Ugh, can we please move the "more comments" box someplace USEFUL. I don't want to have to go up and re-read stuff, I just want to load all the comments to begin with. I also liked having the threshold on the sidebar, I generally browse at -1, unless things are too full of trolls, then I can switch on the fly. It was nice.
I don't need the topics on the side, why would I ever use them? I generally, when on full-blown Slashdot mode, have the mainpage pinned and check it when I'm don't killing time on the current selection of stories. I never once though "well that story was interesting... what is going on in the 'cloud' section!?"
Also, white space, less of it. Horizontal scroll bar (on Chrome daily, Windows 7), kill it, I don't have a status bar for a reason, I don't need you to waste my real estate instead.
What happened to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought? What was wrong with the last system? It had all the stupid web2.0 crap that makes PHBs happy, and internet hipsters cream themselves, it had some decent added functionality (live replies, live threshold), and enough bugs to make me realize that I was on a geek site. This doesn't seem to improve on it.
Also why the hell is this site now keeping my processor pegged at 10%? I have a fairly beefy processor, does it really need to work so hard to show what should be some static text?
Not to be too negative, I'm sure I'll be fully used to it in 5 years, so I can spread some nerd-rage over the next revision.
Google Search, Maps, Apps and Mail are all for-profit advertising-supported web services. Not much point in products that lose money.
Actually most of Google's non-adsense/adwords products are operated at a loss. It causes some hub-bub in the financial papers since they are pretty much a one trick pony. Basically all Google has going for it, revenue-wise, is serving ads and increasingly Android.
I have no personal stake in this issue. I just think it's important to appreciate the content provider's perspective in all this. No such thing as a free lunch
I understand this. Content providers should, first, go to pains to understand everyone else's point of view. You don't have the right to profit from your webpage, and I have the right to block content going through my connection. Perhaps content providers and users could come to some compromise someday.
It annoys me when people whine at me for not giving them money.
Ads, all of them, annoy me more. I will never, EVER click on your ad. Even if I'm interested in the product, I will go to the seller myself. Why? Because I'm at war with advertising. I'm sick of it, and would do about anything I can to screw advertisers over. I don't like the fact that I can go a block from my house without being inundated with ads, I don't like the fact that most television shows are 50% ads (wow, a 15 minute show with 15 minutes of ads!), I don't like how ads killed sports (the last straw was at the play-off game leading to the 2001 World Series, where they suspended live play so the television audience could have ads, while playing it in the stadium, where the minimum ticked price was at least $80, not counting $20 beer and $10 hotdogs).
I feel bad for web-content producers who think they should get some money for their work. They are collateral damage. But perhaps they should reevaluate their business, what are they actually producing? Can they make money some other way? Do they NEED to make money to make their hobby enjoyable (hint: it isn't a hobby then).
You are referring, of course, to sites like Slashdot, Google, etc? The overwhelming majority of all Internet content is advertising-supported.
Hmm... I haven't had ads on Slashdot for some time. There is a nice little checkbox telling me that I don't need to see them*. Google is an ADVERTISING COMPANY, 90+% of its revenue is from serving ads to other people, not displaying them. Outside of news sites, who haven't figured out how to actually sell their product in the modern age (thanks to ignoring that "internet trend" for the last 10 years), most sites that expect revenue are selling a... you know... product.
If there were micropayments, I wouldn't simply ignore 90% of sites begging for money, since 90% of everything is crap and thus not worth even a couple real-life cents to me.
I don't understand the brouhaha your raising here. Your site doesn't have any ads, and its product is open source and free (from what I could tell).
*I was feeling generous the other day, and unchecked the box, and turned APB off on Slashdot, but some stupid ad wouldn't load, and caused every damn page to hang indefinitely. APB is on, and the box is once again checked. Google is still the only site/server that isn't blocked.
Objectively, if I'm funding my site with advertising and you block it, why should you be allowed to access my content?
You can go ahead and block your content. But that would probably drive users away, which would hurt your presence, which would pretty much kill your Pagerank, etc... In the mean time, someone will make a way around however you block users, and people will still view your content without you forcing ads down their throats.
