can get a CRT television for free at most yard sales.

> So why do people keep using spyware services when there is something like tox available?

I'd love an encrypted chat client, but there's a trade-off between security and convenience that people who make encrypted chat applications aren't willing to acknowledge. I'd never heard of Tox before, but I see it's no exception. It features "perfect forward secrecy," which is great if you're a spy trying to hide from the NSA, but not so great if you just want to send a message to a friend whose chat client isn't presently online.

Look at every popular chat application and there are some common features to all of them: You can send messages to friends who aren't online. You can have the application open on your PC and on your phone and messages sent to you will be received on both devices. You can have it open on your PC and closed on your phone, receive messages on your PC, then later open it on your phone and see those messages that were sent to your PC. You and a bunch of friends can join a group and send messages that are sent to everyone in the group. This is all just common functionality that everyone expects from every chat application.

Security is just one feature of a chat application. Just because it might be the only feature you care about doesn't mean that other people are willing to give up every other feature just to get security. If they have nothing to hide, those other features are far more valuable than encryption.

Do you even know what Net Neutrality is? How does net neutrality make anything harder for an ISP? It's almost like an anti-regulation in that it tells them that they're not allowed to do something that's actually more difficult to do than what it requires them to do. All they have to do is treat all packets equally.

Net neutrality is "OK, you paid for internet access, so here's your internet access." A lack of net neutrality is "OK, you paid for internet access, but if you want to connect to Netflix, Netflix needs to pay for access to you. Never mind that they too pay for their own internet access and so you'd think that two people, both paying for internet access, would be able to talk to each other on the internet. Nope, access to you is just an asset for your ISP to sell to other companies, despite the fact that you've paid your ISP for that to not be the case when you paid to be able to access the whole fucking internet.

ISPs just want us to pay for internet twice, first in the fee we pay them for our internet access, then in the additional fees we pay to Netflix to cover what Netflix has to pay our ISPs to access us. Again, remember that Netflix is already paying their own ISP. Our ISPs feel like they should be paid by Netflix too.

Net neutrality is just saying "look, it costs a certain amount to get packets to and from the internet. Just charge that amount for your service and quit it with all of the bullshit." The reason ISPs want to do away with it is because every company wants to charge each individual customer as much as that customer can afford to pay, but its hard to do that after every customer figures out that all they have to do is call up and say they're going to cancel their service because they can no longer afford it and they get a lower price. It's easier to just charge everyone the lower price, and let the customers with more money pay you via the money you get from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc., by charging them for access to your customers. Customers with more money will sign up to more online services and, in doing so, be paying their ISP more than customers who sign up to fewer, regardless of how much internet bandwidth they use. Someone who watches Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube doesn't necessarily use more bandwidth than someone who just watches YouTube.

As for their argument that they need to charge because of how much bandwidth these services use, well, they could always just charge for bandwidth if that's really the problem. They don't want to do that though because that puts customers in control of how much they have to pay. Remember, they want each customer to pay as much as that customer can afford. That doesn't happen if the customer can decide to save money by not using so much bandwidth.

As for the asymmetrical bandwidth argument, who pays who has fuck all to do with which way the data is flowing. I pay my ISP whether I send more data or receive more data because either way I'm taking the data 20 feet to the cable modem and my ISP is carrying it the rest of the way around the world. If Netflix's ISP is carrying their data half-way to customers before dumping it onto those customers ISPs then that's all that matters. If it isn't, then refuse to peer with those bitches and let Netflix find a new ISP. There's no need to do away with net neutrality to solve the problem.

You're a philosophical zombie, aren't you?

I've had a theory for some time that a lot of people lack genuine intelligence, but instead simply fake intelligence much like those automatic content generators for link farms generate informative text -- they just randomly piece together related information and, if the information is stitched together well enough, you can end up reading a paragraph before realizing that what you're reading, while it has a lot of words, isn't actually saying anything. Obviously to avoid detection, these philosophical zombies would have to employ a rather effective algorithm for faking intelligence, so exactly how to recognize them has been something I've been trying to figure out for a long time.

Your post strikes me as a possible candidate for a text generated by a philosophical zombie. While it does contain seemingly intelligent arguments, those arguments fail to maintain a cohesiveness in what argument they are attempting to promote. In particular, they seem to entirely miss the argument I was attempting to make, much like how a chat bot misses the substance of anything you say to it but instead merely picks up on keywords which it wishes to respond to because it knows how to talk about those things.

