If a program tells me to disable an anti virus scanner, I don't install it. Why? Because I don't trust it to not infect me with malware. I might whitelist a program that I absolutely trust because it happens to trip up on more modern scanners due to how the program works.

Ad's are a virus conduit that leads to malware infections. So.

If a website tells me to disable an Ad blocker, I don't use it. Why? Because I don't trust it to not infect me with malware. I might whitelist a site that I absolutely trust because it happens to trip up on more modern Ad Blockers due to how the site works.

I'm just sitting back and waiting for Google to ban ad blockers in Chrome claiming a TOS violation, Because that's the day that Chrome dies and another browser's market share soars until that browser makes the same mistake.

Seriously, How many children under 16 are buying smartphones using their own money? Most likely their parents are buying smartphones for them and letting their kids use them on their phone plan.

Unless they're going to make giving a cellphone to kids akin to giving them cigarettes and alcohol, I don't see how this ban will do anything.

Nobody gets mugged at gunpoint in their home, and nobody is going to willingly go to an area where they think they're going to get mugged at gunpoint or have their car smash and grabbed, so they stay home and feed Amazon.

The malls that I see that are thriving are swarming with security visible both inside and out. Crime is at a absolute minimum and retailers are packed. The dying malls around here have to cut costs, and one of the first things they lax on second only to building maintenance is security. Crime goes up, Patrons go elsewhere to feel safer, and mall dies.

The same thing happened to downtown storefronts in the 60s. Cities took cops off the walking beat to save cost, Crime goes up, Patrons go to malls to feel safer, and downtown dies.

This belief that rising crime both inside and outside of a store isn't a major driving factor to retail sales is dead wrong. It's probably the #1 driving factor to declining sales with "Fear of catching a virus from the crowd" being #2

Even in the computer world, DisplayPort availability is nuanced.

I constantly see computers with DisplayPort only on them and all of the low cost monitors have HDMI only. To get a DisplayPort on a monitor, You have to tack on another $25-50 on a monitor's cost with most of those cheaper on that scale being "Gaming" monitors that have obnoxious LED Lighting that's unacceptable in a business environment. This adds up if you're buying 100+ monitors for a company. You would think it would be the other way around since HDMI has royalties, but apparently monitor manufactures want to light money on fire for some reason.

I can't tell you how many DisplayPort to DVI Adapters we had to buy for this reason alone because the adapters are cheaper than buying a dedicated monitor.

If anything, the CCS chargers were the main reason why EV charging has such a bad rap in the first place. NACS in the US is a far superior standard to CCS both in reliability and network size.

Here's a video of a guy taking two identical road trips in the US, one using CCS and one using Tesla. Long story short most of the CCS chargers failed while most of the Tesla chargers charged at full speed.
https://youtu.be/92w5doU68D8

The main problem was that Tesla was hording the standard as a way to only sell their cars. In fact I thought there was no way the NACS connector was going to get adopted because they waited so long to open the standard to other manufactures and CCS was so ubiquitous in the industry at this point. I was wrong there.

The other problem is the CCS chargers are not maintained well. This is in part to the auto manufactures relying on third party chargers as well as a lack of investment in improving the CCS charging system for better reliability. Tesla has a vested interest to make sure their chargers work, and for the most part their design seems to be much more robust vs their competitors.

I know it's a different company that was claiming to eventually charge EV's and the like, but the same tech nonetheless.
At least this company is being a little more realistic with their claims, but it sounds like their big breakthrough is to make the current tech either cheaper or in more volume then their competitors.

EEVblog #1333 - Nuclear Diamond Self-Charging Battery DEBUNKED!
https://youtu.be/uzV_uzSTCTM?s...

EEVblog 1579 - Nuclear Diamond Battery FRAUD Lawsuit by SEC!
https://youtu.be/5M5MF6KE-jY?s...

Outside of China for some reason, Buick's haven't sold in volume in over a decade. The mid luxury brands died back in late 2000s when Ford and Chrysler killed Mercury and Plymouth respectively, and while GM killed Olds as a sporty mid luxury brand, they should've also killed Buick as well.

When you Ad campaign's primary slogan is "Is that a Buick?" you know the brand dead.

Exactly. The minute these cable companies started letting networks bully them for retransmission fees was the day Pay TV died.

Why should I pay $100 a month for the privilege of watching a 10 year old movie in 5 minute slices between 15 minutes of Camp LeJeune / Mesothelioma, Medicare, ASPCA and St. Jude commercials. The Jerry Lewis, Easter Seals and even PBS Telethons had more entertainment programming then some of these cable networks anymore.

There was a Device called the "Tornado Alert System" that was sold in the 90s that would supposedly detect tornadoes via infrasound. Can't find anything online about it or even if it worked but here's one on eBay.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/27561...

It even had a patent.
https://patents.google.com/pat...

Yes. Let's make the rationale for porch piracy justifiable because the insurance will pay for the replacement, so not only do the pirates get the goods, but you do as well when the insurance replaces the item.

And it only costs you 2% as well! For twice the happiness!! Both you and the pirate are happy!!!

And if you're in cahoots with the pirate, it's like a permanent half off sale for less than Amazon Prime! You buy it, the pirate steals it, you get another one and they both go on eBay for less than retail! Then use the profits to do it again and again using hundreds of different porch mules! The possibilities are endless!!

