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One of the things I hate most about drupal (after, as you say, the memory use) is that I have to watch videos to figure out how to do anything, because the people who know how to do this stuff are apparently incapable of sitting down and writing a HOWTO useful as reference material.

I don't think anyone is arguing the fact that there wasn't tablets before the iPad, but the "Many of them looked similar" line is what is getting everyone's panties in a bunch. There was not a single tablet on the market or even introduced to the market that looked anything like the iPad. Everyone had some sort of bulky case thingy that held the display, no one had a flat surfaced tablet. Tablet Designs Before and After the iPad.

Fuck you and your bullshit link, which is a lying lie told by a liar, and you are a liar too for repeating it. How about the GRiDPad 1910 or the GRiDPad 2390? Okay, so they have some buttons on them; so did all the portable devices of their day. I also own a DT360 which seems like a good example of what you're saying, but the big rubber stuff is an optional accessory and while mine is red, it was also offered in black. I'm running Debian Lenny with Matchbox on mine; Lenny is probably the earliest Linux with the proper kernel patches for the Dt3?? machines, which are cheap, low power, and fanless.

Er, anyway, I digress. The point is that there WERE black rectangle tablets before the iPad. They had some buttons, but so did everything. If "remove the buttons" is deserving of a design patent, then digital picture frames are sufficient to prove that the idea is obvious.

I'm pretty sure Palm made a lot of money with a flat device that had icons in rows. Take a look at the images on the right hand side of this page. Palm was using that look right back in 1996, and was making a lot of money until smartphones started to replace PDAs.

No, Palm was using that back in 1993, before the Palm Pilot, with the Casio Zoomer/Tandy Z-PDA-7000/GRiDPad 2310, which ran GEOS. And it came in just one color, Casio watch charcoal wannabe black. Tandy provided marketing, casio the case and coating, palm computing the software, GRiD the hardware, with a NEC V20 CPU and a 384x512 backlit monochrome LCD. This was also the birthplace of the graffiti handwriting recognition system. I have the same software (GEOS with graffiti) on my GRiDPad 1910. My 2390 refuses to talk to my PC via the appropriate serial cable, unfortunately, even with fresh new batteries (both main and reserve.)

The simple fact is that everything is a derivative of what came before.

thank you.

Abject, horrific bullshit, spread by idiots who don't have a fucking clue about meteorology, basic physics, and more importantly that a few documents mentioning cloud seeding do not instantly mean that even one single witnessed contrail is anything other than a contrail.

Snicker snort. I bet you're attacking the non-arguments from the fringe of the fringe. It's a long jump from reality, where the military continually talks about ongoing plans and goals to "own the weather" with new papers published talking about how it can be done regularly, to "a few documents mentioning cloud seeding". I'm sure you think this is totally normal for example.

Critical thinking - it works, bitches.

though not for you.

You can embed evince (and presumably okular or whatever), which loads slightly more slowly and doesn't capture the Ctrl+F and Ctrl+P hotkeys (those will be picked up by the browser and not work), but has a few more features than the non-free PDF viewer by Google Chrome.

I've also had trouble getting the Chrome viewer to work consistently in Chromium. It repeatedly crashed or failed to load, requiring a browser restart. This could be related to version discrepancies, though, as I used the .so from Chrome 13 (dev) with Chromium 11 (stable).

What? Are you really saying that the American government is trying to keep it's citizens from fleeing the country? Wow man, you're more insane than I thought.

At least I know how to use apostrophes. In any case, the American government is only doing what all governments under the control of corporate interests do, they are ensuring a captive audience.

Go outside and get in touch with the real world some time.

I go outside plenty. Sometimes I bring my camera with me.

But the RRD doesn't even have to be recovered from the disk through a reboot... hibernate is for power-off situations. On the Amiga if you had enough spare RAM (where "enough" was less than a megabyte) you could load the whole of the Workbench floppy into the RRD and then essentially reboot from it, only loading the shell, startup-script, and RRD driver from the boot disk. Hmm, now I want to put a flash storage device in the A1200 and see how fast it gets. Maybe that is my next casemod.

Right back at ya. Lay off the booze for a few hours and maybe you'll come up with a coherent post for once.

The problem with HFCS is not so much what it is or how it's used but how ubiquitous it is in our food supply.

