but Google will not (any time soon) be able to pass up the benefits of such a heavily populated country.
Even when that populated country isn't infected with a consumerist "I like to buy stuff" mentality? (They're not quite there yet, but signs point in that direction, at least in the major metropolitan areas)
I often wonder how much google really stands to benefit. They don't make money by making information accessible and easy to find; they depend on advertising. If people aren't buying things or advertising online, how does Google make their money?
I'm not sure why the idea of commercial sortware is "appalling" - I mean, you're running this on Windows!
I'm not appalled by commercial software by any means. I just didn't like the idea that this particular piece of commercial software, which for whatever reason at the time didn't render my frequently visited sites properly, especially when a free browser (firefox) was available.
I will try the new version though - competition is usually a good thing.
I know it's free now, I was just commenting on my past experience when it wasn't free and didn't render half of my regularly visited sites properly.
I definitely plan on trying the new version. My original post reflected those intentions. Had the Euro-MS 'browser choice' issue not made mainstream headlines, I wouldn't have really paid much attention to the fact that a new version of Opera was recently released.
I still don't get why I was modded flamebait (by more than just a few mods). Had a bad past experience when Opera wasn't free, but I'm willing to give it another chance. Oh well, so much for my good karma bonus.
I had completely forgotten about Opera, until the MS "browser choice" started making the mainstream headlines.
I tried Opera a few years ago and quickly dumped it because of so many incompatibilities. Regular pages that looked fine in IE and Firefox were completely mangled in Opera, so I gave up and said never again. I was also appalled that it wasn't free; they wanted me to pay for it! (I got it as part of some special promotion where it was free) Why pay for a piece of crap when there were free browsers that rendered my pages correctly?
I'm going to guess it's a combination of a new version and the ballot screen that are attracting more interest. Despite my past experiences, I'm willing to give it a try again and help it's 'dramatic rise.'
A simple helmet can save thousands of dollars in taxpayer money
Every day, thousands of people hit their heads while performing mundane activities, requiring treatment for head injuries. I don't like the idea of my tax dollars paying for their care either, so I think we should mandate that helmets for EVERYONE to wear all the time, not just while riding a motorbike.
Pedestrians in New York City are especially at risk of getting hurt- and there happens to be a lot of people in NY who receive public healthcare, which means I'm paying for their care indirectly. I think we should stand up against this! I demand that all pedestrians in New York wear helmets, shoulder protection, elbow protection, knee protection, hip protection, sort of like the gear a hockey player wears. This will surely make the world a safer place and keep our insurance costs down.
They also don't have the concept of "direct debit". something that astounds me. You either have to go to an online bill consolidator service of have to pay each bill (sending a cheque!!!!) individually!
That's not entirely true. I'm not a big fan of the bill consolidation services that are usually offered for 'free' by your bank, as long as you meet the minimum criteria of $X minimum balance, direct deposit, X transfers per month, X debit purchases per month, etc.
Every service that I need to pay for, from my gas utility, electric utility, student loan, and credit card bill can be paid directly at the company's website as a direct debt. I enter my routing and checking account numbers, and the bill gets deducted from my bank account.
Everything but my rent gets paid this way, and that's only because the company managing my apartment charges an additional $5 fee for electronic transfers. They can keep the $5 and instead take the extra effort to pick up their mail, open my envelope, and run to the bank to deposit the check I give them (you'd think that effort would be more than a $5 expense to them?)
You can do a wire transfer in the USA... if you pay the additional $25 fee from the bank! I don't understand this policy - I would guess it requires many more resources and expenses to process a paper check.
I'm quite surprised people still use checks, however I'm stuck using them for one specific case. I only use a check to pay my rent because the company that runs my apartment charges a $5 fee for electronic rent payments which I refuse to pay.
A good NES/Genesis/SNES emulator and a gamepad is all you need. Heck, even with a small SSD you could still store every ROM ever made for all of those systems!
Were any good games ever made beyond those systems?
D'OH! Your mention of a "good ol' fashion pub that serves dark ale" made me (wrongly) assume you're from the UK. I live just outside NYC where there are a ton of great quirky holes that serve up a variety of beers.
