I think you are wrong, and here is why: Most of that shareware you seem to be railing against? Frankly was a hell of a lot more like the Humble Bundles than it was commercial software which FYI there were high dollar software that you couldn't pass around legally then too, most of the database software for an example.
Most of those shareware titles gave you several levels of the game so you could "try before you buy" to make sure it ran well on your system and you liked it, and the money? Was used to make more games. In a way it was like Kickstarter only you actually got something for your money up front.
Sadly the reason you don't see shareware anymore is that the corps have bought so many laws frankly I doubt shareware would survive the legal minefield that is today's software landscape. I should know as i tried to contact the makers of all those old shareware titles, I wanted to build with a software programmer friend an easy to use platform to run those old titles on a modern OS and quickly found out it was a total legal quagmire, with many pieces in limbo because nobody knows who the hell owns the rights to it (so called abandonware which covers a LARGE part of the software made before Windows 95) and the ones that do own the rights are either scared of being sued by somebody, don't even know where the complete code is anymore, or think that one day it'll be able to turn it into an iPhone game for big bucks.
But as somebody who lived through those years frankly I think you are looking at them through rose colored glasses, just look at how the devs of KDE and Gnome as well as those in charge of the audio subsystem in Linux all gave the "community" a Goatse when it came to KDE 4, GnomeShell, and Pulse, none of which the community actually wanted. If there was a REAL community then those at the bottom would have a say it what goes on, IRL look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" to see how the "community" actually IS behind the scenes. What you have is some devs with massive egos setting edicts on high and unless you can get enough programmers with enough skills to actually fork the entire thing AWAY from its creator (which ironically happened to RMS, both Emacs and GCC he "blessed" but are actually forks to take him out of the picture) then you are screwed, you have no say in anything.
At least with pay software if enough people hate the software or a company's policies they can force them to change or go under, see how EA is on the selling block and Activision is undergoing restructuring for examples. Hell if MSFT doesn't come out with an OS that doesn't assault their customers they may end up the same, with Apple and Google taking their customers away from them.
Allow me to say thank you, as my great grandfather was an actual card carrying socialist that had his skull cracked several times for daring to point out that sharecroppers? They could actually feel pain and did need to rest when they are sick. I know that would be just common fucking sense but words like that simply not tolerated by the large land owners who frankly treated their workers like disposable people.
And I'm not even gonna respond to the libertarian, know why? because they ARE the young earthers, I swear to fucking God that is EXACTLY what they are like. You can point to societies that had no government, you can show how time and time again this ALWAYS leads to feudalism, how the history of this planet, going back to the first clay tablets, shows it ALWAYS follows the same pattern 1.-Make large sums by ANY means, be they legal, moral, or not, 2.-Hire goon squad, 3.-Become God of the Mountain and treat those below you like shit but JUST LIKE the young earthers whose stock answer is "Satan did it" their answer is "The free market fixes that".
Believe me I know of which I speak, I spent a year arguing with one on YouTube before someone pointed out "You DO realize you are about as likely to get him to see logic as you are getting a member of the Taliban to see women as anything other than chattel, right?" and its true, there is NO amount of citations, no amount of history, hell I even quoted Adam Smith who knew that unfettered capitalism would be a fricking disaster yet NONE of this matters, because the market is his God, the invisible hand his Jesus. Notice how badly he distorted a period of history that frankly is VERY well documented, by coming up with a single ultra right book that says "Those poor wittle robber barons, picked on by the nasty government" which has about as much weight with historians, and not meaning to Godwin here, just don't have a better example of this level of batshit historical revisionism, the former executioner that wrote a book that said all those empty cans of poison at the camps was used for clearing buildings of lice.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what history shows to be true because just like religion libertarian beliefs are all about FAITH not science. look up that Stefan from FreeDomainRadio some time, for him the magic word is "insurance". Yes insurance will magically keep the rich guy from poisoning my land, keep the rapist from raping my wife and children, why we don't need a government at all to stop evil men, just...insurance policies. No I'm NOT making that shit up, I swear to God he actually believes this and even more scarily has hundreds of thousands of followers that buy this kind of batshit.
Of course we ALL know what it ultimately is about, and I have to thank Ron Paul of all people for giving us the ultimate example and that is GREED. When all those libertarians cheered at the thought of a 22 year old dying because he didn't have money for medical treatment I thought "Here is the perfect metaphor for libertarianism, cheer death and suffering as long as it doesn't take their precious pieces of silver from them" because at the end of the day what IS libertarianism? Its about greed, its about not minding if the guy down the road is starving and living in filth as long as you have your gold plated shitter and maid to wipe your ass, its frankly one of the most disgusting belief systems I've ever seen, right up there with fascism and cults of personality like Stalinism in my book. As one of the posters pointed out there is really only 2 flavors of libertarians, one wants the government to protect them from their slaves, the other wants to be able to hire a goon squad to protect them from the slaves as the government might enact laws saying they can only beat their slaves once a week.
And you just answered your own question. Why doesn't XBMC work and Android does? Because nobody has gotten Android working on generic hardware other than cell phones which frankly are so weak there isn't any way for them to capture the streams.
Compare this to my 9 year old Sempron that can capture video streams trivially and more importantly there are several pieces of software that allows you to do this with no knowledge of how it works (Jaksta is the one I recommend and use myself, but there are several that do the job) and thus is why we have DRM on Windows and not on Android, that wussy little ARM core and teeny tiny storage space (yes I know you can add a Mini-SD, but the throughput on those is just terrible) makes piracy on Android a non starter. Interesting bit of trivia while piracy has lowered profits for music everywhere else in Japan sales has tripled, why? Because the most popular device for music in Japan is NOT the PC or PMP, but the phone. Because of the locked down nature of phones people there either buy the tracks directly on their phones or buy the CDs and pay to have them put on their phones.
But so far I've been batting 9 out of 10 when it comes to tech predictions, simply because I don't predict unless I'm damned sure that is the way things are headed based on what I'm seeing down here on the ground. I called both Vista and Win 8 flopping (I also called WinME but I had no broadband at the time and thus nowhere to make my prediction to so its unrecorded), I called Canonical flopping like a fish from one trend to another trying to find a viable market to stay afloat (I also predicted that they would last 5 years 2 years ago and so far still seems to be on track so unless Shuttleworth breaks out a check Canonical dead in 3) and I hereby predict that Android WILL be locked down in less than 4 years, sorry I can't pin it down better but I don't have enough info on how HTML V5 and H.265 are coming along to make it a tighter prediction.
Honestly this should be obvious to anybody watching the trends, while the RIAA gave up on DRM (and are frankly making up for losses by fucking the artists harder than ever, so badly I've seen artists tell their fans to just steal the songs as they ain't getting a dime for a million selling CD) the MPAA on the other hand has gotten nastier as the tech has gotten better, from the trivial protection of DVDs to the nasty DRM they have on Blu Rays where the system constantly gets new firmware to make it nastier as time rolls on. Then you have Google who unlike Canonical who basically packaged the same old Debian with a little more flash has sank BILLIONS in R&D on Android/ChromeOS so naturally they are gonna want to see a ROI, tellingly they have made GPL V3 verbotten on both Android and ChromeOS which when you consider the entire point of GPL V3 was to close the "TiVo trick" is a red flag IMHO, finally you have the consumer market that Android is aiming for who if your device won't play Netflix and big content? Well the home users are not gonna give a shit WHY your device is "broken" just that it is.
At the end of the day Drinkypoo I'm sure even you will admit its pretty damned obvious that Google wants their name said in the same sentence as MSFT and Apple, yes? I mean surely you can't think that after sinking billions into their OS that big content says "no DRM no movies" that Google will say "Oh well, can't have our OS without the four freedoms" and just walk away, right? So either big content is gonna have to do a 180 away from a stance they've kept for nearly 30 years and which if anything they have gotten MORE nasty and aggressive with, or Google has to lock down Android, one of the two. That is REALLY what we are talking about here, will Google be able to do any of this without the ability to play big content (which both iPhone and WinPhone will be able to play) or will they take the obvious example set forth by the TiVo and just lock it down with code signing or eFuses. Remember that with GPL V2 both of these is 100% legal to do
This is why the ONLY company that sells more than one niche, like say Newegg, I allow to send me emails is Amazon because at least THEY show common sense! Take the one I got today, it might as well have been worded "Hey we saw that you bought your mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books, did you know she has a new one coming out?" because guess what, I DID buy my mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books for her BDay and since those things are like the old "penny dreadfuls" in that they are always some 10-20 book serial there are always new books coming out in the series, so ya know what? I bought the book, mom will have her mail handed to her next week and find another trashy horror book which I'm sure she'll love.
