You're also assuming the satellite transmission is secure. This would require that you fully trust everybody involved in building and launching the satellite - throw one rogue programmer in the mix and you could have the satellite spitting out pseudo-random numbers which could make this easily crackable.
You could also have a man-in-the-middle attack with a guy standing outside your house feeding you a bogus satellite signal so that you use a pseudo-random pad. Of course, maybe he worked out a way around this so you can verify that the stream is actually from the satellite - I haven't read his paper, just the NYT article.
I use Megapath and they're excellent, but since they've apparently stopped taking residential accounts I recommend people investigate SpeakEasy as well.
I use Speakeasy at home and Megapath at work and they have both been excellent so far. Their tech support, customer support, and quality of service is so far and beyond Verizon. Of course, that may be largely because Verizon's DSL service is the bottom of the barrel, but then again when have you heard of a residential DSL service where the tech support offers to help you troubleshoot your Linux setup (Speakeasy did this for me)? It's good to know that Speakeasy has been passing along my money to Covad because they are a great company and should be kept in business.
A couple of places I have contracted for tried to put clauses in my NDA/non-comp agreement that basically said that if they sued me to enforce the agreement I would have to pay their legal expenses incurred by them in suing me. What my lawyer advised me was to change such clauses to read that the "prevailing party" would be entitled to recover reasonable legal expenses from the losing party. So essentially, this took a very bad clause that would have been detrimental to me (they could sue me on a whim and I would have to pay for it) into something which protected me doubly from frivolous lawsuits (because if their case isn't solid they would stand to lose a good chunk of money reimbursing me).
I just wanted to throw this idea out because I think that there are plenty of "standard" clauses like this which are bad for contractors, and it helps to have a good response in your arsenal to turn it around into a positive. If we have enough people in the industry insisting on reasonable terms, companies won't be able to ignore us because _we_ will then be setting the standard terms by our shear numbers. Besides, if a company doesn't agree to the change that I mentioned above it should be a pretty big warning sign - enough to make you walk away.
You seem to not know how the industry works. Microsoft has been known for hiring the top programmers, period. Microsoft Research is the most prestigous position a programmer can find! The truth is, Microsoft *does* hire the best people, because they can pay the top buck.
Bah again! You're saying that 1) Microsoft hires all of the top programmers and 2) that these people are only programming because Microsoft gives them a big fat paycheck. How on earth can you make these assertions? Maybe if Microsoft didn't pay them top dollar they wouldn't be working for Microsoft, but a lot of them would probably go on programming somewhere because, for a lot of top programmers, the money is just a nice fringe benefit.
And your assertion that all top programmers work for Microsoft is just absurd. There are oodles of top notch programmers working elsewhere - James Gosling and RMS spring to mind. You say that a position at Microsoft research is the most prestigious position a programmer can get, but that is a very subjective statement and one that most people I know would strongly disagree with. Even for those who don't loath Microsoft, positions such as professorships at MIT, Stanford, or somewhere like that carry a lot more prestige than working at Microsoft. And for the many who do loath Microsoft... well, they would find your statement laughable and their opinion is not to be discounted because they make up a sizeable portion of "the industry".
Basically if open source gets out of hand, normal software development will cease, and the quality of software will go down. Why? Because the top programmers will no longer program, if they don't get paid.
I just don't see how you can refute this argument.
Bah! I say the end result would be the exact opposite. If money were to leave the industry then the people still programming will be those who love to program and who are passionate about their work. Having the money leave would do a good job of weeding out all of the lousy hacks who write crappy code because they only care about getting their fat paycheck. Fewer crappy programs being churned out means the quality of software in general will rise. The quality of software today sucks and getting rid of the programmers who don't actually like programming would be one of the best ways to improve this.
If this happens, there is no money to pay programmers. As a result, intelligent people such as myself, who could command 6
figure salaries in any profession will take different career paths.
With fewer programmers, the result will be less innovation and worse software.
Bah! I say the end result would be the exact opposite. If money were to leave the industry then the people still programming will be those who love to program and who are passionate about their work. Having the money leave would do a good job of weeding out all of the lousy hacks who write crappy code because they only care about getting their fat paycheck. Fewer crappy programs being churned out means the quality of software in general will rise. The quality of software today sucks and getting rid of a lot of programmers would be one of the best ways to improve this.
