Let me stop you right there.

You keep repeating that quote over and over again as if it's something I said, yet never once did I say or argue that. Stop putting words in my mouth. If you'll cease treating me as an antagonist and will stop constructing straw men arguments for a moment, you'll find that we already agree on almost everything and have been from the start.

I agree. Your list is valid. I never argued otherwise. That's also why I never directly addressed it, since there's no point in addressing topics that we agree on.

Darned if I know, and darned if I care. As I said before and as I'll explain in more detail below, those sorts of lists are useless for the discussion we're having.

You pointed out an alternative solution that works in one browser. That's great for some people, not all. Having alternatives is certainly a good thing, but it's not the complete solution you make it out to be. You've failed to provide me with an alternative that provides those features in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, all of which are more widely used than Opera. As such, add

I'm obstinate about refusing to accept absolute assertions regarding subjective matters. I don't disagree with you, but I don't agree either, because I think there is no basis for agreement or disagreement.

My current problem is that you're saying, "X does more" and are using that itemized list of features as the basis for your assertion. The thing is, I bet we could double the length of your list without too much difficulty if we got a bit more specific about some of the things it does. And it'd all still be perfectly valid and accurate. Wouldn't you agree?

Likewise, any list that exists for the other side could be increased or decreased in a similarly arbitrary manner without making it untrue. As a result, arguing that "X does more than Y" on the basis of such lists is a meaningless argument, since we could easily consolidate or split up items in those lists to inflate/deflate the number of items present, while all of it is still accurate and true.

Until you can provide an objective basis for asserting that one "does more" than the other, I can neither agree nor disagree with that assertion. THAT'S what I'm being obstinate about.

I'm simply asserting that hosts and ad-blocking addons do different things and that they're best used together, rather than to the exclusion of the other, but that where their features do overlap, I readily agree that hosts is more efficient. I'm fairly certain that's already a valid stance, and if we can't agree on it, I'm not going to argue it further.

Likewise, I'm not going to argue about which of them "does more". I don't know how you'd objectively quantify that, nor do I see why that matters at all, nor do I have any interest in arguing it with anyone. Yes, you have a list of a lot of things that hosts can do. I'm sure someone else has a nice list of everything that ad-blocking addons can do. And I'm equally sure that we can pad both lists by splitting up items and rewording them a bit. Seeing which list has more items in it is a pointless and subjective exercise, since I'm only interested in using a subset of those features anyway, and don't care in the least which of them "does more".

All I care about as a user is if the addons can do something I want to do that hosts can't do (they can) and if hosts can do something I want to do that the addons can't do (it can). As such, I'll continue using both.

If we're constraining your assertion to ad-blocking addons, then I'd be willing to concede that they may indeed be both lesser-featured and less efficient (I'm not willing to do the research necessary to ascertain whether it's true or not). Even so, I still contend that some have features that hosts lacks, and that as a result they remain useful as a complement to hosts.

If we're talking about addons in general, as your assertion was originally phrased, then no, hosts does not do more than any addon. Off the top of my head, I'd say it's fairly safe to assume that Greasemonkey, for instance, does far more than hosts ever will. But that's an unrelated discussion, or at least I hope it is.

Just have to say, I keep stumbling across your posts in this discussion area, and they are absolutely filled to the brim with useful and factual knowledge. Thank you!

The 2011 model I have came with a BTO discrete GPU. I skipped the 2012 model since even it was a step backwards for me, on account of it not offering a discrete GPU. I was waiting for the new models with bated breath, only to find out that the entry-level model benchmarked the same or worse in pretty much every metric that I cared about when compared to my current machine. By the time I specced a mini that was better enough than mine to make it worth the upgrade, I realized I'd be better served by just building my own PC with that money while keeping my old mini around, since the only reason I wanted the upgraded hardware was for gaming anyway, given that my old mini will be fine for general purpose stuff for at least several more years.

And then I went and got engaged, so that money got spoken for in other ways...

Bull*.

YouTube provides full 1080p videos at around 3.5 Mbps. If you rip and encode your own blu-ray at home, you'll be on the high end if you come in around 8 Mbps. Netflix serves up 1080p 3D videos that customers can watch on original Playstation 3 models. I routinely rip blu-rays and then compress/encode them at high quality settings for use via iTunes Home Sharing with my Apple TV. I never have to deal with waiting for more than a few seconds before playback starts. You can watch 1080p YouTube on an 802.11b laptop, those PS3s only have 802.11g, and my Apple TV only came with 802.11n. All of this is possible today and working just fine.

It sounds to me like you're blaming WiFi for a problem that lies elsewhere (e.g. misconfigured VLC buffering settings, wrong tools for the job, etc.), since plenty of us have working setups** that deliver HD video over WiFi without issue.

* Unless you're working with uncompressed video, of course, which consumes orders of magnitude more resources. If memory serves, a 1080p uncompressed video feed can be as high as 1.6 Gbps, so if you're dealing with that sort of stuff, then of course you should use wired instead of WiFi. But since we're talking about MKVs for an at-home setup rather than live video capture from an event, I figured we were dealing with compressed HD video. ;)

** Regarding my setup, I just have a typical 802.11n router and an Apple TV for hardware. On the software side, I use MakeMKV with DTS-HD to FLAC encoding enabled to rip my discs. I then use Don Melton's scripts (with the --big flag set) to crop and transcode them, followed up by a quick pass through Subler to add any of the metadata for use in iTunes. After that, I just add them to iTunes, enable Home Sharing in iTunes, and then log in on my Apple TV to gain access to my entire iTunes library. Super simple and works great, even though none of it is wired.

Reading through your examples, I can't help but think that they seem very specific to someone in the sorts of professions we see around this site, rather than the general population of professionals interested in those sorts of laptops, and that the "Ok. That's you." way that you started your response could have been applied to virtually everything you said too.

