In a future of unlimited storage & compute power, we'd no longer use MP3 - or any other compressed file format for that matter. Everything would be lossless. It's not a question of us being able to tell the difference, but unnecessarily degrading data.
Also, as mentioned above, our media will probably start including things such as depth & other environmental data. True VR will require much more than a simple 3D projection & stereo audio.
For what it's worth, Americans actually pay *more* for their welfare than many European countries, and yet get much less for it. From what I see, your government's generally prohibited from making social care more efficient because it hurts the profits of the private companies suckling on the public teat & "ohnosocialism!".
Not so much a malfunction as a poor configuration in the face of unexpected circumstances. The comet was apparently *much* softer than planned for, so the pressure sensors didn't pass the threshold to activate. They were expecting rock, when in fact, they landed in a big pile of dust. Depending on the design of the harpoons, even if they had been triggered in that situation, they might not have had much to hold on to.
You must be visiting too many porn & crapware sites then, because my experience has been distinctly different from yours. Of course, you're mostly blowing hot air, because as by your own admission you have everything blocked anyway - you don't see any of it in the first place.
I've never had anything silently installed by flash or anything else on my browser. I got bitten a by search bar once, but only because I stupidly installed some shitware off SourceForge (RIP). It was hardly a surprise.
You're also highly unlikely to see any adult ads on any reasonably frequented gaming site. If you'd worked with ANY commercial sites yourself in the past DECADE, you'd know that. With the exception of, again, adult & crapware sites, all advertising is now targeted - it's more profitable for the client, it's more profitable for the advertiser, it's more profitable for the site & it's less annoying to the user. And the base line for targeting is aiming at that particular site's audience. So no, you're not going to be finding any adult content on kids' sites.
It's about being selective with what you block to show site owners what is & isn't acceptable. Blocking *everything* fails to provide any sort of feedback & just encourages them to try & find workarounds to the ad-blockers.
Content providers in both online & printed media rely on the same model. Fees, subscriptions or advertising. I don't see many people complaining about the ads in newspapers & magazines. Don't fool yourself. The only print media you get for free & *doesn't* include ad spreads are brochures & sponsored material which is *itself* the ad.
No, I'm a pragmatist with enough experience in the area to know what it costs to run big infrastructure. When you leave high school, you might also learn what it's like to keep quality services running in the real world.
Slashdot is pretty much the only site I visit which is mostly user-generated content. They also have relatively little advertising. Complain about the way the site is run all you like - I agree with much of it, however that Slashdot isn't itself Slashdotted, an effect caused by just a fraction of its visitors (I mean, come on, what percentage of people actually RTFA?) just shows how much goes into their own infrastructure.
I already stated above that I also hate the abusive flash-heavy ads - I block them myself. However I make sure to allow any advertising which I think is reasonable. With any luck, that will help influence what type of advertising is the most effective. Nuking *everything* just encourages advertisers to try & find workarounds.
4) The site is run Ad-Free as a side cost of doing business. Oh, the only business _is_ the site?
No, the business is the "content". I frequent many sites who provide quality content & support themselves with advertising & merchandising. I've got little interest in merchandise, so the only revenue these sites can earn from me to cover their costs are from advertising & donations. The latter tends to be limited to small hobby sites. B&M is expensive & restricts you to a physical location, & in my case the majority of the content I consume (tech news & blogs, international politics, manuals, etc.) comes from countries on the other side of the world.
I find many Slashdotters to be very hypocritical on this subject. They complain about paywalls, targeted advertising AND general advertising. And to those of you, I say, "Fuck You". Quality content doesn't come free.
I have Adblock+ installed on my browser, but I only use it on the most obnoxious of sites.
There are 3 ways content sites can support themselves: 1) With payments & subscriptions; 2) With Ads outside of the content; 3) With sponsored content that *is* an Ad
I choose 2. I don't want to have to pay for every site & page that I click on, so the only other option a site has bar explicit ads, is with sponsored content. Content which attempts to look legitimate & impartial, but whose ultimate goal is to influence the reader for financial gain.
I reserve the adblocking only for when I'm forced to use the flashy heavy sites which drag my browser to a crawl. I've even gone so far as to never have used the/. function to disable ads. I use the site, I want to support the site, and I occasionally click through to the ads I personally find interesting.