No, the problem with HFCS is how it's used. You think it's ubiquitous because it's replacing sugar, but no, that would be OK (except that most processed foods have way too much added sugar. I don't need my cheese and crackers to taste like cookies and cheese, you Kraft bastards. ugh.) The problem is that vegetable oil is being replaced in recipes with HFCS, which produces similar texture results with a longer shelf life, because oil goes rancid but HFCS doesn't. So they have a whisper of vegetable oil in the product to convince you that it is real (oil has to be in the ingredients or you will be suspicious) and then they stuff it full of HFCS to replace the lost oil. Then they have to add a shitload of citric acid to the product to balance out [most of] the sweetness of the HFCS.

So YES, the problem is VERY MUCH how HFCS is being used. It's being used to LIE TO PEOPLE. In the same vein, it's very much used in "low fat" food. Remember the food pyramid? It looks a little different now but it still over-recommends carbohydrates. Fat is not bad for you. Rapidly-converted carbohydrates are. Low-fat processed foods are the worst offenders. Eating these foods can make you fat even if you consume a reasonable amount of calories. Further, your brain becomes resistant to insulin over time meaning you have to eat more of them to feel full. Consequently anyone eating that shit will become miserable and/or fat.

I think there are basically two roads out of this mess. One of them is to ban everything that the junk food industry abuses; none of it is interesting to the actual cook anyway. The other way is to mandate that the mass in grams of every ingredient be listed on the packaging. I would also like to see every ingredient be listed by nation of origin as well, but I recognize the difficulty inherent to such an idea and don't really propose it yet. Maybe in another few decades when all printing is on-demand.

Calling it Jesusing is probably not the way to go, but it would be great if we the people of the internet could agree on an alternative term.

Ah, so now the definition of "Open" is twisted yet again to fall on the side opposite MS/Apple/Sony. How convenient.

uh no, I have been quite consistent

TFA does not support the summary. The submitter does not understand the history involved. Christine Peterson is one of at least three people including Bruce Perens who claim to have invented the term "Open Source", in spite of the simple fact that the term appears in the media and in press releases prior to that date. They did not invent the term; they co-opted it. TFA does not state that the term was "coined" at this meeting, although it does strongly imply it. This would be a false and revisionist view of history, but you can't saddle TFA's author with explicitly expressing it, only with failing to disambiguate. This may have been a deliberate choice on their part, since the actual origins of the term are themselves ambiguous.

Further, TFA makes no predictions, and thus can be roundfiled after being stamped "I've had all these thoughts before and they weren't particularly insightful."

GMGruman is either an ignoramus who speaks without knowing, or a follower of the OSI.

let me resize a window on any edge, not just a tiny 10x10 pixel corner... oh and double click to maximise... how I could dream!

or you could run Linux with Compiz and Emerald. I use a glass theme of my own devising, with Cillop-Go widgets, and avant-window-navigator for that glitz and glamor.

Of course, if that's not where your software runs, then it's not the environment in which you're going to work, but it certainly is a nice place to hang out.

Last time I checked, and it was a long time ago, Steam worked fine on Windows. When I first tried it, it would not restore backups without help, but everything else worked fine. The next time I tried it, everything worked fine. You will only be able to install and successfully play games based on the Source engine in most cases.

Can you point out any references to "Open Source" that predate the current common meaning (that includes free redistributability)?

Yes. This predates Perens' erroneous claim of invention of the term by a year, and "everyone else's" claim of when it was invented at a meeting in which Perens was included (but everyone there thinks they invented the term, which is I suppose reasonable considering that no one there invented the term) by two years.

Bruce Perens has done an excellent job of convincing the masses that Open Source means what he wants it to mean, but the reality is that it meant source code access but not rights of redistribution before the OSI existed, before Bruce claims to have invented the term, and so on. Unfortunately, Even Wikipedia buys into this revisionist view of history which can be debunked by any asshole who can use google. And yes, I am that asshole, and I did use google, and I wrote the last-linked article which expands on this theory.

Can someone figure out who wrote that Wikipedia entry? It might be interesting.

Any way you slice it, there is no license that could in any practical manner prevent free redistribution and still be open source let alone free software.

One last time to link my article (Since amazon is not functioning on my site right now, I do not in any way get paid for any kind of clicks or views) and then I will stop: The supposed Open Source Definition does not define Open Source. The term predates the OSI. I have proven this conclusively; the use of the term in the sense in which redistribution is not guaranteed (though since you own your patchset you can always send that around, as in the case of qmail) is clearly Open Source:

Individuals can use OpenDOS source for personal use at no cost. Individuals and organizations desiring to commercially redistribute Caldera OpenDOS must acquire a license with an associated small fee. Source code for proprietary third-party components of Novell DOS 7 will not be published.

