The article mentions that the house was in rural Washington. It's entirely possible that the neighbor's house was quite a distance away. My in-laws live in rural western New York on 10 acres of land. They are largely surrounded by farms and forest. It's very common for people to be out shooting guns, especially in hunting season. It's not unusual to hear guns going off, or see people in hunting attire walking along the road or in a field with a firearm. I've also lived in the southern and western US and similar behavior happens there.
Indeed, if you want to do some target practice to achieve proficiency with your weapons, a friend who lives out in the cut is the best way to do it. It beats the hell out of paying shooting-range fees, you can use whatever you want for targets, and you can also practice at longer distances than anything an indoor facility could offer.
A cop bought a video camera to catch an illegal alien unloading a firearm at bottles on his own porch, among other things...catches the guy, along with a significant drug operation no less...and the court "nixes weeks of warrantless video surveillance" is a GOOD THING? You'll notice they aren't nixing the YEARS of warrantless surveillance that every citizen of the U.S. has been under, nor the YEARS of collusion with friendly nations to extend that surveillance program to every citizen, worldwide. No, they're nixing the one bit of fucking video that might actually have been worth recording in the fucking first place. Footage of a criminal, committing a crime. How novel.
The EFF logo for this story was perfect, "extremely fucking foolish" was the first thought that came to mind.
It's simple enough. This was a local police department in a small rural area, so they were held to the rules. If they were a national agency with an effectively unlimited budget, ties to major military-industrial corporations, and loads of political clout, the courts would have performed some mental gymnatics and invented a bullshit reason why that inconvenient Fourth Amendment doesn't really apply. Currently "anti-terrorism" is popular.
Why does the fourth amendment apply? If he is not a citizen of the US, our laws shouldn't protect him.
Because the Constitution is a document describing what powers the government has and how these powers may be used. It's like a default-deny firewall: the government has no powers whatsoever, except these enumerated powers. The Constitution is emphatically not a document describing what rights a person (citizen or not) has and when they will be honored.
The document was written based on the idea of "natural rights". You have certain rights simply because you are a human being; the government either recognizes that or it becomes dysfunctional and fails to fulfill its major purpose, which is to protect your natural rights. The Founders (mostly Deists) explained it in terms of us having been "endowed by our Creator" with such rights. You could also remove the Creator-concept entirely and argue that such a system simply works better and does the greatest good for all involved, and thus is inherently superior to systems that reject the concept of natural rights.
You don't have rights merely because the government deigned to let you have them, or decided that depriving you of them wasn't worth the trouble. A system where that's the foundational principle has lost even the pretense of human dignity. That kind of system wouldn't even have to bother with the incremental "hey we have an excuse that sells (protect the children! stop the terrorists!)" encroachment of liberty that we're seeing now. It could just go straight into open tyranny without having all those little baby steps for naive people to ignore.
You may wish to brush up on a little American history, specifically why the Tenth Amendment was written. It affirms that the federal government has only those powers which are delegated to it, with the rest being reserved by the states and the people. I'm all for deporting this guy, by the way. We should either enforce our immigration laws (like Mexico and every other sovereign nation) or repeal them, but if we're going to arrest this man, there's a process that must (and should) be followed.
Cell frequencies are licensed and pretty much anything that touches those frequencies needs to be fully approved by the FCC.
The carriers aren't going to allow it on their networks.
Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.
When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.
Isn't it more important to do cool and interesting things with a computer rather than everything obsessedly being open source?
The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.
Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. However I haven't seen that in this thread. To cry "obsession" merely because someone points out a controversy isn't helpful (and ironically raises the question of whether you have an obsession with the perceived obsessions of others). All I saw was someone stating that they wish to avoid certain Broadcom hardware because it does not provide the degree of open source access that he or she desired. That people have their own criteria and express a desire to choose products that best suit their own needs is a good thing. Your own priorities being different is not surprising and doesn't indicate fault with anyone else.
Gimp has a dbus dependency, and dbus in turn has the systemd libs as dependencies.