He didn't say anything about the copyright not being valid, he said the framework & procedure as outlined by the DMCA are not valid. If an American company wants to make a copyright complaint against a UK body, they have to do so according to UK law & procedures. That means filing in a UK court, not simply firing off an email quoting legislation enacted in a country on the other side of the fecking globe.
Wow, you have such a lack of understanding of European (dare I say, global) politics that I don't even know where to start...
First off, the world is not the United States. Our countries weren't recently formed by homogeneous colonialists divvying up their spoils of war for easier administration. Previous attempts to force the rest of the world to work like this have given us the lovely situation we now have in the Middle-East & across Africa. European countries are built upon many different cultures, traditions & "tribes" that have interdependently developed over millennia. A single European government would work about as well as a single American government (consisting of Northern, Central & Southern America). In fact with the relatively young age of the "New World" countries, an "American" government could arguably be easier to set up!
There are very few countries that meet all the following criteria: EU member; uses the Euro; member of the NATO. Notably missing from the 'full' integration...
Those 3 institutions have very little to do with each other & the only crossover is that the EU & Eurozone happen to be based in the same region, & NATO & the EU were a result of WWII. A federation such as the United States has never been a goal.
No wonder Russia feels comfortable doing what it wants on the perifery, and will continue to shift map and influence boundaries as it wants.
Instead, the Russians fill the power vacuum like there's no tomorrow, and already granted a €10Bn loan for a Russian power plant constrution in Hungary.
If Eastern Europe falls to the Russians...
Perhaps it's a little rusty, so let me refresh your memory: It's still in recent human memory when all of that was Russian territory & the West was on the brink of war with them. Roll forward 2 or 3 decades & many of those territories are now under the wing of a political union that was their sworn enemy for a good part of a century (their support during the war was a mutually reluctant "Enemy of my Enemy" situation. That the Russians might get a bit nervous with a Western European bloc on their doorstep is hardly a surprise.
...it's a pain that something offsets the demographic process that was going to cause an Islamic and Asian majority in the largest UK cities in a few decades.
It pains me that it's only after I've bothered writing this long reply that I see you're getting your world info from Fox. What a wasted few minutes:( I think it's also worth pointing out that the most deadly attack recently experienced in Europe was committed by an extremist far-right Christian xenophobe.
Yes, UK is a net contributor (if we only tally the directly measurable, like budget contribution vs funds awarded
So Britain *does* pay in more than that it gets back then? With regards to measurements, contributions vs rebate are the only solid numbers you can judge against.
(oh, oh, oh.... and also it negotiates budget cuts, like in... 2014... or.... 2013... and if I go back the calendar I'll find this going on, and on, and on).
No, all Osborne managed to do was defer part of a payment for a couple of months. He then deducted the rebate (that they'd get anyway) from the bill & claimed that he "halved" what had to be paid. As much as he wanted to claim, there was no negotiation involved - he rightly got told to fuck off & play by the legally agreed rules that everybody has to follow. He then went home & used "statistics" to make it look like he got some sort of concession.
So...schooled? Or want more? Stop reading The Guardian and such, try the official documents of your government or from the EU institutions.
I presume you don't read the Guardian. They're largely pro-union & were one of the leaders in pulling apart Osborne's claims.
Opium may be produced by some criminal groups, but the overall majority is produced by poor farmers who have no other choice. The Americans went in all heroic & destroyed many of their crops, without giving them any other viable alternative to make a living. You want them to grow something else? Okay, create a demand for it.
It's the same for coca, in fact coca is a traditional crop that's nationally consumed in Bolivia as both a tea & chewing herb. The majority of cocaine is produced from illegal, unlicensed plantations.
I actually find it quite tragically humorous that the very nation that created this narcotics black market & has so heavily bullied other countries to fight its "War on Drugs", is now going through the process of liberalising & legalising the production of its own drugs. The hypocrisy after all the damage they've caused is startling.
Wut? There's no alcohol in yeast - it (& carbon dioxide) are created as a by-product in a warm, damp, sugar-rich environment. You'd have to be really lax with your storage methods if you're getting alcohol in your bread mixture.
We may know how all of it works, but how long would it take us to rebuild the infrastructure used to build it? Good look building electronics from scratch with a hammer & wrench.
But inequality's effects may go beyond simple access to opportunity
I'm not sure what they're defining as "opportunity" here, but it clearly doesn't include access to a healthier diet, better educational tools, more experiences in life, quality time & attention from their guardians, etc, etc.