So people aren't being sued over the use of GPL code? I'll give you that. However, I fail to see how it's relevant. Perhaps lawsuits are rare because people wish to abide by the terms of the GPL even if they aren't legally enforceable. Perhaps lawsuits are rare because people who write GPL code often don't have the money to sue. Perhaps lawsuits are rare because it is difficult to tell what source code was used by looking at a closed-source binary which the author of the open-source code may not even know exists. Whatever the reason, the lack of lawsuits says nothing about what the GPL actually says, and the lack of lawsuits definitely doesn't imply that it is acceptable to violate the terms of the GPL. So exactly why you decided to mention this, I have no idea, other than that perhaps you are a chat bot which is programmed to respond to any negative comments about the GPL with responses that you've seen other use in response to negative comments about the GPL.

"Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head forcing them to use the code." I'll give you that one too. Indeed, it's kind of central to my argument that no one is going to use this image library. If someone were holding a gun to their head, they'd have no choice but to use it and as a result release their projects under the GPL license. However, I wasn't saying that they were being forced to do this. I was saying that they're not going to do this, as they're not going to use this image library. So again, I have no clue why you think this argument is relevant, other than that you're a chat bot which is programmed to respond to any negative comments about the GPL with responses that you've seen other use in response to negative comments about the GPL.

"How can you believe in the far more controlling and forceful terms of closed source models that even include EULAs to try to extend controls to usage which isn't even part of the rights granted by copyright" ... Well, given that I never said that, perhaps this is a comment that your chat-bot-like nature picked up from someone else you've conversed with in the past. I dunno.

Anyway, I've clearly reached the limit of my ability to participate in internet discussions in any constructive manner, so I'm going to delete this account (or at least change the password to some random shit if I can't delete the account) in order to discourage myself from wasting any more time in internet discussions, at least until next month when I succumb to my addiction and create a new account.

It truly seems as if the only people who are pro-GPL are people who haven't read the GPL.

GPL 2.0 section 2 part B:

GPL 3.0 section 5 part C:

Now you are correct in that merely using a library doesn't make a project a derivative work of the library, but the problem is that the authors of the GPL don't see it that way. ...or perhaps they do, but they're not willing to admit to it, because admitting to that would defeat the entire purpose of the GPL, as its purpose is to leverage existing open-source code to force other developers to release open-source code.

So while it may be OK legally to use that library in closed-source software, no one is going to do so as they don't want to be sued by authors who think otherwise, and especially if the FSF were to become involved, that lawsuit could prove to be quite costly. ...and then there's the whole moral issue of the fact that, by using the GPL, the authors have declared that they do not want the code to be used in closed-source software regardless of whether it is legal to do so or not. So no developer who cares about authors rights is going to utilize the library in their closed-source software regardless of whether the law says that they can do so.

If the authors of the image library wish for it to be included in closed-source software, they should choose a license that doesn't explicitly state that they want any software that uses the library to also be licensed under the GPL 3.0.

That's what always gets me about the anti-HFCS people. Why they think sugar is so innocent is beyond my understanding. Normally, when one takes a plant and refines it down to a single chemical which not only causes bad health but which is also addictive, we consider that to be a very bad thing and make it illegal, but somehow sugar gets a free pass because it's a simple five-letter word which everyone has been familiar with for as long as they can remember, and so it doesn't sound nearly as scary as "high-fructose corn syrup."

Another thing that annoys me is when they eventually become tired of typing "high-fructose" all of the time and so they start being anti - corn syrup rather than anti - high-fructose corn syrup. Ordinary corn syrup contains no fructose, but is instead only glucose, the sugar that your body uses for energy, and so while you still shouldn't consume a lot of it, its health effects aren't nearly as bad since there's nothing in it that your body doesn't know how to metabolize correctly. The problem is the fructose which can only be metabolized by the liver because the rest of the body doesn't know how to use it for energy, and which the liver turns into all of the symptoms of "metabolic syndrome," e.g. non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

It doesn't matter if the fructose comes from HFCS, sugar, or fruit, it's unhealthy to consume it. ...but fuck you if you say anything bad about fruit, as it is the icon for healthy eating, as it's the only source of addictive fructose that those natural foods types get and they sure as hell don't want to give it up. However, we can get the vitamins in fruit from many sources and so it isn't necessary to allow trees and plants to exploit our addiction in order to spread their seeds. Despite popular belief, trees don't create fruit because they love us and would never do anything to harm us, they're just doing whatever helps them to survive, and it doesn't matter to them whether the fruit is mildly toxic to us or not. Fruit juice is every bit as harmful as soda, so it's sad to see people promote it as a healthy alternative.

I did read it, but yes, I'm clearly not understanding exactly what your site was. Hopefully that doesn't matter too much to the discussion.

