Well, what problem is this making a dent in other than a billionaire setting up a small private school for his kids and some of his employees?
Because if the entire story is "billionaire sets up private school for own kids"... who gives a shit?
If he's purely doing something for his own benefit, this has no business being in the news. Because then it's just "rich asshole can afford to buy his children a better education than you can afford", and kind of pointless.
Otherwise, we'd see daily stories that say "Netcraft confirms it, Larry Ellison is still a douchebag".
Well, if you let an egotistical billionaire run the education of 20 students, you will probably come up with awesome results.
But how much of this is applicable when it isn't being paid for by an egotistical billionaire?
You can say nothing about this other than... highly focused, very expensive private education can be effective, but that this doesn't tell you anything about educating the rest of them.
You can't say this was better because you eliminated grades. This is a PR stunt, but it's not some revolution in education.
But where regulation is not being updated to allow new mobile phone app services which are good for passengers, drivers and even other road users, then clearly there is a legislation problem.
Do you know how stupid that sounds?
"I'm OK with taxi regulation as long as they drop them for Uber".
Look, Uber can play the victim card here all they want.
This isn't a legislation problem. This is a problem of the world not suddenly bowing to the will of a fucking tech company who thinks a mobile phone app is magic and that laws should be changed to accommodate them.
And civil disobedience is a legitimate way to highlight bad law.
And impounding Uber drivers' cars and fining them is a legitimate way to say "we don't give a fuck that you think the law shouldn't apply to you.
Uber is a greedy technology company, who is trying to control the spin of "boo hoo, we're downtrodden" to prop up their business model which amounts do "an app for dispatching illegal cabs and pretending laws don't apply to us because we stepped in unicorn poop and are now magical".
But pointless laws to create false scarcity are a crime against humanity.
No, again, you're full of crap and stating your opinion as if it is a fact.
The laws aren't there to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. You'd have to be an idiot to think that.
The laws are to regulate who is running a taxi, the rules under which they operate, and the minimum safety standards... stuff like that.
That some people want to make the idiotic claims that laws are hurting innovation, or that regulating an industry is some fucking grand conspiracy to keep taxi owners rich... saying it doesn't make it true. It's still batshit crazy stuff which has nothing to do with reality, other than indicating you desperately wish reality adhered to your crazy beliefs.
No, there is no public interest in inhibiting fair competition. This is about protecting vested private interests, not the public interest.
No, that is bullshit.
If you want fair competition, you have to do it under the same rules as everyone else.
Not by throwing a tantrum like a spoiled child and deciding the rules don't apply to you.
This has nothing to do with fair competition, or protecting entrenched players. This is about governments having the authority to pass laws, and whiny idiots claiming they don't want laws.
Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.
Free markets don't solve every problem, but they can solve this one.
Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.
Uber aren't the champions of truth and justice... they're a greedy corporation who think they are something special.
But don't let reality stand in the way of your libertarian fantasy world.
The laws and regulations exist. That Uber (and you) disagree with those regulations is completely fucking irrelevant.
Uber doesn't get to throw a tantrum like a child and refuse to adhere to the law. You can't refuse to eat your broccoli, the real world doesn't work like that.
Don't like it, try to change the law. If that doesn't work, you can suck it up and accept that the law exists, and claiming you don't like it or that you think it doesn't apply to you is nothing but a crock of shit.
Just because in some libertarian fantasy of the world you think you shouldn't be regulated doesn't mean a damned thing.
Surely Time Warner has learned the lesson of not being bought for funny money stock?
Because when AOL bought them with trumped up stock, somehow AOL was worth more than an entity with cable, programming,network infrastructure, move studios.
Somehow I wonder if Time Warner isn't selling the farm for a couple of magic beans (again).
And you can bet your ass this single entity will not do anything to lower prices or foster competition... it will be more "we're screwing you because we can".
The only people this will be good for are executives who get huge severance packages. But I'm betting in the long run it hurts consumers, and quite possibly shareholders.
In my experience, the development environment for software is larger than the actual software.
Working copies, and interim copies, and what have you. Tools, pieces, and parts.
