Google has the same search revenue agreement with Opera.
A relevant question is how much they pay Opera. Since Opera is so much smaller than Firefox, it seems reasonable that they are paid a much smaller amount of money than the 75 million that Mozilla gets. If (which I hope not) Firefox significantly dips in usage, Google could keep an agreement, but lower the amount paid proportionally.
Except that is the browser equivalent of shooting mosquitoes with a cannon. What if you want certain animations to run but not others? I wouldn't want to turn off Wikipedia's often excellent animations that visualize various processes, but I sure can't stand all these animated Flash ads that also chew up all your CPU power (or at least a significant part of it). The solution to that particular problem is spelled FlashBlock. You can whitelist sites that should be able to run Flash, such as YouTube, and require explicit approval for the rest. Of course that doesn't solve the "animated GIFs" problem, but in my experience, almost every animating ad is Flash-based these days.
You should learn to use NoScript. It's a white list script blocker. It only allows ads that you've approved.
No, it only allows scripts that you have approved. Many ads are supplied as inline images from a third-party content provider. NoScript does nothing about those. NoScript is excellent, I use it myself on every Firefox installation, but it doesn't do everything. So I always combine it with AdBlock Plus.
There are a few for FF that do it, but they all have problems with selecting text
You don't need an extension for that. Try enabling autoscrolling in the Firefox preferences, then press the middle mouse button (or wheel) on a page and drag the mouse.
Personally I find that because many ads are now flash based
I have also found that many flash ads are not blocked by AdBlock Plus. With a dozen tabs open, the CPU usage would hover at some 50% even when doing nothing, despite AdBlock Plus being enabled. Since I suspected Flash as the culprit, I finally got around to installing Flashblock, which reduced my idle CPU usage to near 0%.
There just aren't THAT many ads on websites to justify the irrational fear of not having Ad Block Plus that seems to abound in so many firefox users.
The number of ads are probably less relevant than the slowness of many advertising servers. At least that's why I started blocking ads a couple of years ago. On many pages, it took ages for the underpowered ad servers to respond, and until it did, the page wouldn't render. That problem went away completely with AdBlock Plus, and I haven't experienced it since. And those few times that I browse at some place without an ad blocker, I find that underpowered ad servers are still a major problem as it was back then, so blocking ads is obviously still a necessity.
And for those whining about lost revenues: If the advertising networks had done things right, I would never had had a reason to start blocking them. Now they are paying the price for their stupidity.
Slow 3rd-party advertisement and analytics servers still hold up the whole parade
That's exactly the reason why I first installed AdBlock. Since that time, AdBlock and later AdBlock Plus has always been the first extension I install on a new system.
I never understood how this could be possible. I mean, the software on the retail servers are unlikely to become pirated (unless they are broken into), so that means that the private servers must be developed by people outside Blizzard. But that sounds insanely complex. Not only do you need to reverse engineer all their protocols, but you need to (re)create the entire game world, along with the thousand and one other things to make it all work. So people have actually done this?
Not to mention other things, such as server infrastructure and development costs. How do they pay for it? Are players paying monthly fees? Or are the developers giving it all away for free? Donations could possibly be the answer, I mean, it is obviously possible to run a very-high-traffic site such as Wikipedia on donations, but the audience of Wikipedia is so much larger, so it might be somewhat easier to find donors (although it's probably not easy, as I've seen the long-running "please donate" banners from time to time).
I don't play WoW, and I never will, but this question is interesting anyway.
When in the EU something happens, all become aware of it only as a post factum, when it is too late to influence anything.
That was the case until the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Before, the Commission and the Council of Ministers could largely ignore the Parliament in many questions, but the Lisbon Treaty stipulates that the Parliament should have a say in pretty much all matters being decided on. So when the Commission and the Council of Ministers try to continue trampling on the Parliament, such as w.r.t. the ACTA, the Parliament is more than willing to exercise its newly acquired powers and make sure that they are not ignored, e.g. by blocking things as the ACTA, the SWIFT agreement, etc.
