Because right now I am at work, and I may forget to push the images later. My house is a 50 minute drive away, and I have another 3.5hrs before the buzzer rings, and I can go home.
Pulling the image now keeps it in the phone, so that even if I forget about it, I still have it, and can push it later without incident.
The OP I made was more intended in the tone of "Nasa often offers large PNG files for these kinds of things, even on their mobile version pages. It would sure be nice if this article did the same, or had a link to such an image link for those interested."
I don't mind sucking down a 200mb+ image file with the phone, then hacking it up later. Getting images out of swf containers on a smartphone with outdated (abandoned) firmware is not a trivial exercise.
Yes, I know the filesize will be enormous. Been there, done that with NASA HIRISE images.
I have a 16gb card in the phone, and yank the big image out of it when I go home. I can then resize and reformat the image to suit my own personal needs myself, with an artifact free source. JPEG files meant for webpages look horrible on a high contrast display as the desktop image.
While "a" solution, not a workable one in my situation. When I say "sneak", I literally mean it.
We work with proprietary aerospace engineering data and processes, including DoD funstuff.
Seriously, there is no way in hell I can sneak in a laptop. It's hard enough sneaking in a smartphone. I am literally stuck with mobile view webpages until after 2am, and limited to the tools available for an android platform running froyo. It isn- by choice that I play in the pool with orange floaties on, ok?
While definately hyperbole, I think it aptly sums up the "level" of dissatisfaction I have for Unity and Gnome3, and similar "oh look! Great big icons, and obfuscated indicators of what's actually installed, forcing you to grasp blindly with a search dialog!" UIs.
In other words, I have tried both, actually, earnestly, honestly tried them, and my passionate hatred of the paradigm they uphold only intensified the more I tried.
Not all UIs are for everyone. Insisting that I don't like it "because you haven't tried it yet", or "because it's different, and if you just used it you would come to like it" are strawmen. I have tried them, for a 2 month trial window. I hate them. End of story. I LIKE menus. I LIKE having the option of turning them on, because I find them useful. I LIKE not being ridiculed for doing so. It is NOT hard to understand.
As for why one would use a standard distro package and not a repacked themed hackjob? Really, do I actually need to answer that? Really? Ok, how about, "because the main distro has been vetted by more eyeballs, and has better user support by being more commonly used." Hmm? Maybe trying to get updated packages down the road is less of a headache with the main distribution pack? Naw.. that clearly isn't a good enough reason, I must totaly be an idiot instead.
Flash player embeds are great and all, but I would rather have a good, high resoluton image that I can span over my multi monitor setup instead as my desktop image.
You know, because I think its cool? I understand that the photographer worked hard to make it, and can release however he damnd well wants, but I would still like this in PNG format.
Personally, I wonder if there are any use metrics for Gnome3's default mode, vs running on fallback/classic.
Personally, I can't stand either Unity or Gnome3-standard modes. One of the first things I do with Ubuntu boxes is nuke LightDM and Unity from orbit, and replace them with something less resembling a botched ST:NG computer interface. I actually happen to LIKE menus. That Gnome has listened to the sound of angry feet stampeding to XCFE and KDE over the issue makes me happier, but still displeased over the "No, we don't do it that way anymore, nanaananananannaa" mantra they were using for so long previously.
I've ued 64bit builds of nightly for some time now.
The issue is getting plugins to play nice.
You can't really blame Mozilla for not wanting to jump the shark, when they will catch all the flames for plugin makers who refuse to make their plugins 64bit friendly.
Right now, it's "whaaaaaa! I want 64bit builds!"
They offer a 64bit build, and then its "whaaaa! Flash plugin doesn't work! Noscript doesn't work! Adblock Plus doesn't work! Its horrible, and it crashes to boot!"
The market has to build up enough pressure to push out the colonic obstructions in the way of 64bit adoption as the new standard. It will take awhile.
Considering the physical incompatibility of both the signal encoding methodologies and the physical form factors, no.