It just amazes me how these companies can have so much info and can't even get close to the target, with Amazon I have NEVER gotten an email that wasn't about 1.-Music gear, 2.-PC gear, 3.-Cheesy horror books, 4.- Video games. Why? Because that is what I fricking buy from Amazon! Geez how stupid can these companies be, if I NEVER click on an ad for a hotel chain why in the fuck do you keep giving me ads for hotel chains? They are either lazy as hell or dumb as a stump, one of the two because obviously all that money they spent on targeting went straight down the shitter.
The sad part is as a retailer I bet I could make you click on those ads, hell you would probably even enjoy those ads, how? COMMON FUCKING SENSE that is how! Let's say you are reading an article on GPUs, without knowing jack shit about you I would put ads that say "Hey are you looking for a new GPU? We have both new and refurb GPUs at good prices and you get a 5% discount for being a reader here, why don't you check out our selection and see if we have what you want?"
This is why Amazon is swimming in pools of money, because if you are looking at motherboards they ain't trying to sell you baby diapers! Instead its a VERY basic formula that we retailers have used since the dawn of sales "Hey you want this? Well people that buy this often buy that because they work well together, maybe you would like to buy that too?" and ya know what? I often DO buy that because it works well with this, if I am buying a DDR 3 board to replace a DDR 2 board and they offer a bundle deal on some DDR 3 sticks, why wouldn't I buy them together and save some money?
The reason everyone blocks ads now when they didn't before is the current system is BROKEN, they use third party ad servers in fuckuistan that will be happy to spread malware as long as the check clears, the ads have jack shit to do with what you are reading, and they are as obnoxious as a fat racist drunk screaming about Jews and have about as much to do with what you are actually reading about, IE none at all. So no shit people block them, they'd have to be stupid not to!
Yeah the old folks and the lonely, which sadly in this day and age has a lot of crossover. Most of the younger folks I deal with just don't have enough hours in the day as it is for all they want to do, taking time out for ads they don't give a rat's ass about is not part of the equation. They figure "Hey I'll spend 20 minutes figuring how to block ads and will save several HOURS a year in bullshit" so they block, simple as that.
What pisses me off is as a retailer there is NO POINT in all this tracking except to be nosy assholes, this era is the age of niches and anybody with 2 functioning braincells can figure out how to target without knowing jack shit about the readers. Take Ars who asked nicely so I unblocked, now what kind of ad did I see on an article I was reading about the new GPU designs? Was it an ad for new or used GPUs? NOT EVEN CLOSE it was an ad for fucking BUSINESS SOFTWARE from IBM! WHAT THE FUCK, does ANYBODY believe that the demographic looking at the latest CONSUMER graphics cards are gonna be doing business for SaaS solutions from big blue?
And the truly sad part? I set up the netbox at the shop to block NOTHING when the whole stink of "targeted ads" came out, because I wanted to see if they actually worked, know what I found? I named their "new tech" as "eternally late software" or ELS because it is NEVER targeting what you WANT to buy, but what you bought as long as 2 years ago! I had been spending something like 3 months researching small SSDs for use as caching drives, did I get a single ad for SSD? Oh fuck no, they kept showing me ads for netbooks and ultrabooks even though I had ALREADY BOUGHT my EEE netbook nearly a year before and hadn't looked at a single page about netbooks since!
The whole thing is annoying, intrusive, puts you at greater risk of malware, and doesn't even offer you products you'd want to buy, so why would I not block them? The ONLY ONE I have seen "get it right" is fellow retailer Amazon, who use a simple "Hey if you like this people who bought this also bought that, would you like to buy that too?" that doesn't need to know jack shit other than which products usually sell together and ya know what? IT WORKS, it doesn't show me diapers when I'm looking at CPUs, doesn't try to sell me web hosting when I'm looking at RAM sticks, it shows me things that actually go together and ya know what? I've bought quite a few things thanks to them pointing out what works well together, I actually enjoy and look forward to the email ads they send me because it is strictly based on "You bought this and that works well with this" formula and makes fucking sense! Good Lord common sense really is a God damned superpower in this day and age from the looks of these ad companies!
Thanks Crosshair, you nailed it right on the head. I have a half a dozen sites, not a site more, that I allow to show Flash content because 1.-Its ALL first party, 2.-They properly vet all first party content so I know each has been checked individually for malware, and 3.- they have a proven track record for not allowing dodgy content onto their sites. Newgrounds is one of those BTW.
But with flash ads NONE OF THOSE CONDITIONS applies in any way,1.- it is NOT first party, so I not only have to concern myself with the security of the site I'm at but which third party ad server they are using (which can change from day to day depending on who is paying better, thus making research worthless) 2.- It is NOT in any way vetted by the site I am at, most sign a contract which lets the ad company serve any ads they want and they aren't provided before being served so who knows what is coming next, 3.- There is not only NOT a history of security, its the opposite as I have pointed out the porn topsites of old had a better record for not serving malware than the current ad servers, again and again we see the largest source for PC infections? Ad servers, and a great chunk of those? Using Flash to call an attack vector, such as embedding a PDF or Word Doc and using Flash to serve it or using Flash to call a third party site through a hidden iFrame which then has a laundry list of vulnerabilities to hit you with when it loads, see my journal for how many of my customers using Firefox were hit with what I named the "Yahoo porn bug" by simply looking at flash porn from untrusted third parties. You miss one patch to one first or third party piece of software released in the last 6 months? They have you pwned.
So while I still say Flash is better than HTML V5 in every way, in support, in resource usage, in bandwidth, better than does NOT equal great in any way, shape or form and you'd have to be a fool to run flash ads from untrusted sources and I'm sorry but I have no desire to spend my days insuring the/. never changes ad servers and that the ad company has an unblemished record when it comes to flash. Hell even finding that kind of data out is like pulling teeth which is why third party ads frankly don't work, it lets everyone play "pass the buck" and blame the other guy for the infection, the buck never stops anywhere which is simply unacceptable for security purposes.
Dude look at the pics you provided, see the one with the bikes? Now look at how the TOP of the headrest is even with his dick and he isn't even standing up straight. That means he HAS to go DOWN to get into the seats, no other way unless he has some powered lift kit.
Now compare that to my Ranger which has NOT been jacked, I put stiffer shocks but they didn't raise the height any, height wise its stock. If I were to stand by the truck, just as he is doing in that pic? The headrest would be about where my CHIN is, not my dick. This means that all I have to do is slide sideways and I'm in the vehicle, no going up or down required. Again not only is the extra height more comfortable on me, I trashed my left knee in a bike wreck ages ago so when the weather is nasty not having to climb is a Godsend, but for my elderly relatives like my mom it can mean the difference between going to her doctor's appointment or not. My oldest has an S10 that is the same height as that car, she can't get in and out of that because its TOO LOW for her to get out of without literally being pulled out and stood on her feet, with my Ranger she simply puts her feet on the ground and she is practically standing already, all she has to do is shift her weight from the seat to her feet.
So I'm sorry but a 1 inch lift isn't even close, you'd need more like 6-8 inches to equal the height of a late model Ranger.
And you are an example of why we need to remove ACs or at least have every post automatically be at -2, because you didn't even bother reading the post before you spewed your drivel.
If you WOULD have bothered reading before waving your little flag you would have seen that I ALREADY ADDRESSED the possibility of using hardware DRM and at the end of the day the ONLY WAY that hardware DRM like a TPM works is if the code is locked, because otherwise what is to keep me from compiling code that just lies to the module? That is why Windows and TPM work well together, you don't have the source for the kernel so have no way of making the kernel lie to the module, in Linux this is NOT the case. This is why ultimately if you want to use a TPM in Linux you have to use some form of hashing or signing of the code, its the only way the TPM module has of seeing that it isn't just lying to the module.
