And I say unto thee, "RTFP". I explicitly noted that with this: "has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers."
Wherein I made clear that most non-technical users, which are not most of us Slashdot members, will leave it as-is. Implied, and from years of experience with non-technical users, because non-techies don't know/don't understand how/are afraid, to change anything from "normal".
Which means that Eyeo, Inc. continues to create a big user base of "pay for play" payola opportunities to sell to Google, Amazon, and other ad networks. And indeed they do sell the right to be listed as "Acceptable Ads" - it's right on their website, buried in weasel-words but there, and it's been in plenty of news articles about them. You do the DuckBingGoogle if you want cites of sites. Yes, the small guys, like my blog or yours, can probably get listed as "Acceptable" for free, and Eyeo will have a big public discussion on each and every one of those on their site, because, "transparency". But the details of the huge moneyflows from Google et al will not be there.
Here's the thing: Ad blockers are not default in any browser nor as part of any operating system. Which means that anyone who installs an ad blocker has already made an affirmative choice to block ads. That means it's contrary to common sense and clearly against the desire of the user, for any "ad blocker" to have a default setting that deliberately allows ads - ANY ads.
Unless, of course, the "user" AKA "the customer" is NOT the person who installs the adblocker. Unless that person is the product. And for Eyeo, the person using Adblock Plus is no longer the user/customer, they are the "product" - the eyeballs being sold to their real customer, the companies that pay Eyeo to be part of the "Acceptable Ads" program.
It's not "you can just turn it off". It's how the very concept of a partially non-blocking adblocker, and a very non-transparent financial arrangement between Eeyo and "BigAdNetworks", is inherently contrary to the baseline concept and user case for an adblocker.
Obviously I didn't need somebody to lecture me about the existing of Adblock Edge, or the ABP checkbox, or the other various adblocking options, when I put references to such things right in my post.
And for the record, in the years of using Adblock Edge, its brief predecessor Adblock Light, the pre-Acceptable Ads Adblock Plus, and since this month, uBlock and now after reflection on their ethics, uBlock Origin instead, I have and continue to un-block many sites, specific third-party networks, major affiliate-link trackers such as Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, etc., so that small webmasters and some large websites who aren't eyebleed-inducing, can get some potential monetization from my use. I even sometimes go back to look for and click through an ad of specific interest, or via a site's affiliate link, to a product/service I'm considering buying. I also run a few affiliate link ads on some of my own sites - and make sure I do nothing to force people to unblock them. In fact, I suggest adblockers and privacy blockers right in the privacy policy on my sites.
Difference between that and the skeevy policies of Adblock Plus/Eyeo: Transparency and full choice. Choice on my part as to ads I want to see, choice on visitors to my sites on how they can not see ads and not get into my analytics. No pay-for-play, no whitelisting decisions made for somebody else.
Anybody who can't see the difference is either a) brainwashed, b) a sockpuppet for the ad industry, c) a sockpuppet for Eyeo/Adblock Plus (which really is part of the ad industry at this point), or d) naïve.
Ghostery, Inc is totally open and fully upfront about their connection to the advertising industry. And their not-quite-equivalent feature is OPT-IN, rather than OPT-OUT.
AdBlock (Chrome) as far as I know was never really Open Source - it was one-time-nag (install-time) donationware but not with a "libre" li
Seriously folks, pay some attention to the name of the product and what it means. It's stuff that matters.
"AdBlock": A Chrome, and later other platform, ad blocking extension that has nothing whatsoever to do with "Adblock Plus" either in terms of codebase or project history.
"Adblock Plus" (note no MixedCase): The increasingly-monetizing adblocker which is owned and marketed by for-profit company Eyeo, that Wladimir Palant created to make money with the open source adblocker he took over as maintainer years ago, but did not create. The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers.
"adblock": Not a product at all but a generic term for an advertising, and sometimes also privacy, blocking extension for browsers. There are many competing products which might be generically called "adblock".
"adblocker" A more obviously generic term for the set of "adblocker" products that include, among many others, AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Bluhell Firewall, uBlock, uBlock Origin.
"Adblock" One of, if not the, earliest adblocking extensions for Firefox. Long obsolete, it was the inspiration for, and partially the codebase for the first version, of Adblock Plus. The maintainer of AdBlock (note the MixedCase) also claims Adblock is an inspiration for AdBlock but is no part of its codebase.
The article is about only Adblock Plusâ from Eyeo Inc. Which has the most commercialized, most cooperative with advertisers, and some including me would say, most skeevy business model of any of the major adblocker. Though the drama around the creator of uBlock forking it to "uBlock Origin" and the massively overlarge donation-begging by the new uBlock owners are some evidence that new-uBlock is pretty skeevy too. Which is why this tablet has uBlock Origin running in Firefox.
And finally Firefox is really really bad with bad certificates. I have to often do things like manage networking gear that has expired certificates and similar. Firefox just says "you cannot do that" where with Chrome I can say "yes I know it is insecure, but I really do not care" Thus I have to use chrome almost weekly for such.
Umm, no!
If anything, Firefox (and all FF-based browsers like Waterfox and Pale Moon) are far better for things like self-signed certs, expired certs which you happen to know are still real-life valid because it's your own site. Firefox lets you permanently store the exception so that it doesn't bother you every single time you go to your self-signed Webmin/Virtualmin VPS management page (or in Thunderbird, to your own domain name with TLS on when you don't have a cert under your own domain and mail subdomain for your webhost's email server.)
Chrome bugs you every single time. If that's your reasoning to be against FF and for Chrome, you're 180 degrees backwards. There are plenty of other reasons why you might prefer Chrome and you gave reasons why FF has issues for your use cases, but on this particular use case, Firefox would be better than Chrome, bigtime.
When Mozilla gets their Windows 64 bit Firefox version running and stable I will likely switch to it.
If you're waiting for Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation to release a 64-bit, official FF release for Windows, your wait will be long. Waterfox basically is that release, and Mozilla has long made clear that they are never going to release it themselves. Pale Moon used to be my go-to for 64-bit FF, but as I explained at length upthread in response to another comment, they've gone off the rails of FF compatibility. Including on extensions. Waterfox was seemingly dead for a long time post FF18, but the one person running that project has now gotten caught back up. If you want Firefox Windows 64 it's called "Waterfox".
Oh yeah, that's gonna work out well for you. I used to be the biggest Pale Moon booster around (at least in hyperbole-land), promoting it to IRL friends, to thousands of socialmedia follower/friend/stalkers, my wife loved it especially when it came to Linux (she's using Mint).
But then "Moonchild" went off the rails of reality in reaction to Australis, and to and Firefox Accounts replacing the "Sync formerly known as Weave". Pulled the "Firefox" identifiers right out of it, including in the Application ID. Which guess what, breaks the hell out of many extensions. Then posted manifestos about how extension authors only have to make a few simple changes to have their extensions work with Pale Moon. And how website owners should stop being stupid about browser strings and allow Pale Moon.
For anybody with a sense of history, as in, pre-relase "Mozilla" in 2001 or thereabouts, how did that work out for y'all? If the successor to still-then-known Netscape had a hell of a time getting websites to accept Mozilla, what the heck does Moonchild think will happen with his browser being a spinoff of Mozilla's successor product, Firefox? When Firefox itself is now essentially a "niche browser" with barely double-digit share?
Further egotistic actions abound: Coming out with a half-assed (and about to be abandoned) variant of Firefox for Android (with a bad-UI replacement start page that makes you unnecessarily open a new tab before you can get to your bookmarks), for the sole purpose of having a mobile product that can sync to Pale Moon, now that he refuses, for reasons, to use the new Firefox Accounts sync. Despite a long public exchange with a key FF Sync developer who was trying to help him realize there was no risk. He had a massive problem getting an own-server version of Firefox Sync 1.1 (Weave) running. And expecting that people will on his say-so distrust Mozilla Foundation/Corporation's "Firefox Accounts" in terms of privacy, but hey, having a sync server run by "Moonchild" is perfectly fine? (Yes, I know that Sync 1.1 supposedly encrypts only with the key at the client, never at the server itself, but no, I didn't audit Moonchild's code variant of it to see if it does what he says it does, because, I have a life.)
One the extensions issue, they've even started making their own "static copy" versions of popular extensions they broke, including Adblock Plus, and a spinoff of Adblock Edge called Adfblock Latitude. Because, rightly, nobody is going to make a variant for Pale Moon.
Seriously, WTF? You're a minor variant (yes, minor, no matter how much you want to be seen as a totally different browser) of Firefox, and Firefox itself is now a minor browser, and you expect site developers and extension developers to change their code for you? I get that he hates Australis UI. I hate Australis UI. I'm using Firefox beta right now in one window and Waterfox (to have a 64-bit Firefox) in another, and over on my Linux side I use formerly-Aurora Firefox Developer Edition. All with Classic Theme Restorer extension, and Status-4-Evar statusbar restoration/customization extension added. So it still works just like pre-Australis, plus more flexibility. Pale Moon already baked-in / borrowed Status-4-Evar as an inherent part of Pale Moon - no reason he couldn't have added CTR to that same mix, if he wanted to deliver a "Non-Australis" variant of Firefox with his other code tweaks, module removals, and optimized compiles. Without breaking extension and websites compatibility.