Apparently, the new Firefox developers were never told This bedtime story when they were kids.

As for Chrome. The second that Chrome blocks ad blockers is the day Chrome Dies. Once you go ad free you will never go back. Unfortunately I think more people will go to more questionable browsers than migrate back to Firefox.

Full disclosure: I Worked in IT for higher ED for 11 years and K12 for 1 year.

Over the course of 11 years, the quality of the students in the higher ED college became worse and worse. but my 1 year stint in K12 however gave me the insight as to why the higher ED students were coming in so badly prepared for college that most of them basically talked like the kid from Porkchop Sandwiches

K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react

Problem solving and critical thinking skills is absolutely discouraged and replaced with instant gratification and fast fact finding. Take Math for example. Instead of teaching a kid how to add 2+2, we show them a table that already has it figured out, or hand them a calculator. Word problems that attempt to make math more usable in the real world are basically nonexistent and replaced with papers with just simple math problems for easy calculator entry and cartoon characters saying "GOOD JOB!" written no less than three times on the paper. Most kids have a iPad shoved in their face most of the day to solve a math problem with a cartoon penguin that jumps an iceberg in a cutesy attempt to recreate Brain Age, except that all the kid does is see the simple math problems that they've seen hundreds of times and reacts to the problem like people react to Bejeweled.

Science is even worse. Everything that's in the book or the internet is fact. The scientific method is either not taught or barely taught. For example, when I was in school our Science teachers taught us the process on how we got to the current theory of the origin of life, from Theology, to spontaneous generation all the way to the current theory. Today, they just teach the Origin of life theory with either barely or no explanation on how we got there.

Also STEM was a big component of K12 education, which is fine, but again, is taught with reaction rather than thinking. Back in school we had LOGO and the Turtle, they gave you basic commands and you had to figure out how to get the turtle to walk. Today, they give kids Python and a book with all the programs written for them in it, so basically you're teaching a kid to transcribe rather than code and then teaching the kids that if you change this number this happens. The kids have no idea why it happens or what they typed. They just know the words in the book make things work so GOOD JOB!

The best way I can describe the difference between two decades ago and today is this video. This was a short on Sesame Street for years that illustrates how to use critical thinking to solve a simple problem but was pulled due to the chance that a kid could trip and fall doing it. Instead of replacing the video with something similar but safer to teach critical thinking skills what did they replace the video with? More Elmo's World.

In this day and age, I would argue that having a competent ad blocker is just as important, if not more important, than having a virus scanner.

99% of infections come from Website ad's. Period. End of story. We blocked ads at our companies' firewall and malware alerts from our antivirus system went from 5-10 a day to literally 1 every 3-6 months, and all of them being secure e-mail bombs that happened to escape our mail and URL filters. I get a call once a month for a "Call Microsoft" Scam vs 1 at least daily before the block.

Oh, but Web browsers block malicious ad's. Yes they do. And they are absolute trash as it. By the time they block a malicious URL, Half the world and dog has already been infected and every competent Adblocker was already blocking it in the first place. Every single one of the calls I have got from a "Call Microsoft" Scam has either come from the Microsoft Start Page in Edge, The Recommended By Pocket in Firefox, the or the Front page of Google Search. If they can't even keep their home pages clean, then why the hell would you trust them to keep your PC clean?

Also, you would think that the companies that serve ads would screen them, They Don't. Period. If they do anything it's a quick skim, the URL pops up a GIF or JPG and it's off to a million+ hit site to become a bomb within 20 minutes.

The absolute, dumbest, most "Pants on head Retarded" thing that ever happened to web ad's was allowing any form of active content. If in the off chance I ever went nuts and started to run an ad company, and was accepting ad's from a third party, I would only accept two things.

1) the GIF, JPG or WEBM of your ad, which would be screened for malicious things like timed frames or code injections and possibly re-encoded on the fly through a screener for maximum protection.
2) The URL that the ad goes to when you click on it (which would be only to a direct site such as whatevermysitenameis.com, not whatevermysitenameis.com/obfuscator/reallylongrandomcharacterssoyourscreenermissesthe/infectomaticscript?uniqueinfectionvectorID or absoluterandomcharacters.stupidTLD)

I would absolutely, never ever, EVER let anyone other then my company serve the ads to save on bandwidth or other stupid things. I'd save bandwidth by the re-encoding process and try to win on customer trust rather than profit maximization. This is exactly what Google did when they started their Adwords campaign back in the day when the world was full of noisy flash ads, popups and monkeys trying to get people to punch them for $20. No Pictures, Ad's were off to the side and easily identifiable and prices were equable to the point that everyone went with them. Now a Days, they might as well rename adwords to TreeLoot.

Ad's lost my trust when they started becoming less about adverting something and more about being an infection vector. There is no turning back. I will not risk my security (or my coworkers) because you need to make a buck or two, and if anyone in our company gets an infection from any site because YouTube coerced them into removing or disabling their adblocker you can be damn sure that there will be a lawsuit against Google for the malware cleanup cost afterwards.

I'm sure Caltech will enjoy their brand new state of the art Steve Jobs Management Empowerment and Technology Research Center.