Hmm. I'd say, if you're going to buy a second camera, buy one that takes ~10 seconds to change tape in instead of one where you have to unscrew from the tripod just to eject the disk. Sell your old one on eBay if you want, then buy a THIRD that doesn't have this forehead-slappingly stupid design flaw, and slap yourself on the wrist soundly for ever buying the original camcorder in the first place.
If you are filming a 4-hour event with no obvious breaks, however, I'd have to say that a single-camera solution isn't the right one. You should at the very least set up multiple cameras on tripods for different angles, and if you are getting paid well for this hire some assistants to man the other cams.
As the grandparent said, there's always bathroom breaks in there. If there aren't, then either the guy asking you to record it should understand that there will be breaks in coverage, or be paying you enough to come up with a multi-angle/multi-camera shoot solution (where you can flip to a different camera while changing tapes, if necessary).
Scenario: You are putting out a new version of your all-but-monopoly OS.
You have a whole slew of performance improvements that can make applications run a lot faster by providing faster interrupt servicing, and other improvements that make applications more reliable by more exactly conforming to your published API.
You have an application which is competing in the marketplace on, among other things, performance and stability.
Now, how do you employ these improvements?
In Microsoft's case, I can tell you how they generally did: they cloned the original API call, fixed the clone, and let the Excel/Word folks know about the now-undocumented API.
How can I tell you that's what Microsoft did? I didn't interview Bill G. or Mitch K. I lived through it, and read about it again years later in court transcripts.
"DOS Isn't Done 'Till Lotus Won't Run", when I heard it in the late 80's/early 90's, was not talking about a specific release of DOS not getting out the door until Lotus broke on it, but rather the overall trend of DOS releases to improve Microsoft's application performance and stability and do nothing or even have a negative effect on competitors' (Lotus, WP, et al) performance and stability. The theory being, projecting the line out, eventually nothing but MS products would run on DOS.
Would MS put out a release which broke Lotus outright? Certainly not in the days where the phrase originated, when Lotus not running on a DOS meant that people bought a different DOS. But there's a wide spectrum between active breaking and subtle booby-trapping which Microsoft did tend to wander. Subtle booby-trapping, stagnating available services, while providing a competitor application which used undisclosed APIs for better performance and stability, one can imagine, would have an overall degrading effect on the competition's market share.
Well, I know what the Task's name is. The process, not so much. There are lots of processes in there, not many of which have decipherable names.
Windows knows which processes go with the task I'm trying to kill. It just doesn't want to tell that to ME. As a result, killing a task by killing all its child processes is not exactly feasible to the non-gurus out there. More importantly: why the hell would I want Windows to "ask the process nicely" to shut down when I tell it to end a task via ctrl-alt-del? If I wanted to ask the task to end nicely, I'd click the damned big black X in the corner of it's window, or hit Alt-F4, or choose File | Exit. If I'm at the stage of hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, I'm in no mood to be asking the stupid fsking program ANYTHING "nicely"!!!
In contrast, OS X tasks also spawn multiple processes. OS X knows that if I go to Force Quit, I mean to FORCE something to Quit, and I've already tried the normal route of closing the application. A second later, the task, including all it's processes, is gone!
Why can't things be simple in Windows? At the moment of deepest frustration, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom chooses to harass me with illogical and unintuitive crap.
So, anyone would be more than welcome to fill in how their OS of choice handles killing a process that's waiting for a system call to finish.
Hmm. Let's see. Maybe by NOT requiring a user-land app to spend 75-90% of its time in kernel space just to get performance that doesn't suck eggs?
On OSX, I force quit something, and it's gone in a half second. On Linux, I kill -9 something, it's gone in the next screen refresh. On Windows, I ctrl-alt-delete, end process, wait, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, wait, click "yes, really kill it", repeat, wait, wait as progress bar fills in, repeat, and it's gone. Or not. Yeah, obviously this is NOT Windows' fault!
