Yes! Harold and Maude is the only movie you'll ever watch that includes footage of an E-type Jaguar converted to a hearse. It's just a shame they had to drive it off that cliff:-(
It's one of the very few movies I've ever watched which has had me convulsing in uncontrollable fits of laughter -- that bit with the hand and the cleaver was hysterical.
Whoever cast Ruth Gordon in this movie deserved an Oscar for doing so -- it was probably her best ever role.
This is definitely one of my top five movies of all time.
A Clockwork Orange was pretty cool too -- you can't beat a bit of the Ludwig Van and some ultraviolence eh?
Down here in New Zealand, the Osborne was the first really "affordable" CPM personal computer.
All the other CPM-based microcomputers were priced at well over $5,000 (and that was when a $ was really worth something) so the Osborne's $1,600-$1900 price-tag was a real breakthrough.
I wrote some debtors/invoicing software designed specifically to work around the limitations of the tiny screen and very limited disk space -- it sold a heap and made me a respectable amount of profit.
I suspect that the Osborne was responsible for introducing a *lot* of people to the wonderful world of computing -- and the somewhat less wonderful workd of DataStar and CalcStar -- although I still have a soft-spot for WordStar [eyes glaze over, breathes sigh of nostalgia]
Hell, the fact that the guy behind this machine has died makes me feel real old!
The only question I have to ask is: Why was it him and not Bill Gates who had to die?:-)
Wait... what am I saying? Why not just buy a PC with an ATI All-in-wonder card?
Or the Hauppauge PVR-250/350 cards.
The only downside is that the software is still somewhat immature.
Having spent a *lot* of time on PC-based PVR project, and having tried a number of hardware/software options, I think the PC solution is only about 90% there.
However, it's absolutely brilliant for creating archival copies of programs broadcast on TV.
The PVR-250 in particular does an excellent job of capturing to MPEG-2 format (SVCD or DVD) in realtime and once you've edited out the ads you can fit a 1 hour program (or two half-hour ones) onto a single 700MB CDR in SVCD format.
Movies are easily fitted onto two CDRs or a single DVD +-R/RW and the quality is excellent.
Tapes suck for long-term storage -- some of the recordings I made on top-quality VHS tape just five or six years ago are alread showing signs of degrading. In theory, CDRs should last ten times that (normal storage caveats).
Tapes are also a hugely inefficient use of space. By switching to CDR I can now fit more than four times the amount of material on the same shelf.
Whether you intend to use your PC as a PVR or not, a decent capture card is a worthwhile investment these days.
Why isn't it a 4-stroke? Weight. Size. Power. 2 cycles like this one will produce gobs more power with smaller weight than 4 strokes. Plus they are simpler, easy to rebuild, and can be mounted in different positions because they don't have an oil sump
Obviously you haven't looked at the latest four-stroke model airplane engines.
These things operate in any attitude (heard of aerobatics?), are not much heavier than a two-stroke of equivalent power, and offer much better fuel economy, less polution and less noise.
Check out this engine which produces more than two horsepower from just 32 ounces (900g) of weight and 1.2 cubic inches (19.7cc) of displacement.
Or this one which manages to extract 3.5ps (2.6hp) from an engine that weighs under 1KG and displaces just 23ccs.
What's more, small four-stroke glow-plug engines run on methanol, a renewable fuel that is far more environmentally friendly (and cheaper in some places) than gasoline.
Hell, first of all GW Bush unilaterally appoints the US as the world's international police force, stepping into the internal politics of other soverign nations and fostering the widespread hatred of Americans amongst some of the world's most populous countries.
Then, in the name of the "war against terrorism", the government usurps the very constitutional rights of its own citizens to legal representation and the presumption of inocence.
And now it seems that the US government is set on forcing its own laws upon all citizens of the world.
It strikes me that the American people need to wake up and realize that those in power are starting to run amok and need to be reigned in -- for the benefit of *everybody* on the planet.
The USA is a great nation and I have lots of really nice American friends -- but hasn't anyone over there noticed that there's a bunch of crazies driving your wagon?
