When the going gets tough, the tough check into hotels.
LOL, that's what my wife calls roughing it too... but we're not saying we're survival experts.
And, really, they *do* need to keep him alive during filming, so I'm not exactly surprised that what is shown on screen doesn't 100% reflect what actually happened or that some of it is carefully staged. The little I've seen of that, he's doing some really dangerous things, and the insurance companies aren't going to let you kill off your principal.
It's shocking how little effort shareholders in the tech sector are willing to put into scrutinising the products of the companies they are investing in
The stock market stopped being about strong fundamentals before the.COM bubble, as you said. The last decade or more has been about hype.
Look at Facebook and their IPO -- were there solid financials to merit their price? Or was it just hype? I honestly don't know, but I suspect there was a lot of hype.
Sadly, this isn't all that different to what led to the stock market melting down in '08 -- a bunch of junk debt got laundered and rated as AAA-rated debt and sold to everyone else. Essentially the whole world paid the price for the US having incredibly stupid mortgage lending practices. Practices which had been identified as risky several years before.
And now we've seen it with a "next iPad" tablet.
Seriously, is it that hard to look at the product line of the company you're investing in and ask yourself "can I imagine any significant number of people parting with their cash for this?".
Well, in fairness, if you're trying to make a product which competes with the iPad, you have a lot of evidence that people are actually spending money on tablets.
Just not ones made by Microsoft, apparently. Both Apple and Android tablets have been selling quite well.
So now you have a market which is healthy and selling a lot of units, and then you have the Microsoft offering not selling. The problem isn't tablets.
why in the world did Microsoft spend so much on such a bad idea? Same with the phones...
Well, maybe they assumed "we're Microsoft, people will buy anything we make", or they were completely out of touch with what consumers actually wanted and missed the mark completely, or maybe they're losing a lot of good-will with people who no longer care about them or their products. Tough to say.
But Microsoft really needs to be asking themselves this. Because this is now several products which are proving to be failures in the market, and the investors aren't going to stand for a company which keeps making billion-dollar gambles on stuff nobody buys.
Right now, except for maybe Office and the enterprise market -- it's hard not to think that Microsoft is losing money on every product they make, and trying to make it up on volume.
Typical sue-happy mentality of the USA: My bad judgement is your fault.
Not so sure... Microsoft publicly said "everything is fine" during this. If they knew stuff which was materially relevant and they didn't disclose it, it might be that this has merit.
I have no idea if that's the case, since I don't know enough about the relevant laws (which will be long and complicated and interpreted differently by all parties).
But, I do know that when you do your quarterly filings you're supposed to list business risks you're aware of. That nobody is actually buying your product... well, that sounds like it applies.
So, if they knew this (and how could they not), and if they're required by law to disclose this (again, don't know the specifics so I can't say) -- then they might have done a few things which, from a perspective of a publicly traded stock, weren't quite as expected.
A near $1 billion write off. That would put most companies out of business, and even Microsoft can't keep taking losses like that.
Windows 8 is under-performing, people are pulling out of making Windows Phones, the XBone is facing a lot of backlash, their own tablet is becoming a huge flop, and the hardware makers are deciding they want to focus on other things.
Increasingly it's looking like Microsoft is asleep at the switch and just assuming they'll keep selling as much as they always have.
Either they need to start fixing some fundamentals, or Microsoft is going to face some serious long-term problems.
Because hard work down the line doesn't translate into higher exam scores today.
But it will translate into a generation of children getting out into the workforce who can't do any actual work because they've been coddled and who have been educated in such a way as to maximize standardized tests.
And then we'll be really screwed. Pay the cost of educating them now, or pay the cost of living with that as your workforce later.
Yes, make it so kids can't read a book without a smartphone to keep them entertained.
Our kids can apparently barely read now, and writing with a pen is becoming something they don't know how to do.