Which makes Moonchild's anti-Australis follow-on decisions even stupider in proportional consequence than Mozilla's own stupid Australis decision, or Sinofsky/Ballmer's stupid Windows Metro decision.
Pale Moon was great. It's dead to me now. Too much stupid ego leading to stupid development decisions. Given its miniscule marketshare, doing things that make it harder for Jane Q Public and Joe Schmoe to use, was idiotic. Doing things that made it harder
Yet another +1 for Gandi, and mentioning a few specifics that haven't come up, as to why.
1. Good nameservers and the ability to have full control of your DNS zone file, in both a form-based "easy mode" and raw-text "expert mode". Once you start doing a lot of custom DNS; especially if you might split what services you have for that domain across multiple providers (e.g. a Linode or DO droplet, email on a different one, or Google or Zoho, subdomain for git, some different dev, staging, beta subdomains) it's really nice to have direct easy-edit access to your zone. In that sense, easier than Namecheap's DNS (which I also use on some domains registered their and via their FreeDNS on some not registered there), which is only form-based.
2. Free IMAP/POP/SMTP/webmail email with your domain. It's not great, it's max 1GB storage overall and 5 mailboxes (near-unlimited aliases), unless you pay extra, but that's fine if you simply need a way to send/receive mail from your domain in "real email programs" as well as in RoundCube webmail. It has spam filtering but no configurability thereof. Mail is hosted in their Paris, France datacenter. For my domains where I don't do a whole lot of email, it's perfect, saves the need for a hosting plan or for hosted email, or of the hassle of running my own server in one of my droplets (each of which I do indeed do for some of my domains).
3. Free first-year SSL/TLS cert (underlying issuance by Comodo but Gandi as the cert issuer) with every domain. Which trumps the $1.99 at time-of-registration-only low-end Comodo cert that is basically the same thing, from Namecheap.
4. Gandi includes domain privacy for address, phone, email for all contacts that are individual contacts - your name shows, but that means that you indisputably own the name. If you are a "corporate handle" (in other words, if you fill in the "Company Name" field), then you cannot mask your address and phone, but they still mask your email.
5. (Maybe good or bad depending on your preference) Gandi still uses the old concept of "handles" rather than "customer accounts", at least optionally. Thus it's possible to have entirely separate IDs as the Registrant, Admin Contact, Tech Contact, and Billing Contact, on any domain. Those are entirely separate logins to Gandi. You don't have to do that, you can make everything just one. But any difference in address, email, name, is by definition another contact. This is powerful, but confusing to newbies to domain ownership.
6. First-time domain registrants (not first-time per domain) get a half-price coupon for a year of Gandi Simple Hosting. "SImple Hosting" is actually "Gandi Complicated Hosting" compared to typical shared hosting: no email, no cPanel, no "hosting panel" at all, but panels for the VPS, for the apache daemon, for PHP APC, and for whichever one database you choose. But it's a lot simpler than managing a full bare VPS, as it's a managed Platform as a Service, and sold as such as a PaaS. Given that a size S is only $2.50/month or the more-reasonable starter, a size M, is only $5/mo at that discount, it's a great deal. I've been running both some development and some client production sites on Simple Hosting for a few years now, and in many ways it beats the heck out of shared hosting. It's basically a tech-stack-specific, managed VPS on which you don't get root, but do get a lot of control otherwise. You get to take a half-price shot at this with your first domain registration, and no, it doesn't have to involve that domain.
Items 3 (1 year free SSL per domain) and 6 (1 year half-price Simple Hosting per customer) aren't tied to the domain which entitled you to them, nor to its period of registration. You just have to order the certificate before that registration period is up. I've gotten Gandi certs from a domain, only a few days before transferring that domain out, and the cert is good for a year, of course. I've used Simple Hosting promo coupons the same way, near the end of their 1-year validity.
Either Obama has written off the Cuban vote in Miami or he has decided to concede FLA to the GOP.
You seriously think Obama cares who wins the next election? If he cares at all, it's probably to make sure that Hillary's chances of winning are even lower than they'd be if he hadn't antagonized the GOP by this move. And that just out of a "FU Clintons" perspective, not from any ideology at all.
Obama is done with elections. Well, at least until it's time for Malia or Sascha to run. He has no votes to "write off"
You're incredibly naive, or are part of the H-1B game on some side that benefits from it, if you believe that.
The simplest one is to hire Infosys or another big house, or a bunch of crappy "body shops", who can provide their own H-1Bs. Get rid of the $80/hr programmer, replace with a $50/hr billable programmer "contracted" from the Axis of Evil around I-287 in NJ or the one in northern VA, where the H-1B is paid $35/hr "prevailing wage" because the work gets redefined from senior to junior levels. Bottom line, "Americans" (as in US citizens and US permanent residents with green cards, committed to the USA already) are out of work, and a bunch of IT people from India are in their cubes. If from INFY or similar, there's a decent chance it's still a professional quality of work, though missing all the years of experience tossed aside in the purge, and likely at least some of the cultural and business context. If from the "body shops" with fake "diploma-mill graduate" H-1B's, the work quality goes to shit.
In which case, they hire back a few of the old laid of FTE workers, now desperate to get any professional work, back as "contractors" at crap pay, no right to unemployment, and no or shite benefits. "They can't do that by law" like hell, they can use their own in-house captive "consulting agency" to hire them as W-2 but not "real employees" of the parent firm, thus getting around the IRS regs on "are you a contractor or an employee". The IRS cares, because, taxes. The other agencies don't give a crap.
Every bookseller of not-Kindle-format eBooks. Adobe Digital Editions is not Adobe OFF. For a tech site it's facepalmworthy how much of this discussion is by people unaware of that.
It's also not just library books. It's the DRM tech and server license infrastructure behind Google Books, Kobo Books, back in the day Sony, anybody who let you download your so-called "purchased" eBook for reading in other than their specific app or hardware.
Nook uses an odd variant without the ADE server and.acsm license file, but e-ink Nook and the original Nook Color are authorizable devices to read standard ADE-downloaded DRM EPUB books. My ancient Nook Color and Kobo e-ink readers are loaded with ADE-downloaded DRM books from Google Books and other "not device-native store" books. The Nook has all my Kobo book purchase's on it by that ADE method, though due to Nook's nonstandard non-acsm version of Adobe DRM, I can't put the nook purchase's on the Kobo.
It's also how you get mixed-stores books into on combined better reader app like Bluefire or Aldiko on Android. Download your.acsm license file From Google Play, Kobo, whomever. Open it in ADE, signed in with your adobe ID and your EPUB download's, authorized to that ID. Copy that EPUB to your mobile and if Aldiko or Bluefire is registered with your adobe ID you can read it.
Nothing to do with PDF format, though PDF files can be DRM'd with the same tech. Normally on modern reflowable EPUB.
So Adobe tracking non-DRM EPUB files is a big deal, because ADE is crucial for every non-circumventer in the anything-not-Kindle eBook world.
Recent college grads, at least back in the days when jobs were available, tend to live in apartment buildings in cities or in apartment complexes of townhouse or garden-apartment types of units in the suburbs. Neither of which typically have any access to one's own electrical outlet, nor in many cases dedicated-to-unit parking.
The entire electric car argument, however environmentally beneficial it may seem on surface, is dependent on everyone having their own "single-family home" with its garage to put the high-powered dedicated charging unit. Or at least their own dedicated parking spot, direclty by their unit, with its own electric outlet on their own power account, easily accessible yet secured against leechers. Physically located such that nobody's running cable-spaghetti of extension cords across lawns and pavement to reach their vehicles. Protected against the scourge of HOAs who tend to have shitfits if anybody paints their doorway, plants the wrong color flower, or even puts out an unapproved welcome mat, never mind runs an electric cord five feet to their car. Indemnified against nuisance but financially disastrous (even to defend against if winning) lawsuits by somebody claiming their entire future livelihood was ruined by tripping on the cord, thus $MILLIONS.
That's not to mention the relatively large group of "woo-woos" who will belive that "car charging radiation is causing cancer" or some such dribble. But I repeat myself, I already mentioned "HOAs" and you can bet that any Homeowners Association has at least one or two "condo commandos" who are "woo-woos" of the Alex Jones / Natural News / Jesse Ventura nature. For you "I'd never live in a place that had an HOA" folks, well aren't you just very special libertarian snowflakes. Wide swathes of the USA are dominated by HOAs including so-called "single-family" home developments. Condo apartments and townhouses are often the first "affordable" home ownership options, and all come with HOAs or equivalent. Your family, personal, and employment opportunity issues might make your "Off to a non-HOA freehold" fantasy just that, a fantasy. I'm talking about Real People here, not Slashdotters or Randian politburo members.
