Google Play works fine with cyanogen.

Advertising subsidises the services you use. Spam makes them more expensive.

The standard would probably be 48V. Easy to step down, keeps current down to manageable levels, and plenty of 48V equipment is already available.

Electric vehicles use DC for charging. They either have their own rectifier on-board, or for fast charging can take a direct DC input. My Leaf will take 400V/100A DC for charging, for example. So, there are devices that could make use of a direct DC feed.

At the time it made sense to use AC, because high efficiency solid state DC-DC converters didn't exist. Nowadays high voltage DC transmission lines are used all over the world, with conversion to AC at the destination.

For home use it is a little trickier, because you still want high voltage until you get close to the device. Maybe you could have a DC line direct from the battery pack to your car or a central air conditioner or something, if you could keep them physically close together. You won't want to 48V/50A to your appliances that are tens of metres away from the source though. You could step the voltage up but then it might as well just be AC...

Didn't some cable TV company already disable the fast forward button during ads? DVDs don't let you skip ads most of the time. I'm surprised that the mute button still works.

They would love to just send you one large .png image of the page so that it renders exactly as they want it to, complete with ads. Well, it would probably be a seizure-inducing animated GIF actually.

The reason they don't is the same reason people don't make "websites" that are actually just big Flash animations any more. Search engines can't properly interpret them and tend to give them a low ranking. So they want it both ways - a high ranking for usefulness and information/bullshit ratio, but also total control over the display.

Advertisers pay to display their ads, spammers usually don't.

https://piratebrowser.com/

Firefox with Tor pre-integrated and configured. Give the link to your friends.

This is hardly something new. Books have been censored since before the invention of the printing press, especially if they are about the secret services or might leak information that the government considers sensitive. Before the internet the BBFC pretty effectively controlled what British people could see. There is a specific law allowing the government to censor newspapers.

Despite the on-going assault on freedom, we are winning and will continue to win. The internet massively increased our freedom and blocked a lot of censorship. We have to stay vigilant of course, but we are definitely subject to less censorship now than we were in the past.

None. Piracy increases income.

Most people just prefer to head over to a trusted torrent site, free from viruses and the like, and download a clean DRM-free copy. It's easier and quicker, and if they are young or don't have a credit card it is also affordable and possible for them to do. Pirate copies are always the best quality ones, unless the vendor goes DRM free, and even then... eBooks are relatively easy to convert from one format to another, but movies and music are more hassle and why would people bother?

That is extremely fucked up. Thanks.

Japanese manufacturers offer collision avoidance that can completely stop the car when it is travelling below 30 MPH, if a crash is imminent. It works very well for preventing rear-endings in traffic.