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Comment Re:I work in the advertising industry (Score 1) 283

1 It's just making it convenient to do what users can already do with their DVRs anyways.

If you don't want advertising, go buy the DVD boxes which don't have them.

2. It isn't always the case that there aren't ads in the DVDs. Some are quite annoying playing before the menus and after each episode ends.

Comment Re:IP Insanity (Score 5, Insightful) 284

The problem is the reason for the bandwidth caps to begin with was that the last mile was the weak link (cable being shared, your heavy usage affected your neighbors, thus the cap to get you to limit yourself). Now they want to put data from their service over that same link, causing the same congestion problems but not counting it towards the cap. This limits the spread of competing services that might use enough bandwidth to hit the cap.

Either congestion on the last mile is a problem requiring caps or it isn't. It shouldn't matter what's in the data packets or where they're from.

Comment Re:ddg uses bing? (Score 1) 315

Sources

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko.

Added bold for emphasis. Granted they seem to do a lot more than just Bing so the summary is somewhat misleading (a misleading slashdot summary, how shocking).

Comment Re:Doublespeak (Score 1) 247

As a user of Adblock Plus for Firefox who also blocks ads in other browsers I use by using blocklists, I welcome this as an option.

The only real reason I installed it in the first place was because ads started using animated images/flash and slowed down page loads and my machine (a low-power nettop). Firefox already seemed slow (UI) compared to other browsers at the time and having the ads slow down the machine more than the actual content became much too annoying when I could simply block them all. I tried for a time to only block a limited number of ads/types that annoyed me but I realized that it had become a lot of effort for the benefit of the people annoying me when I could just download an addon and a blocklist and be done with it.

In the end, I hope the allowing of "acceptable" ads helps return the web to not being so annoying without addons by forcing advertisers to make their ads less annoying if they want to be seen.

Comment Re:Seriously?! (Score 2) 574

From what I can tell:

Tabs on bottom:

  • shorter distance to go to get to tabs when moving mouse from page content
  • the way it used to be

Tabs on top:

  • Page specific things such as address bar are visually under the tab, making it seem more connected to the page content, since the address bar and buttons do tab specific things
  • Not needed things like the address bar can be hidden without moving the tab bar placement such as when using things like the add-ons manager in firefox.
  • It's the way most browsers do it now.

Comment Re:Got to respect them for not pandering (Score 1) 574

The tabs Go UNDER the address, period. Stop. Done.

http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-tabs-above-below/

Chrome, Opera and Firefox seem to disagree. Mozilla even has a nice little list with the reasoning for it:

  1. The conceptual model: the address bar and controls apply to the current tab.
  2. App tabs: like Chrome, Firefox 4.0 will allow you pin small regularly-used tabs to the tab bar. The address bar and other controls will be removed for these web applications.
  3. Tab-based UI: Firefox 4.0 will show windows such as downloads and the bookmarks organizer in tabs. It makes no sense to have the address bar and other controls visible.
  4. Notifications: some error and warning messages now appear below the address bar.

The part in bold is what I think really decides it. Putting everything related to that specific tab (the url, notification dialogues, etc) under it makes more sense, especially with the themes most browsers have now that have inactive tabs in the back with the current tab's edges extending down to connect with the rest of the page specific things.

Comment Re:Abolish time zones (Score 1) 238

You don't have to be that old. Phantasy Star Online used it. I kinda wish something like that had taken off, as time zones are quite annoying, especially when they keep changing them and you have to make sure every program is working with the new info. Beat might have had a better chance if it was based on UTC instead of some weird offset.

Or you know, we could just use UTC everywhere, solving the problem without having to get used to new units like a beat.

Comment Re:Oh yeah? (Score 1) 238

So while the sweat of the brow in compiling a telephone directory does not confer blanket copyright protection, the research involved in finding the true facts of time data, identifying the incorrect items, and presenting the rules could be an entirely different matter.

As far as I can tell from a layman's perspective, the only thing copyrightable in that should be the presentation. It's the only thing I can think of that gets creative at all. Determining if facts are true seems like "sweat of the brow". The TZ data likely has a completely different presentation thus it shouldn't infringe.

Comment Re:Terrible reason for veto; Let courts do their j (Score 3, Insightful) 462

The SCOTUS didn't strike down a similar bill, they just didn't disagree with the California Supreme Court in their assessment that lets police search cell phones of people they arrest. It's entirely in the legislature's rights to then say, 'oh that's not how it should be' and pass more protections against searches. I don't really see anything unconstitutional about law makers passing restrictions on what police, a part of the government, can do against citizens. If it was the other way around, for example allowing searches when there should be protections, then yes it should be struck down.

Comment Re:Better question... (Score 2) 25

When finally there will be a P2P network with encryption like DHT used by some ... P2P networks.

Do you mean a P2P network with encryption and DHT, because "encryption like DHT" doesn't exactly make sense to me (DHT is not encryption).

While it doesn't have DHT, a thing like RetroShare might be what you're looking for. Have a look at dark and friend-to-friend networks, too.

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