You realize that one of those people is the CEO of the company that makes the product and the other is a fictional character who pals around with a drunken DIVX player and a fruit-raping machine, right? And that the comic is making fun of how no one owns the things?
Legal by statue in Oregon for several years and in Washington as of this past election. Recently legal by court decree in Montana as of this week but not yet reviewed by the state's Supreme Court.
And if he's personally seen people "enjoy" their rights to euthanasia and abortion, he's got some pretty sick hobbies.
I can't believe that some people care more about which MP3 player he uses than what policies he's going to implement.
We're gonna have a Presidency where the NYT & WSJ crowd are finally crushing over the same person as the People and ET crowd. Whee! The line between political muckraking and celebrity gossip has just vanished!
Instead you should kill yourself for putting Voyager & Enterprise in the same bucket with TOS & Next Generation or for putting the prequels in the same bucket as the original trilogy or for even caring in the first place.
Exactly. These new UI changes being made to Slashdot are HORRIBLE. They do not make the site look better. They do not make it easier to read (quite the opposite on the laptop I use as my daily work/home machine). They do not make the site load faster, and they do not make it easier to use. The new users page is just VILE, more obfuscatory than helpful -- you can't even tell if anyone has replied to your posts without clicking through to another page.
However, this site is a labor of love in some ways for the creators, so after investing so much time and labor into creating all these new features, I give it less than a 1% chance that the "editors" of the site will reverse any of these changes. I've known too many people too invested in their personal creations to consider user feedback.
Its being reminded again and again of how we can't keep nice things that makes one crotchety as they get older.
For the record, I think 99% of what's out there (hollywood or otherwise) as "sci-fi" is shit, and should not really be considered sci-fi.
Then what is it instead? What *is* SF in your mind? Saying, "It has to meet my exacting standards of quality before I accept it as part of the genre," is meaningless unless you define what those standards are.
Otherwise, you're just a living example of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
Gripe? I'm stating an opinion: That surgery should be done properly, no matter who the person is. Thankfully, this time it -was- done properly, despite a bad decision on the part of the doctors involved.
You call it a "bad decision." I call it the only decision available at the time.
Also, you have no idea just how much information he needed at what point, yet you insist that the choice to use text messages was wrong. While he'd never done this particular surgery before, the man was obviously not an unskilled and inexperienced doctor to be able to pull it off in the conditions he was working with. He's a 52 year old vascular surgeon, not some fresh out of med school intern. You complain that he didn't bother to get "instant feedback," but who (other than your holy highness) says he actually *needed* it instead of just some general guidelines? Apparently, all he needed was two long messages before starting surgery to know enough to do it himself without assistance. (See this version of the story.)
In other words, you're talking out of your ass -- armchair quarterbacking someone with superior knowledge of what they actually needed and raining venom all over someone who saved a doomed young boy's life because he didn't meet the expectations of some internet jackass sitting in comfort and ignorance in his own home in a well-to-do country.
You? You're saying that it's okay to give them cut-rate surgery because the doctor is volunteering his time.
Now who makes who sick?
I bet you're the kind of person who sneers at someone for "only" putting a dollar in the holiday Red Cross donation buckets instead of twenty while walking on by yourself without giving a damned thing. It is a mark of privilege to sneer at all assistance rendered if it is not done to one's own exacting and unrealistic standards and to suggest that someone would be better served by having nothing. If you had your way, people like this boy would simply be dead from lack of volunteers to help.
Necessary: The article is about utilizing salt water for plants, not about damaging soil with current practices.
The current practices are why we need to use plants capable of growing in salt water. I mean, that's what the second paragraph of the article points out! Excessive irrigation has destroyed the usability of acres and acres of farmland in Australia, California, Northern China, Iraq, South Africa, etc, etc. It's pretty much a problem everywhere in the world.
This article is about finding a suitable use for the ruined areas, not about adding salt water to good soil. Please reread TFA.
Guns, Germs, and Steel = Eugenics, Racism, Sexism. The kind of box only children with small imaginations like.
I can only conclude that you haven't read the book at all. It's the only explanation I can find for why you'd spout off that nonsense. Jared Diamond takes great lengths to discount racist theories of why certain civilizations have triumphed over others.
The great overarching theme of the book is that Europe and Asia had several geological advantages over the rest of the world that led to their more rapid growth and civilization: easier to cultivate and more nutritious crops, better access to large animals capable of being domesticated, an east-west trade axis that allowed early agricultural technology to spread across large areas (without running into climates where the same crops couldn't be grown), etc. He neither advocates for any racial or gender superiority theories.
