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Comment Re:Best way to block ads (Score 1) 203

Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.

I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.

Honestly.

And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?

Peace.

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BMO/Dan

Comment Re:Well I guess it's a good thing... (Score 1) 203

They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.

The former is true

The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.

Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.

So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."

Please, please let this happen.

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BMO

Comment Re:Obviously didn't work so well... (Score 4, Interesting) 103

That's the problem isn't it?

Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.

Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein.

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BMO

Comment Re:Well I guess it's a good thing... (Score 3, Interesting) 203

But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.

This.

And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run /only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.

Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?

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BMO

Comment Re:Chromebook Shmomebook (Score 1) 169

Why doesn't RedHat, or Oracle, or SUSE, or someone else run Linux through the compliance tests?

Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).

Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.

Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.

Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.

Comment Re:Chromebook Shmomebook (Score 4, Informative) 169

Wake me up when they post a useful article on how to run Unix on my Macbook Pro.

Mac OS X *is* UNIX. It's certified. Wake me up when Linux passes conformance testing.

PS: We even put UUCP on the damn thing to pass the tests; it's definitely UNIX, so feel free to spin up your own NetNews node on your MacBook Air.

Comment Re:Popcorn time! (Score 1) 376

All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, December 25, 1783

Comment And now... 3... 2... 1... (Score 2) 110

And now... 3... 2... 1...

(1) Find a journalist you don't like who has linked to a vulnerable site they don't control
(2) Replace the content at the link target with illegally obtained material about someone powerful
(3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!

Journalistic shield laws anyone? The new first amendment-resistant law enforcement looks like we need something to replace the old antibiotics...

Comment Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry (Score 1) 307

No one wants to switch from a Mac/Windows to a Windows/Mac system if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work.

Most businesses use this same example:

"No one wants to switch from a Windows XP system to a Windows [inset non-XP Windows here] if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work."

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