Furthermore, universities, etc. won't be able to afford to run computing courses, since, as is the stated aim of many OS people,
MS will be dead - and MS funds a lot of universities.
Here's a news flash for you - computer science existed long before Microsoft appeared on the scene. Universities had comp sci departments ages before Microsoft existed (well, I know my alma mater did at least). Microsoft has not been providing significant funding to universities for more than a few years now and universities got along just fine beforehand.
I had this idea for patent reform the other day. How about this: if you patent something and the patent is later invalidated in court you lose the right to patent anything else for the next five years. Not only would this drastically cut down on the number of absurd patents, but it would encourage companies to only patent things which are truly innovative. This would make companies who rely on patents for their bread and butter particularly careful about trying to patent something stupid.
To give proper credit, this is sort of a twist on an idea somebody else posted to Slashdot awhile back about how there should be a law stating that politicians who vote for a law that is later deemed unconstitutional should automatically lose office.
Many people seem to classify human cloning as the ultimate excess of science, worse than nuclear power, worse still than the Internet! I just don't see what the big deal is.
I happen to agree with you that the opposition to cloning is grossly overblown. However, there are a few issues to consider which are legitimate which are at least cause for pause:
Building a "super"-race of humans - I don't want to invoke Godwin's law, but certain nefarious people would have loved to use cloning for evil means. What better way to wipe out "inferior" races than by overpopulating the earth with your own.
Spare parts - Somebody is bound to want to start cloning people for spare parts. If you clone yourself, you will have a full array of spare parts lying around that are a perfect match for you and which your body wouldn't reject. Leave the brain out of your clone so that it never develops consciousness and suddenly this becomes a very sticky ethical issue. You could end up with people owning other people (their clones) depending on how you look at it.
I wonder what legitimate purpose anybody would have for cloning themselves. The "spare parts" concept is the only good reason I can think of, and even that seems creepy. People who would want to clone themselves for fun (and who have the means to do so) would scare me even more.
Then again, traditional breeding merits equally great consideration (it is unfortunate that it rarely gets it).
Remember Win3.* that would not run under ANY DOS unless it was MS DOS? I think Microsoft has absolutely no problem shoving its clout to say "No JAVA on our OS from now on, period"
I don't think your analogy holds up very well because of one thing - there are already a lot of apps out there that use Java (even if they aren't written entirely in Java). I don't think there were many (any?) apps that required DR-DOS, but there are plenty of apps out there that would need to be largely rewritten if Java ceased to work. If Microsoft intentionally broke Windows so that Java wouldn't run, it would piss off an inordinate amount of current users who are dependent on it. The companies who put out products dependent on Java would have the choice of rewriting their software and not have it work for the next several months (at least) while the new version is developed, or switching to a platform that does support Java (e.g., Linux) to keep their products useful.
All these people posting about how Microsoft WMP formats are not supported in Linux should check out the AVIfile library . This library uses bits of Wine so that it can load Windows-native en-/de-coder DLLs to play/encode ASF/AVI files under Linux (or any other platform Wine supports).
Wouldn't that mean that you would still need to own a copy of Windows in order to (legally) get the DLLs in the first place? Or is the WMP available through a download with a license that would allow this sort of thing? If it is, I wouldn't expect it to last if a lot of people started doing this. It seems like it would be safer, in terms of long term viability, to go with a client which is intentionally cross platform and not in danger of having a legal rug pulled out from under it.
Although quite how far into the realms of fantasy I am I'm not sure...
You're obviously pretty deep in fantasy - you left out a lot of features that are in Verizon DSL that are sure to make they're way into the TV service:
We'll send you the wrong type of DSL modem and then charge you 6(!) times for it at over $100 a pop.
We'll refuse to take back the original modem because it is no longer supported and we'll take over half a year to refund the erroneous 5 charges.
When your line goes down and you call up for tech support we will keep you on hold for several hours so that you think you're at the front of the queue, but then drop the phone connection so that you don't get to talk to anybody. We will do this often.