But, my dvd player does play vhs tapes. It's a combo deck unit.
Laserdisc was a short lived product that was quickly orphaned. It was never popular enough to be worthwhile for backward compat. To be a marketable feature. VCD and SVCD however were *insanely* popular in asia, and have a physically identically sized form factor disc, made with similar tech. It is trivial to include VCD and SVCD capability in a bluray/dvd player.
Really, you were asking rhetorical questions, but the rhetoric behind the question is invalid; the assertion being that back compat is not a valid marketing tactic. The fact that essentially *every* dvd player is also a vcd and svcd player, and that are even vhs players as well, and that the features in question were driving forces for adoption in certain markets, invalidates the rhetoric.
One of the very first stable particles that would have formed after the big bang would have been a massive wash of photons. All those exotic particles and antiparticles smashing into each other would have created an incandescent soup, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG before stars could even begin to form, so "light" existing before the sun is scientifically predicted.
Light would have existed long before baryonic matter in fact.
For the first issue: tracking location data for purchase metrics:
There are some recursion issues involved with your example I would like some clarity on. If company X sees a bump in the sales trend for a specific location, then bumps the advertising budget, then the advertising does what it is supposed to do, and increases awareness of product, and inflates more sales for that location. As soon as that happens, measuring sales for the region as the metric for determining where to spend advert money becomes a recursive loop. Eg, the company invests advertising money in the region because sales are higher, and the sales are higher because of the increased advertising. There is no longer any clear signal, and as such, the reason for collecting the metric data vanishes. One 'could' argue that the 'pre advertising increase' historic metric can be used to measure impact, but over the course of just a short while, (I would say less than 1 year) that historic data becomes an unreliable indicator of intrinsic demand. Given that the collected metric renders itself almost useless as soon as it is used, I question the sanity and rationality of continued collection.
Likewise, a major merchant will use local distribution hubs to deliver packages more efficiently anyway. Tracking numbers of sales per regional distribution center, instead of per purchaser address, gives you a generalized indicator of local demand as well, and doesn't require data mining a user's transaction history. IIRC, this is how this information used to be collected. The benefit of datamining individual transactions is a finer granularity, and an indicator of a specific user's preferences, which that user may well not wish to have investigated.
Take for instance, if I want to buy a gag gift for a bachelor party, and I order the most gawd awful set of sex toys imaginable. I really do not intend to purchase any other such product, am not into that kind of thing myself, and am getting it as a joke. Naturally, I don't want to be pestered about "great deals on black leather bondage costumes", "lifelike RealDolls!", herbal viagra, penis enlargement products, et al. However, because I made several one-off purchases of those kinds of products, and actually shopped around, the automatic profiling features of the targeted advertising machine decides that I really would be absolutely thrilled to learn about double headed viting crotch rockets, despite my protests to the contrary. Likewise, I may not want to advertise to the world that I have made such a purchase, and being subjected to such lovely things as evercookies and persistent tracking coupled with data sharing between merchants and advert companies, that information now gets around in ways I really don't want at all.
All because I wanted to buy a friend some gag items that I know damned well he will throw away.
This can be easily dealt with by simply ASKING if I want this purchase to be added to my shopping profile or not, with a checkbox.
The issue is that many users seriously do not want to be tracked at all, and this jeapordizes the sacred business models of the age, and so, cannot be permitted. This is precisely why things like the evercookie, and the deeply persistent "user experience" monitoring BS is performed. Honoring user privacy does not make the company money, and invading the fuck out of it does.
In reality, only tracking transactions that the user specifically consents to would allow far better targeted adverts, making the data more valuable to the advert company anyway, by reducing the noise of the channel. It would also make sure the only people getting targeted adverts are the ones who really, actually DO want them, and would allow a means for users to shop with some measure of discretion.
as for what data should be removed from a purchase history profile/targetted advertisement profile:
All tracking data associated with their computer and or user identity. (Any unique ID hashes, any credit card data, any billing addresses, phone numbers,
The same way computer based metal detectors work. (Those things you walk though? Many models have a COTS PC in the top of th arch!)
