What was the question?

Ad blockers are not immoral. The "economic realities" to which you obsequiously collapse before are.

I haven't found display ads a particularly effective marketing tool. Ad blockers are not the only reason their effectiveness is diminishing. Ads are so ubiquitous that we don't even see them anymore. We have several billboards within blocks of our house, I drive past them every day and couldn't tell you what's on them. It's just noise and we tune it out after a while.

At least when it comes to books, paid reviews and blogs are more effective than display ads. Even if the reviews aren't positive, they're useful if they can explain why they didn't like your book.It's more work but better results. That's also life without display ads. More work.

Best keyboard I ever owned - built like a truck and cost me - I dunno - $65? The two previous keyboards died after about couple years each - with the money I pissed away on them, I could have bought the unicomp...

Who gave the US ownership of the universe.....

God did. That's why when a white, humanoid alien from another planet comes to earth it's perfectly natural that they're going to fight for truth, justice and the American way. God likes us best and the rest of you fereners can suck it. Ha-ha!

Hey, I am fine with industry standing on its own and living or dying by the free market, but since when was letting the government own your liabilities part of the free market vision?

They're just asking for the same deal the insurance industry, defense industry, agriculture, pharmaceutical and banking industries already enjoy. Who paid the tab for the last recession? That would be the government, as in we the people. Who paid to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina or Florida after the last set of hurricanes? It was partly the insurance industry, which threatened to claim bankruptcy if the government didn't pick up most of the tab. Who pays for bad weather that wipes out crops? And who pays when someone loses their job and can't make their mortgage payment? Who paid for broadband infrastructure and then gave it away to telecos to sell at a profit which then started to whine like bitches when it came time for upgrades?

I actually agree that the government shouldn't be on the hook for any of that, at least not indefinitely. The government might have to be the buck of last resort for the private space industry until the risks are understood and private insurance has a structure for coverage. But then there's an accident and the insurance companies threaten to file bankruptcy if they have to shoulder the full burden of the claim and most re-insurers are located offshore, so they're not worried about paying up to the limit of coverage and saying, C' ya!

If the government doesn't shoulder the burden of liability then the private space industry never gets off the ground. On the other hand, we the people deserve some payback if we're providing insurance.

Oculus Rift is this years flavour. No one really cares that much about 3D. I predict it will no longer exist in 3 years.

Never mind - I found it myself. Short answer: either jailbreak the phone or give them your victim's iCloud credentials so they can trawl the backup files.

Say I want to spy on my kid. (I don't, but work with me here.) How would that software work? Short of jailbreaking the phone, I can't imagine what iPhone spyware would look like. Would said kid have a Spy On Me app that she'd need to run from time to time? Even keyboard replacement apps are somewhat vetted in what information they send to their vendors, and I don't think they have access to photos, email, or anything else but the keyboard.

By which you're referring to "Le Show" which covers items in the news and his very well researched documentary "The Big Uneasy" which shows how the Army Corps of Engineers made Hurricane Katrina far worse than it would have been and evades responsibility throughout. Speaking of showing, Shearer backs up his points by quoting and interviewing experts in the relevant fields of discussion and by quoting published hypocrisy from those in power. That's far more backing for his points than I see you giving your views which purport to know what he thinks. In short, you apparently don't think he's funny or insightful but "without actual good context" for anyone to see your views as anything but a name-calling accusation.

OK, I can go along with that. But I've happened across a few current die-hards, and I lump them in with Blackberry users and "the South will rise again!".

Son, it's about time we had a talk.

It says that they make reasonable inferences based on prior experience. It's just an email address, sure, but one associated with a service designed for "people not smart enough to be on the real Internet". For a long time, AOL didn't have Internet access at all, just keywords that took you to an internally hosted web page-like media view. It was generally understood that no one clever enough to grok the Internet would ever settle for constricting AOL access, so its usage came to connote cluelessness. By the time it opened up to the rest of the web, there were many viable local and national competitors.

OK, you're one of the handful of AOL users who picked it for non-clueless reasons. You can't be surprised that the rest of the world sees you as a tiny minority, though, and automatically assumes that @aol.com implies @i-dont-know-what-an-isp-is.net. I don't begrudge you your right to dig in your heels and resist. Hey, I had an Amiga for years after they stopped being cool - I get it! Shine on, crazy contrarian diamond! Your address may very well eventually come around to be hipster-cool and retro, and if so, congratulations! But if it doesn't, well, understand that you made the decision.

FWIW, Gmail's "Mail Fetcher" can be configured to pull mail out of non-Google accounts and into a Gmail inbox. You could start using Gmail today and not miss a single @aol.com email, then gradually transition over a period of days/weeks/years as the legacy email slows to a trickle. I don't personally use Gmail and I'm not trying to push you onto it. I just wanted to point out that you don't have to pick a flag day to switch from one email provider to another. If you decide to transition, it can be as quick or gradual as you feel like that day.

Quite right about how Digital "Rights" Management is a propaganda term designed to frame the issue as though it's okay to take user/reader rights away from them in the switch from one means of seeing media to another. But Mozilla has always framed its work as "open source". So one should expect with "open"ness -- the open source movement is, as Brad Kuhn pointed out recently, the greenwashing movement it was defined to be. The Free Software Foundation has long pointed out how "open source" differs from "free software" (older essay, younger essay). The younger open source movement accepts proprietary software and the older free software movement does not because open source was defined as a proprietor-friendly response to the user freedom-seeking social movement.

Get yourself a cheap PC and install Squid on it, then configure all your browsers, etc. to use that as a proxy. Think of it as a huge, multi-user, multi-platform, multi-browser shared cache. If you find an interesting article on CNN and share it with your wife/roommate/dog, there's no need for them to re-download the entire thing. You can also switch from, say, Chrome to Firefox if a page doesn't render as expected and not have to refetch all of it. Once one person on your LAN fetches http://example.com/image.gif, you all get the benefit of having it stored on your own network.

This made a slow connection at a previous house almost tolerable. It's not a cure-all but I'd stake cash that you'd see a noticeable improvement in routine browsing.