Its a shame you know so little about the subject because it is quite an interesting one, at the end of the day it all comes down to trust. How can the software trust the OS? How can the hardware trust the software? And without code signing or hashing if the software is FOSS the answer is "you can't" because I can make an altered version of the kernel or any other piece (Again just as RMS intended) that does what I want it to do, including lie to the TPM if that is what I wish. This is why FOSS as laid down by RMS and DRM will never be compatible, the entire point of GPL was to be able to make the software do what YOU want it to no matter what, and the entire point of DRM is to make sure you CAN NOT do certain actions.
Now anybody with the ability to read and common sense would see how those 2 are incompatibile but sadly you and most other ACs don't read, you spew dogma, which is why the ACs need to be banned.
Uhhh...kinda forget your history bud? We ALREADY TRIED so called "pure capitalism" and it got us a little period known as "the age of the robber barons" which left us some really nice superfund sites that We, The People are on the hook for, along with tons of toxin dumped all over the place, quite a few worker deaths, and oh yeah...you know those regulations that you libertarians are always harping on about, guess who paid for them? THE ROBBER BARONS, that's right, those "unfettered capitalists" after they had made THEIR fortunes sure as fuck didn't want any competition so like the rich in any other period since the dawn of time they bought their own government to enforce their monopolies...nice huh?
So I'm sorry, like fascism and communism, we've been there and done that, don't work. Kinda funny how the Libertarians refuse to claim what was a half a century of EXACTLY what they have been asking for, because it highlights the flaw in their logic which is thus: For libertarianism, or any other ism for that matter, to work you need to have players who are NOT douchebags, yet if there is one thing that history has taught us its that those at the top often have dreams of being Nero and are very much douchebags, so it always ends in disaster. Maybe if you could build a system controlled by an AI that didn't have an ego to inflate? Maybe. But as long as meatbags are in charge its gonna suck because everyone dreams of being their own "King God of the Mountain" and ruling over the peasants with an iron fist.
Hell give me half a trillion and I'll buy a chunk of South America and make Chavez look like a choirboy, I wouldn't be able to help it, power corrupts. To paraphrase a line from LOTR "I would take this power from a desire to do good, but through me it would do great evil" because that is just how power works, it appeals to our belief that we know better than everybody else and it blinds us to "the little things" that end up causing great suffering. Capitalism is NO DIFFERENT, those that end up with great wealth decide they have this because it "proves" they are better and thus should rule, it blinds them and corrupts them and it ends up causing suffering because they are too high in the tower to see what their edicts are doing to those on the ground. It has been this way since the olden days, it will be this way a thousand years from now, that's just how it works folks.
That's not gonna be the problem, the problem is FOSS and DRM are completely opposed to one another (which RMS made quite clear that was his intent) so that Google will end up having to lock down the OS to keep the DRM from being trivially cracked. After all if you have the source there is no reason why you couldn't compile a kernel that say put video and audio out into a file, so unless they have hardware DRM built into the unit I predict Google WILL lock it down.
I have a feeling Google already knew this day was coming which is why GPL V3 has been verbotten, if there was GPL V3 there wouldn't be the "TiVoization" trick that allows you to lock down the software with code signing thus making the source worthless.But we all should have known this day was coming, the masses want big studio content, music, movies, games, and that means DRM. Since Google has been using FOSS as their base and they are trying to sell to the masses this day had to come, it was either that or tell the masses no big content which would be the kiss of death for ChromeOS.
Well I DO block ads from/. and I'll tell you why...the last 2 times i unblocked them, guess what the FIRST thing the site loaded was? Adobe Flash. I'm sorry but Adobe Flash is for content ONLY and even then it has to be first party and I have to trust you. While I think Adobe Flash is better than HTML V5 in just about every way lets be honest, the track record for Flash when it comes to security ain't great and I sure as hell ain't gonna trust ANY site to show me ads using Flash Player. I've seen too many infections caused by Flash ads for me to allow it on my system.
Now when I was using a Mozilla based browser I would just allow the image and text based ads to go while blocking any third party or flash ads but since I am no longer on a Moz based all I have is adblock and it just isn't that finely grained. If/. stops using flash for ads? Would have NO problem with unblocking but until then its just too much of a security risk.
I haul everything from band gear to furniture in mine, the cost of having to rent a truck every time I need to haul something would eat up any savings I would see from having a car with better gas mileage. Maybe where you are at you have an easy way to haul loads but around here you either need a truck or know somebody with a truck or you'd be screwed.
And allow me to say as an American? I don't see how in the hell y'all fit in them little cracker jack cars. I swear I'd have to cut the roof off the damned thing to get in it, too damned tall and lanky for them little go carts you folks drive. Of course at nearly $4 a gallon the gas ain't cheap in a Ranger but when you are mostly doing short hops it ain't bad, about $15 for a round trip to the state capital.
I take it you have never been to AR, or as we call it "The pothole state". Putting better shocks is pretty much SOP around here if you don't want to bounce around like a kangaroo on crack, although I went for the harder shocks as I never cared for the whole "floating" thing, makes the ride a little too loose for my tastes.
And I agree its a damned shame which is why I'll be driving that 99 Ranger until the wheels fall off it. To me the Ranger/S10/King Cab size trucks were just perfect, not so big or as gas sucking but not so small you couldn't carry a decent load. My oldest boy feels the same and was constantly bugging me and my dad to borrow our trucks, boy you should have seen the look on his face when dad drove up in a Midnight Blue S10 and said "Here ya go boy, now quit asking to borrow my truck LOL!"
But you really can't beat a small size pickup, easy to park and get into tight spaces, will haul just about anything your family could ever need to haul, and they were just well built trucks. The one I had before the Ranger was a 92 King Cab and I ended up with nearly 400k of hard miles on it before she finally threw a rod, my neighbor saw me in the Ranger and said "Is that King Cab still around? wanna sell it?" and damned if he didn't just drop the engine out a crunched Sentra in her and handed it to his boy who is driving the far out of it.
And you and my dad would probably get along really well, for while he keeps a Ranger at the shop for the employees to use he has been driving nothing but F series for 20 years now. Like he says "You just can't go wrong with a Ford F series when you need a good work truck" and considering how much electrical gear he hauls I'd say he knows what he is talking about. The only thing either of us have had to replace in our Fords is the ball joints which when you are talking potholes you can bury a goat in? One set of ball joints every 150k miles really ain't bad at all. Shame it doesn't get better gas mileage but there is no way I'm giving up my Ranger.
1 inch? Dude are you high? You ever rode in a Ranger? Its high enough that a 6 foot guy like me can just slide into the bucket, no climbing up or down required. When you have elderly relatives you'll be damned glad you got that extra height too, hell of a lot easier to get an elderly person out of a vehicle that is at standing height than to try to pull them out of a ground dragger.
Which is why it never should have been allowed, its gonna create nothing but a headache for everybody else, be a squatters paradise, the ONLY ones that end up ahead are ICANN who can pull this trick any time they want more $$$.
Meh, don't care if its a Honda or VW myself as I'll never give up my Ford Ranger. Its a gas pig but built like a tank and on the Ranger forums I've been told the Vulcan V6 can easily rack up 300k-400k before needing a rebuild and then you can get another 300k easily. Every time I ask questions and list the specs of the Ranger I always get "Hey...you wanna sell it?" because those Vulcans are supposed to be real sweethearts, easy to work on, dependable as hell, just rock solid and I got one in a practically mint 99 Ranger with less than 120k on it.
But this is why I always put down "people's car/truck" because there are many of us that need/want a truck and won't switch to a car no matter how good the mileage. No way in hell I could go back to riding so damned low to the ground, every time I ride in a car it feels like I'm in a damned go-cart after 24 years of driving trucks, just no way I could go back to driving cars. If all I cared about is mileage my mom has a nice Taurus she never drives that gets nearly 30MPG but it feels like I'm 2 inches above the pavement, no thanks.
Uhhh...you expect grammar nazis to care about logic? Really? You must be new here.
As for TFA frankly ALL hybrids might as well be toys for the rich because if you remove all the government subsidies? The math just doesn't work. The problem is we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in years and the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense. From the tests I've seen depending on where you live and whether you own a climate controlled garage (because of differences in temps affecting battery life) you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery. Now from what I read the batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k depending on feature set so already you have a car that is gonna be practically worthless on the used car market (because the battery costs more than the used car is worth) and any economist will tell you its the used car market that seriously hurts our fossil fuel numbers, currently the USA averages 14MPG and that is because of all the poor folks in used cars on the road.