Further, Caldera does not even claim to have invented the term: "Caldera's OEM and Channel Partners can utilize the open-source code models for DOS and Linux to create low-cost, custom applications and enhanced utilities for vertical and niche markets." So OpenDOS was free but not Free software and yet was still Open Source, in that you could get the code and look at it. And because you retain the copyright on your patchset (has this been tested? is an overlay for someone else's artwork which is only meaningful when laid over their artwork a derivative work?) you can distribute that, so everyone who has PAID for the software can receive most of the benefits of Free software. For Caldera, Open Source was indeed the selling point of Linux (see above snippet) and not Free Software.

Unless you can somehow show that Caldera was abusing the term by bringing out a yet older citation, something which I for one would very much like to see, it will have to be accepted that the OSI was created well after the fact and is not entitled to redefine Open Source, which is the real reason they have never properly applied for a trademark. There will simply be prior conflicting use demonstrated, and the OSI's cachet (and that of Bruce Perens, who has most personal stake in this falsehood) will be deprecated.

Open Source, as applied to software, was never in use before Eric Raymond/Open Source Initiative started using it.

That is a lie, or at best, you are mistaken. But stating it as fact when you are wrong makes you a liar of a special sort, the kind who runs his mouth when he does not know what he is talking about.

The term "Open Source" was invented to be distinct from more strict definition of "Free Software".

No, it is very much the other way around. The term "Open" has been used in computing since long before ESR's problem with a printer driver. Bruce Perens attempted to steal the term for himself (as did several other people who claim to have invented the term at the same meeting, see my above article) and used it to found a minor cult of personality. He continues to champion this appropriation of the term in an attempt to increase his cachet to the levels of RMS or ESR.

The term "Open" (without "source") was routinely applied to software that is most definitely closed source (for example, everything by Open Systems Foundation), and has absolutely nothing to do with Open Source.

Open means interoperable. Full stop. Caldera used the term "Open Source" to mean "you can get the source" over a year before Bruce even claims to have invented the term, and almost two years before anyone else claims that he invented it. Your view of history is revisionistic at best and if you continue to promote it I will conclude that you have a vested interest in Perens being named as the coiner of the phrase. Please further note that ESR does not claim the term, only to have been present at the meeting at VA Software where it was supposedly invented, a full year after I can find the term being used in a press release from Caldera.

But (AFAIK) if you pay for an open source (as OSI defines it) product, you are allowed to copy and give it away at no cost.

However, there could be an open source license that doesn't allow this. Find a counter-example is left as a problem for the reader.

You (and the GP) have completely misunderstood the meaning of Open Source. It's not your fault; Bruce Perens and the OSI have been lying to you about what it means literally for years. The GP's statement ("as OSI defines it") is at the heart of the problem; Bruce Perens does not have the right to redefine the term "Open Source", and by extension neither does the OSI. That's because Bruce Perens did not invent the term. As per the link, the earliest use of the term "Open Source" that I can find pertains to Caldera (I know, right?) OpenDOS, in 1996. Perens claims to have invented the term in 1997 but my research indicates that his first recorded claimed use was in 1998. So not only does he not have a good claim to the term, but his claim is not even as good as he says it is.

"Open Source" means that those who receive the binary can receive the source, that is all. The right to redistribute is part of the rights of Free Software, not Open Source.

Can we finally put this dog to bed, please?

In the UK motor trade Glass Guide is known as the black book and is the motor traders bible when it comes to pricing, so it might be made up fud but it is made up fud that has a very real effect on the price of used vehicles.

In the US we have a "blue book" made by a publisher called Kelley. From my extensive experience buying used cars I can tell you that it means basically nothing. Our book is ostensibly created by taking average used car sales prices, but I have come to suspect that it is not statistically valid since nobody I know ever pays full blue book for most cars, and nobody ever gets some cars as low as their blue book "value". Is your book really different?

There's always Chromium; I run it on Ubuntu. For Windows there's SRWare Iron. I'm not sure which is the preferred build for OSX; perhaps Crossover Chromium. TFA doesn't say whether Chromium is affected. Some comments under TFA state that the effect lasts only until Chrome is restarted, suggesting that the information is stored only in the memory cache.

Chromium is the exact same code as Chrome. Of course it will be affected, unless you patch it out.

