randomb_1979

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman

>>I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.

Unfortunately, if this is actually true, then you are the exception which proves the rule. That's precisely why I call these people "freeloaders". If they actually stopped visiting my website and wasting my site's resources based on such principles, I would be ecstatic to see them leave.

>>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.

That's because you already paid for it, and the payment was what allowed the content to even get created.

>>I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back.

That's an interesting example, considering the number of times you see non-paywalled links here on HN.

Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay. That's exactly why paywalled articles also have non-paywalled versions. If you don't believe me (that non-paywalled versions are subsidized by people who pay), just ask someone who produces the content and report back. Or better yet, ask the same person who produced the content how long they will keep producing content if no one paid for access. As the old saying goes, at some point, you run out of other people's money.

Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites.

The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using the website itself for the sake of their principles. Hilarious.

Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)

Given how far computer vision has advanced nowadays, I would be interested to know if anyone has done an analysis of the frequency and delta of over-speeding vs the make of the car as a (not so great) proxy for how rich a person is. That might be an additional data point to consider when formulating these laws.

But I would still endorse Apple over Microsoft until MS shows that it cares about user privacy by publicly distancing themselves from Facebook.

Plus, Apple stuff just works. You still end up being an unpaid IT support for MSFT when you buy Windows machines for your loved ones.

I would be much more interested in email leaks about the "friendly fraud" case [1], because I think Facebook actually broke the law on that one.

[1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...

The key word, of course, is "often" and not "always".

How would you know the difference?

I have never seen a comment which is so ignorant of Facebook's past behavior.

Are you aware that Facebook at one point unilaterally decided to allow people to see and comment on photos of friends of friends (i.e. 2nd degree connections)?

Just in case you are not clear on what actually happened: this "feature" didn't initially exist, so you behaved in a certain way one day. And the next day, they added this feature and you had no way to opt out of it.

Am I now supposed to also monitor and choose the friends of my friends? And then also study Facebook's API to know what level of access is provided to first degree connections? And then second degree connections? And are you suggesting everyone who uses Facebook is supposed to learn about all this stuff?

>>I don't know what goes into running this site, but personally, if I know I'm guaranteed to get a totally one-sided take, I'd rather have the one from the people who actually know how to code.

In other words, if you don't know how to code, you are probably not intelligent enough to write about a technical topic?

>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."

Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)