I don't think we need a room full of kids on smart phones scanning Shakespeare to get entertaining images. We need a room full of kids who can actually sit through a class without using their smartphone, and who can actually read and write.
I don't see this improving that any. This is just more shiny stuff to make sure the kids grow up with ADHD and can't function without a smartphone.
It's interesting that you're offended by a large number of completely unfounded assumptions you've made about my opinions and beliefs based on a single sentence which carries no such implications.
Well, that's an interesting interpretation of what I said as well. It's inaccurate as hell, but it's interesting.
I am merely stating that these experience come down to one of two things... crazy brain activity, which may or may not equate to something experiential... or magic. With magic being considered a relatively low probability thing.
Irrational nonsense like this is exactly what I expect from the self-described "rationalists", who assert reverence for logic, reason, and science yet understand nothing about the subjects nor how to apply them.
I'm sorry, did you have a plausible third alternative we were meant to be discussing?
Does logic, reason and science suggest that anything other than electrical signals going haywire is at work here? Obviously, I'm over-simplifying in my thinking of it as a power surge... but I don't think it's grossly inaccurate either. Given that your brain is an electrical system, it might interpret that 'power surge' in all sorts of random ways -- ie the classic near-death experience.
That doesn't suggest that to an objective observer, there is anything supernatural happening -- but the patient sure could perceive it as such. Isn't this what the article is about? I don't believe the researchers felt they were witnessing rats having a religious experience, they're neuro-scientists after all.
Can I make such an assumption about you?
I may have made significantly stronger assumptions than the researchers, but I made no assumption at all about you.
You, apparently, have already made lots of assumptions about me.
It's interesting that you're willing to draw a significantly stronger conclusion that the authors of the study.
How does that make you feel?
Really, which of the following two statements is more likely to be true?
Random brain activity causes brain to experience many strange things in unpredictable ways
God talked to you
Short of some incontrovertible physical evidence for God being involved in the process, me, I'm sticking with option #1 -- and I suspect anybody looking for a scientific answer to this is more likely to buy into random brain activity.
Quite frankly, anybody studying neuroscience will likely as well. The God hypothesis, last I checked, was entirely outside of objective science and therefore not something science can credibly ponder.
Old reports of victims turning their eyes and looking at people were always brushed off as nonsense "because the brain dies right away"
Which is odd, because unless the guillotine went through your head and caused traumatic damage, your brain will last while it's still got a little oxygen and glucose.
Kinda like how drowning isn't some quiet sleepy way to go... sure, once you've lost all oxygen and blacked out maybe, but the process of getting there isn't instantaneous.
So at a time when you're not conscious, and random activity is spiking in your brain, you might experience something as the various bits turn on.
Now, as with so many things in science, it's not "real" until you've measured it and seems like something obvious after someone has.
And, of course, that won't stop people from believing that it really was a supernatural experience, instead of random electrical impulses which your brain is trying to assign meaning to.
Clever but not much use unless you're directly underneath a flimsy roof.
Yeah, but given the sheer number of people around the world who do live directly underneath a flimsy roof... this is the kind of thing which can be an improvement to probably millions of people for the cost of some plastic bottles and bleach.
Am I going to poke holes in the shingled and insulated roof of my townhouse to put in plastic bottles? Nope. Are there a huge amount of people in the world for which this would provide cheap lighting? Absolutely.
That said, I'd like to see more real light tube installations in multistory buildings.
Indeed, who of us hasn't sat in a part of an office which doesn't afford any natural light at all?
They did not, in fact, say "this is what we're making, deal with it."
Yes, they did in fact. They quite vocally said words to the effect of it had to be that way, was going to be that way, and it was far too late to change and we should just suck it up and deal with it. You can believe they never said that, but anybody who has been following the news on this knows otherwise.
This may shock you, but there are people who were actually excited about the original plans, because always-on connection means multiple people can play online games on the same account in one household
It doesn't shock me at all -- but since it was functionality I didn't want and I found their insistence on always-on internet and daily phone-home wasn't something I couldn't live with, they helped me make up my mind about the product. Just maybe not how they'd hoped.