Now imagine something as massive as a video game, specifically involving art and computer graphics... models, mockups, rendered seqeunces, things I don't even know what might be in there.
I'm betting the amount of source material which feeds into a finished game is likely many thousands of times the end-product. Because you probably have various edits and do-overs of stuff which took a long time to make, and is probably valuable.
I can't imagine how many terabytes it takes to build a modern video game.
But 40GB of cool stuff? Yeah, I totally buy that as possible.
The world should not be set up safe as a default for you and your fucking whiny children.
The moral upbringing of your children in a sealed bubble which keeps the world at bay is your damned problem.
Every parent who insists the world be made sanitized for you and your precious little snowflake can piss off.
You want a nanny internet, you take the time to sign up for it and request it. But if you think the rest of the world should have to opt-in... you can fuck off and leave the rest of us out of it.
I'm s sick of idiotic parents who think the world should change to protect their children. We don't give a crap, they're not our kids... on behalf of parent-less couples everywhere, this is your fucking problem not ours.
I won't moderate my behavior for my mother. If you think I'll do it for you and your brood of annoying children... well, ask me. I dare you. Because they'll learn every possible bad word as well as hearing them used in complete sentences.
If you think the world should tiptoe around you and your kids... you're too stupid to have kids.
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits. Fuck you, fuck off, go the fuck away, and don't make me tell you again.
I will not in any way attempt to say that I understand the entirety or magnitude of the issue. While I've known people with mental illnesses, that doesn't mean I can truly understand it.
But I lament that one has to describe internet privacy and security as something which you have to be in the throes of a clinical mental illness to appreciate.
Because these days, a perfectly sane and rational person should be assuming that governments are, in fact, spying on them. Or at the very least have the capacity to do so with shockingly little oversight.
But if people think that only clinical paranoids are, or should be, concerned about such things.. people will continue to act as it only clinical paranoids are concerned about such things.
Being somewhat paranoid due to my periodic bi-polar "manic" periods, I already was convinced the goobernmints and corporations of the world were up to nefarious snooping and hacking
Of course the problem with this characterization is it somehow implies that this is something only people with mental illness believe.
The reality is, it is now an objective fact that it is true.
But for some reason this fact hasn't sunk in, and people keep acting like it's solely for paranoids and other crazy people to be concerned about.
I think it's hilarious when Windows 95 icons are more intuitive than an OS that'll literally be twenty years later from the same company
LOL, that's because Windows '95 was still using visual metaphors they'd 'borrowed' from Apple -- and since Microsoft won a court case which said you can't own look and feel, there's no denying they borrowed from Apple.
The problem seems to be now that they're borrowing elements of a tablet interface, and trying to innovate... they seem to be painting themselves into a corner by believing a tablet interface is somehow suitable for all kinds of tasks.
I think the Metro UI is probably really well suited for a tablet or a phone. But I think for many of the things people still use computers for will not be well suited to this new UI.
The problem is the belief that having Metro as a default UI isn't a stupid idea when it's not on a platform optimized for it.
On a 23" monitor with no touchscreen... Metro is a giant leap backwards which has decided ergonomics and proximity are archaic ideas, and that everybody wants to move from corner to corner.
My Windows 8.1 feels like a fast, rock-solid platform. But Metro felt like a child's interface slapped on the front which needed to be replaced.
Yeah stupid people making UIs for end-users and not for programmers!
Wow, nice either or.
In between clueless people who want to access the intertubes and programmers is pretty much everything else computers are ever used for.
And business software users do not gain a damned thing from Metro. They gain a clunk interface which is useless to them.
So, while Metro has its place for some people... it is completely unsuited for the tasks of what many many people do with computers.
So Microsoft (and idiots like you) can keep pretending that Metro is a suitable interface for everything. Or Microsoft (and idiots like you) can actually realize that "one size fits some" isn't going to cut it.
You sound like a whiny graphic designer who still doesn't understand that a GUI which doesn't suit the task is fucking useless.
Yes, for many home users Metro will probably do everything they need. For for people with more demanding tasks, and most people in business... Metro is utterly useless as a UI.