I think it's important to note that I'm not really trying to. Yes, I do think that what your site did was kind of wasteful (assuming I understand what it did), but it isn't my opinion that matters, it's the opinion of your site's users that matters. So what I'm really trying to say is that, in terms of their willingness to donate to keep the site alive, apparently they did not believe it to be worth the expense.

For example, I might decide to build an outdoor ice skating rink in the desert, and allow people to use it for free. Then after some time, I become unable to afford the upkeep myself, and so I ask for people to help out, at a cost of $80 per visitor per day, since it is in the desert and keeping that ice frozen in that location is insanely expensive. In that situation, I'd expect most people to decide that, while they love the ice skating rink, and using it brings them a lot of happiness, it just isn't a cost-effective means of entertainment. Meanwhile, if I did the same thing in a colder location with a higher humidity level, it might cost only $8 per visitor per day, and in that case many of the visitors would happy just pay the $8, since it does bring people $8 worth of happiness, it just doesn't bring people $80 of happiness. So perhaps, in the desert, I need to find some way to either increase the value of the experience, or decrease the expense of it. For example, if I built a dome over the rink, trapping all of the humidity inside, that would likely reduce the evaporation rate, and reduce the cost. If that wasn't enough, I might also open the rink only at night, keeping it covered with insulation during the day, which is certainly non-ideal, but it does enable people in the hot desert climate to continue to enjoy an ice-skating rink from time to time for an affordable price.

What I'm saying is that I think your web site was in that sort of situation. I'm not saying that it was worthless, I'm just saying that I don't think its worth was in proportion to its cost, and that's why you weren't able to raise sufficient donations. So I think it would have made sense to look into ways to provide a similar value at a lower cost, e.g. asking users to not hot-link the images from literally everywhere but instead just from key locations like their MySpace page or personal web site where the probability that anyone seeing the images is interested in the information they contain is highest, so that you can continue to provide most of the value you provided before but at much less than most of the cost.

Obviously I don't know your situation and so I can only speculate as to what might have helped, but my point is that your situation seems unusual to me. I think most of the discussion for this story isn't about such unique circumstances, but rather it's about much more typical web sites like my own, the type which I think I can quite easily argue aren't harmed in any way that anyone should care about by the use of ad blocking software.

Take a look at this web page. When the Anonymous Coward asked "would you pay money to use any of the 'free' websites you currently use?" it was this particular web page that I had in mind when I replied "no, and even so, the web sites I really care about would continue to exist."

About a year ago I needed to find that information again, having successfully used it the first time I found it, and having a bottle of the enchant saved from that time but no memory of how to properly test its acidity and adjust it. So I went looking, and only encountered search results like this despite using search terms that one would hope would result in such high-quality in-depth information as one of the first results.

I went all the way to page 12 in those results, hoping to tell you at what rank the page actually shows up, but never found it and at that point I gave up. Instead, those search results are all bullshit like instructables.com where you'll find that someone apparently seems to have read the page I'm looking for, but promptly forgot 50% of the information and 95% of the details, but they decided to make an instructable about it because... I don't know, to help instructables.com to earn more ad revenue I guess. So there's pages and pages of half-assed copies of that information, with the best information nowhere to be found. ...and I say "copies" because I'm fairly certain that when I first found that web page, it was the only thing around with that information on it, and it really seems to be the case that all of the existing information on that topic on the internet originates from that web page. That's why I was so surprised to be unable to find that page at all when I went looking for it years later. It's the original source, and such a high-quality source at that, so how could it not be the top search result? I stuck at it, and after about 45 minutes I was finally able to get Google to give up the location of the page I was looking for. ...or actually, it gave me someone's mirror of it, but with a copy & paste of some of the text I was then able to find the original source. (Note that this was all a year ago. At present, it seems that Google is willing to help out with one of the search suggestions including the author's name. That makes me think that no one is able to track down that web page without including the authors name, even though obviously enough people agree that that page is the best source of that information, otherwise it wouldn't be one of the suggested alternative searches.)

The internet didn't used to be like this. It used to be all (well, maybe not "all") high-quality stuff that people put together and hosted for free. However, as time moves on, it becomes increasingly commercialized, and the result is that rather than the quality of the information being what determines what is and isn't online (as no one is going to be charitable about hosting worthless content), it's the ability to generate ad revenue that matters now. <sarcasm>So, you barely know anything at all about etching circuit boards with cupric chloride? That doesn't matter! Just create a web page about it and earn some ad revenue anyway. You deserve it for taking three minutes to research the topic and writing a half-assed summary of the process.</sarcasm> Did I mention I hate about.com with a passion? Fuck those people.

