This alleged agreement isn't in conflict with the DMCA. The DMCA says that if you own some copyrighted material, and service provider's customer puts up content that infringes it, and you allege that it's a copyright violation, the service provider has to take down the content to avoid having you sue them, and if the content provider counters that it's not a violation, the service provider can put the content back up without risk of you suing them, until you give them more paperwork to make them take it down again. (I think "more paperwork" is defined as some kind of copyright infringement lawsuit against the alleged infringer, but I haven't looked at it in a while.)
UMG is alleging that their agreement with Google lets them demand that content to be taken down without there being a copyright violation. You can't do that, because you don't have that kind of agreement with Google and you don't have a law that lets you do it. It's not in conflict with the DMCA, though it may be in conflict with common sense or "not being evil", and UMG may be using it in ways that count as restraint of trade or are otherwise illegal or unethical, but that's not the DMCA's problem.
Megaupload is a business, and this video is basically an ad for them. UMG is claiming that they've got an agreement that lets them shut down content they don't like, and they're using it to shut down ads for their semi-competition, similar to paying a newspaper or TV station not to carry ads for competitors. IANAL, and I don't know how strong a lawsuit that gives them, but it should at least be enough to subpoena the shutdown requests and the alleged agreement between UMG and YouTube. If the shutdown requests allege violation of copyright, then they're also on the hook for libel.
Yes, it's a minor annoyance, but I've got the Kensington cable looped around the seat mounting, and lock the laptop with it if I'm leaving it in the car. Trying to lock the laptop bag would be silly, but the cable's at least a bit of a deterrent. Putting things in the trunk only works if you have a trunk, which I haven't had since well before I had a laptop.
I drove a van for years (you'd probably call it a caravan?), and my current car is a crossover-thing that you can think of as a square hatchback or small station wagon. My wife's car has a cover over the back cargo area, but it's still just a lift-up thing, not something strong. My current car doesn't even offer a hard cover in the US, just a cloth one.
And yeah, it's surprising how little it takes to interest a thief. Usually when my van was broken into, the thief had the decency to do it right and use a coathanger or screwdriver, but one time it was parked in a brightly-lit high-traffic-area parking lot, so they just smashed the window and grabbed the walkman and a bag of shopping. (The walkman was there because the last two radios had been stolen.)
Crook smashed the window and stole the GPS (really, are used GPS's _worth_ enough to buy meth with?) and broke into a couple of other cars in the same 3am run.
Mobile window-replacement service, they'll show up at your home/office, done in an hour, even vacuumed the car (more or less; we were finding stray glass bits for a week.) They'd have been happy to sell us a car radio as well, since radio+window used to be a standard business model, but that didn't get taken. I don't remember who they were, but we found them on Yelp.
I'm putting this under the "toaster" comment not only because of the traditional usage of "toaster" to refer to any small machine (there have been actual toasters running NetBSD for years...) but because you might alternatively want to put Raspberry PopTarts in your toaster, and I need to make it clear that you shouldn't put Raspberry Pi in your toaster, even if it is RoHS-compliant.
But a Raspberry Pi computer is designed to attach to your TV, works fine with TVs that don't already have web-toasters built in, is something you can take to random hotels with randomly-filtered ISP service, doesn't cost much, and should have enough horsepower to run Tor. It may not have enough storage for some of the classic applications for Tor-on-a-TV, such as downloading pirated movies, but maybe a USB disk drive can fix that.
"Making a driverless car" is a concept people have talked about for a long time - that's not what you get to patent. Google's specific methods for making a driverless car probably are, but you can find other ways to make driverless cars and Google's patents aren't supposed to affect you.
One of the big problems with software patents, and especially with business method patents, is that the Patent Office was pretty clueless about prior art and obviousness to skilled practitioners and allowed a lot of patents about "Do X Using a Computer!" or "Do Y On the Internet!" where those were obvious things to want to do, and usually done in obvious ways, and of course, there have been lots of patents like "A wheel, with this very specific new technique for building part of the axle" and then trying to extort money from anybody using wheels or other rotating devices.
I just started up Firefox natively on Windows (because the Disqus mafia who've taken over the blog-commenting business don't like something about my Linux Firefox config, and I can't figure out what:-), and it reminded me of another reason I like running Firefox in a Linux VM - native WinXP FF likes to burn the whole CPU for no apparent reason (or in this case, on a dual-core machine, burn its whole CPU core), and the Linux version doesn't do that to me.
