It will be interesting to see if upgrading a OEM-SLP Windows Loadered Windows 7 maintains full "genuine" status on an upgrade to Windows 10.
If so, it's going to be a pirate free-for-all on Windows 10, just like Windows 7
When Windows 8 was released there was a free upgrade for Windows Pro users to Windows 8 Pro Pack. You could install Windows 8 Pro, activate against KMS, then upgrade to Pro Pack. It would then be permanently activated. Microsoft caught on and stopped letting new KMS clients upgrade to Propack.
Disallowing security updates to run on non-genuine copies of Windows is not exactly in Microsoft's best interest.
After push back YEARS ago, Microsoft allowed security updates for non-genuine users. No "feature feature improvement" type downloads though.
Interestingly, with Windows 7 at least, OEM-SLP loader method of "piracy" has remained bullet-proof. In the past 5 years it's been in use, it has always reported genuine, no altering MS binaries, and MS can't tell the difference between you and someone that bought their HP PC at Best buy.
So far with Win 8.x phony KMS servers has made it indistinguishable from a computer activating on a company's LAN.
XP you could just harvest VL keys from university and workplaces attended.
There are clean ways to "pirate" any MS OS, starting with a clean genuine install ISO, yet people end up with junky malware filled garbage.
In any case even if you get a free upgrade on this "genuine" pirated copy, I would expect to remain genuine, but not be able to call in for tech support, etc.
Google is making money from him flying his drone...
From TFA:
Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.
He may not have received money, but he enabled ads on his videos with the hopes of earning money from his videos.
His videos are posted for commercial purposes (earning HIM money), so his flying is commercial purposes. On Youtube they are somewhat lenient if you post videos with copywritten material if they are ad free. If you post copy-written music / TV shows etc with ads enabled they can and will shut you down. In that case you are hoping to earn money from someone else's copy written material, instead of a potentially fair use situation. This really isn't any different.
yes, but that need to be plugged into amp with "inverse RIAA curve", ie base boost and treble cut to match vinyl's properties, and boosted from the hundredth of a volt to the 1 volt or more a PC or your TV might need to function
. . . or not.
Here's a $51 sale price (regular $80) Turntable at Bestbuy with built in speakers, a headphone jack, RCA out (line level not phono) and USB connection: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/je...
I assume it's a mediocre player, with even crappier speakers, but you can buy it, put an LP on it, and play it through the built in speakers, without any scanning software, and without a specially inverse RIAA curve Preamp, or any other hardware.
Records have a bit of a resurgence as being hipster, as well as people still having lots of old records they want to listen to (or convert to PC)
Out here in the real world we still have VGA projectors from 2008 or earlier. Even replacement projectors still rely on VGA cables already run. My new work Thinkpad T440 has excellent battery life, is fairly thin, only has two USB ports, but they did manage to shove a VGA port on there that I'm thankful for. I have to connect my other external monitor to a Micro-Displayport adapter when "docked".
Not just the cost of service, but the initial cost too.
Buy a $50 Timex, in 5 years time spend $5 on a battery, in another 5 years spend another $5 on a battery... somewhere in there spend $5 on a new strap... still orders of magnitude better than $10k on a watch even if you have to throw it away after 12 years.
My point is the future. In 2000 when USB 2.0 was invented, the concept of USB connected flash drives and Hard Drives was very foreign, yet the higher capacity bus provided much better performance in ~2005-2006 or so when these devices started becoming popular.
Something something 640kB will be enough RAM for anyone, for all eternity.
It's interesting the headphone jack is still there since bluetooth chips are so cheap, easy to use, and are smaller than the headphone jack itself. I guess the problem for wireless headphones is powering them requires too many batteries.
Flying: Many airlines / countries won't allow the use of wireless headphones.
Aside from that I love my wireless headphones. I have a set of over the ear 900Mhz Analog headphones that I plug into my computer or TV's headphone jack, but mobile I love my bluetooth headphones, especially at the gym. I really don't know how people manage to use corded headphones at the gym, especially with cardio. I can dock my iPod Touch on the elliptical or treadmill, view recorded TV shows on the built in 15" LCD, yet not worry about yanking the cord out.
