In just the same way, you could tell Google to just do search and advertising and forget all that peripheral "loss leader" stuff like fancy browsers, mobile OSs and cars that drive themselves. But I don't think that would be good advice. The problem with MS is not that they're playing in too many games, it's simply that they're not winning them anymore. There might soon come a day when they actually make some great products, but nobody will buy them. This would be so ironic because about ten years ago, they made rather bad products, and everybody bought them. Even their icon on Slashdot changed. Google is the new Borg. Its greatest innovation is that now we happily volunteer for assimilation. BillG and SteveB used to have to bully us into it.
...if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product...
Not really. They're paying that money in order to be able to fight MSIE/Bing with two sharp weapons instead of one. If they cut off Firefox's oxygen and pumped the $100 million into Chrome, the pressure on MSIE would shrink and not grow. So this absolutely is a wise investment.
Ok, I've returned from a long trip through the Wikipedia and it turns out that you're right. I think I was talking about the AVR, which started operation in 1961. The story of the THTR is a sad one, especially the costs of decomissioning it. (Although to be fair, the THTR is basically also a 60's design; construction started in 1971, which means that final plans must have been made long before that). I don't know enough about reactor engineering to judge whether the problems of graphite dust buildup are fundamental to the design or whether we have since discovered better solutions. The inherent safety of the pebble/helium design is still a very attractive feature, and many people seem to think we can do it better. So yes, this was an important lesson. It's sad that it turned out to cost so much, but like I said in my last post: When the goal is something important, we can't let ourselves be deterred by early mistakes. I think the analogy with stopping the space program when our first rocket exploded is still a good one. Maybe that's exactly what we would have done if the space program were getting started today. But we're all glad that we kept at it. Nuclear power is an answer to an even more important problem, and I think we should give ourselves a few generations to work out the bugs.
I would certainly prefer this to what Germany is doing today, which is building new, gigantic coal burning plants while refusing to close their old ones. Some info on the scale of the coal boom is here, but I remember reading a much more detailed article about it in the Spiegel. It coincides nicely with the exit from atomic power, and yet everyone knows that it will kill more people (thousands instead of zero) and do much more to damage the global climate. It puzzles me immensely that a country which is afraid to plant GM crops and use nuclear power is not afraid of new, record size powerplants that burn brown coal! I thought Germans would act more responsibly. One thing I appreciate about the Germans I know is that shame makes them act more responsibly (this works less well in here in the US), and this new coal boom to replace their nuclear powerplants really is something that Germans should be ashamed of. There is no uglier way to make power today. OK, sorry for the rant, but it's not completely off topic here.
In this case, you're right. On the other hand, France makes almost 80% of its electricity by nuclear fission, and I don't think they're hysterical about how vaccines are making their babies stupid. I don't know how they are with homeopathy, though Europe in general is more susceptible to such quackery than I initially expected.
What you are talking about are research reactors built in the 60s. They were used for research, and the one that started operating too hot did so because it was being used to research situations that wouldn't occur in an operational reactor. For example, they were testing out many different kinds of fuel pebbles, because they didn't have the computers back then to model what would happen, so they just had to jam them in and see what happens. Yes, problems can occur in that kind of research, it's lucky that nobody got hurt. Anyway, now it's 50 years later and our designs, along with our understanding, have improved a lot. I'm glad that Americans aren't saying in 2011 that because a 1961 rocket design failed, we shouldn't build more rockets.
Pebble bed reactors are very nice, but I'd prefer we really go for it with traveling wave reactors. They're just so damn beautiful, elegant and efficient that it's worth our while to get them right.
I hope there aren't people here trying to minimize the seriousness of what happened at the Fukushima plant, but let's put this in perspective: The bill being debated now in the US congress is supposed to reduce the emissions from old coal plants, which is estimated to prevent 11,000 deaths per year. Yeah, 11,000! That's just from people breathing pollution, and doesn't take into account the catastrophes that happen when coal is mined. It also doesn't take into account all the damage to the planet's climate from all those tons of CO2. Now compare this to Fukushima, the second largest nuclear accident of human history. It turns out that the death toll of this catastrophe so far is zero; hopefully it will remain that way. Another way to put it: if nuclear power killed 10,000 people, it would be the world's worst nuclear catastrophe, by far. When coal kills 10,000 people, we call that a "better than average year" for coal deaths. I'm all for improving our sources of electricity to more optimal ones, but in doing this, the plants we should shut down first are the ones that are hurting us and the planet the most. And clearly, those are coal plants. When we're no longer burning coal, we can start thinking about replacing our nuclear and gas-burning plants, which are also not great, but nowhere near as terrible as coal.