Sorry, Word was a bad choice (although document name isn't always distinguishable in the first 10 letters either). This is application specific behavior, and certain apps DO put the full path in there (sorry, not on a Windows machine to find the ones that do).
Well, the browser seems to be smart enough for that. I don't get third-party cookies showing up (and I also don't see third-party images on iframe-based ads either).
Gee, sucks to be a money-losing company which pisses off their customers so much that they need to constantly bring in cold-called fresh marks to replace the ones leaving.
Maybe you should convince your superiors to take some money and invest in customer satisfaction and non-intrusive marketing instead of going straight to the bottom of the barrel.
Or, get a new job. If you don't like people looking down on you because you are a tele-marketer, then be something else.
Umm, the people of the state you are so pissed with DO get a very distinct benefits for their tax dollars:
1. No telemarketing calls from companies they ordered from last Christmas with no intention of ever using again, and no 18-months-to-harrass-me-into-accepting-your-credit -card-again loophole to deal with.
2. The extra costs to telemarketing firms like your own tend to cause said firms to avoid doing business in their state altogether. A win for all 80-year-old grandmothers who either don't know about the DNC lists or who foolishly bought something from someone giving them the "right" to scam them over the phone for the next 18 months.
As I see it, that's damned fine use of my tax dollars!
Exactly. If your open window is generating enough drag to affect gas consumption to anywhere near the degree your AC does, then keeping cool is your least concern.
More important: wind burn, surprisingly hard crickets hitting soft human flesh at 70 miles per hour, and your map flying out the window.
At 70mph, if I have the window open, it is only a crack open. Additional drag is only marginally higher than that at 45mph or 25mph.
What happens if the target window is completely obscured by the front window? If there is no overlapping edge for you to move towards and wait for focus to be given to the underlying windows?
Generally, I stagger my windows for just this reason, although it is annoying to have to do so.
(Then again, I have not used Mac OS X that much and maybe what they already have is better than what is being proposed here...
Well, as the other comments here will show, OS X has Expose, which in some ways skins the same cat. Expose has its problems, though, most specifically in dealing with lots of non-distinctive large windows.
Actually, I think the more intuitive solution (than fold/drop) in situations where Expose yields too much "clutter" would be to allow Command-` to work during drags, and to cause a Dock hover to bring the hovered-over app to the front. Then, the way to drop from one window in one app to some arbitrary hidden window in another app would be to drag whatever, hover over the proper app's dock icon, then hit Command-` until the correct window came up.
Note also that if you are dragging from one app to another, then, again, the "Current App" expose gets you there faster than "All Windows"... Hit F10 (by default), then hit until you've got the right app's windows exposed, then hover, F10, drop.
Works well, assuming you have a hand free to hit tab...
In MS Word, for example, note the difference between dropping a file into the document area of the window vs the title bar.
Wow. Talk about bad application UI design as a result of bad OS design.
Drop a document onto the title bar of another document's window, and it opens that document in a new window? Seems... stupid? I greatly prefer the "drop the document onto the application icon to open the document"paradigm built into OS X. Doesn't work as nicely on Windows as there is an "Application icon" for every window of that application (assuming the now more-common SDI style windows), which is probably why Word had to do such a funkugly thing.
In any case, I think it wouldn't be too hard to add a default-drop-target hook to Cocoa and MFC which tells Expose/Taskbar what the user means when they drop onto the Expose'd window / taskbar button. Generally speaking, there is almost always one intuitive, non-destructive answer to the question, "What might the user be thinking when they drop a file/text snippet/image/url on me?"
Okay, take your theoretical situation in Expose, because I come across it fairly often. You have ten windows open in XCode, all code windows so they all look essentially the same. You start dragging and hit Expose. Since they were all stacked almost directly on top of each other, they scatter in a somewhat random fashion (if they really ARE stacked atop each other, Expose places them side by side across the middle of the screen, making the thumbnails even MORE indistinguishable, but that's not what i'm talking about). Since they were almost each the entire size of the screen, they shrink to an indistinguishable blob of black and white. Which one did you want? Hover over first, wait for name to pop up. Not it. Hover over second, wait for name to pop up. Not it. Etc.