Re:Improve and go on until a third accident
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So they will improve the safety of the shuttle and go on with it. Until a third accident proves the unsafety of the shuttle
Hey, despite the fact that fourteen lives have so far been lost in two shuttle accidents, it's still a whole lot safer than driving your car on a "lives lost per mile travelled" basis.
There's no way to change the fact that flying into space (even a low earth orbit) is always going to be an activity that carries a degree of risk.
If the astronauts are prepared to take that risk then I don't think some crazy belief that this should be 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe should get in the way.
Ultimately, the choice should belong to those who put their lives on the line. Has anyone (including the media) actually bothered to ask all those NASA astronauts still waiting in the wings whether they'd be prepared to fly the shuttle gain without modifications?
Imagine if we could only drive cars that were proven 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe... the roads would be empty and we'd all be walking from place to place. Even Segway's would be considered "too dangerous" to risk a single human life.
Come on folks, life is risky -- if it wasn't then where would the fun be?
The /. model is the future of online publish
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 1
Here is an interesting editorial on the future of online publishing and why the Slashdot model is far better suited to the Net and today's competitive environment than Salon ever was.
but companies that refuse to make their websites accessible and usable to anything other than WIndows IE are demonstrating either major ignorance on customer service, a blatant disregard for standards, or both
The sad truth is that most companies don't design or implement their own websites -- they hire a web designer to do the job for them.
Unfortuantely, a growing number of web designers are incompetent and/or just plain lazy when it comes to building sites that work with browsers other than IE.
There is no excuse for building a site that won't at least provide basic navigation and information with even the simplest of browsers.
I get real ticked off when I keep having to turn Javascript back on just so I can see some "clever" designer's pull-down menus, or have to fire up IE because a site is MS-specific.
Even more annoying are those sites that use Active-X components so that if you're a *smart* websurfer who has disabled Active-X, you keep getting little dialog boxes and beeps advising you that the page may not display properly.
Then there's those sites built almost entirely from Flash. The worst of these even force you to have Javascript enabled before the Flash code will load as well.
Listen-up smarty-pants web designers. I don't want to be entertained, I don't want to be blown away by your fancy tricks -- I just want to be able to access the information and navigate without a whole lot of fuss, and without wearing the great big "kick me" sign that IE paints on your back when you're surfing unknown URLs.
The V2000 may have been theoretically better but Philips' own player was fraught with problems.
It used a piezo-electric system to adjust the tracking/azimuth of the head assembly and this was one of the main weaknesses -- it just never worked very well.
There were a number of other problems too. I think it was just too far ahead of its time to become a commercial success, since the price was incredibly high at a time when few people could justify such a novel device in their homes.
When I last bought a monitor (1999) I wanted a really good quality image (accurate geometry is my biggest demand) and I looked at Sony as an option.
Quite frankly I wasn't that impressed with the performance of the 17" Sony Trinitron monitors I saw and there's no way a 19" unit would fit on my desk.
I ended up plumping for a 17" Viewsonic GT775 which uses a Trinitron (albeit under a different name) tube and has truly excellent geometry, color rendition and sharpness.
As you would expect from a trinitron-type tube, covergence and purity is perfect, stright lines are dead straight and the OSM provides all the controls needed to fix any minor distortions.
I've been very happy with this monitor and don't think I'll be switching to an LCD until it expires (even though I'd love to recover a little desk space and look cool:-)
Last month the New Zealand Government published a position paper on proposed changes to its copyright laws.
Burried deep inside the paper is the following in respect to users engaging in "format shifting" (ie: copying their legally-purchased CDs to tape or MP3):
Should format shifting of sound recordings for personal use be a permitted act?
If so, what limitations should apply?
Is there any economic loss to copyright owners arising out of format shifting of sound recordings for personal use?
If so, should a levy scheme apply to remunerate copyright owners for potential lost revenue?
(the emphasis is mine).
It should be noted that there is no fair use exclusion for NZers - any copying of music, even just backing up your CDs or creating a compliation disk from legally-purchased disks is illegal.
The hinted-at levy in the position paper would be solely to reimburse the music industry for the losses they would be incurring when users ripped their own CDs to MP3 for use on their own MP3 players or PCs.
Besides which, it leaves consumers asking: in these days of copy-protected CDs, how can the industry even think of collecting a levy for something that they've made it impossible to do?
