Recent Comments

haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
refrigerator

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/lists/7-hilarious-haiku

Ad blockers these days have subscription lists specifically because just blocking a domain or a pattern was never sufficient. While 1st party ads with non-obvious names will require much more effort, they're still easily blockable. And considering the huge amount of money Adblock Plus has flowing in, they're very much in a position to police it.

I always hated haikus, since the 5th grade. Thanks for the illustrations why -- these are no worse than "real" ones. A load of tripe.

Prose rocks. Falsely imbued meaning via brevity and manufactured mystery is for the weak minded. Haikus are a lower form of poetry than limericks.

Find out the truth of the matter with this one weird trick!

Neither can I, particularly since the US intelligence apparatus has reportedly been used to provide a competitive advantage for US businesses over others.

I cannot see a good reason why they agreed to this.

"The data suggest that longer and larger trials are associated with bigger placebo responses,"

So, really it's not about a greater placebo effect in the US, but longer trials that change the placebo response. This isn't surprising considering how many drugs take several weeks to have any effect at all. The subject assumes that the drug is working better the longer they are on it, regardless of if its a placebo or not. This should not make it "harder for pharmaceutical companies to prove that the drug being tested is more effective than treatment with a placebo" as suggested in the summary, but the normal response to a longer trial.

The FDA's standards for response above placebo are very, very low. They are already looking into changing the rules to exclude drugs that solve the same problem that aren't just "above placebo," but "above what's available." (google "fda comparative effectiveness"). It should be harder to make new drugs that solve the same problem as existing ones: if it's not better, why should people have to pay higher prices for it (new drugs get new patents)?

And of course, I believe them 100%. Just as I believe all advertising messages. :-D

Accomplished Google hacker James Forshaw has given Windows 10 a slight security tick of approval, badging the platform as two-steps-forward, one-step-back affair when compared to version 8.1. Forshaw judged the versions of windows against how many system services and drivers are enabled by default and by security measures implemented in Windows 10. No comparison of Windows 8.1/10 to a BSD or Linux variant was made.

Thanks NordVPN. I love you. From afar. Via credit card. Yearly.

NO SYSTEMD!!!!!!!

If you don't have a very good caring dedicated alert doctor around here then don't bother. The best you can hope for is a 2 or 3 day sick certificate. Get bulk bill if you can. Heaven help you if you actually have a serious disease which is not easily diagnosable or treatable.

"red tube" "private" ??? If there wasn't a link included I would think that someone is pulling a leg here. Seriously.

Please send some help now
I am stuck in a haiku
Die I will in here

Give us garlic bread
lead us not into vegetarianism
deliver us some pizza

Too late, she did reply
My moon has now passed us by
Soon vader you will be

Conquered I now sleep
The mighty tower crashing down
White heaven fluid gushing

Elsewhere you go now
Performing your bad haiku lines
Our ears bleed in sync

I'd nominate this older one:

https://pipedot.org/2SSC

Worst.
Haiku.
Ever.

Thank you.
Let me try...
New line.

On android there were and there still are LOTS of options if your phone is rooted. I have been using adaway on android for a few years. It uses hosts file to blocks ads in browsers, apps etc.

Insert newlines manually using HTML br markup.

Well, the slashdot beta ui made it much harder to read, crap or not.

Ghostery have a mobile browser now

Actually, there were almost no options for mobile ad blocking a short while ago... Both Google and Apple forbid them from the application stores.

Firefox was the only one that held on to its ad blocking extensions, but is a dog on older phones. Now there's a handful of other options in the market, and those with rooted phones can install custom hosts files, but still not a lot of choices.

With Apple opening the floodgates, things may improve for ad blocking on both platforms.

Personally, I tend to consume it as a magazine - only jump to the topics i'm interested in; occasionally i'll take in the whole episode, start to finish - just some topics don't interest me.

But it is nice that there is enough going on in the *BSD world to fill the time each week.

Here the solution:

https://youtu.be/ZaLVAVYSCnQ

Off topic, any idea why newline disappears when I post from Chrome on Android? Everything appears as one long paragraph. Posting from desktop Chromium is fine.

In my opinion, the only certainty is that ads would go back to being intrusive and annoying before very long, as every advertiser tried to outdo each other.

They will have hard time "selling" less intrusive ads back to people. Everybody I know has already tasted the freedom of not having ads thanks to the ad blockers and I am sure that going back to ads would be a step back.What guarantee is there that ads won't start being intrusive again in a while? Intrusive ads are better noticed than other ads and over time they would become dominant again.

You should install an ad blocker on your mobile. Plenty of choices for most of the platforms. No need to prevent loading images or to completely stop js.

It has gotten SO much worse over the last year or two. I spend much of my browsing time on mobile, which until recently had been somewhat of a refuge. Now it's MULTIPLE screen takeovers and autoplay videos with sound on mobile sites, and jiggles and refreshes and jerks as pages try to load, complete with additional takeovers that pop up after you've finally begun reading. Infuriating.