I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional"... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.
With a keyboard and mouse, on a large screen with no touch... Metro is a completely fucking useless UI.
So you can boo hoo about how the graphic designers will save the day. But if all they have is eye candy which impedes function compare to existing UIs... all they're doing its making pretty garbage.
But people who use computers for grown up things will simply not benefit from Metro. Because it's the completely wrong interface paradigm for many things, and Microsoft (and idiots like you) whining it's the wave of the future doesn't make it a good universal UI.
This isn't about the interface for normal people and programmers... this is about the entirety of human computer interface design, and is much more sophisticated than your clueless reductionism.
No, apparently US business interests are far more important.
I think it's time the rest of the world told the US: we don't give a fuck about your business interests, we care about not putting toxic crap on our foods.
"Aggressive US lobbyists" should be told the STFU or simply shot.
Free trade with the US is "we will ignore any obligations, and we will cram our laws down your throat."
If diplomacy with the US is entirely about advancing US business interests to the detriment of local industry and environment... the response should be a big giant "fo fuck yourself".
Because the US pushes for trade deals, and then still reuses to ignore them... things like steel subsidies, massive corn subsidies, and country of origin labeling requirements are things they've repeatedly lost in WTO arbitration.
So why the hell do countries keep putting up with this shit?
Such horseshit. It's time the rest of the world stopped giving a shit about US business interests... because they never actually coincide with domestic interests.
We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!
You know, if people are actually doing proper user interface design, that might be true.
But having seen Metro on a Windows 8.1 box... that's not what is happening.
Graphic designers focusing on pretty, but with no understanding of functional are producing shitty interfaces which, while they might be fine for a tablet or a handheld, are complete garbage for a desktop machine with no touch screen and operated with a keyboard and mouse.
So, I don't care which shade of pastel and crayons the useless interface is. I want to turn off the useless interface entirely, because it provides nothing in the way of utility.
Windows 8.1 is fast and stable, and has nice features. But it's only usable as a desktop once you install something like Classic Shell and turn off the crap that these "designers" have put in.
They're spending all the time tweaking the wrong things.
What I can not understand is why aren't there a unified solution to provide tracking data to all different underlying tracking systems.
Because there's more than one set of greedy bastards, each of which have their own branding, and feel they deserve a slice of the pie -- because they all have executives who need hooker and yacht money.
Are you expecting greedy advertisers to pool their resources so users only see a single greedy embedded in their web pages? Or that somehow having the big giant clearinghouse of everyone's data would somehow be good?
I have an alternative, block the shit out of all of them, and then nuke the offices of tracking and advertising companies from orbit.
Just because a bunch of advertising agencies thinks they own the internet doesn't mean we should play along. In fact, we should try to weed them out entirely.
So, instead of trying focus on what kind of user experience we're going to have (which sounds like they think the tablet interface is what people actually want for everything)... and focusing on making all of that good and usable... why does it sound like throwing out new sets of icons means someone has lost the plot and is focused on the eye candy, and ignoring the fact that for a desktop machine Metro is a completely garbage interface?
I like my Windows 8.1 machine. But it was really only useful once I basically removed all of the stuff that Microsoft thinks they innovated or that was valuable.
Metro on a 23" non-touch screen monitor is a pathetic interface for Windows. If Microsoft is going to think everybody is running everything on a touch screen interface, instead of a mouse and keyboard... they're doing a shitty job of knowing what people actually use computers for.
But, hey, we've been working diligently on the icons. 'Cuz, that's what people really want.
It's not bullshit, it's an ex-Mozilla employee discussing just how bad the situation is.
Fair enough, but TFS makes it sound like this is a speedup due to how super awesome the tracking protection is, as opposed to the default crap of letting everything from a zillion other domains run by default.
Run everything from every cross domain crap and advertising the crux of the problem here, because ads and other tracking crap have fucked up the internet to the point that dozens of other domains get to know every page you visit.
Those entities, and the people whose websites use them, should not be rewarded for putting shit all over the internet.
