I just bought a big box of recertified ZTE Trek 2s to give to my friends' kids. These are 8" tablets meant to be sold as AT&T phones, originally. Inspecting the software load via ADB does not reveal the software in question and scans from Lookout, Avast and BitDefender all come up perfectly clean.
I can absolutely believe some crappy Android devices have Malware on them but even with poorly regarded ZTE, it does not appear to be an issue with all devices. Since I don't see any signs of the malware wrapper, I think my biggest issue with this particular device is the carrier-mandated Facebook installation.r
Marvel's license deal for its properties is actually non-transferable. If Fox is sold to some other party, the agreement that gave Fox rights to stuff like X-men and Deadpool is voided. Those rights will be returned to Disney/Marvel regardless. I'm sure there will be legal wrangling over it but as I understand it, that happens regardless of any other deal.
But will Comcast be a decent steward of other Fox IPs like the Simpsons or Avatar? I sincerely doubt it. Look what it did with the Universal Monsters.
For what it's worth, I was trying things recommended by dating coaches and recommendations of experts of various sorts with regard to online dating. With over two decades of working at it, I wanted to demonstrate that I had put time in to trying to make the services work. I've never been the guy who just writes "Sup?" and expects a response.
As for the content of what I would write, on services where there's a profile to read (e.g. OKCupid), I'd most likely read what's available and formulate about three sentences that would demonstrate that I read their profile, that we have interests in common and which would include a question to invite a reply. The slightly longer introduction also gave me a chance to demonstrate some level of intelligence and literacy.
OKCupid used to let users track profile visits. Mine almost never rose past the lowest level, 1 visit per month. That told me that even the people I was writing weren't bothering to visit my profile. I suspect that real women on dating sites get so slammed with messages that there's no reason for them to go looking at random messages or profiles. I have no way of knowing.
I'm not creepy, nor a neckbeard. I'm isolated from certain common human experiences and I am deeply depressed about that. I'm venting about it in what I suspect is a relatively sympathetic setting. I'm sorry for whatever set your default expectation of a human in distress to that particular set of assumptions.
I've also come to this conclusion, but as far as I know there's nothing to be done about it. The only online alternative (was?) Craigslist, which was also a wonderful way to get dick pics and had approximately the same sketchy vibe as writing your phone number on wall of a public toilet.
I really don't think online is the right way to meet people. Maybe it works for attractive people in urban areas. Maybe it works for someone who ONLY wants to get laid. But dating apps seem to encourage the worst behavior from both the participants and the site owners.
On the other hand, what else is there? Especially for those of us who don't live in urban areas, whose cultural, political or religious leanings don't align well with our location?
I suspect I'm a little older than you and I do have fond memories of USENET as a watering hole. I've also made friends with and met people from other forum sites like Fark, SomethingAwful and Imgur. More broadly, I know of at least one lasting relationship that grew out of an MMO and another that came from, of all things, Etsy.
The idea of people being drawn together through some kind of general social interaction is not new to me and I will say that two of my longest and deepest friendships originate from chatting on forums, but I think the people who actually meet up and make a full relationship work that way are relatively few and far between.
Pick up Artist/NLP bullshit is, so far as I can tell, all about teaching someone to be an asshole. Maybe the people who follow that advice get what they want, but I still have to live with myself and that's now how I want to treat other people.
Sex workers have a particular set of issues in their personal lives. They are, in a way, low-grade therapists, in addition to whatever physical services they provide. Sometimes they are an outlet for damaged people. They have to break social conventions for the sake of their professional lives and they have to deal with at least low-grade fear and jealousy from any loved ones aware of their occupation. I don't envy your lot. Your job is much more difficult than the fiction or fantasy suggest.
My problems are 180 degrees opposite of yours. I have a lifetime of alienation and isolation, no hardened exterior for the sort of careful intimacy one might have from starting relationships and only the barest idea what physical relations entail. I am a stereotype and a punchline and the only thing I can say for myself is that I absolutely cannot give up the idea that one day I will join the rest of the species as a functional human being.
I've been trying for decades. Believe me. You're right that the advice given would normally be helpful, but in my case, it hasn't been. Nor was therapy. Everything about the process of dating relies on finding a willing and appropriate party to date. In this matter, it doesn't matter what insights a therapist or self-help book can share. If I can't connect with anyone who might be interested, all the self-reflection in the world isn't going to do me any good either.