Not to mention the renters. Who in the USA can't do squat without landlord approval. Even things with clear Federal Preemption to allow renter rights. like the decades-old FCC TV Antenna and Dish rulings, are widely ignored, and your landlord can make your life hell if you try to push your "rights".
I honestly believe these "what's it like at home?" issues are bigger blockers to all-electric (Tesla) or electric-primary plug-in-hybrid vehicles (this Fisker, Chevrolet Volt) than anything about range or charging stations at destinations.
"Medium reports..." makes as much sense as saying "WordPress.com reports..." or for that matter, "Geocities reports..."
Medium is a self-publishing fancy hipster bloggy vehicle. It doesn't have a staff of journalists, nor even pseudo-journalists nor curators like Timothy. It's a prettified competitor to wordpress.com for the hipsters, while being slightly less self-indulgently vapid than Thought Catalog. Slightly.
"Bolt reports, on their blog at Medium, because they can't be arsed to put one on their own website,..." would be more accurate. Except they do actually have a blog on their own website, and this same article is on it. Though their "blog" on their site is just an index page of posts on their hipster Medium account.
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
If your intention is to advertise only to the US market, which is what I assume from your example, you're doing it wrong if you are even showing AdWords to audiences in Europe. Unless, of course, they are using a VPN or proxy or other means to browse with a US-based IP address.
Heck, you can target down to individual zipcodes, Congressional districts, counties, Metro areas, and a bunch more ways. No excuse other than ignorance if you or your clients ads are running in an entirely different continent.
If you want your ads for your US company to appear in Europe as well as in USA, then you need to create a sufficient AdWords daily budget, plus perhaps do time of day targeting. Or to be better at it, have separate AdWords campaigns for each geo, with separate budgets, even if you're using the same ads.
There's a lot I don't like about AdWords, including how Google loves to split functionality into different menus and services and levels of products to create massive confusion about how to use them. Like WTF isn't there one single thing that has all my ad budgets, my analytics, my webmaster tools, my everything-about-it, all in one damn place? Or to use another, non-ads example, Google Voice can be used as VOIP from a computer, but only by a not-well-explained combo of Google Voice + Google Chat + Gmail page + Google Talk plugin, something no non-technical "normal person" will ever discover. Some of that dysfunctional UX comes from Google's only-engineers culture, but on the advertising products I think some of it is also deliberate ambiguity so you will inadvertantly spend more. Same reason that in USA and many other jurisdictions, Google will not let you prepay for a fixed spend, only postpay - they like that you can't quite control it, and the house always has the edge.
But they do provide geotargeting tools, rather good ones. So no excuse if your ads are running in the wrong locales.
That doesn't make the sleazy service abusing AdWords any less evil themselves. But if the ads are eaten up by wrong geolocations, whether from that sleazy service or just from legitimate browsing clicks in the wrong countries, that is the advertiser's own fault for not using the control Google gives them.
Sometimes I wonder if I was the only one paying attention in Civics and Social Studies. Cliff notes version:
1) The United States is not a Democracy, it's a Republic....
Oh jeez this again? The classic GOP / Libertarian / Tea weak-minds binary thinking that gets the meaning of both "republic" and "democracy" wrong.
The US is (supposed to be) a democracy. Just ask any living current or ex-President. Look at any respected list of "countries that are democracies". You do the research. It's simple.
The US is a republic. As in, "not a monarchy".
Republics can be democracies or they can be dictatorships, and pretty much anything in between. There is also nothing in the word "republic" which implies "representative". Just ask North Koreans.
Democracies can be direct democracies, like ancient Athens or a current-day New England Town Meeting or California ballot initiative. Or they can be representative. There is nothing in the word "democracy" that implies "direct-only".
"Democracy" and "Republic" are orthogonal concepts, they are not antonyms. Even when the US Senate was appointed, it was appointed by state legislatures which were comprised of elected representatives, who were elected by democratic elections. As opposed to being appointed by the monarch or being passed down via aristocratic houses.
Actually nowadays we are closer to that, with the money=speech nonsense and an increasingly distractable and distracted public who will vote whichever way paid media brainwashes them to do. House Clinton, House Bush, House Kennedy, and the upstart House Paul.
You may flip the order of the following words around, depending on what you want to emphasize, change some from adjectives to nouns, but all these terms are needed to properly define what the US system of government is:
Constitutional Federal Republic governed as a Representative Democracy,
or a Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic.
Choose your emphasis, but you cannot leave any of those terms out without misrepresenting how the system is designed.
It's a Federation of States. Not a unitary central government with weak subdivisions that have only specifically designated powers (like for example Uruguay is, where the "departamentos" of my new country of residence are far weaker than US States or even Canadian provinces, are more like counties in US states.)
It operates under a written Constitution, rather than an unwritten or partially-wrtten collection of basic law (like the UK has)
It is a Republic, not a Monarchy (unlike the UK which is a monarchy even though it is also a democracy)
It is a Representative democracy rather than a direct democracy, at its Federal and in most cases at lower levels (same as UK)
It is a Democracy rather than a dictatorship. We The People (supposedly) have a voice and a fairly-run, democratic vote, in deciding who represents us.
Leaving any of that out is at best, ignorant point-missing. Usually it is deliberate agitprop.
The sky isn't blue, it's where birds fly. What you are saying is every bit as nonsensical and more dangerous.
Typical slashdot bad editors. Fastest in Norway != fastest in world.
I now live in a small beach town in Uruguay, on a dirt road, and I got a free upgrade to fibre-to-home, which is being extended to every home in Uruguay. Time for me to get my bogus submission ready for "Uruguay has the best internet in the world". Just because a country is socialist on basic services, and extends fiber to everywhere, does not make it the best in the world. Makes it damn good, but "best" or as hyperbolically stated, "the highest quality Internet experience in the world" requires proof. As others have mentioned, that requires specific speeds, pings, and total transfer allowances, before making such a claim.
Better than the Comcast/ATT/Verizon cabal does not mean "best". Despite what all you US-centric folks may think.
What he said. The truth is, I never had cable TV for those reasons, and this: Remember, the deal was commercials = free TV. Cable started out with no commercials (yes, it did - except for the network channels), but they slowly began adding them in, until now, where there are more commercials on cable channels than on network television. Of course, TV watchers are a docile group to begin with...
When was that ever "the deal" as opposed to "what you wanted to be the deal"? Cable used to be called CATV, for "Community Antenna TV" and was primarily a way to bring television programming into areas that were geographically un-served by TV, usually due to actual geological / topographic reasons. Places like Ithaca, NY, or Breckenridge, Colorado, where no way in hell is a TV signal from Syracuse or Denver is getting into them through the hills down into the valleys. Later, urban canyons like NYC where not everyone had the ability to put up any kind of outdoor antenna - not because of regulations as much as real estate realities, and indoor antennas suffered from horrible multipath. I've lived in all three of the places I mentioned, laughably tried to get OTA TV in them, and have been a cable subscriber in all of them at one point or another. Getting "content" without commercials was never the deal - it was getting content, at all.
Later, the idea of "cable channels" started taking off, and what we now think of as the "basic tier" of cable stations began to show up. Watching "USA Night Flight" back in the day, then the launch of MTV with actual music videos. Along with the "Arts and Entertainment Network" that had plays, classical concerts, opera, not dysfunctional yahoos. Whether or not these extra stations had commercials, there was never any "deal" that "your cable bill pays for the content", CATV was a distribution method. Then the "pay tv" channels like HBO became popular. You can't pay for HBO without paying first for the "CATV" distribution subscription. In 2014 that's a dumb idea, but back then it wasn't - you were paying for the pipe, and now that you had the pipe, you could also pay for premium content. Given that "pay tv" is either "pay by having commercials" or "pay by having a CONTENT fee", I don't see a difference.
Your strawman argument against cable is flawed. You never understood the deal. You weren't paying for the pizza, you were paying for the delivery of the pizza.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Time Warner is some ongoing licensing royalty from the "Roadrunner" intellectual property "beep beep", but otherwise they have no connection at all. Next month it will be 5 years since TWC was fully independent of Time Warner. Try to keep up.
In fact, "Time" likely won't be part of Time Warner before long either, in that they're looking to spin off that group. But the Cable Company is already long gone away from Time Warner (oh, and AOL isn't part of it either, in case you're still confused). Thus TWC, which Comcast wants to buy, does not own any cable program networks at all. No CNN, no TBS, no Cartoon Network, no HBO. That's all part of the "Warner" part of "Time Warner", not any part of the cable company.
You're equally ignorant about the scope of Comcast's fully-owned NBC Universal, which is ridiculously larger than "NBC/NHL/MLB". I assume that you meant NHL Network and MLB Network, not the actual sports leagues. MLB network is only partly-owned by NBC Universal's NBC Sports Group; Time Warner Cable (OK, that's Comcast too if this goes through), DirecTV, Cox Communications are the other minority owners, while Major League Baseball itself is the majority owner. NBC owns 5.44% per Wikipedia. On NHL Network (USA), NBC is the only minority owner, but has just 15.6% with the National Hockey League owning the rest.