So while we need to invest in R&D of new battery tech frankly at this point in time hybrids and electrics are just money sinks, all that money sank into subsidizing hybrids is just money pissed down a rathole. If you truly wanted to put the USA on a path of energy independence what you would be better off doing is putting that money into a "people's car/truck" that ran on diesel (so you could later on switch to bio-diesel if the tech becomes viable) with a minimum of 38 MPG for the truck and 45 MPG and a price target of under $30k, THEN you could do a "cash for clunkers" and other subsidies to get the poor out of the older gas guzzlers. If you were to do this with the current national MPG being 14 you could cut our fuel usage by half (figuring in that some will not switch) while having something that would actually make economic sense. With economies of scale you could probably make the vehicles profitable and as the years went by and more and more of the used market was filled by these higher gas mileage vehicles the savings would continue to rise.
But hybrids are just a symptom of a larger disease, the fact that subsidies end up becoming entrenched and continue long after it has been shown not to be economically viable. Just look at ethanol, it causes higher food prices, damages engines, yet we continue to shell out all this money on a tech that has proven to be a dead end because so many in the agra business lobby to keep it. What we need is to spend our money wisely on tech that works economically and hybrids just aren't there yet.
Thanks and this subject REALLY pisses me off with regard to the attitude of the web masters. I mean I'm not asking for much here, just that you don't put my system at risk by using third party ad companies and don't blow my speakers...yet they act like this is a big hardship. Most of the adblocks are VERY easy on first party content and if you just say "We are hosting our own ads with no flash and java, would you please unblock us?" I've found a lot of folks will do just that...but if you then break that trust by going to doubleclick or some other web tracking malware provider? Well fuck you you'll never get unblocked again.
Frankly I think we geeks need to get together and set a standard for ads, after all we are being most reasonable and WE are the ones that end up cleaning up the messes when a zero day splatters across the networks. First party, no flash or java, no speaker blasting...this sounds like a fair and reasonable compromise to me and would make it so they could show ads without the users playing Russian Roulette with their security. That sounds fair doesn't it?
I just wanted to say thanks for the link and it proves what I've thought for quite awhile, that web ads are riskier than the porn topsites were back in the day. I see more infected systems from ads than by any other method which is why my SOP is to give them adblock.
If you ran a bar and 5 out of every 10 cars that parked in your lot were broken into, how long do you think you'd stay in business? That is the current state of web advertising in a nutshell only instead of doing something about the break ins they have the brass balls to blame US for not wanting to risk our cars being broken into...fuck you, if the only way you can stay in business is to make it easier for crooks to break into my system then go OOB.
Oh bullshit, that is just being a lazy asshole. Its called common damned sense which needs ZERO info to target ads. If I am on Ars reading a review of the latest AMD GPUs should you show me ads for baby strollers? NO you should show me ads for GPUs! How fucking hard is that? This is the era of niches, every page being focused on a topic, yet you are honestly telling me you are too damned clueless to figure out what to show me without following me around like some peeping tom? What the fuck?
Its laziness, that is ALL it is, not even bothering to spend a whole 5 minutes to find out what a website is about or what the target audience is. Fuck most websites wouldn't even take 5 minutes, look at Slashdot, there are several sections and each are pretty damned obvious as to which ads you should target to which section. YRO? Privacy related hardware and software. Cloud? SaaS and cloud management solutions. Fuck this ain't brain surgery, its pretty damned obvious and I don't need to know jack shit about you to target those ads, just by seeing what pages you are currently looking at one can get a good idea of what they like. Its no different than Amazon with their "You are looking at this? Well many people that look at this also buy that, would you like to buy that too?" recommendations in that you don't need to know jack shit about the customer, just by monitoring your end you can learn enough to target effectively as long as you bother to do the work.
Then you use a different business model. With my last band people said "You'll never make enough off of just CDs to do more than break even" and they were right, yet we were clearing a couple grand a night...how? Simple, if one business model doesn't work you find another, in our case I got a local graphics artist to design us a cool logo which we put on shirts to supplement the CD sales. Also to get people to buy more stuff we'd have little contests and every sale gave you another shot at the prize. While others were lucky to sell 30 CDs a night we'd end up selling 200 plus a ton of shirts.
If your current business model doesn't work you change the model, simple as that. The world doesn't owe you jack shit, and the ad companies have sealed their fate by not giving a shit if they served malware thus making adblocking the single biggest security measure you can perform, so either adapt and come up with new models or die. After cleaning so damned many systems that have gotten infections from ads I really find it hard to have any sympathy for companies that make their living off of risking their users.
Hear Hear and I would only ad that the current ad system has become such a haven for malware it makes the old porn topsite pages look clean by comparison. When you can cut a person's risk of getting malware by more than half by simply blocking ads honestly you'd be a fool NOT to block ads.
Now I have argued for years that we need to replace JavaScript and the current "Hey we'll crap the content all over the place and use third party dynamic content to "build" the page" for something designed from the ground up with security in mind, JavaScript was designed in a less hostile world than we have now and every thing we've tried from sandboxes to scan before load AV plugins have been bandaids on the bullet wound that is the current "Web 3.0" design model. But even if you don't agree with me surely everyone can see how big a problem the current system is when you look at how the vast majority of viruses the average user gets will be from infected ads.
Are these websites gonna pay to have any viruses they deliver removed? Then why in the fuck should I care that you go under if you have built your entire business model around forcing me to play roulette with the security of my system? I have found the single biggest security measure you can perform on a user's system is to block ads, yet you tell me I have to put all my customers at risk because you can't find a way to make money any other way? Fuck you lazy web devs, either stand by your product and make damned sure not a single ad you serve is a source of malware or find another business model because as long as ads are the #1 attack vector every customer WILL be getting adblock from me PERIOD.
No I think they should stand by their product as I do. Think if I handed out a virus to my customers I wouldn't have to clean up the mess? Then why in the fuck should THEY get a free pass for doing the same? They have no fucking clue as to whether the ads they are serving is malicious or not and frankly I have yet to see a single indicator that they give a rat's ass one way or the other as long as the checks roll in.
If your business model is flawed that is YOUR problem, not mine. There is a REASON why adblock suddenly exploded, its because people got tired of having to shell out nearly a c-note to guys like me because sites like Destructoid gave them a zero day and got tired of having their senses assaulted by blaring ads. Why do you think nobody cared about blocking ads for the longest time? Because at the worst they were little GIFs and hyperlinks. Now if you block ads you can watch the risk of infection drop right off the chart, before adblock I'd see some customers 3 or 4 times a year, after? Now I only see them when they need hardware upgrades.
Like it or not the current ad system is BROKEN, its broken because there is ZERO responsibility when it comes to passing out infections with the ads (look up the figures on where people get viruses from, you'll see more than half comes from infected ads so blocking ads just cut your risk in half) and its broken because they show ZERO respect for their customers by letting blaring ads take over the page, fucking up the flow and making web surfing frankly unpleasant.
So either take responsibility, make sure all ads are checked BEFORE they go lie for the presence of malware, stop allowing blaring ads, and stop fucking up page layouts to try to milk us for ad money. If you don't like it? Then your ass better be coming up with a new model, something to replace the current broken mess with something more secure and user friendly because its my job to protect my customers and that means blocking your malware ridden ads.
You don't have to pay more, just buy AMD products. AMD has opened up their GPUs, supports coreboot and intends to use coreboot exclusively on future boards, last I checked they were even paying some devs to work on the FOSS drivers to their APUs and GPUs to help get them up to speed so that free drivers would be ready at release for their products. Hell as an added bonus not only does it not cost you more money but you can save quite a pretty penny as AMD chips have never been cheaper (especially the Thuban X6s, the bang for the buck on these $100 chips is just insane) and you can build the entire system for less than the cost of the CPU and board from the other guy.
So if you support open hardware that you control? Buy AMD and put your money where your mouth is. I put my money where my mouth is, not only has my shop been AMD exclusive for several years now but myself and my entire family is on AMD, 5 desktops and 1 each of laptops and netbooks. Performance is great, even after 3 years I still get over 4 hours on my E350 netbook and my Thuban just tears through games and video transcoding with cycles to spare.
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I think you are wrong, and here is why: Most of that shareware you seem to be railing against? Frankly was a hell of a lot more like the Humble Bundles than it was commercial software which FYI there were high dollar software that you couldn't pass around legally then too, most of the database software for an example.