In fact, I'd like to know exactly what they what they think opportunity is if it's *not* those things?!
It could've come from GCHQ - y'know, the guys who turned up to the Guardian's offices & forced them to "symbolically" destroy a couple of their hard drives. And also the guys who harassed journalists & their partners whilst they were in the "international" zones of our airports.
Same in the UK (although IIRC, on regulations mandated by the EU). T-Mobile hit me with a £15 fee to unlock my phone, which was already out-of-contract.
These days exactly none of that is true - the work has become MUCH simpler.
You don't have the faintest fucking clue what you're talking about. A digital camera doesn't magically process your photos for you - you still have to go through every shot, make your selections & then go about developing your RAWs into something presentable. You still have to go & scope your locations & plan your shots. You still have to spend time getting to know your clients, so you can capture the style & feeling that they're looking for. You still have to spend a shit-ton on equipment, redundant equipment, insurance, assistants, etc. etc.
The only difference technology has made is the ability to review your shots in the moment & allow more shots to be taken. Yes, that helps a lot, but it also means that we're now able to push photography far further than was even possible before. It means that you'll be able to get far more for your money than you would have done in the days of film.
Copyright also works exactly the way it always used to, you're just confusing the two methods a photographer uses to bill for their work: per print, or per hour/day/etc.
I used to perform in a lot of sports competitions & if you wanted to purchase a photo, the price would depend on what size print you wanted. If you wanted to buy the photo & copyright outright, it would be a different price than simply buying a 4x3. Photographers aren't contracted for these events, they earn their money by selling prints. If you contract a photographer & pay them for their time, then (unless you agree otherwise) you will retain the rights over the material they create during that period. To draw an analogy with the IT world, it's like buying a single-site licence for a web template & then demanding that you get sole use. No, if you want to buy it outright, you pay for it.
You do get some cowboys who try to milk their fees by selling overpriced CDs, etc. But that's because they're cowboys trying win contracts by undercharging & then heaping on a bunch of other hidden costs. That's not the photographer's fault, that because there are people out there who expect the moon on a stick for $300. Fuck that!
A good professional photographer is definitely worth it, especially for once-in-a-lifetime events such as weddings. The problem is digital photography made the barrier to entry much lower & the market is now flooded with point-&-shoot cowboys who don't know their bokeh from their flare. Photography is an expensive & time consuming profession & it takes a lot of experience to know how to work an event & your subjects well. Taking pictures is about a 10th of the total work involved.
In the UK, if you're paying under £1.5k per day, then your "photographer" probably spends most of his other days driving a taxi.
There's a lot of double-think in the world, and those in the medical profession are no exception. I could be a bit more empathetic with nurses though - they work in care rather than diagnosis & treatment. I've met a few nurses who are highly trained on paper, but have little idea of *how* the treatments they're applying actually work - that's the Doctor's job.
Healthcare workers are required to be vaccinated because they work with people who are highly vulnerable both to giving & receiving diseases. It's not just vaccines, even health workers who catch the common cold will be required to take time off, as it could be deadly to their patients with poor immune systems.
This is just current enterprise tech finally making its way into the consumer world. I've done a lot of work developing technology for language schools, requiring the recognition & reproduction of speech. This is nothing new, it's just speech recognition algorithms being parsed through a translator & then spat back out by a text-to-speech engine. Heck, I even have something like this running on my home Media Centre.
The groundwork has been done by universities & is being improved by both public (the CIA comes to mind) & private sectors. Unsurprisingly, it's big business in the teleconferencing market.
It's not perfect, however it's very different to the challenges presented to the likes of YouTube. A telephone conversation doesn't have problems with background noise & the people using this technology are aware they need to speak more slowly & clearly - a benefit not afforded to movies & cat videos.
The Japanese telecoms company NTT Docomo has been offering this technology to its customers since 2012! http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
They're just the static tiles you get on a normal new tab page, except they're populated with sponsored sites until your browser history automatically replaces them. This isn't something that would even affect updating users, just fresh installs with an empty history.
Slashdot Mirror
In a future of unlimited storage & compute power, we'd no longer use MP3 - or any other compressed file format for that matter. Everything would be lossless.
It's not a question of us being able to tell the difference, but unnecessarily degrading data.