I think it's like this: 2012 is the year of phone ensmartening - which is to say, a big proportion of the world's people will upgrade from a dumbphone to a smaprtphone. Many of them will do it with the attitude "I don't need a damn smartphone anyway, but if it's easier to text with that on-screen keyboard thingie, and my carrier will basically cover the costs, I might as well. So what's my carrier offering me for real cheap?" And you know very well that it will be some crappy Android handset. So yes, I see Android making much bigger gains in 2012 just because it's the default upgrade for billions. The iPhone simply isn't. You have to want one, you don't "get upgraded" to one.
I understand why you think you want this, but peer-reviewed research shows that what you think you want is often quite different from what you want. One stable piece of advertising research is the datum that emotion-evoking ads strongly influence opinion, and yet the people thus influenced always insist that the degree of influence was exactly zero. ("I made up my own mind based on the facts alone.") They're just wrong, and this research shows that we are completely in the dark about what's behind our very own decisions. That said, all this comes in degrees, and we can learn to see through some of the common tricks that work on people. Some people actually do make decisions partly based on reviews in Consumer Reports. Many people respond to arguments made in a personal way. But nobody should suggest that the struggle about decisions some internal "reason v. passion" fight - as if we have some pre-defined passions inside of us which occasionally come out when we impulsively buy impractical cars. No, passions can very easily be implanted into us from outside (say, by ads), and these get rationalized to appear like passions that we've always had but only recently discovered. This especially applies to politics, which is why the award for the best advertising campaign of 2007/8 went to the Obama political campaign. (But of course, I saw through all that hype and made my own decision to support Obama, based on the facts alone.)
I've actually seen this happen for real. It happened to a Republican in the neighboring district. Some PAC bought an attack ad against his opponent, claiming he used campaign funds for phone sex. The story was quickly and publicly debunked, but the incredibly stupid ads just kept running. It didn't take long for the whole district to think this Republican candidate was a complete asshole for not pulling the ads after they were debunked, but he couldn't if he tried. They were bought by a SuperPAC. He wasn't allowed to coordinate with them. All he could say is that he doesn't want the ads to run, but it was the PAC's call about whether to pull them. They didn't, and the ads really hurt the Republican candidate.
Yeah, but you know very well that the policies back then (many years ago) don't apply to ATI practices with new hardware, which is what this article is about. For starters, it's a different company now. Also, their relationship with the OSS community has changed a lot. Maybe they're not going back and fixing 7 year old problems, but that doesn't mean that their new stuff has the same problems. I'm not saying that everything is peachy now with the drivers, but I'm saying that I see too many people base their conclusions on what they know to be outdated reasons.
Which version are you having trouble with? Are you sure that you're not just mindlessly repeating a 7 year old meme? Are you also one of the people who switched to Chrome because "Firefox uses too much memory" when simple tests show that Chrome uses more? I know it feels like you're a part of the club when you repeat what you hear from the other club members. But don't confuse groupthink with truth - especially when it comes to the quickly-changing world of tech.
Without that caviat, it's pretty misleading to call this a particle, when all we've really measured was an excitation state of already familiar particles. So do I have it right that even this combination of quarks has been observed before, and what's new is that we've never seen them so excited before? Well, good. I mean, surely we knew it was possible for the thing to reach a higher excitation state and we had a decent idea about what energy the whole system would have at that state. What I'd like to know now is this: Just how much of a surprise is this measurement? Did the standard model predict the precise energy we measured, or does the measurement add new detail or precision to the standard model? Gah, actual science is hard, but that can't be helped. Science journalism is shallow and uninformative, but that can - which makes it pretty frustrating. (This is one field where blogs are really way ahead of the traditional media.)
Really great link - important enough to warrant appending it to the summary by the/. editors. This directly answers the first question I had when I read the abstract (and unfortunately asked in a lower thread).