You can see a more recent example of this effect with YouTube. Just a few years ago it had become a fairly good resource for instructions on any topic, as people made tutorial videos just for fun. Now you're likely to just find a bunch of shit videos, many of which are so absurd as to require ten minutes to give you one sentence of information that they easily could have simply placed in the video's description. Why did this happen? It's because Google decided to offer video authors a cut of the ad revenue. Suddenly people no longer cared so much about the quality of their videos, but instead they focus on how much ad revenue they can generate, and while I'm sure a lot continue to create quality content to this day, good luck finding it after millions swarm to YouTube hoping to get a share of that sweet ad revenue causing the search results to be polluted with countless worthless videos.

I'm not against the idea of people earning money from their work, but advertising is simply the worst way to allow that to happen, because it enables people to be paid regardless of the quality of their work. Even though I'm sure it'll never happen, I'd be much happier with micropayment tip jars, none of that "you must micropay to view" bullshit as it suffers from the same problem as ads, but a simple "thank you, and here's 10 cents for your trouble" button. Like I explained before, just ten cents from one out of every thousand visitors would cover my costs, and if I'm not helping 0.1% of my visitors enough to cause them to give me ten cents, then I'm probably doing something seriously wrong, like using a bunch of SEO techniques to drive uninterested visitors to my web site.

Now I'm sure there are some good things that cannot exist without ads. The world is a huge place and so it would be really weird if there weren't any such things. I just think that ads do far more harm than good, and so I'm rather certain that I'd be far happier with the internet we end up with after ads are removed from the equation than I am with the internet that we have now.

So it sucks that you couldn't sustain your web site on the donations you received, and it would have been wonderful if you could have found a way to keep it alive, but there's no way that the loss of just one good web service is going to change my position on this issue. I'd be foolish to assume that there wouldn't be at least dozens of innocent casualties from the loss of internet ads. I just can't care about that when I know that we presently have millions of innocent casualties resulting from the continued existence of internet ads, in that they're presently ruining the internet in general for everyone by replacing high-quality information that people might have found with piles of low-quality bullshit that exists for no reason other than to generate income for someone.

No worries. I'm rather harsh myself, as it takes to rephrase things so that they're said correctly, and if you're like me then you already spend way too much time editing internet posts anyway. ...and honestly, if the person you're speaking to is aiming to be offended rather than aiming to understand your true intent, then there's not really anything you can do about that anyway.

...and you're certainly one of the more kind people I've discussed anything with on the internet. Even though you don't agree with me, you seem to be honestly trying to understand my point of view and reading everything I write. I wish more people were like you.

I just want to say I agree. (I'm the guy the person you've responded to was talking to.)

It seems crazy to me that ads on the internet are sold by the number of clicks. It would be like paying for newspaper ads by the number of people who show up in your store after you place an ad. The newspaper would never agree to that because it isn't their problem if you're advertising nothing of value to the wrong audience, but that's how it works on the internet. A consequence of that is that ad networks are focused on obtaining clicks, unlike a newspaper which is focused on maintaining readership. They don't care where the clicks come from, and so they often come from the worst of places, because the quality of what the ads appear alongside of is irrelevant. All that matters is that someone clicks on the ads.

A friend of mine decided to buy ads for a free game that the two of us created, just to try to get some more people to play it, under the theory that once it reached a "critical mass" that people would be sufficiently entertained by the other players to make up for the fact that, by itself, the game just isn't very fun. So he signed up for Google AdWords, or AdSense, I can never remember which is which. We assumed that if we just chose words that Google presently shows no ads for, we'd get those ad spaces for a low price. However, that isn't how it works.

How it works is that if you're not willing to pay at least 20 cents per click, your ads will never be shown anywhere. At 20 cents per click, you get your ads shown in two places: In paid search results on third-party search engines, where users mistakenly assume your link is a relevant search result, and quickly hit the back button upon realizing it is not, and web sites hosing flash games which were literally cobbled together from stolen assets in about ten minutes, which surely are being played only by five year olds who just blindly click on things. (Seriously, if you saw those games, you'd agree they're the most worthless games on the internet by a wide margin.) At 50 cents per click, Google will begin displaying your ads on some search results, but only if there are no other ads to show for those search terms, and only if Google deems your web site "relevant," meaning that it likely would have included it in the first few pages of search results anyway. You have to go all the way up to $1 per click before you begin to get anything of any value whatsoever.

Anyway, my friend spent about $100 on this, partially by accident since Google will happily spend more than you've deposited and simply expect you to send them cash for the rest later. After examining the web site logs, I found that no one who came to the web sites because of the ads downloaded the game, or even looked at more than the landing page for the ad. So for $100 we got nothing.

