Guest0918231

> So what? That was years ago, and that says nothing about the present state of affairs.

You overlooked my second point, about Fortnite leading to the Epic store gaining traction, which is the present state of affairs. Also look at EA Games launches their store in the past by using their AAA games as leverage. All these gaming stores and trying to use games as a way to get their foot in the door, so I think you're wrong by saying it's no longer a valid approach. In fact, it's the only approach that seems to work.

> No it isn't, because you are missing the fact that the gaming market is not a zero-sum game, fix-cake that you can only get a share of. It's constantly growing, and new games create new public the whole time.

It's very much a zero-sum situation when these stores sell the majority of the same games. When you spend your $60 buying Grand Theft Auto on the Epic store, that's a $60 loss for Steam, because you're not going to buy the game twice. When one store wins your sale, the other loses it.

1. Steam became a success because of the games Valve developed.

2. Epic created Fortnite, which you likely know is a popular release. That game is leading to the Epic store getting off the ground and gaining traction. This is causing a rather large loss in revenue for Valve.

That's why games are important. If you control the top games, you control the users, and you control the platform.

> Would it be legal/ethical to allow automated pre-commitment to all terms and conditions that nefarious sites may choose to scatter around their pages, many of which won't have been written until after the user had ticked this "agree to everything" box?

Isn't everyone 'agreeing to everything' outside of the GDPR when they visit sites now, without the option of saying 'no'? Isn't everyone covered by GDPR being tricked into 'agreeing to everything' at the moment? Giving users the ability to disable the tracking aspect across all sites with one simple setting seems like a plus here.

> Any site doing this is breaking the law. Report them please.

Has any action been taken against a site for making their opt-out option more complicated than their opt-in option? Why try to regulate how millions of sites prompt users for consent instead of a few browsers?

> Because sites which track you don't want it. After all, they're the ones who invented "cookie banners"; and they could choose to get rid of them by just, you know, not tracking people. Yet they don't.

They didn't invent cookie banners, they added them because they were required by law. The same law could remove cookie banners and require the sites to respect a browser cookie.

I agree with the browser implementation. Automatically blocking the cookies will likely not work because sites frequently combine tracking and required cookies.

1. When the user starts the browser for the first time, ask if they want to allow tracking cookies on all websites.

2. When the user visits a website, pass that tracking answer as true or false. Firefox and Chrome have buttons beside the URL already for 'Site Settings'. Allow users to override their global tracking setting with a per site settings there.

This would be infinitely better than the mess we have now, where every website gives us a pop-up with an intentionally confusing interface. Why can't I say 'No' to tracking once? Why do I need to do it countless times a day, each time navigating a new and confusing interface?

Cups work great for certain things, such as a cup of water, sugar, flour, or peanuts. It gets difficult in other situations though, like trying to measure a cup of spinach, strawberries, or ice, because the measurement greatly varies depending on how the items are packed or arranged in the space.

Wouldn't someone send communication signals to lure or bait other civilizations? For example, spam a friendly hello message on every potential communication channel and encourage new civilizations to reply. When they do, destroy them.

They don't say that, because that's not their goal. Google makes money from consumers being online, searching, browsing the internet, and using Google apps. It doesn't matter if that person is using Windows, Mac, Linux, or some imaginative Google OS to connect to the internet. They profit either way.

They make some where you attach a device to the dog's collar, and it unlocks the door when they approach.

That being said, I grew up in an area completely surrounded by trees and every animal imaginable (squirrels, rabbits, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, deer, etc). We had a dog door (a simple plastic flap) to our barn. I saw raccoons and squirrels with nests literally 10ft from the dog door. Nothing ever came inside. The barn even had food (dog food, plus a fridge and cupboards with snacks). It was even heated during the winter. Nothing came in. I don't know the reasoning, but that little piece of plastic kept everything out.

How would this be different than going to Amazon.com and searching for "bluetooth speaker" or "marble chess site" and seeing offers from different companies for products you can buy? Amazon also makes it convenient since you can order through their site instead of being redirected to a third-party, and they assist in the shipping/return process.

I get emails all the time from Google about DMCA notices and pages from my site being removed from search. They'll just give me a list of 100s of pages that have been removed. The requests make absolutely no sense. For example, it'll be a URL for a comment permalink, which redirects to a comment that says, "Great!". The vast majority of the requests are because someone mentions the name of a TV show or movie. Some company that represents them just issues a DMCA removal for any page that uses their name, claiming it infringes on their copyright. So, I've had thousands of pages removed from Google during the past year. I don't have time to make counterclaims for each of them. Most of them are old pages that receive little to no traffic. Still, it's a shame for anyone trying to search for them.

I don't think it's a fair comparison.

There's a difference between someone crashing their own Volvo, and someone sitting in the backseat of a Waymo that misinterprets the lane markers and crashes into a barrier. One is not news, one is front page news.

I guarantee the first Waymo death is going to be publicized everywhere. It doesn't need to be a trend, and as I said, it doesn't mean the cars are more dangerous than human drivers. However, it's going to be news. There are going to be all sorts of moral debates when an algorithm decides to drive over a child instead of turning into an oncoming car. People will want answers. How does Waymo rank the value of different lives? I imagine it'll be news for the next decade until there are thousands of deaths and it becomes normal.

It's an industry that's going to be full of "firsts" and that's going to be the news. Waymo drives over dog while auto-piloting to a parking lot. Waymo mistakes grocery cart for stroller and swerves into elderly man. Waymo kills cyclist when poor weather disrupts censors. It doesn't matter if they ship something safe. Get enough cars on the road and these things will happen and people will be talking about it.

People are going to die in Waymo cars, and sometimes we'll wonder if the accident was avoidable and if the car made the wrong choice leading to someone's death.

It'll look bad on the brand when the news is reporting how, "Google self-driving car kills family en route to Disneyland".

I'm not saying self-driving cars are dangerous, but it's just the numbers. People will die and self-driving car deaths will be shocking news and make headlines for a long time. I wouldn't want my brand name anywhere near them.

Yes, they can do whatever they desire. The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google.

On the user side if you only want straightforward recipes, you're out of luck, because they're never going to be near the top of the search results.

If you are one of the people looking to read these recipe background stories, even you get a mediocre experience, because the majority of the content you're reading was written primarily for Google (how many times can I reference salmon, fish, atlantic, norwegian, protein, healthy, omega-3 and smoked in this recipe story to hit all of the important keywords?).