I agree that people respond differently to online writing than they do to what appears in print, and I even agree with you about the reasons why. My problem is with the response to this phenomenon. When someone gets sued or fired for an offhand remark, in any medium, our response ought to be, "That's not right!" rather than, "Deal with it, that's the way it is."
Or do what I do: post under your real name (and my name is rare enough that it's pretty easy for anyone who wants to find out about me to do so) and take the risk.
It's a real risk, I acknowledge that. It shouldn't be, any more than writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper back in the days when that was the main way for people to get their political opinions out to the world, but I know it is. But there are benefits as well. For one thing, there are probably just as many people who share my opinions as disagree with them. People who would, say, deny me a job because I expressed a political opinion are probably people who are looking for an excuse to fire me anyway (or wouldn't hire me in the first place.) And maybe most importantly, I can take a certain amount of pride in knowing that I'm attaching my name to my words. If an opinion is important enough for me to express in a public forum, then it's important enough for me to say "I say this."
All that being said, of course we need an option for anonymity, to protect whistleblowers and the like. But the assumption that posting under a screen name is always the best way to go strikes me as kind of distasteful.
Yes, just like in the real world, if you criticize someone on the Internet they can slapp you with a lawsuit designed to silence critics
You do realize, don't you, that "SLAPP" is a derogatory slang term? No one describes a suit they're filing as a SLAPP, nor does any law (AFAIK) outline the grounds and procedures for filing such a suit. Note that I'm not saying it's not a useful description of some types of lawsuits, but labeling any libel/slander/restraint-of-trade suit as such dilutes the term to the point of meaninglessness.
So, there's no difference, in the same way that the printing press was really just a minor improvement over scribes. Yup, no big deal at all!
Of course there's a difference; I think most people would agree that being able to publish anything you want on the web, and reach a worldwide audience almost instantaneously, is as large a change as being able to print documents over and over at relatively low cost, instead of having to make copies by hand.
But with respect to this particular issue, the difference isn't -- or shouldn't be -- all that great. I used to write a lot of letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, and fairly often they got published. In those letters, I was never shy about expressing my opinions in pretty strong words. Anyone who fired or sued me over those letters would have been rightly condemned. We should apply the same standard to online communication as we do to printed and hand-written: there is a very narrow range of writing over which you can go after someone in any substantial way.
Ah, full-scale language support is an aspect I hadn't thought of, and yeah, I can see how that would add a lot of complexity. Thanks; that's the kind of specific problem I was looking for.
As for SCORM, at first glance I have to say that it looks like an absurdly complex specification for something that ought to be a lot simpler. Which is a problem not unique to LMSs, of course.
it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas
It's okay for people to want to make money off just about anything, including sitting on their asses all day reading/.
However, We The People are not obligated to provide them with legal avenues for doing so.
In the specific case of "making money off ideas" -- no. Ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. Most of them are clearly silly and impractical, some of them seem to make some sense, and a few would probably be useful (and lucrative) if I put the time and effort into developing them. But making them from a passing thought into an actual product takes a hell of a lot of work. Until I've shown that I am willing and able to do that work, I really don't have the right to tell anyone else that their similar ideas, and work to turn those ideas into something valuable in the real world, are off-limits. Or rather, I have the right to tell them that, but they are under no obligation to listen, and neither are the courts.
The claim that ideas alone are of such sacred value that they must be carefully protected from the moment of their inception is a deeply pernicious one, which has done enormous damage to our economy and society. "Capitalists" who insist that the law interfere with the free market in such a manner are making a mockery of the principles they claim to hold.
Which makes me wonder -- why is it that LMSs in general seem to suck so much? I mean, the basic functionality isn't hard; it's the kind of thing that lots of database-driven web apps do. It seems to me that most schools would be better off paying some junior- and senior-level CS students to roll their own than using pretty much any of the prepackaged "solutions," whether proprietary or OSS. Are there hidden complexities that I'm just not seeing? Can anyone who's ever worked on an LMS explain what some of the challenges are?
my Nokia 810 and iphone kicks the crap out of any wearable I have had over the past 15 years in my personal research.
And your typical smartphone kicks the crap out of the typical desktop computer from a decade ago. Do you see any reason to think this trend (smaller + more powerful) won't continue?
Snow Crash tech is only useful for plugging in when you are a blob of goo at home never leaving your chair. The raging BS about logging in while riding his motorcycle will never exist as I could not even stand the speed and status info in my helmet when I used to race.