I'm already involved in adult education. My students are mostly older men, but I had the thought that being on a campus would at least increase my available pool. It hasn't, but this is definitely an idea I've put in to practice.
That's true now, but the vast majority of my online dating lack-of-experiences predate Facebook substantially. I don't actually believe that's the issue, nor does every dating service, even in 2018, integrate with Facebook such that it's a requirement.
One of my close friends is a well-regarded queer sex worker in Chicago. She contends that I just need to partake of a similar service, much as you and she provide. Here is my counter:
What I want is not just sex, or to have a dining or public companion. What I want is emotional engagement. I want the support and access to intimacy that can only be found in free will. I want to be considered genuinely worthy has a companion, to share a bed and a washroom and to be able to touch another person freely and without concern that I'm violating taboos of human interaction. That comes from having a full time partner, not a rental. Were I a busier person, or one less concerned about my long-term emotional health, or someone who was just horny, I absolutely agree: renting is a great option. But that's not what I'm looking for. I wish it was. Everything would be so much easier.
I thought very highly of the OKCupid approach, when it was run by its creators. I thought they were on to something with the data-driven tools and matching. I believe most of its user base ignores all or most of that in favor of simple profile creation and chat, but to the extent that someone has put data science forward to address compatibility, I think OKC did.
I'm also fairly convinced that humans don't actually know what they want or, in my case, lack the experience to properly say. It may be that nothing short of individual behavioral modeling can crack this problem. Self-reported data just may not be trustworthy in this domain.
I object to the Facebook terms of service. I'd be happy to explain to anyone why that's the case, and why filling out a profile with misleading information doesn't meaningfully overcome my objection. Most people aren't sophisticated enough about what Facebook is or does and act as if it's some sort of public utility. Those aren't people I'd want to date anyway. I'm actually grateful for all the negative attention Facebook has been getting lately, since some of these things have finally come in to widespread awareness.
If I had the option to get a date once a week, I absolutely would. My average is probably closer to "once per Presidential term" because of the talking-to-a-wall experience of using online dating services.
I do have friends half my age and they appreciate an occasional dinner or movie, but they're not appropriate for my interest, nor are they interested in me. As a pragmatic matter, they're off the table.
I live close but not close enough to a big city in one of those flyover states, such that my location is definitely a factor, but I've been looking all over the USA for 15+ years. Moving is a touchy subject in my case. I have unique job that I wouldn't give up for anything but absolute assurance that I'd be getting something better out of the deal.
I definitely tried making different profiles just to see if one got more response than another. I tried selecting different geographic locations, wildly different photos (sartorial choices, professional vs. candid photos etc). I have to say that I never saw a difference.
My experience with dating sites is such that I can absolutely believe that the overwhelming majority of contacts made on them are by people or software working for the sites rather than actual humans. Some sites are so overrun by obvious bots.
I don't know where the people are, but there is no way in hell that I believe meeting someone once a week or once a month from a dating site is within the realm of possibility.
I have a large number of female friends. The problem is that they're all gay and/or 20+ years younger than I am. Someone who is in my age cohort at this point is almost certainly married or at least in a long term relationship at this point in their life. I actually don't know any women around my age. I live in a place where I'm definitely a demographic outlier for a lot of reasons, but my job is unique and I really couldn't give it up unless I knew I'd be getting something better.
I had a Match.com account for 21 years. I paid for it for about 10 years of that. I'd go to cancel and magically someone would start messaging me. Nothing ever came of it. I joined OKCupid and Plenty of Fish within a year of their launch and, by last February, I was to some degree active on 10 dating services.
I've read books about how to game the systems. I've paid photographers and tried to get feedback on my dating profiles from tens of friends, acquaintances and even total strangers. I tried all manner of strategies in making first impressions, created multiple profiles and basically I've spent two or three hours a day trying to meet someone for over two decades.
I'm not messaging models. I'm not holding anyone to any ridiculous standard; my sole filtering is that my partner be childless (which, admittedly, is much more difficult as I am now a person in my forties). But across platforms and years of effort, I might get a reply to one out of approximately 300 messages sent on a dating site. One out of ten of THOSE might lead to an ongoing conversation.