And seriously, people, get a grip. It's not like this tells Google what sites you visited. It just stores it on your computer. It has nothing to do with Google wanting your information, that's a complete non sequitur here. Geez.

There's always Chromium; I run it on Ubuntu. For Windows there's SRWare Iron. I'm not sure which is the preferred build for OSX; perhaps Crossover Chromium. TFA doesn't say whether Chromium is affected. Some comments under TFA state that the effect lasts only until Chrome is restarted, suggesting that the information is stored only in the memory cache.

Forgot to delete edit off the end... try this link if the other doesn't work.

My problem is with how the FSF is implying that Jobs is a hypocrite.

Jobs is clearly a hypocrite. (Link to opinion piece on my website, no ads)

It seems that they're more interested in making his thoughts into something that they're not than they are about promoting free software.

It seems to me like they're talking about what his thoughts mean. Jobs is trying to anticompetitively support H.264.

Either way, I'm disappointed that Ars ran with this article rather than going with something less bias.

You must be new [t]here.

Who but the US supposes that the US are number one creator of all times? By the way, there are a hundred or more other countries that didn't develop it.

Are there any other countries that didn't develop it after prototyping it four or more years ago?

I think the best solution for those who want to spend the money is colocation. Get a case with a padlock, and lock it. Disable USB in the BIOS, with a setup password. It would be convenient to use a system with OOB management, e.g. an IPMI module.

I used to have an IBM eServer 325, which is really just a rebadged MSI system. It is supposed to support coreboot and I suspect it would support Opteron VE if you did that... the system BIOS is not up to it. They will take up to 12GB RAM though, and I suspect the SCSI models should be cheaper these days. SCA drives are practically free...

There are an astounding number of books which cover revisionism in various versions of the bible. You can read some lighter material on this subject which has more citations, I can point you in THAT direction at least. For instance, one great book on the subject is King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel which speculates that the origin of the bible may have been as a history of the life of King David, which was later edited down to try to reconcile some of David's actions which are precisely opposed to the supposed desires of god.

Another excellent book on the birth of christianity is God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. Both books are from the same author; both books have so far stood up well to criticism.

Actually, in the old days, you could buy a book for your make of car to figure out what's wrong. These days you can't do that.

You are officially on crack.

I have the factory service manual for both my 1989 Nissan 240SX and my 1981 Mercedes 300SD. The former is a book. The latter is on cdrom. Both were purchased from or at least through a dealer.

Both books have extensive troubleshooting flowcharts, although the Nissan one has much better ones. This only makes sense, since it's eight years newer and done by the Japanese who are experts on that kind of crap.

I don't have the book for my Subaru Impreza yet, because it's spendier. Subaru is one of the worst actually, because they publish manuals with a prime set when a new model comes out, and then as differentials thereafter, and you need ALL the manuals in between model year one and your current year to make sure you have all the info.

Now, gone are the days when you could go buy a motors manual and have it cover like nine cars. But then again, cars do a shitload more than they used to. Most of it is behind the scenes, but it's there. Also, the motors books were never actually that good, but cars were so simple all you really needed was torque specs and the like. You could see how it all worked and lay your hands on all the parts.

We do still have Chilton's/Haynes manuals, but they are shit, and have been since about the seventies. You get what you pay for when you spend $17.95 on a book explaining how to fix every part of your car.

By the way, you can find out the procedure for getting the computer to spit out codes for basically any car by googling, except for 1996+ vehicles (and a small handful of 1995 models, and an even smaller set of 1994 models) which are OBD-II and typically require a code reader - which you can get for about $50. It's easy as hell to come by a list of OBD-II powertrain codes - as a matter of fact, I have a list on my website. If this all happened recently, then your dad is a chump, and you and he both fail Google 101.

Basically you need p2kman and a hex editor, I prefer xvi32 and it's basically the standard for hex editing in the motorola community. p2ktools has a built-in hex editor but it doesn't handle the RAZR very well so I ended up going back to p2kman.

p2kman comes with the p2k drivers, so that makes life easier. The places to go are motomodders.net, especially for tools, and howardforums, which is where I found out about the whole motorola modding thing in the first place.

See also: Hacking the Motorola V3i for Long Video Clips. This is a page on my website that also has links to where I found out about the whole thing. You mostly want to read the linked post but that will give you a short overview.

