Package managers do not solve the problem of compatibility across different distros. In fact, not even across the semi-major upgrades you see each month with a single distro. PMs also contribute to making the development environment app-unfriendly because they don't work well with anything that hasn't been subsumed into "the repository"... i.e. independent software distribution is really an uphill slog to the point where even Mozilla gave up on packaging apps for Linux-based distros long ago; Mozilla packages apps for Windows and OS X.
Really, if you don't make it easy for curious types to make something interesting and to then share it easily with others, then the platform doesn't work. People will continue cutting their programming teeth on OS X and Windows and will stay there or with other platforms that satisfy the same criteria. So-called "Desktop Linux" doesn't even have an SDK! The longbeard hacker politics affecting the Linux Foundation demand that it doesn't have an SDK. Skittering around in Google's wake, they saw fit to create an SDK for Mobile Linux but heaven forbid if we get one for ye olde desktop.
The subculture stubbornly refuses to standardize both the user experience and that of the app developer. And so it drives both groups away.
Indeed, reading that blog is like a trip back to 2004... Blame others and say 'what a shame' about the Gnome/KDE/whateverGUI thing. It is actually gratifying to see one of the 'audio stack' coders displaying their considerable degree of cluelessness. These people have misunderstood what personal computing is all about, and think that *nix hacker culture can be brought to the consumer as long as a GUI is present.
Even a well-designed platform will at first attract only early adopters, but then many of them *will* feel inspired and be empowered to create apps that are truly great on top of it. So the initial market penetration doesn't matter as much as TFA implies.
Since I've posted on this subject many, many times in the past, here are a couple posts that I think spell out what is really wrong with the phantom entity some techies call "Desktop Linux"...
I've gotten my a$$ modded (rather kicked) clear across the board for rubbing either GNU, Apple or Microsoft fanboi sensibilities the wrong way. (The GNU crowd is losing their impetuousness lately...)
The open source crowd hasn't helped that situation much, either. They are really keen on reminding themselves that they're only coding to scratch their own itch.
I sometimes try to make a point here and elsewhere that even though Linux distros try to standardize on libraries/APIs below a certain level for coders to use, the UI itself is an interface like an API and needs consistency for the sake of users. An interface is a contract to offer functionality in a consistent way. This ought not to mean coders only stabilizing interfaces that are of particular interest to other coders, but in FOSS that's how it plays out because the Linux Foundation will scarcely touch the issue and distros like to officially support between 3 and 5 DEs.
Officially offering anything more than 1 is crazy. But the distros (all of them, even the so-called easiest to use) are caught up in the hacker mentality and they all have the same politics of "choice" that eschew a standard UI. They are hypocritical because in most distros they are not exerting pressure for totally different kernels or shell environment.
People in developing countries are probably even less prepared to deal with the amorphous nature of 'Desktop Linux' than are people in the more developed countries.
Now, if somebody fights back against Metro by porting KDE or Gnome to Windows 9... well, THEN Microsoft might get really annoyed and notice...
Wow, the delusion here is so intense its hard to look at.:)
The very idea that Windows users would buy into the mentality that their cohorts and support desk people should have 8 or 10 different UI environments to choose from is ludicrous. I know that's not exactly what you meant, but it doesn't make sense that you'd port an alternative desktop to Windows without also importing the culture that produced the alternatives. Windows has had its own (few) desktop alternatives in the past and it will once again, and no one will be under the misapprehension that troubleshooting and maintenance all be done in the CLI just because desktop alternatives exist (because Windows will come with a standard desktop even if some people don't like it).
The sad truth here is that Desktop Linux mostly annoys the consumers who encounter it, and a big part of that annoyance is the DE conundrum.
No, the US government spends vastly more money on this kind of thing. $940K is barely even a rounding error in the federal propaganda budget.
-jcr
Indeed, and we're brazen about it, too.
The difference I see is that Russian news doesn't blatantly lead into news stories with comments like, "The same government that corralled natives away from most of the country and then conducted germ warfare against them...". Or, "The ex-Opium War aggressor today is making news with...". At least not since the USSR.