It'd be nice if commenter Billy Gates were correct about IE8 being enough more standards-compliant than previous versions that stuff should just work, but what matters more is whether the corporate IT desktop support organization will just work, and unfortunately Microsoft has no control over that:-)
The VMware is running Ubuntu, so it gets whatever Firefox and Flash versions Ubuntu uses (currently Ubuntu 11.04; I may eventually upgrade to 11.10.) Chrome is running on native XP, using whatever flash that gets, and unlike IE and Firefox, our Corporate IT folks prefer to have us running current Adobe software for security reasons so that's unlikely to be bad. The real problem is that Flash isn't a great product, and many many websites have bad Flash code on them.
Of course it is, and so is Swap Space, and when you've filled up your physical memory (4GB, in my case) and want to start something new or switch to an paged-out process, you have to wait for the disk to spin for a while paging out the least-used program so the new one can run. And it's not like browsers are the only bloatware I run on my system, there's also Microsoft Office and Adobe PDFs (and I frequently open PDF files that are bigger than 10MB, because they're vendor documentation for equipment I use.)
Yes, of course it's an insecure piece of crap - I don't use it for random sites I don't trust, and usually not for Google Maps. I'd be extremely surprised if Corporate IT supports IE9; I'm hoping for at least IE8 on the next hardware refresh. When I'm talking about Chrome using 2GB, I'm not saying I have a 2GB machine (it's 4GB), I'm saying that's how much virtual memory the various Chrome processes are burning on average, and when I was running Firefox natively on XP, that usually resulted in Chrome spinning the disk for a while swapping itself in when I wanted a Chrome window; it's a lot faster now that Firefox has a VM.
Yes, Chrome really is a much bigger memory hog than Firefox inside a VM - it was also a bigger memory hog than Firefox running native on Windows. I usually give the VM about 1GB of RAM, sometimes 1.5, and for reasons I don't understand, VMware usually uses a lot less than that - I've been assuming that Firefox's memory management must be better on Linux than on Windows. Meanwhile, I've got a similar number of tabs open in Chrome, and it's burning about 2GB of RAM. Firefox occasionally crashes (usually it's the Flash plugin rather than the browser) and often gets into confused-swapping for a few minutes, but it's still better.
The reason I'm using VMware isn't just for privacy, or for getting to run Linux on my IT-supported-Windows laptop. The big motivator for me was that the IT department changed their policy from "Firefox is unsupported" to "Firefox is Supported! This version only! No extensions or add-ons! Maybe we'll update it annually!", and running without Adblock and Noscript is too unsafe and unstable. And while Chrome is really nice when it's working, it isn't stable enough for the way I read news on news-aggregator sites (open a bunch of links as separate tabs, like today's articles from fark.com or BoingBoing. Watch Chrome crash most of the tabs!)
Maybe having a separate VM for Facebook is a bit paranoid, but I got really tired of reading the newspaper online and having the Facebook ad on the side of the page showing me "Here's what all of your Facebook Friends have been reading in the news today!" I could probably have implemented it as a separate Firefox profile, but a separate VM is clean and easy and guaranteed not to leak information all over.
I strongly agree with the recommendation to work internationally in non-war zones, doing work that either makes the world a better place or at least makes cheap consumer junk or entertainment but doesn't make the world worse. It's possible to see the world, meet interesting and exciting people, and not help kill them. I'm not just saying this as a peacenik hippie - I used to work for the military-industrial complex, security clearances and the whole bit, and it does mess with your head even though you get to work on interesting problems*. Don't do it. If you do want to work in a partially-American English-speaking enclave environment, oil companies are a way to do high-tech work in wild and crazy places.
The reasons to work in a war zone are either that you approve of the war or that you think you'll make a big pile of money at the risk of getting killed. So if you are going to do that, you should look into working for a contracting company, not for the US Government themselves. A friend of mine did that for a while in Iraq and then started his own company, providing computing and satellite services. You have to be a real generalist, able to handle anything from hardware installation to electrical generation in addition to the computer stuff.
(*Back in the 80s and 90s I'd have recommended working for drug smugglers in preference to working for the military, but the current cartel wars in Mexico make Blackwater and the Taliban look like friendly moral non-crazy people.)
ABP already had a mechanism to let you choose what ads to block and what ads not to block - it's the blocklist subscription choice that you make when you install/update ABP. Instead of putting in a whitelist, they could have just offered a choice of blocklists beyond the current "Ads in English" / "Ads in French" / etc. choice. Maybe this makes it easier for the ABP authors to get everybody to use the less strict list.