Because disabling 3rd party cookies and setting cookies to "ask before setting" will probably also have the same effect, because once you hit a site you've said "no" to, you never get asked again.
This is saying "our awesome tracking protection is faster than promiscuously accepting all cookies and running scripts".
The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts.
Their tracking protection isn't magic, it's just blocking crap. Some of which can be blocked by default anyway.
And it's a setting which Mozilla backed down on enabling by default because advertisers whined at them.
That's a ridiculous number trumped up by idiots in the stock market who have overvalued a tech company.
Unicorns indeed. Uber is a tech company with an app, they sure as hell don't have that as a sensible valuation based on revenues or assets.
So every company Uber is going to buy with a stock swap? The stock owners should sell off and run, because they're being bought with funny money -- like when AOL bought Time Warner.
Increasingly I think the stock market is full of drooling idiots who think they're playing the lottery -- because that's the only sensible explanation for these ridiculous valuations. And, yes, this is exactly like the.com era -- a complete lack of common sense about the valuation of things because people desperately want them to be huge.
Of course, the problem is by the time the bubble bursts it's only the little guys who were hoping to pick up some scraps still holding onto the stock, because all the wealthy people and institutions have gotten out and run because they know damned well it's overvalued.
Then it's just finding suckers to take the overvalued stock off your hands.
"Alternatively, it might suggest that the government just doesn't care about legal authorization."
Either the company who sells this, or the agencies using this, have convinced themselves they live in a special area of law in which reality is as they have decided it to be.
They do not care if other people say they have no legal basis for this, they either don't care, or believe they do have a legal basis for this.
Which basically means law enforcement is in the hands of a bunch of idiots who don't know or care the law.
American law enforcement have become like the police in a banana republic... they'll do whatever the hell they wish, and if you don't like it, they'll probably try to find some way to abuse the law against you.
But make no mistake about it, these people aren't going to obey the law unless until they find themselves under threat of being in a cell themselves. And then they'll just pretend to obey the law.
Law enforcement now believes they can do anything they want to achieve their ends. Because they're idiots who don't know or care about the law.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you're defending your mullet and your bad 80s hair metal tapes? Or are you fully driving around acting like you're Vanilla Ice?
"Classic sports car" gets you a little too much "Wayne's World". ;-)
Well, what problem is this making a dent in other than a billionaire setting up a small private school for his kids and some of his employees?
Because if the entire story is "billionaire sets up private school for own kids" ... who gives a shit?
If he's purely doing something for his own benefit, this has no business being in the news. Because then it's just "rich asshole can afford to buy his children a better education than you can afford", and kind of pointless.
Otherwise, we'd see daily stories that say "Netcraft confirms it, Larry Ellison is still a douchebag".
Well, if you let an egotistical billionaire run the education of 20 students, you will probably come up with awesome results.
But how much of this is applicable when it isn't being paid for by an egotistical billionaire?
You can say nothing about this other than ... highly focused, very expensive private education can be effective, but that this doesn't tell you anything about educating the rest of them.
You can't say this was better because you eliminated grades. This is a PR stunt, but it's not some revolution in education.
Do you know how stupid that sounds?
"I'm OK with taxi regulation as long as they drop them for Uber".
Look, Uber can play the victim card here all they want.
This isn't a legislation problem. This is a problem of the world not suddenly bowing to the will of a fucking tech company who thinks a mobile phone app is magic and that laws should be changed to accommodate them.
And impounding Uber drivers' cars and fining them is a legitimate way to say "we don't give a fuck that you think the law shouldn't apply to you.
Uber is a greedy technology company, who is trying to control the spin of "boo hoo, we're downtrodden" to prop up their business model which amounts do "an app for dispatching illegal cabs and pretending laws don't apply to us because we stepped in unicorn poop and are now magical".
No, again, you're full of crap and stating your opinion as if it is a fact.
The laws aren't there to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. You'd have to be an idiot to think that.
The laws are to regulate who is running a taxi, the rules under which they operate, and the minimum safety standards ... stuff like that.