Meanwhile you ignore: USA Network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, NBC Sports Channel (formerly Universal Sports), Oxygen, E!, SyFy, Esquire Network, UniversalHD, and a bunch more networks that are both on -2, -3, etc. OTA digital subchannels and on cable like Chiller, Cloo, Sprout, etc. That's just the NBC Universal Cable Group. Don't forget all the OnO (Owned and Operated) NBC TV stations - far fewer than the overall NBC broadcast network total affiliates, but the big-market ones like LA, SF, NYC, and many more are owned by NBC itself. Which means owned by Comcast.
Plus, Universal Studios.
Oh, and Jay Leno just left NBC. Yes, again. Try to keep up.
Even more wrong, with your: "the fight has... been with... Viacom..." in that the big recurrent CBS fights are with CBS, which is way more than CBS old-people-TV network. Viacom and CBS split apart years ago, which means all those "Viacom" TV networks and properties? They belong to CBS (which also owns CNET, ZDNET and lots of online properties too). In fact, CBS now owns "Star Trek". Which is why my paragraph-opener sentence should be read Shatnerized. Yes, the network that turned down Star Trek in the 1960s, saying "We have one of our own we like better - Lost in Space", now is the owner of the "Star Trek" intellectual property. Paramount, which is part of Viacom, has absolutely nothing to do with "Star Trek" other than having some remaining rights to it as a motion-picture-only property. Many of those "Viacom" channels you're thinking about? They're now CBS. Such as the "Showtime Networks" group of channels. The MTV Group is still Viacom.
You really need to follow what is actually happening rather than that outdated Facebook "meme" infographic of "These Six Companies Own All Our Media".
One for ATM transactions/meatspace debit card purchases, one for bill payment, and one for cyberspace debit card purchases.
If your bank doesn't make this easy to manage, switch banks.
Your plan is flawed. Sure, you have three accounts but your comment "If your bank doesn't make this easy to manage, switch banks" implies they are all at the same bank. Which subjects you to many other risks you're likely ignoring:
1. Person with stolen card may be able to social-engineer access to other accounts or online credentials and thus access the other accounts. 2. Your bank may choose to do a "courtesy overdraft transfer" from you other account, to cover thief's new laptop and vacation. 3. An "unusual transaction" on the one account, if unusual enough, may trigger the bank's fraud-bots to put a freeze on all your accounts, at least temporarily. Some stupid institutions do "freeze everything, no messages" as an attention-getting attempt at reaching you, and no, they don't disclose up front that they do that, so you can't "switch banks" based on looking out for that stupidity. 4. Some dispute with a big-enough jerk person, company, or organization may lead to a lawsuit or garnishment against you, and nowadays many banks have an immediate "fire the customer" response to that action. Again, not something they disclose up front. Condo Board (HOA) from Hell got me fired as a customer from a "good local bank". Luckily it wasn't my only bank/bank-alternative.
A much better idea, if you want segregation of accounts between physical world use, online use, and billpay use, is to use three different institutions entirely, picking carefully both for minimal Banksterism and for free external transfer services.
For example, I have (US-centric because that's the topic): 1. A Credit Union membership, in an institution that pays 4% interest (yes, four percent I didn't drop zeros or decimals) on the first $500 in checking and separately on the first $500 in savings. Has totally free 2-3 day ACH "push" to transfer money to any other bank or bank-like-thing (such as a prepaid debit card with a "bank account number" and "routing number" or to "pull" from any other bank-like account. Only if I initiate it. Overnight for a $2 fee. Both checking and savings there to maximize interest, have their Debit MasterCard, have their Bill-Pay but have no current payees set up, deliberately do not have any actual paper checks and never have on this account.
2. A "checking alternative" account with no minimum deposit, no minimum balance requirement, from an online discount brokerage firm (I don't have an investment account with them, just this cash management account.) Has a Visa debit card no added fees for foreign transactions over the Visa conversion fee, full rebate of any ATM-owner surcharge anywhere in the world, deposited back next banking day, no ATM-use fees of their own. Has free printed checks and free check refills. Has free BillPay, free external transfers by ACH. Pushes to my other bank-like institutions typically arrive next banking day despite their saying it is 2 days. Pulls from other accounts usually 2 days.
3. A high-interest (as US interests rates go) online-only savings account with no checking, no bill-pay, no nothing but can be the ACH target for direct deposit from Elance, PayPal, etc. for freelance work, is a transfer source and target for accounts 1) and 2) at those other institutions, has its own ACH external transfer capabilities (typically 2-3 days on pushes, out, a couple more days for funds availability on pulls into it - so I usually push from the other accounts which makes it instantly available when it gets there). Also tied to an online purchases rebates cashback program (Upromise.com - oriented towards savings for students but anybody can use it and get the cashback rebates, no matter what form of payment used, into their Upromise account and then transferred into this bank account.)
It's not just PDF, nor even primarily PDF. It's reflowable standard EPUB. EPUB with Adobe DRM is the standard commercial ebook format for the "rest of the world that isn't Amazon". Barnes & Noble Nook (now mostly Microsoft Nook). Kobo, which is number 2 in much of the world. Google Play Books. eReaders from Kobo, B&N, iRiver, white-box Chinese brands affordable in emerging markets, even iBooks own Appleized format, have Adobe DRM inside. eReading apps from third parties like the well-respected Aldiko Reader and Bluefire reader use Adobe DRM. Only Kindle doesn't use it.
I've got Google Play Books and Kobo books on my Nook Color early-gen ereading tablet, because of Adobe DRM being near-universal. Have Google Play books on my Kobo WiFi e-ink eReader and on my newer Kobo AuraHD e-ink eReader. On my Android phone, whitebox cheap 10" tablet, and Kobo Arc (Android tablet with Kobo's shell but full open Google Play Store Jellybean tablet), I have the Aldiko app so that I can combine my Kobo and my Google Play books into a single library rather than reading in separate apps per bookstore. (Nooks can sideload and read standard EPUB/AdobeDRM but Nook books can't be read outside of Nook hardware or apps due to B&N weird variant AdobeDRM).
Adobe is breaking all this relatively open ecosystem. Sure, it's DRM, but it's an "anything except Kindle" open system. Adobe is screwing over all the people who bought into the non-Kindle commercial ebook ecosystem over the past half-decade or so.
I'm writing from the perspective of a normal human, not a/. geek. Normals don't break DRM because they don't know how, they don't even know it's a thing. They don't buy only non-DRM books, because they want to buy books from their favorite authors, not obscure corners of the web. Even many self-published books, if distributed through "normal channels" carry Adobe DRM (or Amazon DRM). They might, if they read the very simple info on the Kobo, Google Play, and other ecosystem-member web pages, have realized they can buy a book from Google and read it on their Sony eReader, buy a book from Kobo on sale and read it on their original Nook or Nook front-light newer e-ink reader. They may be all over Goodreads and ereader websites where there are lots of how-tos about just that, but they are nowhere near Slashdot. Nor near Linux. And O'Reilly tech books are irrelevant. As are, to most readers, Baen and Tor SF.
Hell, I don't want to deal with this myself, and I know how or can easily figure it out. Just going to the "Download Adobe DRM" link at Kobo or Google Play, getting the.ACSM (Adobe Content Server Mechanism) license file, double-clicking on the download and having previously-installed Adobe Digital Editions get the DRM-unlocked-to-my-ID content was simple. Bang, read it on my PC in Adobe Digital Editions, or tether my Android phone/tablet to drag into Aldiko or Bluefire, tether my Kobo eReaders (e-ink actual ereaders for readers) and drag it into their libraries, tether the Nook Color and drag it into its library.
Now I'd' have to go break DRM on all those files and future purchases. But that would be wrong...
I like your pricing idea. Add to it a bulk-hours discount rate for purchasing viewing time above a threshold amount, and it would be near-perfect. If all the content was readily available.
I wish news/opinion organizations would do that too, instead of everybody and their dog putting up their own paywall. I'm not going to purchase separate subscriptions to the NY Times, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Time, and every podunk paper. But I might want to read more than their monthly free-with-registration allowances on any given month. More, but not enough from any one of them to make an individual subscription to that particular site worthwhile, and the full set of full-pop subs is unaffordable. But if I could pay a reasonable "News / Opinion Consortium" subscription that gave me maybe 120 article views a month to any mix of their several dozen participating properties, for maybe $15-20/mo, I'd be all over it.
I recognize the irony. For each of our pricing ideas, there would need to be an organization somewhat like MPAA/RIAA, and mine for news requires something like a "Pay Cable Tiered Package" concept but mashed-up with a paywall meter for total "News Tier" usage.
But if the pricing were reasonable rather than rapacious, I think it would work.
Slashdot Mirror
And I say unto thee, "RTFP". I explicitly noted that with this: "has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers."