Most of those shareware titles gave you several levels of the game so you could "try before you buy" to make sure it ran well on your system and you liked it, and the money? Was used to make more games. In a way it was like Kickstarter only you actually got something for your money up front.
Sadly the reason you don't see shareware anymore is that the corps have bought so many laws frankly I doubt shareware would survive the legal minefield that is today's software landscape. I should know as i tried to contact the makers of all those old shareware titles, I wanted to build with a software programmer friend an easy to use platform to run those old titles on a modern OS and quickly found out it was a total legal quagmire, with many pieces in limbo because nobody knows who the hell owns the rights to it (so called abandonware which covers a LARGE part of the software made before Windows 95) and the ones that do own the rights are either scared of being sued by somebody, don't even know where the complete code is anymore, or think that one day it'll be able to turn it into an iPhone game for big bucks.
But as somebody who lived through those years frankly I think you are looking at them through rose colored glasses, just look at how the devs of KDE and Gnome as well as those in charge of the audio subsystem in Linux all gave the "community" a Goatse when it came to KDE 4, GnomeShell, and Pulse, none of which the community actually wanted. If there was a REAL community then those at the bottom would have a say it what goes on, IRL look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" to see how the "community" actually IS behind the scenes. What you have is some devs with massive egos setting edicts on high and unless you can get enough programmers with enough skills to actually fork the entire thing AWAY from its creator (which ironically happened to RMS, both Emacs and GCC he "blessed" but are actually forks to take him out of the picture) then you are screwed, you have no say in anything.
At least with pay software if enough people hate the software or a company's policies they can force them to change or go under, see how EA is on the selling block and Activision is undergoing restructuring for examples. Hell if MSFT doesn't come out with an OS that doesn't assault their customers they may end up the same, with Apple and Google taking their customers away from them.
Allow me to say thank you, as my great grandfather was an actual card carrying socialist that had his skull cracked several times for daring to point out that sharecroppers? They could actually feel pain and did need to rest when they are sick. I know that would be just common fucking sense but words like that simply not tolerated by the large land owners who frankly treated their workers like disposable people.
And I'm not even gonna respond to the libertarian, know why? because they ARE the young earthers, I swear to fucking God that is EXACTLY what they are like. You can point to societies that had no government, you can show how time and time again this ALWAYS leads to feudalism, how the history of this planet, going back to the first clay tablets, shows it ALWAYS follows the same pattern 1.-Make large sums by ANY means, be they legal, moral, or not, 2.-Hire goon squad, 3.-Become God of the Mountain and treat those below you like shit but JUST LIKE the young earthers whose stock answer is "Satan did it" their answer is "The free market fixes that".
Believe me I know of which I speak, I spent a year arguing with one on YouTube before someone pointed out "You DO realize you are about as likely to get him to see logic as you are getting a member of the Taliban to see women as anything other than chattel, right?" and its true, there is NO amount of citations, no amount of history, hell I even quoted Adam Smith who knew that unfettered capitalism would be a fricking disaster yet NONE of this matters, because the market is his God, the invisible hand his Jesus. Notice how badly he distorted a period of history that frankly is VERY well documented, by coming up with a single ultra right book that says "Those poor wittle robber barons, picked on by the nasty government" which has about as much weight with historians, and not meaning to Godwin here, just don't have a better example of this level of batshit historical revisionism, the former executioner that wrote a book that said all those empty cans of poison at the camps was used for clearing buildings of lice.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what history shows to be true because just like religion libertarian beliefs are all about FAITH not science. look up that Stefan from FreeDomainRadio some time, for him the magic word is "insurance". Yes insurance will magically keep the rich guy from poisoning my land, keep the rapist from raping my wife and children, why we don't need a government at all to stop evil men, just...insurance policies. No I'm NOT making that shit up, I swear to God he actually believes this and even more scarily has hundreds of thousands of followers that buy this kind of batshit.
Of course we ALL know what it ultimately is about, and I have to thank Ron Paul of all people for giving us the ultimate example and that is GREED. When all those libertarians cheered at the thought of a 22 year old dying because he didn't have money for medical treatment I thought "Here is the perfect metaphor for libertarianism, cheer death and suffering as long as it doesn't take their precious pieces of silver from them" because at the end of the day what IS libertarianism? Its about greed, its about not minding if the guy down the road is starving and living in filth as long as you have your gold plated shitter and maid to wipe your ass, its frankly one of the most disgusting belief systems I've ever seen, right up there with fascism and cults of personality like Stalinism in my book. As one of the posters pointed out there is really only 2 flavors of libertarians, one wants the government to protect them from their slaves, the other wants to be able to hire a goon squad to protect them from the slaves as the government might enact laws saying they can only beat their slaves once a week.
And you just answered your own question. Why doesn't XBMC work and Android does? Because nobody has gotten Android working on generic hardware other than cell phones which frankly are so weak there isn't any way for them to capture the streams.
Compare this to my 9 year old Sempron that can capture video streams trivially and more importantly there are several pieces of software that allows you to do this with no knowledge of how it works (Jaksta is the one I recommend and use myself, but there are several that do the job) and thus is why we have DRM on Windows and not on Android, that wussy little ARM core and teeny tiny storage space (yes I know you can add a Mini-SD, but the throughput on those is just terrible) makes piracy on Android a non starter. Interesting bit of trivia while piracy has lowered profits for music everywhere else in Japan sales has tripled, why? Because the most popular device for music in Japan is NOT the PC or PMP, but the phone. Because of the locked down nature of phones people there either buy the tracks directly on their phones or buy the CDs and pay to have them put on their phones.
But so far I've been batting 9 out of 10 when it comes to tech predictions, simply because I don't predict unless I'm damned sure that is the way things are headed based on what I'm seeing down here on the ground. I called both Vista and Win 8 flopping (I also called WinME but I had no broadband at the time and thus nowhere to make my prediction to so its unrecorded), I called Canonical flopping like a fish from one trend to another trying to find a viable market to stay afloat (I also predicted that they would last 5 years 2 years ago and so far still seems to be on track so unless Shuttleworth breaks out a check Canonical dead in 3) and I hereby predict that Android WILL be locked down in less than 4 years, sorry I can't pin it down better but I don't have enough info on how HTML V5 and H.265 are coming along to make it a tighter prediction.
Honestly this should be obvious to anybody watching the trends, while the RIAA gave up on DRM (and are frankly making up for losses by fucking the artists harder than ever, so badly I've seen artists tell their fans to just steal the songs as they ain't getting a dime for a million selling CD) the MPAA on the other hand has gotten nastier as the tech has gotten better, from the trivial protection of DVDs to the nasty DRM they have on Blu Rays where the system constantly gets new firmware to make it nastier as time rolls on. Then you have Google who unlike Canonical who basically packaged the same old Debian with a little more flash has sank BILLIONS in R&D on Android/ChromeOS so naturally they are gonna want to see a ROI, tellingly they have made GPL V3 verbotten on both Android and ChromeOS which when you consider the entire point of GPL V3 was to close the "TiVo trick" is a red flag IMHO, finally you have the consumer market that Android is aiming for who if your device won't play Netflix and big content? Well the home users are not gonna give a shit WHY your device is "broken" just that it is.
At the end of the day Drinkypoo I'm sure even you will admit its pretty damned obvious that Google wants their name said in the same sentence as MSFT and Apple, yes? I mean surely you can't think that after sinking billions into their OS that big content says "no DRM no movies" that Google will say "Oh well, can't have our OS without the four freedoms" and just walk away, right? So either big content is gonna have to do a 180 away from a stance they've kept for nearly 30 years and which if anything they have gotten MORE nasty and aggressive with, or Google has to lock down Android, one of the two. That is REALLY what we are talking about here, will Google be able to do any of this without the ability to play big content (which both iPhone and WinPhone will be able to play) or will they take the obvious example set forth by the TiVo and just lock it down with code signing or eFuses. Remember that with GPL V2 both of these is 100% legal to do
This is why the ONLY company that sells more than one niche, like say Newegg, I allow to send me emails is Amazon because at least THEY show common sense! Take the one I got today, it might as well have been worded "Hey we saw that you bought your mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books, did you know she has a new one coming out?" because guess what, I DID buy my mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books for her BDay and since those things are like the old "penny dreadfuls" in that they are always some 10-20 book serial there are always new books coming out in the series, so ya know what? I bought the book, mom will have her mail handed to her next week and find another trashy horror book which I'm sure she'll love.