I've been on seven dates in my entire life.
And before anyone says that I need to work on myself: I have over the last 20 years gone from an obese BMI to a healthy one. I do work out and dress like an adult. I have solid academic achievements, a good job and a life-long interest in fine arts. I can carry a conversation. I'm not terribly attractive but I'm also not ugly. Fundamentally, I would call myself unremarkable but certainly not unacceptable.
I did finally outsource Tinder, Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel to a sympathetic friend, albeit mostly because I refuse to agree to Facebook's terms of service. I paid for her to get a new phone in exchange for her work on my behalf. It didn't help. No better luck was had.
I cannot think of an activity less rewarding. Dating sites seem to be actively hostile to almost everyone who uses them. Women are barraged with harassment. Ordinary guys might as not even exist. No one is happy with the state of affairs, but I'm not a person who is going to do well in a bar or other traditional meeting-space and I already teach adult education, I don't see what other choice might be available. I have a great deal of free time now that I don't spend time on dating sites. I get a lot more reading done, but I also have a lot more anxiety at the parts of life that I have failed to experience. There doesn't seem to be a way out of this particular loop. I wish I could have those many thousands of hours and all of the hope of my life back.
Because I'm monitoring traffic on the relevant VLAN. It's pretty easy to tell what's going where. Unless you think that magic spying is happening on my network that I can't see for some reason.
There's something to be said for not getting out of my nice warm bed to shut off the lights in the rest of my house. Or, for that matter, telling the house to turn up the heat.
Amazon has 20 years of my purchase history telling them that I like classical music. I use my smart speakers to listen to classical music. Are they getting new information? I don't think so.
I do have my smart home stuff sitting on a VLAN so I can see what it's doing separate from the rest of my computers. Some of it phones home quite often. But nothing seems to be acting as a bug. It's very clear when data is going out to a service provider. I'm not really worried about someone bugging my place. What are they going to find? That I talk to my cats?
Doubletwist + Airtwist for Android should be under $5, but I still can't see a point in shelling out $350 for one of those unless I were already one of the 100% Apple faithful.
Kodi has limited Airplay support, though the specifics depend on the device and Kodi build. It can definitely connect to audio devices, which might make it the perfect middleware for one of these things.
A WD Employee I know told me that their manufacturing and development processes for WD and HGST have retained their distinct identities, at least as of 2016. Maybe it's too expensive for WD to switch to the HGST ways of doing things?
It looks to me like everyone has cleaned up their act. I'm willing to accept a 1% - 2% annualized failure rate for (mostly) consumer drives. It wasn't all that long ago that I thought anything under 5% was doing pretty well. I'm interested to see how the trends for the 8TB+ units play out, but it doesn't look like there are any obvious crap products any longer.
Cheeto himself carries a Samsung phone. He mostly tweets in the relatively early morning and late in the evening. During the day, a staffer with an iphone does his tweeting, which is why those tweets tend to be better composed but also sometimes get contradicted by later statements. Most of the media seems to only consider his late night/early morning tweets as significant.
When Obama took office, he was described as a Blackberry addict but was ultimately given a specially secured Android phone that had been vetted by appropriate agencies. As far as I'm aware, his Orangeness has never given up his personal phone.
Even if you're convinced that Webkit is strictly speaking better than anything else, it's not like people don't have Webkit alternatives. In Windows-land, I've found that having Chromium installed is most likely an incidence of malware, as there are any number of pre-fucked Chrome-alikes, but there's always Vivaldi or Opera, which are both completely functional and IMO indistinguishable from Chrome.
Ironically, now that Edge has some level of Add-in support and there's both "mainstream" Chrome-like Firefox and Greybeard "Pry my addons from my cold, dead hands" Palemoon, it's not like there aren't any non-Webkit alternatives out in the world, either. It is a bit of a shame that for most web developers "mobile web" = Webkit, but that's also somewhat reasonable given the prevalence of Apple and Google devices.
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought a big box of recertified ZTE Trek 2s to give to my friends' kids. These are 8" tablets meant to be sold as AT&T phones, originally. Inspecting the software load via ADB does not reveal the software in question and scans from Lookout, Avast and BitDefender all come up perfectly clean.