That doesn't mean any amount of them trying to back-pedal and change their mind means I've forgotten and arrogance and douchyness they displayed when this first came out. Because I don't believe they won't just try to sneak this in down the road.
I can live without a new game console. And they can live without me as a customer. In fact, I'm not giving them much choice in the matter -- the best I'll do is buy a spare XBox 360 and never connect it to the network either. If Microsoft is still losing money on the console, that strategy will hurt them more than it will me.
Oh, yes I do. Allow me to be explicit -- I don't want anything from a domain which isn't the one I'm visiting, period.
Some web pages host content from different sites.
If that's the content I want, I'll go there, but when I make a request to www.example.org, www.happyfunadvertising.com and www.wherethecontentreallyis.com aren't what I'm visiting and can piss off. If what I really wanted was www.wherethecontentreallyis.com, WTF am I doing at www.example.com if you bring nothing of value to the table?
Additionally, some sites host ads on their own site. So that's (probably) the wrong place to cut.
When sites host their own ads, I can at least respect that -- they know and bear the cost of serving those ads. Unless they have really obnoxious ads, I don't usually try to block self-served ads.
When they just throw in a link that says "and go grab whatever this guy over here has at the end of this link" -- well, they don't know what the ads are, don't much care, and don't have to serve any of it. I don't trust the advertisers, and have no way of knowing if you've got malicious crap in there. I'm sure as hell not granting you a cookie and the ability to run scripts.
Sometimes it reminds me of the bad old days where a page took forever to load because the external crap (usually ads) was taking forever. If I block your external shit, I don't have that problem.
I ABSOLUTELY want to block all content on a web page which didn't originate in the domain I'm visiting. Sites relying on all of their cross site stuff for advertising and content -- well, cross site stuff is a security and privacy hole, and involves pulling in from sources I don't necessarily even want to trust.
And I'll trust an advertising agency when I'm filling in the hole they've all graciously climbed into -- until then, I won't trust them at all. And I certainly won't help them gather more information about me than I can avoid.
Sorry Microsoft, but it just doesn't matter any more.
You've told us where you'd like to go with this, you've as much as told us you don't give a shit about what it is that we want.
So, as much as I like my XBox 360 -- I won't be replacing it. Certainly not with this thing which is more about what Microsoft wants than what is good for consumers.
My XBox 360 got banished from a network connection when I started seeing ads in the home screen and in the games -- and as much as you keep trying to back pedal, the damage is done, and I am not interested in your shiny new toy.
Maybe if you hadn't acted like such arrogant assholes who said "this is what we're making, deal with it", consumers wouldn't be saying "well, we're not buying it, deal with it".
Instead, I can say quite heartily... not buying it, don't care, and go pound sand.
As others have said, pen and paper is king for that first hour in the lecture itself. Anything you try to do with technology should concentrate on the second hour.
And, cynically, I will say that trying to do that with the technology is in the long run going to cost you a lot more than that 1 hour.
Instead of thinking purely about the content, you're looking at fonts, layouts, application upgrades, file formats... and not what you're trying to study.
Technology is cool and useful, but sometimes it also creates more work unrelated to what it is you're trying to achieve.
Don't get yourself into a position where you're become a slave to your technology and keeping it working is more work than benefit in terms of you understanding the stuff you're studying.
You don't want to spend a bunch of years in med school only to realize that you need to be a full time sysadmin in order to keep accessing your notes. Because I'm betting once you're out in the world, that software environment you so lovingly crafted is going to be low on your list of things to maintain, and if you don't maintain it you no longer have the information.
. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote (sic) rehearsal = good).
Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.
Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something.;-)
Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.
Me, I've used those standard black lab books for my note taking for my daily work for almost 2 decades, and it's tough to do better. At least, for me it is.