Fighter pilots have been using heads-up displays for almost half a century, and at this point, the view from inside a modern fighter cockpit looks more like a virtual world than it does like the real one. The same thing is happening in commercial aviation, and just starting to happen with driving and motorcycling. Maybe you didn't like your HUD, but I can almost guarantee you that future racers won't feel the same way. It's just a matter of what you're used to.
The word is Skeptic, not Denialist. Denialist is clearly an emotionally loaded word designed to evoke thoughts of Holocaust deniers. Anyone who uses it has Godwined themselves.
A skeptic is someone who says, "Well, that seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence." A denialist is someone who says, "NYAAH NYAAH NYAAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU" when presented with overwhelming evidence. They are not the same thing. As for the Godwin charge: yes, people who claim the Holocaust didn't happen are clearly denialists (in some cases; in other cases, they're out-and-out anti-Semites who know perfectly well that it happened, think it was a fine and dandy idea, and would like to see more of that sort of thing, but know that it makes for bad PR.) But they're not the only denialists out there, and in fact the denialist mentality is seen in a lot of areas, perhaps more often when dealing with science than with politics.
Denialism can happen any time people are confronted with a reality that makes them uncomfortable. Climate change and evolution seem to be the big two right now, but there are small-but-active groups devoted to denying just about any science that contradicts our "common sense" view of the world -- relativity, quantum mechanics, archaeological finds that contradict various religions' origin cherished myths, etc. On the surface it may seem like skepticism, but it's not, because it's a completely emotional response. So if the word is "emotionally loaded," then too bad; find me a word to describe the emotionally loaded behavior of people that isn't.
All of the proposed plans are based on the arguably flawed assumption that humans can add significant value in flexibility over current robotic explorers. Which is clearly not the case based on experiences with the mars rovers and similar devices.
What you're describing is an experiment with no control. In other words, no, it is not "clearly not the case" that humans can do a better job than robots; the only way to find out is to send humans there and compare the results. Asserting that robots can do just as good a job as humans doesn't make it so.
My father was a NASA engineer on Apollo, and according to him they were actively planning for a Moon base as a follow-on, right up to the point where the whole thing got canceled. Not a clickable link, I know, but you know, personally I find it pretty strong evidence...
You'll know when your people are ready for statistics. . . don't even bother trying until state-run lotteries go broke for lack of players.
Er, not really. The usual cost-benefit, expected-payoff analysis doesn't really work when you're talking about extreme examples like winning the lottery, at least not with huge payoffs measured in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. You can know, perfectly well, that the ROI on a lottery ticket is less than the cost of the ticket, and still consider it a perfectly rational investment.
If I buy $150 worth of groceries and throw in a $1 lottery ticket on top of it, the effective cost to me is zero. I'm never going to notice that dollar being gone. Not having that dollar is going to make no difference to my life. But in the (exceedingly unlikely, yes) event that I win a $100 million jackpot, the payoff is damn near infinite. Having that kind of money can't really be compared to, say, getting a raise, or seeing your stocks go up in the market. It's just on a whole different scale.
So in short: infinity - (0 * 10^-9) = infinity. Don't assume that everyone who buys a lottery ticket is ignorant. Actually, I suspect most people who buy lottery tickets are making this kind of calculation, even if they're not doing the numbers quite as explicitly.
Here's an example in the opposite direction, which I think will make things a little more clear. Suppose I were to set up a "reverse lottery," which works as follows. You have, let's say, a net worth of $100,000. If you sign up for my lottery, I pay you a dollar. Then you pick six numbers between 1 and 10, I draw six balls out of urns, and if the numbers match... I take everything you own. Your house, your car, your computer, the clothes off your back. You're turned out on the street.
In probabilistic terms, it would make perfect sense for you to play. 1 - (100000 * 10^-6) = 0.9, which means that the game has a positive expected payoff. In fact, it would make sense for you to play a lot, up to whatever limit is allowed, let's say once a day. But would you do it? I kind of doubt you would, because every day, you'd be looking at that one-in-a-million chance of having your life shattered. Most people would consider that a bad risk, no matter what the raw numbers say. And people who play the lottery consider it a pretty good risk for the same reason.
I work in academia, of course. My salary comes from NIH grants. And that, my friend, is how the vast bulk of basic science research gets done.
You want applications of scientific knowledge? Industry is great at that. And when corporate researchers come up with a novel, useful, and non-obvious way to apply knowledge in a specific way to a specific problem, patents are a great way to keep such work going. Getting the knowledge in the first place... not so much.