I can absolutely believe some crappy Android devices have Malware on them but even with poorly regarded ZTE, it does not appear to be an issue with all devices. Since I don't see any signs of the malware wrapper, I think my biggest issue with this particular device is the carrier-mandated Facebook installation.r
Marvel's license deal for its properties is actually non-transferable. If Fox is sold to some other party, the agreement that gave Fox rights to stuff like X-men and Deadpool is voided. Those rights will be returned to Disney/Marvel regardless. I'm sure there will be legal wrangling over it but as I understand it, that happens regardless of any other deal.
But will Comcast be a decent steward of other Fox IPs like the Simpsons or Avatar? I sincerely doubt it. Look what it did with the Universal Monsters.
For what it's worth, I was trying things recommended by dating coaches and recommendations of experts of various sorts with regard to online dating. With over two decades of working at it, I wanted to demonstrate that I had put time in to trying to make the services work. I've never been the guy who just writes "Sup?" and expects a response.
As for the content of what I would write, on services where there's a profile to read (e.g. OKCupid), I'd most likely read what's available and formulate about three sentences that would demonstrate that I read their profile, that we have interests in common and which would include a question to invite a reply. The slightly longer introduction also gave me a chance to demonstrate some level of intelligence and literacy.
OKCupid used to let users track profile visits. Mine almost never rose past the lowest level, 1 visit per month. That told me that even the people I was writing weren't bothering to visit my profile. I suspect that real women on dating sites get so slammed with messages that there's no reason for them to go looking at random messages or profiles. I have no way of knowing.
I'm not creepy, nor a neckbeard. I'm isolated from certain common human experiences and I am deeply depressed about that. I'm venting about it in what I suspect is a relatively sympathetic setting. I'm sorry for whatever set your default expectation of a human in distress to that particular set of assumptions.
I've also come to this conclusion, but as far as I know there's nothing to be done about it. The only online alternative (was?) Craigslist, which was also a wonderful way to get dick pics and had approximately the same sketchy vibe as writing your phone number on wall of a public toilet.
I really don't think online is the right way to meet people. Maybe it works for attractive people in urban areas. Maybe it works for someone who ONLY wants to get laid. But dating apps seem to encourage the worst behavior from both the participants and the site owners.
On the other hand, what else is there? Especially for those of us who don't live in urban areas, whose cultural, political or religious leanings don't align well with our location?
I suspect I'm a little older than you and I do have fond memories of USENET as a watering hole. I've also made friends with and met people from other forum sites like Fark, SomethingAwful and Imgur. More broadly, I know of at least one lasting relationship that grew out of an MMO and another that came from, of all things, Etsy.
The idea of people being drawn together through some kind of general social interaction is not new to me and I will say that two of my longest and deepest friendships originate from chatting on forums, but I think the people who actually meet up and make a full relationship work that way are relatively few and far between.
Pick up Artist/NLP bullshit is, so far as I can tell, all about teaching someone to be an asshole. Maybe the people who follow that advice get what they want, but I still have to live with myself and that's now how I want to treat other people.
Sex workers have a particular set of issues in their personal lives. They are, in a way, low-grade therapists, in addition to whatever physical services they provide. Sometimes they are an outlet for damaged people. They have to break social conventions for the sake of their professional lives and they have to deal with at least low-grade fear and jealousy from any loved ones aware of their occupation. I don't envy your lot. Your job is much more difficult than the fiction or fantasy suggest.
My problems are 180 degrees opposite of yours. I have a lifetime of alienation and isolation, no hardened exterior for the sort of careful intimacy one might have from starting relationships and only the barest idea what physical relations entail. I am a stereotype and a punchline and the only thing I can say for myself is that I absolutely cannot give up the idea that one day I will join the rest of the species as a functional human being.
I've been trying for decades. Believe me. You're right that the advice given would normally be helpful, but in my case, it hasn't been. Nor was therapy. Everything about the process of dating relies on finding a willing and appropriate party to date. In this matter, it doesn't matter what insights a therapist or self-help book can share. If I can't connect with anyone who might be interested, all the self-reflection in the world isn't going to do me any good either.
I'm already involved in adult education. My students are mostly older men, but I had the thought that being on a campus would at least increase my available pool. It hasn't, but this is definitely an idea I've put in to practice.