You can always write your own mind maps or some kind of wiki later... but, for the first pass, nothing is more flexible than pen and paper notes since it supports multiple languages, terminologies, and creating diagrams. No upgrades of licenses to worry about.;-)
And a lab book has the advantage of being hard-covered as well as being pretty obvious if pages have been removed (which is why they use them as lab books in the first place).
Technology has all sorts of failure points and limitations. And most alternatives to pen and paper either have in-built limitations, or in the long run are harder to actually keep your notes with.
I'm not saying you shouldn't look at some technology to see if it helps, but for me, good old fashioned bound paper notebooks are still my preferred way, and look to remain so. I've got a stack of about 40-50 to them that I periodically refer back to.
In regard to that, does anyone know if (some version of) FF allows a plugin to intercept all outgoing requests
I'm sure it's not 100% exhaustive, and I doubt it's 100% effective... but NoScript + AdBlockPlus + DoNotTrackMe + the setting to not accept 3rd party cookies + the setting to ask me for every cookie is what I've got in Firefox.
In Chrome I've got ScriptSafe + DoNotTrackMe + AdBlockPlus.
You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.
Do you know how effective the blocking of 3rd party cookies in Safari is? It isn't. It's useless because people found ways to circumvent it quite a while ago and it's never been fixed.
Don't believe me? Clear all of the cookies from Safari, and then visit one website of your choosing. Now, count the number of cookies you have. You'll notice you've got several 3rd party cookies that failed to be blocked.
So, no Safari doesn't already do this -- they have a setting which looks like it should, but my direct experience with it is that it is completely ineffective at doing any blocking of 3rd party stuff.
I wish it did work better, but the reality is, it doesn't. In fact, it doesn't appear to work at all.
If you bother to take a deep dive into reality, there are tens-of-thousands of long-tail websites that rely on advertising to remain online and perhaps even pay salaries.
You know what, the problems with their business model aren't my problem. If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party... well, tough.
The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
I'm not stealing their content, I'm viewing what they've made publicly available on the internet. If they want to go subscription only so I can't see it for free, well, I'll stop seeing their site. Such is life.
And I'm not breaking any social contract, and I'm not using their bandwidth, I'm using my bandwidth -- because I pay for my internet, and the amount I can access is metered. Arguably, the advertising asshats are using my bandwidth by putting all that extra crap I didn't request.
If a site serves their own advertising (and they're not Flash or otherwise annoying animated stuff), I won't block their ads. If they rely on 3rd parties I have absolutely no reason to trust, I will block everything which is a reference to an external site. Because I have no interest in providing information to those 3rd parties, because they provide nothing of value to me -- in fact they provide negative value by expecting me to give up information about myself in return to being marketed to.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, that's what my wife calls roughing it too ... but we're not saying we're survival experts.
And, really, they *do* need to keep him alive during filming, so I'm not exactly surprised that what is shown on screen doesn't 100% reflect what actually happened or that some of it is carefully staged. The little I've seen of that, he's doing some really dangerous things, and the insurance companies aren't going to let you kill off your principal.
Or make for really awesome ratings when he doesn't.
Fox would be all over that.
The stock market stopped being about strong fundamentals before the .COM bubble, as you said. The last decade or more has been about hype.
Look at Facebook and their IPO -- were there solid financials to merit their price? Or was it just hype? I honestly don't know, but I suspect there was a lot of hype.
Sadly, this isn't all that different to what led to the stock market melting down in '08 -- a bunch of junk debt got laundered and rated as AAA-rated debt and sold to everyone else. Essentially the whole world paid the price for the US having incredibly stupid mortgage lending practices. Practices which had been identified as risky several years before.
Well, in fairness, if you're trying to make a product which competes with the iPad, you have a lot of evidence that people are actually spending money on tablets.
Just not ones made by Microsoft, apparently. Both Apple and Android tablets have been selling quite well.
So now you have a market which is healthy and selling a lot of units, and then you have the Microsoft offering not selling. The problem isn't tablets.