Harsh language aside, I understand why ads exist, and why "content producers" are so negative about extensions like ABP. On the other hand the interent has existed before every damn site had to have 200x more ads than content, and where a significant portions of ads are keen on blocking off content, making obnoxious noises, injecting my machine with malware, and, topically, attempts to track my movements without my permission or desire . The internet will survive. A lot of people don't expect to make a living off of their hobby, and they will happily produce content without me having useless, unwanted, products shoved in my face. The hobbyists pretty much invented the modern Web, and still out number people who expect to fund themselves off ads.
I also, on viewing your site, did not sign a contract that allows you to force whatever unwanted content on to my computer.
As it stands, ad blocking isn't as ubiquitous as us Slashdot reading nerds think it is. Most people still use IE, or unmodified installs of Firefox. I had to remove the adblocker I set up on my dad's computer because he couldn't figure it out (for the 1% of valid content it blocks).
No, it wouldn't. Even if you could bring enough force to bear to keep the police from putting you in jail, you would still have to expend a tremendous amount of energy in building up everything that society used to give you because you were willing to work within its parameters.
So... So there is an artificial barrier to my efficiency? A barrier that exists to keep me from harming others. So... why isn't it okay to do the same to corporations? Or expect them to limit their efficiency to ethical ends, like the law does for us mere humans?
That was my point, not that we should all be sociopaths. Most of us aren't sociopaths, and won't kill of neighbors even if there were no law barring it. Corporations aren't the same, they aren't innately ethical entities like we are. We, as humans, don't even need the reasoning involved that you provided to guide us (for the most part). Corporations are psychopathic by nature, we humans are ethical by nature.
If what you mean by treating people fairly is keeping these obsolete jobs available then you're way off.
I wouldn't advocate this, since it is a bit silly, and we all would probably all be worse of in the long run.
However, treating people fairly in terms of shafting them for rights to their resources is very important. There are a few companies who agree, but sadly I think most don't all for love of quarterly earnings reports.
This is more of what I meant, sorry for being a bit vague.
My dad works for a large trucking company that delivers product to a very large chain of coffee shops (I'm sure your guessing right). Recently they used the economy as an excuse to fire over half of their work force, and hire them back at half wages to work as "lumpers" (non-driving helpers). They then increased everyones hours to around 15 hours a day 6 days a week for the same pay. They are, and were before this change, making record profits, now they are making even more. The economy didn't play a roll, it just was a decent excuse to pad profits by screwing your employees (as a result efficiency went from 95% to something around 65%). This is what I'm talking about. This is one example, but it is extremely common right now, so common that everyone I know is in a similar place.
Damnit, you started a discussion that forces me to agree, in the end, with Circletimessquare.
Yes, charity can be done for non-charitable reasons. When, and if, you donate time or money to charity are you doing so for purely self-advancing, egotistical, reasons? Why can't a person worth more money than you do the same?
I actually don't see any past behavior of Bill Gates that would preclude him from donating to charity. Sure, I don't like his company, or some of that companies policies and decisions, but why would that preclude Mr. Gates, as an individual, donating to charity for the sake of being a decent human being?
Apple's actions strike me as a bit more cynical, since they do have a track record of giving mouth noise to their customer base's philosophy, while acting like any other giant, irresponsible, corporation (see their environmental track record, and previous recycling policies). But then again Apple is a giant amoral corporation while Mr. Gates is a private individual who is just associated with a giant amoral corporation.
Being rich doesn't make you an asshole, just like being poor doesn't make you magically noble.
Although understandably so, you are clearly getting emotional.
Nope. I just constructing an absurd, and admittedly exaggerated analogy to show that efficiency is not a proper ethical ends. If I was a space alien or time traveler I might have the ability to get truly emotional about this, but I grew up in this system and thus sadly accept it as the way things are.