Which still sounds odd to me. I'm running Gentoo on my main desktop (Mint on my laptop) and have never installed systemd. I've decided to stick with OpenRC. GIMP works fine here and I do have dbus installed.
It seems this dbus dependency is not an unsolvable problem.
That's funny because twenty years ago, people were saying exactly the same things about x86 processors.
Slashdot has a long sordid history with Flash.
Pre-Android: "Flash sucks. It's proprietary"
Post Android when Apple was denying Flash on iOS and Google and Adobe were praising how great Flash was on Android: "Flash is great!"
Adobe dumps support for Flash on Android: "Flash sucks. Its proprietary."
It's that proprietary nature that makes this a concern at all. If it weren't proprietary then it wouldn't matter if Adobe themselves decided to release it for a particular platform. The community would produce a version that would run on just about any widely-used system.
I've been hooked on opiates for 15 years now. [...] and my morals are still intact
These two things don't go together. You may want to re-evaluate. Get real help and free yourself.
Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).
Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.
Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?
The headline is part of the submission. Editors sucking at editing submissions has been an eternal Slashdot problem, but the person to blame is schwit1.
Fire an editor or two, starting with the consistently worst-performing, and Dice will have rediscovered a time-tested method by which employers have dealt with employees who don't even try to perform their jobs competently.
As it stands now, they have little or no incentive to produce quality. If they had a sense of shame, embarassment, or pride in their work then that would at least be an improvement.
Right. So when any of the normal annual changes take place (the way they handle certain experimental drugs or therapies, the way they handle certain hospital scenarios, etc), the insurer can no longer provide the plan - the ACA shuts it down because it doesn't provide post-menopausal women maternity care, etc.
So I am a bit confused about why that is a problem. The cost to the insurer of offering maternity care to post-menopausal women should be about zero. Why not tack that onto an otherwise good plan if that's what the law requires? Wouldn't that make more sense than scrapping the plan for such a flimsy reason?
Man, when personal citizens' rights and powerful corporate interests align, amazing things can happen.
Now if we could only get powerful corporations to do the same thing on NSA overreach, CIA overreach, money in politiics,...
If the majority of people would vote (at the ballot and with their wallets) for their own rational self-interests once in a while, and not what the silver-tongued TV sound bite sold to them, this would happen much more often. My cynical side tells me that few will ever appreciate the value of abstract principles in and of themselves, but the self-interest angle should be at least achievable.
Clearly this particular Puritannical (shallow, phoney) "moral" crusade must prevail. We must make certain that small children NEVER see a woman's nipple!
You really seem to have difficulty comprehending two concepts: 1) the efficiency of doing both is more than good enough for my setup; 2) I am in fact doing both addons and a good/etc/hosts file.
br
You remind me of a religious zealot.
It'd be good if culture could refocus on respecting the notion of growing up, wisdom, and respect for elders. (and get off my lawn, too)
Yes, it would, because the infantile mind doesn't recognize a power grab or the early steps of establishing a soft tyranny when they happen before its eyes.
I'd recommend a copy of Jeffrey Grupp's book The Telescreen if you want to know what's really been done to this culture.
It is, actually, and it's a subtle one. In the face of all evidence, the dogma of political correctness dictates that men and women are exactly the same and should want the same things. Therefore, using this twisted excuse for logic, anything that is done primarily by men must be portrayed as inherently sexist and actively excluding of women. That's what happens when masses of soft-minded people use low-quality logic on "sacred" conclusions they refuse to question.
The idea that it's good enough to have open access for anyone who wants to do something (and when has a wider variety of games been more available than now?) and then those who are interested can participate is anathema to this mentality. There's nothing for them to do in that scenario, no soapbox to climb on, no social engineering to perform, no downtrodden victim to pretend to champion (while actually changing nothing).
You may find this an interesting article. They were going to metaphorically roast a Harvard professor for daring to suggest men and women have different interests and priorities. He hadn't actually done anything to discriminate against women and showed no hostility towards them. He just didn't hold the "correct" viewpoint.