Seeing as you've obviously neither read the article in this discussion nor the books I commented on, you probably should refrain from sticking your foot further in your mouth on this matter. (i.e. lurk moar)
Would someone who knows please explain how the [European Court of Human Rights] has jurisdiction over national laws?
The same way the WTO has jurisdiction over the US -- they signed a treaty that said that they will abide by the decisions of the international body.
Of course, unlike the states of the US, any country is significantly more free to simply ignore the rulings, thought not without impunity. Ignoring the ECHR could mean severe potential trade problems with the rest of Europe but could also just mean having to pay some fines every now and then. Heck, Italy gets dragged before the court regularly for failure to provide a speedy trial and just pays off the fines and ignores making changes to their entrenched legal system -- at least according to my law prof, they do.
When did the ability to obfuscate the truth about things and operate from the shadows become an important part of democracy?
Democracy relies on people having access to as much information as possible so they can make wise decisions. Privacy is contrary to democracy.
I think you are confusing the need for an informed electorate with the need for an informed government.
Democracy requires that we be as informed as possible about the people in government and the people "trying out for" the job. The enforcement of the government power is aided by a government that knows everything about its citizens.
However, these goals are not necessarily compatible. For one thing, the need for a government to exert its will is universal to ALL forms of government -- from democracy to autocracy. In fact, one can say that the greatest difference between democracy and autocracy are the levels of limits on what the government can do to the people and how accountable it is to the people.
Democracy has little to with you knowing everything about your neighbors or your government knowing everything about you -- unless you are running for office.
Apparently you and the AC below you have still managed to miss the fact that he's IN! AFRICA!
This is a doctor doing aid work in a third world WAR ZONE, at a hospital less than 20 miles from the border with Rwanda. This is volunteerism; he doesn't even have sufficient *blood* to do the surgery safely, much less someone to reimburse him for what might end up as a several hundred dollar phone bill. You work with the tools you have, and the fact that he was able to pull this off given the resource and budget constraints that were put on him is something to be commended.
Commended. Not denigrated by some privileged jackass who has NO FREAKING CLUE what the world is like outside of his wealthy Western lifestyle and doesn't know (or probably even care) what kind of resources these doctors are working with. This guy takes a month off each year to go work for FREE to save lives, working 24-hour trauma shifts, and you gripe him out because his method of checking with his colleagues isn't high class enough for you -- because he isn't emptying his pocket fast enough.
On the 'public internet', IE's a menace... & so are apps based on it I feel.
Yes, I would agree, but... A) Not my policy call, and not my machine. If it burned my employer, so be it, it was their bad IT policies bed, and they should lie in it. B) Most of the most dangerous sites, I should NOT be viewing at work anyway. Unless someone hijacked one of the news sites I read, there was no risk (especially with ads blocked).
Call me a "fanboy" all you like, but, the fact remains that since MaxThon is based on IE engines? It too will be as vulnerable as IE is, unless something in its code takes care of hassles IE has, somehow... I am just pointing out facts, NOT 'dumping on you'...
Look, Maxathon had its uses. I never once said it was my browser of choice, but I was impressed by how much it made being forced to use IE suck less. So if you are just "pointing out facts," then why point them out *to me*, and why the big rant about how unfair it was that Opera didn't get a better shake when I *never once* said anything bad about Opera?
I mean, if you wanted to post about how awesome Opera is, fine -- do so. Just don't post it *in response to* someone else saying nothing related, and don't do so in a manner that suggests that your and your product of choice are somehow put upon because it makes it look like you're saying that I'm somehow representative of the people responsible for your favorite product's misfortune.
I mean, I could maybe understand if my post was highly moderated and you were just seeking some karma whoring attention for the issue, but why all of this was addressed to *me* in a post that most other people wouldn't see just boggles me.
I used to live in Idaho, literally up the street from a potato processing plant. After I found out what kind of potatoes Pringles were made from, it took me three years to be willing to eat them again.:)
Now you have me curious. Dish.
I know that what goes into processed food is usually the crops which aren't photogenic enough for the grocery store shelves, but what would seriously put you off?
As opposed to the completely made-up data and completely erroneous and overly-simplistic models by the "global warming" crowd.
I hear that said a lot by people who aren't willing to back up their wild claims. If you've got some proof that data is "completely made-up" or that modeling is "overly-simplistic," I'd love to hear it.