It seems like they went to a lot of trouble writing a whitelist mechanism and the associated whitelist distribution method, when there was already a mechanism to implement it - letting the user choose which blocklist subscription to use. ABP already asks you which list to use, so just put out a list that doesn't block the well-behaved ads and another list that does.
Ok, it's not strictly instead of Firefox and Chrome, but it's my default browser on my primary work machine. I'm currently running VMware Player, with a Linux machine on it, and that runs Firefox, which crashes Way Way Too Often, usually because of Flash. I do most of my web browsing there, and have NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus, and usually a couple of other safety tools. And I keep another Virtual Machine around, with a stripped-down Linux distro with Firefox in Private Browsing Mode, which I use to read Facebook, because I don't want Facebook contaminating anything else, stealing cookies and history files, or whatever. (If there's a way to keep VMware Player paged in, using the whole 1GB I have allocated for it, instead of swapping itself out when it's not busy even though there's spare hardware RAM left, I'd appreciate pointers; I haven't found them.)
I'm also running Chrome natively, mostly for a bunch of electronics blogs like Hackaday, and occasionally for Gmail, and it's really bloated - burns almost 2GB if I have it turned on with my usual set of tabs. I'm not sure I entirely trust Google to behave themselves with Chrome, but they already know everything about my Gmail account (which I don't use for anything sensitive), and the electronics stuff doesn't get much personal information except when I'm buying equipment.
I used to run Firefox natively as my default browser, but there are a couple of problems with it - it Crashes Way Too Often, and it's also a memory hog (though better than it used to be, and not as bad as Google), and there are a couple of work applications that don't run cleanly except on IE. Until recently, it was my default browser, so if I clicked on a link in an email message, FF would either start from scratch or open another tab, spin the disk for a while while it sucked down memory, and then run, hopefully without crashing itself or crashing something else by hogging memory, and then be its usual friendly self. But I found that usually when I'm clicking on links from my work email, they're either sites I trust, or else they're work related sites like the HR website or web conference bridge that are happier running in IE, and I got tired of that.
That takes us to IE. It's IE7 because the Desktop Support department at work finally let us use IE7 instead of IE6, but is too scared to go to IE8, at least on Windows XP, and they made their saving throw against Windows Vista a couple of years ago - my next set of hardware will run Win7. And it has tabs, so it's not totally obnoxious to use, and it really doesn't crash much, so it's less obnoxious than Firefox, and it usually doesn't use a lot of memory, because I don't usually let it keep more than a couple of tabs open at a time, though it would happily be a memory pig if I let it.
(And then there's Safari and Opera, which I used to have installed - the IT department run little scanning robots that rat you out within a day if you install them, for reasons that sound more like the Software License Police rather than the IT department's normal reticence to have useful software running on our machines, and you get a call from some guy in India who's going to walk you through uninstalling them whether you like it or not. So I no longer run them.)
I suppose there's also Konqueror or other Linux-oriented browsers that I could be running in the Linux VM - are there times it's worth using them instead of Firefox?
There's already an obvious way to permit no-annoying ads while blocking annoying ones, which is to have the subscription blacklist you already use for AdBlock delete the entries for the annoying ads. No need to build a special whitelist capability, unless you want to prevent people from using alternative blacklists.
I'm not actually too bothered by having a few ads, as long as
* None of them use Flash/Javascript/ActiveX/Popups/Popunders/Floatovers/StupidHTML5Tricks/iFrames/etc.
* None of them use animation, just static images/text
* None of them use cookies
* None of them pretend not to be ads
* None of them are sleazy, annoying, or NSFW.
* None of them get REFERER except the originating site.
Unfortunately, that kills off most of the advertising services that might be used to support web sites I like (especially the no-tracking features, because the ad services use those to prevent web sites from faking view data.)
The current advertising-like annoyance I still get is Disqus's takeover of the site-comments business. It thinks that I'm blocking its cookies (I'm not), so some combination of Linux, Firefox, NoScript, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, FF's Don't track is breaking it. (Also, it has lots of other problems, like not being good at keeping track of multiple identities - my comment histories on BoingBoing and various newspapers aren't supposed to all get lost, which happens if they get mushed together into one Disqus ID.)
Maybe he doesn't have a dedicated workstation at home, but he's about to have a spare laptop that's more than fast enough to be a print server, and the dead battery won't matter if it's plugged in all the time.