She sends it to her friend, Carrie, who sends it to her friend, Bill, who sends it to my friend, Alex. Now I can get it, and all the sharing has been perfectly legal.
No, that wouldn't be legal in Sweden, since each recipient must get their copy directly from someone who owns an original (i.e. one they bought in a store).
Frankly, if I had to pay an extra $1 on a spindle of CDs or an extra $10 on an iPod and in exchange get the right to download whatever the hell media I want, I (as an American) would gladly take that option.
In Sweden, we have a levy system, but non-commercial sharing is still illegal, except in a very narrow set of your closest friends and family, where enforcement would be very hard. So you cannot download from people you don't know, but you still pay a levy on blank CDs, DVDs, portable audio players, etc. In addition, you cannot legally get a copy from someone who doesn't have the original.
When this point is brought up, it is excused with the levy being compensation for the copying between family members and very close friends. If the levy meant that you could download all you wanted, I think far fewer people would have any problem with it (given that it isn't also raised significantly.
With weaker copyright the GPL would certainly be less beneficial because the GPL relies on strong copyright.
Why? I cannot see why the GPL would benefit more from the excessively strong copyright law of today compared to a sane copyright law with a term length of maybe 20 years, and no DMCA-style rules such as the notice and takedown system, anti-circumvention provisions, statutory damages of 150,000 USD per infringement, etc. Name one case where any open source developer has sent a DMCA takedown request to an infringer, or an open source developer suing a grandma for 150,000 USD because of license infringement.
it also affects open source coders who release their code under GPL. If there weren't copyrights, there couldn't be GPL either, nor Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivative Works and Share Alike licenses.
Yes, that is technically correct, but the non-confrontational attitude* of open source people hints that the increasingly aggressive copyright laws of today are not what they are asking for. I think that few open source developers/artists/etc would have any problems with reasonable term lengths (e.g. 10-20 years after creating a work) and lax enforcement w.r.t. non-commercial private use.
* = i.e. try to work out a solution first, only go to court if an offender fails to rectify problems after several attempts to raise awareness of a problem, and only ask the court to stop infringement - i.e. usually no damages are asked for.
But then I got tired and switched to OS X where I can use the computer the way it was meant to be used
But instead, you'll have Time Machine take all your resources at some random point during the day, which makes the computer pretty useless for the duration of the backup. Not to mention the frequent spinning wheels that occur when the badly broken virtual memory system in Mac OS X decides to start paging things in and out even though there is still lots of free RAM available.
The teacher's job is to teach, which requires the maintenance of order. If two kids are fighting, regardless of who started it, both are guilty of disrupting class.
During my school years, bullying almost never took place in the classroom. It was always at breaks, when teachers forced everyone to go out in the schoolyard, so that they could drink coffee in their offices in silence, convincing themselves that all the kids were happily playing together in the schoolyard.
The only bullying that took part on lessons were in athletics classes, not to mention the locker rooms, which I really hated. But there were also bullying allowed by the athletics teacher in class, especially when we were being split up in two teams, such as for playing soccer. The teacher would typically pick the top two "stars" in the class, which were assigned the task to take turns picking members of their team from those not yet selected. They picked team members in order of athletic abilities, from best to worst. The good ones were quickly selected, and then the mediocre ones, with those who sucked were left for last. Then they would usually try to avoid picking any of those (us) at all, creating an uneasy silence for a while, until finally the teacher would assign the rest at random to the teams. This used to take place under heavy moaning and complaining from the "stars" that they didn't want us to ruin their teams, and so on. And so I hated athletics and sports, especially team sports.
The teacher probably didn't see how things started, and the teacher knows that at least one kid is sure to be lying. The kid running away or getting beaten up could have started things by silently spitting on the other kid.