The idea that the sun is the dominant factor in global warming has been resoundingly debunked.
And the idea that warming has increased carbon dioxide (and that somehow carbon dioxide is just an innocent bystander in the whole affair) is frankly facile. Carbon dioxide is the dominant cause of global warming (with methane coming in second). Global warming is increasing the release of some natural carbon dioxide sources. However, these natural releases are DWARFED by industrial releases, a fact commonly ignored by "global warming causes increased CO2" reality deniers. It's a theory that only holds up if you completely toss large amounts of data out the window, which frankly isn't uncommon among the "global warming is a myth" crowd.
Yes. Yes there are -- which you damned well should know if you've ever read nearly ANY Slashdot science discussion. And thank you so much for feeding the delusional trolls so that yet ANOTHER science discussion will be hijacked in a "debate" between people who do and don't believe in the issue.
Yes, thank you, because it's largely irrelevant to the issue of salinization. Salinization is about excessive irrigation. It has little to do with global climate change directly.
I'd like to recommend the book "Collapse," by Jared Diamond (the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," another book I'd recommend). He spends several pages explaining the damage that salinization has done to farmland in places like Australia. It's kind of an eye opener about how wasteful irrigation policies have ended up basically permanently ruining large ares of Australia's farmlands by drawing salt up into the soil.
The damage, once done, is ridiculously expensive to fix, so we need to find crops that can grow in the unusable land, especially as the world's population grows -- especially its meat-eating population as third world countries acquire first world living standards, which multiplies the need for vegetable crops.
Shocking, isn't it? I have no idea what's been going on. The US dollar has apparently rallied against most major world currencies except the Japanese yen. Here's an article speculating about why. Apparently, risk adverse investors are dumping less "reliable" currencies in favor of "safe" ones like the US dollar and the yen. No, I don't get it either.
The story is that this was a procedure which is difficult even in a fully equipped hospital with bountiful access to donated blood which the doctor performing the surgery wasn't 100% familiar with and yet the kid lived in spite of being in a third world country with minimal tools and very little blood to work with -- all thanks to the ability to fact check with a more skilled surgeon several thousand miles away (and a pretty talented physician on the ground).
20 years ago, this would not have been possible. Hell, I don't know how well cell phone networks were set up in the DRC a mere 10 years ago.
It's a human interest story and a story about how modern life has given us solutions to difficult problems. Cheer up, emo kid -- at least it's not a story about the latest photogenic blond white girl in trouble.
Did you somehow miss the part where he was calling from Africa to the UK? Have you never priced an international call?
Assume that you're an Orange customer. (It's the first UK cell phone provider I could think of off the top of my head.) Roaming in Africa and calling England costs £1.20/minute (or over $1.75/minute) if you have the Orange Travel plan.
Texting is much, much cheaper. In fact, in Africa, it's the dominant form of cell phone communication because voice rates are so ridiculously high in comparison even among local carriers, according to a family member who spent several months there on a mission trip.
Maxthon is based on IE and thus has all of its security hassles (see secunia.com &/or securityfocus.com in that regards to verify the truth of my statement if you wish).
Technically not true. Ad blocking *will* prevent some malicious code from running. Maxathon had a couple of other security features base IE didn't that I forget since it's been years since I ran it. Even so, it's not like I had much of a choice -- see below.
As far as tabbed browsing, Opera had that before IE or FireFox AND Maxthon... [blah blah Opera is awesome]
Was there a point to this entire rant? Did you miss the part where I *had* to have IE's rending engine because the company had some brain dead internal apps that required it? As long as Opera (and Firefox, my browser of choice) didn't do ActiveX, it was either IE or a shell around IE or running multiple browsers at once.
Opera is underrated and largely due to reviews like this one that short-changed it imo.
Geez, are you blaming ME for that or something? I worked with what I had to. If it assuages your fanboy persecution complex, I had Opera on my phone for years and liked it, and I was fond of Opera when I tried it back before it was free in '99.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that one of those people is the CEO of the company that makes the product and the other is a fictional character who pals around with a drunken DIVX player and a fruit-raping machine, right? And that the comic is making fun of how no one owns the things?
- Euthanasia is illegal (Points: 1)
Legal by statue in Oregon for several years and in Washington as of this past election.
Recently legal by court decree in Montana as of this week but not yet reviewed by the state's Supreme Court.
