Please, give me a break. Do you really buy into all the expiration date BS? Yes, some stuff expires relatively quickly, but most of it is BS...a combination of covering their ass and encouraging you to throw good product out to buy more. The best is when I see stuff like bottles of vinegar or water dated only a few months out. Give me a break.

But that aside...RTFS:
"Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold"

Yes, I'm sure Costco agreed to sell a product that was so clearly rancid that even some slashdot poster could tell just by reading about it.

If you knew a little bit about how macrovision worked, you'd be able to reason why your "fun fact" doesn't make logical sense. So let me give you some details

1) Most VCRs (I'm not sure if this was always the case or only in later years) contain an automatic gain control in the recording mechanism. The AGC would try to adjust the picture brightness based on the signal it received, so that what you recorded would be neither too dark nor too bright. I'm not familiar with the exact mechanisms they use to calculate how much adjustment to apply. Many VCRs also apply this AGC processing to signals that are merely passing through the VCR, even if you aren't recording

2) As an unrelated fact, analog video signals actually include the closed captioning data encoded into the video feed. This data is encoded into a part of the video stream that usually isn't displayed on your TV. However, sometimes you may see this data when playing back the analog signal on a digital display, if overscanning is turned off. If you've ever seen video with a row of black and white dots/bars at the top, that's the closed captioning data.

3) Along comes Macrovision. Some assholes discovered that if you manipulate the signal contained in the closed captioning data, you can often screw with the AGC mechanism in VCRs, causing it to repeatedly alter the video signal from brighter to darker. Also, because VCRs often apply this AGC to signals being passed through, this also explains why you usually couldn't hook up your DVD player to your VCR to get around the fact that your older TV didn't have RCA inputs.

So if you think about this, there is no reason why it should matter if the VCRs are the same brand. With any VCR, the signal it outputs is going to be the same, no matter whether hooked up to a TV, a VCR of the same brand, or of a different brand. Likewise, the input signal is going to be processed the same, no matter whether coming from a VCR of the same brand or different brand, a DVD player, a camcorder, or a cable box. The only thing that makes the difference is the implementation of AGC in the VCR. Either
A) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that is susceptible to macrovision manipulation
B) Your VCR implements AGC in a manner that ignores this extra data.
C) Your VCR doesn't do AGC

If the VCR doing the recording falls into category A, then it won't work right. If the VCR falls into category B or C, then the macrovision won't have any effect on you. I think Occam would say that the simplest explanation would be that the VCRs you worked with fall into category B or C.

It's kind of funny you didn't even bother to read my post carefully before responding

Firefox: " Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds"

Chrome: "Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory...Despite that, performance is still perfect."

Clearly from my post, I don't care very much how much memory the app uses. It's the fact that, as firefox grows in memory size, it becomes less and less responsive. Chrome at 3GB seems no less responsive to me than Chrome at 60 MB. Can't say the same for firefox, not even at 800MB (and I'd have to kill myself before suffering long enough for it to actually get up to 3GB).

The question was asked: "I really just don't see why anyone would use Chrome...What positive purpose does it serve?". I was simply answering. Isn't that what we do here in slashdot discussions?

As for any denial, there's nothing for me to be in denial about. I've been using chrome as my primary browser for (I'd guess) approximately 2 years now and I've never had cause to complain about it. Like I already acknowledged, memory footprint is probably the big issue people complain about with Chrome, but that's a negligible issue to me. I've got plenty of memory.

I do tons of web development, so I'm back and forth between these browsers (and others) on a regular basis for development purposes, but for regular use I stick to Chrome and have seen no reason to switch back to Firefox. My wife is much more of your ordinary, non-technical user. She was the first one to make the switch to Chrome permanently because of several issues she had (which went away once using Chrome). My mother-in-law has a very old, quite under-powered machine. Somewhere along the line, firefox started becoming extremely unresponsive to the mouse. It's the only application that behaves that way. No idea what caused it (tried updating video drivers and searching online for solutions...no luck). Switched her to chrome and it's been fine for her (she never uses more than 1 tab, so memory issues are not a problem for her underpowered machine either)

Those are just my experiences. Like I said earlier, your experiences may differ. Use what you like. I'm not particularly religious about browsers.