Expose is a great tool. I use it every day and miss it dearly when I have to use Windows. However, if I had a "thick" stack on my desktop, and not arbitrarily thick (meaning, not something like ten 100x200 pixel windows all stacked atop each other instead of already spread out over the desktop) then it would be significantly easier to fold back the "top" windows to reveal those underneath than to use Expose and pick amongst randomly-arranged, visually indistinguishable thumbnails.
In my experience, that plug in always dragged my computer (2.2 GHz P4) to its knees, so I turned it off. The problem being, of course, that for Alt-Tab to draw that reduced window thumbnail, it has to tell the app to redraw itself completely in a memory buffer, then resize that to the proper size, etc. With OS X's window manager, all that is done by the video card, and the app doesn't redraw anything since it's already double-buffered.
In any case, that gets a little closer to Expose functionality, except that a large window will get shown indecipherably tiny while a small window will get shown nice and big (no common scale), you get no spatial recognition as the thumbnail is always center-screen, and only one window is visible at once.
The contrast between this alt-tab approach and the article's approach is precisely the spatial recognition. While you "fold" front windows out of the way, you see what's directly behind them in the stack, as you would in a desk of overlapping papers. Spatial memory is incredibly important for usability.
Yes, ten Word icons followed by "C:\Docu..." is a REALLY great way to drag stuff from window to window within an application (or multiple apps)!
The problem with the Task Bar is that it relies upon the window title, which is overloaded with the application and document name typically, and provides no clue as to the actual content of that window. Expose provides a visual thumbnail approach for finding the "right" window, and allows for "tooltip"-like document names to pop up if you hover the mouse.
Yes, old idea. Even older than the Army's use (using an exothermic reaction to heat materials... isn't that one of mankind's first inventions? And didn't he just kinda steal that idea from Nature?)
However, never before has someone thought of using an exothermic reaction contained inside a coffee cup, for this very purpose. I mean, I thought of flicking a zippo lighter inside a cup of not-quite-hot-yet chocolate, but the flame just always seemed to go out. Mankind was dumbfounded. How to harness the power of fire in a small, nonreusable, container to heat a miniscule amount of liquid while simultaneously consuming a massive volume of shelf and landfill space? No one could figure out this riddle.
Well, apparently, at least not until 1997. Now, here, eight years later, we are able to enjoy the fruits of their genius!
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.
If I had a device which automatically sensed the start and end of commercials and skipped them as though they were never there... well, that wouldn't be "stealing", but it certainly would be violating a public trust.
On the other hand, having to mute / fast-forward / time a bathroom break during TV commercials at least gives them a fighting chance, and I don't think any rational individual would blame you for that.
Blocking ALL internet ads, I agree, is just stupid and selfish. I agree with the others: unobtrusive, text-only or at least static ads need to be encouraged and not thrown out with the bath water.
That having been said, I block the vast majority of them selectively (on IE too) by filtering out hostnames for DoubleClick et al with my hosts file. Not as configurable as AdBlocker, but effective.
Not slow. Just inaccurate aiming of the tachyon beam.
They aimed for the exact moment you clicked, but ended up being off by several seconds. Damned unionized workforce! Can't count on them to aim a tachyon beam right!
Just count yourself lucky they were off in the future direction instead of the past! I hate it when sites beamed from the future come up on my browser hours before I ask for them! Especially the tri-boob fetish ones that come up while I'm at work!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. I'd say, if you're going to buy a second camera, buy one that takes ~10 seconds to change tape in instead of one where you have to unscrew from the tripod just to eject the disk. Sell your old one on eBay if you want, then buy a THIRD that doesn't have this forehead-slappingly stupid design flaw, and slap yourself on the wrist soundly for ever buying the original camcorder in the first place.