Americans and other native anglophones of all stripes love them some Russophobia (which is why I'll probably be modded down), and they'll find opportunities to serve it up with just about anything. The only way that Russian characters ever seem to be redeemed on US television shows is if they have emigrated to an anglophone country, or are trying to do so. A Russian who wants to stay a Russian national (or to belong to another non-English speaking country) is portrayed as a villain -- every single time I have viewed.
If you're going to posit that we'll invent ftl travel to go to other stars, then why not save yourself the trouble and posit all the other Earthly technologies that ftl makes possible?
Think about it. You could keep traveling to the past to keep accelerating the rate of technological development. You could invent anything... how about angels? You could fit X angels on the head of a pin, with X being any number you wished. After all, the laws of thermodynamics would be out of your way.
In the hypothetical process of creating ftl, you're actually transforming yourself into something that would consider the need to spread out "through space" to be positively quaint.
-
A better question might be: Why is it fashionable in circles like Slashdot to posit ftl, but not perpetual motion machines?
You are basically expecting the possibility to make perpetual motion machines, travel to the past and other breaches of the laws of thermodynamics that FTL implies.
And the history of science is full of people experimenting outside of theoretical frameworks or models. Where is the evidence for FTL?
What you're hoping for is really a supernatural conveyance (miracles) foretold by the 'prophets' of sci-fi in order to keep us entertained in the age of technological wonder. By clinging selectively to those narrative scraps in a sense of faith, what you're really doing is helping build the world's first religion where impossible things are hoped-for someday from a messiah known as "Technology".
There is already a precursor to such a religion: Its called Prosperity Gospel and its (mostly American) proponents like to live large as a way to attract more souls to the "word of God". They have faith their God will provide the desired lifestyle which requires material profusion. What they are really doing is worshiping consumer technology / consumerism using the Christian God as a proxy. That God promises wealth accumulation and then a rapture where they escape the bonds of the Earth.
Like being whisked away to eternal life in heaven, the vision of FTL travel is a difficult one to let go of if it underpins the stories you grew up with.
Note that Einstein did not so much transcend old models, but added a whole new layer of descriptive detail to our observed universe. And most of that added detail looks an awful lot like constraints on what we can do. So if indeed there is little reason to think that future discoveries won't have the same impact as science past, then we are probably looking at a reification of the cosmic speed limit along with some other limiting surprises.
If anything, FTL would be more compatible with Newtonian physics than what came after it. Come to think of it, a return to Newton would probably make a lot of theologians happy.
I've had this experience myself with the RHEL-family distros (RHEL6, Fedora 16, CentOS 6). On some models they don't seem to run the system fans correctly, the kernel generates a lot of CPU temperature warnings, then the system stops working (sometimes permanently). Actually, I think this problem holds for most Linux distros that are not based on Ubuntu (which runs fine on the same systems).
A) There is no standard IDE and the SDK is nonexistent -- App developers generally don't feel welcome or like they can easily 'get their legs'.
B) 'Developer' support sites are overwhelmingly oriented to system coders, and these sites pretend that all coders are the same.
C) The GUI environment fluctuates greatly from distro to distro, and within each distro, and every 18-24 months.
C1) The chaotic state of GUIs prevents the user experience from 'gelling', making the systems feel disjointed and even unidentifiable. (That's right, most people could not identify a "Linux Desktop" if their lives depended on it, which to me signifies that "Linux Desktop" is a apparition experienced by techies.)
C2) Just try doing phone tech support for a GUI app on Linux, for a living. I have and with non-techie customers the overhead and disorientation factor is too high.
D) Most PCs are now laptops, and Linux power management still sucks. Hardware support lags in general, partly because the Linux Foundation has ignored the role it has to play in helping consumers identify compatible equipment. The smart thing to do would be to start a hardware certification program for OEMs and license a special Linux-compatible logo to them.
D1) Shall I describe how popular distros handle mirroring and dual-displays, combined with events like wake and sleep, on my 2006 and 2009 vintage laptops? Actually, its too frustrating to go into here.