Also, as mentioned above, our media will probably start including things such as depth & other environmental data. True VR will require much more than a simple 3D projection & stereo audio.
For what it's worth, Americans actually pay *more* for their welfare than many European countries, and yet get much less for it. From what I see, your government's generally prohibited from making social care more efficient because it hurts the profits of the private companies suckling on the public teat & "ohnosocialism!".
Not so much a malfunction as a poor configuration in the face of unexpected circumstances. The comet was apparently *much* softer than planned for, so the pressure sensors didn't pass the threshold to activate.
They were expecting rock, when in fact, they landed in a big pile of dust. Depending on the design of the harpoons, even if they had been triggered in that situation, they might not have had much to hold on to.
Woo! Just enough time to grab a couple of pints before the maintenance window opens!
You've clearly never been to Asia! I'm going to presume the rest of your comment is just as accurate.
You must be visiting too many porn & crapware sites then, because my experience has been distinctly different from yours.
Of course, you're mostly blowing hot air, because as by your own admission you have everything blocked anyway - you don't see any of it in the first place.
I've never had anything silently installed by flash or anything else on my browser. I got bitten a by search bar once, but only because I stupidly installed some shitware off SourceForge (RIP). It was hardly a surprise.
You're also highly unlikely to see any adult ads on any reasonably frequented gaming site. If you'd worked with ANY commercial sites yourself in the past DECADE, you'd know that.
With the exception of, again, adult & crapware sites, all advertising is now targeted - it's more profitable for the client, it's more profitable for the advertiser, it's more profitable for the site & it's less annoying to the user. And the base line for targeting is aiming at that particular site's audience. So no, you're not going to be finding any adult content on kids' sites.
It's about being selective with what you block to show site owners what is & isn't acceptable. Blocking *everything* fails to provide any sort of feedback & just encourages them to try & find workarounds to the ad-blockers.
Content providers in both online & printed media rely on the same model. Fees, subscriptions or advertising.
I don't see many people complaining about the ads in newspapers & magazines. Don't fool yourself. The only print media you get for free & *doesn't* include ad spreads are brochures & sponsored material which is *itself* the ad.
No, I'm a pragmatist with enough experience in the area to know what it costs to run big infrastructure. When you leave high school, you might also learn what it's like to keep quality services running in the real world.
Slashdot is pretty much the only site I visit which is mostly user-generated content. They also have relatively little advertising.
Complain about the way the site is run all you like - I agree with much of it, however that Slashdot isn't itself Slashdotted, an effect caused by just a fraction of its visitors (I mean, come on, what percentage of people actually RTFA?) just shows how much goes into their own infrastructure.
I already stated above that I also hate the abusive flash-heavy ads - I block them myself. However I make sure to allow any advertising which I think is reasonable. With any luck, that will help influence what type of advertising is the most effective. Nuking *everything* just encourages advertisers to try & find workarounds.
4) The site is run Ad-Free as a side cost of doing business.
Oh, the only business _is_ the site?
No, the business is the "content". I frequent many sites who provide quality content & support themselves with advertising & merchandising. I've got little interest in merchandise, so the only revenue these sites can earn from me to cover their costs are from advertising & donations. The latter tends to be limited to small hobby sites.
B&M is expensive & restricts you to a physical location, & in my case the majority of the content I consume (tech news & blogs, international politics, manuals, etc.) comes from countries on the other side of the world.
I find many Slashdotters to be very hypocritical on this subject. They complain about paywalls, targeted advertising AND general advertising. And to those of you, I say, "Fuck You". Quality content doesn't come free.
I have Adblock+ installed on my browser, but I only use it on the most obnoxious of sites.
There are 3 ways content sites can support themselves:
1) With payments & subscriptions;
2) With Ads outside of the content;
3) With sponsored content that *is* an Ad
I choose 2. I don't want to have to pay for every site & page that I click on, so the only other option a site has bar explicit ads, is with sponsored content. Content which attempts to look legitimate & impartial, but whose ultimate goal is to influence the reader for financial gain.
I reserve the adblocking only for when I'm forced to use the flashy heavy sites which drag my browser to a crawl. I've even gone so far as to never have used the /. function to disable ads. I use the site, I want to support the site, and I occasionally click through to the ads I personally find interesting.