Wherein I made clear that most non-technical users, which are not most of us Slashdot members, will leave it as-is. Implied, and from years of experience with non-technical users, because non-techies don't know/don't understand how/are afraid, to change anything from "normal".
Which means that Eyeo, Inc. continues to create a big user base of "pay for play" payola opportunities to sell to Google, Amazon, and other ad networks. And indeed they do sell the right to be listed as "Acceptable Ads" - it's right on their website, buried in weasel-words but there, and it's been in plenty of news articles about them. You do the DuckBingGoogle if you want cites of sites. Yes, the small guys, like my blog or yours, can probably get listed as "Acceptable" for free, and Eyeo will have a big public discussion on each and every one of those on their site, because, "transparency". But the details of the huge moneyflows from Google et al will not be there.
Here's the thing: Ad blockers are not default in any browser nor as part of any operating system. Which means that anyone who installs an ad blocker has already made an affirmative choice to block ads. That means it's contrary to common sense and clearly against the desire of the user, for any "ad blocker" to have a default setting that deliberately allows ads - ANY ads.
Unless, of course, the "user" AKA "the customer" is NOT the person who installs the adblocker. Unless that person is the product. And for Eyeo, the person using Adblock Plus is no longer the user/customer, they are the "product" - the eyeballs being sold to their real customer, the companies that pay Eyeo to be part of the "Acceptable Ads" program.
It's not "you can just turn it off". It's how the very concept of a partially non-blocking adblocker, and a very non-transparent financial arrangement between Eeyo and "BigAdNetworks", is inherently contrary to the baseline concept and user case for an adblocker.
Obviously I didn't need somebody to lecture me about the existing of Adblock Edge, or the ABP checkbox, or the other various adblocking options, when I put references to such things right in my post.
And for the record, in the years of using Adblock Edge, its brief predecessor Adblock Light, the pre-Acceptable Ads Adblock Plus, and since this month, uBlock and now after reflection on their ethics, uBlock Origin instead, I have and continue to un-block many sites, specific third-party networks, major affiliate-link trackers such as Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, etc., so that small webmasters and some large websites who aren't eyebleed-inducing, can get some potential monetization from my use. I even sometimes go back to look for and click through an ad of specific interest, or via a site's affiliate link, to a product/service I'm considering buying. I also run a few affiliate link ads on some of my own sites - and make sure I do nothing to force people to unblock them. In fact, I suggest adblockers and privacy blockers right in the privacy policy on my sites.
Difference between that and the skeevy policies of Adblock Plus/Eyeo: Transparency and full choice. Choice on my part as to ads I want to see, choice on visitors to my sites on how they can not see ads and not get into my analytics. No pay-for-play, no whitelisting decisions made for somebody else.
Anybody who can't see the difference is either a) brainwashed, b) a sockpuppet for the ad industry, c) a sockpuppet for Eyeo/Adblock Plus (which really is part of the ad industry at this point), or d) naïve.
Ghostery, Inc is totally open and fully upfront about their connection to the advertising industry. And their not-quite-equivalent feature is OPT-IN, rather than OPT-OUT.
AdBlock (Chrome) as far as I know was never really Open Source - it was one-time-nag (install-time) donationware but not with a "libre" li
Seriously folks, pay some attention to the name of the product and what it means. It's stuff that matters.
"AdBlock": A Chrome, and later other platform, ad blocking extension that has nothing whatsoever to do with "Adblock Plus" either in terms of codebase or project history.
"Adblock Plus" (note no MixedCase): The increasingly-monetizing adblocker which is owned and marketed by for-profit company Eyeo, that Wladimir Palant created to make money with the open source adblocker he took over as maintainer years ago, but did not create. The one that takes money from advertisers to whitelist so-called "Acceptable Ads" and has that feature turned on by default, so most non-techies see ads from Eyeo customers.
"adblock": Not a product at all but a generic term for an advertising, and sometimes also privacy, blocking extension for browsers. There are many competing products which might be generically called "adblock".
"adblocker" A more obviously generic term for the set of "adblocker" products that include, among many others, AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Bluhell Firewall, uBlock, uBlock Origin.
"Adblock" One of, if not the, earliest adblocking extensions for Firefox. Long obsolete, it was the inspiration for, and partially the codebase for the first version, of Adblock Plus. The maintainer of AdBlock (note the MixedCase) also claims Adblock is an inspiration for AdBlock but is no part of its codebase.
The article is about only Adblock Plusâ from Eyeo Inc. Which has the most commercialized, most cooperative with advertisers, and some including me would say, most skeevy business model of any of the major adblocker. Though the drama around the creator of uBlock forking it to "uBlock Origin" and the massively overlarge donation-begging by the new uBlock owners are some evidence that new-uBlock is pretty skeevy too. Which is why this tablet has uBlock Origin running in Firefox.
And finally Firefox is really really bad with bad certificates. I have to often do things like manage networking gear that has expired certificates and similar. Firefox just says "you cannot do that" where with Chrome I can say "yes I know it is insecure, but I really do not care" Thus I have to use chrome almost weekly for such.
Umm, no!
If anything, Firefox (and all FF-based browsers like Waterfox and Pale Moon) are far better for things like self-signed certs, expired certs which you happen to know are still real-life valid because it's your own site. Firefox lets you permanently store the exception so that it doesn't bother you every single time you go to your self-signed Webmin/Virtualmin VPS management page (or in Thunderbird, to your own domain name with TLS on when you don't have a cert under your own domain and mail subdomain for your webhost's email server.)
Chrome bugs you every single time. If that's your reasoning to be against FF and for Chrome, you're 180 degrees backwards. There are plenty of other reasons why you might prefer Chrome and you gave reasons why FF has issues for your use cases, but on this particular use case, Firefox would be better than Chrome, bigtime.
When Mozilla gets their Windows 64 bit Firefox version running and stable I will likely switch to it.
If you're waiting for Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation to release a 64-bit, official FF release for Windows, your wait will be long. Waterfox basically is that release, and Mozilla has long made clear that they are never going to release it themselves. Pale Moon used to be my go-to for 64-bit FF, but as I explained at length upthread in response to another comment, they've gone off the rails of FF compatibility. Including on extensions. Waterfox was seemingly dead for a long time post FF18, but the one person running that project has now gotten caught back up. If you want Firefox Windows 64 it's called "Waterfox".
I switched to Pale Moon across the board.
Oh yeah, that's gonna work out well for you. I used to be the biggest Pale Moon booster around (at least in hyperbole-land), promoting it to IRL friends, to thousands of socialmedia follower/friend/stalkers, my wife loved it especially when it came to Linux (she's using Mint).
But then "Moonchild" went off the rails of reality in reaction to Australis, and to and Firefox Accounts replacing the "Sync formerly known as Weave". Pulled the "Firefox" identifiers right out of it, including in the Application ID. Which guess what, breaks the hell out of many extensions. Then posted manifestos about how extension authors only have to make a few simple changes to have their extensions work with Pale Moon. And how website owners should stop being stupid about browser strings and allow Pale Moon.
For anybody with a sense of history, as in, pre-relase "Mozilla" in 2001 or thereabouts, how did that work out for y'all? If the successor to still-then-known Netscape had a hell of a time getting websites to accept Mozilla, what the heck does Moonchild think will happen with his browser being a spinoff of Mozilla's successor product, Firefox? When Firefox itself is now essentially a "niche browser" with barely double-digit share?
Further egotistic actions abound: Coming out with a half-assed (and about to be abandoned) variant of Firefox for Android (with a bad-UI replacement start page that makes you unnecessarily open a new tab before you can get to your bookmarks), for the sole purpose of having a mobile product that can sync to Pale Moon, now that he refuses, for reasons, to use the new Firefox Accounts sync. Despite a long public exchange with a key FF Sync developer who was trying to help him realize there was no risk. He had a massive problem getting an own-server version of Firefox Sync 1.1 (Weave) running. And expecting that people will on his say-so distrust Mozilla Foundation/Corporation's "Firefox Accounts" in terms of privacy, but hey, having a sync server run by "Moonchild" is perfectly fine? (Yes, I know that Sync 1.1 supposedly encrypts only with the key at the client, never at the server itself, but no, I didn't audit Moonchild's code variant of it to see if it does what he says it does, because, I have a life.)
One the extensions issue, they've even started making their own "static copy" versions of popular extensions they broke, including Adblock Plus, and a spinoff of Adblock Edge called Adfblock Latitude. Because, rightly, nobody is going to make a variant for Pale Moon.
Seriously, WTF? You're a minor variant (yes, minor, no matter how much you want to be seen as a totally different browser) of Firefox, and Firefox itself is now a minor browser, and you expect site developers and extension developers to change their code for you? I get that he hates Australis UI. I hate Australis UI. I'm using Firefox beta right now in one window and Waterfox (to have a 64-bit Firefox) in another, and over on my Linux side I use formerly-Aurora Firefox Developer Edition. All with Classic Theme Restorer extension, and Status-4-Evar statusbar restoration/customization extension added. So it still works just like pre-Australis, plus more flexibility. Pale Moon already baked-in / borrowed Status-4-Evar as an inherent part of Pale Moon - no reason he couldn't have added CTR to that same mix, if he wanted to deliver a "Non-Australis" variant of Firefox with his other code tweaks, module removals, and optimized compiles. Without breaking extension and websites compatibility.