And that is exactly the meek response that allows bullying to continue unabated, and also sets society up for many more school shootings in the future, when bullying victims decide to take it no more, and take revenge on the bullies and all those who stood by the sidelines and watched in silence.
That won't happen if it would be like in my school when I was 13-15. There were two tracks for English and maths, called the common track and the enhanced track. Most of the pupils in the school went on the enhanced track, except nearly all bullies, who took the common track. Among most pupils, the common track was regarded for what it was, the retard class, specially made for those that were slow learners (despite the insidious name, which implied that it should be the track for the majority).
At least, no bully ever raised that subject, since it would fall right back onto themselves. But of course, they took pride in getting low results in most theoretical classes, and cared only about athletics and sports.
I was the one that was too stupid to read their expressions correctly.
Sounds like a case of the Stockholm syndrome.
Once I clued in, I... quickly made friends with many of them.
Making friends with your bullies? Do you often make friends with sworn enemies? People that threatened to kill you if they had had a gun? Why would you want that? Several of my former bullies are in jail, not exactly the types I would like to have as friends. But of course, to each his own.
The teachers and principal all said they were surprised I had lasted as long as I had before fighting back
Did they actually admit that they had known about the bullying for long but done nothing about it? If so, that would be a rare occurrence. At least I have never heard any school official admit any wrongdoing on their part, it's always the fault of others, primarily the victim.
No judge in my part of the world is going to convict a guy of socking some asshole who tried to push him down the stairs.
In Sweden, self-defense is permitted, but at least in cases that reach the media, the judges seem to not consider the heat of the moment and often choose to punish people that defended themselves for using just an inch more than the absolute minimum amount of force required.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has the same search revenue agreement with Opera.
A relevant question is how much they pay Opera. Since Opera is so much smaller than Firefox, it seems reasonable that they are paid a much smaller amount of money than the 75 million that Mozilla gets. If (which I hope not) Firefox significantly dips in usage, Google could keep an agreement, but lower the amount paid proportionally.
image.animation_mode=none
Except that is the browser equivalent of shooting mosquitoes with a cannon. What if you want certain animations to run but not others? I wouldn't want to turn off Wikipedia's often excellent animations that visualize various processes, but I sure can't stand all these animated Flash ads that also chew up all your CPU power (or at least a significant part of it). The solution to that particular problem is spelled FlashBlock. You can whitelist sites that should be able to run Flash, such as YouTube, and require explicit approval for the rest. Of course that doesn't solve the "animated GIFs" problem, but in my experience, almost every animating ad is Flash-based these days.
You should learn to use NoScript. It's a white list script blocker. It only allows ads that you've approved.
No, it only allows scripts that you have approved. Many ads are supplied as inline images from a third-party content provider. NoScript does nothing about those. NoScript is excellent, I use it myself on every Firefox installation, but it doesn't do everything. So I always combine it with AdBlock Plus.
There are a few for FF that do it, but they all have problems with selecting text
You don't need an extension for that. Try enabling autoscrolling in the Firefox preferences, then press the middle mouse button (or wheel) on a page and drag the mouse.
Personally I find that because many ads are now flash based
I have also found that many flash ads are not blocked by AdBlock Plus. With a dozen tabs open, the CPU usage would hover at some 50% even when doing nothing, despite AdBlock Plus being enabled. Since I suspected Flash as the culprit, I finally got around to installing Flashblock, which reduced my idle CPU usage to near 0%.
There just aren't THAT many ads on websites to justify the irrational fear of not having Ad Block Plus that seems to abound in so many firefox users.
The number of ads are probably less relevant than the slowness of many advertising servers. At least that's why I started blocking ads a couple of years ago. On many pages, it took ages for the underpowered ad servers to respond, and until it did, the page wouldn't render. That problem went away completely with AdBlock Plus, and I haven't experienced it since. And those few times that I browse at some place without an ad blocker, I find that underpowered ad servers are still a major problem as it was back then, so blocking ads is obviously still a necessity.
