I'm sure it's coming. The Data Download tool is likely a requirement to satisfy the new GDPR regulation that goes into effect in a month or so, specifically article 20 ( Right to Data Portability: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdpr-info.eu%2Fart-20-gd... ). There is another requirement in the same regulation that guarantees the right to erasure ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgdpr-info.eu%2Fart-17-gd... )

Not sure on Rigel, but I know what they call it in Theta 116: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...

Absolutely not. I only want to ban 80 and 443. Think of all the other ports that could carry useful data though! In this particularly case, I wouldn't want to deprive myself of the notably excellent hollywoodreporter.com gopher space.

More to the point, while I could use my hosts file, I would still need a mechanism to keep it up-to-date with all sites that auto-play audio. Self maintenance would mean that I would have to visit most offending sites at least once, whereas I would like to keep that number much closer to 0.

This is a good analysis of the new Trek movies. However, one can say the same thing of some of the older (particularly TNG) trek movies. Trek TV has always been about exploration, but movies 9 and 10 (and even 8 if you eliminate the Zephram Cochrane arc), for example, had precious little to tickle the curious mind. They were good-guys / bad-guy "action" flicks, but they weren't even good at the action parts. Ever since Star Trek II (the first one), the studio[s] considered it a safe financial bet to just turn Star Trek cinema into a Star Wars clone (but with more people per ship). Heck, even Discovery so far has been way heavy on the war plot.

Well, fair enough - thank you good sir!

Thanks for the suggestion! However, Ghostery looks more like a content filter (to remove trackers, ads, etc.), whereas I don't even want to patronize the site at all. I just want my browser to tell me that it's a garbage site before my browser navigates away so I can move quickly along with the rest of my life.

1. 1. Click on link
2. 2. Immediately video starts playing back with sound
3. 3. Leave page because fuck that.

Can anybody suggest a good plugin that will ban sites that do that shit? I don't even want to show up in their daily-active-user count.

Ahh, good catch! I stand corrected.

It's almost certainly a bubble commodity, but it has been solidly above $1,000 for over 7 months now.

I think the plural is misleading. That's less than 20% of one bitcoin at the time of this comment.

Maybe this works for TPB, but increasingly, websites won't work when you do that. I say this as the lead developer of a single-page-app that most certainly requires javascript. Plus, even without making it a single-page-app, TPB could be trivially rewritten to require js.

You make it sound so tawdry, perhaps because you failed to identify the most important distinction: free as in beer, or as in speech? Many of the people who want "free stuff" are more than happy to buy their media, but only without DRM. People who don't want DRM and do want privacy actually overlap quite nicely.

Haha, a reasonable point to be sure. That being said, companies can have subsidiaries with a more tarnished reputation than their parent. Also, I would claim that one way of measuring the "brand of record" is the domain that shows up first when I Google. In this case, "beatsbydre.com". iPhone, by contrast, returns "apple.com".

Also, I bet if you look outside tech circles, a lot of people don't even know Beats is owned by Apple. There were only two references to Apple on the Beats site that I identified. One was the Apple icon inside the "buy" buttons, and the other was the registration footer with excruciatingly low contrast. Maybe one day when they get renamed to BeatsByCook, I'll reconsider my position.

I think you're playing fast and loose with the word "premium". If you must use an adjective that is not pejorative, I would choose "fashion headphones". When I think "premium", I think Sennheiser, AKG, Shure, Beyerdynamic.

I would have thought the same thing. However, I've been using Bing since the James Damore incident out of curiosity, and it really isn't that bad. I haven't had to do as many technical (i.e. programming) searches since I switched, and that was always Bing's weakness compared to Google, so I reserve full judgement for later. Regardless of what you feel ethically about Google vs Microsoft, it can't be good for any particular search engine to have a near Monopoly in the US.