Well, maybe they assumed "we're Microsoft, people will buy anything we make", or they were completely out of touch with what consumers actually wanted and missed the mark completely, or maybe they're losing a lot of good-will with people who no longer care about them or their products. Tough to say.
But Microsoft really needs to be asking themselves this. Because this is now several products which are proving to be failures in the market, and the investors aren't going to stand for a company which keeps making billion-dollar gambles on stuff nobody buys.
Right now, except for maybe Office and the enterprise market -- it's hard not to think that Microsoft is losing money on every product they make, and trying to make it up on volume.
Not so sure ... Microsoft publicly said "everything is fine" during this. If they knew stuff which was materially relevant and they didn't disclose it, it might be that this has merit.
I have no idea if that's the case, since I don't know enough about the relevant laws (which will be long and complicated and interpreted differently by all parties).
But, I do know that when you do your quarterly filings you're supposed to list business risks you're aware of. That nobody is actually buying your product ... well, that sounds like it applies.
So, if they knew this (and how could they not), and if they're required by law to disclose this (again, don't know the specifics so I can't say) -- then they might have done a few things which, from a perspective of a publicly traded stock, weren't quite as expected.
A near $1 billion write off. That would put most companies out of business, and even Microsoft can't keep taking losses like that.
Windows 8 is under-performing, people are pulling out of making Windows Phones, the XBone is facing a lot of backlash, their own tablet is becoming a huge flop, and the hardware makers are deciding they want to focus on other things.
Increasingly it's looking like Microsoft is asleep at the switch and just assuming they'll keep selling as much as they always have.
Either they need to start fixing some fundamentals, or Microsoft is going to face some serious long-term problems.
But it will translate into a generation of children getting out into the workforce who can't do any actual work because they've been coddled and who have been educated in such a way as to maximize standardized tests.
And then we'll be really screwed. Pay the cost of educating them now, or pay the cost of living with that as your workforce later.
Yes, make it so kids can't read a book without a smartphone to keep them entertained.
Our kids can apparently barely read now, and writing with a pen is becoming something they don't know how to do.
I don't think we need a room full of kids on smart phones scanning Shakespeare to get entertaining images. We need a room full of kids who can actually sit through a class without using their smartphone, and who can actually read and write.
I don't see this improving that any. This is just more shiny stuff to make sure the kids grow up with ADHD and can't function without a smartphone.
Well, that's an interesting interpretation of what I said as well. It's inaccurate as hell, but it's interesting.
I am merely stating that these experience come down to one of two things ... crazy brain activity, which may or may not equate to something experiential ... or magic. With magic being considered a relatively low probability thing.
I'm sorry, did you have a plausible third alternative we were meant to be discussing?
Does logic, reason and science suggest that anything other than electrical signals going haywire is at work here? Obviously, I'm over-simplifying in my thinking of it as a power surge ... but I don't think it's grossly inaccurate either. Given that your brain is an electrical system, it might interpret that 'power surge' in all sorts of random ways -- ie the classic near-death experience.
That doesn't suggest that to an objective observer, there is anything supernatural happening -- but the patient sure could perceive it as such. Isn't this what the article is about? I don't believe the researchers felt they were witnessing rats having a religious experience, they're neuro-scientists after all.
I may have made significantly stronger assumptions than the researchers, but I made no assumption at all about you.
You, apparently, have already made lots of assumptions about me.
How does that make you feel?
Really, which of the following two statements is more likely to be true?
Short of some incontrovertible physical evidence for God being involved in the process, me, I'm sticking with option #1 -- and I suspect anybody looking for a scientific answer to this is more likely to buy into random brain activity.
Quite frankly, anybody studying neuroscience will likely as well. The God hypothesis, last I checked, was entirely outside of objective science and therefore not something science can credibly ponder.
Which is odd, because unless the guillotine went through your head and caused traumatic damage, your brain will last while it's still got a little oxygen and glucose.