It was back in the 90s, if I remember correctly, and unlike some licensing laws that were passed to protect special interest groups, this was just because a legislator had met a licensed civil engineer at a party who was complaining about how he needed a license to build bridges and buildings, but people could design safety-critical software without knowing what they were doing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so the legislator cribbed the state's civil engineering licensing laws, turned them into software engineering licensing laws, and by the time she was done you couldn't operate a microwave oven without a four-year degree from an accredited software engineering program, much less tell a web site designer what you wanted your web site to look like. And because she was in the majority political party in the state assembly, it not only passed her committee without any intelligent thought being applied to it, but also passed the state House. (And after all, most of the legislators were lawyers who also needed licenses to practice, so it didn't occur to them that this actually mattered.) Fortunately, a reporter from the Bergen Record saw the bill, thought about what it might mean, and asked the PR person from a major high-tech firm in the state what their opinion was. They looked at it, said "[expletive deleted]!!", told their friends, and all of them told their state senate contacts to kill the bill or it would cripple all the high-tech business in the state, and it died quietly.
Cnet and download.com used to be the site I trusted for downloading software, given their consistently good business practices and the number of other sites that included malware, spyware, and/or bloatware along with their downloads. Obviously I still trust Sourceforge, Ubuntu apt-get, and the download sites that various other projects provide for their own code, but for Windows software, download.com used to be the place to go.
So are there other sites that have good collections of Windows software and are reasonably trustable?
It's obviously clunky, but it shouldn't be hard to set up an external battery pack with four AA rechargeables and a USB output. If you want to get fancy, add a voltage regulator chip as insurance, in case your camera doesn't have one built in, or just trust that 4x1.2 - 4x1.5 is safe.
is that there are so many to choose from. When cameras were larger, you had more room for batteries, but as there's increasing pressure to make them smaller and more power-hungry, that fails.
If 2.4v is enough, you can use two AA batteries (most rechargeables only do 1.2v, but they hold a lot more power than 1.5v disposables), but it takes up a fair bit of space.
3.6v and 3.7v LiPo rechargeable technology is becoming a widely available standard, with a range of different sizes and capacities, but needs an extra chip or two for power management (since they're very sensitive to over-charging and over-draining - dropping below 3.0v tends to kill them.) Since it's a bit below 5v, that means a standard USB is the obvious power supply interface for charging as well as data, and cellphones and similar devices use them.
Also, while I can see that you might need to replace the charger for a camera, why would you want to use a point&shoot digital camera that's old enough that you can't find batteries for it? Resolution has been improving rapidly, and prices have been dropping rapidly. Using a bigger camera with real lenses on it, sure, but any point&shoot I can buy today is a lot better than the good one I got a couple of years ago.
It was easy:-) All I had to do was buy a ticket from a venue that's using TicketMaster as its only ticket sales channel. There wasn't any way to buy my ticket without TM's fees, and there wasn't any way to buy it without paying $8-10 for parking even though I wasn't driving there. (I live about a mile from a venue that's usually a bad traffic jam for concerts, and I'd much rather bike there, not get stuck in traffic, and not need to worry about my substance consumption during the concert:-) Also, one year I ended up with a subscription to Rolling Stone that I'm sure was padded on to my bill, even though I didn't see any checkbox where I authorized it.
While 2.4GHz is pretty crowded in environments like that, 5 GHz usually isn't - very few people use it, and the channel separation is better, so you really get N different channels, not just 3-4 of 11. If your laptop doesn't support it, you might need a $20 USB dongle. A year or so ago a bunch of my neighbors got 802.11n, crowding out my 802.11g, so I had to do the same:-) I also used an Android app to find which 2.4g channel was quietest, so I didn't have to mess with 5g or using Channel 14 (a not-for-US-use channel that's usually quiet enough.)
Depending on the circumstances, the press release might get written by a business trying to push their next product release or dis their competitor's new product, or it might get written by a government agency trying to increase its clout within the government or as part of a longer-running PR campaign.
Then the press release is sent to the press, some of whom ignore it, some of whom mindlessly print it, and some of whom decide it's a good enough story for their market so they talk about it on radio or TV or give it print space.
Then other commenters start giving it coverage, whether that's talk radio ranting about how bad or good it is or somebody submitting it to Slashdot or whatever.
Then the tweets and the blogosphere get it. That doesn't mean they don't start stories on their own, but the people with interests in controlling the press or touting their products don't leave it to chance. (That's not even counting the ones where the tweets and blogosphere get started by astroturf, which is also pretty common today as an alternative business model to astroturfing the AP, Washington Post, or EE Times.)