And you think the Canadians and Aussies have got it tough?
The record companies can't ban something AND get paid for it as well can they?
Oh come on -- the recording industry is a law unto itself.
Remember the Dutch(?) taxi-drivers who have to pay a fee if they use their car-radios when carrying passengers?
We have the same setup here in NZ where a cafe or restaurant playing a radio where the customers can hear it have to pay an annual fee to the music industry.
So the radio stations have paid a fee for broadcasting the music, the restaurant owner pays another fee (for the same music) to have that radio going for his customers, and you can bet that some of those customers will already own the CD containing the track that's being broadcast.
As a result, the music industry gets THREE bites of the same apple!
In any other industry this would be called profiteering or unfair trading. However, when you're one of the largest industries on the face of the planet and have some very slick and highly paid lobyists then you can get away with murder right?
I covered this story yesterday (Sunday US-time) in my daily interent commentary and also highlighted the crazy situation taking place in Europe right now.
It seems that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has succeeded in obtaining a injuction from a Hamburg court that forbids a UK newspaper from pubilshing details about an alleged extramarital affair.
The UK newspaper have basically thumbed their nose at the order, as did another UK paper which went a step further and published not just in print but on the Web as well.
My column on this matter can be found here if anyone's interested. Check out today's edition as well: When Microsoft Owns Your ISP
I published this commentary less than a week ago which puts the case for a "music media" (as opposed to a data media), the price of which includes a recording industry levy.
This would allow all those people with "stolen" music to legitimize their collections at a relatively low cost.
At the very least, it would test the claims that people don't want to steal music but aren't buying CDs simply because they're too expensive.
What we need is not more efficiency but lower cost!
Who cares if you need 10 square feet instead of 1 square foot to extract a given number of watts? What we need is a solar power source that is affordable -- such that we can afford to cover the entire roof area of our houses for just a few hundred dollars.
The promise of low-cost amorphous silicon solar cells has been touted for over a decade now -- but *all* solar cells remain expensive if you want to collect any reasonable amount of power.
As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content
But hang on, Google News only takes the headline and first paragraph -- it doesn't copy entire stories. And the main web index already allows you to specifically exclude your pages from Google's cache if that's what you'd prefer.
However, by allowing Google to spider your site and exerpt a paragraph or two the result is a three-way value exchange:
1. Google gets to build a great index that it can leverage to generate revenue
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
3. The average Net user gets a nicely organized index to help them track down the latest news or information.
So long as this balance remains, everybody wins.
When I started out in the online News aggregation business five years ago I encountered some resistance from a few news sites (such as Nando.net) that actually wanted to charge me for carrying their headlines and providing links to their stories.
Just 18 months later (when my aggregation network was being accessed over a million times a day), many of those same news sites were begging to be included in the index because they wanted the traffic.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
Just look at the Google model -- one of the main reasons that it is at the top of the pile is because it continues to offer a good value exchange to visitors.
Unlike many of its peers, Google doesn't assault you with endless banners and pop-ups or insult you with paid listing that are made to look like genuine search results. As a user, I get good value out of Google so I keep going back.
If someone chooses not to be included in Google's index because they demand payment then it's their loss, not mine (nor Google's).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Harold and Maude is the only movie you'll ever watch that includes footage of an E-type Jaguar converted to a hearse. It's just a shame they had to drive it off that cliff :-(
It's one of the very few movies I've ever watched which has had me convulsing in uncontrollable fits of laughter -- that bit with the hand and the cleaver was hysterical.
Whoever cast Ruth Gordon in this movie deserved an Oscar for doing so -- it was probably her best ever role.
This is definitely one of my top five movies of all time.
A Clockwork Orange was pretty cool too -- you can't beat a bit of the Ludwig Van and some ultraviolence eh?
Down here in New Zealand, the Osborne was the first really "affordable" CPM personal computer.
:-)
All the other CPM-based microcomputers were priced at well over $5,000 (and that was when a $ was really worth something) so the Osborne's $1,600-$1900 price-tag was a real breakthrough.
I wrote some debtors/invoicing software designed specifically to work around the limitations of the tiny screen and very limited disk space -- it sold a heap and made me a respectable amount of profit.