As far as batteries, my Bluetooth LG Tone are rated at 10 hours, essentially 1 day, and charge by USB. My 900Mhz Nexxtech Wave are rated at 8 hours, and the AAA batteries charge overnight when the headphones are in their dock.
A big thing USB 3.1 is touting is the ability to tie two SSDs together in a RAID 0 configuration and not max out its bandwidth.
Nobody is touting that. SSDs in RAID is going to be a niche use at best. Most people are going to be connecting simple flash drives, and very few of those come close to even maxing out USB 3.
USB 2.0 is 15 years old, yet widely popular, and mostly adequate. Compared to 20 year old USB 1.1 which is painful for anything other than keyboards and mice. Having lots of extra bandwidth for future use isn't a bad thing. See also how new SSDs can saturate SATA 3, yet 10 years ago a hard drive struggled to keep up with the ATA-133 bus.
Something else, RS-232 is a very simple. Plug a scope into it and you can figure it out pretty quick. The digital equivalent of "hold the film up to the light and look in a magnifying glass"
I know this was in jest, but it might not be quite as crazy as it sounds. If there is any electronic interface format that we are using today that will outlast the rest, and maintain backwards compatibility, it's going to be Ethernet. So while there likely won't be any equipment directly compatible, there would probably still be some around and operational. Consider the systems that run B52s, for instance.
So if there is space to spare besides the obvious choice of film, some sort of NAS device could be an option, and itself an interesting thing to find in a time capsule.
Going forward Ethernet does have a good chance (RJ45 10-Base-T dates to 1990, yet is very much still current), and more and more embedded devices include an Ethernet connection, and unlike USB (aside from certain classes) doesn't require special drivers.
To it's credit, RS-232 is 53 years old and still accessible. My new Haswell based desktop has a pin header on the motherboard, and USB-converters are a dime a dozen. Connecting to legacy equipment at work, RS-232 has the best support. A lot of equipment interfaces with 16 bit software that we have to run in "XP-mode" on our 64-bit Windows 7 machines, but I can plug in a $3 CH340 based USB-RS232 adapter, pass through the port to the VM, and it runs perfect. Unlike anything requiring Parallel port, proprietary ISA cards, etc.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the contents of the flight data recorder are of immense value to the safety of future air travel, the cockpit voice recorders are likely of no value. The CVR uses a two-hour loop, so the audio recorded during the time period from the aircraft's last contact with ATC until well after loss of radar contact was likely overwritten multiple times.
The last two hours would contain information in my post. Were they conscious when the plane crashed? Were they trying to do a safe ditch or did they aim for destruction? Maybe they tried transmitting in the blind (in which case you'd hear their side of the conversation)? Maybe you'd have some indication if the plane was hijacked.
The Malaysian black boxes are almost certainly of no use.
I wouldn't say of no use. Were the pilots conscious upon crashing? Were the pilots trying to execute a ditch, or trying to crash and kill? Perhaps they made a (failed) attempt at a Mayday call prior to ditching, which would be recorded, and may include clues to the nature of the emergency.
I remember when Google first came out it assumed a boolean AND for the search terms instead of boolean OR like most other sites. This was huge as right away you got results for what you searched. Then they started searching using boolean OR, and searched for related words. First you could use "+" to force boolean AND, they removed that and you have to put it in quotes. It's like they're trying to make it harder to use.
you downloaded utorrent from cnet. utorrent doesn't install conduit. Stop with the bullshit,
uTorrent, at least at some point in time, did offer Conduit with the installer from their website. Here is a post from a moderator on the uTorrent Forum: http://forum.utorrent.com/topi...
We are among many products that support the production and distribution of our free software through advertising. In cases where an advertisement is for an installed product, our requirements include: 1) The user must accept the offer; 2) The user must be able to easily revert to a state prior to the offer install. We also offer a premium product as an ad-free option.
You may have inadvertently accepted an offer from one of our partners during your installation of BitTorrent/uTorrent or when updating to the latest version of our clients. If that’s the case, don't worry - here are some easy instructions for reverting to your original settings.
PC Users
If your home page and default search was changed to Bing you have Conduit Search Protect. If it changed to Yahoo then you have installed software from Spigot. See the instructions below based on which search engine you are seeing.
