jomamaxx

" statistically significant improvements in scores of stress and depression"

It's hard to measure what 'benefit' means.

These things are a matter of choice as much as anything else.

Moreover, it may very well be that some of the answers were 'primed' by the content of the retreat.

"Don't underestimate people who hate ads, especially video ads."

If you don't want ads - then you have to pay for the apps.

Get it?

This has nothing to do with technology, ad-blockers, advertisers or anything else.

It's not even at the level of 'economics'.

No pay / No ads = no content.

None of you teenagers have been able to counter that point yet.

> 99% of Apps and Websites with content would disappear if there was no ad revenue or payment.

I can't believe that any of you are finished school and have jobs, because all this talk of 'turing machines' is laughable and incredulous.

"This is an out-and-out lie. They are willing to serve me pages without ads, because they do it every time I browse there with an ad-blocker"

You people are naively deluded.

" No ads = they don't exist = no content. It's not my job to worry about their business model."

You don't seem to grasp the realpolitik here.

No ads = no content - in the long run.

Get it?

You don't seem to grasp the math here.

If there are no ads, they, and all their peers cease to exist.

Or else they go full paywall.

I'm not even making an ideological statement - although I could very well do that, I don't need to.

Do you know the reason that there are maybe 1/3 the number of foreign correspondents for major news networks - and why there is so little coverage of Middle East etc? Because CNN now competes with click-farms like Buzzfeed. Less revenue = less product.

So it's the 'choice' consumers make.

These things don't exist in a vacuum they are real.

You don't want ads, you don't want to pay - they you are 'de facto' saying you don't want the content in the long run.

There is no argument against this - you can rant and rave as much as you want about side issues such as 'the http stream belongs to me' yada yada yada - it's totally irrelevant.

No ads (or pay, or donations) = no content.

It's as simple as that.

"This may sound greedy to you, but for you to have the absolute gall of telling people that they need to expose their computers to malware is purely asinine."

No - I am not exposing people to malware by suggesting that they 'not use ad blockers'. Because 99.9% of the world does not use adblockers and don't face such malware problems. I'm not even suggesting they 'not use ad blockers'. I'm merely pointing out the reality of the situation.

Denying reality is the only 'asinine' thing going on here.

Most of the content in 'the open web' depends upon advertising.

No ads = not much for you to download.

Realpolitik will very quickly trump any ideological arguments.

"Controlling what my own mechanical device does with the information it receives from other people's machines. Even if the internet had no ads and no tracking code and no malware anywhere whatsoever, there would still be a need for the technology to block and change the way in which my computer handles the things sent to it by other computers before showing them to me. "

This is not true at all.

You see ads all the time in apps you have on your mobile device (i.e. non browser) - and there is nothing you can do about it. Is the world freaking out over the consumers ability to 'control which ads come up in a specific app'? Not really.

"They are willingly serving up a page to my computer for free."

No they are not. They are willing to serve you pages with ads. Not pages without ads.

The logic that you guys use is pretty twisted.

These companies exist because of ads.

No ads = they don't exist = no content.

In the long run:

A) They will find a way around it in which case you will see ads.

or B) They will all be about of business, in which case you get no content.

Nothing is free, everything takes time and energy from someone else.

"is also none of their damn business" obviously it's 'their business'. It is literally their business :)

My bet is that companies just find a way around ad-blocking.

It'll be interesting to see just how.

"It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow."

It might have something to do with profitability and margins.

When you make a lot of money, it's easier to justify investments.

Fired - you did something wrong, incompetent (or pissed someone off) and they are doing it specifically to you.

Laid off - your group is redundant or discontinued, they have no need for you or your team/product, they're closing an overseas business unit, or culling 10% of their staff. You're in the wrong boat at the wrong time.

It has different connotations.

This.

Design Patters are simply tools at a higher level of abstraction than the code itself.

They are 'approaches to modelling information'.

That's it.

Use them, hack them, or not.

I've found them handy enough, though never implemented anything precisely. They make sense when communicating ideas as well.

I don't see why there is a need for debate.