I suspect that the Osborne was responsible for introducing a *lot* of people to the wonderful world of computing -- and the somewhat less wonderful workd of DataStar and CalcStar -- although I still have a soft-spot for WordStar [eyes glaze over, breathes sigh of nostalgia]
Hell, the fact that the guy behind this machine has died makes me feel real old!
The only question I have to ask is: Why was it him and not Bill Gates who had to die?
Wait... what am I saying? Why not just buy a PC with an ATI All-in-wonder card?
Or the Hauppauge PVR-250/350 cards.
The only downside is that the software is still somewhat immature.
Having spent a *lot* of time on PC-based PVR project, and having tried a number of hardware/software options, I think the PC solution is only about 90% there.
However, it's absolutely brilliant for creating archival copies of programs broadcast on TV.
The PVR-250 in particular does an excellent job of capturing to MPEG-2 format (SVCD or DVD) in realtime and once you've edited out the ads you can fit a 1 hour program (or two half-hour ones) onto a single 700MB CDR in SVCD format.
Movies are easily fitted onto two CDRs or a single DVD +-R/RW and the quality is excellent.
Tapes suck for long-term storage -- some of the recordings I made on top-quality VHS tape just five or six years ago are alread showing signs of degrading. In theory, CDRs should last ten times that (normal storage caveats).
Tapes are also a hugely inefficient use of space. By switching to CDR I can now fit more than four times the amount of material on the same shelf.
Whether you intend to use your PC as a PVR or not, a decent capture card is a worthwhile investment these days.
Hell, with the right capture card you can even get all the music and movies you want for free without downloading from the Net.
Why isn't it a 4-stroke? Weight. Size. Power. 2 cycles like this one will produce gobs more power with smaller weight than 4 strokes. Plus they are simpler, easy to rebuild, and can be mounted in different positions because they don't have an oil sump
Obviously you haven't looked at the latest four-stroke model airplane engines.
These things operate in any attitude (heard of aerobatics?), are not much heavier than a two-stroke of equivalent power, and offer much better fuel economy, less polution and less noise.
Check out this engine which produces more than two horsepower from just 32 ounces (900g) of weight and 1.2 cubic inches (19.7cc) of displacement.
Or this one which manages to extract 3.5ps (2.6hp) from an engine that weighs under 1KG and displaces just 23ccs.
What's more, small four-stroke glow-plug engines run on methanol, a renewable fuel that is far more environmentally friendly (and cheaper in some places) than gasoline.
I wonder why the guy runined a great concept by fitting a two-stroke engine?
:-)
Two-strokes not only create more polution but they're also significantly less fuel-efficient than a four-stroke engine of the same power.
I mean, if you're after thrills rather than efficiency then why not just build a scooter like the one on this page?
Good grief!
Don't forget that the recording industry is *already* getting a levie from CDR/RW drive sold in Germany.
Check out this story published by the BBC back in 2001.
What next I wonder?
A special tax on speakers because they "might" be used to listen to pirated music?
A special tax on guitars because 9 out of 10 amateur musicians play copyrighted tunes without paying the relevant performance fee?
It's just a shame that the recording industry has such deep pockets and politicians the world-over are so willing to accept bribes.
Hell, first of all GW Bush unilaterally appoints the US as the world's international police force, stepping into the internal politics of other soverign nations and fostering the widespread hatred of Americans amongst some of the world's most populous countries.
Then, in the name of the "war against terrorism", the government usurps the very constitutional rights of its own citizens to legal representation and the presumption of inocence.
And now it seems that the US government is set on forcing its own laws upon all citizens of the world.
It strikes me that the American people need to wake up and realize that those in power are starting to run amok and need to be reigned in -- for the benefit of *everybody* on the planet.
The USA is a great nation and I have lots of really nice American friends -- but hasn't anyone over there noticed that there's a bunch of crazies driving your wagon?
So they will improve the safety of the shuttle and go on with it. Until a third accident proves the unsafety of the shuttle
Hey, despite the fact that fourteen lives have so far been lost in two shuttle accidents, it's still a whole lot safer than driving your car on a "lives lost per mile travelled" basis.