And if he's personally seen people "enjoy" their rights to euthanasia and abortion, he's got some pretty sick hobbies.
I can't believe that some people care more about which MP3 player he uses than what policies he's going to implement.
We're gonna have a Presidency where the NYT & WSJ crowd are finally crushing over the same person as the People and ET crowd. Whee! The line between political muckraking and celebrity gossip has just vanished!
Instead you should kill yourself for putting Voyager & Enterprise in the same bucket with TOS & Next Generation or for putting the prequels in the same bucket as the original trilogy or for even caring in the first place.
What does it matter if he's an apple or windows guy? It's not linux, so why does it matter?
The irony of these two sentences back to back is so deliciously rich.
Stupid Apple fanboys -- why won't people praise Linux more!?
Exactly. These new UI changes being made to Slashdot are HORRIBLE. They do not make the site look better. They do not make it easier to read (quite the opposite on the laptop I use as my daily work/home machine). They do not make the site load faster, and they do not make it easier to use. The new users page is just VILE, more obfuscatory than helpful -- you can't even tell if anyone has replied to your posts without clicking through to another page.
However, this site is a labor of love in some ways for the creators, so after investing so much time and labor into creating all these new features, I give it less than a 1% chance that the "editors" of the site will reverse any of these changes. I've known too many people too invested in their personal creations to consider user feedback.
Its being reminded again and again of how we can't keep nice things that makes one crotchety as they get older.
For the record, I think 99% of what's out there (hollywood or otherwise) as "sci-fi" is shit, and should not really be considered sci-fi.
Then what is it instead? What *is* SF in your mind? Saying, "It has to meet my exacting standards of quality before I accept it as part of the genre," is meaningless unless you define what those standards are.
Otherwise, you're just a living example of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
You also are postulating a position against the commonly held wisdom.
Common beliefs are commonly incorrect.
Hee hee! "And that's why you're RIGHT! I mean 'WRONG!' Wrong! @#$%!"
Could I chime in with a request that you get Paris Hilton to model a t-shirt with that one too?
See my responses to Aladrin above. They pretty much cover why your post is sheer silver spoon idiocy.
(Hint: What did he bill the boy's family?)
Gripe? I'm stating an opinion: That surgery should be done properly, no matter who the person is. Thankfully, this time it -was- done properly, despite a bad decision on the part of the doctors involved.
You call it a "bad decision." I call it the only decision available at the time.
Also, you have no idea just how much information he needed at what point, yet you insist that the choice to use text messages was wrong. While he'd never done this particular surgery before, the man was obviously not an unskilled and inexperienced doctor to be able to pull it off in the conditions he was working with. He's a 52 year old vascular surgeon, not some fresh out of med school intern. You complain that he didn't bother to get "instant feedback," but who (other than your holy highness) says he actually *needed* it instead of just some general guidelines? Apparently, all he needed was two long messages before starting surgery to know enough to do it himself without assistance. (See this version of the story.)
In other words, you're talking out of your ass -- armchair quarterbacking someone with superior knowledge of what they actually needed and raining venom all over someone who saved a doomed young boy's life because he didn't meet the expectations of some internet jackass sitting in comfort and ignorance in his own home in a well-to-do country.
You? You're saying that it's okay to give them cut-rate surgery because the doctor is volunteering his time.
Now who makes who sick?
I bet you're the kind of person who sneers at someone for "only" putting a dollar in the holiday Red Cross donation buckets instead of twenty while walking on by yourself without giving a damned thing. It is a mark of privilege to sneer at all assistance rendered if it is not done to one's own exacting and unrealistic standards and to suggest that someone would be better served by having nothing. If you had your way, people like this boy would simply be dead from lack of volunteers to help.
Necessary:
The article is about utilizing salt water for plants, not about damaging soil with current practices.
The current practices are why we need to use plants capable of growing in salt water. I mean, that's what the second paragraph of the article points out! Excessive irrigation has destroyed the usability of acres and acres of farmland in Australia, California, Northern China, Iraq, South Africa, etc, etc. It's pretty much a problem everywhere in the world.
This article is about finding a suitable use for the ruined areas, not about adding salt water to good soil. Please reread TFA.
Guns, Germs, and Steel = Eugenics, Racism, Sexism. The kind of box only children with small imaginations like.
I can only conclude that you haven't read the book at all. It's the only explanation I can find for why you'd spout off that nonsense. Jared Diamond takes great lengths to discount racist theories of why certain civilizations have triumphed over others.