Of course, no experiment is worthwhile without a control, so it's worth mentioning that my friend also found a web site that has an index of indie games, and so he created an account there and posted an entry about our game. That didn't result in as many clicks as the ad network, but they were very high quality clicks. Those people actually downloaded the game, and indeed many of them spoke to us about it after meeting us within the game. While our game ultimately still failed to become popular, that free effort at advertising did infinitely more to promote it than that $100 given to Google did, at least to the extent that one considers division by zero to result in infinity.

As far as I'm concerned, Google's advertising is just a huge scam, from providing many success stories to encourage you to make such a huge investment ("give us money and you'll get money" is a central theme of many scams), to having that poorly defined "landing page quality" metric which determines how much you have to pay for your ads. The help for that metric tells you that if you improve your page quality then you'll be able to get your ads to display, but it never defines exactly what the page quality test looks for or what it is about your landing page that it is finding fault with, and so I suspect the whole ordeal is just a way to convince people to think that the high cost of the ads isn't Google's fault, but rather, the high cost is their own fault. They'll spend a few days trying to improve their landing page, but in being unable to do so, they'll assume that they simply lack the skill to do so, and so they'll decide it is easier to simply pay more for the ads to compensate for their lack of skill. In reality, while some particularly bad landing pages may be filtered by that check, even perfectly fine landing pages will never cause the ads to be displayed until you've committed to handing over enough cash to Google for each click you receive.

So "clicks" is just the wrong metric to use. It really should be "impressions" and even at that it should be impressions to a known audience. How would you feel if you paid for newspaper advertising to a million readers, only to find that rather than your ad running in a major newspapers where it was viewed by adults with income to spend, it was instead run in high school newspapers all over the country?

The only correct way to run ads is to choose where your ad will be displayed and to pay for it to be displayed there and nowhere else, and you also have to pay regardless of how many people take notice of your ad because ultimately the selection of the audience and the interest in your ad is your responsibility. Those providing the content that draws people to where your ad is displayed should be focused only on providing quality content, not on tricking readers into visiting your web site.

I think that's the core of the reason why advertising on the internet is so atrocious. Who wants to blindly pay for clicks regardless of their source? If you're trying to sell a product, it's important that your advertising targets people with money to spend, and so clicks from five year olds with no money are worthless. However, if you're advertising some malware that you've packaged up as if it is a fun game, then those clicks from five year olds are solid gold. They'll download your "game," and in doing so, they'll encrypt someone's computer, and that someone will then be forced to contact you and hand over $100 for the decryption key. That's why nothing of value is advertised on the internet. People engaged in legitimate business cannot compete with what scammers are willing to pay for ads because legitimate business is nowhere near as profitable as scams.

Consequently, the only time I've seen any ads that were of any value was when reading blogs where the author of the blog was selling ad space on the blog to his readers. In that case, the advertisers knew what audience would be viewing their ads, and so the ad space was valuable, and so paying $100 for ten thousand impressions (which at a penny each seem like quite a bargain compared to AdSense) makes a lot of sense, and to whatever extent that someone felt that was too much to pay, they could also consider the excess a donation to the blog's author for the work they've done to create content that they find interesting.

However, the vast majority of advertising on the internet isn't that kind of advertising, and so I find no fault whatsoever in people wanting ad blockers. In particular, while adults may be smart enough to view the ads without clicking on them, if they have any children in the house, or perhaps elderly parents, or maybe just the occasional house guest whom they'd like to be able to allow to use the computer without supervision, then not installing an ad-blocker is a huge liability, and it's insane to expect a web site's viewers to accept that liability just so that the site's author can earn money through ads rather than ask for donations. In particular, I believe the reason there's much more use of ads vs. asking for donations is because those ads pay a lot better than donations do, and people want to earn income from their web site. I won't say that earning income by itself is bad, but it certainly is bad when the root of that income is malware infections and other scams.

My claim wasn't that the ads themselves themselves are the malware, my claim was that the ads are for malware and scams. In other words, you're OK if you just view the ad, but if you actually click it then you're heading down a dangerous path. The ad networks do a fair job of not serving malware directly, because web site operators don't want to infect all of their viewers with malware for cash. However, they're quite OK with leading a small percentage of their viewers to malware in exchange for some cash, and so they don't care so much what the ad links to.

I think the reason you're not understanding my point of view is because what you were doing was too expensive for the value it gave to users.

The average page on my web site is 500 kB, and my web host charges me $0.20 per GiB, and so each page view costs $0.000093, which isn't a lot of charity on my behalf to provide that information to people for free. However, if I did end up with the popularity necessary to turn that small cost into something I couldn't handle, I'd have some options:

Convince 1 out of every 1000 visitors to donate 9.3 cents.
Convince 1 out of every 10,000 visitors to donate 93 cents.
Convince 1 out of every 100,000 visitors to donate $9.30.
Convince 1 out of every 1,000,000 visitors to donate $93.