If you are filming a 4-hour event with no obvious breaks, however, I'd have to say that a single-camera solution isn't the right one. You should at the very least set up multiple cameras on tripods for different angles, and if you are getting paid well for this hire some assistants to man the other cams.
As the grandparent said, there's always bathroom breaks in there. If there aren't, then either the guy asking you to record it should understand that there will be breaks in coverage, or be paying you enough to come up with a multi-angle/multi-camera shoot solution (where you can flip to a different camera while changing tapes, if necessary).
Scenario: You are putting out a new version of your all-but-monopoly OS.
You have a whole slew of performance improvements that can make applications run a lot faster by providing faster interrupt servicing, and other improvements that make applications more reliable by more exactly conforming to your published API.
You have an application which is competing in the marketplace on, among other things, performance and stability.
Now, how do you employ these improvements?
In Microsoft's case, I can tell you how they generally did: they cloned the original API call, fixed the clone, and let the Excel/Word folks know about the now-undocumented API.
How can I tell you that's what Microsoft did? I didn't interview Bill G. or Mitch K. I lived through it, and read about it again years later in court transcripts.
"DOS Isn't Done 'Till Lotus Won't Run", when I heard it in the late 80's/early 90's, was not talking about a specific release of DOS not getting out the door until Lotus broke on it, but rather the overall trend of DOS releases to improve Microsoft's application performance and stability and do nothing or even have a negative effect on competitors' (Lotus, WP, et al) performance and stability. The theory being, projecting the line out, eventually nothing but MS products would run on DOS.
Would MS put out a release which broke Lotus outright? Certainly not in the days where the phrase originated, when Lotus not running on a DOS meant that people bought a different DOS. But there's a wide spectrum between active breaking and subtle booby-trapping which Microsoft did tend to wander. Subtle booby-trapping, stagnating available services, while providing a competitor application which used undisclosed APIs for better performance and stability, one can imagine, would have an overall degrading effect on the competition's market share.
Well, I know what the Task's name is. The process, not so much. There are lots of processes in there, not many of which have decipherable names.
Windows knows which processes go with the task I'm trying to kill. It just doesn't want to tell that to ME. As a result, killing a task by killing all its child processes is not exactly feasible to the non-gurus out there. More importantly: why the hell would I want Windows to "ask the process nicely" to shut down when I tell it to end a task via ctrl-alt-del? If I wanted to ask the task to end nicely, I'd click the damned big black X in the corner of it's window, or hit Alt-F4, or choose File | Exit. If I'm at the stage of hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, I'm in no mood to be asking the stupid fsking program ANYTHING "nicely"!!!
In contrast, OS X tasks also spawn multiple processes. OS X knows that if I go to Force Quit, I mean to FORCE something to Quit, and I've already tried the normal route of closing the application. A second later, the task, including all it's processes, is gone!
Why can't things be simple in Windows? At the moment of deepest frustration, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom chooses to harass me with illogical and unintuitive crap.
So, anyone would be more than welcome to fill in how their OS of choice handles killing a process that's waiting for a system call to finish.
Hmm. Let's see. Maybe by NOT requiring a user-land app to spend 75-90% of its time in kernel space just to get performance that doesn't suck eggs?
On OSX, I force quit something, and it's gone in a half second. On Linux, I kill -9 something, it's gone in the next screen refresh. On Windows, I ctrl-alt-delete, end process, wait, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, wait, click "yes, really kill it", repeat, wait, wait as progress bar fills in, repeat, and it's gone. Or not. Yeah, obviously this is NOT Windows' fault!
You're right. The "wait" I experience is my brain reading the window title :) after I move the mouse over it.
Sorry, Word was a bad choice (although document name isn't always distinguishable in the first 10 letters either). This is application specific behavior, and certain apps DO put the full path in there (sorry, not on a Windows machine to find the ones that do).
Well, the browser seems to be smart enough for that. I don't get third-party cookies showing up (and I also don't see third-party images on iframe-based ads either).