My wife plays a lot of Hay Day. I don't see a lot of true, real life concerning issues there. I guess I don't smell the magic sauce that makes women playing games any different.
Identity politics has taught people to exaggerate these differences, that it's "normal" to worry about things like which demographic is doing what activity. It's just so damned useful for divide-and-conquer purposes for anything from voting to marketing. TFA is merely following what the rest of the media has done for a long time now.
If women want to play games, they will. If women don't, then they won't. To me it's as simple as that. The "magic sauce" is the bullshit concerns of politicians, media personalities, and marketers. It's not normal to share in them. One has to be conditioned to do that.
I respect and approve of your reluctance to be tracked.
I also suggest that clinging to that reluctance will block you from much of modern society. The isolation can be psychologically harmful over time.
That depends on whether you have a life in meatspace including meaningful quality time with loved ones.
If you do, you'll never miss the online tracking.
The principle here is that generally anything pathological, like the desire to track people without regard for their consent, requires some kind of unfulfilled need or other problem to provide fertile soil in which it can fester and grow. Otherwise it wouldn't be tolerated because what it offers in return is not tempting.
Incidentally I also use the Linux kernel feature called Transparent Hugepage Support. I set it to "Always" (as opposed to only when a program specifically wants it enabled). This is known to increase the memory footprint of applications, though by how much I couldn't tell you. The idea of this feature is: the operating system's memory allocator is gaining increased performance ("This feature can improve computing performance to certain applications by speeding up page faults during memory allocation, by reducing the number of tlb misses and by speeding up the pagetable walking") at the cost of higher memory usage.
Just thought I'd mention that since it may be relevant.
* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption too + hugely excessive cpu use (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... [mozilla.org])
That this can happen, I do not dispute. But I believe the case for it is being severely overstated by people who *ahem* have a vested interest in promoting alternatives to browser add-ons.
I currently run Firefox with 24 addons installed and actively enabled. This is mostly for ad-blocking and privacy-enhancing, with a few miscellaneous add-ons like one that restores the old-style Stop button behavior (stops animated GIFs as well as page loads). Since you seem to appreciate bold: there is no slowdown or latency problem that I can subjectively notice. If my addons are "slowing down the browser" they're doing it below the threshold of what a human can detect. I consider that a good and reasonable trade-off to make on my own systems.
On memory... I have 26 tabs open with a wide variety of sites loaded, many of which are content-heavy. This browser instance has been running continuously for many days. KSysGuard gives a nice breakdown of the memory usage of my Firefox process and this is the summary:
-----
Summary
The process firefox (with pid 5618) is using approximately 993.9 MB of memory.
It is using 971.4 MB privately, 15.6 MB for pixmaps, and a further 26.5 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 7.0 MB. Adding that to the private and pixmap usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 993.9 MB.
-----
Another section mentions that the 15.6MB for pixmaps may be stored on the graphics card's memory. At any rate, this is nowhere near 4+ gigs. Nor have I ever, with any version of Firefox, experienced anything remotely like 4GB of memory usage. This is a 64-bit system running a 64-bit Firefox that I compiled from source (your article mentions the memory penalty for Adblock is higher on 64-bit systems, which makes sense when you understand what that means). This system has 8GB of RAM installed, so ~994MB is negligible to me. For a little perspective, currently about 6GB is being used for buffers and disk cache, since this is what Linux does with memory that would otherwise be empty and therefore doing nothing. If I run a Windows game via WINE then that comes down to 4-5GB for buffers/cache since about another 1-2 gigs of memory becomes used.
Incidentally, I don't run Windows so I don't use your hosts file tool (and even if I ran Windows I'd probably rather roll my own, nothing personal). But I do use a comprehensive/etc/hosts file. I believe that good security is done in overlapping, interlocking layers. "Security" does not mean just remote attackers, but also anything intrusive I don't want, like advertisers and their tracking. I use an/etc/hosts file AND Adblock Plus, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and several others. What one of them alone does not catch, another one will.
