10:10 – Is it just me, or is the new CNN website just about unusable? In the past, I’ve visited that site to keep an eye on what the leftie/progressive statists are up to, just as I visit the Foxnews site to keep an eye on what the religious-right statists are up to. But CNN is now so cluttered that I suspect they’ll see a huge drop-off in traffic, not that that’d be a bad thing. Turner’s news operations have been going downhill ever since the good old days when Bill Tush read the “news” with a paper bag over his head.
It’s supposed to get a bit chilly here by mid-week, with forecast lows about 10F (-12C). That’s dangerously cold around here, where many people don’t own suitable coats and the furnaces in many homes are insufficient to cope. I’m sure the new homeless shelter downtown will be packed to capacity, as will the churches that also take in homeless people during very cold weather.
We are -30C (wind chill -37C) this morning in Edmonton. Fortunately I have heated indoor parking.
-Ron Snider
Re: New CNN website. It isn’t just you. The site is horrible: the text crawl at the bottom of the page is maddening; the other “features” are equally annoying (large fonts, huge “posterish” photos used as links, and on and on). I’ve had CNN as my home page for years, but now I’m seriously considering a change.
The Weather Channel homepage (www.weather.com) is just as bad…
CNN is obviously desperate. FoxNews is far and away the #1 news website, with CNN and MSNBC fighting it out for a far-distant second place. I understand that MSNBC beat CNN in the latest ratings, so obviously CNN decided that they needed to Do Something.
What they should have done was fire all their leftie/progressive editors and reporters, but instead they shot themselves in both feet by using a completely incompetent website “designer” to butcher their site.
Yeah, I stopped using the Weather Channel website years ago.
Just for fun I looked at CNN (never do). I have NoSctipt addon to FireFox (as well as adblock plus) and that obviously helps. I brought it up in Chrome and yes it’s pretty damn bad. Wayyyyy too much Flash going on.
I’m surprised you run a browser with scripts allowed (if you do). I’ve become so I don’t even realize how much crap is stopped. Sometimes you have to grant temporary permissions to see something and anytime I use something like Chrome I sure see the difference.
No, I run Firefox with NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and Flashblock, and it’s still terrible. I haven’t even looked at it with Chrome.
I’ve visited that site to keep an eye on what the leftie/progressive statists are up to, just as I visit the Foxnews site to keep an eye on what the religious-right statists are up to.
You used the term “communist” yesterday to describe Harry Reid. The term “statist” is more appropriate.
Rick in Portland
RBT, your comment on blocking add-ons is golden and IMHO a must install.
I have only been using AdBlock Plus.
I installed NoScript and Flashblock and was amazed at the amount of scripts that there are. No wonder page loads are so slow with many sites running 20, 40, and more scripts. 99.99% of these scripts have no business running, they add nothing and are there just to feed you crap and follow you.
I am humbled that I have not run across these add-ons (NoScript and FlashBlock) before. This old dog learned some valuable new tricks today.
Thanks.
@Mr. DadCooks, and anyone else interested:
https://securityinabox.org/
Scroll down to the Firefox add-on info, but there’s a ton of other useful intel here, though designed mainly for activists and dissidents worldwide.
“US Debt Soars By $100 Billion On Last Day Of 2014, Hits Record $18.14 Trillion”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-02/us-debt-soars-100-billion-last-day-2014-hits-record-1814-trillion
“As of the last day of 2014, total US debt soared by $98 billion in one day (driven again by Social Security debt surging on the last day of the month to a record $5.117 trillion), and closing off 2014 with a new all time high total of $18.141 trillion in Federal debt – an increase of $136 billion in the month of December and $790 billion for all of 2014.”
Wow, just wow. You know, a few more bucks on this and the options to handle this massive debt are going away. Inflate or repudiate will just be the only solutions then.
With NoScript, you don’t need Flashblock, as NoScript also has that functionality.
For a quick read on Firefox and those (and other) useful add-ons,
Firefox with add-ons – Secure Web Browser
If you configure Firefox similar to that guide’s instructions, “www.cnn.com” also commits another sin,
“Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page.”
.mg
“…Inflate or repudiate will just be the only solutions then.”
They’ll continue inflating until they have no choice but to repudiate, i.e., the Great Default. I’m thinking there is gonna be some kind of major shift by next summer in the global financial situation but am not entirely clear on how it will shake out. It won’t be pretty or a good thing, though, not for us Mundanes.
It’s patriotards, phony pro-war conservatives and Tea Party buffoons who stay glued to Faux Nooz Nitwits, and I hear them reciting almost verbatim the official “party” platform all the time now. The other side sucks up the rubbish and gruel served by CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the NYT and their phony “intellectuals” go those Aspen and TED conferences and jack each other off when they’re not bloviating about how the rest of us should live our lives.
@OFD – thanks for another gem of a website.