Slashdot Mirror
This alleged agreement isn't in conflict with the DMCA. The DMCA says that if you own some copyrighted material, and service provider's customer puts up content that infringes it, and you allege that it's a copyright violation, the service provider has to take down the content to avoid having you sue them, and if the content provider counters that it's not a violation, the service provider can put the content back up without risk of you suing them, until you give them more paperwork to make them take it down again. (I think "more paperwork" is defined as some kind of copyright infringement lawsuit against the alleged infringer, but I haven't looked at it in a while.)
UMG is alleging that their agreement with Google lets them demand that content to be taken down without there being a copyright violation. You can't do that, because you don't have that kind of agreement with Google and you don't have a law that lets you do it. It's not in conflict with the DMCA, though it may be in conflict with common sense or "not being evil", and UMG may be using it in ways that count as restraint of trade or are otherwise illegal or unethical, but that's not the DMCA's problem.
Megaupload is a business, and this video is basically an ad for them. UMG is claiming that they've got an agreement that lets them shut down content they don't like, and they're using it to shut down ads for their semi-competition, similar to paying a newspaper or TV station not to carry ads for competitors. IANAL, and I don't know how strong a lawsuit that gives them, but it should at least be enough to subpoena the shutdown requests and the alleged agreement between UMG and YouTube. If the shutdown requests allege violation of copyright, then they're also on the hook for libel.
Yes, it's a minor annoyance, but I've got the Kensington cable looped around the seat mounting, and lock the laptop with it if I'm leaving it in the car. Trying to lock the laptop bag would be silly, but the cable's at least a bit of a deterrent. Putting things in the trunk only works if you have a trunk, which I haven't had since well before I had a laptop.
I drove a van for years (you'd probably call it a caravan?), and my current car is a crossover-thing that you can think of as a square hatchback or small station wagon. My wife's car has a cover over the back cargo area, but it's still just a lift-up thing, not something strong. My current car doesn't even offer a hard cover in the US, just a cloth one.
And yeah, it's surprising how little it takes to interest a thief. Usually when my van was broken into, the thief had the decency to do it right and use a coathanger or screwdriver, but one time it was parked in a brightly-lit high-traffic-area parking lot, so they just smashed the window and grabbed the walkman and a bag of shopping. (The walkman was there because the last two radios had been stolen.)
Crook smashed the window and stole the GPS (really, are used GPS's _worth_ enough to buy meth with?) and broke into a couple of other cars in the same 3am run.
Mobile window-replacement service, they'll show up at your home/office, done in an hour, even vacuumed the car (more or less; we were finding stray glass bits for a week.) They'd have been happy to sell us a car radio as well, since radio+window used to be a standard business model, but that didn't get taken. I don't remember who they were, but we found them on Yelp.
I'm putting this under the "toaster" comment not only because of the traditional usage of "toaster" to refer to any small machine (there have been actual toasters running NetBSD for years...) but because you might alternatively want to put Raspberry PopTarts in your toaster, and I need to make it clear that you shouldn't put Raspberry Pi in your toaster, even if it is RoHS-compliant.
But a Raspberry Pi computer is designed to attach to your TV, works fine with TVs that don't already have web-toasters built in, is something you can take to random hotels with randomly-filtered ISP service, doesn't cost much, and should have enough horsepower to run Tor. It may not have enough storage for some of the classic applications for Tor-on-a-TV, such as downloading pirated movies, but maybe a USB disk drive can fix that.
"Making a driverless car" is a concept people have talked about for a long time - that's not what you get to patent. Google's specific methods for making a driverless car probably are, but you can find other ways to make driverless cars and Google's patents aren't supposed to affect you.
One of the big problems with software patents, and especially with business method patents, is that the Patent Office was pretty clueless about prior art and obviousness to skilled practitioners and allowed a lot of patents about "Do X Using a Computer!" or "Do Y On the Internet!" where those were obvious things to want to do, and usually done in obvious ways, and of course, there have been lots of patents like "A wheel, with this very specific new technique for building part of the axle" and then trying to extort money from anybody using wheels or other rotating devices.
I just started up Firefox natively on Windows (because the Disqus mafia who've taken over the blog-commenting business don't like something about my Linux Firefox config, and I can't figure out what :-), and it reminded me of another reason I like running Firefox in a Linux VM - native WinXP FF likes to burn the whole CPU for no apparent reason (or in this case, on a dual-core machine, burn its whole CPU core), and the Linux version doesn't do that to me.