That some people want to make the idiotic claims that laws are hurting innovation, or that regulating an industry is some fucking grand conspiracy to keep taxi owners rich ... saying it doesn't make it true. It's still batshit crazy stuff which has nothing to do with reality, other than indicating you desperately wish reality adhered to your crazy beliefs.
Which is precisely what Uber does as well.
No, that is bullshit.
If you want fair competition, you have to do it under the same rules as everyone else.
Not by throwing a tantrum like a spoiled child and deciding the rules don't apply to you.
This has nothing to do with fair competition, or protecting entrenched players. This is about governments having the authority to pass laws, and whiny idiots claiming they don't want laws.
Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.
Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.
Uber aren't the champions of truth and justice ... they're a greedy corporation who think they are something special.
But don't let reality stand in the way of your libertarian fantasy world.
No, piss off Uber.
The laws and regulations exist. That Uber (and you) disagree with those regulations is completely fucking irrelevant.
Uber doesn't get to throw a tantrum like a child and refuse to adhere to the law. You can't refuse to eat your broccoli, the real world doesn't work like that.
Don't like it, try to change the law. If that doesn't work, you can suck it up and accept that the law exists, and claiming you don't like it or that you think it doesn't apply to you is nothing but a crock of shit.
Just because in some libertarian fantasy of the world you think you shouldn't be regulated doesn't mean a damned thing.
Surely Time Warner has learned the lesson of not being bought for funny money stock?
Because when AOL bought them with trumped up stock, somehow AOL was worth more than an entity with cable, programming,network infrastructure, move studios.
Somehow I wonder if Time Warner isn't selling the farm for a couple of magic beans (again).
And you can bet your ass this single entity will not do anything to lower prices or foster competition ... it will be more "we're screwing you because we can".
The only people this will be good for are executives who get huge severance packages. But I'm betting in the long run it hurts consumers, and quite possibly shareholders.
In my experience, the development environment for software is larger than the actual software.
Working copies, and interim copies, and what have you. Tools, pieces, and parts.
Now imagine something as massive as a video game, specifically involving art and computer graphics ... models, mockups, rendered seqeunces, things I don't even know what might be in there.
I'm betting the amount of source material which feeds into a finished game is likely many thousands of times the end-product. Because you probably have various edits and do-overs of stuff which took a long time to make, and is probably valuable.
I can't imagine how many terabytes it takes to build a modern video game.
But 40GB of cool stuff? Yeah, I totally buy that as possible.
The world should not be set up safe as a default for you and your fucking whiny children.
The moral upbringing of your children in a sealed bubble which keeps the world at bay is your damned problem.
Every parent who insists the world be made sanitized for you and your precious little snowflake can piss off.
You want a nanny internet, you take the time to sign up for it and request it. But if you think the rest of the world should have to opt-in ... you can fuck off and leave the rest of us out of it.
I'm s sick of idiotic parents who think the world should change to protect their children. We don't give a crap, they're not our kids ... on behalf of parent-less couples everywhere, this is your fucking problem not ours.
I won't moderate my behavior for my mother. If you think I'll do it for you and your brood of annoying children ... well, ask me. I dare you. Because they'll learn every possible bad word as well as hearing them used in complete sentences.
If you think the world should tiptoe around you and your kids ... you're too stupid to have kids.
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits. Fuck you, fuck off, go the fuck away, and don't make me tell you again.
I will not in any way attempt to say that I understand the entirety or magnitude of the issue. While I've known people with mental illnesses, that doesn't mean I can truly understand it.
But I lament that one has to describe internet privacy and security as something which you have to be in the throes of a clinical mental illness to appreciate.
Because these days, a perfectly sane and rational person should be assuming that governments are, in fact, spying on them. Or at the very least have the capacity to do so with shockingly little oversight.
But if people think that only clinical paranoids are, or should be, concerned about such things .. people will continue to act as it only clinical paranoids are concerned about such things.
And, that's just simply not true.
Of course the problem with this characterization is it somehow implies that this is something only people with mental illness believe.
The reality is, it is now an objective fact that it is true.
But for some reason this fact hasn't sunk in, and people keep acting like it's solely for paranoids and other crazy people to be concerned about.
