Yeah, but aren't the search engine ads also less obtrusive, like usually on the side where they're obvious that they're ads? That makes them easy to ignore (and doubly so, since they aren't graphical with flashing colors and shit like that which draws your eye to it).

I'm not saying they're perfect by any means, but compared to most advertising these days, it's a giant step up IMO.

Calling for suppression of discussion on an important issue that not enough people are talking about...do you realize what you are? Do you know what a "heel realization" is?

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."

-- George Bernard Shaw, communist

Cities will go completely bankrupt before they even think of reining in their police.

I seem to remember that plane literally leaking fuel when it was on the ground.

Probably not much, however, who wants to live someplace where they have to hear the boom of a massive lightning storm day in and day out? Thunderstorms are noisy, it's true, but for most people they're a fairly rare event.

Hahaha, that's like the opposite of that patent office guy circa 1900 who said that everything that could be invented had already been invented.

Some of the hysteria is probably because a very low-altitude plane flying supersonic can probably break windows, so people are worried about that. Of course, we're talking about higher-altitude planes here, so that isn't really justified.

The other worry is probably the frequency of the booms. One boom a month isn't a big deal, but what if they decide to make a frequent flight path over your house in the suburbs or in the country? Now you've got sonic booms every day, throughout the day. No one wants that.

They don't occur often over the continental USA because they're illegal (except for military planes), and these days because there's no supersonic passenger planes left. The Concorde was the only one, and it was limited to trans-Atlantic routes over water because of the restriction on sonic booms. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be worried about something that isn't a problem now because of legality and current technological state; these things can and do change. Texting-and-driving 20 years ago wasn't a problem either, but now it is; it would have been helpful if someone had worried about it a little more. Drunken driving wasn't a problem 120 years ago, but again maybe someone should have worried about it and done something before it turned into a big societal problem.

Personally, I don't even see why supersonic travel should exist for passengers. It uses insane amounts of fuel, and even if that problem is fixed, it's unlikely it'll ever be as fuel-efficient as subsonic flight. No one really needs to get around that fast. If you don't like 14-hour flights over the Pacific, then don't do them; stay at home instead, or choose a closer vacation destination. Maybe eventually we'll avoid this problem altogether with some kind of sub-orbital vehicle which is both fast and fuel-efficient, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's probably muscle memory. I do something similar: many times when I try to type "ratio" I'll add an extra 'n' for "ration", which I of course then need to backspace over. And of course, auto spell checkers think it's just fine since it's still a valid word.

This is why I actually don't have a problem with Google's text ads. You do a search on some terms, and alongside your search results you also get some ads based on those terms. This can be really helpful if you're looking for a product to solve a problem you have, and the ad shows you something which is exactly what you're looking for. I guess this is called "targeted advertisement".

The mass-spam advertisement is the stuff that sucks, because I have to see it even when I'm not looking to buy something, and it can be for anything, not something that I specifically need.

No thanks to Adblock Plus. That thing is a giant resource hog.

I've switched to uBlock now; it's much better than ABP ever was.

It seems you're implying that that is the default method of doing things, which it is not. If it were, it would not be exceptional and would not be worthy of attention. Look at places like Brazil or Venezuela where there are constant videos of police doing what they do in those countries, and nobody cares. And yet, in America, whenever it happens it is front-page news and the footage is endlessly replayed on the 24-hour media.

Here's a project: ask actual African people what they think about African-Americans. Then, ask them how they would behave if the situations were reversed.

Because it's not? Seriously, this sort of "it's ruined already, let's go ahead and implement THE REVOLUTION" thinking is wrongheaded. Your life will be worse off, on every measurable metric, after the revolution. Unless you're one of the elite, and you're not. It is better to live under robber barons than oppressive moral busybodies. Especially moral busybodies who are so far to the left that anything to the right of Mao Zedong looks like fascism.

I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded.

You should be. That is entirely out of character for Microsoft. In fact, devoting more resources to a problem just makes it worse, see the book "The Mythical Man-Month" where this is discussed at length. This book was written in the 1960s! So this has been with us for a long time.