When it comes to Ethernet, I never bothered getting the adapter for my last laptop. Never needed it either. But that's just me. And most people these days.

Apple is mixing gold with lightweight ceramic, resulting in the alloy being much harder and less scratch-prone.

Getting only slightly more detailed, the "18K gold" mark basically just means that it's 75% gold by mass. By using low-density ceramics, the ceramics can be disproportionately represented in the total volume, resulting in the watch being significantly less than 75% gold by volume, even though it remains 75% gold by mass.

If you want even more specifics, I'd suggest reading this fascinating piece by Dr. Drang that goes into the details on Apple's patent covering their metallurgy.

Also worth noting: your assertion that a solid gold casing is impractical for a watch is contradicted by the fact that they've been in widespread use since at least the 1800s.

No real disagreements, but it's worth pointing out that...

...doesn't consider Thunderbolt 2, which has twice the bandwidth of USB 3.1 at 20Gbps and has been shipping on computers for over a year. Nor does it consider Thunderbolt 3, which will have 40Gbps, 100 W of power delivery, and is due out with Skylake architecture later this year, about the same time that we should be expecting USB C to be hitting the mainstream. Even so, "a bird in the hand" and all that...

He actually left the site over a year ago, which, according to at least one other site, was about the time that it seemed to began its decline.

Quite clearly, we've found the gateway to Hell* if we're finding pentagrams in space. What in the world would make you think it had anything to do with stars?

* Not to be confused with the Door to Hell

Hubs are not the answer, nor did I say they were, but they are a necessary intermediate step.

As it is, there isn't a computer on the market with enough ports for everything I do (and I'd imagine that's true for most laptop setups of folks around here), so hubs are something I'll be using no matter what. At that point, it doesn't matter to me how many ports my computer has, since the only thing I'll use them for at home is to plug in my hubs. After all, I don't want to be plugging/unplugging every peripheral at home every single time I sit down, given that most or all of those peripherals are stationary. And if I'm away from my desk, I'll either bring a travel hub or do entirely without hubs, just as I do now. A reduction in the number of ports on the laptop changes nothing.

Long term, I'd like to see short range, low latency, high bandwidth protocols that can both charge and communicate with peripherals wirelessly, thus negating the need for any sort of cabled connection at all. But in the meantime, I'll settle for hubs, since they reduce the cable clutter and reduce the amount of plugging/unplugging I do, neither of which would be accomplished by adding more ports on a computer.

I think I understand the confusion now. The "read more closely" comment wasn't related to my using hosts. As you correctly said, you couldn't possibly know that I used hosts until I said so, and I said I used it in the same comment where I said "read more closely". The "read more closely" comment was in relation to the fact that you posted an attack on AdBlock in response to my initial post, presumably because you thought my initial post was a defense of AdBlock (which it wasn't), which I believed was the result of your not having read my initial post carefully enough. That's all.

We can both agree that hosts is very good at doing what it is designed to do and that it's more efficient at doing what it's designed to do than extensions are. Hosts is a purpose-built tool at a lower level that does a specific set of tasks extremely well. Extensions and add-ons are tools that do a huge variety of tasks reasonably well. Arguing that hosts is both more efficient AND more capable is like arguing that a traditional GPU is both more efficient AND more capable than a traditional CPU, even though they are intended for different purposes.

That's great. I just wish your app worked for me. I'm sure I could port it if I wanted to, since I have network programming experience at much larger scales than this (my grad research involved distributed, massive-scale web crawlers), but it's not an important enough issue for me to set aside the time necessary. I'm happy to just intermittently update my custom hosts file manually until a fully-automated solution arrives that works for me.

Yes, you need more ports, but they don't need to be on the computer itself. That's what hubs are for. Besides which, hubs are much more convenient, since you only need to plug in the hubs themselves, rather than needing to plug in every peripheral.

I'm honestly eager for the day when we can finally ditch cables coming out of our computers and can instead wirelessly link to hubs that will manage legacy cabled connections for us...ones which we can hide out of sight and mind in drawers of desks or other places where they don't need to be making things untidy. We're nowhere close yet, but we're getting there.

Movement != Location and Watch Tracking != Apple Tracking

It tracks your movement locally on the watch, such as the number of steps you take, by using its accelerometer and gyroscope, and then it can plug that into a Health app on your watch or phone so that you can monitor your own activity across a period of time. That data doesn't typically get sent back to Apple. On top of that, it does not track your location, nor would it even able to do so, since it lacks GPS or cellular antennas. The best it can do is ask your phone where you're at, assuming you've allowed your phone to track your location and share that data with your watch, which is entirely optional and can be controlled on a per-app basis from within settings. You can even configure apps to only have location tracking capability while they are actively running in the foreground, rather than allowing them to access it while running in the background.

Meanwhile, let's not pay attention to the fact that Google Wallet tracks all of your purchases and makes it accessible to Google, nor that Google Health (RIP) used to centralize all of your medical information in Google's cloud, whereas Apple's offerings—Apple Pay, HealthKit, and ResearchKit—keep Apple out of the loop entirely. The only way Apple would even possibly get any of that information is if you choose to take advantage of the entirely optional iCloud Backup feature to backup your device, but doing so would mean that the backed up data would be encrypted with a key that was generated on your device which they don't have access to, meaning that they don't have access to your data at all. Hell, even look at hardware encryption on the phone. It got dropped from Lollipop after Google made a big deal about adding it, but it's been on every iPhone since the iPhone 3GS, released back in 2009.

While there are arguments to be made in favor of some of the niche players in this space, as best I can tell, Apple is currently well ahead of the other major players in terms of protecting their users both from outside prying eyes and from themselves.