Which makes Moonchild's anti-Australis follow-on decisions even stupider in proportional consequence than Mozilla's own stupid Australis decision, or Sinofsky/Ballmer's stupid Windows Metro decision.
Pale Moon was great. It's dead to me now. Too much stupid ego leading to stupid development decisions. Given its miniscule marketshare, doing things that make it harder for Jane Q Public and Joe Schmoe to use, was idiotic. Doing things that made it harder
Yet another +1 for Gandi, and mentioning a few specifics that haven't come up, as to why.
1. Good nameservers and the ability to have full control of your DNS zone file, in both a form-based "easy mode" and raw-text "expert mode". Once you start doing a lot of custom DNS; especially if you might split what services you have for that domain across multiple providers (e.g. a Linode or DO droplet, email on a different one, or Google or Zoho, subdomain for git, some different dev, staging, beta subdomains) it's really nice to have direct easy-edit access to your zone. In that sense, easier than Namecheap's DNS (which I also use on some domains registered their and via their FreeDNS on some not registered there), which is only form-based.
2. Free IMAP/POP/SMTP/webmail email with your domain. It's not great, it's max 1GB storage overall and 5 mailboxes (near-unlimited aliases), unless you pay extra, but that's fine if you simply need a way to send/receive mail from your domain in "real email programs" as well as in RoundCube webmail. It has spam filtering but no configurability thereof. Mail is hosted in their Paris, France datacenter. For my domains where I don't do a whole lot of email, it's perfect, saves the need for a hosting plan or for hosted email, or of the hassle of running my own server in one of my droplets (each of which I do indeed do for some of my domains).
3. Free first-year SSL/TLS cert (underlying issuance by Comodo but Gandi as the cert issuer) with every domain. Which trumps the $1.99 at time-of-registration-only low-end Comodo cert that is basically the same thing, from Namecheap.
4. Gandi includes domain privacy for address, phone, email for all contacts that are individual contacts - your name shows, but that means that you indisputably own the name. If you are a "corporate handle" (in other words, if you fill in the "Company Name" field), then you cannot mask your address and phone, but they still mask your email.
5. (Maybe good or bad depending on your preference) Gandi still uses the old concept of "handles" rather than "customer accounts", at least optionally. Thus it's possible to have entirely separate IDs as the Registrant, Admin Contact, Tech Contact, and Billing Contact, on any domain. Those are entirely separate logins to Gandi. You don't have to do that, you can make everything just one. But any difference in address, email, name, is by definition another contact. This is powerful, but confusing to newbies to domain ownership.
6. First-time domain registrants (not first-time per domain) get a half-price coupon for a year of Gandi Simple Hosting. "SImple Hosting" is actually "Gandi Complicated Hosting" compared to typical shared hosting: no email, no cPanel, no "hosting panel" at all, but panels for the VPS, for the apache daemon, for PHP APC, and for whichever one database you choose. But it's a lot simpler than managing a full bare VPS, as it's a managed Platform as a Service, and sold as such as a PaaS. Given that a size S is only $2.50/month or the more-reasonable starter, a size M, is only $5/mo at that discount, it's a great deal. I've been running both some development and some client production sites on Simple Hosting for a few years now, and in many ways it beats the heck out of shared hosting. It's basically a tech-stack-specific, managed VPS on which you don't get root, but do get a lot of control otherwise. You get to take a half-price shot at this with your first domain registration, and no, it doesn't have to involve that domain.
Items 3 (1 year free SSL per domain) and 6 (1 year half-price Simple Hosting per customer) aren't tied to the domain which entitled you to them, nor to its period of registration. You just have to order the certificate before that registration period is up. I've gotten Gandi certs from a domain, only a few days before transferring that domain out, and the cert is good for a year, of course. I've used Simple Hosting promo coupons the same way, near the end of their 1-year validity.
Yep. Certified Old Fart here.
It's a referback to a famous saying and song of the Seventies, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
Gil Scott-Heron.
Kids these days. Probably don't get what either of the two basic meaning of "Tube" in YouTube mean either.
Either Obama has written off the Cuban vote in Miami or he has decided to concede FLA to the GOP.
You seriously think Obama cares who wins the next election? If he cares at all, it's probably to make sure that Hillary's chances of winning are even lower than they'd be if he hadn't antagonized the GOP by this move. And that just out of a "FU Clintons" perspective, not from any ideology at all.
Obama is done with elections. Well, at least until it's time for Malia or Sascha to run. He has no votes to "write off"
You're incredibly naive, or are part of the H-1B game on some side that benefits from it, if you believe that.
The simplest one is to hire Infosys or another big house, or a bunch of crappy "body shops", who can provide their own H-1Bs. Get rid of the $80/hr programmer, replace with a $50/hr billable programmer "contracted" from the Axis of Evil around I-287 in NJ or the one in northern VA, where the H-1B is paid $35/hr "prevailing wage" because the work gets redefined from senior to junior levels. Bottom line, "Americans" (as in US citizens and US permanent residents with green cards, committed to the USA already) are out of work, and a bunch of IT people from India are in their cubes. If from INFY or similar, there's a decent chance it's still a professional quality of work, though missing all the years of experience tossed aside in the purge, and likely at least some of the cultural and business context. If from the "body shops" with fake "diploma-mill graduate" H-1B's, the work quality goes to shit.
In which case, they hire back a few of the old laid of FTE workers, now desperate to get any professional work, back as "contractors" at crap pay, no right to unemployment, and no or shite benefits. "They can't do that by law" like hell, they can use their own in-house captive "consulting agency" to hire them as W-2 but not "real employees" of the parent firm, thus getting around the IRS regs on "are you a contractor or an employee". The IRS cares, because, taxes. The other agencies don't give a crap.
How come slashdotters always write it as HAM? It's ham radio, not HAM. Despite rumors, it does not stand for Highly Antique Morse.
OP clearly stated that she doesn't want to go to the senior center for internet - she wants to stay home.
Every bookseller of not-Kindle-format eBooks. Adobe Digital Editions is not Adobe OFF. For a tech site it's facepalmworthy how much of this discussion is by people unaware of that.
It's also not just library books. It's the DRM tech and server license infrastructure behind Google Books, Kobo Books, back in the day Sony, anybody who let you download your so-called "purchased" eBook for reading in other than their specific app or hardware.
Nook uses an odd variant without the ADE server and .acsm license file, but e-ink Nook and the original Nook Color are authorizable devices to read standard ADE-downloaded DRM EPUB books. My ancient Nook Color and Kobo e-ink readers are loaded with ADE-downloaded DRM books from Google Books and other "not device-native store" books. The Nook has all my Kobo book purchase's on it by that ADE method, though due to Nook's nonstandard non-acsm version of Adobe DRM, I can't put the nook purchase's on the Kobo.
It's also how you get mixed-stores books into on combined better reader app like Bluefire or Aldiko on Android. Download your .acsm license file From Google Play, Kobo, whomever. Open it in ADE, signed in with your adobe ID and your EPUB download's, authorized to that ID. Copy that EPUB to your mobile and if Aldiko or Bluefire is registered with your adobe ID you can read it.
Nothing to do with PDF format, though PDF files can be DRM'd with the same tech. Normally on modern reflowable EPUB.
So Adobe tracking non-DRM EPUB files is a big deal, because ADE is crucial for every non-circumventer in the anything-not-Kindle eBook world.
Recent college grads, at least back in the days when jobs were available, tend to live in apartment buildings in cities or in apartment complexes of townhouse or garden-apartment types of units in the suburbs. Neither of which typically have any access to one's own electrical outlet, nor in many cases dedicated-to-unit parking.
The entire electric car argument, however environmentally beneficial it may seem on surface, is dependent on everyone having their own "single-family home" with its garage to put the high-powered dedicated charging unit. Or at least their own dedicated parking spot, direclty by their unit, with its own electric outlet on their own power account, easily accessible yet secured against leechers. Physically located such that nobody's running cable-spaghetti of extension cords across lawns and pavement to reach their vehicles. Protected against the scourge of HOAs who tend to have shitfits if anybody paints their doorway, plants the wrong color flower, or even puts out an unapproved welcome mat, never mind runs an electric cord five feet to their car. Indemnified against nuisance but financially disastrous (even to defend against if winning) lawsuits by somebody claiming their entire future livelihood was ruined by tripping on the cord, thus $MILLIONS.