"I've gone to places where the choices were a handful of American beers, or water. I've chosen water."
I do the same; though I have to admit that I can tolerate Miller Lite. I'd never pay for one, but if someone offered to buy and that's all that was available I wouldn't say no.
Here we go again, somebody taking cheap shots at America whenever they have a chance.
As an American and a beer lover, I've been offended by the crap that is called "American Beer" and somehow remains extremely popular among the drinking crowd. Recently I've been doing some more world travel and I've learned that nearly every country has their share of mass-produced, mass-marketed beers, which are light colored (coloured), boring, and bland tasting.
Now I can't lie, there are certainly much better mainstream beers in the UK that are as easily available as Bud/Miller is on this side of the pond, but it's not all that bad here. We still have many decent alternatives that are easy to find; Sam Adams, for one, is a fine 'mainstream' American beer. I just wish our culture was more open and accepting of Alcohol. On a recent trip to Barcelona, I had the freedom of grabbing a can of Estrella Damm and enjoying it on a park bench while relaxing after a day of walking. Do that anywhere in the USA and you'll get funny looks from people, and within minutes a visit from a police officer.
Not all of Irvine is like that, it varies by HOA. Lots of homeowners associations all over the country have silly regulations like that, and you agree to it by choosing to live there.
What I find ironic in this story is that the couple is trying to 'be green' by conserving water, meanwhile the photo in TFA shows a FULL SIZE SUV parked in their driveway! Smug alert!
Every automatic transmission vehicle that I've driven in the past 20 years can be put into neutral while driving.
br>
What you say makes no sense - if the oil pump is driven by the engine, as long as the engine is running your oil pump will still be working. Besides, engines and transmissions are usually isolated systems - engine oil is separate from transmission fluid.
It's called emergency preparedness. Unfortunately most people don't think about what could go wrong in a car, and don't give much thought to what they should do. Being the nerd that I am, I always try to think about things that could go wrong, and figure out how I should handle those situations. For me, the one possible problem that always comes to mind is losing my brakes down a steep long descent. Downshift -> Ease the emergency brake on -> Look for something to crash into that will absorb some energy.
I had an accelerator stick on a new F-350 recently. It was a company vehicle, and one of the boneheads I work with decided to put small rubber mats on the floors. One of these mats slid forward and caused the accelerator to stick down. 560 lb-ft of torque is a lot to hold back. My IMMEDIATE instinct was to apply the brakes and put it in neutral at the same time, and it worked. I stopped, and the engine was bouncing off a temporary rev limiter (as is usually the case when the engine is revved without the car/truck in gear)
Most people don't think of their cars as a complex system, and don't give much thought to operating them in all possible situations. Drivers of cars should do the same as pilots who try to prepare for any possible emergency situation, if not formally at least give it some thought.
I mean, how hard would it really be if every router shipped with a unique SSID and a default random password?
The routers that verizon hands out with their FiOS service do exactly this. They have a unique 6 character hexadecimal string as the SSID, and each has a unique WEP password that's printed on the bottom of the router on a sticker.
Now I know this isn't perfect (WEP security limitations aside), but it's sure as hell better than every single customer in my apartment complex having "Linksys" or "Netgear" access points with no encryption and default passwords.
I quickly ran into a limitation on the size of the NAT with this freebie router so I run my own router as the primary, and simply use the Verizon device as a bridge/media converter so my set top box can obtain guide info and IPTV (on-demand video) since it only has a coax interface.
Don't get me started on "Go Daddy." Aside from a ridiculous company name that is far from even whispering professionalism, I had an incident where I lost a domain to them because of their shady squatting practices.
I used GoDaddy to search the availability of my last name as a domain, about two or three times within a week, and then when I went to register it a short while later the domain was already freakin' registered by GoDaddy. They were squatting on my last name! This is NOT a common last name, and I didn't use any other registrar to search the availability. There's no chance in hell this was coincidence, GoDaddy intentionally did this. I had to wait a year for their registration to expire before I could finally register it myself.
I happened to get lucky, running a site about something I felt strongly about which turned out to have high paying ads that were getting a lot of clicks (relative to the site traffic).