Conduit Search Protect
Conduit Search Protect is one of the offers PC users can receive. To remove Conduit Search Protect and revert to your original settings, follow these steps.
In the Windows control panel, go to uninstall a program. Look for “Search Protect” by Conduit and select Uninstall. When the uninstall dialog box appears, simply check the “Go back to my original home page and default search settings” box at the bottom, and then click Uninstall. Your default search engines will revert to their original settings.
Spigot
First, go into the Windows Control Panel and select UnInstall a Program or Add/Remove Programs. Locate and uninstall Spigot Search Protect. Then revert each affected browser back to your desired homepage and search engine settings with the following steps.
Chrome
In Chrome you can set the default search engine, home page, and new tab behavior on the Chrome Settings page. For more info, see these links:
Set your default search engine Set your homepage Set startup preferences (including new tab behavior)
Firefox
Set your Home Page Set your New Tab page To change the default search engine in Firefox, simply click the icon next to the search box and choose your desired site.
Internet Explorer
The method for changing your settings will vary depending on your current version of Internet Explorer. Follow these links to view instructions on Microsoft’s site.
Change your Home Page (you can select your version of IE via the tab to the right of the page) Change your default Search Engine Change your New Tab settings
Mac Users
Mac users can revert to their original settings by uninstalling the Searchme extension from each affected browser and then resetting the homepage manually. For more info, please view these detailed instructions.
Safari
Under Safari’s Preferences menu, select Extensions. Locate the Searchme extension and select Uninstall. Go back to the General Preferences tab and select the Default Search Engine and Homepage you would like to use.
Chrome
Under the Window menu, select Extensions. Locate Searchme and click the corresponding trash can icon. Once the extension has been removed, open the Chrome menu and select Preferences. On the settings page that appears, select the homepage and default search provider you would like to use.
Firefox
Under Firefox’s Tools menu, select Add-Ons. When the Add-Ons page opens, click Extensions. Remove the Searchme extension. To revert your search engine, simply click the search engine icon next to the search box and select the provider you wish to use. To revert your default home page, open the Firefox menu, select Preferences, and select the General tab. Here you can select the home page you would like to use.
As to reporting potholes, every major city responds to reports of potholes needing patched, but the sheer amount of requests, traffic, time of year, etc, prevent them from quickly filling them. When you include limited monetary resources, things get much worse.
If you have never driven in colder climates where potholes are ubiquitous this time of the year, you don't have a frame of reference to understand how bad these things are. It's like people who have never lived down south don't understand the perpetual heat and humidity combined with insects left over from the dinosaur era roaming about.
We get to laugh at them down south when they get 1" of snow and hundreds of vehicles are written off in wrecks, and a state of emergency is declared.
With potholes cities are hesitant to patch them while it's still freezing out (cold patches don't bond as well to the road), but will patch really bad potholes on major roads.
A lot of potholes go under-reported. I'll drive by a pothole for a couple weeks, send in an online work request, and within two business days the hole is patched. This is even on major roads where you'd think someone from the city (like the 4 busses an hour) would drive by. Yet rather than send a work request to the city, people rather complain to the local radio station's stupid morning show's "find the worst pothole in the city". Same with dead streetlights. Send in a request and it's fixed.
I've called in and reported pathways that weren't fully plowed days after a storm, and another plow is dispatched.
I was impressed when I called in to report an open manhole cover on a major road (which could cause serious damage if not straddled), that the operator responded "Is it at such and such address? That one has been reported". People other than me do call in problems on the road.
If you lived in MA this winter, you'd know that you don't always get the option to avoid potholes. Sometimes they eat your car. Cue the cracked rims.
You can always spot the ones who don't live in cold climates by that they assume that you can always spot the pothole in time to avoid it. Sometimes it was hidden by the vehicle ahead of you, sometimes it's in a part of the road where you'd have to swerve into an oncoming lane to avoid it, and sometime it is filled with just enough snow to look flat but not dense enough snow to keep your car's tire from falling into it, etc.