Gee, sucks to be a money-losing company which pisses off their customers so much that they need to constantly bring in cold-called fresh marks to replace the ones leaving.
Maybe you should convince your superiors to take some money and invest in customer satisfaction and non-intrusive marketing instead of going straight to the bottom of the barrel.
Or, get a new job. If you don't like people looking down on you because you are a tele-marketer, then be something else.
Umm, the people of the state you are so pissed with DO get a very distinct benefits for their tax dollars:
t -card-again loophole to deal with.
1. No telemarketing calls from companies they ordered from last Christmas with no intention of ever using again, and no 18-months-to-harrass-me-into-accepting-your-credi
2. The extra costs to telemarketing firms like your own tend to cause said firms to avoid doing business in their state altogether. A win for all 80-year-old grandmothers who either don't know about the DNC lists or who foolishly bought something from someone giving them the "right" to scam them over the phone for the next 18 months.
As I see it, that's damned fine use of my tax dollars!
Exactly. If your open window is generating enough drag to affect gas consumption to anywhere near the degree your AC does, then keeping cool is your least concern.
More important: wind burn, surprisingly hard crickets hitting soft human flesh at 70 miles per hour, and your map flying out the window.
At 70mph, if I have the window open, it is only a crack open. Additional drag is only marginally higher than that at 45mph or 25mph.
What happens if the target window is completely obscured by the front window? If there is no overlapping edge for you to move towards and wait for focus to be given to the underlying windows?
Generally, I stagger my windows for just this reason, although it is annoying to have to do so.
(Then again, I have not used Mac OS X that much and maybe what they already have is better than what is being proposed here...
Well, as the other comments here will show, OS X has Expose, which in some ways skins the same cat. Expose has its problems, though, most specifically in dealing with lots of non-distinctive large windows.
Actually, I think the more intuitive solution (than fold/drop) in situations where Expose yields too much "clutter" would be to allow Command-` to work during drags, and to cause a Dock hover to bring the hovered-over app to the front. Then, the way to drop from one window in one app to some arbitrary hidden window in another app would be to drag whatever, hover over the proper app's dock icon, then hit Command-` until the correct window came up.
Note also that if you are dragging from one app to another, then, again, the "Current App" expose gets you there faster than "All Windows" ... Hit F10 (by default), then hit until you've got the right app's windows exposed, then hover, F10, drop.
...
Works well, assuming you have a hand free to hit tab
In MS Word, for example, note the difference between dropping a file into the document area of the window vs the title bar.
... stupid? I greatly prefer the "drop the document onto the application icon to open the document"paradigm built into OS X. Doesn't work as nicely on Windows as there is an "Application icon" for every window of that application (assuming the now more-common SDI style windows), which is probably why Word had to do such a funkugly thing.
Wow. Talk about bad application UI design as a result of bad OS design.
Drop a document onto the title bar of another document's window, and it opens that document in a new window? Seems
In any case, I think it wouldn't be too hard to add a default-drop-target hook to Cocoa and MFC which tells Expose/Taskbar what the user means when they drop onto the Expose'd window / taskbar button. Generally speaking, there is almost always one intuitive, non-destructive answer to the question, "What might the user be thinking when they drop a file/text snippet/image/url on me?"
Okay, take your theoretical situation in Expose, because I come across it fairly often. You have ten windows open in XCode, all code windows so they all look essentially the same. You start dragging and hit Expose. Since they were all stacked almost directly on top of each other, they scatter in a somewhat random fashion (if they really ARE stacked atop each other, Expose places them side by side across the middle of the screen, making the thumbnails even MORE indistinguishable, but that's not what i'm talking about). Since they were almost each the entire size of the screen, they shrink to an indistinguishable blob of black and white. Which one did you want? Hover over first, wait for name to pop up. Not it. Hover over second, wait for name to pop up. Not it. Etc.