There's no way to change the fact that flying into space (even a low earth orbit) is always going to be an activity that carries a degree of risk.
If the astronauts are prepared to take that risk then I don't think some crazy belief that this should be 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe should get in the way.
Ultimately, the choice should belong to those who put their lives on the line. Has anyone (including the media) actually bothered to ask all those NASA astronauts still waiting in the wings whether they'd be prepared to fly the shuttle gain without modifications?
Imagine if we could only drive cars that were proven 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe... the roads would be empty and we'd all be walking from place to place. Even Segway's would be considered "too dangerous" to risk a single human life.
Come on folks, life is risky -- if it wasn't then where would the fun be?
Case in point
Here is an interesting editorial on the future of online publishing and why the Slashdot model is far better suited to the Net and today's competitive environment than Salon ever was.
but companies that refuse to make their websites accessible and usable to anything other than WIndows IE are demonstrating either major ignorance on customer service, a blatant disregard for standards, or both
The sad truth is that most companies don't design or implement their own websites -- they hire a web designer to do the job for them.
Unfortuantely, a growing number of web designers are incompetent and/or just plain lazy when it comes to building sites that work with browsers other than IE.
There is no excuse for building a site that won't at least provide basic navigation and information with even the simplest of browsers.
I get real ticked off when I keep having to turn Javascript back on just so I can see some "clever" designer's pull-down menus, or have to fire up IE because a site is MS-specific.
Even more annoying are those sites that use Active-X components so that if you're a *smart* websurfer who has disabled Active-X, you keep getting little dialog boxes and beeps advising you that the page may not display properly.
Then there's those sites built almost entirely from Flash. The worst of these even force you to have Javascript enabled before the Flash code will load as well.
Listen-up smarty-pants web designers. I don't want to be entertained, I don't want to be blown away by your fancy tricks -- I just want to be able to access the information and navigate without a whole lot of fuss, and without wearing the great big "kick me" sign that IE paints on your back when you're surfing unknown URLs.
When the people of the USA become more afraid of those they elect to protect them than they do of Al Qaeda then the terrorists have won.
Will the words of the national anthem have to be changed by the insertion of the word "formerly" before the word "free"?
As said in a song by Midnight Oil, "it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
The V2000 may have been theoretically better but Philips' own player was fraught with problems.
It used a piezo-electric system to adjust the tracking/azimuth of the head assembly and this was one of the main weaknesses -- it just never worked very well.
There were a number of other problems too. I think it was just too far ahead of its time to become a commercial success, since the price was incredibly high at a time when few people could justify such a novel device in their homes.
Seriously? Do you know how much money it costs to make a David Hasselhoff record even remotely
:-)
listenable?
Hey, it costs just $22.95 on special at this site.
BFG
When I last bought a monitor (1999) I wanted a really good quality image (accurate geometry is my biggest demand) and I looked at Sony as an option.
:-)
Quite frankly I wasn't that impressed with the performance of the 17" Sony Trinitron monitors I saw and there's no way a 19" unit would fit on my desk.
I ended up plumping for a 17" Viewsonic GT775 which uses a Trinitron (albeit under a different name) tube and has truly excellent geometry, color rendition and sharpness.
As you would expect from a trinitron-type tube, covergence and purity is perfect, stright lines are dead straight and the OSM provides all the controls needed to fix any minor distortions.
I've been very happy with this monitor and don't think I'll be switching to an LCD until it expires (even though I'd love to recover a little desk space and look cool
Burried deep inside the paper is the following in respect to users engaging in "format shifting" (ie: copying their legally-purchased CDs to tape or MP3):
(the emphasis is mine).
It should be noted that there is no fair use exclusion for NZers - any copying of music, even just backing up your CDs or creating a compliation disk from legally-purchased disks is illegal.
The hinted-at levy in the position paper would be solely to reimburse the music industry for the losses they would be incurring when users ripped their own CDs to MP3 for use on their own MP3 players or PCs.
Besides which, it leaves consumers asking: in these days of copy-protected CDs, how can the industry even think of collecting a levy for something that they've made it impossible to do?
And you think the Canadians and Aussies have got it tough?