Kinda like how drowning isn't some quiet sleepy way to go ... sure, once you've lost all oxygen and blacked out maybe, but the process of getting there isn't instantaneous.
So at a time when you're not conscious, and random activity is spiking in your brain, you might experience something as the various bits turn on.
Now, as with so many things in science, it's not "real" until you've measured it and seems like something obvious after someone has.
And, of course, that won't stop people from believing that it really was a supernatural experience, instead of random electrical impulses which your brain is trying to assign meaning to.
Yeah, but given the sheer number of people around the world who do live directly underneath a flimsy roof ... this is the kind of thing which can be an improvement to probably millions of people for the cost of some plastic bottles and bleach.
Am I going to poke holes in the shingled and insulated roof of my townhouse to put in plastic bottles? Nope. Are there a huge amount of people in the world for which this would provide cheap lighting? Absolutely.
Indeed, who of us hasn't sat in a part of an office which doesn't afford any natural light at all?
Yes, they did in fact. They quite vocally said words to the effect of it had to be that way, was going to be that way, and it was far too late to change and we should just suck it up and deal with it. You can believe they never said that, but anybody who has been following the news on this knows otherwise.
It doesn't shock me at all -- but since it was functionality I didn't want and I found their insistence on always-on internet and daily phone-home wasn't something I couldn't live with, they helped me make up my mind about the product. Just maybe not how they'd hoped.
That doesn't mean any amount of them trying to back-pedal and change their mind means I've forgotten and arrogance and douchyness they displayed when this first came out. Because I don't believe they won't just try to sneak this in down the road.
I can live without a new game console. And they can live without me as a customer. In fact, I'm not giving them much choice in the matter -- the best I'll do is buy a spare XBox 360 and never connect it to the network either. If Microsoft is still losing money on the console, that strategy will hurt them more than it will me.
Oh, yes I do. Allow me to be explicit -- I don't want anything from a domain which isn't the one I'm visiting, period.
If that's the content I want, I'll go there, but when I make a request to www.example.org, www.happyfunadvertising.com and www.wherethecontentreallyis.com aren't what I'm visiting and can piss off. If what I really wanted was www.wherethecontentreallyis.com, WTF am I doing at www.example.com if you bring nothing of value to the table?
When sites host their own ads, I can at least respect that -- they know and bear the cost of serving those ads. Unless they have really obnoxious ads, I don't usually try to block self-served ads.
When they just throw in a link that says "and go grab whatever this guy over here has at the end of this link" -- well, they don't know what the ads are, don't much care, and don't have to serve any of it. I don't trust the advertisers, and have no way of knowing if you've got malicious crap in there. I'm sure as hell not granting you a cookie and the ability to run scripts.
Sometimes it reminds me of the bad old days where a page took forever to load because the external crap (usually ads) was taking forever. If I block your external shit, I don't have that problem.
I ABSOLUTELY want to block all content on a web page which didn't originate in the domain I'm visiting. Sites relying on all of their cross site stuff for advertising and content -- well, cross site stuff is a security and privacy hole, and involves pulling in from sources I don't necessarily even want to trust.
And I'll trust an advertising agency when I'm filling in the hole they've all graciously climbed into -- until then, I won't trust them at all. And I certainly won't help them gather more information about me than I can avoid.
Sorry Microsoft, but it just doesn't matter any more.
You've told us where you'd like to go with this, you've as much as told us you don't give a shit about what it is that we want.
So, as much as I like my XBox 360 -- I won't be replacing it. Certainly not with this thing which is more about what Microsoft wants than what is good for consumers.
My XBox 360 got banished from a network connection when I started seeing ads in the home screen and in the games -- and as much as you keep trying to back pedal, the damage is done, and I am not interested in your shiny new toy.
Maybe if you hadn't acted like such arrogant assholes who said "this is what we're making, deal with it", consumers wouldn't be saying "well, we're not buying it, deal with it".