Yep, and then when you reload all of those tabs:
1) oops, those ones don't reload because you have to log back in, and then you lose your context
2) oops, those other tabs use server side sessions which are now expired, so the page is no longer valid and can't be reloaded
3) oops, any pages that have any complex script state need to be put back into the proper state
Not to mention that just closing the browser takes it like 5 minutes to unallocate its 2 GB of memory.

Seriously, why do you seem so upset that I've not enjoyed my firefox experience and that I now find Chrome better? If it works for me and makes me happy, why does that have to bug you so much that you have to be an asshole with comments about breaking out in a sweat and having low UID self esteem issues?

Why did I chose Chrome over Firefox? Because I got sick of the memory leak problems under firefox. When I browse, I use a shit-ton of tabs. After about 3 days, firefox is consuming over 1GB of memory even after I close every single tab. If I let it go about a week, it's up to nearly 2 GB. Once the memory hits about 800MB, it starts to hiccup/pause all the time. When it gets to its worst, I can't even watch a video on youtube without it pausing for 1/2 second every 5 seconds. I went through year after year of "sorry, but there's no memory leaks", followed by "oh, we fixed those leaks...there are no more leaks", followed by "now we've redesigned it all so it won't leak any more", etc. Sure, go ahead and deny the problem and blame it on the plugins if you like. Switching to Chrome has resulted in flawless performance for me since then, despite me using an equal number of similar plugins.

Does chrome use a crapload of memory? Sure, but I don't really give a shit. I've got 12GB of memory in my machine and rarely come close to using it all. Chrome is using nearly 3GB of memory right now across about 50 processes, but I've still got 6GB free on my box. Despite that, performance is still perfect. I could never say the same about firefox. And if I close Chrome down to a single tab, it will shrink back down to 60MB or so of memory. It cleans up perfectly (due to its process-per-tab design).

That was the one major thorn that twisted in my side with Firefox year after year, but it wasn't the only one. Another one was the firefox instance that didn't start but also didn't terminate, resulting in firefox refusing to open another copy until I manually killed the previous process. Then in the last year or 2 of me using it, it seemed like an increasing number of small changes/bugs/whatever causing one site or another to stop working properly when I upgraded versions. Since switching to Chrome, that's all been a thing of the past.

Your experience may differ from mine, but for me Chrome has been a much nicer experience. I don't miss firefox the slightest bit.

This isn't the first time this happened. In late 2012, there was a promo where you by an LG (I think that was the brand) HDTV and get a year of netflix for free. The problem was, you could just go onto the LG website and enter your serial number, and the website would accept any made up number as long as it started with the correct 2 or 3 digit sequence (or something like that). That was all over slickdeals too.

Why isn't that useful to consumers? I can't tell you the number of time I've spent 10 minutes looking for a product, going up and down aisles, ask an employee which aisle it's in, still can't find it, and then finally realize I've walked right by it a half dozen times. If I could just pull out my phone and it could lead me right to it, I'd love it. That's not them forcing something on me...it's helping me more easily find something I already know I want.

Still, such a thing is probably quite a ways out. Just think about how often stores reorganize their merchandise. Any maps like this would quickly be out of date. It's not really feasible until it would be cheap enough for a store to own a mappinig robot of their very own and have it automatically map the aisles by itself at night once a week.

Wow. I didn't realize google glass was storing its data on magnetic media. Or do you mean that the eye piece is actually a mini CRT?

Are you sure? You might want to check you mailbox again, or your spam filters. I've received the following emails from them:

Dec 20 - Letter from Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel and Important Notice
Dec 23 - Important Information for our REDcard Holders

Not sure how you figured that. Target has 1921 stores, and is generally open 14 hours per day for the holiday season (8am-10pm). 40 milllion spread across that and over 19 days comes to 1 transaction every 46 seconds
Awesome work with the math. But let me give you one tiny bit of info you might have missed. Did you realize Target is more than 1 store? Actually, 1921 stores to be exact. So that's (lets round up) 20823 per store. Spread over 19 days, that's 1096 per store per day. The stores are open probably closer to an average of 14 hours a day for the holiday season. So that's 78 per hour, or one transaction every 46 seconds. Somehow I think they can manage a bit more than that. Even if you factor in that not every transaction is a credit/debit transaction, I think it's still very believable.