Those people's skills are antiquated and need to adapt to a progressing, changing economy
This is true (my mother is the master of obsolete skills, paper and pen drafting, and paper and pen bookkeeping). But sadly this isn't always possible, and people get disenfranchised. My mom, for instance, was stuck in the cultural expectation that women stay at home and raise children, and don't go to school or continue careers once married (especially if they make more than the men-folk). As a result, when her marriage ended, she was 20 years behind.
Coupled with an uncompetitive education system propped up by government subsidy and you have further depression of economic growth.
I agree fully with this. I don't know if the government subsidy actually hurts much (I owe my education to governmental largess, as does most everyone I know). My state (Arizona) and many others are proving that without some degree of government money education moves far out of the grasp of many, mostly the poor who need the education the most.
Beyond this: I truly appreciate your attempt at trolling. Once in college I was forced to take a bullshit sociology course called "social problems". Most of the class was blaming me (a middle class white male) for all of their problems. We had to write a "solution statement" as the final project, mine was title "Mental Illness: A Swiftian Proposal" and involved eating the mentally ill. I got full points on it.
Its an analogy, it isn't supposed to be a 1:1 correspondence (that would be rape&murder:rape&murder). Moreover, it was an analogy that was purposely constructed to be exaggerated to dramatically point out a double standard, and that mere efficiency is not a proper ethical ends.
Now, what we're complaining about is the fact that companies follow the laws. Laws that we democratically set, and which demarcate what's allowed and what's not. Well, if you didn't want a company to do X, it should forbidden. Don't leave X as "legal in court, but we're still going to blame you for doing it"
The problem is that we have (idiotically) decided that Corporations are people, and people (in the flesh and blood category) are generally moral and ethical entities, while corporations are not. While laws exist to cover some moral and ethical issues, they are not strictly necessary (if there was no law against rape and murder, I still wouldn't rape or murder). Most corporations don't have any ethics beyond "maximize profit". We would be forced to pass hundreds of thousands of extra laws to force corporations to act in an ethical manner (which is something that humans, mostly, just do).
I'm not a fan of passing millions of laws just to force a collection of people to behave decently towards other people.
I'm not anti-corporation, or anti-business, or anti-capitalist. I just think that the "profit at all costs" function of corporations might be one of the more hurtful philosophical constructs of our age. We shouldn't need to pass tons of extra laws just to make a "person" behave decently.
You realize the term "meme" predates its modern usage of describing "LOL cats", and other internet ephemera, right? The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, coined it to explain much larger phenomena, like the evolution of society as a whole, and pretty much all evolving intellectual and sociological phenomena that is not immediately traceable to genetics.
Efficiency often has a moral trade off. Why have 5 men do the work if it can be done by one robot? The robot will save money and be more efficient at the expense of giving 5 people work. If the company decided not to be efficient it would shortly fail to be competitive.
It would be vastly more efficient for me to shoot my neighbor and take his food, than have to go to work every day to earn my food. It would be vastly advantageous to me to run around raping women, than having to spend the time and resources to woo one in the traditional way.
These are sociopathic statements, when stated by an individual, but are valid corporate logic. It is more efficient to lay off 90% of my workforce, than to pay them a living wage. It is more advantageous to screw over 3rd world countries to sell fruit or designer water to American and Europeans, than it would be to have an ethical policy and treat people fairly.
You've hit the nail on the head. These are doctors. Doctors are generally bullies with some macho delusion that they're invaluable to the world and, well, just *better* than everyone else. They also like throwing temper tantrums and generally carrying on in the most unprofessional, childish manner imaginable with anyone below them. It is simply a broken, abrasive culture of macho bullshit.
Odd, most of the doctors I've seen (on a patient level), or known (on an acquaintance level) have been rather nice people. Most of whom are first or second generation immigrants who are trying to be better than their parents (you know the now dead "American Dream"). My family GP (of 20 years) is a Vietnamese boat person, devout Buddhist, and an all around nice guy, when my family faced a bit of hard time, he even did some work under the table for us. Sure, I've met a few asses, but there is a decent number of asses in every profession. Whatever your career is, I'm sure it is saturated with assholes too, should I judge you, and your whole profession based on them?