And for those whining about lost revenues: If the advertising networks had done things right, I would never had had a reason to start blocking them. Now they are paying the price for their stupidity.
Slow 3rd-party advertisement and analytics servers still hold up the whole parade
That's exactly the reason why I first installed AdBlock. Since that time, AdBlock and later AdBlock Plus has always been the first extension I install on a new system.
There is the argument that doing it once could be shrugged off as a stroke of luck, but doing it twice would prove that you could repeat the result.
retail server to a private one
I never understood how this could be possible. I mean, the software on the retail servers are unlikely to become pirated (unless they are broken into), so that means that the private servers must be developed by people outside Blizzard. But that sounds insanely complex. Not only do you need to reverse engineer all their protocols, but you need to (re)create the entire game world, along with the thousand and one other things to make it all work. So people have actually done this?
Not to mention other things, such as server infrastructure and development costs. How do they pay for it? Are players paying monthly fees? Or are the developers giving it all away for free? Donations could possibly be the answer, I mean, it is obviously possible to run a very-high-traffic site such as Wikipedia on donations, but the audience of Wikipedia is so much larger, so it might be somewhat easier to find donors (although it's probably not easy, as I've seen the long-running "please donate" banners from time to time).
I don't play WoW, and I never will, but this question is interesting anyway.
When in the EU something happens, all become aware of it only as a post factum, when it is too late to influence anything.
That was the case until the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Before, the Commission and the Council of Ministers could largely ignore the Parliament in many questions, but the Lisbon Treaty stipulates that the Parliament should have a say in pretty much all matters being decided on. So when the Commission and the Council of Ministers try to continue trampling on the Parliament, such as w.r.t. the ACTA, the Parliament is more than willing to exercise its newly acquired powers and make sure that they are not ignored, e.g. by blocking things as the ACTA, the SWIFT agreement, etc.
Sopssa is right. If you did that, you would fall foul of the "family member or close personal friend" clause.
She sends it to her friend, Carrie, who sends it to her friend, Bill, who sends it to my friend, Alex. Now I can get it, and all the sharing has been perfectly legal.
No, that wouldn't be legal in Sweden, since each recipient must get their copy directly from someone who owns an original (i.e. one they bought in a store).
Frankly, if I had to pay an extra $1 on a spindle of CDs or an extra $10 on an iPod and in exchange get the right to download whatever the hell media I want, I (as an American) would gladly take that option.
In Sweden, we have a levy system, but non-commercial sharing is still illegal, except in a very narrow set of your closest friends and family, where enforcement would be very hard. So you cannot download from people you don't know, but you still pay a levy on blank CDs, DVDs, portable audio players, etc. In addition, you cannot legally get a copy from someone who doesn't have the original.
When this point is brought up, it is excused with the levy being compensation for the copying between family members and very close friends. If the levy meant that you could download all you wanted, I think far fewer people would have any problem with it (given that it isn't also raised significantly.
With weaker copyright the GPL would certainly be less beneficial because the GPL relies on strong copyright.
Why? I cannot see why the GPL would benefit more from the excessively strong copyright law of today compared to a sane copyright law with a term length of maybe 20 years, and no DMCA-style rules such as the notice and takedown system, anti-circumvention provisions, statutory damages of 150,000 USD per infringement, etc. Name one case where any open source developer has sent a DMCA takedown request to an infringer, or an open source developer suing a grandma for 150,000 USD because of license infringement.
it also affects open source coders who release their code under GPL. If there weren't copyrights, there couldn't be GPL either, nor Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivative Works and Share Alike licenses.
Yes, that is technically correct, but the non-confrontational attitude* of open source people hints that the increasingly aggressive copyright laws of today are not what they are asking for. I think that few open source developers/artists/etc would have any problems with reasonable term lengths (e.g. 10-20 years after creating a work) and lax enforcement w.r.t. non-commercial private use.