We will promise to look into your line problems within 72 hours, but actually take 2 months.
We will waste several cummulative days of your life in hold time on the phone waiting for tech support.
When you do get ahold of tech support, they won't know what you are saying when you tell them that packets are being dropped on your connection.
We'll continue to bill you for the service until almost half a year after you cancel. Also, we'll bill you through our telephone service so that your telephone bill becomes delinquent if you refuse to pay.
All of the above unfortunately happened to me when I had BellAtlantic/Verizon DSL (in addition to the previously mentioned tendancy for the service to not work). I wish I were being sarcastic, but I'm not. I hope this TV service isn't being run by any baby bell, because I hear they're all pretty bad.
I have since switched to speakeasy.net for DSL service and the difference is just phenomenal. The one time I thought my service was actually out I called up their tech support to report the problem. Once the tech support guy and I had traced the problem to my Linux NAT box he offered to transfer me to a level 2 technician to help diagnose the problem in my box! This is such a massive difference from Verizon where I would have to pretend I was using Windows when I called up and where their level 2 tech support was always just as useless as their level 1 tech support. I recommend Speakeasy every chance I get so that they grow strong and prosper so that I can use their service for years to come.
Quitting over a little thing like bad hands
on
Insurance For Geeks?
·
· Score: 4
When I think of getting something like carpal tunnel, the question that always come to my mind is how I could keep coding if my hands didn't work. I'm sure I could find something to hunt and peck with and I'm sure I would want to try. What I fear more is going blind because coding can be so visually intesive. What blew my mind when I was in school was that there was a blind guy in a lot of my computer science classes. He had no problem with the material either, and in fact seemed to grasp things much better than most people (and this was at MIT, so the material was no cakewalk). It was extremely impressive to say the very least and it gave me hope that I will always be able to work on what I like (coding) as long as I have the desire. Don't let a little thing like bad hands stop you - others have succeeded against much greater odds.
I've read articles by people who were *trying* to get fired from MS but couldn't (until, of course, they finally managed to do something bad enough).
If you have links to any such articles I would greatly appreciate if you could post them here (or email them to me at the above address). It's fascinating that Microsoft parades itself around as the supreme innovator when they are doing stuff like this which is practically as detrimental to innovation as you can get. I've started a web page with a list of links demonstrating this and the articles you have mentioned would make nice additions.
I think you're numbers are actually a bit pessimistic. The site under discussion says that the traffic on that particular site is 10% Netscape. To extrapolate this to the whole web is just plain wrong. Of course there is going to be a lot more IE traffic since that is the only browsers they support. They aren't going to get more than one hit from a Netscape user if they are being turned away immediately, but IE users will register multiple hits because there is presumably something on the site that they want. This would heavily bias the numbers on the site in favor of IE.
The guy who wrote the anti-Netscape page must have taken a lesson from The Simpsons(?): "You can prove anything with statistics - 90% of all people know that."
BTW, if Keanu had become the One in Matrix1, I believe they had to invent something incredible if they still want him to fight in its sequel.
Has he or not become a God which could just destroy his opponents in less than 2 seconds ?
He's only "The One" inside the Matrix. He's still very vulnerable in the real world - hence the whole rush at the end of the movie to get him out of the Matrix. Here's what I would do if I were the machine in charge of the Matrix and wanted to elimate Keanu:
Wait until he enters the Matrix again (or lure him in, maybe by taking the Oracle hostage).
Pull all of the agents out of the Matrix.
Switch all of the phone lines within the Matrix to Verizon so that phone service goes down the toilet, thereby blocking all of the exits from the Matrix (they wouldn't be able to use the phone lines to get out at that point).
Erect an OpenBSD firewall so that hacking another way out of the Matrix will be beyond even Keanu's abilities.
Now the machines would be free to take their jolly old time hunting down Keanu in the real world. Once they find the ship they simply destroy it and eliminate the threat.
Personally, I'd wait until.71/.8 came out, or at least some bugfixes - I can almost guarantee some will be needed.
Unlike Netscape 4 and IE 5, which are both bug free.;p
However, it's got enough functionality now to make it a secondary browser.