That's not to mention the relatively large group of "woo-woos" who will belive that "car charging radiation is causing cancer" or some such dribble. But I repeat myself, I already mentioned "HOAs" and you can bet that any Homeowners Association has at least one or two "condo commandos" who are "woo-woos" of the Alex Jones / Natural News / Jesse Ventura nature. For you "I'd never live in a place that had an HOA" folks, well aren't you just very special libertarian snowflakes. Wide swathes of the USA are dominated by HOAs including so-called "single-family" home developments. Condo apartments and townhouses are often the first "affordable" home ownership options, and all come with HOAs or equivalent. Your family, personal, and employment opportunity issues might make your "Off to a non-HOA freehold" fantasy just that, a fantasy. I'm talking about Real People here, not Slashdotters or Randian politburo members.
Not to mention the renters. Who in the USA can't do squat without landlord approval. Even things with clear Federal Preemption to allow renter rights. like the decades-old FCC TV Antenna and Dish rulings, are widely ignored, and your landlord can make your life hell if you try to push your "rights".
I honestly believe these "what's it like at home?" issues are bigger blockers to all-electric (Tesla) or electric-primary plug-in-hybrid vehicles (this Fisker, Chevrolet Volt) than anything about range or charging stations at destinations.
"Medium reports..." makes as much sense as saying "WordPress.com reports..." or for that matter, "Geocities reports..."
Medium is a self-publishing fancy hipster bloggy vehicle. It doesn't have a staff of journalists, nor even pseudo-journalists nor curators like Timothy. It's a prettified competitor to wordpress.com for the hipsters, while being slightly less self-indulgently vapid than Thought Catalog. Slightly.
"Bolt reports, on their blog at Medium, because they can't be arsed to put one on their own website,..." would be more accurate. Except they do actually have a blog on their own website, and this same article is on it. Though their "blog" on their site is just an index page of posts on their hipster Medium account.
Medium doesn't report squat, comprende?
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
If your intention is to advertise only to the US market, which is what I assume from your example, you're doing it wrong if you are even showing AdWords to audiences in Europe. Unless, of course, they are using a VPN or proxy or other means to browse with a US-based IP address.
Heck, you can target down to individual zipcodes, Congressional districts, counties, Metro areas, and a bunch more ways. No excuse other than ignorance if you or your clients ads are running in an entirely different continent.
If you want your ads for your US company to appear in Europe as well as in USA, then you need to create a sufficient AdWords daily budget, plus perhaps do time of day targeting. Or to be better at it, have separate AdWords campaigns for each geo, with separate budgets, even if you're using the same ads.
There's a lot I don't like about AdWords, including how Google loves to split functionality into different menus and services and levels of products to create massive confusion about how to use them. Like WTF isn't there one single thing that has all my ad budgets, my analytics, my webmaster tools, my everything-about-it, all in one damn place? Or to use another, non-ads example, Google Voice can be used as VOIP from a computer, but only by a not-well-explained combo of Google Voice + Google Chat + Gmail page + Google Talk plugin, something no non-technical "normal person" will ever discover. Some of that dysfunctional UX comes from Google's only-engineers culture, but on the advertising products I think some of it is also deliberate ambiguity so you will inadvertantly spend more. Same reason that in USA and many other jurisdictions, Google will not let you prepay for a fixed spend, only postpay - they like that you can't quite control it, and the house always has the edge.
But they do provide geotargeting tools, rather good ones. So no excuse if your ads are running in the wrong locales.
That doesn't make the sleazy service abusing AdWords any less evil themselves. But if the ads are eaten up by wrong geolocations, whether from that sleazy service or just from legitimate browsing clicks in the wrong countries, that is the advertiser's own fault for not using the control Google gives them.
Netcraft confirms it.
Sometimes I wonder if I was the only one paying attention in Civics and Social Studies. Cliff notes version:
1) The United States is not a Democracy, it's a Republic. ...
Oh jeez this again? The classic GOP / Libertarian / Tea weak-minds binary thinking that gets the meaning of both "republic" and "democracy" wrong.
The US is (supposed to be) a democracy. Just ask any living current or ex-President. Look at any respected list of "countries that are democracies". You do the research. It's simple.
The US is a republic. As in, "not a monarchy".
Republics can be democracies or they can be dictatorships, and pretty much anything in between. There is also nothing in the word "republic" which implies "representative". Just ask North Koreans.
Democracies can be direct democracies, like ancient Athens or a current-day New England Town Meeting or California ballot initiative. Or they can be representative. There is nothing in the word "democracy" that implies "direct-only".
"Democracy" and "Republic" are orthogonal concepts, they are not antonyms. Even when the US Senate was appointed, it was appointed by state legislatures which were comprised of elected representatives, who were elected by democratic elections. As opposed to being appointed by the monarch or being passed down via aristocratic houses.
Actually nowadays we are closer to that, with the money=speech nonsense and an increasingly distractable and distracted public who will vote whichever way paid media brainwashes them to do. House Clinton, House Bush, House Kennedy, and the upstart House Paul.
You may flip the order of the following words around, depending on what you want to emphasize, change some from adjectives to nouns, but all these terms are needed to properly define what the US system of government is:
Constitutional Federal Republic governed as a Representative Democracy,
or a
Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic.
Choose your emphasis, but you cannot leave any of those terms out without misrepresenting how the system is designed.
Leaving any of that out is at best, ignorant point-missing. Usually it is deliberate agitprop.
The sky isn't blue, it's where birds fly. What you are saying is every bit as nonsensical and more dangerous.
Typical slashdot bad editors. Fastest in Norway != fastest in world.
I now live in a small beach town in Uruguay, on a dirt road, and I got a free upgrade to fibre-to-home, which is being extended to every home in Uruguay. Time for me to get my bogus submission ready for "Uruguay has the best internet in the world". Just because a country is socialist on basic services, and extends fiber to everywhere, does not make it the best in the world. Makes it damn good, but "best" or as hyperbolically stated, "the highest quality Internet experience in the world" requires proof. As others have mentioned, that requires specific speeds, pings, and total transfer allowances, before making such a claim.
Better than the Comcast/ATT/Verizon cabal does not mean "best". Despite what all you US-centric folks may think.
What he said. The truth is, I never had cable TV for those reasons, and this: Remember, the deal was commercials = free TV. Cable started out with no commercials (yes, it did - except for the network channels), but they slowly began adding them in, until now, where there are more commercials on cable channels than on network television. Of course, TV watchers are a docile group to begin with...
When was that ever "the deal" as opposed to "what you wanted to be the deal"? Cable used to be called CATV, for "Community Antenna TV" and was primarily a way to bring television programming into areas that were geographically un-served by TV, usually due to actual geological / topographic reasons. Places like Ithaca, NY, or Breckenridge, Colorado, where no way in hell is a TV signal from Syracuse or Denver is getting into them through the hills down into the valleys. Later, urban canyons like NYC where not everyone had the ability to put up any kind of outdoor antenna - not because of regulations as much as real estate realities, and indoor antennas suffered from horrible multipath. I've lived in all three of the places I mentioned, laughably tried to get OTA TV in them, and have been a cable subscriber in all of them at one point or another. Getting "content" without commercials was never the deal - it was getting content, at all.
Later, the idea of "cable channels" started taking off, and what we now think of as the "basic tier" of cable stations began to show up. Watching "USA Night Flight" back in the day, then the launch of MTV with actual music videos. Along with the "Arts and Entertainment Network" that had plays, classical concerts, opera, not dysfunctional yahoos. Whether or not these extra stations had commercials, there was never any "deal" that "your cable bill pays for the content", CATV was a distribution method. Then the "pay tv" channels like HBO became popular. You can't pay for HBO without paying first for the "CATV" distribution subscription. In 2014 that's a dumb idea, but back then it wasn't - you were paying for the pipe, and now that you had the pipe, you could also pay for premium content. Given that "pay tv" is either "pay by having commercials" or "pay by having a CONTENT fee", I don't see a difference.
Your strawman argument against cable is flawed. You never understood the deal. You weren't paying for the pizza, you were paying for the delivery of the pizza.
How'd that "enforced separation" work out with Network Rail and the train services that replaced British Railways?
Comment is full of wrong.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Time Warner is some ongoing licensing royalty from the "Roadrunner" intellectual property "beep beep", but otherwise they have no connection at all. Next month it will be 5 years since TWC was fully independent of Time Warner. Try to keep up.
In fact, "Time" likely won't be part of Time Warner before long either, in that they're looking to spin off that group. But the Cable Company is already long gone away from Time Warner (oh, and AOL isn't part of it either, in case you're still confused). Thus TWC, which Comcast wants to buy, does not own any cable program networks at all. No CNN, no TBS, no Cartoon Network, no HBO. That's all part of the "Warner" part of "Time Warner", not any part of the cable company.
You're equally ignorant about the scope of Comcast's fully-owned NBC Universal, which is ridiculously larger than "NBC/NHL/MLB". I assume that you meant NHL Network and MLB Network, not the actual sports leagues. MLB network is only partly-owned by NBC Universal's NBC Sports Group; Time Warner Cable (OK, that's Comcast too if this goes through), DirecTV, Cox Communications are the other minority owners, while Major League Baseball itself is the majority owner. NBC owns 5.44% per Wikipedia. On NHL Network (USA), NBC is the only minority owner, but has just 15.6% with the National Hockey League owning the rest.
