It's a lot of fun. The server I'm running has a ton of mods. Vanilla minecraft is kind of about digging and building stuff. Modded minecraft is about automating everything with awesome machines.
Pretty crazy that we're closer to 2030, than we are 2005. Where did the time go!
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Show posts MenuQuote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
The problem I have is that the cost isn't well known. Nobody thinks about how the advertising agencies work, or how Google and Facebook make their money. And they certainly don't directly disclose their business practices to the users. Instead, users see free software and services thinking that they're free (and they're not). That's pretty deceptive.
Quote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
Why not directly disclose the cost to the user if it's so great? Why is it secretive? Maybe advertising agencies really suspect that users wouldn't appreciate the cost at all or maybe they think users wouldn't care. Either way, a price tag is nice.
Quote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
And by the way, Google is among many that buries its policies in lengthy legal jargon too. At least it makes users aware of policy changes.
Quote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
I can only speculate what kinds of information advertising agencies collect and how they use the data. Whether it can identify me as nslay, my Google ID, a cookie number, an IP address, or a behavior pattern is irrelevant. I don't like the idea that Google, for example, can build (and probably does) an almost complete profile of my web surfing history (since many sites host Google Ads). I personally don't want to be tracked and I am opted-in by default. I have to 1) know that I am being tracked (which is generally kept hidden), 2) Find a way to opt-out (if any).
Quote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
And again, as I pointed out: Anonymous data isn't necessarily anonymous. Once you cross reference data, you could, for example, build a statistical model and accurately predict the identities* of users. It's been done before and I imagine advertisers do this too (predicting someone's identity* by their web surfing behavior would be an interesting learning task).
* : By identity, I mean some abstract server-side representation of a user (which is not limited to something like a unique number for example).
Quote from: nslay on January 07, 2014, 09:18:51 PM
You want my support for Google: Be upfront and direct about the costs and practices. Otherwise, I think you're a bunch of hypocrites to your own motto "don't be evil." Surely Larry Page and Schmidt have nothing to hide from us, the unsuspecting user ... right?
Quote from: nslay on January 06, 2014, 06:24:44 PM
I guess you're right. It wouldn't be snooping in the case of AT&T Fiber since it is disclosing its monitoring practices directly to the customer.
Quote from: nslay on January 06, 2014, 06:24:44 PM
The same cannot be said of some advertising firms that bait computer illiterate users into using free software and/or services and either bury their policies in long ToS agreements or just not at all (e.g. Google Ads will track me when I visit sites that host Google Ads without my knowledge or consent and independent of whether I use Google services or not ... I would call this snooping).
Quote from: nslay on January 06, 2014, 06:24:44 PM
My impression is that these practices are either obfuscated or hidden from users for fear that users may not actually agree with those practices. That's just a guess though.
Quote from: nslay on January 06, 2014, 06:24:44 PM
And how do you actually know that these types of companies take privacy seriously?
Quote from: nslay on January 06, 2014, 06:24:44 PM
Facebook is a reputable company that has repeatedly violated its own privacy policy in the past (that we know of). And Google's executive staff are outright hostile toward privacy. So yes, I generally take a pessimistic point-of-view. On top of that, there are numerous obscure advertising agencies that appear all over the web that most people have probably never even heard of. What could you say of these? Who would even notice privacy violations from obscure advertising agencies no one has ever heard of?
At the least, I think more transparency is needed.
Quote from: nslay on January 03, 2014, 03:51:00 AM
Anonymous data isn't as anonymous as you think. The most obvious example is the insurance information debacle in Massachusetts ... (an MIT student cross referenced anonymous medical information with voter information and was able to infer the governor's prescriptions and doctor visits).
The creepy aspect of the data mining is that it's often without anyone's knowledge or consent and no one knows how that data is used.
Sorry to go off topic.
Quote from: nslay on January 03, 2014, 05:45:57 PM
Snooping is big business. A lot more than either you (@iago) and @Sidoh give it credit.
Quote from: nslay on January 03, 2014, 01:14:38 AMQuote from: Sidoh on January 02, 2014, 03:14:04 PMQuote from: iago on January 02, 2014, 11:08:48 AMQuote from: Rule on January 01, 2014, 05:33:39 AMQuote from: iago on December 31, 2013, 01:03:52 PM
Living in the Bay, working at the Google.
Wow, I'm surprised! I didn't think you would leave Canada, or work at a huge monopoly corporation. It's probably a nice place to work though.
Yeah, I didn't think I'd leave Canada either, but here I am!
I wouldn't call it a 'monopoly'. On one hand, I feel bad that 99.9% of my salary comes from ad revenue; on the other hand, they're constantly changing the world for the better, and they have really good policies regading privacy (privacy is SUPER important to them, because people will jump on anything) and lock-in (it's important that every app lets you view, manage, and export all your data). So that's a plus, at least. :)
I dunno -- I actually like their business model significantly more than just about any other tech company. It's much more conducive to innovation. Ads enable free stuff on the Internet. Of course there are alternatives, but I think ads are really the only thing lucrative enough to enable the kinds of crazy awesome things Google does without a ton of capital.
Ads were never a bad thing. Nobody is complaining about advertising itself but the data harvesting aspect that has become almost synonymous with advertising. Google's (among others) vision of the future is aligned with its business model: full and total annihilation of privacy (Larry Page has said this repeatedly over the past decade). It's that kind of point of view that people don't like ... not advertising.
EDIT:
Happy new year.
QuoteIt's that kind of point of view that people don't like ... not advertising.
Quote from: iago on January 02, 2014, 11:08:48 AMQuote from: Rule on January 01, 2014, 05:33:39 AMQuote from: iago on December 31, 2013, 01:03:52 PM
Living in the Bay, working at the Google.
Wow, I'm surprised! I didn't think you would leave Canada, or work at a huge monopoly corporation. It's probably a nice place to work though.
Yeah, I didn't think I'd leave Canada either, but here I am!
I wouldn't call it a 'monopoly'. On one hand, I feel bad that 99.9% of my salary comes from ad revenue; on the other hand, they're constantly changing the world for the better, and they have really good policies regading privacy (privacy is SUPER important to them, because people will jump on anything) and lock-in (it's important that every app lets you view, manage, and export all your data). So that's a plus, at least. :)
Quote from: Joe on December 03, 2013, 09:03:10 AM
Galacticraft? I never managed to get that running, but I was playing 1.6.4. Apparently 1.6.2 was more compatible.
Quote from: Joe on December 03, 2013, 09:03:10 AM
Oh, did you know that HdxBmx27 (or whatever his nick was) wrote Forge? Small world.
Quote from: Newby on December 03, 2013, 01:27:34 PMQuote from: Sidoh on December 02, 2013, 01:38:15 PM
Work.Recovering from a breakup.Minecraft!
This! (Replace Minecraft with random video games and you have my life.)
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