Simply pop in a pci card with a boot rom. Or, just replace the system rom completely.
System can by in a ready state in mere seconds. (4 or 5.) About the time between turning the key, and moving the shifter.
Basically, the rom just loads a minimal system state, then "resumes". Bonus if the added rom is really button cell powered SRAM, the carputer has fail over internal emergency power, and suspends immediately on main power loss.
You can get 32mb of SRAM pretty cheap these days. That's plenty big for a loaded linux environment on a headless system.
Take something like this shield, and then connect the camera's SDCard socket to the arduino on 6 of the GPIO lines. (The shield uses the SPI interface.) Read/write speed may be a factor though, due to using serial bitbash mode to read and write to the card over SPI.
This would let you add encryption functionality to any SDcard capable device that doesn't currently support it. Putting a buffer lytic cap on, and a voltage regulator would let you tap the camera's SDCard slot's +3.5v DC line to power the arduino. (Arduino needs +5v, so you need the regulator and some load balancing capacitance if the ardino needs more than the port wants to give occasionally, such as durng heavy write cycles.)
A possibly faster option is to use one of the sexxier arduinos that has a USB interface on it, and attach an AES keyfob.
In both cases, the arduino tells the camera that it is an SDCard, and impersonates same, while doing things behind the scenes with permanent attached storage.
This would let the constructed device work with pretty much any commercial camera.
Prepaid t-mo sims are good for this. Just be sure your phone likes the odd band combination first, and that your handset is unlocked. (Being from europe, I assume yours already is.)
Just pop the sim in, ad enjoy the prepaid service. Tmo doesn't give a rats about who made your phone or what FW you are running on it.
Coverage in extended service areas is very inconsistent. You would really need to get a t mo subscriber in your town to get a good answer.
Me? On T Mo's 60/mo prepaid 2.5gb + unlimited talk + unlimited text plan. (Made the splurge to get the better service for 10$.)
It works fantastic in the city I work in (smexy 4g speeds!). Edge and gsm voice service only out in the sticks where I live, provided through a roaming partner. As such, I use wifi calling and a wireless router. Works great. It doesn't handle call handoffs well though, so finish your call before leaving the house.
Find somebody in your town on T-mo and get a real site assesment before investing though. Good advice is to splurge for a quadband handset, since you never know.
2.5gb monthly at LTE. Unlimited talk Unlimited text
In addition to Tmo's normal perks:
Wifi calling for areas not covered Wifi hotspot and tethering at no added cost Bring your own device friendly
T Mo has offered these packages for quite awhile now, (well over a year and a half!) But the main squeeze in the stores and on the billboards was the familiar subsidized phone plan model used by the other 3 cartels.
My only suggestion is to make sure that T Mo has good coverage in your area first. Here's how: either get a friend on T Mo to test cell service at your house with his phone, or buy a rinkydink cheapo disposable tmo prepaid brick for 20$ and test yourself. I never trust coverage maps, because they lie. Only a real empirical test is appropriate when you are looking to plunk down 700$ for a smartphone. (As a plus, the sim from the rinkydink phone can go into your smexy smartphone, and when you set up the service, they can reprogram it for you.)
As for the AC spouting about blasting through 500mb in 16 seconds, that's not really true unless you are running torrents or something.
I object to getting the "value added service" of having my browser hijacked by markting morons just because I DARED to click on a news article, or DARED to check a price on something.
Last I checked, giant swarming eyeballs with a secret RFID implant needle don't come swarming out of the airducts when I pick up a product in a store, turn it over for the price, and make not of it. I don't get assaulted by endless questionaires about why I was looking at the product, and if I buy it often. Etc.
I hold firm to the assertion that it is like agreeing to be raped, just because you are outside, and the sun is down. (Cause, CLEARLY, you wouldn't go outside at night unless you WANTED forced penetration! Because, like, that's what happens when you do LULZ!)