It'd be nice if commenter Billy Gates were correct about IE8 being enough more standards-compliant than previous versions that stuff should just work, but what matters more is whether the corporate IT desktop support organization will just work, and unfortunately Microsoft has no control over that :-)
The VMware is running Ubuntu, so it gets whatever Firefox and Flash versions Ubuntu uses (currently Ubuntu 11.04; I may eventually upgrade to 11.10.) Chrome is running on native XP, using whatever flash that gets, and unlike IE and Firefox, our Corporate IT folks prefer to have us running current Adobe software for security reasons so that's unlikely to be bad. The real problem is that Flash isn't a great product, and many many websites have bad Flash code on them.
Of course it is, and so is Swap Space, and when you've filled up your physical memory (4GB, in my case) and want to start something new or switch to an paged-out process, you have to wait for the disk to spin for a while paging out the least-used program so the new one can run. And it's not like browsers are the only bloatware I run on my system, there's also Microsoft Office and Adobe PDFs (and I frequently open PDF files that are bigger than 10MB, because they're vendor documentation for equipment I use.)
Yes, of course it's an insecure piece of crap - I don't use it for random sites I don't trust, and usually not for Google Maps. I'd be extremely surprised if Corporate IT supports IE9; I'm hoping for at least IE8 on the next hardware refresh. When I'm talking about Chrome using 2GB, I'm not saying I have a 2GB machine (it's 4GB), I'm saying that's how much virtual memory the various Chrome processes are burning on average, and when I was running Firefox natively on XP, that usually resulted in Chrome spinning the disk for a while swapping itself in when I wanted a Chrome window; it's a lot faster now that Firefox has a VM.
Yes, Chrome really is a much bigger memory hog than Firefox inside a VM - it was also a bigger memory hog than Firefox running native on Windows. I usually give the VM about 1GB of RAM, sometimes 1.5, and for reasons I don't understand, VMware usually uses a lot less than that - I've been assuming that Firefox's memory management must be better on Linux than on Windows. Meanwhile, I've got a similar number of tabs open in Chrome, and it's burning about 2GB of RAM. Firefox occasionally crashes (usually it's the Flash plugin rather than the browser) and often gets into confused-swapping for a few minutes, but it's still better.
The reason I'm using VMware isn't just for privacy, or for getting to run Linux on my IT-supported-Windows laptop. The big motivator for me was that the IT department changed their policy from "Firefox is unsupported" to "Firefox is Supported! This version only! No extensions or add-ons! Maybe we'll update it annually!", and running without Adblock and Noscript is too unsafe and unstable. And while Chrome is really nice when it's working, it isn't stable enough for the way I read news on news-aggregator sites (open a bunch of links as separate tabs, like today's articles from fark.com or BoingBoing. Watch Chrome crash most of the tabs!)
Maybe having a separate VM for Facebook is a bit paranoid, but I got really tired of reading the newspaper online and having the Facebook ad on the side of the page showing me "Here's what all of your Facebook Friends have been reading in the news today!" I could probably have implemented it as a separate Firefox profile, but a separate VM is clean and easy and guaranteed not to leak information all over.
I strongly agree with the recommendation to work internationally in non-war zones, doing work that either makes the world a better place or at least makes cheap consumer junk or entertainment but doesn't make the world worse. It's possible to see the world, meet interesting and exciting people, and not help kill them. I'm not just saying this as a peacenik hippie - I used to work for the military-industrial complex, security clearances and the whole bit, and it does mess with your head even though you get to work on interesting problems*. Don't do it. If you do want to work in a partially-American English-speaking enclave environment, oil companies are a way to do high-tech work in wild and crazy places.
The reasons to work in a war zone are either that you approve of the war or that you think you'll make a big pile of money at the risk of getting killed. So if you are going to do that, you should look into working for a contracting company, not for the US Government themselves. A friend of mine did that for a while in Iraq and then started his own company, providing computing and satellite services. You have to be a real generalist, able to handle anything from hardware installation to electrical generation in addition to the computer stuff.
(*Back in the 80s and 90s I'd have recommended working for drug smugglers in preference to working for the military, but the current cartel wars in Mexico make Blackwater and the Taliban look like friendly moral non-crazy people.)
