// exception was found
// beyond here be dragons, run
// make your escape now
goto blah;
^^ code master

Leech.

Let's be clear here ... fuck yeah.

I don't surf little private vanity sites, I hit major news agencies, and sites owned by large corporations.

Let me be perfectly clear: I don't give a crap about the revenue of large corporations. Not now, not ever.

You think I should give a shit if Dice gets ad revenue? Or cnn? or google? Or Microsoft? Of Ziff Davis? Or Facebook? Or Twitter?

Fuck that.

They don't owe me a damned thing, and I don't owe them anything -- but until they find a technology solution to stop me, too damned bad.

I'm still going to block as many advertising and analytics companies as I can, using as many plugins as I can find. In every browser I use.

The sites I read aren't in any danger of going under because I don't give them ad views -- and even if they were, I still don't trust the companies involved.

But blocking Facebook and Twitter and the big ad/a analytics companies? If you think I give a crap about that, you're sadly mistaken.

So you go ahead and be a well behaved little consumer, me, I'll continue to not give a crap about the revenue of large corporations.

I'm curious... At this point do we just expect everything to be 100% free? Or do we think money fairies give companies the capital to pay for bandwidth and processing power?

Hey, there will always be people who don't block ads. Some sites have subscriptions, which people are free to use.

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.

I will allow a site which serves its own advertising to show ads as long as they're not overly intrusive. But doubleclick, discus, scrorecard reasearch, quantcast, facebook, twitter -- and literally hundreds of other shit sites I have no interest in, well -- that's not my problem.

I'm visiting your website. Unless you lock me out via subscription (in which case I'll ignore your site), I do not owe you ad revenue, and I sure as shit don't owe the 20 other sites embedded in your website anything.

Honestly, if you eventually go out of business ... that is not my problem. Protecting myself from marketers and malware is my problem, and quite frankly, Flash gets reported as loading up malware pretty regularly. I've treated it as malware for over a decade now.

But let's not act like I owe you something. And let's certainly not act like just because you collect your money from a bunch of shady assholes that I owe them anything.

What? That doesn't sound right ... because I'm pretty sure I've seen a board which comes with both chess and checkers pieces.

I'm not buying that at all -- they're both 8x8.

You're just making shit up.

James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is

Already filthy rich.

Do I get counted as an astronaut as I'm waiting for NASA to call me up? Or as a porn star in case one of the starlets decides she wants a hunka hunka burning nerd for a quicky?

Does wishing you had another job cause you to count towards the statistics of that job?

I honestly don't think "wannabee" counts towards these things. :-P

I don't have one, and it's unlikely that I will have any tablet, ever.

Touchscreens are a regression in human interfaces. Yes, it's more intuitive than a mouse, but it lacks any way to even emulate buttons after the first, "cursor" positioning is imprecise at best, and worst of all there's just no substitute for a keyboard.

Honestly, have you even tried one?

I'm pretty high on the "get off my lawn" scale, and while I agree that for doing work, I still prefer a keyboard. But I find I do completely different things on my tablet, and in different ways. And for that, I prefer my tablet.

When I'm planning a trip, I'm using Google Maps, marking points of interest so I have them for later. When I'm reading the daily news, or checking the weather ... I simply don't find myself feeling like I need a keyboard or a mouse.

Sitting on a sofa, or in a comfy chair, or in the back yard, or on a plane ... purely consuming content changes what I'm using it for and how I interact with it.

So, yes, for work nobody is saying most people could replace their laptop or desktop. Well, most people aren't.

But the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming majority of the time, are NOT "getting stuff done". And when I'm not actively working, there are many things I'd prefer to do on my Nexus 7 than I would on a desktop or a laptop.

I know many people, who are not geeks or techies, or who are retired, or any number of things ... and for them, a tablet actually provides more utility that a computer. My mother in law has little interest in using their computer ... she pretty much does everything you'd use a computer for on her tablet. She can get to her email, do her banking, look stuff up on Google, look at maps, and even book a tee time for golf.

And I know many people who are geeks and techies, and outside of office hours, they prefer their tablet for many tasks.

So, in the same way that people find their phones exceedingly useful, people who find a phone too small also find their tablets exceedingly useful.

Not everybody is coding, or writing spreadsheets, or doing the TPS reports ... and for those people, a tablet is actually a good fit.

f all the stories and thing said about quantum computers, especially with the amount of poorly written stuff out there, that is the sentence you highlight when talking about gibberish?

LOL ... honestly, it's as good as any as far as I'm concerned.

It sounds like something out of a mission statement generator ... we've created light with minty and peaty overtones, which exemplify the highest moral standard.

I simply have no idea of WTF it's telling me.

With which I will do ... what, exactly?

"Our device is capable of emitting light with striking quantum mechanical properties never observed in an integrated source," said Bajoni. "The rate at which the entangled photons are generated is unprecedented for a silicon integrated source, and comparable with that available from bulk crystals that must be pumped by very strong lasers."

As usual, every story to do with quantum anything is pretty much gibberish to the layperson.

Sounds like a quantum mood ring, but I have no idea.

Unless Android tablets have also plateaued or started to decline .. can you actually say we've reached "peak tablet"?

The people I know with tablets prefer them to a phone for the things they do with it.

A friend keeps his Nexus 7 on his sofa so that while he's watching TV if he sees something he wants to Google he has it handy. My mother in law uses her tablet for almost everything she'd use a computer for. I still get a lot of use from my Nexus 7 as well.

I admit, my Android tablet isn't a 'necessity', and may not get used daily .. for there's lots of situations in which it's what I'd prefer to bring with me. When I go on a trip, I bring my tablet because I can still check my email and the like.

Yes, you could use a phone for a lot of this stuff ... but unless you have stats showing that Android tablets are also slowing down, maybe they're just eating into the growth of iPads?

I know more than a few non-techies for whom their tablet is more important than their PC.

"But we're very concerned they not lead to the creation of what I would call a 'zone of lawlessness,' where there's evidence that we could have lawful access through a court order that we're prohibited from getting because of a company's technological choices.

You've demonstrated you can't be trusted. The CIA has proven they're willing to lie to Congress.

So the reality is, you're all lying, thieving bastards who ignore the law and our rights.

You got fucking probable cause and a warrant, show it. But you don't get blanket fishing expeditions just in case.

Sorry, but you're asking for back doors to all forms of security ... which defeats the purpose of those forms of security in the first place.

Go piss up a rope.

It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements.

Not really ... without even bothering to look, I'm assuming that Apple is raking in money hand over fist through the iTunes store.

So, it's not all from the devices, but the on-going revenue stream of selling all that tasty digital content.

But music, and books, and movies, and apps, and whatever else they can sell digitally ... I'm betting that's where the real money comes from. The incremental cost on digital stuff probably means that a huge portion of it is purely profit.

The problem with security is it is an on-going process, and it takes time. Which means the trust that you actually are secure also takes time.

So, just because you started out thinking "Oh boy, are we going to be hella secure" -- it takes a long time to FIND all those things which defeat that, and just as long to convince everybody that you've done it.

Almost as soon as I heard of this phone my first thought was "gee, you're brand new, why should be trust that you've got it sorted out".

And, as TFS says ... this phone is used by people who want additional security. What the hell made you think you wouldn't be immediately targeted? This is like advertising you have an unbreakable vault ... now everybody wants to prove you wrong.

I think they started trading on a reputation they hadn't earned yet, and now it's biting them in the ass.