He didn't say anything about the copyright not being valid, he said the framework & procedure as outlined by the DMCA are not valid. If an American company wants to make a copyright complaint against a UK body, they have to do so according to UK law & procedures. That means filing in a UK court, not simply firing off an email quoting legislation enacted in a country on the other side of the fecking globe.
Wow, you have such a lack of understanding of European (dare I say, global) politics that I don't even know where to start...
First off, the world is not the United States. Our countries weren't recently formed by homogeneous colonialists divvying up their spoils of war for easier administration.
Previous attempts to force the rest of the world to work like this have given us the lovely situation we now have in the Middle-East & across Africa.
European countries are built upon many different cultures, traditions & "tribes" that have interdependently developed over millennia. A single European government would work about as well as a single American government (consisting of Northern, Central & Southern America). In fact with the relatively young age of the "New World" countries, an "American" government could arguably be easier to set up!
There are very few countries that meet all the following criteria: EU member; uses the Euro; member of the NATO. Notably missing from the 'full' integration...
Those 3 institutions have very little to do with each other & the only crossover is that the EU & Eurozone happen to be based in the same region, & NATO & the EU were a result of WWII. A federation such as the United States has never been a goal.
No wonder Russia feels comfortable doing what it wants on the perifery, and will continue to shift map and influence boundaries as it wants.
Instead, the Russians fill the power vacuum like there's no tomorrow, and already granted a €10Bn loan for a Russian power plant constrution in Hungary.
If Eastern Europe falls to the Russians...
Perhaps it's a little rusty, so let me refresh your memory: It's still in recent human memory when all of that was Russian territory & the West was on the brink of war with them. Roll forward 2 or 3 decades & many of those territories are now under the wing of a political union that was their sworn enemy for a good part of a century (their support during the war was a mutually reluctant "Enemy of my Enemy" situation.
That the Russians might get a bit nervous with a Western European bloc on their doorstep is hardly a surprise.
...it's a pain that something offsets the demographic process that was going to cause an Islamic and Asian majority in the largest UK cities in a few decades.
It pains me that it's only after I've bothered writing this long reply that I see you're getting your world info from Fox. What a wasted few minutes :(
I think it's also worth pointing out that the most deadly attack recently experienced in Europe was committed by an extremist far-right Christian xenophobe.
Except that you aren't...
Yes, UK is a net contributor (if we only tally the directly measurable, like budget contribution vs funds awarded
So Britain *does* pay in more than that it gets back then? With regards to measurements, contributions vs rebate are the only solid numbers you can judge against.
(oh, oh, oh.... and also it negotiates budget cuts, like in... 2014... or.... 2013... and if I go back the calendar I'll find this going on, and on, and on).
No, all Osborne managed to do was defer part of a payment for a couple of months. He then deducted the rebate (that they'd get anyway) from the bill & claimed that he "halved" what had to be paid. As much as he wanted to claim, there was no negotiation involved - he rightly got told to fuck off & play by the legally agreed rules that everybody has to follow. He then went home & used "statistics" to make it look like he got some sort of concession.
So...schooled? Or want more? Stop reading The Guardian and such, try the official documents of your government or from the EU institutions.
I presume you don't read the Guardian. They're largely pro-union & were one of the leaders in pulling apart Osborne's claims.
George Osborne’s top five budget claims – and how they could be shot down
UK to pay £1.7bn EU bill in full despite Osborne’s claim to have halved it
George Osborne rebuked for boasting he halved £1.7bn EU surcharge
For what it's worth, I'm British & will be voting to stay in the union.
Opium may be produced by some criminal groups, but the overall majority is produced by poor farmers who have no other choice. The Americans went in all heroic & destroyed many of their crops, without giving them any other viable alternative to make a living. You want them to grow something else? Okay, create a demand for it.
It's the same for coca, in fact coca is a traditional crop that's nationally consumed in Bolivia as both a tea & chewing herb. The majority of cocaine is produced from illegal, unlicensed plantations.
I actually find it quite tragically humorous that the very nation that created this narcotics black market & has so heavily bullied other countries to fight its "War on Drugs", is now going through the process of liberalising & legalising the production of its own drugs. The hypocrisy after all the damage they've caused is startling.
Wut? There's no alcohol in yeast - it (& carbon dioxide) are created as a by-product in a warm, damp, sugar-rich environment. You'd have to be really lax with your storage methods if you're getting alcohol in your bread mixture.