ABP already had a mechanism to let you choose what ads to block and what ads not to block - it's the blocklist subscription choice that you make when you install/update ABP. Instead of putting in a whitelist, they could have just offered a choice of blocklists beyond the current "Ads in English" / "Ads in French" / etc. choice. Maybe this makes it easier for the ABP authors to get everybody to use the less strict list.
It seems like they went to a lot of trouble writing a whitelist mechanism and the associated whitelist distribution method, when there was already a mechanism to implement it - letting the user choose which blocklist subscription to use. ABP already asks you which list to use, so just put out a list that doesn't block the well-behaved ads and another list that does.
Ok, it's not strictly instead of Firefox and Chrome, but it's my default browser on my primary work machine. I'm currently running VMware Player, with a Linux machine on it, and that runs Firefox, which crashes Way Way Too Often, usually because of Flash. I do most of my web browsing there, and have NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus, and usually a couple of other safety tools. And I keep another Virtual Machine around, with a stripped-down Linux distro with Firefox in Private Browsing Mode, which I use to read Facebook, because I don't want Facebook contaminating anything else, stealing cookies and history files, or whatever. (If there's a way to keep VMware Player paged in, using the whole 1GB I have allocated for it, instead of swapping itself out when it's not busy even though there's spare hardware RAM left, I'd appreciate pointers; I haven't found them.)
I'm also running Chrome natively, mostly for a bunch of electronics blogs like Hackaday, and occasionally for Gmail, and it's really bloated - burns almost 2GB if I have it turned on with my usual set of tabs. I'm not sure I entirely trust Google to behave themselves with Chrome, but they already know everything about my Gmail account (which I don't use for anything sensitive), and the electronics stuff doesn't get much personal information except when I'm buying equipment.
I used to run Firefox natively as my default browser, but there are a couple of problems with it - it Crashes Way Too Often, and it's also a memory hog (though better than it used to be, and not as bad as Google), and there are a couple of work applications that don't run cleanly except on IE. Until recently, it was my default browser, so if I clicked on a link in an email message, FF would either start from scratch or open another tab, spin the disk for a while while it sucked down memory, and then run, hopefully without crashing itself or crashing something else by hogging memory, and then be its usual friendly self. But I found that usually when I'm clicking on links from my work email, they're either sites I trust, or else they're work related sites like the HR website or web conference bridge that are happier running in IE, and I got tired of that.
That takes us to IE. It's IE7 because the Desktop Support department at work finally let us use IE7 instead of IE6, but is too scared to go to IE8, at least on Windows XP, and they made their saving throw against Windows Vista a couple of years ago - my next set of hardware will run Win7. And it has tabs, so it's not totally obnoxious to use, and it really doesn't crash much, so it's less obnoxious than Firefox, and it usually doesn't use a lot of memory, because I don't usually let it keep more than a couple of tabs open at a time, though it would happily be a memory pig if I let it.
(And then there's Safari and Opera, which I used to have installed - the IT department run little scanning robots that rat you out within a day if you install them, for reasons that sound more like the Software License Police rather than the IT department's normal reticence to have useful software running on our machines, and you get a call from some guy in India who's going to walk you through uninstalling them whether you like it or not. So I no longer run them.)
I suppose there's also Konqueror or other Linux-oriented browsers that I could be running in the Linux VM - are there times it's worth using them instead of Firefox?
There's already an obvious way to permit no-annoying ads while blocking annoying ones, which is to have the subscription blacklist you already use for AdBlock delete the entries for the annoying ads. No need to build a special whitelist capability, unless you want to prevent people from using alternative blacklists.
I'm not actually too bothered by having a few ads, as long as
Unfortunately, that kills off most of the advertising services that might be used to support web sites I like (especially the no-tracking features, because the ad services use those to prevent web sites from faking view data.)
The current advertising-like annoyance I still get is Disqus's takeover of the site-comments business. It thinks that I'm blocking its cookies (I'm not), so some combination of Linux, Firefox, NoScript, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, FF's Don't track is breaking it. (Also, it has lots of other problems, like not being good at keeping track of multiple identities - my comment histories on BoingBoing and various newspapers aren't supposed to all get lost, which happens if they get mushed together into one Disqus ID.)
Maybe he doesn't have a dedicated workstation at home, but he's about to have a spare laptop that's more than fast enough to be a print server, and the dead battery won't matter if it's plugged in all the time.