It just amazes me how these companies can have so much info and can't even get close to the target, with Amazon I have NEVER gotten an email that wasn't about 1.-Music gear, 2.-PC gear, 3.-Cheesy horror books, 4.- Video games. Why? Because that is what I fricking buy from Amazon! Geez how stupid can these companies be, if I NEVER click on an ad for a hotel chain why in the fuck do you keep giving me ads for hotel chains? They are either lazy as hell or dumb as a stump, one of the two because obviously all that money they spent on targeting went straight down the shitter.
The sad part is as a retailer I bet I could make you click on those ads, hell you would probably even enjoy those ads, how? COMMON FUCKING SENSE that is how! Let's say you are reading an article on GPUs, without knowing jack shit about you I would put ads that say "Hey are you looking for a new GPU? We have both new and refurb GPUs at good prices and you get a 5% discount for being a reader here, why don't you check out our selection and see if we have what you want?"
This is why Amazon is swimming in pools of money, because if you are looking at motherboards they ain't trying to sell you baby diapers! Instead its a VERY basic formula that we retailers have used since the dawn of sales "Hey you want this? Well people that buy this often buy that because they work well together, maybe you would like to buy that too?" and ya know what? I often DO buy that because it works well with this, if I am buying a DDR 3 board to replace a DDR 2 board and they offer a bundle deal on some DDR 3 sticks, why wouldn't I buy them together and save some money?
The reason everyone blocks ads now when they didn't before is the current system is BROKEN, they use third party ad servers in fuckuistan that will be happy to spread malware as long as the check clears, the ads have jack shit to do with what you are reading, and they are as obnoxious as a fat racist drunk screaming about Jews and have about as much to do with what you are actually reading about, IE none at all. So no shit people block them, they'd have to be stupid not to!
Yeah the old folks and the lonely, which sadly in this day and age has a lot of crossover. Most of the younger folks I deal with just don't have enough hours in the day as it is for all they want to do, taking time out for ads they don't give a rat's ass about is not part of the equation. They figure "Hey I'll spend 20 minutes figuring how to block ads and will save several HOURS a year in bullshit" so they block, simple as that.
What pisses me off is as a retailer there is NO POINT in all this tracking except to be nosy assholes, this era is the age of niches and anybody with 2 functioning braincells can figure out how to target without knowing jack shit about the readers. Take Ars who asked nicely so I unblocked, now what kind of ad did I see on an article I was reading about the new GPU designs? Was it an ad for new or used GPUs? NOT EVEN CLOSE it was an ad for fucking BUSINESS SOFTWARE from IBM! WHAT THE FUCK, does ANYBODY believe that the demographic looking at the latest CONSUMER graphics cards are gonna be doing business for SaaS solutions from big blue?
And the truly sad part? I set up the netbox at the shop to block NOTHING when the whole stink of "targeted ads" came out, because I wanted to see if they actually worked, know what I found? I named their "new tech" as "eternally late software" or ELS because it is NEVER targeting what you WANT to buy, but what you bought as long as 2 years ago! I had been spending something like 3 months researching small SSDs for use as caching drives, did I get a single ad for SSD? Oh fuck no, they kept showing me ads for netbooks and ultrabooks even though I had ALREADY BOUGHT my EEE netbook nearly a year before and hadn't looked at a single page about netbooks since!
The whole thing is annoying, intrusive, puts you at greater risk of malware, and doesn't even offer you products you'd want to buy, so why would I not block them? The ONLY ONE I have seen "get it right" is fellow retailer Amazon, who use a simple "Hey if you like this people who bought this also bought that, would you like to buy that too?" that doesn't need to know jack shit other than which products usually sell together and ya know what? IT WORKS, it doesn't show me diapers when I'm looking at CPUs, doesn't try to sell me web hosting when I'm looking at RAM sticks, it shows me things that actually go together and ya know what? I've bought quite a few things thanks to them pointing out what works well together, I actually enjoy and look forward to the email ads they send me because it is strictly based on "You bought this and that works well with this" formula and makes fucking sense! Good Lord common sense really is a God damned superpower in this day and age from the looks of these ad companies!
Thanks Crosshair, you nailed it right on the head. I have a half a dozen sites, not a site more, that I allow to show Flash content because 1.-Its ALL first party, 2.-They properly vet all first party content so I know each has been checked individually for malware, and 3.- they have a proven track record for not allowing dodgy content onto their sites. Newgrounds is one of those BTW.
But with flash ads NONE OF THOSE CONDITIONS applies in any way,1.- it is NOT first party, so I not only have to concern myself with the security of the site I'm at but which third party ad server they are using (which can change from day to day depending on who is paying better, thus making research worthless) 2.- It is NOT in any way vetted by the site I am at, most sign a contract which lets the ad company serve any ads they want and they aren't provided before being served so who knows what is coming next, 3.- There is not only NOT a history of security, its the opposite as I have pointed out the porn topsites of old had a better record for not serving malware than the current ad servers, again and again we see the largest source for PC infections? Ad servers, and a great chunk of those? Using Flash to call an attack vector, such as embedding a PDF or Word Doc and using Flash to serve it or using Flash to call a third party site through a hidden iFrame which then has a laundry list of vulnerabilities to hit you with when it loads, see my journal for how many of my customers using Firefox were hit with what I named the "Yahoo porn bug" by simply looking at flash porn from untrusted third parties. You miss one patch to one first or third party piece of software released in the last 6 months? They have you pwned.
So while I still say Flash is better than HTML V5 in every way, in support, in resource usage, in bandwidth, better than does NOT equal great in any way, shape or form and you'd have to be a fool to run flash ads from untrusted sources and I'm sorry but I have no desire to spend my days insuring the /. never changes ad servers and that the ad company has an unblemished record when it comes to flash. Hell even finding that kind of data out is like pulling teeth which is why third party ads frankly don't work, it lets everyone play "pass the buck" and blame the other guy for the infection, the buck never stops anywhere which is simply unacceptable for security purposes.
Dude look at the pics you provided, see the one with the bikes? Now look at how the TOP of the headrest is even with his dick and he isn't even standing up straight. That means he HAS to go DOWN to get into the seats, no other way unless he has some powered lift kit.
Now compare that to my Ranger which has NOT been jacked, I put stiffer shocks but they didn't raise the height any, height wise its stock. If I were to stand by the truck, just as he is doing in that pic? The headrest would be about where my CHIN is, not my dick. This means that all I have to do is slide sideways and I'm in the vehicle, no going up or down required. Again not only is the extra height more comfortable on me, I trashed my left knee in a bike wreck ages ago so when the weather is nasty not having to climb is a Godsend, but for my elderly relatives like my mom it can mean the difference between going to her doctor's appointment or not. My oldest has an S10 that is the same height as that car, she can't get in and out of that because its TOO LOW for her to get out of without literally being pulled out and stood on her feet, with my Ranger she simply puts her feet on the ground and she is practically standing already, all she has to do is shift her weight from the seat to her feet.
So I'm sorry but a 1 inch lift isn't even close, you'd need more like 6-8 inches to equal the height of a late model Ranger.
And you are an example of why we need to remove ACs or at least have every post automatically be at -2, because you didn't even bother reading the post before you spewed your drivel.
If you WOULD have bothered reading before waving your little flag you would have seen that I ALREADY ADDRESSED the possibility of using hardware DRM and at the end of the day the ONLY WAY that hardware DRM like a TPM works is if the code is locked, because otherwise what is to keep me from compiling code that just lies to the module? That is why Windows and TPM work well together, you don't have the source for the kernel so have no way of making the kernel lie to the module, in Linux this is NOT the case. This is why ultimately if you want to use a TPM in Linux you have to use some form of hashing or signing of the code, its the only way the TPM module has of seeing that it isn't just lying to the module.
Its a shame you know so little about the subject because it is quite an interesting one, at the end of the day it all comes down to trust. How can the software trust the OS? How can the hardware trust the software? And without code signing or hashing if the software is FOSS the answer is "you can't" because I can make an altered version of the kernel or any other piece (Again just as RMS intended) that does what I want it to do, including lie to the TPM if that is what I wish. This is why FOSS as laid down by RMS and DRM will never be compatible, the entire point of GPL was to be able to make the software do what YOU want it to no matter what, and the entire point of DRM is to make sure you CAN NOT do certain actions.