E) App packaging and management is still in a bad way. It has to be both intuitive for the consumer (they can download a file or use a CD if they wish) and flexible for the author (packaging for independent distribution ought not to be a high-wire act that leaves you with only the most sparse set of APIs to work with). Work on offering the best of both world instead of cramming everything into a huge repository because many things simply won't fit in there.
F) "Linux Desktop" proponents keep telling us to sit tight because web apps are the future. That cop out doesn't even work in the smartphone market. So stop pushing thick clients in place of personal computers; that is a shameful bait-and-switch.
G) Apps still sell the systems to a large degree. A,B,C and E are the most direct causes for the dearth of top-tier apps.
"No OS or desktop is perfect" -- indeed -- but what we know of as "Desktop Linux" is a non-entity for the average consumer. There will be no real advance in mindshare or marketshare until most of the above are changed for the better. A distro like Ubuntu would do well do follow my advice, and while they're at it remove the overt association with "Linux" itself... people who like and support the OS should be coding apps for "Ubuntu" not "Linux". It seems to work for Android.
My definition of operating systems is basically two things: It's a well defined user experience and it's a well defined developer experience. So those are the two interfaces we need to provide and everything else is an implementation detail - down to the hardware.
I don't know if you saw Lennart's talk the other day, he said that we should let the user experience and the developer experience drive everything in the lower level stacks.
When I saw this, I thought: Wow, someone who *gets* it! The OS provides the common ground for app developers and their users. Not only that, he is willing to even make that dev/user distinction, which I think is a crucial position that many FOSS projects try to shirk.
But he doesn't seem to get what those positions imply: In particular, that you need a single organization driving its vision down into the lower stacks, achieving sufficient vertical integration to make the user and developer experiences sane and interesting. In order to really get somewhere with this idea, they will need to fork their entire stack and take charge of it the way Google has with Android.
He also doesn't make a distinction between system developer and app developer. IMO, this is also a common and necessary distinction that FOSS system devs tend to shirk. Blurring these distinctions does no one any real service, because it robs you of opportunities to keep asking the question, "Does X feature or Y implementation technique hinder or facilitate a user who wants to try programming... who might become an app developer for this platform someday?" Counting on your audio stack devs to design the next 'Garage Band' is kind of pointless -- it rarely works. You need to entice lots of people who would love programming but will never give a rats a** about tweaking system code.
What the lack of distinctions also does is create an attitude of indifference about system oddities and shortcomings... The old "If you don't like it fix it yourself" cop out (which I think Gnome has more of than any other DE). You attract almost no one that way.
All in all, the conceptual step displayed in this article may be good, but I think too little too late. He's discovering only part of what Jobs and Gates knew in the 1980s.
Re #4) I think he has a point. I used to support commercial software on Linux desktops and its much more difficult to get anywhere with the user unless they are the type of user that you can just tell them to drop to CLI. Even so, it was a GUI app and that is where Linux distros are the most chaotic.
Re #5) In the 8+ years I've been giving constructive criticism in forums like this and in bugtrackers, I've never seen a DE project implement a suggestion I've made. Mozilla and other projects have, including some proprietary products, but the DE projects IMHO are among the worst of them. They start by repudiating the defacto definition of an OS as including a GUI (to them the OS is a text environment that only provides programming interfaces, and their project is just a bit of high-calorie icing on top). From there it goes downhill.
If its privacy, not security, you are concerned about then enter "Private Browsing" or "Incognito" mode to access that site with JS and all turned on. Then nothing in your cookies, cache or history can be connected with your other browsing (for which you may want to use the blocking extensions). At that point, they will have little more than an IP address as a commonality.
To make this approach even more effective, in both modes use an add-in that manages your browser 'fingerprint' such as FireGloves.
I'm using NoScript + RequestPolicy + Ghostery. I'm not sure that either Ghostery or Adblock go far enough since there are a number of commonly referenced, commercial script and CDN sites that can be (and probably are) co-opted for tracking purposes (e.g. referencing of useful scripts can itself become a tracking mechanism, unless the scripts are copied and hosted on the page's own domain).