Now you might be thinking that the sort of person who is going to donate $93 to a web site is a one-in-a-million kind of person, but when only one out of a million people who see the text asking for a donation have to donate that much, then the rarity of that type of individual isn't a problem. Similarly, if only 0.001% of web site visitors will donate $10, because that still covers the cost of the web site, and while 0.001% sounds like a crazy small number someone just made up to explain how they think it'll never happen, that's the actual number that is required.

Now, I'm sure that if I were to turn all of the text on my web site into images so that people can then be encouraged to hot-link my content into every forum and blog on the internet, then I'm sure I could turn that $93 per million visitors into $93 per thousand visitors. ...and in that case I can imagine that I'd never be able to obtain donations in that amount. So in that case, yes, I'd just shut the thing down, because clearly I'd be doing something that is so wasteful of money that no one is willing to pay for it, even if it is only 9.3 cents per user, though in lieu of shutting it down I'd probably just look into doing something more sustainable, e.g. let people create their own page on my web site which pulls up the stats of all of their friends in text form and, in doing so, doesn't waste bandwidth by providing that information in inefficient form to people who aren't even going to look at it.

Then agree to new terms. Explain what the service is costing you to operate, talk about how those many images on every web site are helping to promote the game (who wouldn't want their game mentioned in many threads on many forums all over the internet), and explain that if they don't remove that restriction from your agreement then you'll be forced to shut down the free advertising network you've created for their game.

Your relationship with that game developer reminds me too much of Minecraft and its mods community. People slave away to create mods with no help from the developer other than the obfuscated source code to the game, and their thanks is that they're unable to make any money doing so, other than tricking a significant number of their users into downloading malware via adf.ly ads. They also get the joy of modifying their mod for every release since the developer fails to realize that the mods are a significant portion of the value of the game and so there is no stable API for the mod authors to work with. It's a one-way relationship, yet for some reason those mod authors continue to slave away and in doing so all they do is make Mojang's product more valuable so that more people give money to Mojang.

People need to realize when they're in a bad relationship and just terminate it. If all of those mod authors were to work together, they could certainly make their own Minecraft as there seriously isn't all that much to the game, indeed some of those individual mods do far more impressive computations than Minecraft does in total, e.g. one mod creates "sack doll" physics for dead players, leaving them on the ground where you can kick them around and they move realistically, and that's so far beyond the simplistic physics of Minecraft that I'm sure that these mod authors would have no problem implementing the relatively trivial physics that Minecraft presently has. Yet they don't. Instead they work as virtual slaves to the owners of Minecraft, helping them to become rich while they do nothing to help out those who are creating 50% of the value of their game. It's a ridiculous situation, and yet I'm sure that if advertising were banned from the internet, all of those mod authors would be here with you complaining that the removal of ads has terminated what was a totally awesome and beneficial thing for the world. Then next week they'd move on to something else, probably writing their own indie games, but they'd still remember that time that the removal of ads from the internet caused their totally awesome and symbiotic relationship with Mojang to become unsustainable and bring it up in every discussion about advertising on the internet.

So I ask, what did you do after you stopped running this service? Oh, wait, you already said...

It sounds to me as if you should be thanking those ad-blockers, not complaining that they've ruined a good thing for you. The removal of that ad-based income forced you to stop thanklessly slaving away for a game developer and instead focus on your own interests.

That certainly isn't what I meant. Like any charity, it's a "do it if you're able to" sort of thing.

I'd say that this is the true "evil" that did you in, not ad-blocking software. Without a doubt you were doing something to aid the popularity of this game and yet the developer was insisting that you be unable to earn any money to cover the cost of doing so. I imagine you wouldn't have had too much difficulty convincing some of your users into donating $10 per month towards keeping the service alive for everyone else, e.g. how Wikipedia is user-supported and yet still free to anyone who isn't able to pay for the service due to the charity of those who do pay for it. At $700/month you must have had thousands or tens of thousands of users, so you'd only need to talk between 7% and 0.7% of them into sending you money.

...and I'm another one of those people. The way I see it, ads are one of the worst ways to fund anything. Whereas with donations, content actually has to be valuable in order to get anyone to pay for it, advertising extracts cash from visitors regardless of their experience, and so attention to quality is often replaced with attention to page view counts. Now I realize that in your case you were obviously doing what your users want, but because of that, if the game's developer hadn't been strangling your ability to fund what you were doing, you wouldn't have had a problem funding it on donations.