(Also just to note: bank and loan services have existed comfortably for centuries without reselling account information. They don't actually NEED that revinue stream, except to sate either their own greed, or someone else's greed. (Like shareholders, etc.))
Internet search can realistically be funded without adverts, since they can operate like an advert company themselves. The assertion that the service would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary users is unsubstantiated.
Social networking does not need centralization. FOSS communities have lived and operated just fine on home-operated IRC servers and the like just fine. The issue is handling large volumes of users. But, like many supply/demand problems, this would likewise sort itself out, just like demand has forced migration away from dialup. Moving the demand away from centralized networks and into distributed ones would only change the market, not destroy it.
(Social networking is also not something I consider to be of much value, other than as a means of communication. I consider it to be a mashup of 1980s pagers and geocities, with an oppressive marketing goul behind the curtain. I would not shed a single tear if facebook closed its doors.)
Local news likewise has survived for a long time without reselling eyeballs, making the claim insubstantiated.
Slashdot Mirror
Because right now I am at work, and I may forget to push the images later. My house is a 50 minute drive away, and I have another 3.5hrs before the buzzer rings, and I can go home.
Pulling the image now keeps it in the phone, so that even if I forget about it, I still have it, and can push it later without incident.
The OP I made was more intended in the tone of "Nasa often offers large PNG files for these kinds of things, even on their mobile version pages. It would sure be nice if this article did the same, or had a link to such an image link for those interested."
I don't mind sucking down a 200mb+ image file with the phone, then hacking it up later. Getting images out of swf containers on a smartphone with outdated (abandoned) firmware is not a trivial exercise.
Uh, I did notice. Yes. Thank you captain obvious.
It was however, and image I did not have. So I yanked it. I also noted it was a jpeg, and not a png.
Nowhere did I assert that it was the same image. I didn't feel that it needed to be said.
I email the picture to myself later, once I go home. :D
I log in to the corporate webmail portal, using the crippled browser client, attach the file, and set myself as the recipient.
Pull the image out once I go back to work the next day. It looks for all the world like an internal email.
Yes, I know the filesize will be enormous. Been there, done that with NASA HIRISE images.
I have a 16gb card in the phone, and yank the big image out of it when I go home. I can then resize and reformat the image to suit my own personal needs myself, with an artifact free source. JPEG files meant for webpages look horrible on a high contrast display as the desktop image.
While "a" solution, not a workable one in my situation. When I say "sneak", I literally mean it.
We work with proprietary aerospace engineering data and processes, including DoD funstuff.
Seriously, there is no way in hell I can sneak in a laptop. It's hard enough sneaking in a smartphone. I am literally stuck with mobile view webpages until after 2am, and limited to the tools available for an android platform running froyo. It isn- by choice that I play in the pool with orange floaties on, ok?
While definately hyperbole, I think it aptly sums up the "level" of dissatisfaction I have for Unity and Gnome3, and similar "oh look! Great big icons, and obfuscated indicators of what's actually installed, forcing you to grasp blindly with a search dialog!" UIs.
In other words, I have tried both, actually, earnestly, honestly tried them, and my passionate hatred of the paradigm they uphold only intensified the more I tried.
Not all UIs are for everyone. Insisting that I don't like it "because you haven't tried it yet", or "because it's different, and if you just used it you would come to like it" are strawmen. I have tried them, for a 2 month trial window. I hate them. End of story. I LIKE menus. I LIKE having the option of turning them on, because I find them useful. I LIKE not being ridiculed for doing so. It is NOT hard to understand.
As for why one would use a standard distro package and not a repacked themed hackjob? Really, do I actually need to answer that? Really? Ok, how about, "because the main distro has been vetted by more eyeballs, and has better user support by being more commonly used." Hmm? Maybe trying to get updated packages down the road is less of a headache with the main distribution pack? Naw.. that clearly isn't a good enough reason, I must totaly be an idiot instead.
You know, not everyone has the luxury of a full browser + suite of tools to do such things, and get fed the crippleware "mobile versions" of webpages?