Hell, I had the same reaction to lawyers for years, I even eschewed going to law school (despite scoring very high on the LSATs) because I thought the experience would suck out my soul. But then I realized that most lawyers aren't rich, aren't sleaze bags (most of them are glorified clerks), and are generally normal people. The highly visible ones are generally asses, but why should that taint the whole profession? Should I base all of computer science on RMS, Steve Jobs, Steve Balmer, or Hans Reiser?
Because a vote for either a Republican or Democrat is a vote for the rich multinational corporations. A vote for a Republican or Democrat is a vote against American and the American way of life.
I agree with you, most of the time. Though there still are some true liberals and conservatives kicking around in the rotting carcases of the Big Two still. I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, for example. Didn't have a chance in hell of winning, but I felt he was, at least, honest and actually standing for his beliefs (I don't agree with all of them, obviously, but they lined up more than most). The previous senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, was also a true liberal who was mostly untouched by whatever ails the rest of Washington.
There are still a couple true conservatives kicking around in the Republican party as well. I won't try to enumerate them, since I don't have as solid a grasp on that side of the aisle. Ron Paul, arguably, comes to mind, though.
The two parties aren't necessarily evil in themselves, their members have just been corrupted, or deluded, over time. Having a third, fourth, of 100th, party would be a marked improvement over having just two, but it wouldn't be a guaranteed fix. Look at most of Europe whose member states generally embrace tens of parties, which is also suffering from some serious political problems with corrupt, or overly idealistic, morons.
We probably won't ever escape having two main parties. As a disease it hit us early, and has pretty much been written into government. I'm sure we could someday allow a massive overhaul of how we do things, but I'm not holding my breath.
Ultimately, no matter how idiotic, corrupt, egotistic, authoritarian, or blindly dogmatic they are, the Democratic and Republican parties aren't really at fault. Its us, the voters, who vote them in. When they act badly, we will re-elect them, so there is no need to fear for their jobs, and no real feedback. We really can't blame them, until we STOP VOTING FOR THEM. Worse, we vote for their clones when we vote them out, see the Tea Party victories, most of the canidates had the same moral, ethical, and ideological failings of the people they voted to replace. Worse, most of them just changed their rhetoric from "Republican party line" to "tea party insane ranting" mode a couple months before the election, and we still bought it. Not a year back most of them were endorsing the same toxic policies that are bringing America down to the bottom of the First World, but we still voted for them...
Obama, there is another example.... An example I won't get into, since this already changed from a reply to a rant. Sorry about that.
Liberals? That would be, uh, who? Rather than voting for liberals, I have been choosing non-Republicrats for some time.
You realize that the Democratic party doesn't have a monopoly on liberal, right? "Liberal" really has nothing to do with "Democrat", yes, most Democrats are more likely to be liberal than Republicans are, just like the Republicans are more likely to be conservative than Democrats. I could draw a Venn diagram. Most Democrats are liberal, but not all liberals are Democrats. They aren't synonyms.
Of late, the Democratic party has drifted pretty far from its liberal, progressive, base and roots, and has turned into the centrist party, compromise party.
Both the Libertarians and the Greens could be called liberal. The Greens are pretty much just liberal. the Libertarians are socially liberal (for the most part), and economically conservative.
I think you mean libertarians. You know, the guys who actually give a damn about adhering to constitutionality and civil liberties, even when it doesn't directly suit the individuals personal gain in any way.
As long as you keep the "l" lower-cased, then they aren't mutually exclusive. I'm a liberal libertarian (also called a social libertarian), so we obviously can exist.
Most capital-"L" libertarians I met aren't about doing much of anything against their own personal gain (what, have they stopped worshiping the Rand?!), most of them use their politics as a post hoc justification for being greedy, entitled, egotists who think they have a right to their piece of the pie, all else be damned. Not all, just most of the ones I met. Same with the "adhering to Constitutionality" bit, this is true only if you recognize their particular reading of the document and completely ignore every other, equally valid, reading of it. As for "civil liberties" you mean only the ones that directly lead to personal financial gain. Most libertarians forget about anything that doesn't have a direct monetary value.
