anon1m0us

Peddling links means networking with people who you can pay to link key words in their existing content or new content to your content. For example, I've had businesses contact me and say, "hey, for $100 we'll pay you to link these two words in your blog post to our website."

And also vice versa where you reach out to others to sell keywords in your content to them to improve their SEO.

> Isn't the first page of results supposed to be more about relevance than quality?

According to whom? What google tells you? If google made more money sending you to a web page with regurgitated content on it surrounded by adwords that would actually send you back to google to click on an ad making them more money, why would they send you to a high quality original source that was written in 1999 by someone who cared about the topic and got them zero revenue?

Most people would think f u money after a year of gaming the system to be a good direction to have taken.

Prior to social security and pensions, people had kids to care for them in their old age. In order to do that, parents would save and the children would inherit the wealth they had created.

Now society is different. Older folks don't rely on children anymore, they rely on corporations and the government. They reverse mortgage their homes instead of leaving them to their children.

The family has broken down. Extrapolate that to communities. Companies. Friends.

Our society is broken for everyone but the wealthy in power and they don't want to help anyone else either.

A lot of this is the rush of foreign investment and the government you elect caring more about the tax revenue from people who don't even live in your country over the welfare of their own constituents.

all this could be done without AJAX. Just loading a javascript file would enable this.

Prior to AJAX, sending info was done by loading a "transparent.gif?value1=x&value2=y&value3=z"

It's not technology that has ruined the web. It's greed.

Whenever people talk about how IE ruined the internet, I think about AJAX. I actually thought IE was great for the web. A poignant example I remember was, if you got a /TR /TD out of order, Netscape wouldn't show the web page at all. It'd work fine in IE though.

IE just made it so much easier to move fast in web development. People blast IE, but I really don't think the web would be as good as it is today without it.

Contrast that with what Chrome has done to the web. Not good.

> I must sadly conclude that there is no significant economic benefit to these ideas

Halfway through the movie Ray, about Ray Charles (a blind musician), I closed my eyes and watched the rest of the movie "blind" to ... try to empathize with the antagonist. It was a good theater, good sound system. The audio in the movie really helps. I remember a scene near the beginning with a cricket or grasshopper he was listening to as a child and the location of the sounds drew my eyes right to that spot on the screen.

There was a school for blind children near where I grew up and I had been to that school as a child, not because I'm blind, but for other reasons. After watching Ray, I was inspired to help the students there and developed a piece of software that blind people could use to "hear" things on the screen as they moved their mouse around.

I used it on sighted people. They could tell vaguely what was behind the blanked out screen with only sounds playing to indicate something was behind or under the mouse. "It's a tree!" they would say, when it was a cross, for example. I thought, "It works!"

So I took the software to the blind school and showed it to the administrators.

They sat back in their chairs.

"This is nice. I appreciate the effort you spent, but there's no aptitude in the students here for something like this, they couldn't learn to use this." One of them said.

I said, "Can we try? Can you give it to one of the kids with some aptitude and see if it'll help? I can make it better. I can work with them one-on-one and see if we can make it work!"

He kinda shook his head, "No... no I don't think so, but hey I've been wanting someone to help me with my website can you help me with that?"

So, there you have it.

I was so sad. So disappointed that I was shut down like that.

Brings a tear to my eyes just typing this out right now...

I guess my point is that ... who cares about economic benefit? Why is the world like that? I cared enough. I had no economic incentive. I just wanted to help people use computers better. Get access to things. Have a new way to perceive the world.

Why isn't that good enough? I had that inspiration and went out and did something to make the world better and the people in power, those in charge, shut me down.

Why on earth would he do that?

The pig. If your pig comes on my land, it's now likely my pig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_is_nine-tenths_of_t...

Which, coincidentally, has a case about the Hatfield/McCoy feud over a pig, whose ownership was granted to those who possessed the pig.

How does having the data tell the EFF how they are using the data? If you give me a spreadsheet with a bunch of data in it, I don't know how you use it.

Are they using it legally? How can we know just by looking at the data they have?

> We rarely condone murder in the name of the betterment of humanity: some tried, didn't go so well.

sounds like "War" to me.

> (I really want to find a more accurate way of phrasing this than “sql queries happen/run in this order” but I haven’t figured it out yet)

Maybe "Order of Operations"? Similar to order of operations in math where you do (), then * and /, then + and -, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations

Understood. Thank you.

Yes, that's correct. That's the idea. That is the goal. People are working on this right now. Writing basically, exactly those functions.

The survival of humanity has escaped ALL tribal boundaries. The human beings with the most power are the ones contributing the most to our assured destruction.

It's basically inevitable. I am not a religious person, but ... has this happened before? Have we destroyed ourselves before?

On another planet? Millions of years ago, before the dinosaurs? How could revelations have predicted it so well thousands of years ago, hundreds maybe, before there was any evidence all of this would be happening right now.

Lots of religions have these stories about ourselves destroying ourselves and our planet. Indian religions describe it too I know for sure. Battles of the gods in ships with laser like weapons.