Instead of viewing browser add-ons as an obstacle in your path to promoting your own solution, you could learn to work with them, use them effectively, and incorporate them into a multi-layered approach that includes all the work you've put into hosts files. Everyone would benefit that way, especially your users.
Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place"
They don't use tracking cookies (their preferences cookies are not identifying, they're just a string of your options, if you've set them), so the most data that they can have for identifying you is the IP address. They've been SSL by default (redirecting from http to https and defaulting to https in search results where available, for example on Wikipedia) for a long time, so you don't suddenly jump into an unencrypted connection as soon as you leave.
It sounds much better than any other US-based search engine I'm aware of. But my own preference doesn't even log an IP address since 2009. You can also bookmark a URL generated with your preferences so there is no need to accept even preference cookies from them (and preferences include options like using POST instead of GET so search terms stay out of other sites' logs). And the aforementioned deal about being outside US jurisdiction is nice too.
DuckDuckGo also does not appear to offer to act as your Web proxy like Startpage will do. I rarely ever use this feature but it's nice that they would offer it. Startpage also offers the option to act as your proxy only for image/video searches, so other sites don't even get that data from you. This is what I like about them: they not only don't log and track you themselves, they also go out of their way to enhance your privacy against third-party sites.
I'm not knocking DuckDuckGo by any means; in my opinion it's good but Startpage/Ixquick is great. Yet, I think all of us benefit from having multiple privacy-conscious options available. Choice is a good thing.
Local newspapers are the worst. My local newspaper give you ten free page views based on ip number and then locks you out.
Precisely because they are small and local, they probably wouldn't bother identifying TOR users. As a bonus you wouldn't be accessing this major multinational site where tens of thousands of others had the same idea and already got the exit node IPs banned.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions that the house was in rural Washington. It's entirely possible that the neighbor's house was quite a distance away. My in-laws live in rural western New York on 10 acres of land. They are largely surrounded by farms and forest. It's very common for people to be out shooting guns, especially in hunting season. It's not unusual to hear guns going off, or see people in hunting attire walking along the road or in a field with a firearm. I've also lived in the southern and western US and similar behavior happens there.
Indeed, if you want to do some target practice to achieve proficiency with your weapons, a friend who lives out in the cut is the best way to do it. It beats the hell out of paying shooting-range fees, you can use whatever you want for targets, and you can also practice at longer distances than anything an indoor facility could offer.
A cop bought a video camera to catch an illegal alien unloading a firearm at bottles on his own porch, among other things...catches the guy, along with a significant drug operation no less...and the court "nixes weeks of warrantless video surveillance" is a GOOD THING? You'll notice they aren't nixing the YEARS of warrantless surveillance that every citizen of the U.S. has been under, nor the YEARS of collusion with friendly nations to extend that surveillance program to every citizen, worldwide. No, they're nixing the one bit of fucking video that might actually have been worth recording in the fucking first place. Footage of a criminal, committing a crime. How novel.
The EFF logo for this story was perfect, "extremely fucking foolish" was the first thought that came to mind.
It's simple enough. This was a local police department in a small rural area, so they were held to the rules. If they were a national agency with an effectively unlimited budget, ties to major military-industrial corporations, and loads of political clout, the courts would have performed some mental gymnatics and invented a bullshit reason why that inconvenient Fourth Amendment doesn't really apply. Currently "anti-terrorism" is popular.
Why does the fourth amendment apply? If he is not a citizen of the US, our laws shouldn't protect him.
Because the Constitution is a document describing what powers the government has and how these powers may be used. It's like a default-deny firewall: the government has no powers whatsoever, except these enumerated powers. The Constitution is emphatically not a document describing what rights a person (citizen or not) has and when they will be honored.