The second link is hosed, but the abstract says they discovered "a new chi_b state" of quarkonium. This is well beyond my physics comfort zone, and maybe there is no real difference between states and particles in this realm, but intuitively it seems like there should be one. In my, case a hardon is not something I have now, but when I get one, it's not like I get a new organ. It's just a temporary state of a pre-existing organ. Sorry for not using a car analogy; I'm just trying to understand how physicists think of the difference between states and things, or if this dichotomy even makes sense on that level.
From the same course you should have learned that advertising works, and works really fucking well. There is nothing personal about it, in fact, it's the least personal sort of communication that you can imagine. The sort of grassroots buzz you mention is worth something in politics, but its power is almost negligible compared to the power of the political machine, whose #1 tool is the 30 second TV commercial. Believe me, politicians may not be smart, but the people who coordinate their campaigns certainly are, and they know how to spend their resources effectively. TV is their #1 tool for a good reason, and don't think that they don't have an army Ph.D. sociologists and social psychologists advising them. Their budget for running focus groups and surveys put the whole social science research budget of UCSC to shame. The sad truth is that people are often very ignorant about what influences their decisions. [Lots of good research shows this.] They prefer to think that they're voting for X because a cousin who felt passionately about X convinced them, when in fact they may be voting for x because of an especially ugly anti-Y attack ad.
It's very important that you understand that a PAC or this SuperPAC is not the same thing as the Democratic Party. In fact, they are legally barred from coordinating their activities. So even if you think this is a dirty move, it's not fair to blame the Democratic Party or any of its candidates for this. In fact, they can't even legally tell this SuperPAC to knock it off - that would be coordination, and it's not allowed. No, I think this is a stunt by some misguided well-wishers. Sadly, both parties seem to have more than their fair share of these. (BTW, every Democratic partisan I've ever met or heard of is praying to Santa Claus that Newt gets nominated. Something stinks about this whole story.),
Testing is one thing. I get it that every test can't succeed. Planes in their testing phase have an "X" in their model identification number, to and they are not expected to have the reliability of planes in regular service. But here we are talking about the F-22, a plane that according to Wikipedia was designed in the 80s, started production in 1997 and officially entered service six years ago. The eight years between 1997 and entry into service in 2005 was the time when the bugs were supposed to be worked out. As of 2011 its status is "out of production". So we're not talking about some newborn program having toothing pains. We're talking about a retiree program that cost us $66,700,000,000 and so far managed to kill only Americans.
Yeah, it sounds like whoever made these things and charged the government billions had really screwed up. Luckily, they are never going to get another multibillion dollar contract from the government, right? I mean, if they did, that could screw that one up just as badly, and then where would we be? We're lucky that we don't live in some communist country where arms manufacturers just get fat from the handouts of the government without any real accountability.
I'm serious here. I don't think it's the state's business to protect the feelings of people. The state should protect their rights, and there is no such thing as a right to not have your feelings hurt. Just think of how horribly you can fuck someone up, and scar them for life, by telling them that never loved them and that you are disgusted by their various inadequacies. You can do all this for transparently vicious reasons, and doing it might well be deeply immoral, but never in a million years would I want that sort of immorality to be illegal. Can you imagine if we had to police people's feelings? What I'm saying is that in every state that I would ever want to live in, there is such a thing as the right to be a jerk - even a very cruel jerk. Of course the state must guarantee certain rights, like the right to bodily integrity, property, and some extent of protection from harassment and wrongful slander. These, however, leave lots of room for hurt feelings - and that's as it should be.
Funny. I often say I hate ads, yet I subscribe to advertisement "newsletters" from Newegg, Musician's Friend, and others. And I think that's as it should be. People should choose by an opt-in mechanism which ads they want to be exposed to, and advertisers should be working hard to make their ads relevant and good enough to make people want to see them. If they fail at this, why should anyone pity them for being blocked?
What you said about the smart way to use NoScript is exactly right, but it's also very labor intensive. Wouldn't it be nice if there was such a thing as NoScript+ that allowed you to subscribe to whitelists of valuable and harmless scripts?
Do you really think that someone who learned about browser extensions, found Adblock+ and installed it suddenly becomes so helpless that they can't tick off a box in the configuration menu? I agree that the typical internet user is not technically savvy, but the typical Adblock+ user is certainly savvy enough to know how to use a configuration gui.