Because some of us have to sneak access using mobile devices because of corporate firewalls?
Yeah. That.
But.... that's a JPEG!
(Still saved it anyway though.)
Flash player embeds are great and all, but I would rather have a good, high resoluton image that I can span over my multi monitor setup instead as my desktop image.
You know, because I think its cool? I understand that the photographer worked hard to make it, and can release however he damnd well wants, but I would still like this in PNG format.
Personally, I wonder if there are any use metrics for Gnome3's default mode, vs running on fallback/classic.
Personally, I can't stand either Unity or Gnome3-standard modes. One of the first things I do with Ubuntu boxes is nuke LightDM and Unity from orbit, and replace them with something less resembling a botched ST:NG computer interface. I actually happen to LIKE menus. That Gnome has listened to the sound of angry feet stampeding to XCFE and KDE over the issue makes me happier, but still displeased over the "No, we don't do it that way anymore, nanaananananannaa" mantra they were using for so long previously.
I've ued 64bit builds of nightly for some time now.
The issue is getting plugins to play nice.
You can't really blame Mozilla for not wanting to jump the shark, when they will catch all the flames for plugin makers who refuse to make their plugins 64bit friendly.
Right now, it's "whaaaaaa! I want 64bit builds!"
They offer a 64bit build, and then its "whaaaa! Flash plugin doesn't work! Noscript doesn't work! Adblock Plus doesn't work! Its horrible, and it crashes to boot!"
The market has to build up enough pressure to push out the colonic obstructions in the way of 64bit adoption as the new standard. It will take awhile.
Considering the physical incompatibility of both the signal encoding methodologies and the physical form factors, no.
But, my dvd player does play vhs tapes. It's a combo deck unit.
Laserdisc was a short lived product that was quickly orphaned. It was never popular enough to be worthwhile for backward compat. To be a marketable feature. VCD and SVCD however were *insanely* popular in asia, and have a physically identically sized form factor disc, made with similar tech. It is trivial to include VCD and SVCD capability in a bluray/dvd player.
Really, you were asking rhetorical questions, but the rhetoric behind the question is invalid; the assertion being that back compat is not a valid marketing tactic. The fact that essentially *every* dvd player is also a vcd and svcd player, and that are even vhs players as well, and that the features in question were driving forces for adoption in certain markets, invalidates the rhetoric.
But thanks for playing anyway.
So silly, the predecessor of the DVD was the SVCD. NOT the VHS.
Order of precidence:
VHS/BetaMax->Laserdisc->VCD->SVCD->DVD->Bluray/HDDVD
How crude of you to completely ignore the massive number of titles that came out on VCD and SVCD in asia!
And yes, My DVD player plays VCD and SVCD discs just fine, thank you.
The devil's advocate in me wants to say...
One of the very first stable particles that would have formed after the big bang would have been a massive wash of photons. All those exotic particles and antiparticles smashing into each other would have created an incandescent soup, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG before stars could even begin to form, so "light" existing before the sun is scientifically predicted.
Light would have existed long before baryonic matter in fact.
For the first issue: tracking location data for purchase metrics:
There are some recursion issues involved with your example I would like some clarity on. If company X sees a bump in the sales trend for a specific location, then bumps the advertising budget, then the advertising does what it is supposed to do, and increases awareness of product, and inflates more sales for that location. As soon as that happens, measuring sales for the region as the metric for determining where to spend advert money becomes a recursive loop. Eg, the company invests advertising money in the region because sales are higher, and the sales are higher because of the increased advertising. There is no longer any clear signal, and as such, the reason for collecting the metric data vanishes. One 'could' argue that the 'pre advertising increase' historic metric can be used to measure impact, but over the course of just a short while, (I would say less than 1 year) that historic data becomes an unreliable indicator of intrinsic demand. Given that the collected metric renders itself almost useless as soon as it is used, I question the sanity and rationality of continued collection.