The document was written based on the idea of "natural rights". You have certain rights simply because you are a human being; the government either recognizes that or it becomes dysfunctional and fails to fulfill its major purpose, which is to protect your natural rights. The Founders (mostly Deists) explained it in terms of us having been "endowed by our Creator" with such rights. You could also remove the Creator-concept entirely and argue that such a system simply works better and does the greatest good for all involved, and thus is inherently superior to systems that reject the concept of natural rights.
You don't have rights merely because the government deigned to let you have them, or decided that depriving you of them wasn't worth the trouble. A system where that's the foundational principle has lost even the pretense of human dignity. That kind of system wouldn't even have to bother with the incremental "hey we have an excuse that sells (protect the children! stop the terrorists!)" encroachment of liberty that we're seeing now. It could just go straight into open tyranny without having all those little baby steps for naive people to ignore.
You may wish to brush up on a little American history, specifically why the Tenth Amendment was written. It affirms that the federal government has only those powers which are delegated to it, with the rest being reserved by the states and the people. I'm all for deporting this guy, by the way. We should either enforce our immigration laws (like Mexico and every other sovereign nation) or repeal them, but if we're going to arrest this man, there's a process that must (and should) be followed.
Problems with that.
Cell frequencies are licensed and pretty much anything that touches those frequencies needs to be fully approved by the FCC.
The carriers aren't going to allow it on their networks.
Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.
When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.
Isn't it more important to do cool and interesting things with a computer rather than everything obsessedly being open source?
The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.
Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. However I haven't seen that in this thread. To cry "obsession" merely because someone points out a controversy isn't helpful (and ironically raises the question of whether you have an obsession with the perceived obsessions of others). All I saw was someone stating that they wish to avoid certain Broadcom hardware because it does not provide the degree of open source access that he or she desired. That people have their own criteria and express a desire to choose products that best suit their own needs is a good thing. Your own priorities being different is not surprising and doesn't indicate fault with anyone else.
Gimp has a dbus dependency, and dbus in turn has the systemd libs as dependencies.
Which still sounds odd to me. I'm running Gentoo on my main desktop (Mint on my laptop) and have never installed systemd. I've decided to stick with OpenRC. GIMP works fine here and I do have dbus installed.
It seems this dbus dependency is not an unsolvable problem.
Slashdot has a long sordid history with Flash.
Pre-Android: "Flash sucks. It's proprietary"
Post Android when Apple was denying Flash on iOS and Google and Adobe were praising how great Flash was on Android: "Flash is great!"
Adobe dumps support for Flash on Android: "Flash sucks. Its proprietary."
It's that proprietary nature that makes this a concern at all. If it weren't proprietary then it wouldn't matter if Adobe themselves decided to release it for a particular platform. The community would produce a version that would run on just about any widely-used system.
Indeed I did, but people who have invested in their worldviews have this nasty habit of only seeing what they want to see.
These two things don't go together. You may want to re-evaluate. Get real help and free yourself.
Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).
Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.
Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?
The headline is part of the submission. Editors sucking at editing submissions has been an eternal Slashdot problem, but the person to blame is schwit1.
Fire an editor or two, starting with the consistently worst-performing, and Dice will have rediscovered a time-tested method by which employers have dealt with employees who don't even try to perform their jobs competently.
As it stands now, they have little or no incentive to produce quality. If they had a sense of shame, embarassment, or pride in their work then that would at least be an improvement.
Right. So when any of the normal annual changes take place (the way they handle certain experimental drugs or therapies, the way they handle certain hospital scenarios, etc), the insurer can no longer provide the plan - the ACA shuts it down because it doesn't provide post-menopausal women maternity care, etc.
So I am a bit confused about why that is a problem. The cost to the insurer of offering maternity care to post-menopausal women should be about zero. Why not tack that onto an otherwise good plan if that's what the law requires? Wouldn't that make more sense than scrapping the plan for such a flimsy reason?
Then how would the baby feed? With his eyes closed?
Maybe the manufacturers of formula can use this as a marketing angle.
Man, when personal citizens' rights and powerful corporate interests align, amazing things can happen.
Now if we could only get powerful corporations to do the same thing on NSA overreach, CIA overreach, money in politiics, ...
