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Cellphones

How the Smartphone Killed the Three-day Weekend 232

An anonymous reader writes "As we in the U.S. settle in for Memorial Day weekend, this article points out how our cultural addiction to technology is making it less of a vacation than it used to be. 'The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation — or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors' questions.' Even for those of us who don't have any work to do over the weekend, we'll probably end up reading all of our work-related emails as they roll in, and take time out of our day to think about what's going on — to the detriment of our weekend activities: 'A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that new experiences fail to become long-term memories unless brains have downtime for review.' I imagine it's even worse for your average Slashdotter, who's likely plugged in to more technology at home and at work. How can we make our employers understand that downtime needs to remain downtime? 'It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years.'"
Technology

3D Printers For Peace Contest 273

First time accepted submitter Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest. Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure? Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost."

Comment Are they really that bad? (Score 2) 106

I've been in digital advertising for over 14 years, and have always been involved in tracking / targeting of ads. I don't bother to block cookies, simply because I honestly don't see much privacy infringement. At the back end of our tracking systems I just see a bunch of numbers. I've never once seen a name and honestly I have no desire to target or track an individual ... there's no money in such a tight target group, but we purposely don't try in any case.

All this Mozilla change means to me is that a lack of data will mean I pay web publishers less ... and I deliver nappy ads to pensioners :P

What worries this little advertising stalwart is credit checking firms, they're much more likely to have the data you're looking to protect and none of it comes from third party cookies.

Peace out ...

Comment Misleading (Score 2) 313

This article is pretty misleading. Overall spend on paid search is up, not down. Spend on online display is up, not down.

One of the liked articles says "To make up for the CPC loss, it managed to increase overall clicks by 42 percent". That's pretty speculative as to the direction of causation. It makes more sense that clicks are growing heavily in non-premium keywords, ones that command lower price points. I haven't seen any evidence that premium keyword ad pricing is falling dramatically.

One thing that does ring true is that overall online advertising spend growth is trailing inventory growth, and therefore per-unit pricing on inventory is probably decreasing. Spend growing, inventory volumes growing faster, per unit prices falling.

Comment Make it easy (Score 1) 312

I just donated $10. I have two thoughts that might help:
1. Put a prominent donate button on the homepage. It took me a while to find how to donate, and this will reduce donations greatly.
2. Offer a donation subscription. I'd happily offer $2 per month for instance, which would be a lot more than $10 over time.

Comment Re:considering content providers (Score 1) 181

Yeah, this is a bit of an issue for me. DNT is a value in the header, nothing more. However it pans out, 'good' companies will end up respecting it, and everyone else - probably the nasties - won't care. P3P, if you remember it, required anyone setting cookies to declare their privacy policy in the header. I'm really not sure why that's been thrown out but, whilst being more granular in privacy statements, it also allowed anyone to simply lie and the browser wouldn't know the difference. Not all cookies are evil, so the question is how to reliably identify those set by respectable businesses that follow the prevailing guidelines and are interested in being 'good'.

Comment Do we really want this? (Score 2) 181

This is a potential disaster in my eyes. We're talking about destroying the commercial web here. Advertising, for all its foibles, underpins vast amounts of free content and services. Data largely drives that value these days, by making ad distribution more efficient. The vast majority of the data underpinning this is anonymous - no names, no email addresses, no phone numbers - just general preferences inferred from the types of sites people visit. DNT is not defined yet, but I suggest that a lot of your favourite websites are supported or helped by this data. Even slashdot has advertising these days. Slashdotters have a choice by nature of knowing how things work, but there's also some pretty decent advertising industry programs aimed at giving information and choice to consumers. Blanket DNT could seriously destroy businesses at-scale. I'm really worried about this move.

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