It's like we are uncontrollably, knowingly, ... desiring of self-destruction as a species.

Why are we like this and how do we change us?

Maybe I'm insane.

Yes, thank you, I did. To clarify, the debate was about allowing robots to kill without a human in the loop.

Basically, drop the robots in and let them start killing by whatever algorithm has been programmed into them.

That's my point. There's been a steady trend toward global annihilation and as a species we are running toward it.

I was out with a bunch of friends who worked for Northrup Grumman and I was like, "Why do you guys work there building things designed to kill people?"

Synchronized response: The money is good.

Humans aim and pull the trigger -- and they aren't self-motive.

Robots are different.

My only evidence is that I didn't hear of one. Didn't even hear about the studies. Perhaps they just confirmed what everyone already thought or wanted to believe or the gender disparaged by the studies didn't care enough to raise a fuss. Whatever the reason.

I did hear about the president of Harvard being fired though. I read about The Bell Curve. Damore. The list goes on and on. You must know what I'm talking about.

Maybe I'm just biased so I filter bubble out evidence that sexism is sexist.

Cash and real estate. I realized after all the investing and while I did beat the market, I realized if I invested in myself I could get 1000x returns rather than 1.10x returns.

So I got out of the market, started a bunch of different businesses. A couple stuck and now I'm working on another one that will need a lot of cash in the near future, so that's where I leave it.

> anger and other undesirable effects.

"other" could mean these from the linked article:

> The growing literature on androgenic anabolic steroid (AAS) usage suggests that some users can develop bouts of aggression known as steroid rage, mood disturbance, hypomania, irritability, and depressive episodes (9–15).

Whenever I think about ourselves, I think from an evolutionary perspective. All of the mentioned effects exist in species other than humans. I can list several reasons why the behaviors could be considered desirable.

Also note, the article says the only significantly increased emotion was anger hostility. Why does anger exist?

Why should they be shocked that it doesn't work? Why is something that doesn't work and can kill people being deployed anyway? It doesn't work!

You cannot blame people who bought a car because it has a feature they want actually trying to use that feature.

I heard a story on the radio the other day about the debate of whether or not we should allow robots to kill people.

I wonder if ever in history there was a time when we needed to kill people faster and set our engineering minds to solve that problem. Would there be any lessons to learn we could apply to our current problem of automated human life destruction.

I just can't believe there are human beings who would actually write that code!

Edit: Clarification, Yes, robots that kill automatically with no human intervention. Programmed to seek and kill the enemy.

I was a happy customer for a long time until they broke their web interface to the point I couldn't use it anymore. I tried everything. Finally I tracked down the bug to a particular line of javascript, emailed customer support with exact instructions how to fix it.

They did nothing. Never fixed it, so I had to move to another broker that had working software.

This is actually making me consider investing again.

It's amazing that something so sexist could have been suggested without backlash.

Imagine if studies indicated that low testosterone limited or in some way hindered another desirable human capability. People have been fired for it and reputations ruined.

Suggesting men are emotionally stunted. Oh that's fine.

Absolutely! It's relational data that could map to a defined relational schema, so why not?

The airborne particulates from brakes is asbestos!

edit: Very odd that both mine and the contradictory reply to it are both down voted. What I said is a fact, so I'm not sure why anyone would disagree with it.

You could put the nested data into a separate sheet with a unique identifier for the row. Then include a foreign key back to the original sheet's primary id.

> because the best ROI has been in the property market.

That is not true. It seems like it is true because we can look at our parents and grandparents and see that the house they bought in 1980 for $300,000 is worth a million dollars now, but that's not a great return. It seems like it because they are millionaires, but you'd have been better off in bonds with a better return and a whole lot less risk.

I knew two people who both got cancer about the same time. One said no to chemo. The other said yes to chemo.

The differences in quality of life until death were dramatic. Neither had a longer life than was expected had they not taken the chemo, but the one who did lost hair, physical dexterity, then life. Suffered greatly.

The other one suffered much less, but still died.

The doctors all said take the drugs. You don't have to take the drugs. Do the research. Chemo isn't always beneficial.

Sometimes... it's just hope.

My friend dropped out of college. My girlfriend is in college. I was talking about how she has a few years left and he starts shaking his head. "I just don't get it. So long and for what? To get a job?"

When he dropped out of engineering school he went to manage a restaurant. Made good money. Then started to build a house. Quit that too. He almost had occupancy on it and said, "I'm done. I'm out."

That's also what college is about. If you come to me looking for a job and didn't go to college, why? Did you drop out? Why? Do you not think learning is important? Do you not understand sticking it out until you have accomplished the goal?

Do you give up before you are through?

Not only that, but of course, I meet folks all the time who think "you don't need a degree to be a programmer." Sure. You don't need a degree to put Ikea furniture together either. I don't need programmers. I write programs to write programs. I need folks who know how to think... for themselves and learn and go out and find knowledge they need to solve problems and then solve the problems.

Until they are done solving the problem.

Not until they've given up.