Look, I want people to make money off my work. If one of my papers ever gets mentioned in a good patent on a diagnostic or treatment that actually helps people, I'll be overjoyed. That's why I do what I do. Do I want a decent paycheck? Of course I do. But if the paycheck were all I cared about, believe me, there are easier ways to make a living. I walked away from a steady, secure, well-paid, and generally quite enjoyable DBA job to go back to grad school, and although I regret the loss of income, I don't regret the decision itself at all.
Science is a public good. Treating the fruits of science as property pretty much guarantees that science, as we mean the word in modern usage, does not happen. If we want the benefits of our ever-increasing knowledge of the natural world, we have to make that knowledge as widely usable as possible.
Talk to your university legal department immediately.
I'm serious. Okay, first, get together with your department chair and maybe your dean. Talk to your collaborators and their bosses at the other university, too. Make sure everyone understands what a major problem this is. Then sit down with the lawyers. If you can convince them that this is a serious threat to your institution, there's a good chance they'll sign on to the case. Is your work NIH-funded? Then they might get on board too.
Academic researchers -- you know, the people who actually create the knowledge which IP vultures try to scavenge -- need to start fighting back. It doesn't mean we should try to take up every case that offends us, however tempting that may be. It does mean that when we hear about a case that might directly affect our work, we should see if there's something we can do.
On the other hand, the research surrounding statistical analysis of correlation between diseases and body diagnostics will surely skyrocket as people race to patent these things.
Speaking as someone who does this kind of research for a living, I can tell you that patentability is neither necessary nor desirable to spur research in the field.
I think this would mean that you would have to carefully plan your meals -- times, portions, specific foods -- for the rest of your life. Or die of starvation and never even be aware of it.
It would work, sure, but it really strikes me as a case of the cure being worse than the disease. And if you are capable of putting that kind of care into your diet, you can probably lose weight without burning out a part of your brain.
Yes, which was kind of my point -- KHTML and Gecko are both widely used, and any web developer who doesn't know what rendering engines are generally and support the most widely used ones is profoundly ignorant. But there are a lot of profoundly ignorant, IE-only web developers out there. To be fair, there are probably just as many knowledgeable web developers with profoundly ignorant bosses. The end result is the same.
You could try explaining KHTML to these people with the example of the iPhone, but they'd probably just give you a blank stare.
If it is intentional, then my question becomes as follows: Why would a reasonable site owner only want to support Firefox?
You're assuming "reasonable."
The thought process (if it may be dignified with such a term) goes something like this, I suspect. These are sites which, until fairly recently, only supported IE. The developers only ever use IE, it's all they know, and they don't really want to know about anything else. As far as they're concerned, the big blue E is the internet. Yes, there are Windows web developers who think like this. Lots of them.
But there's this weird "Firefox" thing they've heard about, it's too popular for them to ignore completely, so they'll grudgingly kinda-sorta support it. If Firefox users are very lucky, the developers may have a little-used copy of Firefox on their machines which they will use to skim through the site after it's been built using IE. And if it looks okay, then they can say, "We support Firefox too!"
Anything else is just beyond their ken. Rendering engine? Gecko? KHTML? What the hell are those? Look, we made our site work for you weirdos who don't want to just use the big blue E like everyone else does. Get off our backs. Jeez.
Maybe some flower-snorting soldier-hating just-give-peace-a-chance idiot with no sense of reality has mod points today.
Given the tone of GPP's post, I think it's more likely he was modded down by some 101st Fighting Keyboarders type who thinks he's being bold and patriotic by putting a "Support The Troops" magnetic ribbon on his SUV, and war is the coolest thing EVAR as long as someone else does the dying. There are a lot more of those out there than there are the naive hippies, and they tend to react badly to having their macho illusion-bubble punctured.
This may come as a shock to you, but test pilots aren't actively suicidal. They accept the risk of death as part of their job, sure, but they do this in order to make the craft they fly safer.
"Politically incorrect"? "Media coverage"? Jesus. Dying on the job is unpopular because it involves, you know, dying on the job. And when three men burn to death with hundreds of others listening to their screams, most sane people take that as a sign that something needs to be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we beat the dinosaurs was the fact that dinosaurs don't do well at all in colder climates.
The penguins disagree.
I agree that people respond differently to online writing than they do to what appears in print, and I even agree with you about the reasons why. My problem is with the response to this phenomenon. When someone gets sued or fired for an offhand remark, in any medium, our response ought to be, "That's not right!" rather than, "Deal with it, that's the way it is."