Meanwhile you ignore: USA Network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, NBC Sports Channel (formerly Universal Sports), Oxygen, E!, SyFy, Esquire Network, UniversalHD, and a bunch more networks that are both on -2, -3, etc. OTA digital subchannels and on cable like Chiller, Cloo, Sprout, etc. That's just the NBC Universal Cable Group. Don't forget all the OnO (Owned and Operated) NBC TV stations - far fewer than the overall NBC broadcast network total affiliates, but the big-market ones like LA, SF, NYC, and many more are owned by NBC itself. Which means owned by Comcast.
Plus, Universal Studios.
Oh, and Jay Leno just left NBC. Yes, again. Try to keep up.
Even more wrong, with your: "the fight has... been with... Viacom..." in that the big recurrent CBS fights are with CBS, which is way more than CBS old-people-TV network. Viacom and CBS split apart years ago, which means all those "Viacom" TV networks and properties? They belong to CBS (which also owns CNET, ZDNET and lots of online properties too). In fact, CBS now owns "Star Trek". Which is why my paragraph-opener sentence should be read Shatnerized. Yes, the network that turned down Star Trek in the 1960s, saying "We have one of our own we like better - Lost in Space", now is the owner of the "Star Trek" intellectual property. Paramount, which is part of Viacom, has absolutely nothing to do with "Star Trek" other than having some remaining rights to it as a motion-picture-only property. Many of those "Viacom" channels you're thinking about? They're now CBS. Such as the "Showtime Networks" group of channels. The MTV Group is still Viacom.
You really need to follow what is actually happening rather than that outdated Facebook "meme" infographic of "These Six Companies Own All Our Media".
That's why I have three "hot" bank accounts.
One for ATM transactions/meatspace debit card purchases, one for bill payment, and one for cyberspace debit card purchases.
If your bank doesn't make this easy to manage, switch banks.
Your plan is flawed. Sure, you have three accounts but your comment "If your bank doesn't make this easy to manage, switch banks" implies they are all at the same bank. Which subjects you to many other risks you're likely ignoring:
1. Person with stolen card may be able to social-engineer access to other accounts or online credentials and thus access the other accounts.
2. Your bank may choose to do a "courtesy overdraft transfer" from you other account, to cover thief's new laptop and vacation.
3. An "unusual transaction" on the one account, if unusual enough, may trigger the bank's fraud-bots to put a freeze on all your accounts, at least temporarily. Some stupid institutions do "freeze everything, no messages" as an attention-getting attempt at reaching you, and no, they don't disclose up front that they do that, so you can't "switch banks" based on looking out for that stupidity.
4. Some dispute with a big-enough jerk person, company, or organization may lead to a lawsuit or garnishment against you, and nowadays many banks have an immediate "fire the customer" response to that action. Again, not something they disclose up front. Condo Board (HOA) from Hell got me fired as a customer from a "good local bank". Luckily it wasn't my only bank/bank-alternative.
A much better idea, if you want segregation of accounts between physical world use, online use, and billpay use, is to use three different institutions entirely, picking carefully both for minimal Banksterism and for free external transfer services.
For example, I have (US-centric because that's the topic):
1. A Credit Union membership, in an institution that pays 4% interest (yes, four percent I didn't drop zeros or decimals) on the first $500 in checking and separately on the first $500 in savings. Has totally free 2-3 day ACH "push" to transfer money to any other bank or bank-like-thing (such as a prepaid debit card with a "bank account number" and "routing number" or to "pull" from any other bank-like account. Only if I initiate it. Overnight for a $2 fee. Both checking and savings there to maximize interest, have their Debit MasterCard, have their Bill-Pay but have no current payees set up, deliberately do not have any actual paper checks and never have on this account.
2. A "checking alternative" account with no minimum deposit, no minimum balance requirement, from an online discount brokerage firm (I don't have an investment account with them, just this cash management account.) Has a Visa debit card no added fees for foreign transactions over the Visa conversion fee, full rebate of any ATM-owner surcharge anywhere in the world, deposited back next banking day, no ATM-use fees of their own. Has free printed checks and free check refills. Has free BillPay, free external transfers by ACH. Pushes to my other bank-like institutions typically arrive next banking day despite their saying it is 2 days. Pulls from other accounts usually 2 days.
3. A high-interest (as US interests rates go) online-only savings account with no checking, no bill-pay, no nothing but can be the ACH target for direct deposit from Elance, PayPal, etc. for freelance work, is a transfer source and target for accounts 1) and 2) at those other institutions, has its own ACH external transfer capabilities (typically 2-3 days on pushes, out, a couple more days for funds availability on pulls into it - so I usually push from the other accounts which makes it instantly available when it gets there). Also tied to an online purchases rebates cashback program (Upromise.com - oriented towards savings for students but anybody can use it and get the cashback rebates, no matter what form of payment used, into their Upromise account and then transferred into this bank account.)
It's everything that isn't Kindle. Including the Nook, Sony, Kobo, iRiver. Everything.
It's not just PDF, nor even primarily PDF. It's reflowable standard EPUB. EPUB with Adobe DRM is the standard commercial ebook format for the "rest of the world that isn't Amazon". Barnes & Noble Nook (now mostly Microsoft Nook). Kobo, which is number 2 in much of the world. Google Play Books. eReaders from Kobo, B&N, iRiver, white-box Chinese brands affordable in emerging markets, even iBooks own Appleized format, have Adobe DRM inside. eReading apps from third parties like the well-respected Aldiko Reader and Bluefire reader use Adobe DRM. Only Kindle doesn't use it.
I've got Google Play Books and Kobo books on my Nook Color early-gen ereading tablet, because of Adobe DRM being near-universal. Have Google Play books on my Kobo WiFi e-ink eReader and on my newer Kobo AuraHD e-ink eReader. On my Android phone, whitebox cheap 10" tablet, and Kobo Arc (Android tablet with Kobo's shell but full open Google Play Store Jellybean tablet), I have the Aldiko app so that I can combine my Kobo and my Google Play books into a single library rather than reading in separate apps per bookstore. (Nooks can sideload and read standard EPUB/AdobeDRM but Nook books can't be read outside of Nook hardware or apps due to B&N weird variant AdobeDRM).
Adobe is breaking all this relatively open ecosystem. Sure, it's DRM, but it's an "anything except Kindle" open system. Adobe is screwing over all the people who bought into the non-Kindle commercial ebook ecosystem over the past half-decade or so.
I'm writing from the perspective of a normal human, not a /. geek. Normals don't break DRM because they don't know how, they don't even know it's a thing. They don't buy only non-DRM books, because they want to buy books from their favorite authors, not obscure corners of the web. Even many self-published books, if distributed through "normal channels" carry Adobe DRM (or Amazon DRM). They might, if they read the very simple info on the Kobo, Google Play, and other ecosystem-member web pages, have realized they can buy a book from Google and read it on their Sony eReader, buy a book from Kobo on sale and read it on their original Nook or Nook front-light newer e-ink reader. They may be all over Goodreads and ereader websites where there are lots of how-tos about just that, but they are nowhere near Slashdot. Nor near Linux. And O'Reilly tech books are irrelevant. As are, to most readers, Baen and Tor SF.
Hell, I don't want to deal with this myself, and I know how or can easily figure it out. Just going to the "Download Adobe DRM" link at Kobo or Google Play, getting the .ACSM (Adobe Content Server Mechanism) license file, double-clicking on the download and having previously-installed Adobe Digital Editions get the DRM-unlocked-to-my-ID content was simple. Bang, read it on my PC in Adobe Digital Editions, or tether my Android phone/tablet to drag into Aldiko or Bluefire, tether my Kobo eReaders (e-ink actual ereaders for readers) and drag it into their libraries, tether the Nook Color and drag it into its library.
Now I'd' have to go break DRM on all those files and future purchases. But that would be wrong...
I like your pricing idea. Add to it a bulk-hours discount rate for purchasing viewing time above a threshold amount, and it would be near-perfect. If all the content was readily available.
I wish news/opinion organizations would do that too, instead of everybody and their dog putting up their own paywall. I'm not going to purchase separate subscriptions to the NY Times, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Time, and every podunk paper. But I might want to read more than their monthly free-with-registration allowances on any given month. More, but not enough from any one of them to make an individual subscription to that particular site worthwhile, and the full set of full-pop subs is unaffordable. But if I could pay a reasonable "News / Opinion Consortium" subscription that gave me maybe 120 article views a month to any mix of their several dozen participating properties, for maybe $15-20/mo, I'd be all over it.
I recognize the irony. For each of our pricing ideas, there would need to be an organization somewhat like MPAA/RIAA, and mine for news requires something like a "Pay Cable Tiered Package" concept but mashed-up with a paywall meter for total "News Tier" usage.
But if the pricing were reasonable rather than rapacious, I think it would work.