That's true now, but the vast majority of my online dating lack-of-experiences predate Facebook substantially. I don't actually believe that's the issue, nor does every dating service, even in 2018, integrate with Facebook such that it's a requirement.
One of my close friends is a well-regarded queer sex worker in Chicago. She contends that I just need to partake of a similar service, much as you and she provide. Here is my counter:
What I want is not just sex, or to have a dining or public companion. What I want is emotional engagement. I want the support and access to intimacy that can only be found in free will. I want to be considered genuinely worthy has a companion, to share a bed and a washroom and to be able to touch another person freely and without concern that I'm violating taboos of human interaction. That comes from having a full time partner, not a rental. Were I a busier person, or one less concerned about my long-term emotional health, or someone who was just horny, I absolutely agree: renting is a great option. But that's not what I'm looking for. I wish it was. Everything would be so much easier.
I thought very highly of the OKCupid approach, when it was run by its creators. I thought they were on to something with the data-driven tools and matching. I believe most of its user base ignores all or most of that in favor of simple profile creation and chat, but to the extent that someone has put data science forward to address compatibility, I think OKC did.
I'm also fairly convinced that humans don't actually know what they want or, in my case, lack the experience to properly say. It may be that nothing short of individual behavioral modeling can crack this problem. Self-reported data just may not be trustworthy in this domain.
I object to the Facebook terms of service. I'd be happy to explain to anyone why that's the case, and why filling out a profile with misleading information doesn't meaningfully overcome my objection. Most people aren't sophisticated enough about what Facebook is or does and act as if it's some sort of public utility. Those aren't people I'd want to date anyway. I'm actually grateful for all the negative attention Facebook has been getting lately, since some of these things have finally come in to widespread awareness.
If I had the option to get a date once a week, I absolutely would. My average is probably closer to "once per Presidential term" because of the talking-to-a-wall experience of using online dating services.
I do have friends half my age and they appreciate an occasional dinner or movie, but they're not appropriate for my interest, nor are they interested in me. As a pragmatic matter, they're off the table.
I live close but not close enough to a big city in one of those flyover states, such that my location is definitely a factor, but I've been looking all over the USA for 15+ years. Moving is a touchy subject in my case. I have unique job that I wouldn't give up for anything but absolute assurance that I'd be getting something better out of the deal.
I definitely tried making different profiles just to see if one got more response than another. I tried selecting different geographic locations, wildly different photos (sartorial choices, professional vs. candid photos etc). I have to say that I never saw a difference.
My experience with dating sites is such that I can absolutely believe that the overwhelming majority of contacts made on them are by people or software working for the sites rather than actual humans. Some sites are so overrun by obvious bots.
I don't know where the people are, but there is no way in hell that I believe meeting someone once a week or once a month from a dating site is within the realm of possibility.
I have a large number of female friends. The problem is that they're all gay and/or 20+ years younger than I am. Someone who is in my age cohort at this point is almost certainly married or at least in a long term relationship at this point in their life. I actually don't know any women around my age. I live in a place where I'm definitely a demographic outlier for a lot of reasons, but my job is unique and I really couldn't give it up unless I knew I'd be getting something better.
I had a Match.com account for 21 years. I paid for it for about 10 years of that. I'd go to cancel and magically someone would start messaging me. Nothing ever came of it. I joined OKCupid and Plenty of Fish within a year of their launch and, by last February, I was to some degree active on 10 dating services.
I've read books about how to game the systems. I've paid photographers and tried to get feedback on my dating profiles from tens of friends, acquaintances and even total strangers. I tried all manner of strategies in making first impressions, created multiple profiles and basically I've spent two or three hours a day trying to meet someone for over two decades.
I'm not messaging models. I'm not holding anyone to any ridiculous standard; my sole filtering is that my partner be childless (which, admittedly, is much more difficult as I am now a person in my forties). But across platforms and years of effort, I might get a reply to one out of approximately 300 messages sent on a dating site. One out of ten of THOSE might lead to an ongoing conversation.
I've been on seven dates in my entire life.
And before anyone says that I need to work on myself: I have over the last 20 years gone from an obese BMI to a healthy one. I do work out and dress like an adult. I have solid academic achievements, a good job and a life-long interest in fine arts. I can carry a conversation. I'm not terribly attractive but I'm also not ugly. Fundamentally, I would call myself unremarkable but certainly not unacceptable.