And yet, to someone like me (a non-physicist) the rubber sheet analogy makes a lot of sense to me, while the orange analogy....well, I'm not exactly sure where you are going with that because it helps me understand nothing. Maybe you just didn't explain it fully or correctly, but I'm not finding it very useful

Or three (I saw it on Friday).

From the other clues, I had the first 3 letters. The only think that made sense to me for the 4th letter was "E". I thought "well, I guess that kind of makes sense, though that's a really awkward way of phrasing it". It wasn't until later I realized that was the wrong answer. When I found the correct answer I was a bit surprised. Not being a big fan of crosswords, I didn't realize they did that in answers (trying to be vague in my reply, so as not to spoil it for anyone).

Whine whine. Your typical slashdot "google this google that...blah blah blah...do no evil...now give me my +5" post. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that asking you to sign up for google+ qualifies as EVIL? My god, the bar for that one has really gotten low lately. You've offered me a decent service for free while only very slightly inconveniencing me....EVIL!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!!one!!!

Google does a ton of things in the last decade that benefit users, or at least myself, greatly:
1) youtube - Great place for me to host videos to share with my family. They're all private URLs so not publicly searchable, and I know pretty much anybody that I want to share the url with can see them, even on a tablet or phone. And if google wants to do some video datamining of my 3 year old daughter doing something cute, who the fuck cares.

2) maps - Nevermind that it's not even 10 years old. Most of the best improvements (street view, real time traffic, predictive traffic, navigation, public transit) were all created in the last 5-6 years. All accessible from my android phone. It's amazing how useful this is. In 2004 I visited Chicago for a weekend and used only public transit. As a tourist, I remember how nervous I was using it. I had the maps, trying to figure out what bus to take to where, and what connections I need to pick up and seeing how they all timed up. Nightmare to me. I visited there again this summer and unlike last time, I didn't plan a thing as far as how to get here or there. When I needed to go somewhere, I just put in the location and it showed me all the options for bus or rail. In 2004, I didn't go anywhere without knowing exactly where I was in relation to everywhere else. This time, I couldn't tell you shit about where I was, as I didn't need to know. Just followed a few simple instructions and I was where I needed to be

3) google+ - yes, some of us actually use it. I can't stand facebook. You have little control over what you see, they're always breaking your privacy settings, and it's filled with crap (half the "posts" are some score or achievement somebody in farmville or some other crappy game). Google let me control exactly what/who I want to see, and they've always been pretty good at not "breaking" privacy options.

4) gmail - even this is less than a decade old (launched in 2004), but I'll give you a break there. But still, tons of great improvements in UI design over the last 5 years. There has been cool enhancements, like the Google Talk feature

5) video chat - text chat has already been pretty easy to do among different os and device options, but video was a different story. Even 2-3 years ago, I remember trying to do video chats between android and ipad. So very few options. The ones I did try were all buggy (ex: some devices the video would be upside down), and blatantly missing support for obvious features (like rotating displays). The ones that worked halfway decent quickly made themselves annoying after some updates were released. Since google got serious about this in the last year or so, this is has become a piece of cake

6) voice - Thanks google. With the help of a $40 obi device, I haven't paid a penny for my home phone service in 3 years (sadly it looks like that may be coming to and end in the next 5 months or so). The abilty to ring mulitple phones (and use your contacts to control who rings to what phones) is awesome. The spam call detection is fairly good (looking at my history, google has saved me from a ton of useless interruptions)

7) android - I had an i-device, and it always drove me crazy. I've been much happier since moving to android. And all of the above mentioned features are accessible from it.

I'm sure I could go on, but despite your typical troll response with the "do no evil" buzz-phrase in it, I've found much of what google has done to be immensely beneficial to me. Perfect? Hell no. But FAR ahead of most everything else that's been offered by others so far. And I haven't paid a penny for any of it (except my nexus 4)

I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that?
1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect
2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all.
3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.

So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.