Now anybody with the ability to read and common sense would see how those 2 are incompatibile but sadly you and most other ACs don't read, you spew dogma, which is why the ACs need to be banned.
Uhhh...kinda forget your history bud? We ALREADY TRIED so called "pure capitalism" and it got us a little period known as "the age of the robber barons" which left us some really nice superfund sites that We, The People are on the hook for, along with tons of toxin dumped all over the place, quite a few worker deaths, and oh yeah...you know those regulations that you libertarians are always harping on about, guess who paid for them? THE ROBBER BARONS, that's right, those "unfettered capitalists" after they had made THEIR fortunes sure as fuck didn't want any competition so like the rich in any other period since the dawn of time they bought their own government to enforce their monopolies...nice huh?
So I'm sorry, like fascism and communism, we've been there and done that, don't work. Kinda funny how the Libertarians refuse to claim what was a half a century of EXACTLY what they have been asking for, because it highlights the flaw in their logic which is thus: For libertarianism, or any other ism for that matter, to work you need to have players who are NOT douchebags, yet if there is one thing that history has taught us its that those at the top often have dreams of being Nero and are very much douchebags, so it always ends in disaster. Maybe if you could build a system controlled by an AI that didn't have an ego to inflate? Maybe. But as long as meatbags are in charge its gonna suck because everyone dreams of being their own "King God of the Mountain" and ruling over the peasants with an iron fist.
Hell give me half a trillion and I'll buy a chunk of South America and make Chavez look like a choirboy, I wouldn't be able to help it, power corrupts. To paraphrase a line from LOTR "I would take this power from a desire to do good, but through me it would do great evil" because that is just how power works, it appeals to our belief that we know better than everybody else and it blinds us to "the little things" that end up causing great suffering. Capitalism is NO DIFFERENT, those that end up with great wealth decide they have this because it "proves" they are better and thus should rule, it blinds them and corrupts them and it ends up causing suffering because they are too high in the tower to see what their edicts are doing to those on the ground. It has been this way since the olden days, it will be this way a thousand years from now, that's just how it works folks.
That's not gonna be the problem, the problem is FOSS and DRM are completely opposed to one another (which RMS made quite clear that was his intent) so that Google will end up having to lock down the OS to keep the DRM from being trivially cracked. After all if you have the source there is no reason why you couldn't compile a kernel that say put video and audio out into a file, so unless they have hardware DRM built into the unit I predict Google WILL lock it down.
I have a feeling Google already knew this day was coming which is why GPL V3 has been verbotten, if there was GPL V3 there wouldn't be the "TiVoization" trick that allows you to lock down the software with code signing thus making the source worthless.But we all should have known this day was coming, the masses want big studio content, music, movies, games, and that means DRM. Since Google has been using FOSS as their base and they are trying to sell to the masses this day had to come, it was either that or tell the masses no big content which would be the kiss of death for ChromeOS.
Well I DO block ads from /. and I'll tell you why...the last 2 times i unblocked them, guess what the FIRST thing the site loaded was? Adobe Flash. I'm sorry but Adobe Flash is for content ONLY and even then it has to be first party and I have to trust you. While I think Adobe Flash is better than HTML V5 in just about every way lets be honest, the track record for Flash when it comes to security ain't great and I sure as hell ain't gonna trust ANY site to show me ads using Flash Player. I've seen too many infections caused by Flash ads for me to allow it on my system.
Now when I was using a Mozilla based browser I would just allow the image and text based ads to go while blocking any third party or flash ads but since I am no longer on a Moz based all I have is adblock and it just isn't that finely grained. If /. stops using flash for ads? Would have NO problem with unblocking but until then its just too much of a security risk.
I haul everything from band gear to furniture in mine, the cost of having to rent a truck every time I need to haul something would eat up any savings I would see from having a car with better gas mileage. Maybe where you are at you have an easy way to haul loads but around here you either need a truck or know somebody with a truck or you'd be screwed.
And allow me to say as an American? I don't see how in the hell y'all fit in them little cracker jack cars. I swear I'd have to cut the roof off the damned thing to get in it, too damned tall and lanky for them little go carts you folks drive. Of course at nearly $4 a gallon the gas ain't cheap in a Ranger but when you are mostly doing short hops it ain't bad, about $15 for a round trip to the state capital.
I take it you have never been to AR, or as we call it "The pothole state". Putting better shocks is pretty much SOP around here if you don't want to bounce around like a kangaroo on crack, although I went for the harder shocks as I never cared for the whole "floating" thing, makes the ride a little too loose for my tastes.
And I agree its a damned shame which is why I'll be driving that 99 Ranger until the wheels fall off it. To me the Ranger/S10/King Cab size trucks were just perfect, not so big or as gas sucking but not so small you couldn't carry a decent load. My oldest boy feels the same and was constantly bugging me and my dad to borrow our trucks, boy you should have seen the look on his face when dad drove up in a Midnight Blue S10 and said "Here ya go boy, now quit asking to borrow my truck LOL!"
But you really can't beat a small size pickup, easy to park and get into tight spaces, will haul just about anything your family could ever need to haul, and they were just well built trucks. The one I had before the Ranger was a 92 King Cab and I ended up with nearly 400k of hard miles on it before she finally threw a rod, my neighbor saw me in the Ranger and said "Is that King Cab still around? wanna sell it?" and damned if he didn't just drop the engine out a crunched Sentra in her and handed it to his boy who is driving the far out of it.
And you and my dad would probably get along really well, for while he keeps a Ranger at the shop for the employees to use he has been driving nothing but F series for 20 years now. Like he says "You just can't go wrong with a Ford F series when you need a good work truck" and considering how much electrical gear he hauls I'd say he knows what he is talking about. The only thing either of us have had to replace in our Fords is the ball joints which when you are talking potholes you can bury a goat in? One set of ball joints every 150k miles really ain't bad at all. Shame it doesn't get better gas mileage but there is no way I'm giving up my Ranger.
1 inch? Dude are you high? You ever rode in a Ranger? Its high enough that a 6 foot guy like me can just slide into the bucket, no climbing up or down required. When you have elderly relatives you'll be damned glad you got that extra height too, hell of a lot easier to get an elderly person out of a vehicle that is at standing height than to try to pull them out of a ground dragger.
Which is why it never should have been allowed, its gonna create nothing but a headache for everybody else, be a squatters paradise, the ONLY ones that end up ahead are ICANN who can pull this trick any time they want more $$$.
Meh, don't care if its a Honda or VW myself as I'll never give up my Ford Ranger. Its a gas pig but built like a tank and on the Ranger forums I've been told the Vulcan V6 can easily rack up 300k-400k before needing a rebuild and then you can get another 300k easily. Every time I ask questions and list the specs of the Ranger I always get "Hey...you wanna sell it?" because those Vulcans are supposed to be real sweethearts, easy to work on, dependable as hell, just rock solid and I got one in a practically mint 99 Ranger with less than 120k on it.
But this is why I always put down "people's car/truck" because there are many of us that need/want a truck and won't switch to a car no matter how good the mileage. No way in hell I could go back to riding so damned low to the ground, every time I ride in a car it feels like I'm in a damned go-cart after 24 years of driving trucks, just no way I could go back to driving cars. If all I cared about is mileage my mom has a nice Taurus she never drives that gets nearly 30MPG but it feels like I'm 2 inches above the pavement, no thanks.
Uhhh...you expect grammar nazis to care about logic? Really? You must be new here.
As for TFA frankly ALL hybrids might as well be toys for the rich because if you remove all the government subsidies? The math just doesn't work. The problem is we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in years and the lithium batteries just don't make economic sense. From the tests I've seen depending on where you live and whether you own a climate controlled garage (because of differences in temps affecting battery life) you are looking at 5-7 years on the battery. Now from what I read the batteries in something like the Leaf or Prius cost around $20,000 to replace yet thanks to government subsidies these cars only cost $24k-$39k depending on feature set so already you have a car that is gonna be practically worthless on the used car market (because the battery costs more than the used car is worth) and any economist will tell you its the used car market that seriously hurts our fossil fuel numbers, currently the USA averages 14MPG and that is because of all the poor folks in used cars on the road.