Also, to any extent that your web service couldn't have been funded through donations, I think it simply shouldn't have existed. The simple fact is that your users would pay for it one way or another, either through direct payments or donations to you, or through the cost of malware infections and purchases of scam-like products from other people. (Ad money comes from advertisers who extract that money one way or another from your users.) So if what your users are willing to choose to pay for your service doesn't cover the cost of that service, then that just means that they'd rather spend their limited resources on something else. By relying upon ads, you take the choice of what they do with their resources out of their hands. Now, if you're doing something which the free market would otherwise reject due to it being too costly for too little benefit (like serving textual information in graphical form to millions of people who then mostly ignore that information) then that may well be the only way you can make that happen, but that doesn't mean that you're entitled to be able to force your web site's visitors to pay for something they don't feel is worth paying for by extracting your revenue from them via all of the shady things that advertisers do.

The one thing worth noting in all of this is that it is possible to do advertising well. I've seen some popular blogs offer ads by using their blog to advertise that they're offering ads, then reviewing the ads that are submitted to them and, after approval, hosting those ads on the blog itself. The result is that there's no malware ads and no scam product ads, instead it's all reasonable stuff like someone who has a little web store somewhere selling some interesting little products who decided to sponsor that web site for $100 in exchange for having their ad shown with one of the blog's stories, but sometimes the ads were just links to someone's little web site which had no means of generating revenue at all, which means that they likely just considered the $100 to be a donation and the link to their web site a cool "thank you" for the donation. ...and ad-blocking software doesn't target these kinds of ads, because it can't know which images are ads and which images are genuine content, and so they aren't harmed by its use at all.

No, and even so, the web sites I really care about would continue to exist. Indeed, they'd be easier to find as well.

Without ads, the only content that exists is created by people who care enough about a subject to create and host that content for free. With ads, these people are drowned out in a sea of other people who create content not because they care about a subject, but because they want ad revenue. Their content is no better than it needs to be in order to trick search engines into believing it is valuable. They also go out of their way to ensure that they have the highest search engine ranking, which results in the good content created by people who care about a subject is very difficult to find.

The only time ads ever worked was when we had Geocities, and they worked specifically because the content creators didn't get any of the revenue, and so they continued to either create good content or create no content at all. Contrast this with YouTube where, because of revenue-sharing with content creators, YouTube is now 50% videos that tell you nothing that couldn't have been stated in a single sentence in the video description, and 50% videos that make up a bullshit story but present it as if it is true in order to go "viral."

So if people don't want other people blocking their ads, here's my suggestion: Ask Google et. al. to allow people to filter search results according to whether a web site has ads. Then those content creators won't have to deal with my ad-blocking, and I won't have to deal with their worthless content, and so we'll both get what we want.

...and just in case anyone thinks I fail to see the content-creator's side of the issue, I'll point out that I have my own web site where I publish some photos and instructions for electronics projects I've built, and some source code for software I've written, and a lot of other random content, and the whole thing costs me only $20/year. Rather than insist that the internet should pay me that $20, I just consider it charity. It makes me happy that people are able to enjoy that content, and so I'm willing to pay $20/year in order to enable them to do so.

Yes, I've known that ever since, after explaining the idea to my nephew, he pointed out that it resembled a part of the "New Deal" that got us out of the great depression. People were being forced to work 80 hour weeks and since everyone who was employed was effectively working two jobs, it meant that unemployment was so massive that people were literally lined up outside ready to take the place of anyone who objected to those 80 hour work weeks. Creating overtime pay turned those 80 hour/week jobs into twice as many 40 hour/week jobs, which meant that those lines of workers ready to take the place of anyone who complained disappeared, and so workers were finally able to demand better work conditions.

Anyway, thanks for your links. It's wonderful to finally see other people talking about this idea.

Since this idea occurred to me in January of 2013, I've been trying to promote it, but with seemingly no success. So I'm rather excited to hear anyone else mention it. Can you tell me where you heard the idea? Not that I expect you heard it from me, as I'm sure I'm not the only person to think of it, rather I'm interested to see where anyone else is talking about it.

At least in my imagination, that isn't how it works.

The problem we have now is that if someone has a thousand employees, they just pay each employee 90% of what they are worth, and in keeping the remaining 10%, they get to pay themselves 100 times the salary of each of those employees, and so many people are rich not because they work harder, but because they're in a position of power. They're able to do this because there is a large pool of unemployed workers desperate for any job at all, and so they simply don't have to pay people what they are worth. This comes about because the labor market doesn't respond to lower wages by reducing the available supply of labor. Indeed, the exact opposite happens, since if a family cannot make ends meet with one working parent, then the other parent enters the workforce as well.

