So sorry-I missed the part where both cites must come from the same website. I guess this disqualifies what I posted.
No problem…dick.
I guess letting people know that it seems to fulfill only one request disqualifies what I posted.
Dial it way back. Personal insults are not permitted.
I read Timewinder’s post as saying ‘No, actually A does occur, and once it does the odds of B occurring increase as well’. If we’re discussing the odds of drawing an ace of hearts after drawing the ace of diamonds, saying ‘The odds of drawing the ace of diamonds from a fresh deck are 1 in 52.’ doesn’t prove anything and is not relevant to the discussion. I trust you see what I’m saying.
Second, the study you cited was performed by people involved in selling online ads. I find the source untrustworthy.
OOPs, that should be giving the odds of drawing an ace of HEARTS from a fresh deck doesn’t prove anything.
Here’s the thing. It’s more than just a matter of allowing ads to appear, malware issues aside – it’s that most of these sites also want to do tracking. Try setting “privacy.trackingprotection.enabled” to TRUE in Firefox and see what happens. Firefox starts blocking such content, so most ads don’t appear and those sites built to detect this start complaining about an ad blocker that they demand you turn off – even when there’s no actual ad blocker running. If they don’t like tracking protection, tough. They’re not even honest about what they’re really doing.
tl;dr
there was a trick to getting around this - copy the article’s title, go to google, and do a news search for the title.
Most sites would let you in if you came form google.
I just clicked on a Google News (my home site, btw) link to LA Times.
Now even a real Google link will not get you past the block.
This is a critical problem - real journalism is expensive, and, in the grown-up world, somebody has to pay for everything.
The old trick of selling a failing business to the Government (which is why the city of San Francisco now operates long-obsolete cable cars) is problematic with news gathering and reporting - do you really want the government running the news?
The Russians tried that and the news quickly became a standing (highly cynical) joke.
The Russian sense of humor is not healthy for the long term.
What are you talking about? San Francisco cable cars aren’t around because some allegedly stupid government hasn’t figured out that they’re very old, they’re around because of public pressure to keep them as a historical heritage and tourist attraction. Otherwise they never would have made it past the middle half of the 20th century.
Governments have, in fact, been responsible for initiating and funding all kinds of major advances in public transportation, from airports and air traffic control and navigation to high-speed rail. The famous Japanese Shinkansen high-speed trains, for example, which today reach speeds as high as 200 mph, were initiated by the Japanese government through the Japanese National Railways, although their operation has since been privatized.
No, I don’t want government “running” the news. But since I don’t want commercial interests to control my only sources of news, I favor a parallel system of public broadcasting which is supported by public funds, but which by its charter and mandate and by law is independent of government influence.
This is the aspect of the ad issue that baffles me. Why are so many online ads stupid clickbaity shit?
I have an email account on Outlook.com (the former Hotmail). It has an ad panel on the right side of the window. You can’t close it, but I don’t mind at all, because they are ads for normal, real-world products and services. Right now, it’s showing an ad for Frigidaire appliances. The ad sits there in its space and behaves; it doesn’t cover the screen or demand that I interact with it. Why aren’t other websites’ ads like that?
I also have a Freecell game on my iPad that displays an ad banner at the bottom of the screen. Incredibly, these ads are often for local businesses, like the Safeway down the street from me. I’m sure Amateur Barbarian would tell me that it’s very bad that they’ve figured out that I live near a Safeway, but arguably this is a vastly more effective ad approach than Drivers Furious About New Rule or Obama Reduces Amount Homeowners Owe. I actually do shop at Safeway occasionally, but the chances that I’ll refinance my home via a clickbait ad are zero.
Maybe there’s something obvious I’m overlooking, but I can’t understand why we’re told that the internet won’t survive unless we tolerate the most obnoxious, intrusive, and utterly pointless advertising imaginable.
And – to reiterate my earlier point – ads that are not only obnoxious and intrusive, but that commandeer our own computers and hihack their resources to stealthily track our surfing behavior.
It’s not just a matter of a simple cookie. If you look at what’s actually being referenced when you open a typical commercial website, it’s often a surprisingly large number of stealth URLs that are all related to advertising and tracking, and it’s a major reason for browser bloat and slowdown of responsiveness.
Well, it’s your computer to run how you like. I’ve already linked to multiple cites showing that it does happen and it happens to perfectly reputable sites. Maybe it’s a low chance but it only takes one cryptolocker ransomware hit to ruin your day and it only takes a few seconds to install an add-on that greatly reduces your chances of getting randomly hit.
Our news providers are already arguably a joke. The only upside is that you can choose which variety of jokes you’re reading/watching.
I just removed Adblock Plus and installed uBlock and Disconnect.
Still getting the piss-off notice from Orlando Sentinal. Firefox if anyone is curious.
I’m talking about living in
SF for 30 years, seeing abandoned cable tracks (the cable slot is unique to the cables) on Nob Hill, know the story of the effort to save the cables when Muni first started testing diesel coaches on Russian HIll in 1953, and the employee telling the concerned citizen of the city’s plan to kill the cables if the coaches (buses to others) worked.
I know all that.
But - how did the city get into the business? Because the original private companies were losing money and wanted to sell the lines.
They got their friends in City Hall to buy the businesses from them.
And the first Mission St was a plank toll road - that building that is sinking was built on known marsh land - everyone else know to sink pilings into bedrock - the biggest building (a scandal in its own right) decided to use cheap “friction pilings” about 90’ long.
Bedrock is over 200’ down.
Did you read and understand the rest of my post? Governments tend to do things that are in the overall public interest, not necessarily things that are the most profitable. Whether it’s ancient obsolete cable cars, modern high-speed rapid transit, or public broadcasting of news and documentaries, all these things serve a long-term public interest whether or not they happen to turn a profit.
There are a few sites I visit enough to justify subscribing (and I do have subscriptions to them), but I’m certainly not about to subscribe to a site that I may never visit again. Nor am I opening up my computer to whatever garbage their third-party advertisers feel like dumping onto it.
What they ought to do is take a line from the video game industry and set up a system of microtransactions. I want to see this one article; here’s 25 cents; give me the article. If I want another article, I’ll shell out another 25 cents. After I’ve spent several dollars on a given site, that’s when they should be asking me, “Hey, you seem to like us… wanna subscribe?”
As it is, if I hit a site and get the “Turn off your ad blocking software” message, I shrug and move on. If more people take this approach, and the end result is that everything dies except the sites which offer good enough value to justify paying for them, well, then, the quality of online journalism will probably go up.