Make no mistake, Google doesn't do this because they have our best interest in mind, but because caching means they can't always tell exactly how many and who saw a particular page or ad. They hate caching unless it's them doing it. Going https instead of http defeats most caching, at the expense of the web sites easily having to serve twice as much data to serve the same number of visitors - some of that from the overhead of https, and some of that because of less caching.

Again, follow the money trail, and you'll get the answer for why Google wants to push everyone to https.
The guys over at squid-cache.org are not amused.

What kind of idiot modded this drunken drivel insightful? A sock puppet account?
Look at the GP post - the guy didn't predict anything. He correctly used the present tense for describing timeline events, and drew no conclusions. If you drew your own conclusion and then knock it down, that is not insightful, nor any skin off his back.

Good. There are supposed to be droughts and forest fires. That's why the tall conifers were everywhere in California - trees evolved to survive droughts and fires.

Those not willing to live with the natural climate of the land they have settled on better be prepared to pay high and continuing costs for fighting nature.

That there will be years and even decades of less precipitation than normal is normal. Droughts happen. Floods happen. Hurricanes happen.
People planning for what's out of the ordinary happens less often. It's much easier to pretend it won't happen and then find someone or something to blame.

Please explain how hosts entries would block:

- Any host on the 123.64.0.0/11 network.
- Any host that ends with .2o7.net regardless of hostname[*].
- Requests that embed a hostname or IP address in the URL

[*]: You are aware that some trackers use pseudo-random hostnames that are resolved through wildcard DNS entries, right? That way they can track exactly where you came from too, because the hostname will be unique for just you.

All you have to do is give examples that do the above. It's you who claim hosts files are the panacea - the burden of proof is on you, not others.
Put up or shut up.

No, Privoxy won't help if you have to go through an external proxy. You know, one that you don't have control over, but where work can log who visited what pages. Work, like what you don't have because you're a kook and unemployable.

With a remote proxy, no local resolving takes place at all (other than the address of the proxy server). No matter what hosts tables you have set up on your local machine doesn't matter because the resolving doesn't happen on your machine at all.

Adblock works great, because it filters before you send a request. Neither the resolving nor the request goes anywhere.
Of course, it can filter IPs and wildcards too, unlike a dumb hosts table.

The answer is NO to all of the above, because I have to go through a proxy.

The Do Not Track option is defined in the RFC draft as not doing anything except sending the DNT: 1 header to a remote server. Having it do more goes against the specification.
Of course, browsers can implement other functionality to thwart tracking, but not as part of Do Not Track, which has a very specific meaning.

Pray tell us how to use hosts files through a proxy server.
It's the proxy server that looks up the host names, not your local resolver.

Also, how well does it work with wildcards? There are ad companies that use thousands of random hosts, of the form 47db.adcompany.com, 1a74.adcompany.com, 357f.adcompany.com. With a hosts file, you have to fill out every single possible entry ahead of time, because it doesn't take a wildcard like *.adcompany.com.

Nor does it block IP addresses. How would you use a hosts file to block http://61.174.51.194/ ?

Never mind that big hosts files slow down the system, because it is traversed linearly, not through a hash like better resolve (and blocking) mechanisms.

Using hosts files was viable up until the late 80s, but now it is a joke.

This deserves its own reply. No, it's you who are confusing the two.

Eugenics is when people choose who should live and who should die. This is abhorrent, for a variety of good reasons. It's not only morally repugnant, but from an objective point of view, it is detrimental to the species because when you kill those who are different from you, you also kill the good mutations, i.e. those who are fitter than you.

Natural selection is when those who survive due to their own abilities have more viable offspring, causing a propagation of successful genes and mutations, not selected genes.

If anything, vaccination is more like eugenics than anti-vaccination is. Money and culture controls who gets vaccinated and who doesn't, and most people want their own children to have an advantage, even if unfair.

There is no reason to belive that Stephen Hawking would not have made it into adulthood. ALS isn't a disease that decreases resistances in any great way, and it is also a progressive disease, and most of his childhood he was doing pretty well.

But even if some of the brightest would not have made it, those would be compensated for by the increased number of children born to replace those who didn't make it. By chopping off the tail on the left hand side and increasing the magnitude of the Gauss curve, you cause an increase in the long tail on the right hand side.

And I have never said anything about it being the strongest that survive - of course it is the fittest. Those who are less fit get reaped by predation in species that maintain a healthy base. Whether it's because they can't see the predators coming, can't run away, don't have a immune system fighting off diseases, or otherwise. Those with detrimental mutations are less fit than average, and thus less likely to live to propagate their detrimental mutations, and the culling of the herd leads to the average herd member being fitter than otherwise, especially over multiple generations.

You have misunderstood what "Do Not Track" means.

It turns on a flag always telling remote websites "this user does not want to be tracked". It has nothing to do with telling your browser to change its behavior, it gives remote sites a piece of information about your wishes.

Whoever came up with the idea was a dumb shit, and whoever let it become implemented as a browser option was even dumber - it was blindingly obvious from the star that in real life, it's just sending the remote site one more bit of information they can use to track users with.

Even worse was the idiot who decided to make it default in some browsers. That changes the request from "This user has chosen to ask you to please do not track him", which conceivably a few sites might choose to honor, to "This user has not changed his defaults for this setting", which pretty much ensures that it won't be honored. As it is, it's a waste of a few bytes of transmission.

The only thing I found interesting was this:

Use of AdBlock 49.28%

But that probably says more about the people who would visit the site than it does of AdBlock users.
Especially with the sample size so small at is is. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ has a much much higher sample base.

Other things that could be checked but which aren't include whether the browser allows SSL2, SSL3, TLS1.0, TLS1.1, and what kind of encryption.
Also, the ballpark speed at which it evaluates Javascript.

Fonts seems to be what does it. With many programs coming with extra/special fonts, it quickly narrows the users down based on what they have installed.

Of course, for fonts that only come as part of a software package but install fonts as system fonts (why?), it also tells remote sites what you have installed, which is an additional privacy concern.

If i could see a reasonable use for one at home, I might consider buying one, but I don't, so I don't.

3D printer owners: What is the most useful thing you've printed, how long did it take, and how much did it cost (factoring in the purchase price of the printer divided by how many successful prints you have actually done)?