Likewise, a major merchant will use local distribution hubs to deliver packages more efficiently anyway. Tracking numbers of sales per regional distribution center, instead of per purchaser address, gives you a generalized indicator of local demand as well, and doesn't require data mining a user's transaction history. IIRC, this is how this information used to be collected. The benefit of datamining individual transactions is a finer granularity, and an indicator of a specific user's preferences, which that user may well not wish to have investigated.
Take for instance, if I want to buy a gag gift for a bachelor party, and I order the most gawd awful set of sex toys imaginable. I really do not intend to purchase any other such product, am not into that kind of thing myself, and am getting it as a joke. Naturally, I don't want to be pestered about "great deals on black leather bondage costumes", "lifelike RealDolls!", herbal viagra, penis enlargement products, et al. However, because I made several one-off purchases of those kinds of products, and actually shopped around, the automatic profiling features of the targeted advertising machine decides that I really would be absolutely thrilled to learn about double headed viting crotch rockets, despite my protests to the contrary. Likewise, I may not want to advertise to the world that I have made such a purchase, and being subjected to such lovely things as evercookies and persistent tracking coupled with data sharing between merchants and advert companies, that information now gets around in ways I really don't want at all.
All because I wanted to buy a friend some gag items that I know damned well he will throw away.
This can be easily dealt with by simply ASKING if I want this purchase to be added to my shopping profile or not, with a checkbox.
The issue is that many users seriously do not want to be tracked at all, and this jeapordizes the sacred business models of the age, and so, cannot be permitted. This is precisely why things like the evercookie, and the deeply persistent "user experience" monitoring BS is performed. Honoring user privacy does not make the company money, and invading the fuck out of it does.
In reality, only tracking transactions that the user specifically consents to would allow far better targeted adverts, making the data more valuable to the advert company anyway, by reducing the noise of the channel. It would also make sure the only people getting targeted adverts are the ones who really, actually DO want them, and would allow a means for users to shop with some measure of discretion.
as for what data should be removed from a purchase history profile/targetted advertisement profile:
All tracking data associated with their computer and or user identity. (Any unique ID hashes, any credit card data, any billing addresses, phone numbers,
The same way computer based metal detectors work. (Those things you walk though? Many models have a COTS PC in the top of th arch!)
Simply pop in a pci card with a boot rom. Or, just replace the system rom completely.
System can by in a ready state in mere seconds. (4 or 5.) About the time between turning the key, and moving the shifter.
Basically, the rom just loads a minimal system state, then "resumes". Bonus if the added rom is really button cell powered SRAM, the carputer has fail over internal emergency power, and suspends immediately on main power loss.
You can get 32mb of SRAM pretty cheap these days. That's plenty big for a loaded linux environment on a headless system.
You should be able to use an arduino to do this.
Take something like this shield, and then connect the camera's SDCard socket to the arduino on 6 of the GPIO lines. (The shield uses the SPI interface.) Read/write speed may be a factor though, due to using serial bitbash mode to read and write to the card over SPI.
This would let you add encryption functionality to any SDcard capable device that doesn't currently support it. Putting a buffer lytic cap on, and a voltage regulator would let you tap the camera's SDCard slot's +3.5v DC line to power the arduino. (Arduino needs +5v, so you need the regulator and some load balancing capacitance if the ardino needs more than the port wants to give occasionally, such as durng heavy write cycles.)
A possibly faster option is to use one of the sexxier arduinos that has a USB interface on it, and attach an AES keyfob.
In both cases, the arduino tells the camera that it is an SDCard, and impersonates same, while doing things behind the scenes with permanent attached storage.
This would let the constructed device work with pretty much any commercial camera.
*protip:
Just buy the walmart POS, yank the SIM, and put it in your real phone. Enjoy the different price.
Prepaid t-mo sims are good for this. Just be sure your phone likes the odd band combination first, and that your handset is unlocked. (Being from europe, I assume yours already is.)
Just pop the sim in, ad enjoy the prepaid service. Tmo doesn't give a rats about who made your phone or what FW you are running on it.