So while we need to invest in R&D of new battery tech frankly at this point in time hybrids and electrics are just money sinks, all that money sank into subsidizing hybrids is just money pissed down a rathole. If you truly wanted to put the USA on a path of energy independence what you would be better off doing is putting that money into a "people's car/truck" that ran on diesel (so you could later on switch to bio-diesel if the tech becomes viable) with a minimum of 38 MPG for the truck and 45 MPG and a price target of under $30k, THEN you could do a "cash for clunkers" and other subsidies to get the poor out of the older gas guzzlers. If you were to do this with the current national MPG being 14 you could cut our fuel usage by half (figuring in that some will not switch) while having something that would actually make economic sense. With economies of scale you could probably make the vehicles profitable and as the years went by and more and more of the used market was filled by these higher gas mileage vehicles the savings would continue to rise.
But hybrids are just a symptom of a larger disease, the fact that subsidies end up becoming entrenched and continue long after it has been shown not to be economically viable. Just look at ethanol, it causes higher food prices, damages engines, yet we continue to shell out all this money on a tech that has proven to be a dead end because so many in the agra business lobby to keep it. What we need is to spend our money wisely on tech that works economically and hybrids just aren't there yet.
Thanks and this subject REALLY pisses me off with regard to the attitude of the web masters. I mean I'm not asking for much here, just that you don't put my system at risk by using third party ad companies and don't blow my speakers...yet they act like this is a big hardship. Most of the adblocks are VERY easy on first party content and if you just say "We are hosting our own ads with no flash and java, would you please unblock us?" I've found a lot of folks will do just that...but if you then break that trust by going to doubleclick or some other web tracking malware provider? Well fuck you you'll never get unblocked again.
Frankly I think we geeks need to get together and set a standard for ads, after all we are being most reasonable and WE are the ones that end up cleaning up the messes when a zero day splatters across the networks. First party, no flash or java, no speaker blasting...this sounds like a fair and reasonable compromise to me and would make it so they could show ads without the users playing Russian Roulette with their security. That sounds fair doesn't it?
I just wanted to say thanks for the link and it proves what I've thought for quite awhile, that web ads are riskier than the porn topsites were back in the day. I see more infected systems from ads than by any other method which is why my SOP is to give them adblock.
If you ran a bar and 5 out of every 10 cars that parked in your lot were broken into, how long do you think you'd stay in business? That is the current state of web advertising in a nutshell only instead of doing something about the break ins they have the brass balls to blame US for not wanting to risk our cars being broken into...fuck you, if the only way you can stay in business is to make it easier for crooks to break into my system then go OOB.
Oh bullshit, that is just being a lazy asshole. Its called common damned sense which needs ZERO info to target ads. If I am on Ars reading a review of the latest AMD GPUs should you show me ads for baby strollers? NO you should show me ads for GPUs! How fucking hard is that? This is the era of niches, every page being focused on a topic, yet you are honestly telling me you are too damned clueless to figure out what to show me without following me around like some peeping tom? What the fuck?
Its laziness, that is ALL it is, not even bothering to spend a whole 5 minutes to find out what a website is about or what the target audience is. Fuck most websites wouldn't even take 5 minutes, look at Slashdot, there are several sections and each are pretty damned obvious as to which ads you should target to which section. YRO? Privacy related hardware and software. Cloud? SaaS and cloud management solutions. Fuck this ain't brain surgery, its pretty damned obvious and I don't need to know jack shit about you to target those ads, just by seeing what pages you are currently looking at one can get a good idea of what they like. Its no different than Amazon with their "You are looking at this? Well many people that look at this also buy that, would you like to buy that too?" recommendations in that you don't need to know jack shit about the customer, just by monitoring your end you can learn enough to target effectively as long as you bother to do the work.
Then you use a different business model. With my last band people said "You'll never make enough off of just CDs to do more than break even" and they were right, yet we were clearing a couple grand a night...how? Simple, if one business model doesn't work you find another, in our case I got a local graphics artist to design us a cool logo which we put on shirts to supplement the CD sales. Also to get people to buy more stuff we'd have little contests and every sale gave you another shot at the prize. While others were lucky to sell 30 CDs a night we'd end up selling 200 plus a ton of shirts.
If your current business model doesn't work you change the model, simple as that. The world doesn't owe you jack shit, and the ad companies have sealed their fate by not giving a shit if they served malware thus making adblocking the single biggest security measure you can perform, so either adapt and come up with new models or die. After cleaning so damned many systems that have gotten infections from ads I really find it hard to have any sympathy for companies that make their living off of risking their users.
Hear Hear and I would only ad that the current ad system has become such a haven for malware it makes the old porn topsite pages look clean by comparison. When you can cut a person's risk of getting malware by more than half by simply blocking ads honestly you'd be a fool NOT to block ads.
Now I have argued for years that we need to replace JavaScript and the current "Hey we'll crap the content all over the place and use third party dynamic content to "build" the page" for something designed from the ground up with security in mind, JavaScript was designed in a less hostile world than we have now and every thing we've tried from sandboxes to scan before load AV plugins have been bandaids on the bullet wound that is the current "Web 3.0" design model. But even if you don't agree with me surely everyone can see how big a problem the current system is when you look at how the vast majority of viruses the average user gets will be from infected ads.
Are these websites gonna pay to have any viruses they deliver removed? Then why in the fuck should I care that you go under if you have built your entire business model around forcing me to play roulette with the security of my system? I have found the single biggest security measure you can perform on a user's system is to block ads, yet you tell me I have to put all my customers at risk because you can't find a way to make money any other way? Fuck you lazy web devs, either stand by your product and make damned sure not a single ad you serve is a source of malware or find another business model because as long as ads are the #1 attack vector every customer WILL be getting adblock from me PERIOD.
No I think they should stand by their product as I do. Think if I handed out a virus to my customers I wouldn't have to clean up the mess? Then why in the fuck should THEY get a free pass for doing the same? They have no fucking clue as to whether the ads they are serving is malicious or not and frankly I have yet to see a single indicator that they give a rat's ass one way or the other as long as the checks roll in.
If your business model is flawed that is YOUR problem, not mine. There is a REASON why adblock suddenly exploded, its because people got tired of having to shell out nearly a c-note to guys like me because sites like Destructoid gave them a zero day and got tired of having their senses assaulted by blaring ads. Why do you think nobody cared about blocking ads for the longest time? Because at the worst they were little GIFs and hyperlinks. Now if you block ads you can watch the risk of infection drop right off the chart, before adblock I'd see some customers 3 or 4 times a year, after? Now I only see them when they need hardware upgrades.
Like it or not the current ad system is BROKEN, its broken because there is ZERO responsibility when it comes to passing out infections with the ads (look up the figures on where people get viruses from, you'll see more than half comes from infected ads so blocking ads just cut your risk in half) and its broken because they show ZERO respect for their customers by letting blaring ads take over the page, fucking up the flow and making web surfing frankly unpleasant.
So either take responsibility, make sure all ads are checked BEFORE they go lie for the presence of malware, stop allowing blaring ads, and stop fucking up page layouts to try to milk us for ad money. If you don't like it? Then your ass better be coming up with a new model, something to replace the current broken mess with something more secure and user friendly because its my job to protect my customers and that means blocking your malware ridden ads.
You don't have to pay more, just buy AMD products. AMD has opened up their GPUs, supports coreboot and intends to use coreboot exclusively on future boards, last I checked they were even paying some devs to work on the FOSS drivers to their APUs and GPUs to help get them up to speed so that free drivers would be ready at release for their products. Hell as an added bonus not only does it not cost you more money but you can save quite a pretty penny as AMD chips have never been cheaper (especially the Thuban X6s, the bang for the buck on these $100 chips is just insane) and you can build the entire system for less than the cost of the CPU and board from the other guy.
So if you support open hardware that you control? Buy AMD and put your money where your mouth is. I put my money where my mouth is, not only has my shop been AMD exclusive for several years now but myself and my entire family is on AMD, 5 desktops and 1 each of laptops and netbooks. Performance is great, even after 3 years I still get over 4 hours on my E350 netbook and my Thuban just tears through games and video transcoding with cycles to spare.
Seeing as how you can get a full triple kit for $250 or a full 6 core kit for $300 you can eat your cake and have it too, have open hardware without putting the hurt on your wallet.