Or do what I do: post under your real name (and my name is rare enough that it's pretty easy for anyone who wants to find out about me to do so) and take the risk.
It's a real risk, I acknowledge that. It shouldn't be, any more than writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper back in the days when that was the main way for people to get their political opinions out to the world, but I know it is. But there are benefits as well. For one thing, there are probably just as many people who share my opinions as disagree with them. People who would, say, deny me a job because I expressed a political opinion are probably people who are looking for an excuse to fire me anyway (or wouldn't hire me in the first place.) And maybe most importantly, I can take a certain amount of pride in knowing that I'm attaching my name to my words. If an opinion is important enough for me to express in a public forum, then it's important enough for me to say "I say this."
All that being said, of course we need an option for anonymity, to protect whistleblowers and the like. But the assumption that posting under a screen name is always the best way to go strikes me as kind of distasteful.
Yes, just like in the real world, if you criticize someone on the Internet they can slapp you with a lawsuit designed to silence critics
You do realize, don't you, that "SLAPP" is a derogatory slang term? No one describes a suit they're filing as a SLAPP, nor does any law (AFAIK) outline the grounds and procedures for filing such a suit. Note that I'm not saying it's not a useful description of some types of lawsuits, but labeling any libel/slander/restraint-of-trade suit as such dilutes the term to the point of meaninglessness.
So, there's no difference, in the same way that the printing press was really just a minor improvement over scribes. Yup, no big deal at all!
Of course there's a difference; I think most people would agree that being able to publish anything you want on the web, and reach a worldwide audience almost instantaneously, is as large a change as being able to print documents over and over at relatively low cost, instead of having to make copies by hand.
But with respect to this particular issue, the difference isn't -- or shouldn't be -- all that great. I used to write a lot of letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, and fairly often they got published. In those letters, I was never shy about expressing my opinions in pretty strong words. Anyone who fired or sued me over those letters would have been rightly condemned. We should apply the same standard to online communication as we do to printed and hand-written: there is a very narrow range of writing over which you can go after someone in any substantial way.
Ah, full-scale language support is an aspect I hadn't thought of, and yeah, I can see how that would add a lot of complexity. Thanks; that's the kind of specific problem I was looking for.
As for SCORM, at first glance I have to say that it looks like an absurdly complex specification for something that ought to be a lot simpler. Which is a problem not unique to LMSs, of course.
it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas
It's okay for people to want to make money off just about anything, including sitting on their asses all day reading /.
However, We The People are not obligated to provide them with legal avenues for doing so.
In the specific case of "making money off ideas" -- no. Ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. Most of them are clearly silly and impractical, some of them seem to make some sense, and a few would probably be useful (and lucrative) if I put the time and effort into developing them. But making them from a passing thought into an actual product takes a hell of a lot of work. Until I've shown that I am willing and able to do that work, I really don't have the right to tell anyone else that their similar ideas, and work to turn those ideas into something valuable in the real world, are off-limits. Or rather, I have the right to tell them that, but they are under no obligation to listen, and neither are the courts.
The claim that ideas alone are of such sacred value that they must be carefully protected from the moment of their inception is a deeply pernicious one, which has done enormous damage to our economy and society. "Capitalists" who insist that the law interfere with the free market in such a manner are making a mockery of the principles they claim to hold.
Which makes me wonder -- why is it that LMSs in general seem to suck so much? I mean, the basic functionality isn't hard; it's the kind of thing that lots of database-driven web apps do. It seems to me that most schools would be better off paying some junior- and senior-level CS students to roll their own than using pretty much any of the prepackaged "solutions," whether proprietary or OSS. Are there hidden complexities that I'm just not seeing? Can anyone who's ever worked on an LMS explain what some of the challenges are?
Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
The above sentence contains two statements. One of these statements is true, and one is false. Please indicate which is which, and submit your answer.
Thank you for the most brilliant and succint refutation of the "viral GPL" nonsense I've ever seen.
my Nokia 810 and iphone kicks the crap out of any wearable I have had over the past 15 years in my personal research.
And your typical smartphone kicks the crap out of the typical desktop computer from a decade ago. Do you see any reason to think this trend (smaller + more powerful) won't continue?
Snow Crash tech is only useful for plugging in when you are a blob of goo at home never leaving your chair. The raging BS about logging in while riding his motorcycle will never exist as I could not even stand the speed and status info in my helmet when I used to race.