You are right on the money with your description of search poisoning. The integration of high-powered marketing has made the Web half as useful as it was in 2004.
FWIW I do tell people about Adblock, and offer to install it for them if it piques their interest.
the last time I checked. That isn't nearly enough repairable time to be responsible either in the consumer sense or ecological sense.
And I do urge people to look on eBay for Apple parts... there is a thriving market of mostly used parts that techs use to repair Apple equipment, and it won't last long with Apple's new direction.
Then Sweden's police are intentionally creating a political storm for their executive branch, which is probably intentional given the involvement of Karl Rove.
They have in the past interviewed abroad a murder suspect and someone suspected of tax evasion, so it isn't a question of them wanting due diligence for the sake of the accusers in this case.
What the despots have to work with is whatever took place during that time he was in Sweden.
Assange is not a young man, and in the stark absence of other accusers from other chapters in his life stepping forward, the double-whammy he is getting for something that supposedly happened within a short time frame seems really suspicious. One of the accusers worked with a US-funded political group that is probably a CIA front.
There are also the (now erased) tweets from one the accuser's Twitter feed indicating she was really awake when she claimed to be sleep-raped by Assange.
As far as I can tell, this sh!t against him is all made up and notice it is being driven by the police, not the court system. It is probably a political maneuver by a Right-leaning political branch. These Swedish police are lying through their teeth: Saying they don't interview suspects remotely, when they do in fact, and that the 'case' has nothing to do with the US at the same time they are using Karl Rove as an adviser, there being no bigger lying scoundrel from the US with which they could choose to associate.
Slashdot Mirror
Package managers do not solve the problem of compatibility across different distros. In fact, not even across the semi-major upgrades you see each month with a single distro. PMs also contribute to making the development environment app-unfriendly because they don't work well with anything that hasn't been subsumed into "the repository"... i.e. independent software distribution is really an uphill slog to the point where even Mozilla gave up on packaging apps for Linux-based distros long ago; Mozilla packages apps for Windows and OS X.
Really, if you don't make it easy for curious types to make something interesting and to then share it easily with others, then the platform doesn't work. People will continue cutting their programming teeth on OS X and Windows and will stay there or with other platforms that satisfy the same criteria. So-called "Desktop Linux" doesn't even have an SDK! The longbeard hacker politics affecting the Linux Foundation demand that it doesn't have an SDK. Skittering around in Google's wake, they saw fit to create an SDK for Mobile Linux but heaven forbid if we get one for ye olde desktop.
The subculture stubbornly refuses to standardize both the user experience and that of the app developer. And so it drives both groups away.
I thought BSD relied on outside projects to provide GUI-related functionality (Gnome, KDE, etc). As such, its not a complete desktop system.
Indeed, reading that blog is like a trip back to 2004... Blame others and say 'what a shame' about the Gnome/KDE/whateverGUI thing. It is actually gratifying to see one of the 'audio stack' coders displaying their considerable degree of cluelessness. These people have misunderstood what personal computing is all about, and think that *nix hacker culture can be brought to the consumer as long as a GUI is present.
Even a well-designed platform will at first attract only early adopters, but then many of them *will* feel inspired and be empowered to create apps that are truly great on top of it. So the initial market penetration doesn't matter as much as TFA implies.
Since I've posted on this subject many, many times in the past, here are a couple posts that I think spell out what is really wrong with the phantom entity some techies call "Desktop Linux"...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3070309&cid=41117243
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3067523&cid=41095087
Granted its been a couple years since I checked, but AFAIK Python was/is a heck of a lot faster than Ruby.
That was a great comeback.
I've gotten my a$$ modded (rather kicked) clear across the board for rubbing either GNU, Apple or Microsoft fanboi sensibilities the wrong way. (The GNU crowd is losing their impetuousness lately...)
The open source crowd hasn't helped that situation much, either. They are really keen on reminding themselves that they're only coding to scratch their own itch.