@Mr. DadCooks; enjoy; it’s worth reading in its entirety, which doesn’t take that long. Most folks won’t go the whole route and others can’t or won’t wanna spend the time and effort, but may have the bucks for this:
https://secure.cryptohippie.com/
A little spendy but worth it if one just doesn’t wanna hassle with all the bits and bytes in the PC security buckets. Works out to around $30/month, which is fah less than most pay for their cable/net/tee-vee bundles. I’ve used it and had zero complaints, for the Windows machines here; Mrs. OFD was slightly confounded a few times when the Google page on Chrome turned up in German, as did occasional other pages, because they’re bouncing your bits and bytes through various furrin server farms. Those pages, incidentally, usually have an option, not always easy to find, for rendering it in God’s Own English, which I just read in the WSJ will forever be the dominant language in the world.
As it should be.
Beginning of the PRCs (public residential complexes)?
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/27755680/shipping-container-home-readying-for-detroit-debut
Seeing as how it corroborates what he posted here not too long ago about the virtues of English, Chuck W (among others) might also enjoy that WSJ article:
What the World Will Speak in 2115
“Beginning of the PRCs (public residential complexes)?”
Rack ’em and stack ’em, a mile high, in all the Murkan metropoles, to accomodate the vast hordes we’re allowing in from all over the world now, sky’s the friggin’ limit! Come one, come all, all ye masses struggling and yearning to breathe free, yeah, baby!
That is, once the current occupants of more “upscale” housing have been sent packing or killed off and those housing stocks have been exhausted.
I still see lots and lots of houses, big ones, too, that have been recently built and remain unoccupied up here. Also LOTS of others that have been on the market for many moons and remain unsold. To hear tell, everybody’s jest a’hankerin’ to move back into the cities, young and old alike, for their easy proximity to stores, meds, restaurants and that ol’ debbil night life.
Lemmings. When the balloon goes up, as it surely will someday, those cities will be utter death traps.
English has no virtues: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#.22The_Purity_of_the_English_Language.22
Seen dat quote before. Here, in fact.
And ain’t nuthin’ wrong wid dat.
English has somewhere around a million words; the closest runner-up, Chinese, has less than half that. Everybody is, or will be, speaking English, if not writing it in the eloquent and elegant style with which I deign to adorn this board. Hell, not everybody can be “hyper-literate” ya know.
Princess knows around seven or eight languages; she’s taking Advanced Russian this next year while spending most of it in Leipzig. My choices for “foreign” languages as an aging adult were Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, Medieval and Classical Latin, Old French, Medieval Italian and now I’m messing with Classical Greek. She picks up these things in a week or two; takes me a bit longer.
As it will for CSS3/HTML5, PHP and MySQL, and a couple of apps new to me.
Keeps what’s left of the brain active, I guess.
Didn’t have to drive her up to Montreal tonight; we agreed it would be easier and less of a hassle tomorrow morning; we’ve had very strong winds and a continuing mix of rain and sleet since yesterday. This will all freeze up very nicely over this week when the temps drop below ZERO. I will be RUTHLESSLY loading wood into the stove all week I reckon.
It is bitterly cold here in the Land of Sugar at 38 F and dropping. We are forecast to drop to 31 F on Wednesday night which will be extremely cold for us. My pool pump turns on at 36 F to keep the system from freezing which will probably happen later tonight.
Hope we, the USA, will burn up a little bit of the excess natural gas and oil for heating this month. Gasoline down at my favorite Shell station, the cheap one, is $1.95/gallon today. Unfraking real!
And yes, I have posted that James Nicoll quote here before. It is a truism, worthy of multiple references and postings. BTW, James is a wordsmith and has corrected me several times on my science fiction notes, YASID (yet another story id) guesses, and overall impressions of books. He is rereading all 50 Andre Norton books at the moment. He reread all the Heinlein juveniles in his last review cycle.
For the Chrome users out there: instead of “NoScript” you can apparently go to “settings”, hunt down “content settings” (may be under the advanced settings), and then select “Do not allow any sites to run JavaScript”. I’m just now trying this for the first time – be interesting to see how many websites require an exception…
BTW you should definitely disable “third party cookies” in whatever browser you use. These are pretty much only used by trackers and advertising.
I use Weather Underground for my weather updates. IIRC, it’s now owned by Weather Channel, but they have mostly left it alone. One of my former bosses has his weather station as part of their reporting network. He’s got the ususal stuff (wind, rain, temp) along with solar irradiance, a webcam, and a lightning detector. As a former Naval officer, he’s a weather watcher.
I’m using JavaScript Blocker on Mac Safari.
I have turned off Flash in Firefox on my PCs. You get these weird holes in the screens but no annoying nonsense. And it is easy to turn on temporarily.
That will teach me to read for content–OFD posted the parent link for Security in-a-box a few comments prior. Apropos language,
Up Goer Five
.mg
I was gonna just post the Firefox-related link but thought the parent link would be more useful and lead to more interesting reading.
I won’t be escaping to space or some other planet when it all goes sour down here; ditto the so-called Rapture. We done gone and we ain’t goin’ no further; this is it.