It have as much contempt for capital-"L" Libertarians as I do for Democrats and Republicans. Actually as any named party; by adhering to any of them you pretty much prove that you don't want to think rationally about your political stances, you just want to subscribe unthinkingly to a ready-made ideology. All of them put their bullshit dogma above the only thing that actually matters, the individual humans that compose our country, and our world.
Chromium would (IMHO) benefit greatly from having a UI identical to firefox 3.x.
Welcome to the world of subjective taste! I like my Chrome looking like Chrome, but I'm going to miss my Firefox looking like Firefox (and instead looking like an off-brand version of Chrome). I wish people would stop changing looks/functionality just for the sake of changing looks/functionality. I love Chrome, it is now my primary browser, but is there any actual metric stating what is wrong with Firefox's previous way of doing things? Is "Chromifying" their UI really needed, does it improve the software in any real way? This question is one that EVERY damn developer should ask themselves before doing an superfluous UI rewrite.
I'm sure the logic is that Chrome is, currently, the fastest growing browser, user-wise, so Firefox should at least make itself look like Chrome, hoping some of that popularity rubs off.
Why isn't there room for more than one style of interface, and allowing users to pick which best serves their needs?
Also, why the hell did Mozilla add Panorama, then remove the status bar? Sure, I understand that moving things to addons is fine, but why not develop Panorama as a damn addon instead of foisting more bloat upon me, and not just bloat but crappy UI design ("lets hide tabs in a non-obvious way!").
Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion.
My experiences differ from yours. Perhaps I'm just cursed, though. I installed 4 beta 9, and while it was stable in the "does not crash every 3 seconds way" it was pretty nasty feeling. The full interface lagged to hell, this persisted even when I downloaded the latest daily Minefield. After going through some bouts of extension hell (no CSlite?, grrr...), things got a little better, tabs would actually load in under a second, and Panorama would open in slightly less than two, but it still was a bit aggravating. Firefox 3.6 is still much faster, and much more "complete" feeling (i.e. I can use it for 10 seconds without cussing), and Chrome will remain my new default browser until the Mozilla folks can convince me otherwise. (Why use a clone, when you can use the original... I jest, but only slightly.)
The latest Daily is a bit better, but still takes around 2 seconds, on a warm start, to load up all the chrome and widgets. Tab performance might be a bit impoved (though still not "snappy" feeling), but open Firefox preference tabs sucks.
There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none.
As a happy Chrome/Chromium user, I disagree. Also as a person who had the status bar set to auto-hide on his laptop, I disagree.
I find how Firefox 4 handles displaying links a bit wonky now, however. I like how Chrome just pops it up where the statusbar used to be, you still get the functionality, but save the real estate. Firefox 4 handles extension icons a bit better than Chrome, though.
Only in the last decade or so have we seen powers such as PATRIOT and Obamacare come to be - even when against the will of the people... We the people are indoctrinated from a very young age to believe that we are in control of our government.
We DO have control. We vote. We voted Bush back in AFTER the Patriot act, we knew damn well Obama would do something like "Obamacare" before we ever voted for him.
Thats what gets me about a lot of the rhetoric, it often is anti-Democratic with a bit of analysis. Basically it amounts to "people with my political opinions are the only people whose vote should count, the other group of Americans are anti-American.". The rhetoric after Obama was elected was very prone to this, the Tea Party loves this line of reasoning, that the other 50% of Americans HATES America and only exists to violate their liberties... (Democrats are also prone to this, just so it doesn't sound like I'm attacking the right exclusively).
This is the design. Unfortunately this isn't even close to what's being practiced. The reality of things is that the parties and the corporations that donate to them are in control and the people are powerless.
But we vote them back in, over and over and over, while complaining about how evil they are. This makes no sense. We aren't powerless, we just vote stupidly. The fault lies on the backs of American citizens.
It is very depressing that success in elections is strongly correlated with the amount spent on advertising (and thus general funds...).