I've been using the Dec 6th nightly (on Linux) as my primary browser since it came out and it sure beats Netscape 4. Pretty soon the Mozilla team is going to need to add an "uptime" menu to the browser so we can all brag about how long it's been since we "rebooted" our browsers. That's the main thing which is going to delay my upgrading to 0.7 (I have state in several open Mozilla windows that I don't want to lose).
Seriously - if you're still using Netscape 4, you might want to give Mozilla 0.7 a shot. Each milestone has been an enormous leap in quality over the previous and I can't wait to give 0.7 a try. Unless it's worse than the Dec 6th build (unlikely), it's a keeper.
Sounds like this would be a good thing to hack into Mozilla. You could block Javascript from running on specific sites (or even just block the javascript window.open() command) just like you can block images and cookies from specific sites now. Or turn it around and have an option that lets you block Javascript by default and then enable it on a per-site basis. There's a good chance that this feature will eventually make its way into Mozilla as enough people seem to want it.
Pop up ads are the reason I switched from Intellicast for getting my weather. I ended up switching to Yahoo! Weather because their ads aren't so instrusive and it has the trademark KISS Yahoo! UI, which is always a plus. I almost switched to weather.com, but it popped up a few ads (oddly enough, it only did this once or twice out of about a dozen visits), and I may still switch at some point in the future if the pop-ups from their site can be selectively blocked.
I've been using the December [6th] Build since it was the lastest. It's been really stable(this it's crashed twice) SSL works(I've orderd mose then 3 things using it so far), Netscape's Java plugin and even the flash player plugin works without problems.
I've been using the Dec 6th build as well since it came out. It was the first nightly build I downloaded, so my first impression of the nightlies has been very, very good. This thing is rock solid and very nice. It has crashed on me a total of twice since December 6th and one of those times was when I was looking at a page with a Java applet (Navigator 4 on Linux crashes on applets all the time, so crashing only once is actually a leap up). I have, in fact, left Mozilla running for a two week stretch of intense use and only had to restart it at the end because its memory usage was starting to noticably eat into my swap space.
I don't use Navigator 4.X anymore (except for email, ssl sites, and sites with embedded real audio that I want to hear). The rendering engine in Mozilla is just so much better, and based on the Dec 6th build it seems like it is at least as stable as Navigator. Most of the plugins I want (Java and Flash) run fine in Mozilla now. Dec 6th was the day that I switched to Mozilla for my primary browser. I can't wait for M19 as all the previous milestones have been giant qualitative leaps ahead of the previous ones (I downloaded the Dec 6th nightly because I thought M18 was so close to being the one to make me switch and I was getting impatient for M19).
You wont get it like A&E doesn't get my business, because they think interupting my viewing every 10 minutes is ok. You wont get it like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox rarely get my business, because you don't let me watch TV for reasonable periods of time without interruptions. You wont sell to me products and services I'd have otherwise been willing to pay for, because like Yahoo, you're not willing to let me and too interesting in PISSING ME OFF.
That's what TiVos are for (among many other things).
Most advertising isn't that hard to circumvent with a little know-how and a little effort. The thing is, most people don't know how or don't want to expend the effort, so they end up subsidizing the minority who do. I agree with you that more companies should let people circumvent ads by actually charging for what they provide, but until that day comes I'm happy getting things for free thanks to advertising that other people see. It seems to me that the 3 "upcoming" methods of advertising mentioned in this article would be fairly easy to circumvent (or at least minimize the annoyance of) with a little Mozilla hacking.
What really ticks me off is when companies show me ads after I've already paid for their service. I absolutely hate going to the movies and having to sit through an ad for a car before the movie that I have already paid for. Either make it completely free or raise your ticket prices so that you don't have to show ads - this form of double billing is so distasteful.
I am definitely putting this thing on my christmas list for two years from now! Any estimations on price? I might just be willing to bankrupt myself for something like this
You can buy a cd player that plays CD-Rs (and CD-RWs, I think)
now for $87. It may not be "standard" yet, but whatever... it will read files off of a standard CD-ROM file system which is standard enough for me. Sure, the user experience could use a little work, but $87 for this much storage space can't be beat right now.