I live in Eastern Canada. We've had a particularly rough winter this year, but even normally, there's a lot of freeze thaw cycles that causes havoc on the roads (creating potholes). I'm used to driving anticipating potholes. Changing lanes because I *know* there's a pothole ahead (from the last time I went down the road). Or picking which side I straddle a pothole on based on potholes I know are ahead. Or controlling by braking on an offramp or at an intersection based on which sections are rough, and which are smooth. Can Google do this? Add some radar, and some reports from previous vehicles and hopefully it can. Especially adding when roads suddenly go from dry pavement to whiteout low traction conditions.
Even with the best attempts at straddling the potholes, at night, add some mild (near freezing) conditions where road brine is spraying all over the place, and it's hard enough to see where the road is going, let alone if there's any potholes you don't already know about.
As the years tick on Java has fallen into almost complete irrelevancy (though it will take over your screen at random to notify you of an update for the plugin you forgot you had.) Flash is thankfully becoming more irrelevant as well. As much as I hate Apple at times, I do have to credit the success of the iOS platform combined with the stance against Flash as being a big driver for Web developers to move away from Flash.
I did abandon Adobe (Acrobat) Reader in favour of PDF Xchange viewer 7 years ago due to: Less security risk, higher performance, more features. Sadly they've started offering Ask toolbar and other shit during installation.
Turn all these settings to false: left_rail_offer gui.show_plus_upsell sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled bt.enable_pulse gui.show_notorrents_node offers.content_offer_autoexec
The problem isn't the ads as much as the bundled shit during installation. They make it ever more difficult to opt out of it all, and include malicious stuff like Conduit browser hijacker.
Uggg, Sourceforge too? Failing a repository I always said Softpedia and Download.com were reputable sites for software. Then Download.com started bundling shit. I did some quick searching and sure enough Sourceforge has bundled shit as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see if upgrading a OEM-SLP Windows Loadered Windows 7 maintains full "genuine" status on an upgrade to Windows 10.
If so, it's going to be a pirate free-for-all on Windows 10, just like Windows 7
When Windows 8 was released there was a free upgrade for Windows Pro users to Windows 8 Pro Pack. You could install Windows 8 Pro, activate against KMS, then upgrade to Pro Pack. It would then be permanently activated. Microsoft caught on and stopped letting new KMS clients upgrade to Propack.
Disallowing security updates to run on non-genuine copies of Windows is not exactly in Microsoft's best interest.
After push back YEARS ago, Microsoft allowed security updates for non-genuine users. No "feature feature improvement" type downloads though.
Interestingly, with Windows 7 at least, OEM-SLP loader method of "piracy" has remained bullet-proof. In the past 5 years it's been in use, it has always reported genuine, no altering MS binaries, and MS can't tell the difference between you and someone that bought their HP PC at Best buy.
So far with Win 8.x phony KMS servers has made it indistinguishable from a computer activating on a company's LAN.
XP you could just harvest VL keys from university and workplaces attended.
There are clean ways to "pirate" any MS OS, starting with a clean genuine install ISO, yet people end up with junky malware filled garbage.
In any case even if you get a free upgrade on this "genuine" pirated copy, I would expect to remain genuine, but not be able to call in for tech support, etc.
Can you 3D print it? Buy it with Bitcoins?
Google is making money from him flying his drone...
From TFA:
Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.
He may not have received money, but he enabled ads on his videos with the hopes of earning money from his videos.
His videos are posted for commercial purposes (earning HIM money), so his flying is commercial purposes. On Youtube they are somewhat lenient if you post videos with copywritten material if they are ad free. If you post copy-written music / TV shows etc with ads enabled they can and will shut you down. In that case you are hoping to earn money from someone else's copy written material, instead of a potentially fair use situation. This really isn't any different.
Once McAfee detected critical Windows XP system files as a virus and quaranteed them. http://arstechnica.com/busines...
It affected Intel, and many other companies, basically cancelling work for the day.
Intel was so impressed with it they bought McAfee later that year.
If you want value from gold, then buy pure gold. Don't tie it up in a time piece.
yes, but that need to be plugged into amp with "inverse RIAA curve", ie base boost and treble cut to match vinyl's properties, and boosted from the hundredth of a volt to the 1 volt or more a PC or your TV might need to function
. . . or not.