I did finally outsource Tinder, Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel to a sympathetic friend, albeit mostly because I refuse to agree to Facebook's terms of service. I paid for her to get a new phone in exchange for her work on my behalf. It didn't help. No better luck was had.
I cannot think of an activity less rewarding. Dating sites seem to be actively hostile to almost everyone who uses them. Women are barraged with harassment. Ordinary guys might as not even exist. No one is happy with the state of affairs, but I'm not a person who is going to do well in a bar or other traditional meeting-space and I already teach adult education, I don't see what other choice might be available. I have a great deal of free time now that I don't spend time on dating sites. I get a lot more reading done, but I also have a lot more anxiety at the parts of life that I have failed to experience. There doesn't seem to be a way out of this particular loop. I wish I could have those many thousands of hours and all of the hope of my life back.
Pfft. This is Slashdot. Who in the hell has sex with a partner?
Because I'm monitoring traffic on the relevant VLAN. It's pretty easy to tell what's going where. Unless you think that magic spying is happening on my network that I can't see for some reason.
There's something to be said for not getting out of my nice warm bed to shut off the lights in the rest of my house. Or, for that matter, telling the house to turn up the heat.
Amazon has 20 years of my purchase history telling them that I like classical music. I use my smart speakers to listen to classical music. Are they getting new information? I don't think so.
I do have my smart home stuff sitting on a VLAN so I can see what it's doing separate from the rest of my computers. Some of it phones home quite often. But nothing seems to be acting as a bug. It's very clear when data is going out to a service provider. I'm not really worried about someone bugging my place. What are they going to find? That I talk to my cats?
Doubletwist + Airtwist for Android should be under $5, but I still can't see a point in shelling out $350 for one of those unless I were already one of the 100% Apple faithful.
Kodi has limited Airplay support, though the specifics depend on the device and Kodi build. It can definitely connect to audio devices, which might make it the perfect middleware for one of these things.
A WD Employee I know told me that their manufacturing and development processes for WD and HGST have retained their distinct identities, at least as of 2016. Maybe it's too expensive for WD to switch to the HGST ways of doing things?
It looks to me like everyone has cleaned up their act. I'm willing to accept a 1% - 2% annualized failure rate for (mostly) consumer drives. It wasn't all that long ago that I thought anything under 5% was doing pretty well. I'm interested to see how the trends for the 8TB+ units play out, but it doesn't look like there are any obvious crap products any longer.
Cheeto himself carries a Samsung phone. He mostly tweets in the relatively early morning and late in the evening. During the day, a staffer with an iphone does his tweeting, which is why those tweets tend to be better composed but also sometimes get contradicted by later statements. Most of the media seems to only consider his late night/early morning tweets as significant.
When Obama took office, he was described as a Blackberry addict but was ultimately given a specially secured Android phone that had been vetted by appropriate agencies. As far as I'm aware, his Orangeness has never given up his personal phone.
XUL and a non-Chrome UI already exists. It's called Palemoon. It has drawbacks of its own but if those are things you want, it's out there.
Even if you're convinced that Webkit is strictly speaking better than anything else, it's not like people don't have Webkit alternatives. In Windows-land, I've found that having Chromium installed is most likely an incidence of malware, as there are any number of pre-fucked Chrome-alikes, but there's always Vivaldi or Opera, which are both completely functional and IMO indistinguishable from Chrome.
Ironically, now that Edge has some level of Add-in support and there's both "mainstream" Chrome-like Firefox and Greybeard "Pry my addons from my cold, dead hands" Palemoon, it's not like there aren't any non-Webkit alternatives out in the world, either. It is a bit of a shame that for most web developers "mobile web" = Webkit, but that's also somewhat reasonable given the prevalence of Apple and Google devices.
I suppose the question comes down to whether the value of the actual Google services integration (profile sync, better Youtube experience, cloud print, desktop sharing) is worth ceding control of the whole browsing experience to Google. I don't really use any of that stuff so I can't say, but no, letting a giant ad company control my internet experience really isn't any better than when we were pissed a Microsoft for trying to do the same thing. I'm not really seeing how Google got to this point on the desktop. Firefox and Safari were never THAT bad. Is it really just a matter of marketing?