Slashdot Mirror
In just the same way, you could tell Google to just do search and advertising and forget all that peripheral "loss leader" stuff like fancy browsers, mobile OSs and cars that drive themselves. But I don't think that would be good advice. The problem with MS is not that they're playing in too many games, it's simply that they're not winning them anymore. There might soon come a day when they actually make some great products, but nobody will buy them. This would be so ironic because about ten years ago, they made rather bad products, and everybody bought them. Even their icon on Slashdot changed. Google is the new Borg. Its greatest innovation is that now we happily volunteer for assimilation. BillG and SteveB used to have to bully us into it.
...if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product...
Not really. They're paying that money in order to be able to fight MSIE/Bing with two sharp weapons instead of one. If they cut off Firefox's oxygen and pumped the $100 million into Chrome, the pressure on MSIE would shrink and not grow. So this absolutely is a wise investment.
Thank you! That was so brief, clear and informative! If only real science journalism would sound more like your comment...
Ok, I've returned from a long trip through the Wikipedia and it turns out that you're right. I think I was talking about the AVR, which started operation in 1961. The story of the THTR is a sad one, especially the costs of decomissioning it. (Although to be fair, the THTR is basically also a 60's design; construction started in 1971, which means that final plans must have been made long before that). I don't know enough about reactor engineering to judge whether the problems of graphite dust buildup are fundamental to the design or whether we have since discovered better solutions. The inherent safety of the pebble/helium design is still a very attractive feature, and many people seem to think we can do it better. So yes, this was an important lesson. It's sad that it turned out to cost so much, but like I said in my last post: When the goal is something important, we can't let ourselves be deterred by early mistakes. I think the analogy with stopping the space program when our first rocket exploded is still a good one. Maybe that's exactly what we would have done if the space program were getting started today. But we're all glad that we kept at it. Nuclear power is an answer to an even more important problem, and I think we should give ourselves a few generations to work out the bugs.
I would certainly prefer this to what Germany is doing today, which is building new, gigantic coal burning plants while refusing to close their old ones. Some info on the scale of the coal boom is here, but I remember reading a much more detailed article about it in the Spiegel. It coincides nicely with the exit from atomic power, and yet everyone knows that it will kill more people (thousands instead of zero) and do much more to damage the global climate. It puzzles me immensely that a country which is afraid to plant GM crops and use nuclear power is not afraid of new, record size powerplants that burn brown coal! I thought Germans would act more responsibly. One thing I appreciate about the Germans I know is that shame makes them act more responsibly (this works less well in here in the US), and this new coal boom to replace their nuclear powerplants really is something that Germans should be ashamed of. There is no uglier way to make power today. OK, sorry for the rant, but it's not completely off topic here.
In this case, you're right. On the other hand, France makes almost 80% of its electricity by nuclear fission, and I don't think they're hysterical about how vaccines are making their babies stupid. I don't know how they are with homeopathy, though Europe in general is more susceptible to such quackery than I initially expected.
What you are talking about are research reactors built in the 60s. They were used for research, and the one that started operating too hot did so because it was being used to research situations that wouldn't occur in an operational reactor. For example, they were testing out many different kinds of fuel pebbles, because they didn't have the computers back then to model what would happen, so they just had to jam them in and see what happens. Yes, problems can occur in that kind of research, it's lucky that nobody got hurt. Anyway, now it's 50 years later and our designs, along with our understanding, have improved a lot. I'm glad that Americans aren't saying in 2011 that because a 1961 rocket design failed, we shouldn't build more rockets.
Pebble bed reactors are very nice, but I'd prefer we really go for it with traveling wave reactors. They're just so damn beautiful, elegant and efficient that it's worth our while to get them right.
I hope there aren't people here trying to minimize the seriousness of what happened at the Fukushima plant, but let's put this in perspective: The bill being debated now in the US congress is supposed to reduce the emissions from old coal plants, which is estimated to prevent 11,000 deaths per year. Yeah, 11,000! That's just from people breathing pollution, and doesn't take into account the catastrophes that happen when coal is mined. It also doesn't take into account all the damage to the planet's climate from all those tons of CO2. Now compare this to Fukushima, the second largest nuclear accident of human history. It turns out that the death toll of this catastrophe so far is zero; hopefully it will remain that way. Another way to put it: if nuclear power killed 10,000 people, it would be the world's worst nuclear catastrophe, by far. When coal kills 10,000 people, we call that a "better than average year" for coal deaths. I'm all for improving our sources of electricity to more optimal ones, but in doing this, the plants we should shut down first are the ones that are hurting us and the planet the most. And clearly, those are coal plants. When we're no longer burning coal, we can start thinking about replacing our nuclear and gas-burning plants, which are also not great, but nowhere near as terrible as coal.