It was back in the 90s, if I remember correctly, and unlike some licensing laws that were passed to protect special interest groups, this was just because a legislator had met a licensed civil engineer at a party who was complaining about how he needed a license to build bridges and buildings, but people could design safety-critical software without knowing what they were doing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so the legislator cribbed the state's civil engineering licensing laws, turned them into software engineering licensing laws, and by the time she was done you couldn't operate a microwave oven without a four-year degree from an accredited software engineering program, much less tell a web site designer what you wanted your web site to look like. And because she was in the majority political party in the state assembly, it not only passed her committee without any intelligent thought being applied to it, but also passed the state House. (And after all, most of the legislators were lawyers who also needed licenses to practice, so it didn't occur to them that this actually mattered.) Fortunately, a reporter from the Bergen Record saw the bill, thought about what it might mean, and asked the PR person from a major high-tech firm in the state what their opinion was. They looked at it, said "[expletive deleted]!!", told their friends, and all of them told their state senate contacts to kill the bill or it would cripple all the high-tech business in the state, and it died quietly.
Cnet and download.com used to be the site I trusted for downloading software, given their consistently good business practices and the number of other sites that included malware, spyware, and/or bloatware along with their downloads. Obviously I still trust Sourceforge, Ubuntu apt-get, and the download sites that various other projects provide for their own code, but for Windows software, download.com used to be the place to go.
So are there other sites that have good collections of Windows software and are reasonably trustable?
It's obviously clunky, but it shouldn't be hard to set up an external battery pack with four AA rechargeables and a USB output. If you want to get fancy, add a voltage regulator chip as insurance, in case your camera doesn't have one built in, or just trust that 4x1.2 - 4x1.5 is safe.
is that there are so many to choose from. When cameras were larger, you had more room for batteries, but as there's increasing pressure to make them smaller and more power-hungry, that fails.
If 2.4v is enough, you can use two AA batteries (most rechargeables only do 1.2v, but they hold a lot more power than 1.5v disposables), but it takes up a fair bit of space.
3.6v and 3.7v LiPo rechargeable technology is becoming a widely available standard, with a range of different sizes and capacities, but needs an extra chip or two for power management (since they're very sensitive to over-charging and over-draining - dropping below 3.0v tends to kill them.) Since it's a bit below 5v, that means a standard USB is the obvious power supply interface for charging as well as data, and cellphones and similar devices use them.
Also, while I can see that you might need to replace the charger for a camera, why would you want to use a point&shoot digital camera that's old enough that you can't find batteries for it? Resolution has been improving rapidly, and prices have been dropping rapidly. Using a bigger camera with real lenses on it, sure, but any point&shoot I can buy today is a lot better than the good one I got a couple of years ago.
It was easy :-) All I had to do was buy a ticket from a venue that's using TicketMaster as its only ticket sales channel. There wasn't any way to buy my ticket without TM's fees, and there wasn't any way to buy it without paying $8-10 for parking even though I wasn't driving there. (I live about a mile from a venue that's usually a bad traffic jam for concerts, and I'd much rather bike there, not get stuck in traffic, and not need to worry about my substance consumption during the concert :-) Also, one year I ended up with a subscription to Rolling Stone that I'm sure was padded on to my bill, even though I didn't see any checkbox where I authorized it.
While 2.4GHz is pretty crowded in environments like that, 5 GHz usually isn't - very few people use it, and the channel separation is better, so you really get N different channels, not just 3-4 of 11. If your laptop doesn't support it, you might need a $20 USB dongle. A year or so ago a bunch of my neighbors got 802.11n, crowding out my 802.11g, so I had to do the same :-) I also used an Android app to find which 2.4g channel was quietest, so I didn't have to mess with 5g or using Channel 14 (a not-for-US-use channel that's usually quiet enough.)
Depending on the circumstances, the press release might get written by a business trying to push their next product release or dis their competitor's new product, or it might get written by a government agency trying to increase its clout within the government or as part of a longer-running PR campaign.
Then the press release is sent to the press, some of whom ignore it, some of whom mindlessly print it, and some of whom decide it's a good enough story for their market so they talk about it on radio or TV or give it print space.
Then other commenters start giving it coverage, whether that's talk radio ranting about how bad or good it is or somebody submitting it to Slashdot or whatever.
Then the tweets and the blogosphere get it. That doesn't mean they don't start stories on their own, but the people with interests in controlling the press or touting their products don't leave it to chance. (That's not even counting the ones where the tweets and blogosphere get started by astroturf, which is also pretty common today as an alternative business model to astroturfing the AP, Washington Post, or EE Times.)