Fighter pilots have been using heads-up displays for almost half a century, and at this point, the view from inside a modern fighter cockpit looks more like a virtual world than it does like the real one. The same thing is happening in commercial aviation, and just starting to happen with driving and motorcycling. Maybe you didn't like your HUD, but I can almost guarantee you that future racers won't feel the same way. It's just a matter of what you're used to.
The word is Skeptic, not Denialist. Denialist is clearly an emotionally loaded word designed to evoke thoughts of Holocaust deniers. Anyone who uses it has Godwined themselves.
A skeptic is someone who says, "Well, that seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence." A denialist is someone who says, "NYAAH NYAAH NYAAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU" when presented with overwhelming evidence. They are not the same thing. As for the Godwin charge: yes, people who claim the Holocaust didn't happen are clearly denialists (in some cases; in other cases, they're out-and-out anti-Semites who know perfectly well that it happened, think it was a fine and dandy idea, and would like to see more of that sort of thing, but know that it makes for bad PR.) But they're not the only denialists out there, and in fact the denialist mentality is seen in a lot of areas, perhaps more often when dealing with science than with politics.
Denialism can happen any time people are confronted with a reality that makes them uncomfortable. Climate change and evolution seem to be the big two right now, but there are small-but-active groups devoted to denying just about any science that contradicts our "common sense" view of the world -- relativity, quantum mechanics, archaeological finds that contradict various religions' origin cherished myths, etc. On the surface it may seem like skepticism, but it's not, because it's a completely emotional response. So if the word is "emotionally loaded," then too bad; find me a word to describe the emotionally loaded behavior of people that isn't.
All of the proposed plans are based on the arguably flawed assumption that humans can add significant value in flexibility over current robotic explorers. Which is clearly not the case based on experiences with the mars rovers and similar devices.
What you're describing is an experiment with no control. In other words, no, it is not "clearly not the case" that humans can do a better job than robots; the only way to find out is to send humans there and compare the results. Asserting that robots can do just as good a job as humans doesn't make it so.
Do you have a citation for this?
My father was a NASA engineer on Apollo, and according to him they were actively planning for a Moon base as a follow-on, right up to the point where the whole thing got canceled. Not a clickable link, I know, but you know, personally I find it pretty strong evidence ...
You'll know when your people are ready for statistics. . . don't even bother trying until state-run lotteries go broke for lack of players.
Er, not really. The usual cost-benefit, expected-payoff analysis doesn't really work when you're talking about extreme examples like winning the lottery, at least not with huge payoffs measured in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. You can know, perfectly well, that the ROI on a lottery ticket is less than the cost of the ticket, and still consider it a perfectly rational investment.
If I buy $150 worth of groceries and throw in a $1 lottery ticket on top of it, the effective cost to me is zero. I'm never going to notice that dollar being gone. Not having that dollar is going to make no difference to my life. But in the (exceedingly unlikely, yes) event that I win a $100 million jackpot, the payoff is damn near infinite. Having that kind of money can't really be compared to, say, getting a raise, or seeing your stocks go up in the market. It's just on a whole different scale.
So in short: infinity - (0 * 10^-9) = infinity. Don't assume that everyone who buys a lottery ticket is ignorant. Actually, I suspect most people who buy lottery tickets are making this kind of calculation, even if they're not doing the numbers quite as explicitly.
Here's an example in the opposite direction, which I think will make things a little more clear. Suppose I were to set up a "reverse lottery," which works as follows. You have, let's say, a net worth of $100,000. If you sign up for my lottery, I pay you a dollar. Then you pick six numbers between 1 and 10, I draw six balls out of urns, and if the numbers match ... I take everything you own. Your house, your car, your computer, the clothes off your back. You're turned out on the street.
In probabilistic terms, it would make perfect sense for you to play. 1 - (100000 * 10^-6) = 0.9, which means that the game has a positive expected payoff. In fact, it would make sense for you to play a lot, up to whatever limit is allowed, let's say once a day. But would you do it? I kind of doubt you would, because every day, you'd be looking at that one-in-a-million chance of having your life shattered. Most people would consider that a bad risk, no matter what the raw numbers say. And people who play the lottery consider it a pretty good risk for the same reason.
I work in academia, of course. My salary comes from NIH grants. And that, my friend, is how the vast bulk of basic science research gets done.