I think it's like this: 2012 is the year of phone ensmartening - which is to say, a big proportion of the world's people will upgrade from a dumbphone to a smaprtphone. Many of them will do it with the attitude "I don't need a damn smartphone anyway, but if it's easier to text with that on-screen keyboard thingie, and my carrier will basically cover the costs, I might as well. So what's my carrier offering me for real cheap?" And you know very well that it will be some crappy Android handset. So yes, I see Android making much bigger gains in 2012 just because it's the default upgrade for billions. The iPhone simply isn't. You have to want one, you don't "get upgraded" to one.
I understand why you think you want this, but peer-reviewed research shows that what you think you want is often quite different from what you want. One stable piece of advertising research is the datum that emotion-evoking ads strongly influence opinion, and yet the people thus influenced always insist that the degree of influence was exactly zero. ("I made up my own mind based on the facts alone.") They're just wrong, and this research shows that we are completely in the dark about what's behind our very own decisions. That said, all this comes in degrees, and we can learn to see through some of the common tricks that work on people. Some people actually do make decisions partly based on reviews in Consumer Reports. Many people respond to arguments made in a personal way. But nobody should suggest that the struggle about decisions some internal "reason v. passion" fight - as if we have some pre-defined passions inside of us which occasionally come out when we impulsively buy impractical cars. No, passions can very easily be implanted into us from outside (say, by ads), and these get rationalized to appear like passions that we've always had but only recently discovered. This especially applies to politics, which is why the award for the best advertising campaign of 2007/8 went to the Obama political campaign. (But of course, I saw through all that hype and made my own decision to support Obama, based on the facts alone.)
I've actually seen this happen for real. It happened to a Republican in the neighboring district. Some PAC bought an attack ad against his opponent, claiming he used campaign funds for phone sex. The story was quickly and publicly debunked, but the incredibly stupid ads just kept running. It didn't take long for the whole district to think this Republican candidate was a complete asshole for not pulling the ads after they were debunked, but he couldn't if he tried. They were bought by a SuperPAC. He wasn't allowed to coordinate with them. All he could say is that he doesn't want the ads to run, but it was the PAC's call about whether to pull them. They didn't, and the ads really hurt the Republican candidate.
Yeah, but you know very well that the policies back then (many years ago) don't apply to ATI practices with new hardware, which is what this article is about. For starters, it's a different company now. Also, their relationship with the OSS community has changed a lot. Maybe they're not going back and fixing 7 year old problems, but that doesn't mean that their new stuff has the same problems. I'm not saying that everything is peachy now with the drivers, but I'm saying that I see too many people base their conclusions on what they know to be outdated reasons.
Which version are you having trouble with? Are you sure that you're not just mindlessly repeating a 7 year old meme? Are you also one of the people who switched to Chrome because "Firefox uses too much memory" when simple tests show that Chrome uses more? I know it feels like you're a part of the club when you repeat what you hear from the other club members. But don't confuse groupthink with truth - especially when it comes to the quickly-changing world of tech.
Without that caviat, it's pretty misleading to call this a particle, when all we've really measured was an excitation state of already familiar particles. So do I have it right that even this combination of quarks has been observed before, and what's new is that we've never seen them so excited before? Well, good. I mean, surely we knew it was possible for the thing to reach a higher excitation state and we had a decent idea about what energy the whole system would have at that state. What I'd like to know now is this: Just how much of a surprise is this measurement? Did the standard model predict the precise energy we measured, or does the measurement add new detail or precision to the standard model? Gah, actual science is hard, but that can't be helped. Science journalism is shallow and uninformative, but that can - which makes it pretty frustrating. (This is one field where blogs are really way ahead of the traditional media.)
Really great link - important enough to warrant appending it to the summary by the /. editors. This directly answers the first question I had when I read the abstract (and unfortunately asked in a lower thread).