Slashdot Mirror
You're also assuming the satellite transmission is secure. This would require that you fully trust everybody involved in building and launching the satellite - throw one rogue programmer in the mix and you could have the satellite spitting out pseudo-random numbers which could make this easily crackable.
You could also have a man-in-the-middle attack with a guy standing outside your house feeding you a bogus satellite signal so that you use a pseudo-random pad. Of course, maybe he worked out a way around this so you can verify that the stream is actually from the satellite - I haven't read his paper, just the NYT article.
I use Speakeasy at home and Megapath at work and they have both been excellent so far. Their tech support, customer support, and quality of service is so far and beyond Verizon. Of course, that may be largely because Verizon's DSL service is the bottom of the barrel, but then again when have you heard of a residential DSL service where the tech support offers to help you troubleshoot your Linux setup (Speakeasy did this for me)? It's good to know that Speakeasy has been passing along my money to Covad because they are a great company and should be kept in business.
A couple of places I have contracted for tried to put clauses in my NDA/non-comp agreement that basically said that if they sued me to enforce the agreement I would have to pay their legal expenses incurred by them in suing me. What my lawyer advised me was to change such clauses to read that the "prevailing party" would be entitled to recover reasonable legal expenses from the losing party. So essentially, this took a very bad clause that would have been detrimental to me (they could sue me on a whim and I would have to pay for it) into something which protected me doubly from frivolous lawsuits (because if their case isn't solid they would stand to lose a good chunk of money reimbursing me).
I just wanted to throw this idea out because I think that there are plenty of "standard" clauses like this which are bad for contractors, and it helps to have a good response in your arsenal to turn it around into a positive. If we have enough people in the industry insisting on reasonable terms, companies won't be able to ignore us because _we_ will then be setting the standard terms by our shear numbers. Besides, if a company doesn't agree to the change that I mentioned above it should be a pretty big warning sign - enough to make you walk away.
Bah again! You're saying that 1) Microsoft hires all of the top programmers and 2) that these people are only programming because Microsoft gives them a big fat paycheck. How on earth can you make these assertions? Maybe if Microsoft didn't pay them top dollar they wouldn't be working for Microsoft, but a lot of them would probably go on programming somewhere because, for a lot of top programmers, the money is just a nice fringe benefit.
And your assertion that all top programmers work for Microsoft is just absurd. There are oodles of top notch programmers working elsewhere - James Gosling and RMS spring to mind. You say that a position at Microsoft research is the most prestigious position a programmer can get, but that is a very subjective statement and one that most people I know would strongly disagree with. Even for those who don't loath Microsoft, positions such as professorships at MIT, Stanford, or somewhere like that carry a lot more prestige than working at Microsoft. And for the many who do loath Microsoft... well, they would find your statement laughable and their opinion is not to be discounted because they make up a sizeable portion of "the industry".
I just don't see how you can refute this argument.
Bah! I say the end result would be the exact opposite. If money were to leave the industry then the people still programming will be those who love to program and who are passionate about their work. Having the money leave would do a good job of weeding out all of the lousy hacks who write crappy code because they only care about getting their fat paycheck. Fewer crappy programs being churned out means the quality of software in general will rise. The quality of software today sucks and getting rid of the programmers who don't actually like programming would be one of the best ways to improve this.
With fewer programmers, the result will be less innovation and worse software.
Bah! I say the end result would be the exact opposite. If money were to leave the industry then the people still programming will be those who love to program and who are passionate about their work. Having the money leave would do a good job of weeding out all of the lousy hacks who write crappy code because they only care about getting their fat paycheck. Fewer crappy programs being churned out means the quality of software in general will rise. The quality of software today sucks and getting rid of a lot of programmers would be one of the best ways to improve this.
Furthermore, universities, etc. won't be able to afford to run computing courses, since, as is the stated aim of many OS people, MS will be dead - and MS funds a lot of universities.
Here's a news flash for you - computer science existed long before Microsoft appeared on the scene. Universities had comp sci departments ages before Microsoft existed (well, I know my alma mater did at least). Microsoft has not been providing significant funding to universities for more than a few years now and universities got along just fine beforehand.