BTW, nice site. I'm a big fan of "The Armed Citizen" column in American Rifleman and I'm sure there are many more articles out there. About a few months ago I had an incident where I was able to protect myself from some lunatic, but that doesn't belong here - maybe I'll contact you through your site.
Adsense, however, seems very hard to make any scratch on. I've set it up on one of my sites, www.thankgodihadagun.com, and have gotten 100s of views, but no click-throughs.
It depends on what types of ads get shown on your site. I ran a site that had some strange ads that did get a few clicks, which turned out to be over $1. I didn't earn enough to quit my day job, but for a while I was hitting the $100 threshold each month and getting paid.
Anyone can create a site and maybe get lucky with some high value ads, but if you want to really make money you need to invest some time and figure out what particular subject areas attract high paying ads that people will actually click.
they're even willing to kill those profits if the legit domain complains to them about the typo squatter.
Google allows all sorts of questionable activity, as long as trademark owners don't complain. I have first hand experience with this.
I won't go into the details, but do a quick search on "affiliate arbitrage" and look at some of the shady stuff that is going on. I have a friend who made a lot of money by bidding on typos on AdWords. Google has a huge conflict of interest by running an advertising network and and affiliate network (DoubleClick), as they stand to make boatloads of money from both ends. They turn a blind eye until the merchants complain.
I think the sole reason this is allowed is because there is so much money involved, and in many cases the merchants will tolerate a certain amount of questionable behavior because they are still making sales.
My desktop machine is a P3 800 with 256MB RAM, running Win2K. It has a sleek 20" 1600x900 display too!
It's used primarily for light web browsing (chokes on today's flash), Office XP, downloading, and media storage. I actually still use it quite a bit to play Half Life or Medal of Honor online; the TNT2 video card still works great for those applications.
I've been tempted to upgrade so many times, but I have three decent modern laptops in my house, and don't really use the desktop enough to justify it.
I haven't used any antivirus software on my Win2K box in the past 9 years and NEVER had a virus in that time.
Firefox with Adblock Plus, Noscript, and Flashblock. That's it!
I noticed some sluggish performance recently and suspected malware or a virus. I installed MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware, Clamwin, and Spybot S&D, ran them, and all indicated my system was clean.
The problem turned out to be a badly fragmented hard drive (haven't defragged since 2001 or 2002!)
What matters is that it could become the standard going forward
So let it be. Last I checked, the FOSS movement was gaining a lot of momentum. One of my totally non-tech friends who works at a Pizza Hut is using Ubuntu on his laptop, and he loves it!
If people want a choice, they should GET a choice - use the app store, or don't. Instead, Apple's making the choice for you. And that's no choice at all.
You can still choose NOT to buy an iPad.
I'm still torn on the concept of the iPad; almost everything inside of me says there's no need for one, but thinking about my college days when I lugged around a 30 lb backpack full of books, this may have worked nicely. I was in college during the laptop revolution; when I started very few people had them and my campus had very limited wifi, but four years later everyone had a laptop and wireless access was avaialble everywhere. A vertically oriented screen makes reading books much easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Even when that populated country isn't infected with a consumerist "I like to buy stuff" mentality? (They're not quite there yet, but signs point in that direction, at least in the major metropolitan areas)
I often wonder how much google really stands to benefit. They don't make money by making information accessible and easy to find; they depend on advertising. If people aren't buying things or advertising online, how does Google make their money?
I'm not appalled by commercial software by any means. I just didn't like the idea that this particular piece of commercial software, which for whatever reason at the time didn't render my frequently visited sites properly, especially when a free browser (firefox) was available.
I will try the new version though - competition is usually a good thing.
I know it's free now, I was just commenting on my past experience when it wasn't free and didn't render half of my regularly visited sites properly.
I definitely plan on trying the new version. My original post reflected those intentions. Had the Euro-MS 'browser choice' issue not made mainstream headlines, I wouldn't have really paid much attention to the fact that a new version of Opera was recently released.
I still don't get why I was modded flamebait (by more than just a few mods). Had a bad past experience when Opera wasn't free, but I'm willing to give it another chance. Oh well, so much for my good karma bonus.
I had completely forgotten about Opera, until the MS "browser choice" started making the mainstream headlines.