The second link is hosed, but the abstract says they discovered "a new chi_b state" of quarkonium. This is well beyond my physics comfort zone, and maybe there is no real difference between states and particles in this realm, but intuitively it seems like there should be one. In my, case a hardon is not something I have now, but when I get one, it's not like I get a new organ. It's just a temporary state of a pre-existing organ. Sorry for not using a car analogy; I'm just trying to understand how physicists think of the difference between states and things, or if this dichotomy even makes sense on that level.
From the same course you should have learned that advertising works, and works really fucking well. There is nothing personal about it, in fact, it's the least personal sort of communication that you can imagine. The sort of grassroots buzz you mention is worth something in politics, but its power is almost negligible compared to the power of the political machine, whose #1 tool is the 30 second TV commercial. Believe me, politicians may not be smart, but the people who coordinate their campaigns certainly are, and they know how to spend their resources effectively. TV is their #1 tool for a good reason, and don't think that they don't have an army Ph.D. sociologists and social psychologists advising them. Their budget for running focus groups and surveys put the whole social science research budget of UCSC to shame. The sad truth is that people are often very ignorant about what influences their decisions. [Lots of good research shows this.] They prefer to think that they're voting for X because a cousin who felt passionately about X convinced them, when in fact they may be voting for x because of an especially ugly anti-Y attack ad.
It's very important that you understand that a PAC or this SuperPAC is not the same thing as the Democratic Party. In fact, they are legally barred from coordinating their activities. So even if you think this is a dirty move, it's not fair to blame the Democratic Party or any of its candidates for this. In fact, they can't even legally tell this SuperPAC to knock it off - that would be coordination, and it's not allowed. No, I think this is a stunt by some misguided well-wishers. Sadly, both parties seem to have more than their fair share of these. (BTW, every Democratic partisan I've ever met or heard of is praying to Santa Claus that Newt gets nominated. Something stinks about this whole story.),
That's why it would be delicious if Newt came out crying about how "regulations should prevent the market from freely trading domain names".
So yes, it's a dirty trick, but if anyone deserves a bitchslap from the invisible hand of the market, it's Newt.
Testing is one thing. I get it that every test can't succeed. Planes in their testing phase have an "X" in their model identification number, to and they are not expected to have the reliability of planes in regular service. But here we are talking about the F-22, a plane that according to Wikipedia was designed in the 80s, started production in 1997 and officially entered service six years ago. The eight years between 1997 and entry into service in 2005 was the time when the bugs were supposed to be worked out. As of 2011 its status is "out of production". So we're not talking about some newborn program having toothing pains. We're talking about a retiree program that cost us $66,700,000,000 and so far managed to kill only Americans.
Yeah, it sounds like whoever made these things and charged the government billions had really screwed up. Luckily, they are never going to get another multibillion dollar contract from the government, right? I mean, if they did, that could screw that one up just as badly, and then where would we be? We're lucky that we don't live in some communist country where arms manufacturers just get fat from the handouts of the government without any real accountability.
I'm serious here. I don't think it's the state's business to protect the feelings of people. The state should protect their rights, and there is no such thing as a right to not have your feelings hurt. Just think of how horribly you can fuck someone up, and scar them for life, by telling them that never loved them and that you are disgusted by their various inadequacies. You can do all this for transparently vicious reasons, and doing it might well be deeply immoral, but never in a million years would I want that sort of immorality to be illegal. Can you imagine if we had to police people's feelings? What I'm saying is that in every state that I would ever want to live in, there is such a thing as the right to be a jerk - even a very cruel jerk. Of course the state must guarantee certain rights, like the right to bodily integrity, property, and some extent of protection from harassment and wrongful slander. These, however, leave lots of room for hurt feelings - and that's as it should be.
Funny. I often say I hate ads, yet I subscribe to advertisement "newsletters" from Newegg, Musician's Friend, and others. And I think that's as it should be. People should choose by an opt-in mechanism which ads they want to be exposed to, and advertisers should be working hard to make their ads relevant and good enough to make people want to see them. If they fail at this, why should anyone pity them for being blocked?
What you said about the smart way to use NoScript is exactly right, but it's also very labor intensive. Wouldn't it be nice if there was such a thing as NoScript+ that allowed you to subscribe to whitelists of valuable and harmless scripts?
Do you really think that someone who learned about browser extensions, found Adblock+ and installed it suddenly becomes so helpless that they can't tick off a box in the configuration menu? I agree that the typical internet user is not technically savvy, but the typical Adblock+ user is certainly savvy enough to know how to use a configuration gui.