I sometimes try to make a point here and elsewhere that even though Linux distros try to standardize on libraries/APIs below a certain level for coders to use, the UI itself is an interface like an API and needs consistency for the sake of users. An interface is a contract to offer functionality in a consistent way. This ought not to mean coders only stabilizing interfaces that are of particular interest to other coders, but in FOSS that's how it plays out because the Linux Foundation will scarcely touch the issue and distros like to officially support between 3 and 5 DEs.
Officially offering anything more than 1 is crazy. But the distros (all of them, even the so-called easiest to use) are caught up in the hacker mentality and they all have the same politics of "choice" that eschew a standard UI. They are hypocritical because in most distros they are not exerting pressure for totally different kernels or shell environment.
People in developing countries are probably even less prepared to deal with the amorphous nature of 'Desktop Linux' than are people in the more developed countries.
Now, if somebody fights back against Metro by porting KDE or Gnome to Windows 9... well, THEN Microsoft might get really annoyed and notice...
Wow, the delusion here is so intense its hard to look at. :)
The very idea that Windows users would buy into the mentality that their cohorts and support desk people should have 8 or 10 different UI environments to choose from is ludicrous. I know that's not exactly what you meant, but it doesn't make sense that you'd port an alternative desktop to Windows without also importing the culture that produced the alternatives. Windows has had its own (few) desktop alternatives in the past and it will once again, and no one will be under the misapprehension that troubleshooting and maintenance all be done in the CLI just because desktop alternatives exist (because Windows will come with a standard desktop even if some people don't like it).
The sad truth here is that Desktop Linux mostly annoys the consumers who encounter it, and a big part of that annoyance is the DE conundrum.
happen to control the government along with the airwaves.
No, the US government spends vastly more money on this kind of thing. $940K is barely even a rounding error in the federal propaganda budget.
-jcr
Indeed, and we're brazen about it, too.
The difference I see is that Russian news doesn't blatantly lead into news stories with comments like, "The same government that corralled natives away from most of the country and then conducted germ warfare against them...". Or, "The ex-Opium War aggressor today is making news with...". At least not since the USSR.
Americans and other native anglophones of all stripes love them some Russophobia (which is why I'll probably be modded down), and they'll find opportunities to serve it up with just about anything. The only way that Russian characters ever seem to be redeemed on US television shows is if they have emigrated to an anglophone country, or are trying to do so. A Russian who wants to stay a Russian national (or to belong to another non-English speaking country) is portrayed as a villain -- every single time I have viewed.
If you're going to posit that we'll invent ftl travel to go to other stars, then why not save yourself the trouble and posit all the other Earthly technologies that ftl makes possible?
Think about it. You could keep traveling to the past to keep accelerating the rate of technological development. You could invent anything... how about angels? You could fit X angels on the head of a pin, with X being any number you wished. After all, the laws of thermodynamics would be out of your way.
In the hypothetical process of creating ftl, you're actually transforming yourself into something that would consider the need to spread out "through space" to be positively quaint.
-
A better question might be: Why is it fashionable in circles like Slashdot to posit ftl, but not perpetual motion machines?
You are basically expecting the possibility to make perpetual motion machines, travel to the past and other breaches of the laws of thermodynamics that FTL implies.
And the history of science is full of people experimenting outside of theoretical frameworks or models. Where is the evidence for FTL?
What you're hoping for is really a supernatural conveyance (miracles) foretold by the 'prophets' of sci-fi in order to keep us entertained in the age of technological wonder. By clinging selectively to those narrative scraps in a sense of faith, what you're really doing is helping build the world's first religion where impossible things are hoped-for someday from a messiah known as "Technology".
There is already a precursor to such a religion: Its called Prosperity Gospel and its (mostly American) proponents like to live large as a way to attract more souls to the "word of God". They have faith their God will provide the desired lifestyle which requires material profusion. What they are really doing is worshiping consumer technology / consumerism using the Christian God as a proxy. That God promises wealth accumulation and then a rapture where they escape the bonds of the Earth.
Like being whisked away to eternal life in heaven, the vision of FTL travel is a difficult one to let go of if it underpins the stories you grew up with.
Note that Einstein did not so much transcend old models, but added a whole new layer of descriptive detail to our observed universe. And most of that added detail looks an awful lot like constraints on what we can do. So if indeed there is little reason to think that future discoveries won't have the same impact as science past, then we are probably looking at a reification of the cosmic speed limit along with some other limiting surprises.