I tried Opera a few years ago and quickly dumped it because of so many incompatibilities. Regular pages that looked fine in IE and Firefox were completely mangled in Opera, so I gave up and said never again. I was also appalled that it wasn't free; they wanted me to pay for it! (I got it as part of some special promotion where it was free) Why pay for a piece of crap when there were free browsers that rendered my pages correctly?
I'm going to guess it's a combination of a new version and the ballot screen that are attracting more interest. Despite my past experiences, I'm willing to give it a try again and help it's 'dramatic rise.'
A simple helmet can save thousands of dollars in taxpayer money
Every day, thousands of people hit their heads while performing mundane activities, requiring treatment for head injuries. I don't like the idea of my tax dollars paying for their care either, so I think we should mandate that helmets for EVERYONE to wear all the time, not just while riding a motorbike.
Pedestrians in New York City are especially at risk of getting hurt- and there happens to be a lot of people in NY who receive public healthcare, which means I'm paying for their care indirectly. I think we should stand up against this! I demand that all pedestrians in New York wear helmets, shoulder protection, elbow protection, knee protection, hip protection, sort of like the gear a hockey player wears. This will surely make the world a safer place and keep our insurance costs down.
They also don't have the concept of "direct debit". something that astounds me. You either have to go to an online bill consolidator service of have to pay each bill (sending a cheque!!!!) individually!
That's not entirely true. I'm not a big fan of the bill consolidation services that are usually offered for 'free' by your bank, as long as you meet the minimum criteria of $X minimum balance, direct deposit, X transfers per month, X debit purchases per month, etc.
Every service that I need to pay for, from my gas utility, electric utility, student loan, and credit card bill can be paid directly at the company's website as a direct debt. I enter my routing and checking account numbers, and the bill gets deducted from my bank account.
Everything but my rent gets paid this way, and that's only because the company managing my apartment charges an additional $5 fee for electronic transfers. They can keep the $5 and instead take the extra effort to pick up their mail, open my envelope, and run to the bank to deposit the check I give them (you'd think that effort would be more than a $5 expense to them?)
You can do a wire transfer in the USA... if you pay the additional $25 fee from the bank! I don't understand this policy - I would guess it requires many more resources and expenses to process a paper check.
I'm quite surprised people still use checks, however I'm stuck using them for one specific case. I only use a check to pay my rent because the company that runs my apartment charges a $5 fee for electronic rent payments which I refuse to pay.
I used to do something similar with TNT: an emacs AIM client!!! Truly amazing.
Unhydrogenated lard is a wonderful substitute!
Were any good games ever made beyond those systems?
I do the same; though I have to admit that I can tolerate Miller Lite. I'd never pay for one, but if someone offered to buy and that's all that was available I wouldn't say no.
As an American and a beer lover, I've been offended by the crap that is called "American Beer" and somehow remains extremely popular among the drinking crowd. Recently I've been doing some more world travel and I've learned that nearly every country has their share of mass-produced, mass-marketed beers, which are light colored (coloured), boring, and bland tasting.
Now I can't lie, there are certainly much better mainstream beers in the UK that are as easily available as Bud/Miller is on this side of the pond, but it's not all that bad here. We still have many decent alternatives that are easy to find; Sam Adams, for one, is a fine 'mainstream' American beer. I just wish our culture was more open and accepting of Alcohol. On a recent trip to Barcelona, I had the freedom of grabbing a can of Estrella Damm and enjoying it on a park bench while relaxing after a day of walking. Do that anywhere in the USA and you'll get funny looks from people, and within minutes a visit from a police officer.
What I find ironic in this story is that the couple is trying to 'be green' by conserving water, meanwhile the photo in TFA shows a FULL SIZE SUV parked in their driveway! Smug alert!
br> What you say makes no sense - if the oil pump is driven by the engine, as long as the engine is running your oil pump will still be working. Besides, engines and transmissions are usually isolated systems - engine oil is separate from transmission fluid.