Expose is a great tool. I use it every day and miss it dearly when I have to use Windows. However, if I had a "thick" stack on my desktop, and not arbitrarily thick (meaning, not something like ten 100x200 pixel windows all stacked atop each other instead of already spread out over the desktop) then it would be significantly easier to fold back the "top" windows to reveal those underneath than to use Expose and pick amongst randomly-arranged, visually indistinguishable thumbnails.
Huh? Not sure what you're talking about here. F11 reveals my desktop, completely up to date.
In my experience, that plug in always dragged my computer (2.2 GHz P4) to its knees, so I turned it off. The problem being, of course, that for Alt-Tab to draw that reduced window thumbnail, it has to tell the app to redraw itself completely in a memory buffer, then resize that to the proper size, etc. With OS X's window manager, all that is done by the video card, and the app doesn't redraw anything since it's already double-buffered.
In any case, that gets a little closer to Expose functionality, except that a large window will get shown indecipherably tiny while a small window will get shown nice and big (no common scale), you get no spatial recognition as the thumbnail is always center-screen, and only one window is visible at once.
The contrast between this alt-tab approach and the article's approach is precisely the spatial recognition. While you "fold" front windows out of the way, you see what's directly behind them in the stack, as you would in a desk of overlapping papers. Spatial memory is incredibly important for usability.
Yes, ten Word icons followed by "C:\Docu..." is a REALLY great way to drag stuff from window to window within an application (or multiple apps)!
The problem with the Task Bar is that it relies upon the window title, which is overloaded with the application and document name typically, and provides no clue as to the actual content of that window. Expose provides a visual thumbnail approach for finding the "right" window, and allows for "tooltip"-like document names to pop up if you hover the mouse.
Touch typists will still touch type. The keys won't be moving around in different positions or anything like that.
...
Although, that might be a neat trick. Make random keys exchange positions on the keyboard at random intervals
Yes, old idea. Even older than the Army's use (using an exothermic reaction to heat materials ... isn't that one of mankind's first inventions? And didn't he just kinda steal that idea from Nature?)
However, never before has someone thought of using an exothermic reaction contained inside a coffee cup, for this very purpose. I mean, I thought of flicking a zippo lighter inside a cup of not-quite-hot-yet chocolate, but the flame just always seemed to go out. Mankind was dumbfounded. How to harness the power of fire in a small, nonreusable, container to heat a miniscule amount of liquid while simultaneously consuming a massive volume of shelf and landfill space? No one could figure out this riddle.
Well, apparently, at least not until 1997. Now, here, eight years later, we are able to enjoy the fruits of their genius!
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.
Speculate: Will the Apple iPhone have more than one button?
If I had a device which automatically sensed the start and end of commercials and skipped them as though they were never there ... well, that wouldn't be "stealing", but it certainly would be violating a public trust.
On the other hand, having to mute / fast-forward / time a bathroom break during TV commercials at least gives them a fighting chance, and I don't think any rational individual would blame you for that.
Blocking ALL internet ads, I agree, is just stupid and selfish. I agree with the others: unobtrusive, text-only or at least static ads need to be encouraged and not thrown out with the bath water.
That having been said, I block the vast majority of them selectively (on IE too) by filtering out hostnames for DoubleClick et al with my hosts file. Not as configurable as AdBlocker, but effective.
Ummm ... basic commercial already in full rotation. Guy wakes up, reads paper, shaves, etc, to a bunch of popup ads, obtrusive salespeople, etc.
...
I think its either AOL or Earthlink
Exactly what my reply was going to be.
Nonetheless, in the "other" areas of the country, apparently the advertising worked.
Not slow. Just inaccurate aiming of the tachyon beam.
They aimed for the exact moment you clicked, but ended up being off by several seconds. Damned unionized workforce! Can't count on them to aim a tachyon beam right!
Just count yourself lucky they were off in the future direction instead of the past! I hate it when sites beamed from the future come up on my browser hours before I ask for them! Especially the tri-boob fetish ones that come up while I'm at work!