The great overarching theme of the book is that Europe and Asia had several geological advantages over the rest of the world that led to their more rapid growth and civilization: easier to cultivate and more nutritious crops, better access to large animals capable of being domesticated, an east-west trade axis that allowed early agricultural technology to spread across large areas (without running into climates where the same crops couldn't be grown), etc. He neither advocates for any racial or gender superiority theories.
Seeing as you've obviously neither read the article in this discussion nor the books I commented on, you probably should refrain from sticking your foot further in your mouth on this matter. (i.e. lurk moar)
Gentle answers is what 6 years in customer support teaches you.
That, or hating everyone ;-)
Why can't it be both?
Would someone who knows please explain how the [European Court of Human Rights] has jurisdiction over national laws?
The same way the WTO has jurisdiction over the US -- they signed a treaty that said that they will abide by the decisions of the international body.
Of course, unlike the states of the US, any country is significantly more free to simply ignore the rulings, thought not without impunity. Ignoring the ECHR could mean severe potential trade problems with the rest of Europe but could also just mean having to pay some fines every now and then. Heck, Italy gets dragged before the court regularly for failure to provide a speedy trial and just pays off the fines and ignores making changes to their entrenched legal system -- at least according to my law prof, they do.
When did the ability to obfuscate the truth about things and operate from the shadows become an important part of democracy?
Democracy relies on people having access to as much information as possible so they can make wise decisions. Privacy is contrary to democracy.
I think you are confusing the need for an informed electorate with the need for an informed government.
Democracy requires that we be as informed as possible about the people in government and the people "trying out for" the job. The enforcement of the government power is aided by a government that knows everything about its citizens.
However, these goals are not necessarily compatible. For one thing, the need for a government to exert its will is universal to ALL forms of government -- from democracy to autocracy. In fact, one can say that the greatest difference between democracy and autocracy are the levels of limits on what the government can do to the people and how accountable it is to the people.
Democracy has little to with you knowing everything about your neighbors or your government knowing everything about you -- unless you are running for office.
Apparently you and the AC below you have still managed to miss the fact that he's IN! AFRICA!
This is a doctor doing aid work in a third world WAR ZONE, at a hospital less than 20 miles from the border with Rwanda. This is volunteerism; he doesn't even have sufficient *blood* to do the surgery safely, much less someone to reimburse him for what might end up as a several hundred dollar phone bill. You work with the tools you have, and the fact that he was able to pull this off given the resource and budget constraints that were put on him is something to be commended.
Commended. Not denigrated by some privileged jackass who has NO FREAKING CLUE what the world is like outside of his wealthy Western lifestyle and doesn't know (or probably even care) what kind of resources these doctors are working with. This guy takes a month off each year to go work for FREE to save lives, working 24-hour trauma shifts, and you gripe him out because his method of checking with his colleagues isn't high class enough for you -- because he isn't emptying his pocket fast enough.
You make me sick.
On the 'public internet', IE's a menace... & so are apps based on it I feel.
Yes, I would agree, but...
A) Not my policy call, and not my machine. If it burned my employer, so be it, it was their bad IT policies bed, and they should lie in it.
B) Most of the most dangerous sites, I should NOT be viewing at work anyway. Unless someone hijacked one of the news sites I read, there was no risk (especially with ads blocked).
Call me a "fanboy" all you like, but, the fact remains that since MaxThon is based on IE engines? It too will be as vulnerable as IE is, unless something in its code takes care of hassles IE has, somehow... I am just pointing out facts, NOT 'dumping on you'...
Look, Maxathon had its uses. I never once said it was my browser of choice, but I was impressed by how much it made being forced to use IE suck less. So if you are just "pointing out facts," then why point them out *to me*, and why the big rant about how unfair it was that Opera didn't get a better shake when I *never once* said anything bad about Opera?
I mean, if you wanted to post about how awesome Opera is, fine -- do so. Just don't post it *in response to* someone else saying nothing related, and don't do so in a manner that suggests that your and your product of choice are somehow put upon because it makes it look like you're saying that I'm somehow representative of the people responsible for your favorite product's misfortune.
I mean, I could maybe understand if my post was highly moderated and you were just seeking some karma whoring attention for the issue, but why all of this was addressed to *me* in a post that most other people wouldn't see just boggles me.
I used to live in Idaho, literally up the street from a potato processing plant. After I found out what kind of potatoes Pringles were made from, it took me three years to be willing to eat them again. :)
Now you have me curious. Dish.