And that's simply not true.
You can't buy either hot dogs or beer at Tim Hortons.
And pretty much nobody actually says "eh", and never has.
So why is Mozilla trying to enter into the cheap handset market? This isn't their core competencies.
It just seems like they're flailing about trying to define the next big thing. And, really, that seems to be a waste of resources.
This just feels like Mozilla has kind of lost the plot.
LOL, that's because Windows '95 was still using visual metaphors they'd 'borrowed' from Apple -- and since Microsoft won a court case which said you can't own look and feel, there's no denying they borrowed from Apple.
The problem seems to be now that they're borrowing elements of a tablet interface, and trying to innovate ... they seem to be painting themselves into a corner by believing a tablet interface is somehow suitable for all kinds of tasks.
I think the Metro UI is probably really well suited for a tablet or a phone. But I think for many of the things people still use computers for will not be well suited to this new UI.
The problem is the belief that having Metro as a default UI isn't a stupid idea when it's not on a platform optimized for it.
On a 23" monitor with no touchscreen ... Metro is a giant leap backwards which has decided ergonomics and proximity are archaic ideas, and that everybody wants to move from corner to corner.
My Windows 8.1 feels like a fast, rock-solid platform. But Metro felt like a child's interface slapped on the front which needed to be replaced.
Wow, nice either or.
In between clueless people who want to access the intertubes and programmers is pretty much everything else computers are ever used for.
And business software users do not gain a damned thing from Metro. They gain a clunk interface which is useless to them.
So, while Metro has its place for some people ... it is completely unsuited for the tasks of what many many people do with computers.
So Microsoft (and idiots like you) can keep pretending that Metro is a suitable interface for everything. Or Microsoft (and idiots like you) can actually realize that "one size fits some" isn't going to cut it.
You sound like a whiny graphic designer who still doesn't understand that a GUI which doesn't suit the task is fucking useless.
Yes, for many home users Metro will probably do everything they need. For for people with more demanding tasks, and most people in business ... Metro is utterly useless as a UI.
I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.
With a keyboard and mouse, on a large screen with no touch ... Metro is a completely fucking useless UI.
So you can boo hoo about how the graphic designers will save the day. But if all they have is eye candy which impedes function compare to existing UIs ... all they're doing its making pretty garbage.
But people who use computers for grown up things will simply not benefit from Metro. Because it's the completely wrong interface paradigm for many things, and Microsoft (and idiots like you) whining it's the wave of the future doesn't make it a good universal UI.
This isn't about the interface for normal people and programmers ... this is about the entirety of human computer interface design, and is much more sophisticated than your clueless reductionism.
No, apparently US business interests are far more important.
I think it's time the rest of the world told the US: we don't give a fuck about your business interests, we care about not putting toxic crap on our foods.
"Aggressive US lobbyists" should be told the STFU or simply shot.
Free trade with the US is "we will ignore any obligations, and we will cram our laws down your throat."
If diplomacy with the US is entirely about advancing US business interests to the detriment of local industry and environment ... the response should be a big giant "fo fuck yourself".
Because the US pushes for trade deals, and then still reuses to ignore them ... things like steel subsidies, massive corn subsidies, and country of origin labeling requirements are things they've repeatedly lost in WTO arbitration.
So why the hell do countries keep putting up with this shit?
Such horseshit. It's time the rest of the world stopped giving a shit about US business interests ... because they never actually coincide with domestic interests.
You know, if people are actually doing proper user interface design, that might be true.
But having seen Metro on a Windows 8.1 box ... that's not what is happening.
Graphic designers focusing on pretty, but with no understanding of functional are producing shitty interfaces which, while they might be fine for a tablet or a handheld, are complete garbage for a desktop machine with no touch screen and operated with a keyboard and mouse.
So, I don't care which shade of pastel and crayons the useless interface is. I want to turn off the useless interface entirely, because it provides nothing in the way of utility.
Windows 8.1 is fast and stable, and has nice features. But it's only usable as a desktop once you install something like Classic Shell and turn off the crap that these "designers" have put in.