Most of the rhetoric I've seen has been about the general nature of politics themselves. Your comment was insightful, and worthy of a decent civil debate. Most of the comments are about how the opposition party (and the roughly 50% of the population it represents) are the enemy, anti-American, and their only goal is to destroy the American way. This is hurtful rhetoric, whereas your comments were not.
Damage control. In politics it doesn't matter what you, the politician thinks, it matters what the media spins it into.
It is sad that she doesn't regret her rhetoric, regardless if it had anything to do with this tragedy or not, though.
If I had a giant laser, I would carve "BE CIVIL" onto the moon in 10,000,000 point comic sans. Its really depressing that we even have to argue FOR basic civility these days. Civility is a DEBATE? The mind boggles.
Now lets talk about this socialism, you know there is a cure for that? It's called the Constitution.
That depends on if you find socialism to be compatible with the Constitution. I'm not the hardcore type that believes in a full redistribution of wealth, I'm the nice kind that thinks that we, and our Government, as Americans, has a certain obligation to help elevate the less fortunate among us. This must be balanced with individual rights, with them always taking precedence. Our government, along with its other duties, was charged with overseeing "the general welfare", and holds some responsibility for this as the Government is a societal body and not a private one. We, as citizens, obviously have some responsibility towards this end to, since we do exist in a communal body. This must be balanced with individual rights, with them always taking precedence, obviously.
Yes, I'm a (lowercase "L") libertarian socialist.
Thank you for being honest and having integrity, there are many on your team who have neither.
As a spectator of the American discourse; the cynic in me has to say that most people these days, regardless of team, have neither.
He also spewed anti constitution rants against things he didn't think were right, just like Kelly. He didn't need to be a Tea Party/Republican believer, to side with the enemy of his enemy.
Like being the treasurer of a new currency (since it is "1/infinity", as opposed to "1/1"), something about the second constitution... Something about controlling people's grammar, and something about "conscience dreaming". I knew the Tea Party was odd, but not that odd.
Why the hell does everything have to be some stupid big poltical talking point, or related to it? I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, I obviously do this because I'm a democrat...
It also saddens me that the partisan rhetoric has been put so far ahead of the victim's lives. It saddens me that last night's memorial was less of a memorial, and more like a political rally. I mean, memorial...T-shirts?
This might be a bit of flamebait... but I'd blame Tuscon for that. Tuscon is a very strange place. The politicos there, to their credit, looked very uncomfortable at the whole atmosphere. Outside of that, I was a bit sickened by it, on top of being sickened by the whole treatment of it.
I really do think some pundits and politicians thought this was one of the best things ever, and completely lost sight of the fact that five people were murdered for no reason, and some poor woman might never regain her full functioning. That should be the story, not "the Dems said... but the Republicans said...".
Glenn Beck and the Tea Party folks have been telling people to go buy gold. I just went out and bought some gold. I must have been influenced by Glenn Beck, then?
Either that or I'm a jeweler, or about to propose to my girlfriend, or a specimen collector, or a numismatist, or thousands of other reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with political statements.
As you say, we are discussing it in definite terms somewhat prematurely, but it's not right to simply dismiss the logical haze produced by misinformation from those quarters.
This is true, we shouldn't dismiss them, but we also should discuss it like a fact. Reading the news, it seems like it is perfectly clear that there is a direct causal relationship between the Tea Party and this action. There isn't. If it turns out that there is, it isn't going to be a clear cut "Fox News hinted around x, therefore I will do x", its going to be a very indirect thing, and probably not overtly political. If it is that nebulous, it might be difficult to separate out the violent political rhetoric, from the general acceptance of violence that permeates our culture.
I would be willing to admit that it's possible Palin et al honestly thought nobody would take their tough talk seriously. But then they would have been proved very, very wrong on Saturday, and would probably serve us best by getting out of politics and finding work somewhere they can't hurt themselves or anyone else.
No, they weren't proven "very very wrong" Saturday. We don't know if he took Palin's rhetoric seriously, we don't even know if he cared one bit about Palin (looking at accounts of his politics, I doubt it). We don't know his politics, we don't know his motives, we don't, really, know anything about him outside of the fact that he has some serious mental problems. Nobody has been proven wrong, because nothing has been proven at all.
