It depends, if you are signing up on a mobile device (say creating an account as part of an Android device setup) it is absolutely required in my direct experience with no way to bypass it.
However if you create a new account via a desktop browser, it's not been required.
for your first account, it is not required. once they think you are opening more than one, or they think you may be a bit, a working non-voip humber is required.
Gmail is slow to load compared to others. Notably, FastMail. I abandoned Inbox a while ago because of load time. Coming close to abandoning Gmail too. Takes way to long to load. This happens for me on low end laptops AND high end desktops.
Curious why you tossed Apple in there. In worldwide usage it's a fraction compared to the other three. (I feel compelled to state I use an iPhone in order to avoid this comment being interpreted incorrectly).
Just started diving into it. It's fascinating from a bureaucratic, administrative, and operational perspective.
--we have to increase CI/Intelligence capability or we'll lose primacy to another agency--
Paraphrasing
So poor people don't/won't read the Economist? They "don't care to". wow. BTW, these click-bait sites are rewarded by your employer who then is able to pay you. As an aside: Doesn't google still provide a text only web cache that strips ads? What if I use wget or curl? What about reader view in safari or firefox, absent from chrome of course. Rss? Blocking ads is only one way to go.
The Economist will quite proudly tell you itself how educated and rich its readers are (or take a look at the ads – it's the only periodical I know where you can usually find a small port terminal or newish refinery in the classifieds)
But the actual point you were arguing was: Is it legitimate to block ads and/or circumvent paywalls? What about the poor? or non-Americans?
The latter two aren't actually new situations for publishers – they have actually always operated in 0-marginal-cost environments, and have therefore developed strategies to capture any "consumer surplus" they can get. For those cases, there has always been country-specific pricing as well as discount schemes. Most common are probably student discounts, but you can also do price discrimination by making people jump through hoops to get discounts, essentially trading time for money. That's the principle behind supermarket coupons.
Regarding your technical scenarios: You're trying to do some legalistic hair-splitting, in a discussion that isn't even about legality but morality. I hope we'll get to the point where people realise the importance of professional, traditional print outlets, and see that they can obviously not continue to exist without our willingness to spend some money. I'm rather pessimistic on the former ("yeah I browse the NYT on the loo but it's not worth anything and 15 years ago they were wrong about Iraq WMD and I rather read bloggers from all sides of the spectrum and do the synthesis myself and even learn about Pizzagate and no I don't have a problem with run-on sentences").
The media still has to do its part, as well. I regularly do a shallow read of 10 to 15 publications. I'll happily spend 200$ per year for the privilege, but I haven't found anyone willing to take my money. I'm not going to pay that amount for a single publication as my parents have done over decades.
I'm spending 10$/mo on music now. Before, I had bought maybe two CDs in my entire life. But so far, publishing is blocking "streaming" to protect "CD sales".
I think there is some tremendous gap between what a site believes it's value to be and the value to the person behind the keyboard. My opinion is the reverse of yours. Internet users aren't necessarily cheap, the sites overvalue the content they provide. Just because someone provides content doesn't mean it's good enough to make a living. If people leave site A because they charge for site B that's free but of less value, it may mean that site A doesn't provide enough value for the price they want to charge.Personally, I don't care how intrusive you think they are, I'm not going to view them. Why would you want me to, I'm not going to click anyway. I do pay for several sites via subscription (FT, WSJ, NYT, and others) and I pay for my email service(s) and I pay for Amazon and Netflix and Mubi and Hulu. Oh, I also pay for my broadband connection. If you think that anyone who puts content online should be compensated by default, that's the weirdest contention I've ever heard.
The issue isn't so much you not viewing the site - but rather ad-blocking.
Not having readership is one thing - but people who still want your content, but refuse to pay, or view the ads, well that's another.
I respect people who don't view sites like say, the NYT, or WSJ or The Economist etc. because those sites show ads. Or that won't buy the hardcopy magazines because there is ad space.
What I can't respect is people still trying to view those sites and defeat their anti-ad-blocks.
Or who complain about how link-baity the articles on HN are, or why there are fluff pieces here - but don't think, hey, good content costs money
I suppose if those sites went the way of intrusive, pop-under/pop-over ads, I might chance my tune - but on the whole, I've found the text/small image ads so far on them a reasonable exchange.
In the comedy movie "Back to School", wealthy business man Thornton Melon hires Kurt Vonnegut to write an essay for him on Kurt Vonnegut for English Literature class. The professor knows Melon did not write the essay and tells him "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!." He got an F.
So the F actually is for not doing the work, not for the submitted paper. Whatever the professor said was not the reason why he gave an F, given the context it was aimed at the cheater! Which is why he gets an F.
Uhm... what??? The professor had to evaluate somebody's work. He did exactly that, the guy didn't do the work => grade F. THE END.
What fantasies of your own do you bring into this? Get off those drugs!
PS: Each time you downvote - and I know it's you, nobody reads this old thread any more and definitely not to react within minutes - I see that you actually read my reply. Do you use http://www.hnreplies.com/ to get notified about replies? Nice to know I can still reach you.
Facebook has no idea how many fake accounts exist and neither do I. But it is definitely higher than 11.2%. That estimate was self-serving for business purposes not a serious analysis.
I don't know if comparing "bugs" from AV software and OSs is apples to apples. Also, goto followed by erroneous goto looks like an error (I know) but
"keys are generated, they're inserted using the first 32 bits of MD5(serialNumber||issuer) as the key. If a match is found for a key, they just pull the previously generated certificate and key out of the binary tree"
I guess I'm reading these two examples as:
1. an extra goto
and
2. a strategy dealing with creating an ssl store that uses a 32(!) bit key.
I'm not implying malice but they seem fundamentally different type of errors.