I know that what goes into processed food is usually the crops which aren't photogenic enough for the grocery store shelves, but what would seriously put you off?
As opposed to the completely made-up data and completely erroneous and overly-simplistic models by the "global warming" crowd.
I hear that said a lot by people who aren't willing to back up their wild claims. If you've got some proof that data is "completely made-up" or that modeling is "overly-simplistic," I'd love to hear it.
The idea that the sun is the dominant factor in global warming has been resoundingly debunked.
And the idea that warming has increased carbon dioxide (and that somehow carbon dioxide is just an innocent bystander in the whole affair) is frankly facile. Carbon dioxide is the dominant cause of global warming (with methane coming in second). Global warming is increasing the release of some natural carbon dioxide sources. However, these natural releases are DWARFED by industrial releases, a fact commonly ignored by "global warming causes increased CO2" reality deniers. It's a theory that only holds up if you completely toss large amounts of data out the window, which frankly isn't uncommon among the "global warming is a myth" crowd.
...is there anyone still denying global warming?
Yes. Yes there are -- which you damned well should know if you've ever read nearly ANY Slashdot science discussion. And thank you so much for feeding the delusional trolls so that yet ANOTHER science discussion will be hijacked in a "debate" between people who do and don't believe in the issue.
Yes, thank you, because it's largely irrelevant to the issue of salinization. Salinization is about excessive irrigation. It has little to do with global climate change directly.
I'd like to recommend the book "Collapse," by Jared Diamond (the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," another book I'd recommend). He spends several pages explaining the damage that salinization has done to farmland in places like Australia. It's kind of an eye opener about how wasteful irrigation policies have ended up basically permanently ruining large ares of Australia's farmlands by drawing salt up into the soil.
The damage, once done, is ridiculously expensive to fix, so we need to find crops that can grow in the unusable land, especially as the world's population grows -- especially its meat-eating population as third world countries acquire first world living standards, which multiplies the need for vegetable crops.
Shocking, isn't it? I have no idea what's been going on. The US dollar has apparently rallied against most major world currencies except the Japanese yen. Here's an article speculating about why. Apparently, risk adverse investors are dumping less "reliable" currencies in favor of "safe" ones like the US dollar and the yen. No, I don't get it either.
The story is that this was a procedure which is difficult even in a fully equipped hospital with bountiful access to donated blood which the doctor performing the surgery wasn't 100% familiar with and yet the kid lived in spite of being in a third world country with minimal tools and very little blood to work with -- all thanks to the ability to fact check with a more skilled surgeon several thousand miles away (and a pretty talented physician on the ground).
20 years ago, this would not have been possible. Hell, I don't know how well cell phone networks were set up in the DRC a mere 10 years ago.
It's a human interest story and a story about how modern life has given us solutions to difficult problems. Cheer up, emo kid -- at least it's not a story about the latest photogenic blond white girl in trouble.
Did you somehow miss the part where he was calling from Africa to the UK? Have you never priced an international call?
Assume that you're an Orange customer. (It's the first UK cell phone provider I could think of off the top of my head.) Roaming in Africa and calling England costs £1.20/minute (or over $1.75/minute) if you have the Orange Travel plan.
Texting is much, much cheaper. In fact, in Africa, it's the dominant form of cell phone communication because voice rates are so ridiculously high in comparison even among local carriers, according to a family member who spent several months there on a mission trip.
Maxthon is based on IE and thus has all of its security hassles (see secunia.com &/or securityfocus.com in that regards to verify the truth of my statement if you wish).
Technically not true. Ad blocking *will* prevent some malicious code from running. Maxathon had a couple of other security features base IE didn't that I forget since it's been years since I ran it. Even so, it's not like I had much of a choice -- see below.
As far as tabbed browsing, Opera had that before IE or FireFox AND Maxthon ... [blah blah Opera is awesome]
Was there a point to this entire rant? Did you miss the part where I *had* to have IE's rending engine because the company had some brain dead internal apps that required it? As long as Opera (and Firefox, my browser of choice) didn't do ActiveX, it was either IE or a shell around IE or running multiple browsers at once.
Opera is underrated and largely due to reviews like this one that short-changed it imo.
Geez, are you blaming ME for that or something? I worked with what I had to. If it assuages your fanboy persecution complex, I had Opera on my phone for years and liked it, and I was fond of Opera when I tried it back before it was free in '99.