You want applications of scientific knowledge? Industry is great at that. And when corporate researchers come up with a novel, useful, and non-obvious way to apply knowledge in a specific way to a specific problem, patents are a great way to keep such work going. Getting the knowledge in the first place ... not so much.
Look, I want people to make money off my work. If one of my papers ever gets mentioned in a good patent on a diagnostic or treatment that actually helps people, I'll be overjoyed. That's why I do what I do. Do I want a decent paycheck? Of course I do. But if the paycheck were all I cared about, believe me, there are easier ways to make a living. I walked away from a steady, secure, well-paid, and generally quite enjoyable DBA job to go back to grad school, and although I regret the loss of income, I don't regret the decision itself at all.
Science is a public good. Treating the fruits of science as property pretty much guarantees that science, as we mean the word in modern usage, does not happen. If we want the benefits of our ever-increasing knowledge of the natural world, we have to make that knowledge as widely usable as possible.
Talk to your university legal department immediately.
I'm serious. Okay, first, get together with your department chair and maybe your dean. Talk to your collaborators and their bosses at the other university, too. Make sure everyone understands what a major problem this is. Then sit down with the lawyers. If you can convince them that this is a serious threat to your institution, there's a good chance they'll sign on to the case. Is your work NIH-funded? Then they might get on board too.
Academic researchers -- you know, the people who actually create the knowledge which IP vultures try to scavenge -- need to start fighting back. It doesn't mean we should try to take up every case that offends us, however tempting that may be. It does mean that when we hear about a case that might directly affect our work, we should see if there's something we can do.
On the other hand, the research surrounding statistical analysis of correlation between diseases and body diagnostics will surely skyrocket as people race to patent these things.
Speaking as someone who does this kind of research for a living, I can tell you that patentability is neither necessary nor desirable to spur research in the field.
I think this would mean that you would have to carefully plan your meals -- times, portions, specific foods -- for the rest of your life. Or die of starvation and never even be aware of it.
It would work, sure, but it really strikes me as a case of the cure being worse than the disease. And if you are capable of putting that kind of care into your diet, you can probably lose weight without burning out a part of your brain.
The MAFIAA, yes.
The Mafia, probably not.
It's an easy mistake to make, I know.
Google Solar System, sure. Google Galaxy is still a looong way off.
Yes, which was kind of my point -- KHTML and Gecko are both widely used, and any web developer who doesn't know what rendering engines are generally and support the most widely used ones is profoundly ignorant. But there are a lot of profoundly ignorant, IE-only web developers out there. To be fair, there are probably just as many knowledgeable web developers with profoundly ignorant bosses. The end result is the same.
You could try explaining KHTML to these people with the example of the iPhone, but they'd probably just give you a blank stare.
If it is intentional, then my question becomes as follows: Why would a reasonable site owner only want to support Firefox?
You're assuming "reasonable."
The thought process (if it may be dignified with such a term) goes something like this, I suspect. These are sites which, until fairly recently, only supported IE. The developers only ever use IE, it's all they know, and they don't really want to know about anything else. As far as they're concerned, the big blue E is the internet. Yes, there are Windows web developers who think like this. Lots of them.
But there's this weird "Firefox" thing they've heard about, it's too popular for them to ignore completely, so they'll grudgingly kinda-sorta support it. If Firefox users are very lucky, the developers may have a little-used copy of Firefox on their machines which they will use to skim through the site after it's been built using IE. And if it looks okay, then they can say, "We support Firefox too!"
Anything else is just beyond their ken. Rendering engine? Gecko? KHTML? What the hell are those? Look, we made our site work for you weirdos who don't want to just use the big blue E like everyone else does. Get off our backs. Jeez.
Maybe some flower-snorting soldier-hating just-give-peace-a-chance idiot with no sense of reality has mod points today.
Given the tone of GPP's post, I think it's more likely he was modded down by some 101st Fighting Keyboarders type who thinks he's being bold and patriotic by putting a "Support The Troops" magnetic ribbon on his SUV, and war is the coolest thing EVAR as long as someone else does the dying. There are a lot more of those out there than there are the naive hippies, and they tend to react badly to having their macho illusion-bubble punctured.
This may come as a shock to you, but test pilots aren't actively suicidal. They accept the risk of death as part of their job, sure, but they do this in order to make the craft they fly safer.
"Politically incorrect"? "Media coverage"? Jesus. Dying on the job is unpopular because it involves, you know, dying on the job. And when three men burn to death with hundreds of others listening to their screams, most sane people take that as a sign that something needs to be fixed.