Turning off Javascript (selectively if you can run a Mozilla browser) and turning off images entirely seem like reliable old standbys that help save sanity. I appreciate decent page formatting but 93% of the time I just want to read the damned text.

As to the points above about ad blocking locally hosted ads, it's an arms race certainly. But sites need to track the ads in some way, and most of the time those conventions (naming or script related if not 3rd party hosted) will be discernible in the HTML or perhaps the content of the files or data passed by URL/cookie/etc. Determining the naming or retrieval scheme used by a given site shouldn't be harder than bypassing something like DVD encryption, at worst. It should be manageable at least in the near term.

There's a considerable obstacle to first-party hosting of ads: trusted traffic measurements.

The advertisers pay for views and clicks, after all, and they're not going to trust you to give them honest numbers.

The uptick I've noticed is websites serving ads from their own servers, with URLs that are very similar to their content. I've had the experience multiple times now where I go to create a new block filter and the URL is something like "www.example.com/images/3582351294521.jpg," and all of their visual content is along the lines of "www.example.com/images/3392354894900.jpg." I'm left with the filter "^www.example.com/images/.*" (or creating a more complex, and my-time-consuming, filter based on the html entity containing the ads) and everyone loses.

The more websites that follow this tactic, the less useful ad-blocking filters, as they are designed today, will work.

I found it tiring to listen to the whole podcast, even though I was interested to OpenBSF mail server.

I meant the movie...

Nice article. Cuts to the heart of it: poverty means having to give up others consider essential

The judge argued that it is too difficult to exploit to get the full content of a book, so it does not do any significant harm to the copyright holders. This need not to be true, if no pages are exempt from appearing as search result. The judge might overestimate the difficulty for a specialized program to repeatedly request parts of a book with different search terms and automatically stitch the pieces together.

Bryan did include some relevant ideas:

"automatically created stories generated from popular stream articles." And "share this page" buttons could both help fill the pipe more.

In addition, the pipe does act as a time-suck for me, too, so eliminating that would also help (unless you'd like to jump in). With any luck, readers will see how their direct involvement affects this site and might submit more. If nothing else, it can keep going with an even smaller base and no dedicated editor.

My submissions look a different recently, precisely because I've been submitting from my rss reader on my phone... The final step involves copying to clipboard then submitting via web browser, but it works. An email address for submissions could be nice (though somebody needs to fill in the category) but that last step doesn't take much time.

And just what does any of that have to do with copyright law?

Love this site, and thanks to EvilViper we've had lots of content to read and appreciate. But when EvilViper doesn't post, write, edit, and submit articles, the pipe is otherwise mostly dry. That's this site's single weakness - on the technical side, it's unsurpassed.

If we could make it easier for people to submit articles we could fill up the pipe, get interesting content, and build the user base. But sitting down at a keyboard to write and submit is too much of a hassle, which explains why so few people do it. I'd even say it's a limited risk at this point to establish an email mechanism where you could establish a pipedot whitelist, establish an inbox that routes messages into the queue, and go from there. Point is, we've got to make it easier for people who like |. to populate it with interesting content. When you've got editors writing, submitting, and posting all by themselves, there's a problem.

Would like to reiterate my appreciation for the fact that this site remains focused on science and technology. I still read and like Soylent, but their content is increasingly wandering into social or even political topics that don't interest me at all.

Congrats Brian on a great platform - love the functionality of this site, and it's the only one I can stand to read on a small screen.

Body temperature is 99F, unless the weather is higher than that (which it isn't at NIGHT when people want to sleep), you dont need cooling for comfort.

It is modern society that has made mechanical cooling critical. If you dont live in a huge tight structure that has lots of thermal mass and which blocks airflow, it will cool off quickly at night. If you arent obese, your body will handle high temperatures quite well. If society doesnt frown on you runing around in nothing but a loin cloth, you'll be much more comfortable in much higher (nearing 99F) temperatures.

And even very primitive man knows it stays nice and cool in caves, moist and/or shaded locations, etc. A little shade and evaporative cooling is easy to manage.

This research also seems to undermine the theories pushed by advocates of "segmented sleep", who claim natural sleep patterns involve no more than 4-hour blocks of sleep at a time... That's right, yet again the BBC lied to you:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

Considering the hispanic username, I'd guess it's (most likely) just a cultural thing, with economic implications:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/12/30/the-behavioral-economics-of-mexican-central-heating/

A good read for anybody who has aa few minutes to spare.

People living in the tropics would be more interested in making things cooler than warmer, I reckon.

He could be living in a EER 1 rated space. Or maybe have a serious disease which limits temperature control options. He mite just bee pore. Who nose?

Pre industrial societies have access to fire, too. It would be very easy for them to maintain warmer temperatures.

Your living quarters are COMPLETELY climate uncontrolled? Are you a squatter in an abandoned shipping container?