While they didn't create a dangerous world in which armed maniacs act on illogical impulses, they certainly did fan its coals.
Was this even politically motivated, in a conventional sense? I don't really see it, reading his writings, and looking at interviews with his friends. I've tried to read pretty much everything about him (sick, I know, but this sort of thing fascinates me), and haven't really seen anything that could be called a clear political ideology. Much less a "tea party" ideology.
If you really want to use this as a mere political speaking point, at least wait until the facts are in and the bodies are buried.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing person, just trying to comment myself.
Ugh, can we please move the "more comments" box someplace USEFUL. I don't want to have to go up and re-read stuff, I just want to load all the comments to begin with. I also liked having the threshold on the sidebar, I generally browse at -1, unless things are too full of trolls, then I can switch on the fly. It was nice.
I don't need the topics on the side, why would I ever use them? I generally, when on full-blown Slashdot mode, have the mainpage pinned and check it when I'm don't killing time on the current selection of stories. I never once though "well that story was interesting... what is going on in the 'cloud' section!?"
Also, white space, less of it. Horizontal scroll bar (on Chrome daily, Windows 7), kill it, I don't have a status bar for a reason, I don't need you to waste my real estate instead.
What happened to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought? What was wrong with the last system? It had all the stupid web2.0 crap that makes PHBs happy, and internet hipsters cream themselves, it had some decent added functionality (live replies, live threshold), and enough bugs to make me realize that I was on a geek site. This doesn't seem to improve on it.
Also why the hell is this site now keeping my processor pegged at 10%? I have a fairly beefy processor, does it really need to work so hard to show what should be some static text?
Not to be too negative, I'm sure I'll be fully used to it in 5 years, so I can spread some nerd-rage over the next revision.
Google Search, Maps, Apps and Mail are all for-profit advertising-supported web services. Not much point in products that lose money.
Actually most of Google's non-adsense/adwords products are operated at a loss. It causes some hub-bub in the financial papers since they are pretty much a one trick pony. Basically all Google has going for it, revenue-wise, is serving ads and increasingly Android.
I have no personal stake in this issue. I just think it's important to appreciate the content provider's perspective in all this. No such thing as a free lunch
I understand this. Content providers should, first, go to pains to understand everyone else's point of view. You don't have the right to profit from your webpage, and I have the right to block content going through my connection. Perhaps content providers and users could come to some compromise someday.
It annoys me when people whine at me for not giving them money.
Ads, all of them, annoy me more. I will never, EVER click on your ad. Even if I'm interested in the product, I will go to the seller myself. Why? Because I'm at war with advertising. I'm sick of it, and would do about anything I can to screw advertisers over. I don't like the fact that I can go a block from my house without being inundated with ads, I don't like the fact that most television shows are 50% ads (wow, a 15 minute show with 15 minutes of ads!), I don't like how ads killed sports (the last straw was at the play-off game leading to the 2001 World Series, where they suspended live play so the television audience could have ads, while playing it in the stadium, where the minimum ticked price was at least $80, not counting $20 beer and $10 hotdogs).
I feel bad for web-content producers who think they should get some money for their work. They are collateral damage. But perhaps they should reevaluate their business, what are they actually producing? Can they make money some other way? Do they NEED to make money to make their hobby enjoyable (hint: it isn't a hobby then).
Sorry for the screed.
You are referring, of course, to sites like Slashdot, Google, etc? The overwhelming majority of all Internet content is advertising-supported.
Hmm... I haven't had ads on Slashdot for some time. There is a nice little checkbox telling me that I don't need to see them*. Google is an ADVERTISING COMPANY, 90+% of its revenue is from serving ads to other people, not displaying them. Outside of news sites, who haven't figured out how to actually sell their product in the modern age (thanks to ignoring that "internet trend" for the last 10 years), most sites that expect revenue are selling a... you know... product.
If there were micropayments, I wouldn't simply ignore 90% of sites begging for money, since 90% of everything is crap and thus not worth even a couple real-life cents to me.