There's an idea. Sell CDRs as per-recorded data disks with just a few Kbytes used in a single session.
The rest of the disk (less the 40MB for starting another session) would then be available for recording your own stuff.
The problem is that I doubt anyone can write one of these dummy data sessions to a blank CDR for less than the CDN$0.59 levy anyway.
The record companies can't ban something AND get paid for it as well can they?
Oh come on -- the recording industry is a law unto itself.
Remember the Dutch(?) taxi-drivers who have to pay a fee if they use their car-radios when carrying passengers?
We have the same setup here in NZ where a cafe or restaurant playing a radio where the customers can hear it have to pay an annual fee to the music industry.
So the radio stations have paid a fee for broadcasting the music, the restaurant owner pays another fee (for the same music) to have that radio going for his customers, and you can bet that some of those customers will already own the CD containing the track that's being broadcast.
As a result, the music industry gets THREE bites of the same apple!
In any other industry this would be called profiteering or unfair trading. However, when you're one of the largest industries on the face of the planet and have some very slick and highly paid lobyists then you can get away with murder right?
There's a very good article in today's New Zealand Herald which provides a legal-professional's point of view.
The writer is a (former?) judge and part-time lecturer in law and IT at the University of Auckland.
I covered this story yesterday (Sunday US-time) in my daily interent commentary and also highlighted the crazy situation taking place in Europe right now.
It seems that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has succeeded in obtaining a injuction from a Hamburg court that forbids a UK newspaper from pubilshing details about an alleged extramarital affair.
The UK newspaper have basically thumbed their nose at the order, as did another UK paper which went a step further and published not just in print but on the Web as well.
My column on this matter can be found here if anyone's interested. Check out today's edition as well: When Microsoft Owns Your ISP
About a week ago in my daily Interent column I predicted that Microsoft would launch its own flavor of Linux sometime in the next 18 months.
I still think it's a very real possibility for the reasons I listed.
I published this commentary less than a week ago which puts the case for a "music media" (as opposed to a data media), the price of which includes a recording industry levy.
This would allow all those people with "stolen" music to legitimize their collections at a relatively low cost.
At the very least, it would test the claims that people don't want to steal music but aren't buying CDs simply because they're too expensive.
Once a system is in place to pay money to artists directly, I'll put some money in towards the artists I like. Until then, I ain't paying squat
Time to put your money where your mouth is?
Wow, WinCE adds a whole new meaning to the term "Blue Screen Of Death" when it GPFs at 140mph on the autobahn eh?
And can you imagine the excuses given to the highway patrol...
"Honest officer, it wasn't me who crashed, it was Windows CE"
What we need is not more efficiency but lower cost!
Who cares if you need 10 square feet instead of 1 square foot to extract a given number of watts? What we need is a solar power source that is affordable -- such that we can afford to cover the entire roof area of our houses for just a few hundred dollars.
The promise of low-cost amorphous silicon solar cells has been touted for over a decade now -- but *all* solar cells remain expensive if you want to collect any reasonable amount of power.
Forget efficient, gimme cheap!
As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content
But hang on, Google News only takes the headline and first paragraph -- it doesn't copy entire stories. And the main web index already allows you to specifically exclude your pages from Google's cache if that's what you'd prefer.
However, by allowing Google to spider your site and exerpt a paragraph or two the result is a three-way value exchange:
1. Google gets to build a great index that it can leverage to generate revenue
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
3. The average Net user gets a nicely organized index to help them track down the latest news or information.
So long as this balance remains, everybody wins.
When I started out in the online News aggregation business five years ago I encountered some resistance from a few news sites (such as Nando.net) that actually wanted to charge me for carrying their headlines and providing links to their stories.
Just 18 months later (when my aggregation network was being accessed over a million times a day), many of those same news sites were begging to be included in the index because they wanted the traffic.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
Just look at the Google model -- one of the main reasons that it is at the top of the pile is because it continues to offer a good value exchange to visitors.
Unlike many of its peers, Google doesn't assault you with endless banners and pop-ups or insult you with paid listing that are made to look like genuine search results. As a user, I get good value out of Google so I keep going back.
If someone chooses not to be included in Google's index because they demand payment then it's their loss, not mine (nor Google's).