I had this idea for patent reform the other day. How about this: if you patent something and the patent is later invalidated in court you lose the right to patent anything else for the next five years. Not only would this drastically cut down on the number of absurd patents, but it would encourage companies to only patent things which are truly innovative. This would make companies who rely on patents for their bread and butter particularly careful about trying to patent something stupid.
To give proper credit, this is sort of a twist on an idea somebody else posted to Slashdot awhile back about how there should be a law stating that politicians who vote for a law that is later deemed unconstitutional should automatically lose office.
I happen to agree with you that the opposition to cloning is grossly overblown. However, there are a few issues to consider which are legitimate which are at least cause for pause:
I wonder what legitimate purpose anybody would have for cloning themselves. The "spare parts" concept is the only good reason I can think of, and even that seems creepy. People who would want to clone themselves for fun (and who have the means to do so) would scare me even more.
Then again, traditional breeding merits equally great consideration (it is unfortunate that it rarely gets it).
I think that's exactly how Unisys got the patent on LZW (the compression used in gifs).
I don't think your analogy holds up very well because of one thing - there are already a lot of apps out there that use Java (even if they aren't written entirely in Java). I don't think there were many (any?) apps that required DR-DOS, but there are plenty of apps out there that would need to be largely rewritten if Java ceased to work. If Microsoft intentionally broke Windows so that Java wouldn't run, it would piss off an inordinate amount of current users who are dependent on it. The companies who put out products dependent on Java would have the choice of rewriting their software and not have it work for the next several months (at least) while the new version is developed, or switching to a platform that does support Java (e.g., Linux) to keep their products useful.
Wouldn't that mean that you would still need to own a copy of Windows in order to (legally) get the DLLs in the first place? Or is the WMP available through a download with a license that would allow this sort of thing? If it is, I wouldn't expect it to last if a lot of people started doing this. It seems like it would be safer, in terms of long term viability, to go with a client which is intentionally cross platform and not in danger of having a legal rug pulled out from under it.
You're obviously pretty deep in fantasy - you left out a lot of features that are in Verizon DSL that are sure to make they're way into the TV service:
All of the above unfortunately happened to me when I had BellAtlantic/Verizon DSL (in addition to the previously mentioned tendancy for the service to not work). I wish I were being sarcastic, but I'm not. I hope this TV service isn't being run by any baby bell, because I hear they're all pretty bad.
I have since switched to speakeasy.net for DSL service and the difference is just phenomenal. The one time I thought my service was actually out I called up their tech support to report the problem. Once the tech support guy and I had traced the problem to my Linux NAT box he offered to transfer me to a level 2 technician to help diagnose the problem in my box! This is such a massive difference from Verizon where I would have to pretend I was using Windows when I called up and where their level 2 tech support was always just as useless as their level 1 tech support. I recommend Speakeasy every chance I get so that they grow strong and prosper so that I can use their service for years to come.
When I think of getting something like carpal tunnel, the question that always come to my mind is how I could keep coding if my hands didn't work. I'm sure I could find something to hunt and peck with and I'm sure I would want to try. What I fear more is going blind because coding can be so visually intesive. What blew my mind when I was in school was that there was a blind guy in a lot of my computer science classes. He had no problem with the material either, and in fact seemed to grasp things much better than most people (and this was at MIT, so the material was no cakewalk). It was extremely impressive to say the very least and it gave me hope that I will always be able to work on what I like (coding) as long as I have the desire. Don't let a little thing like bad hands stop you - others have succeeded against much greater odds.
Just a few websites nobody's heard of.
If you have links to any such articles I would greatly appreciate if you could post them here (or email them to me at the above address). It's fascinating that Microsoft parades itself around as the supreme innovator when they are doing stuff like this which is practically as detrimental to innovation as you can get. I've started a web page with a list of links demonstrating this and the articles you have mentioned would make nice additions.
The guy who wrote the anti-Netscape page must have taken a lesson from The Simpsons(?): "You can prove anything with statistics - 90% of all people know that."
That wouldn't be the first time. How do you think the iMac got here? (Note to the differently clued: the preceding link isn't a real news story.)