We may know how all of it works, but how long would it take us to rebuild the infrastructure used to build it? Good look building electronics from scratch with a hammer & wrench.
But inequality's effects may go beyond simple access to opportunity
I'm not sure what they're defining as "opportunity" here, but it clearly doesn't include access to a healthier diet, better educational tools, more experiences in life, quality time & attention from their guardians, etc, etc.
In fact, I'd like to know exactly what they what they think opportunity is if it's *not* those things?!
It could've come from GCHQ - y'know, the guys who turned up to the Guardian's offices & forced them to "symbolically" destroy a couple of their hard drives. And also the guys who harassed journalists & their partners whilst they were in the "international" zones of our airports.
Same in the UK (although IIRC, on regulations mandated by the EU). T-Mobile hit me with a £15 fee to unlock my phone, which was already out-of-contract.
These days exactly none of that is true - the work has become MUCH simpler.
You don't have the faintest fucking clue what you're talking about. A digital camera doesn't magically process your photos for you - you still have to go through every shot, make your selections & then go about developing your RAWs into something presentable. You still have to go & scope your locations & plan your shots. You still have to spend time getting to know your clients, so you can capture the style & feeling that they're looking for. You still have to spend a shit-ton on equipment, redundant equipment, insurance, assistants, etc. etc.
The only difference technology has made is the ability to review your shots in the moment & allow more shots to be taken.
Yes, that helps a lot, but it also means that we're now able to push photography far further than was even possible before. It means that you'll be able to get far more for your money than you would have done in the days of film.
Copyright also works exactly the way it always used to, you're just confusing the two methods a photographer uses to bill for their work: per print, or per hour/day/etc.
I used to perform in a lot of sports competitions & if you wanted to purchase a photo, the price would depend on what size print you wanted. If you wanted to buy the photo & copyright outright, it would be a different price than simply buying a 4x3. Photographers aren't contracted for these events, they earn their money by selling prints.
If you contract a photographer & pay them for their time, then (unless you agree otherwise) you will retain the rights over the material they create during that period.
To draw an analogy with the IT world, it's like buying a single-site licence for a web template & then demanding that you get sole use. No, if you want to buy it outright, you pay for it.
You do get some cowboys who try to milk their fees by selling overpriced CDs, etc. But that's because they're cowboys trying win contracts by undercharging & then heaping on a bunch of other hidden costs. That's not the photographer's fault, that because there are people out there who expect the moon on a stick for $300. Fuck that!
A good professional photographer is definitely worth it, especially for once-in-a-lifetime events such as weddings. The problem is digital photography made the barrier to entry much lower & the market is now flooded with point-&-shoot cowboys who don't know their bokeh from their flare.
Photography is an expensive & time consuming profession & it takes a lot of experience to know how to work an event & your subjects well. Taking pictures is about a 10th of the total work involved.
In the UK, if you're paying under £1.5k per day, then your "photographer" probably spends most of his other days driving a taxi.
There's a lot of double-think in the world, and those in the medical profession are no exception. I could be a bit more empathetic with nurses though - they work in care rather than diagnosis & treatment. I've met a few nurses who are highly trained on paper, but have little idea of *how* the treatments they're applying actually work - that's the Doctor's job.
Healthcare workers are required to be vaccinated because they work with people who are highly vulnerable both to giving & receiving diseases. It's not just vaccines, even health workers who catch the common cold will be required to take time off, as it could be deadly to their patients with poor immune systems.
This is just current enterprise tech finally making its way into the consumer world.
I've done a lot of work developing technology for language schools, requiring the recognition & reproduction of speech. This is nothing new, it's just speech recognition algorithms being parsed through a translator & then spat back out by a text-to-speech engine. Heck, I even have something like this running on my home Media Centre.
The groundwork has been done by universities & is being improved by both public (the CIA comes to mind) & private sectors. Unsurprisingly, it's big business in the teleconferencing market.
It's not perfect, however it's very different to the challenges presented to the likes of YouTube. A telephone conversation doesn't have problems with background noise & the people using this technology are aware they need to speak more slowly & clearly - a benefit not afforded to movies & cat videos.
The Japanese telecoms company NTT Docomo has been offering this technology to its customers since 2012!
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
They're just the static tiles you get on a normal new tab page, except they're populated with sponsored sites until your browser history automatically replaces them. This isn't something that would even affect updating users, just fresh installs with an empty history.