If anything, FTL would be more compatible with Newtonian physics than what came after it. Come to think of it, a return to Newton would probably make a lot of theologians happy.
http://fedora.12.n6.nabble.com/Fedora-causes-laptop-to-overheat-td2406515.html
I've had this experience myself with the RHEL-family distros (RHEL6, Fedora 16, CentOS 6). On some models they don't seem to run the system fans correctly, the kernel generates a lot of CPU temperature warnings, then the system stops working (sometimes permanently). Actually, I think this problem holds for most Linux distros that are not based on Ubuntu (which runs fine on the same systems).
A) There is no standard IDE and the SDK is nonexistent -- App developers generally don't feel welcome or like they can easily 'get their legs'.
B) 'Developer' support sites are overwhelmingly oriented to system coders, and these sites pretend that all coders are the same.
C) The GUI environment fluctuates greatly from distro to distro, and within each distro, and every 18-24 months.
C1) The chaotic state of GUIs prevents the user experience from 'gelling', making the systems feel disjointed and even unidentifiable. (That's right, most people could not identify a "Linux Desktop" if their lives depended on it, which to me signifies that "Linux Desktop" is a apparition experienced by techies.)
C2) Just try doing phone tech support for a GUI app on Linux, for a living. I have and with non-techie customers the overhead and disorientation factor is too high.
D) Most PCs are now laptops, and Linux power management still sucks. Hardware support lags in general, partly because the Linux Foundation has ignored the role it has to play in helping consumers identify compatible equipment. The smart thing to do would be to start a hardware certification program for OEMs and license a special Linux-compatible logo to them.
D1) Shall I describe how popular distros handle mirroring and dual-displays, combined with events like wake and sleep, on my 2006 and 2009 vintage laptops? Actually, its too frustrating to go into here.
E) App packaging and management is still in a bad way. It has to be both intuitive for the consumer (they can download a file or use a CD if they wish) and flexible for the author (packaging for independent distribution ought not to be a high-wire act that leaves you with only the most sparse set of APIs to work with). Work on offering the best of both world instead of cramming everything into a huge repository because many things simply won't fit in there.
F) "Linux Desktop" proponents keep telling us to sit tight because web apps are the future. That cop out doesn't even work in the smartphone market. So stop pushing thick clients in place of personal computers; that is a shameful bait-and-switch.
G) Apps still sell the systems to a large degree. A,B,C and E are the most direct causes for the dearth of top-tier apps.
"No OS or desktop is perfect" -- indeed -- but what we know of as "Desktop Linux" is a non-entity for the average consumer. There will be no real advance in mindshare or marketshare until most of the above are changed for the better. A distro like Ubuntu would do well do follow my advice, and while they're at it remove the overt association with "Linux" itself... people who like and support the OS should be coding apps for "Ubuntu" not "Linux". It seems to work for Android.
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4063
My definition of operating systems is basically two things: It's a well defined user experience and it's a well defined developer experience. So those are the two interfaces we need to provide and everything else is an implementation detail - down to the hardware.
I don't know if you saw Lennart's talk the other day, he said that we should let the user experience and the developer experience drive everything in the lower level stacks.
When I saw this, I thought: Wow, someone who *gets* it! The OS provides the common ground for app developers and their users. Not only that, he is willing to even make that dev/user distinction, which I think is a crucial position that many FOSS projects try to shirk.
But he doesn't seem to get what those positions imply: In particular, that you need a single organization driving its vision down into the lower stacks, achieving
sufficient vertical integration to make the user and developer experiences sane and interesting. In order to really get somewhere with this idea, they will need to fork their entire stack and take charge of it the way Google has with Android.
He also doesn't make a distinction between system developer and app developer. IMO, this is also a common and necessary distinction that FOSS system devs tend to shirk. Blurring these distinctions does no one any real service, because it robs you of opportunities to keep asking the question, "Does X feature or Y implementation technique hinder or facilitate a user who wants to try programming... who might become an app developer for this platform someday?" Counting on your audio stack devs to design the next 'Garage Band' is kind of pointless -- it rarely works. You need to entice lots of people who would love programming but will never give a rats a** about tweaking system code.