By limiting how many hours people are allowed to work, the supply of labor is reduced, which will increase the ability of workers to demand higher wages. These increased wages come out of that 10% that employers presently keep for themselves. Indeed, the increase in wages cannot possibly come from inflation, since the plan doesn't simply increase the number of dollars one must be paid like the minimum wage or basic income would, but rather it gives employees the ability to demand more value in exchange for their labor, and so if dollars are worth only half as much, then employees are able to demand twice as many of them.

That's more true than you may realize. The clock that he "built" is just the internals of an alarm clock mounted in what looks like a fancy school supplies box that resembles a small metal briefcase. (I disassembled everything when I was his age too.)

The whole situation reminds me of when I was in 6th grade and, while doing dumb shit during free time, I created a small "don't kick me" sign, the opposite of a "kick me" sign, and in an effort to add more creativity, I decided that putting "lick me" on the other side was appropriate as it rhymed and seemed slightly affectionate in the sense of how cute little puppies like to lick people, and so it built upon the "opposite of 'kick me'" theme. I then decided to show the result of my efforts to a teacher, who didn't seem too amused but didn't say much about it. When I tried to retrieve the note and return to my desk, she said "no, I'll hang on to it" and kept it. So I thought "well, whatever" as I certainly wasn't all that attached to it, but I was certainly confused as she didn't seem impressed by it and so I had no idea why she wanted to keep it either. The next day I found myself in trouble for having created the note, and eventually ended up with some sort of punishment for having created it (though I don't recall what the punishment was, just that it was less serious than a detention), and yet throughout the whole process I had absolutely no idea why anyone took any offense to what I had done. It wasn't until a year or two later that I realized that she must have assumed "lick me" to be some sort of sexual reference, and that no one wanted to explain to me what I had done because they just assumed I knew what I had done and that I was simply trying to pretend as if I was ignorant of it to avoid punishment.

So with that in mind, here's my hypothesis of what happened to this kid:

He apparently likes to take apart electronics, as evidenced by the many photos of him in articles holding a mess of electronics internals. So after disassembling an alarm clock, he decides he wants to build a clock by mounting the components into a box of some sort. He has this cool little school supplies box that resembles a little metal briefcase, and so he mounts the components into it. He then decides to show it to people at school, and so he takes it to school, and during free time in English class when everyone is talking to their friends, he pulls it out and plugs it in to show his friends. The alarm clock noises catch the attention of a teacher who sees it and realizes it resembles a movie prop bomb, and concludes that he has created a hoax bomb. Indeed, if it made the typical alarm clock buzzing noise, it may have caused a minor amount of panic in the classroom when doing so, and this may have helped her to conclude that the purpose of the device was that it was supposed to be a hoax bomb, one which simply created noise rather than an explosion. (Honestly, that totally sounds like something I would have built when I was his age had the idea occurred to me.) So she confiscates it and reports him to the police. Then the police show up and, assuming the kid knows what he has done, they don't bother to explain the problem to him. Instead they just ask questions hoping to get him to confess to it being a hoax bomb, questions like "what is this" and "what is it for" and "why did you make it," to which he responds "it's a clock" and "it keeps time" and "I wanted to make a clock." So they assume he's just too smart to confess to what he has done and arrest him anyway. Then, when their stupidity makes national news, they try to explain themselves by saying "he wouldn't tell us anything about it, he just kept saying 'it's a clock.'," as if he was being elusive, when in reality they simply never asked a question that couldn't be answered with "it's a hoax bomb" as that is the only answer they were looking for, and so he was never asked a question to which the correct answer wasn't "it's a clock."

The blame-shifting in "he just kept saying it's a clock" is ridiculous. They're the adults; if they wanted to know anything else about it, they should have asked the right questions, and I think everyone is giving them too much credit by assuming that surely they did. I honestly doubt that they asked him any questions that weren't geared towards getting him to incriminate himself. That's why it's generally good advice to not talk to the police -- they're often not interested in finding the truth, but instead they're often only interested in collecting evidence against you, and so you're either going to incriminate yourself or you're going to be completely ignored. So even if the kid wouldn't talk to them, that isn't anything against him anyway. The time to defend yourself is when you are in court, not when you are talking to the police.

The simple fact is that he shouldn't have been arrested without any evidence against him, and there was no evidence against him. There was just an alarm clock in a box which he never claimed was anything else, combined with the concerns of some likely-prejudiced school administrators and police officers who couldn't see the situation as anything other than an Ahmed Mohamed playing with a toy bomb because he has aspirations to be a real terrorist when he grows up.