* = i.e. try to work out a solution first, only go to court if an offender fails to rectify problems after several attempts to raise awareness of a problem, and only ask the court to stop infringement - i.e. usually no damages are asked for.
Of course Microsoft would pass such a cost on to their customers, but at least it would only affect Microsoft customers, not everyone.
M$ are the last people who should be calling for a tax
I suggest a special cleanup tax on Microsoft software.
But then I got tired and switched to OS X where I can use the computer the way it was meant to be used
But instead, you'll have Time Machine take all your resources at some random point during the day, which makes the computer pretty useless for the duration of the backup. Not to mention the frequent spinning wheels that occur when the badly broken virtual memory system in Mac OS X decides to start paging things in and out even though there is still lots of free RAM available.
The teacher's job is to teach, which requires the maintenance of order. If two kids are fighting, regardless of who started it, both are guilty of disrupting class.
During my school years, bullying almost never took place in the classroom. It was always at breaks, when teachers forced everyone to go out in the schoolyard, so that they could drink coffee in their offices in silence, convincing themselves that all the kids were happily playing together in the schoolyard.
The only bullying that took part on lessons were in athletics classes, not to mention the locker rooms, which I really hated. But there were also bullying allowed by the athletics teacher in class, especially when we were being split up in two teams, such as for playing soccer. The teacher would typically pick the top two "stars" in the class, which were assigned the task to take turns picking members of their team from those not yet selected. They picked team members in order of athletic abilities, from best to worst. The good ones were quickly selected, and then the mediocre ones, with those who sucked were left for last. Then they would usually try to avoid picking any of those (us) at all, creating an uneasy silence for a while, until finally the teacher would assign the rest at random to the teams. This used to take place under heavy moaning and complaining from the "stars" that they didn't want us to ruin their teams, and so on. And so I hated athletics and sports, especially team sports.
The teacher probably didn't see how things started, and the teacher knows that at least one kid is sure to be lying. The kid running away or getting beaten up could have started things by silently spitting on the other kid.
And that is exactly the meek response that allows bullying to continue unabated, and also sets society up for many more school shootings in the future, when bullying victims decide to take it no more, and take revenge on the bullies and all those who stood by the sidelines and watched in silence.
The bullies can call it: "Retard Class"
That won't happen if it would be like in my school when I was 13-15. There were two tracks for English and maths, called the common track and the enhanced track. Most of the pupils in the school went on the enhanced track, except nearly all bullies, who took the common track. Among most pupils, the common track was regarded for what it was, the retard class, specially made for those that were slow learners (despite the insidious name, which implied that it should be the track for the majority).
At least, no bully ever raised that subject, since it would fall right back onto themselves. But of course, they took pride in getting low results in most theoretical classes, and cared only about athletics and sports.
Poverty, physical or mental abuse at home, mental health issues, physical flaws or abnormal development
Sounds like several, if not most, of the bullies I was forced to know as a kid.
I was the one that was too stupid to read their expressions correctly.
Sounds like a case of the Stockholm syndrome.
Once I clued in, I ... quickly made friends with many of them.
Making friends with your bullies? Do you often make friends with sworn enemies? People that threatened to kill you if they had had a gun? Why would you want that? Several of my former bullies are in jail, not exactly the types I would like to have as friends. But of course, to each his own.
The teachers and principal all said they were surprised I had lasted as long as I had before fighting back
Did they actually admit that they had known about the bullying for long but done nothing about it? If so, that would be a rare occurrence. At least I have never heard any school official admit any wrongdoing on their part, it's always the fault of others, primarily the victim.
No judge in my part of the world is going to convict a guy of socking some asshole who tried to push him down the stairs.
In Sweden, self-defense is permitted, but at least in cases that reach the media, the judges seem to not consider the heat of the moment and often choose to punish people that defended themselves for using just an inch more than the absolute minimum amount of force required.