Instead, I can say quite heartily ... not buying it, don't care, and go pound sand.
And, cynically, I will say that trying to do that with the technology is in the long run going to cost you a lot more than that 1 hour.
Instead of thinking purely about the content, you're looking at fonts, layouts, application upgrades, file formats ... and not what you're trying to study.
Technology is cool and useful, but sometimes it also creates more work unrelated to what it is you're trying to achieve.
Don't get yourself into a position where you're become a slave to your technology and keeping it working is more work than benefit in terms of you understanding the stuff you're studying.
You don't want to spend a bunch of years in med school only to realize that you need to be a full time sysadmin in order to keep accessing your notes. Because I'm betting once you're out in the world, that software environment you so lovingly crafted is going to be low on your list of things to maintain, and if you don't maintain it you no longer have the information.
Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.
Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something. ;-)
Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.
Me, I've used those standard black lab books for my note taking for my daily work for almost 2 decades, and it's tough to do better. At least, for me it is.
You can always write your own mind maps or some kind of wiki later ... but, for the first pass, nothing is more flexible than pen and paper notes since it supports multiple languages, terminologies, and creating diagrams. No upgrades of licenses to worry about. ;-)
And a lab book has the advantage of being hard-covered as well as being pretty obvious if pages have been removed (which is why they use them as lab books in the first place).
Technology has all sorts of failure points and limitations. And most alternatives to pen and paper either have in-built limitations, or in the long run are harder to actually keep your notes with.
I'm not saying you shouldn't look at some technology to see if it helps, but for me, good old fashioned bound paper notebooks are still my preferred way, and look to remain so. I've got a stack of about 40-50 to them that I periodically refer back to.
I'm sure it's not 100% exhaustive, and I doubt it's 100% effective ... but NoScript + AdBlockPlus + DoNotTrackMe + the setting to not accept 3rd party cookies + the setting to ask me for every cookie is what I've got in Firefox.
In Chrome I've got ScriptSafe + DoNotTrackMe + AdBlockPlus.
I'm not sure where you watch porn ... but ads?
"Oh baby, yeah, that's it ... and now, a word from our sponsor ... crap, where was I again?"
Technically, this is more like someone being able to control your radio remotely, not operate the rest of the vehicle.
We're not quite there yet with ads, but if we ever are, you can bet there will be weapons fire. A lot of it.
You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.
Do you know how effective the blocking of 3rd party cookies in Safari is? It isn't. It's useless because people found ways to circumvent it quite a while ago and it's never been fixed.
Don't believe me? Clear all of the cookies from Safari, and then visit one website of your choosing. Now, count the number of cookies you have. You'll notice you've got several 3rd party cookies that failed to be blocked.
So, no Safari doesn't already do this -- they have a setting which looks like it should, but my direct experience with it is that it is completely ineffective at doing any blocking of 3rd party stuff.
I wish it did work better, but the reality is, it doesn't. In fact, it doesn't appear to work at all.
You know what, the problems with their business model aren't my problem. If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party ... well, tough.
I'm not stealing their content, I'm viewing what they've made publicly available on the internet. If they want to go subscription only so I can't see it for free, well, I'll stop seeing their site. Such is life.
And I'm not breaking any social contract, and I'm not using their bandwidth, I'm using my bandwidth -- because I pay for my internet, and the amount I can access is metered. Arguably, the advertising asshats are using my bandwidth by putting all that extra crap I didn't request.
If a site serves their own advertising (and they're not Flash or otherwise annoying animated stuff), I won't block their ads. If they rely on 3rd parties I have absolutely no reason to trust, I will block everything which is a reference to an external site. Because I have no interest in providing information to those 3rd parties, because they provide nothing of value to me -- in fact they provide negative value by expecting me to give up information about myself in return to being marketed to.
It really is that simple.
And you only watch porn for the riveting plots and insightful commentary too, right? ;-)