For those of us with Triplets or RAZR phones, you want to see map.txt which is a list of the hacks you make to SEEM files. SEEM files are config files, use p2kman to download them. Seem files have a seem number and a record number, and are named SSSS_RRRR.seem. The most interesting one is 0032_0001 but 004a_0001 and 004e_0001 have settings related to the video camera.

You do not have to flash/flex to do this.

Now, I did flash/flex, I wanted to accomplish some other things too. I think I need to load a different language pack because my iTap is apparenly in either spanish or portuguese (Hard for me to tell which) but other than that it's been quite a success. I also loaded a newer Motorola Digital Music Player java applet because the newer one has a better interface. I seldom use it, though, and instead mostly use the built-in multimedia support (non-Java.)

If you have any more questions, I suggest howardforums or motomodders.net forums. Howardforums is probably THE best place to go.

Personally my primary feeling is that Sony is to blame, because they reached too high and produced a product that they couldn't produce in volume.

Yeah, I can tell :)

But I did use the thing to generate a pass with the defaults, and I wrote an article about it already too, because I'm just that fast. You can read it at http://www.hyperlogos.org/story/pointing_out_vulne rabilities if you care. (ObDisclaimer: Amazon referral link on sidebar and in reviews on site, no other ads.)

No no no, you can't cut out the generator. That's a key feature of this unit. Because it has USB you can use external peripherals like a GPS. I would absolutely adore having one of these with Linux, a good set of maps, and a GPS Mouse or a bluetooth GPS (I actually have one) [ObDisclaimer: amazon referrer link, no other ads] to go with. The bluetooth GPS is an acceptable situation but actually not the best option in this case because it has to charge via USB, and since there's no bluetooth (at least, IIRC) I'd need a bluetooth dongle. Sadly, the unit does not also provide a virtual serial connection via the USB.

Right, that's why my page (I just did my updated page for 2.0, it's here tells not only what extensions I use, but also why I use them. (Woops, looks like I need to make one small edit...) A simple list doesn't help. People are always making lists and they're not useful. I mean if we had some kind of web standard for lists it would be one thing, at least people could reference them... but we don't.

Me? I've read slashot for several years, used Firefox for several years off and on... but I just don't like the fact that I have to go in search of extensions.

Wow, you've read slashdot for several years? You must be a god!

Look, you don't have to go in search of extensions. The browser works fine out of the box and provides privacy protection, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, the best javascript implementation, proper support for more image formats than any other browser including SVG, MNG (last I checked) and proper PNG... It just happens that you can add additional functionality through extensions. If you don't need it, then you don't need them. Meanwhile, they provided a very nice site from which you can download extensions so that you can get them if you need them.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a nice website that has a great set of extensions, except that there's apparently little demand. Every so often I do a writeup on which extensions I happen to use, and post it on my website. (The last one was on a different site - I haven't updated for 2.0 yet but that's coming.) (ObDisclosure: I have amazon referral links, but no other ads.)

Dual monitors is really annoying to me. You need at least three IMO, not so much because I feel one needs more area, but because it's best to have one front and center. But then, you can have two, and have one there; this is a necessity for games. If you want to do multi-monitor gaming, you definitely need three monitors, because having a seam down the center of your view is simply unacceptable. Currently though I actually have three systems on my desk at work; I have a HPQ nw9440 Core Duo laptop in the middle, and its 17" display; on the left I have a PC running Scala InfoCenter Designer 3 (that's its whole purpose in life) with a 20" Viewsonic TV/Monitor that I wish we didn't buy (it doesn't allow you to use the panel's native resolution, which is fucking retarded. I'm done with viewsonic until they pull their head out of their ass.) On the right is a dual 2GHz G5, with one of the larger displays, I think it's another 20" widescreen. This is the apple display, and it's pretty, but I'd rather sell my testicles on ebay than use the mac as my primary machine. Instead, I use one keyboard and mouse to control all three systems using Synergy, a program which, well, does that :) (ObDisclaimer: This is an article on my website. I do not have page ads, but I do have some amazon referral links. I do not get anything for page views.)

A survey conducted by the Commerce Committee says that Americans don't know what net neutrality is, and they don't want it.

Gee, that's amazing. I wonder if that could be because almost all the media in the US is owned by ten megacorporations, and they don't report on things that they don't want us to hear about?

If this subject interests you, I suggest watching Orwell Rolls in his Grave. (ObDisclaimer: link to a review on my website, amazon referral link if you clicky from there. You know what to do if you want to find it somewhere else. I do not sell ads, I don't get money for page views.)