Here's a $51 sale price (regular $80) Turntable at Bestbuy with built in speakers, a headphone jack, RCA out (line level not phono) and USB connection:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/je...
You can buy if from Amazon too:
http://www.amazon.com/Jensen-J...
I assume it's a mediocre player, with even crappier speakers, but you can buy it, put an LP on it, and play it through the built in speakers, without any scanning software, and without a specially inverse RIAA curve Preamp, or any other hardware.
Records have a bit of a resurgence as being hipster, as well as people still having lots of old records they want to listen to (or convert to PC)
Exactly. I'm getting almost as tired of these bugus 3d printing articles as I am of the kickstarter ones.
How about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency articles?
Out here in the real world we still have VGA projectors from 2008 or earlier. Even replacement projectors still rely on VGA cables already run. My new work Thinkpad T440 has excellent battery life, is fairly thin, only has two USB ports, but they did manage to shove a VGA port on there that I'm thankful for. I have to connect my other external monitor to a Micro-Displayport adapter when "docked".
Not just the cost of service, but the initial cost too.
Buy a $50 Timex, in 5 years time spend $5 on a battery, in another 5 years spend another $5 on a battery... somewhere in there spend $5 on a new strap... still orders of magnitude better than $10k on a watch even if you have to throw it away after 12 years.
My point is the future. In 2000 when USB 2.0 was invented, the concept of USB connected flash drives and Hard Drives was very foreign, yet the higher capacity bus provided much better performance in ~2005-2006 or so when these devices started becoming popular.
Something something 640kB will be enough RAM for anyone, for all eternity.
It's interesting the headphone jack is still there since bluetooth chips are so cheap, easy to use, and are smaller than the headphone jack itself. I guess the problem for wireless headphones is powering them requires too many batteries.
Flying: Many airlines / countries won't allow the use of wireless headphones.
Aside from that I love my wireless headphones. I have a set of over the ear 900Mhz Analog headphones that I plug into my computer or TV's headphone jack, but mobile I love my bluetooth headphones, especially at the gym. I really don't know how people manage to use corded headphones at the gym, especially with cardio. I can dock my iPod Touch on the elliptical or treadmill, view recorded TV shows on the built in 15" LCD, yet not worry about yanking the cord out.
As far as batteries, my Bluetooth LG Tone are rated at 10 hours, essentially 1 day, and charge by USB. My 900Mhz Nexxtech Wave are rated at 8 hours, and the AAA batteries charge overnight when the headphones are in their dock.
A big thing USB 3.1 is touting is the ability to tie two SSDs together in a RAID 0 configuration and not max out its bandwidth.
Nobody is touting that. SSDs in RAID is going to be a niche use at best. Most people are going to be connecting simple flash drives, and very few of those come close to even maxing out USB 3.
USB 2.0 is 15 years old, yet widely popular, and mostly adequate. Compared to 20 year old USB 1.1 which is painful for anything other than keyboards and mice. Having lots of extra bandwidth for future use isn't a bad thing. See also how new SSDs can saturate SATA 3, yet 10 years ago a hard drive struggled to keep up with the ATA-133 bus.
Something else, RS-232 is a very simple. Plug a scope into it and you can figure it out pretty quick. The digital equivalent of "hold the film up to the light and look in a magnifying glass"
I know this was in jest, but it might not be quite as crazy as it sounds. If there is any electronic interface format that we are using today that will outlast the rest, and maintain backwards compatibility, it's going to be Ethernet. So while there likely won't be any equipment directly compatible, there would probably still be some around and operational. Consider the systems that run B52s, for instance.
So if there is space to spare besides the obvious choice of film, some sort of NAS device could be an option, and itself an interesting thing to find in a time capsule.
Going forward Ethernet does have a good chance (RJ45 10-Base-T dates to 1990, yet is very much still current), and more and more embedded devices include an Ethernet connection, and unlike USB (aside from certain classes) doesn't require special drivers.
To it's credit, RS-232 is 53 years old and still accessible. My new Haswell based desktop has a pin header on the motherboard, and USB-converters are a dime a dozen. Connecting to legacy equipment at work, RS-232 has the best support. A lot of equipment interfaces with 16 bit software that we have to run in "XP-mode" on our 64-bit Windows 7 machines, but I can plug in a $3 CH340 based USB-RS232 adapter, pass through the port to the VM, and it runs perfect. Unlike anything requiring Parallel port, proprietary ISA cards, etc.
