Another trick is to have a block of commercials, then briefly cut back to the programming, (or even just play a few bars of the theme music), and then dump another block of advertising on you when you rush back to resume watching the show. I’ve noticed similar tactics on the internet too.

Am I unreasonable at feeling real outrage and indignation at being treated this way? Hey, I know somebody has to pay for the show, but these kind of mind games reveal a deep and profound contempt for the audience. These bastards really don’t give a shit about us, do they? They are not in business to sell us entertainment or information. They are in business to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Is it just the Liberal in me that finds this really, really offensive?

Maybe that’s why a Socialist is running for President, and has attracted millions of followers. A lot of people are really getting sick and tired of having their intelligence insulted by these corporate scum bags and sleaze ball capitalists.

One of those same books also described how the firearms industry lobbied for a federal law authorizing a subsidy for firearms purchases to impoverished or poverty communities. The rationale was that the second amendment guaranteed the right of citizens to bear arms, but some citizens were too poor to afford to buy any, so a sort of “gun welfare” bill was passed so that even the underprivileged could be armed too. Kind of affirmative action (gun stamps?) for gun nuts.

Another innovation Brunner predicted was right around the corner was a standardized contract printed on every consumer item, from a can of beans to an automobile, that would protect the manufacturer of the product from legal action by the consumer in the event it was unsafe or otherwise unsatisfactory. The contract was considered signed by the consumer, and its terms accepted, upon purchase of the product.

Think of a Trump, or a Cruz, Supreme Court…the possibilities are endless.

Not crack it, route around it. Same as with subscription walls.

There really isn’t any such thing as an indispensable information source. Some websites and news sources are learning this the hard way.

Do they imagine that somebody who uses an ad blocker would start clicking on ads with wild abandon if only they could see them?

Say, Tom, now that I think about it, I recall some past discussions in which you defended advertising as not just benign but beneficial, you have no objection to it, blah blah blah…and now you admit to using an ad blocker?

What are you, some kind of commie trying to starve our benevolent corporate overlords of their rightful sustenance? No trickle down for you!

Cord-cutting is good, though right now it looks like old-guard media establishment is readying itself for a last stand to protect the tired bundled business model. Dinosaurs like HBO still think of themselves as cable channels, protecting their cable company partners, even as they try to go online with subscription bundles. They never will get it: The thing a cord-cutter hates the most is bundling, whether it’s cable company packages or even a single network insisting you subscribe to all its programming to get the one thing you want.

Give me a la carte video, or give me books. I’m ready to say fuck the corporate media.

But to get back to your original post…OK, Chrome and not Firefox, one theory down. Still, on the face of it, your description of your system does make it sound kind of underpowered. The only thing you can do without upgrading is strip everything down to its essentials. Ad-blocking helps, but there too the old dinosaurs are fighting back: Many sites now detect ad blockers and won’t let you in unless you turn it off. I say eff them too, and go away. I never consented to this shitty economic regime in which I have to depend on third-parties to fund my news and entertainment, and I’d certainly opt-out if I ever have the chance. Next best thing is to be a refusenik whenever I can.

You can get some relief from autorun media in Chrome by going to Settings, Advanced Settings, Plugins, link “manage individual plugins”, and finally locating Flash on the list and disabling it.

But a bigger problem with Chrome is that it’s an outrageous memory hog, and that may be slowing you down. Check the Task Manager to see how much memory it’s using and how much is left. Chrome divides itself into a myriad of parts, each of which consumes what seems like a reasonable amount of memory. But add ‘em all up, and Chrome can easily nuke your computer. And note that it seems to bear no resemblance to your actual usage of Chrome–you may have just one tab open, but Task Manager will show dozens of instances of “chrome”, sometimes adding up to a gigabyte sucked down a black hole.

Firefox is a little more parsimonious with memory, but it too will inexorably grow to the point where you have to restart it.

As an old programmer, I’m offended by the ubiquity of what are obviously memory leaks in browsers. Memory leaks are sheer sloppy coding. When a program consumes ever more memory, and never reduces consumption no matter how little of it you use, you have a memory leak on your hands. There seem to be some surprisingly inept programmers at Google and the Mozilla Foundation.

In the past year or so, many sites began seizing up for me as the site loaded an endless supply of ads and little movies, constantly changing. For someone that can have a couple of dozen tabs running at the same time, this gets annoying. And I do not have a low-power computer.

On Internet Explorer 11, the built-in ad blocker is called “Tracking Protection,” and it works like a charm. I can switch it on and off for specific sites. Sometimes I have to temporarily switch it off to see a YouTube on a site or something.

I only use Chrome for a few sites IE can’t handle, so I’m not as familiar with the options, but there is an AdBlock for Chrome.

The antenna gives me all the major network local affiliates, three PBS stations, plenty of home improvement, old movie and TV series re-runs, Christian and shopping stations and about 40 Spanish language channels. Spanish TV is dreadful, especially when you speak the language, but the babes are hot.

My browser is Chrome.

But there are probably a couple more things going on.

In answer to your question “am I missing something obvious?”, yes, ER, you didn’t mention what browser you’re using. Matters, because I’ve been experiencing this thing with Firefox where it periodically becomes unresponsive, sometimes for minutes at a time. White overlay over the page, the twirling timer cursor…ring any bells? I did a quick google of something like “firefox freeze”, and there seems to be a lot of it going around, but the proposed fixes were too esoteric, and I wanted time to investigate further.

And then there’s the connection to third-parties. Poor page design can allow the FaceSpace and Tweeter and all the other “social media” (read: Titans of surveillance capitalism) buttons and badges. Same with the invisible bugs like Google Analytics. With all that stuff, it needs to be at the end of the page so that if it loads slowly, or not at all, it doesn’t hang up loading the page. When that crap goes bad, pages hang.

Sounds like you might be enjoying a trifecta, ER. I think you need a new computer.

Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. In part because of the same experience I’m having, I’m thinking about buying a new box. In the last few years I’ve invested in a lot of USB peripherals, so I think that this time, instead of the big desktop or floor mounted kitchen sink boxes, I’ll get one of the new miniature boxes, aka “NUC”. Small box like an external drive, just the basic guts: CPU and memory, solid state drive, display, wi-fi, bluetooth for peripherals. And lots of USB ports, so you can just plug in the expansions instead of opening the damn box and plugging in a card or mounting a drive. Pretty much recapitulates the epitome of component stereo.

Funny story: I was talking to my Dad, the venerable Attila the Republican, venerating close on to 90 years, and he started complaining that they don’t make web sites like they used to. Seriously, the Net’s been around that long, that almost-nonagenarians remember when it had a Good Old Days.

Hang in there ER, upgrade your box, and the Web will be young again.