Interestingly, J.K. Rowlings is the 4th most banned author in the US, since so many feel her Harry Potter books are promoting witchcraft among susceptible young minds. I only wish I were kidding.

Christianity is full of things like this. The hilarious thing is that all along it has had a serious conflict in the issue of the existence of magic, due to errors (intentional and accidental) in copying, and the work of later authors. Some authors portrayed all magic as coming from God, and no other magic existed, but in the earliest and least-edited portions of the bible we can see that the earlier authors clearly believed in the existence of other gods, of whom Jehovah was the greatest, and in demons and other magical creatures whose existence does not come from Jehovah.

If you're interested in some highly accessible books on biblical history, I suggest King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (ObDisclaimer: link to my website, review) as well as The Harlot by the Side of the Road (also by Kirsch) and finally one more book from the same guy: God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. The first and last ones are actually the most useful here, and give the most insight on the origin of the bible, the origin of christianity, and the editing of the bible. Unfortunately, most of what I know about the origins of christianity I learned in school and as such can't provide a citation for :)

Oh, and as far as something good they are doing, how about the tax cuts? Seems that the economy is "officially" doing better now than the same time last year.

What tax cuts are you talking about? I'm not aware of any tax cuts that affect me. It's funny; the estate tax (aka the "death tax") only affects people leaving large sums of money that most of us will never see, but by calling it the "death tax" Bush got a lot of enthusiasm for a tax cut for the rich. FOR THE RICH. It doesn't apply to over 95% of the population.

You should really watch Orwell Rolls in His Grave. (ObDisclaimer: This is a link to a review on my site, which contains amazon associate links. If you do a websearch for the title, the official site fo the movie should be at the top of the list of links.) You're a tool of the media and this might be the film that opens your eyes. Probably not, though.

Yeah, I posted the same comment (and then some) to the Radio Whymsey24trwe;t (however you spell it) forums. Then, to really compound the fact that no one will care about what I wrote, I wrote something about the article in my blog.

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

drink@hyperlogos.org is your e-mail address? I say, is drink@hyperlogos.org your e-mail address, because your e-mail address contains the word "drink".

Could it be deduced that you'd like to take a little drinkypoo?

I would like to.
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org
drink@hyperlogos.org

Okay, we all hate ads. Animated banner ads are a shameless attempt to burn a little ad-shaped hole in your brain, dumping their talentless, artless ad copy right down your optic nerve and into your delicate brain. But let's face it, a lot of websites which could not ordinarily afford to exist are paid for in this manner.

Also, for those who remember the web before search engines, you know, in that supposed golden age, you couldn't FIND anything. I mean, it usually looked like there wasn't that much content out there, but I doubt that was ever true, at least once the universities started taking it seriously, well ahead of everyone else. You could have a good time browsing around, but if you wanted information on a specific topic you had to get lucky, or follow an awful lot of links.

Let's especially not forget the fact that google caches things, so as long as people put their information in ordinary HTML (A trend which is becoming less and less common these days) google will hang onto the data for some time, making the web more persistent.

Sure, commercialization hurts, but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth, all these sites, the hosting... Suck it up. Enjoy the fact that all you have to pay for is your connection. It's worth remembering that access outside of a university or corporation used to be hellishly expensive. Compu$erve charged by the minute, and didn't even have internet access for the longest time, though there was internet mail.

So it's cheaper and faster today than it's ever been. There's more content, useful and not, and more search engines (though google is the only one I use any more, since they're least offensive and most useful) to find information inside of it. Sure, the fact that any asshole can put together a webpage means there's more useless crap, but it also means you have access to data you wouldn't otherwise see.

And for those who cannot find anything to read on the web: Become involved in a community site. Slashdot is just one example, and perhaps not the best, because it's (ostensibly) news-driven. That, plus a blip on the radar every time Katz squats and squeezes out another pearl. But there are sites like Everything2 which can keep you busy for many hours if you're possessed of the necessary pedanticism. Hell, even livejournal can hold your interest.

In general, whiners need to spend their time developing content. I like E2 because it's a resource which can help people well into the future, and which helps me now. I also develop my own content; I run one of the larger drinking game sites on the internet (hyperlogos.org) which I should really spend more time on, but I'm too busy putting work into E2 :)

More pages, more search engines, more content, faster connections. When I started using webpages, modems were the standard, and MANY MANY sites were on nothing faster than a 28.8k modem, including The Circus where I lived - And we had a Class C from scruz.net at the time. :)