You can also still buy brand new turntables for about $100.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the contents of the flight data recorder are of immense value to the safety of future air travel, the cockpit voice recorders are likely of no value. The CVR uses a two-hour loop, so the audio recorded during the time period from the aircraft's last contact with ATC until well after loss of radar contact was likely overwritten multiple times.
The last two hours would contain information in my post. Were they conscious when the plane crashed? Were they trying to do a safe ditch or did they aim for destruction? Maybe they tried transmitting in the blind (in which case you'd hear their side of the conversation)? Maybe you'd have some indication if the plane was hijacked.
The Malaysian black boxes are almost certainly of no use.
I wouldn't say of no use. Were the pilots conscious upon crashing? Were the pilots trying to execute a ditch, or trying to crash and kill? Perhaps they made a (failed) attempt at a Mayday call prior to ditching, which would be recorded, and may include clues to the nature of the emergency.
I remember when Google first came out it assumed a boolean AND for the search terms instead of boolean OR like most other sites. This was huge as right away you got results for what you searched. Then they started searching using boolean OR, and searched for related words. First you could use "+" to force boolean AND, they removed that and you have to put it in quotes. It's like they're trying to make it harder to use.
you downloaded utorrent from cnet. utorrent doesn't install conduit. Stop with the bullshit,
uTorrent, at least at some point in time, did offer Conduit with the installer from their website. Here is a post from a moderator on the uTorrent Forum:
http://forum.utorrent.com/topi...
We are among many products that support the production and distribution of our free software through advertising. In cases where an advertisement is for an installed product, our requirements include: 1) The user must accept the offer; 2) The user must be able to easily revert to a state prior to the offer install. We also offer a premium product as an ad-free option.
You may have inadvertently accepted an offer from one of our partners during your installation of BitTorrent/uTorrent or when updating to the latest version of our clients. If that’s the case, don't worry - here are some easy instructions for reverting to your original settings.
PC Users
If your home page and default search was changed to Bing you have Conduit Search Protect. If it changed to Yahoo then you have installed software from Spigot. See the instructions below based on which search engine you are seeing.
Conduit Search Protect
Conduit Search Protect is one of the offers PC users can receive. To remove Conduit Search Protect and revert to your original settings, follow these steps.
In the Windows control panel, go to uninstall a program. Look for “Search Protect” by Conduit and select Uninstall.
When the uninstall dialog box appears, simply check the “Go back to my original home page and default search settings” box at the bottom, and then click Uninstall.
Your default search engines will revert to their original settings.
Spigot
First, go into the Windows Control Panel and select UnInstall a Program or Add/Remove Programs. Locate and uninstall Spigot Search Protect. Then revert each affected browser back to your desired homepage and search engine settings with the following steps.
Chrome
In Chrome you can set the default search engine, home page, and new tab behavior on the Chrome Settings page. For more info, see these links:
Set your default search engine
Set your homepage
Set startup preferences (including new tab behavior)
Firefox
Set your Home Page
Set your New Tab page
To change the default search engine in Firefox, simply click the icon next to the search box and choose your desired site.
Internet Explorer
The method for changing your settings will vary depending on your current version of Internet Explorer. Follow these links to view instructions on Microsoft’s site.
Change your Home Page (you can select your version of IE via the tab to the right of the page)
Change your default Search Engine
Change your New Tab settings
Mac Users
Mac users can revert to their original settings by uninstalling the Searchme extension from each affected browser and then resetting the homepage manually. For more info, please view these detailed instructions.
Safari
Under Safari’s Preferences menu, select Extensions.
Locate the Searchme extension and select Uninstall.
Go back to the General Preferences tab and select the Default Search Engine and Homepage you would like to use.
Chrome
Under the Window menu, select Extensions.
Locate Searchme and click the corresponding trash can icon.
Once the extension has been removed, open the Chrome menu and select Preferences.
On the settings page that appears, select the homepage and default search provider you would like to use.