Coverage in extended service areas is very inconsistent. You would really need to get a t mo subscriber in your town to get a good answer.
Me? On T Mo's 60/mo prepaid 2.5gb + unlimited talk + unlimited text plan. (Made the splurge to get the better service for 10$.)
It works fantastic in the city I work in (smexy 4g speeds!). Edge and gsm voice service only out in the sticks where I live, provided through a roaming partner. As such, I use wifi calling and a wireless router. Works great. It doesn't handle call handoffs well though, so finish your call before leaving the house.
Find somebody in your town on T-mo and get a real site assesment before investing though. Good advice is to splurge for a quadband handset, since you never know.
Or, you can look at these plans and get 2.5gb data, unlimited talk, unlimited text, for 60$/mo, no commitment.
Been on that plan for over a year now. These plans aren't new, just previously burried.
The issue with T Mo is the coverage area.
My prepay plan for 60$/mo nets me:
2.5gb monthly at LTE.
Unlimited talk
Unlimited text
In addition to Tmo's normal perks:
Wifi calling for areas not covered
Wifi hotspot and tethering at no added cost
Bring your own device friendly
T Mo has offered these packages for quite awhile now, (well over a year and a half!) But the main squeeze in the stores and on the billboards was the familiar subsidized phone plan model used by the other 3 cartels.
My only suggestion is to make sure that T Mo has good coverage in your area first. Here's how: either get a friend on T Mo to test cell service at your house with his phone, or buy a rinkydink cheapo disposable tmo prepaid brick for 20$ and test yourself. I never trust coverage maps, because they lie. Only a real empirical test is appropriate when you are looking to plunk down 700$ for a smartphone. (As a plus, the sim from the rinkydink phone can go into your smexy smartphone, and when you set up the service, they can reprogram it for you.)
As for the AC spouting about blasting through 500mb in 16 seconds, that's not really true unless you are running torrents or something.
Newsflash assfuck, I DON'T.
I object to getting the "value added service" of having my browser hijacked by markting morons just because I DARED to click on a news article, or DARED to check a price on something.
Last I checked, giant swarming eyeballs with a secret RFID implant needle don't come swarming out of the airducts when I pick up a product in a store, turn it over for the price, and make not of it. I don't get assaulted by endless questionaires about why I was looking at the product, and if I buy it often. Etc.
I hold firm to the assertion that it is like agreeing to be raped, just because you are outside, and the sun is down. (Cause, CLEARLY, you wouldn't go outside at night unless you WANTED forced penetration! Because, like, that's what happens when you do LULZ!)
Seriousy AC, grow the fuck up.
(Also just to note: bank and loan services have existed comfortably for centuries without reselling account information. They don't actually NEED that revinue stream, except to sate either their own greed, or someone else's greed. (Like shareholders, etc.))
Internet search can realistically be funded without adverts, since they can operate like an advert company themselves. The assertion that the service would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary users is unsubstantiated.
Social networking does not need centralization. FOSS communities have lived and operated just fine on home-operated IRC servers and the like just fine. The issue is handling large volumes of users. But, like many supply/demand problems, this would likewise sort itself out, just like demand has forced migration away from dialup. Moving the demand away from centralized networks and into distributed ones would only change the market, not destroy it.
(Social networking is also not something I consider to be of much value, other than as a means of communication. I consider it to be a mashup of 1980s pagers and geocities, with an oppressive marketing goul behind the curtain. I would not shed a single tear if facebook closed its doors.)
Local news likewise has survived for a long time without reselling eyeballs, making the claim insubstantiated.
I visit slashdot enough to pay a few bucks a month to post. So no, not a hipocrite.
Doubly so if I was garanteed not to get served ads and tracking cookies. (Which I already don't get, because I have good karma.)
I would happily pay for the candy, and if the cost was too high, would happily abstain. I do that with television already. Not a problem for me.
And no, shoppers cards aren't worth it. Gas cards aren't worth it. Etc.