I had an accelerator stick on a new F-350 recently. It was a company vehicle, and one of the boneheads I work with decided to put small rubber mats on the floors. One of these mats slid forward and caused the accelerator to stick down. 560 lb-ft of torque is a lot to hold back. My IMMEDIATE instinct was to apply the brakes and put it in neutral at the same time, and it worked. I stopped, and the engine was bouncing off a temporary rev limiter (as is usually the case when the engine is revved without the car/truck in gear)
Most people don't think of their cars as a complex system, and don't give much thought to operating them in all possible situations. Drivers of cars should do the same as pilots who try to prepare for any possible emergency situation, if not formally at least give it some thought.
The routers that verizon hands out with their FiOS service do exactly this. They have a unique 6 character hexadecimal string as the SSID, and each has a unique WEP password that's printed on the bottom of the router on a sticker.
Now I know this isn't perfect (WEP security limitations aside), but it's sure as hell better than every single customer in my apartment complex having "Linksys" or "Netgear" access points with no encryption and default passwords.
I quickly ran into a limitation on the size of the NAT with this freebie router so I run my own router as the primary, and simply use the Verizon device as a bridge/media converter so my set top box can obtain guide info and IPTV (on-demand video) since it only has a coax interface.
I used GoDaddy to search the availability of my last name as a domain, about two or three times within a week, and then when I went to register it a short while later the domain was already freakin' registered by GoDaddy. They were squatting on my last name! This is NOT a common last name, and I didn't use any other registrar to search the availability. There's no chance in hell this was coincidence, GoDaddy intentionally did this. I had to wait a year for their registration to expire before I could finally register it myself.
BTW, nice site. I'm a big fan of "The Armed Citizen" column in American Rifleman and I'm sure there are many more articles out there. About a few months ago I had an incident where I was able to protect myself from some lunatic, but that doesn't belong here - maybe I'll contact you through your site.
It depends on what types of ads get shown on your site. I ran a site that had some strange ads that did get a few clicks, which turned out to be over $1. I didn't earn enough to quit my day job, but for a while I was hitting the $100 threshold each month and getting paid.
Anyone can create a site and maybe get lucky with some high value ads, but if you want to really make money you need to invest some time and figure out what particular subject areas attract high paying ads that people will actually click.
Google allows all sorts of questionable activity, as long as trademark owners don't complain. I have first hand experience with this.
I won't go into the details, but do a quick search on "affiliate arbitrage" and look at some of the shady stuff that is going on. I have a friend who made a lot of money by bidding on typos on AdWords. Google has a huge conflict of interest by running an advertising network and and affiliate network (DoubleClick), as they stand to make boatloads of money from both ends. They turn a blind eye until the merchants complain.
I think the sole reason this is allowed is because there is so much money involved, and in many cases the merchants will tolerate a certain amount of questionable behavior because they are still making sales.
Lines of code? I only ever write one per program. No carriage returns for me, thank you.
It's used primarily for light web browsing (chokes on today's flash), Office XP, downloading, and media storage. I actually still use it quite a bit to play Half Life or Medal of Honor online; the TNT2 video card still works great for those applications.
I've been tempted to upgrade so many times, but I have three decent modern laptops in my house, and don't really use the desktop enough to justify it.
Firefox with Adblock Plus, Noscript, and Flashblock. That's it!
I noticed some sluggish performance recently and suspected malware or a virus. I installed MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware, Clamwin, and Spybot S&D, ran them, and all indicated my system was clean.
The problem turned out to be a badly fragmented hard drive (haven't defragged since 2001 or 2002!)
What matters is that it could become the standard going forward
So let it be. Last I checked, the FOSS movement was gaining a lot of momentum. One of my totally non-tech friends who works at a Pizza Hut is using Ubuntu on his laptop, and he loves it!
If people want a choice, they should GET a choice - use the app store, or don't. Instead, Apple's making the choice for you. And that's no choice at all.
You can still choose NOT to buy an iPad.
I'm still torn on the concept of the iPad; almost everything inside of me says there's no need for one, but thinking about my college days when I lugged around a 30 lb backpack full of books, this may have worked nicely. I was in college during the laptop revolution; when I started very few people had them and my campus had very limited wifi, but four years later everyone had a laptop and wireless access was avaialble everywhere. A vertically oriented screen makes reading books much easier.
iPad. 40% more absorbent than iTampon.