Firefox
Under Firefox’s Tools menu, select Add-Ons.
When the Add-Ons page opens, click Extensions.
Remove the Searchme extension.
To revert your search engine, simply click the search engine icon next to the search box and select the provider you wish to use.
To revert your default home page, open the Firefox menu, select Preferences, and select the General tab. Here you can select the home page you would like to use.
As to reporting potholes, every major city responds to reports of potholes needing patched, but the sheer amount of requests, traffic, time of year, etc, prevent them from quickly filling them. When you include limited monetary resources, things get much worse.
If you have never driven in colder climates where potholes are ubiquitous this time of the year, you don't have a frame of reference to understand how bad these things are. It's like people who have never lived down south don't understand the perpetual heat and humidity combined with insects left over from the dinosaur era roaming about.
We get to laugh at them down south when they get 1" of snow and hundreds of vehicles are written off in wrecks, and a state of emergency is declared.
With potholes cities are hesitant to patch them while it's still freezing out (cold patches don't bond as well to the road), but will patch really bad potholes on major roads.
A lot of potholes go under-reported. I'll drive by a pothole for a couple weeks, send in an online work request, and within two business days the hole is patched. This is even on major roads where you'd think someone from the city (like the 4 busses an hour) would drive by. Yet rather than send a work request to the city, people rather complain to the local radio station's stupid morning show's "find the worst pothole in the city". Same with dead streetlights. Send in a request and it's fixed.
I've called in and reported pathways that weren't fully plowed days after a storm, and another plow is dispatched.
I was impressed when I called in to report an open manhole cover on a major road (which could cause serious damage if not straddled), that the operator responded "Is it at such and such address? That one has been reported". People other than me do call in problems on the road.
If you lived in MA this winter, you'd know that you don't always get the option to avoid potholes. Sometimes they eat your car. Cue the cracked rims.
You can always spot the ones who don't live in cold climates by that they assume that you can always spot the pothole in time to avoid it. Sometimes it was hidden by the vehicle ahead of you, sometimes it's in a part of the road where you'd have to swerve into an oncoming lane to avoid it, and sometime it is filled with just enough snow to look flat but not dense enough snow to keep your car's tire from falling into it, etc.
I live in Eastern Canada. We've had a particularly rough winter this year, but even normally, there's a lot of freeze thaw cycles that causes havoc on the roads (creating potholes). I'm used to driving anticipating potholes. Changing lanes because I *know* there's a pothole ahead (from the last time I went down the road). Or picking which side I straddle a pothole on based on potholes I know are ahead. Or controlling by braking on an offramp or at an intersection based on which sections are rough, and which are smooth. Can Google do this? Add some radar, and some reports from previous vehicles and hopefully it can. Especially adding when roads suddenly go from dry pavement to whiteout low traction conditions.
Even with the best attempts at straddling the potholes, at night, add some mild (near freezing) conditions where road brine is spraying all over the place, and it's hard enough to see where the road is going, let alone if there's any potholes you don't already know about.
This means I have to abandon Java and Flash. ...
I can live with that.
Oh how I wish I could.
As the years tick on Java has fallen into almost complete irrelevancy (though it will take over your screen at random to notify you of an update for the plugin you forgot you had.) Flash is thankfully becoming more irrelevant as well. As much as I hate Apple at times, I do have to credit the success of the iOS platform combined with the stance against Flash as being a big driver for Web developers to move away from Flash.
I did abandon Adobe (Acrobat) Reader in favour of PDF Xchange viewer 7 years ago due to: Less security risk, higher performance, more features. Sadly they've started offering Ask toolbar and other shit during installation.
To turn off all ad related and featured content:
Options>preferences>Advanced...
Turn all these settings to false:
left_rail_offer
gui.show_plus_upsell
sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled
bt.enable_pulse
gui.show_notorrents_node
offers.content_offer_autoexec
The problem isn't the ads as much as the bundled shit during installation. They make it ever more difficult to opt out of it all, and include malicious stuff like Conduit browser hijacker.
Uggg, Sourceforge too?
Failing a repository I always said Softpedia and Download.com were reputable sites for software. Then Download.com started bundling shit. I did some quick searching and sure enough Sourceforge has bundled shit as well.