What the lack of distinctions also does is create an attitude of indifference about system oddities and shortcomings... The old "If you don't like it fix it yourself" cop out (which I think Gnome has more of than any other DE). You attract almost no one that way.
All in all, the conceptual step displayed in this article may be good, but I think too little too late. He's discovering only part of what Jobs and Gates knew in the 1980s.
Re #4) I think he has a point. I used to support commercial software on Linux desktops and its much more difficult to get anywhere with the user unless they are the type of user that you can just tell them to drop to CLI. Even so, it was a GUI app and that is where Linux distros are the most chaotic.
Re #5) In the 8+ years I've been giving constructive criticism in forums like this and in bugtrackers, I've never seen a DE project implement a suggestion I've made. Mozilla and other projects have, including some proprietary products, but the DE projects IMHO are among the worst of them. They start by repudiating the defacto definition of an OS as including a GUI (to them the OS is a text environment that only provides programming interfaces, and their project is just a bit of high-calorie icing on top). From there it goes downhill.
If its privacy, not security, you are concerned about then enter "Private Browsing" or "Incognito" mode to access that site with JS and all turned on. Then nothing in your cookies, cache or history can be connected with your other browsing (for which you may want to use the blocking extensions). At that point, they will have little more than an IP address as a commonality.
To make this approach even more effective, in both modes use an add-in that manages your browser 'fingerprint' such as FireGloves.
I'm using NoScript + RequestPolicy + Ghostery. I'm not sure that either Ghostery or Adblock go far enough since there are a number of commonly referenced, commercial script and CDN sites that can be (and probably are) co-opted for tracking purposes (e.g. referencing of useful scripts can itself become a tracking mechanism, unless the scripts are copied and hosted on the page's own domain).
You are right on the money with your description of search poisoning. The integration of high-powered marketing has made the Web half as useful as it was in 2004.
FWIW I do tell people about Adblock, and offer to install it for them if it piques their interest.
Its too bad that to maintain that upgradable battery you're touting, you are forced to stay in 2008.
Stop volunteering for spoiled rich kids.
...or you get a 10% discount off an iPod (not a new laptop). LOL!
the last time I checked. That isn't nearly enough repairable time to be responsible either in the consumer sense or ecological sense.
And I do urge people to look on eBay for Apple parts... there is a thriving market of mostly used parts that techs use to repair Apple equipment, and it won't last long with Apple's new direction.
Then Sweden's police are intentionally creating a political storm for their executive branch, which is probably intentional given the involvement of Karl Rove.
They have in the past interviewed abroad a murder suspect and someone suspected of tax evasion, so it isn't a question of them wanting due diligence for the sake of the accusers in this case.
Because the UK has nothing to nab him with until the US is willing to go public with a (presumably weak) case against him. As of now, that process in the US is still secret. http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/64235-secret-us-grand-jury-stalks-wikileaks-founder
What the despots have to work with is whatever took place during that time he was in Sweden.
Assange is not a young man, and in the stark absence of other accusers from other chapters in his life stepping forward, the double-whammy he is getting for something that supposedly happened within a short time frame seems really suspicious. One of the accusers worked with a US-funded political group that is probably a CIA front.
There are also the (now erased) tweets from one the accuser's Twitter feed indicating she was really awake when she claimed to be sleep-raped by Assange.
As far as I can tell, this sh!t against him is all made up and notice it is being driven by the police, not the court system. It is probably a political maneuver by a Right-leaning political branch. These Swedish police are lying through their teeth: Saying they don't interview suspects remotely, when they do in fact, and that the 'case' has nothing to do with the US at the same time they are using Karl Rove as an adviser, there being no bigger lying scoundrel from the US with which they could choose to associate.
Why won't a court issue the extradition request?
Why won't the police interview him in the UK?
If the answer to these is "Its not done that way in Sweden", then I'll doubt it with good reason.