He's only "The One" inside the Matrix. He's still very vulnerable in the real world - hence the whole rush at the end of the movie to get him out of the Matrix. Here's what I would do if I were the machine in charge of the Matrix and wanted to elimate Keanu:
Unlike Netscape 4 and IE 5, which are both bug free. ;p
However, it's got enough functionality now to make it a secondary browser.
I've been using the Dec 6th nightly (on Linux) as my primary browser since it came out and it sure beats Netscape 4. Pretty soon the Mozilla team is going to need to add an "uptime" menu to the browser so we can all brag about how long it's been since we "rebooted" our browsers. That's the main thing which is going to delay my upgrading to 0.7 (I have state in several open Mozilla windows that I don't want to lose).
Seriously - if you're still using Netscape 4, you might want to give Mozilla 0.7 a shot. Each milestone has been an enormous leap in quality over the previous and I can't wait to give 0.7 a try. Unless it's worse than the Dec 6th build (unlikely), it's a keeper.
Sounds like this would be a good thing to hack into Mozilla. You could block Javascript from running on specific sites (or even just block the javascript window.open() command) just like you can block images and cookies from specific sites now. Or turn it around and have an option that lets you block Javascript by default and then enable it on a per-site basis. There's a good chance that this feature will eventually make its way into Mozilla as enough people seem to want it.
Pop up ads are the reason I switched from Intellicast for getting my weather. I ended up switching to Yahoo! Weather because their ads aren't so instrusive and it has the trademark KISS Yahoo! UI, which is always a plus. I almost switched to weather.com, but it popped up a few ads (oddly enough, it only did this once or twice out of about a dozen visits), and I may still switch at some point in the future if the pop-ups from their site can be selectively blocked.
I've been using the December [6th] Build since it was the lastest. It's been really stable(this it's crashed twice) SSL works(I've orderd mose then 3 things using it so far), Netscape's Java plugin and even the flash player plugin works without problems. I've been using the Dec 6th build as well since it came out. It was the first nightly build I downloaded, so my first impression of the nightlies has been very, very good. This thing is rock solid and very nice. It has crashed on me a total of twice since December 6th and one of those times was when I was looking at a page with a Java applet (Navigator 4 on Linux crashes on applets all the time, so crashing only once is actually a leap up). I have, in fact, left Mozilla running for a two week stretch of intense use and only had to restart it at the end because its memory usage was starting to noticably eat into my swap space. I don't use Navigator 4.X anymore (except for email, ssl sites, and sites with embedded real audio that I want to hear). The rendering engine in Mozilla is just so much better, and based on the Dec 6th build it seems like it is at least as stable as Navigator. Most of the plugins I want (Java and Flash) run fine in Mozilla now. Dec 6th was the day that I switched to Mozilla for my primary browser. I can't wait for M19 as all the previous milestones have been giant qualitative leaps ahead of the previous ones (I downloaded the Dec 6th nightly because I thought M18 was so close to being the one to make me switch and I was getting impatient for M19).
That's what TiVos are for (among many other things).
Most advertising isn't that hard to circumvent with a little know-how and a little effort. The thing is, most people don't know how or don't want to expend the effort, so they end up subsidizing the minority who do. I agree with you that more companies should let people circumvent ads by actually charging for what they provide, but until that day comes I'm happy getting things for free thanks to advertising that other people see. It seems to me that the 3 "upcoming" methods of advertising mentioned in this article would be fairly easy to circumvent (or at least minimize the annoyance of) with a little Mozilla hacking.
What really ticks me off is when companies show me ads after I've already paid for their service. I absolutely hate going to the movies and having to sit through an ad for a car before the movie that I have already paid for. Either make it completely free or raise your ticket prices so that you don't have to show ads - this form of double billing is so distasteful.
You can buy a cd player that plays CD-Rs (and CD-RWs, I think) now for $87. It may not be "standard" yet, but whatever... it will read files off of a standard CD-ROM file system which is standard enough for me. Sure, the user experience could use a little work, but $87 for this much storage space can't be beat right now.
Hmmm, I thought I had all my tags right, guess not, though - the article can be found here.
I'm shocked that nobody has mentioned Stallman's article The Right to Read yet. It's almost prophetic.