If the majority of people would vote (at the ballot and with their wallets) for their own rational self-interests once in a while, and not what the silver-tongued TV sound bite sold to them, this would happen much more often. My cynical side tells me that few will ever appreciate the value of abstract principles in and of themselves, but the self-interest angle should be at least achievable.
Well, that year.
Clearly this particular Puritannical (shallow, phoney) "moral" crusade must prevail. We must make certain that small children NEVER see a woman's nipple!
It is they who should compensate us, for granting them a complete monopoly on Mickey for so long.
You really seem to have difficulty comprehending two concepts: 1) the efficiency of doing both is more than good enough for my setup; 2) I am in fact doing both addons and a good /etc/hosts file.
br You remind me of a religious zealot.
It'd be good if culture could refocus on respecting the notion of growing up, wisdom, and respect for elders. (and get off my lawn, too)
Yes, it would, because the infantile mind doesn't recognize a power grab or the early steps of establishing a soft tyranny when they happen before its eyes.
I'd recommend a copy of Jeffrey Grupp's book The Telescreen if you want to know what's really been done to this culture.
It's just an oblique attack on men.
It is, actually, and it's a subtle one. In the face of all evidence, the dogma of political correctness dictates that men and women are exactly the same and should want the same things. Therefore, using this twisted excuse for logic, anything that is done primarily by men must be portrayed as inherently sexist and actively excluding of women. That's what happens when masses of soft-minded people use low-quality logic on "sacred" conclusions they refuse to question.
The idea that it's good enough to have open access for anyone who wants to do something (and when has a wider variety of games been more available than now?) and then those who are interested can participate is anathema to this mentality. There's nothing for them to do in that scenario, no soapbox to climb on, no social engineering to perform, no downtrodden victim to pretend to champion (while actually changing nothing).
You may find this an interesting article. They were going to metaphorically roast a Harvard professor for daring to suggest men and women have different interests and priorities. He hadn't actually done anything to discriminate against women and showed no hostility towards them. He just didn't hold the "correct" viewpoint.
My wife plays a lot of Hay Day. I don't see a lot of true, real life concerning issues there. I guess I don't smell the magic sauce that makes women playing games any different.
Identity politics has taught people to exaggerate these differences, that it's "normal" to worry about things like which demographic is doing what activity. It's just so damned useful for divide-and-conquer purposes for anything from voting to marketing. TFA is merely following what the rest of the media has done for a long time now.
If women want to play games, they will. If women don't, then they won't. To me it's as simple as that. The "magic sauce" is the bullshit concerns of politicians, media personalities, and marketers. It's not normal to share in them. One has to be conditioned to do that.
I respect and approve of your reluctance to be tracked.
I also suggest that clinging to that reluctance will block you from much of modern society. The isolation can be psychologically harmful over time.
That depends on whether you have a life in meatspace including meaningful quality time with loved ones.
If you do, you'll never miss the online tracking.
The principle here is that generally anything pathological, like the desire to track people without regard for their consent, requires some kind of unfulfilled need or other problem to provide fertile soil in which it can fester and grow. Otherwise it wouldn't be tolerated because what it offers in return is not tempting.
Incidentally I also use the Linux kernel feature called Transparent Hugepage Support. I set it to "Always" (as opposed to only when a program specifically wants it enabled). This is known to increase the memory footprint of applications, though by how much I couldn't tell you. The idea of this feature is: the operating system's memory allocator is gaining increased performance ("This feature can improve computing performance to certain applications by speeding up page faults during memory allocation, by reducing the number of tlb misses and by speeding up the pagetable walking") at the cost of higher memory usage.
Just thought I'd mention that since it may be relevant.
* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption too + hugely excessive cpu use (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... [mozilla.org])
That this can happen, I do not dispute. But I believe the case for it is being severely overstated by people who *ahem* have a vested interest in promoting alternatives to browser add-ons.
