I love advertising. I block it because it's the opposite of what I want.

Some may say I'm doing the adverse of what I want.

Some may say that to get people to do the adverse of what they want would be called "advertising".

I wouldn't know, cuz I'm an idiot and block out all the good shit, why listen to me!

Lemme get this straight, you were seriously looking to buy a diesel Beetle, and you found out they were making one from an ad?! The only reason they decided to market a diesel Beetle is because people like you got off their asses and demanded it. You speak like the ads brought your diesel Beetle to you. That's just so un-Fahrvergnügen.

I've long been a defender that the next generation Beetles aren't gayer than a treeful of chickadees, but I'm not sure I can extend my persuasive powers to include the diesel model after what I've read here. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Advertising literally means to get people to do what they do not want to do, the adverse. If they were just promoting one option over another that would be called divertising, to divert you to the preferred option over the other.

Fact is that most of what advertisers do is the promotion of what they're paid to promote. But the industry still chooses to use the term 'advertising'. It's like running for political office under the "Totalitarian Fascist Party" pitching to represent the constituents' best interests. Okay, bad example...

Let's try the obligatory car example. It's like claiming that the car you're selling is the best way of getting around despite all other sustainable means that undermine the infrastructure that make cars necessary, which other departments in your company are battling unmercifully. Err... that doesn't work either...

Umm, maybe it's like the farmers in India who were persuaded to use genetically modified seeds... Err, sorry, they're not around anymore to comment.

OK I got it! It's like knowing what you want to do, but getting paid to do something else, and then it bites you in the ass. But that NEVER happens, right?

The bigger question is how people still see ads at all. Is their ad blocker malfunctioning?

I declare shenanigans! This conspiracy of not automatically updating the hardware of obsolete devices must be rooted out!

Wise man say, when crossing one-way street, look both ways. There are very many hazards that automated cars undo as well. I read an amazing essay about life with all fully automated vehicles, where you don't own a car, instead you punch your cargo and travel plans into a website, and the appropriate vehicle shows up and takes care of your travel needs. If it's a mile or so to the grocery store, a wagon shows up. If it's to the remote cottage an SUV shows up. If it's to a wedding a limo shows up. If it's to an airport a shuttle bus shows up with room for you and your baggage along with others etc. Think about how much time your car is parked and think about how many fewer automated vehicles it would take to service a large population. MASSIVE CO2 emission reduction, especially if most of them are fully electric, as they could easily recharge themselves automatically. The ramifications are really stupendous.

I can't find a link to the essay (I'm unwinding after a long day and I get 3 hrs sleep before a 17 hr day tomorrow), but I'm sure other /.ers have heard of it.

This has censorship written all over it, as well as reactionary anti-censorship. The responsibility must be limited to deliberate republications of the comments beyond the automatic publication by the social media. Otherwise it invites antagonists to cause undue penalties to an organization by posting offensive comments, and/or suppresses controversial subject matter from supporters of an organization for fear it may cause them penalties.

Actually, 47.28462943298517% of all statistics are just made up

I am now killing you this instant. You are dying. Blood everywhere...

Wanna ride bikes? 8D

Always be wary of motivation vs fact. Motivation is measured in dollars, fact is measured in labs, but only perceived by the public through the media, which are all motivated by dollars and not facts.

The key question is this: is there enough money to be gained from fracking to change publicly perceived facts? Absolutely. My problem is that if it turned out that fracking was actually OK, I'd have heard about it by now. I know folks in the field, and they don't know anything about any new scientific findings. They're reluctant workers getting paid mad cash to do what they hate for the sake of their families. They're not idiots, and they keep a close eye on this shit. Big media says it's ok? Fuck that.

This finally resolves the biggest problem for USB interfaces and hard drives for audio. The primary factor for performance in audio has always been access speed (seek time), and not throughput. Audio software has to access dozens of separate audio files in a very timely manner frequently, and the overhead of the USB protocol has always been a wrench in the gears. From what I'm reading, UASP offers the same advantages NCQ (Native Command Queuing) offers in SATA, which allowed for much higher track counts on the same drive rather than spreading files across several drives, which was a pain in the butt. It was only with NCQ in ~2005 that SATA finally caught up with SCSI-2 (ca 1994) in audio performance, provided the drive was 7200rpm or faster. Firewire has some form of queuing system built into the host, so it's always been better than USB for audio, but it is vanishing from laptops and desktop motherboards, even Apple products.

Now watch how long it takes before audio hardware manufacturers adopt it, and feel our pain. The first Firewire audio interfaces came out about 4 years after Firewire was standard on Mac desktops...

It's 'kinda' bullshit in that they're only 'kinda' spying on you. Do they harvest as much information about you as the law allows? Yes. Do they push the limit on this harvesting? Sure. Are they hiding the extent of how much information they harvest? Of course. But they are doing it on a systematic basis, and don't care about any one person in particular. Their objective is not to study any individual in particular, but to study a potential advertising market as thoroughly as possible. It's not like they're sending out people to follow you, more like you leaving bread crumbs for them to map.

The danger of this is only in how the information is abused, and the fault there lies in the security of the information and abuses of government access thereto. That's something to worry about, sure, but I see it as an inevitable evolution of the internet motivated by irrepressible marketing forces. If Facebook and Google+ didn't do it to this extent, surely some other social media would have. It's definitely a "don't hate the players, hate the game" situation.

So if you're that concerned about abuse of your personal information, I don't blame you one bit for avoiding social media. Myself, I only worry a thief may see that I'm out of town and take a shot at breaking into my house, but otherwise I'm not afraid of what can be done with what I post, and I'd say about 25% of my revenue stems from research and communications over Facebook. Works for me, might not work for you. I don't see the need for alarm.

As long as there are commercials there will be channels telling studios what kind of crap they want to shove down our faces to assemble demographics to match their potential advertising base. Channels should be paying us for allowing their garbage into our homes.

How many car accidents have you been in recently? Most cars have excellent crash test ratings these days compared to even 10 years ago. A friend recently slammed into a rock cut at about 40mph, her PT Cruiser did a 360 in the air and landed back out on the road. She walked away with belt burn and a bruise on her neck from the air bag. Also, SUV's are most prone to rollovers. Airbags don't help much when the passengers have been ejected from the vehicle.

City mileage drops fast with less weight, highway mileage drops fast with better aerodynamics, both drop fast with a smaller engine. Your 5.4L Expedition gets a reported 13mpg city 18mpg highway, so actual is probably more like 10/15. My 3.4L minivan (Pontiac Montana) gets 20/26 actual.

Many car models offer 4x4, Subaru only makes 4x4's for example.

Many cars handle this fine, so far I'd direct you towards a Ford Flex AWD

Catalytic converters reduce smog emissions by a factor of 430. By my math (880cc/5.4Lx430) your Harley emits about 70 times as much smog as your Expedition. You're not doing us any favors...

Well put. Similarly the Supreme Court can strike down a law passed by the House Of Commons or provincial Legislative Assemblies on the grounds that it violates the Constitution, Charter Of Rights & Freedoms, or provincial jurisdictions etc, however the Supreme Court can't introduce new law, only alter existing ones to suit evolving judicial interests and the Constitution and Charter. That's gotta feel pretty good, the "I know better, nyah nyah" part. That's why they don't wear pants under the robes.