They're spending all the time tweaking the wrong things.
Because there's more than one set of greedy bastards, each of which have their own branding, and feel they deserve a slice of the pie -- because they all have executives who need hooker and yacht money.
Are you expecting greedy advertisers to pool their resources so users only see a single greedy embedded in their web pages? Or that somehow having the big giant clearinghouse of everyone's data would somehow be good?
I have an alternative, block the shit out of all of them, and then nuke the offices of tracking and advertising companies from orbit.
Just because a bunch of advertising agencies thinks they own the internet doesn't mean we should play along. In fact, we should try to weed them out entirely.
So, instead of trying focus on what kind of user experience we're going to have (which sounds like they think the tablet interface is what people actually want for everything) ... and focusing on making all of that good and usable ... why does it sound like throwing out new sets of icons means someone has lost the plot and is focused on the eye candy, and ignoring the fact that for a desktop machine Metro is a completely garbage interface?
I like my Windows 8.1 machine. But it was really only useful once I basically removed all of the stuff that Microsoft thinks they innovated or that was valuable.
Metro on a 23" non-touch screen monitor is a pathetic interface for Windows. If Microsoft is going to think everybody is running everything on a touch screen interface, instead of a mouse and keyboard ... they're doing a shitty job of knowing what people actually use computers for.
But, hey, we've been working diligently on the icons. 'Cuz, that's what people really want.
Fair enough, but TFS makes it sound like this is a speedup due to how super awesome the tracking protection is, as opposed to the default crap of letting everything from a zillion other domains run by default.
Run everything from every cross domain crap and advertising the crux of the problem here, because ads and other tracking crap have fucked up the internet to the point that dozens of other domains get to know every page you visit.
Those entities, and the people whose websites use them, should not be rewarded for putting shit all over the internet.
+ NoScript + Ghostery + AdBlock + Block 3rd Party Cookies
For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect
The internet is full of shit which needs to be ruthlessly blocked.
I'm going to call complete bullshit on this.
Because disabling 3rd party cookies and setting cookies to "ask before setting" will probably also have the same effect, because once you hit a site you've said "no" to, you never get asked again.
This is saying "our awesome tracking protection is faster than promiscuously accepting all cookies and running scripts".
The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts.
Their tracking protection isn't magic, it's just blocking crap. Some of which can be blocked by default anyway.
And it's a setting which Mozilla backed down on enabling by default because advertisers whined at them.
There is no way Uber is worth $41 billion.
That's a ridiculous number trumped up by idiots in the stock market who have overvalued a tech company.
Unicorns indeed. Uber is a tech company with an app, they sure as hell don't have that as a sensible valuation based on revenues or assets.
So every company Uber is going to buy with a stock swap? The stock owners should sell off and run, because they're being bought with funny money -- like when AOL bought Time Warner.
Increasingly I think the stock market is full of drooling idiots who think they're playing the lottery -- because that's the only sensible explanation for these ridiculous valuations. And, yes, this is exactly like the .com era -- a complete lack of common sense about the valuation of things because people desperately want them to be huge.
Of course, the problem is by the time the bubble bursts it's only the little guys who were hoping to pick up some scraps still holding onto the stock, because all the wealthy people and institutions have gotten out and run because they know damned well it's overvalued.
Then it's just finding suckers to take the overvalued stock off your hands.
Either the company who sells this, or the agencies using this, have convinced themselves they live in a special area of law in which reality is as they have decided it to be.
They do not care if other people say they have no legal basis for this, they either don't care, or believe they do have a legal basis for this.
Which basically means law enforcement is in the hands of a bunch of idiots who don't know or care the law.
American law enforcement have become like the police in a banana republic ... they'll do whatever the hell they wish, and if you don't like it, they'll probably try to find some way to abuse the law against you.
But make no mistake about it, these people aren't going to obey the law unless until they find themselves under threat of being in a cell themselves. And then they'll just pretend to obey the law.
Law enforcement now believes they can do anything they want to achieve their ends. Because they're idiots who don't know or care about the law.