/etc/hosts file. I believe that good security is done in overlapping, interlocking layers. "Security" does not mean just remote attackers, but also anything intrusive I don't want, like advertisers and their tracking. I use an /etc/hosts file AND Adblock Plus, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and several others. What one of them alone does not catch, another one will.
I currently run Firefox with 24 addons installed and actively enabled. This is mostly for ad-blocking and privacy-enhancing, with a few miscellaneous add-ons like one that restores the old-style Stop button behavior (stops animated GIFs as well as page loads). Since you seem to appreciate bold: there is no slowdown or latency problem that I can subjectively notice. If my addons are "slowing down the browser" they're doing it below the threshold of what a human can detect. I consider that a good and reasonable trade-off to make on my own systems.
On memory... I have 26 tabs open with a wide variety of sites loaded, many of which are content-heavy. This browser instance has been running continuously for many days. KSysGuard gives a nice breakdown of the memory usage of my Firefox process and this is the summary:
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Summary
The process firefox (with pid 5618) is using approximately 993.9 MB of memory.
It is using 971.4 MB privately, 15.6 MB for pixmaps, and a further 26.5 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 7.0 MB. Adding that to the private and pixmap usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 993.9 MB.
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Another section mentions that the 15.6MB for pixmaps may be stored on the graphics card's memory. At any rate, this is nowhere near 4+ gigs. Nor have I ever, with any version of Firefox, experienced anything remotely like 4GB of memory usage. This is a 64-bit system running a 64-bit Firefox that I compiled from source (your article mentions the memory penalty for Adblock is higher on 64-bit systems, which makes sense when you understand what that means). This system has 8GB of RAM installed, so ~994MB is negligible to me. For a little perspective, currently about 6GB is being used for buffers and disk cache, since this is what Linux does with memory that would otherwise be empty and therefore doing nothing. If I run a Windows game via WINE then that comes down to 4-5GB for buffers/cache since about another 1-2 gigs of memory becomes used.
Incidentally, I don't run Windows so I don't use your hosts file tool (and even if I ran Windows I'd probably rather roll my own, nothing personal). But I do use a comprehensive
Instead of viewing browser add-ons as an obstacle in your path to promoting your own solution, you could learn to work with them, use them effectively, and incorporate them into a multi-layered approach that includes all the work you've put into hosts files. Everyone would benefit that way, especially your users.
Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place"
They don't use tracking cookies (their preferences cookies are not identifying, they're just a string of your options, if you've set them), so the most data that they can have for identifying you is the IP address. They've been SSL by default (redirecting from http to https and defaulting to https in search results where available, for example on Wikipedia) for a long time, so you don't suddenly jump into an unencrypted connection as soon as you leave.
It sounds much better than any other US-based search engine I'm aware of. But my own preference doesn't even log an IP address since 2009. You can also bookmark a URL generated with your preferences so there is no need to accept even preference cookies from them (and preferences include options like using POST instead of GET so search terms stay out of other sites' logs). And the aforementioned deal about being outside US jurisdiction is nice too.
DuckDuckGo also does not appear to offer to act as your Web proxy like Startpage will do. I rarely ever use this feature but it's nice that they would offer it. Startpage also offers the option to act as your proxy only for image/video searches, so other sites don't even get that data from you. This is what I like about them: they not only don't log and track you themselves, they also go out of their way to enhance your privacy against third-party sites.
I'm not knocking DuckDuckGo by any means; in my opinion it's good but Startpage/Ixquick is great. Yet, I think all of us benefit from having multiple privacy-conscious options available. Choice is a good thing.
Local newspapers are the worst. My local newspaper give you ten free page views based on ip number and then locks you out.
Precisely because they are small and local, they probably wouldn't bother identifying TOR users. As a bonus you wouldn't be accessing this major multinational site where tens of thousands of others had the same idea and already got the exit node IPs banned.
How do they legally use Google's service to do that? Google own ToS forbids what they are doing.
I assume that being outside of US jurisdiction helps, but that's just a guess and I'm no lawyer.