I don't understand the brouhaha your raising here. Your site doesn't have any ads, and its product is open source and free (from what I could tell).
*I was feeling generous the other day, and unchecked the box, and turned APB off on Slashdot, but some stupid ad wouldn't load, and caused every damn page to hang indefinitely. APB is on, and the box is once again checked. Google is still the only site/server that isn't blocked.
A bit off topic... But...
Objectively, if I'm funding my site with advertising and you block it, why should you be allowed to access my content?
You can go ahead and block your content. But that would probably drive users away, which would hurt your presence, which would pretty much kill your Pagerank, etc... In the mean time, someone will make a way around however you block users, and people will still view your content without you forcing ads down their throats.
Harsh language aside, I understand why ads exist, and why "content producers" are so negative about extensions like ABP. On the other hand the interent has existed before every damn site had to have 200x more ads than content, and where a significant portions of ads are keen on blocking off content, making obnoxious noises, injecting my machine with malware, and, topically, attempts to track my movements without my permission or desire . The internet will survive. A lot of people don't expect to make a living off of their hobby, and they will happily produce content without me having useless, unwanted, products shoved in my face. The hobbyists pretty much invented the modern Web, and still out number people who expect to fund themselves off ads.
I also, on viewing your site, did not sign a contract that allows you to force whatever unwanted content on to my computer.
As it stands, ad blocking isn't as ubiquitous as us Slashdot reading nerds think it is. Most people still use IE, or unmodified installs of Firefox. I had to remove the adblocker I set up on my dad's computer because he couldn't figure it out (for the 1% of valid content it blocks).
No, it wouldn't. Even if you could bring enough force to bear to keep the police from putting you in jail, you would still have to expend a tremendous amount of energy in building up everything that society used to give you because you were willing to work within its parameters.
So... So there is an artificial barrier to my efficiency? A barrier that exists to keep me from harming others. So... why isn't it okay to do the same to corporations? Or expect them to limit their efficiency to ethical ends, like the law does for us mere humans?
That was my point, not that we should all be sociopaths. Most of us aren't sociopaths, and won't kill of neighbors even if there were no law barring it. Corporations aren't the same, they aren't innately ethical entities like we are. We, as humans, don't even need the reasoning involved that you provided to guide us (for the most part). Corporations are psychopathic by nature, we humans are ethical by nature.
If what you mean by treating people fairly is keeping these obsolete jobs available then you're way off.
I wouldn't advocate this, since it is a bit silly, and we all would probably all be worse of in the long run.
However, treating people fairly in terms of shafting them for rights to their resources is very important. There are a few companies who agree, but sadly I think most don't all for love of quarterly earnings reports.
This is more of what I meant, sorry for being a bit vague.
My dad works for a large trucking company that delivers product to a very large chain of coffee shops (I'm sure your guessing right). Recently they used the economy as an excuse to fire over half of their work force, and hire them back at half wages to work as "lumpers" (non-driving helpers). They then increased everyones hours to around 15 hours a day 6 days a week for the same pay. They are, and were before this change, making record profits, now they are making even more. The economy didn't play a roll, it just was a decent excuse to pad profits by screwing your employees (as a result efficiency went from 95% to something around 65%). This is what I'm talking about. This is one example, but it is extremely common right now, so common that everyone I know is in a similar place.
Damnit, you started a discussion that forces me to agree, in the end, with Circletimessquare.
Yes, charity can be done for non-charitable reasons. When, and if, you donate time or money to charity are you doing so for purely self-advancing, egotistical, reasons? Why can't a person worth more money than you do the same?
I actually don't see any past behavior of Bill Gates that would preclude him from donating to charity. Sure, I don't like his company, or some of that companies policies and decisions, but why would that preclude Mr. Gates, as an individual, donating to charity for the sake of being a decent human being?
Apple's actions strike me as a bit more cynical, since they do have a track record of giving mouth noise to their customer base's philosophy, while acting like any other giant, irresponsible, corporation (see their environmental track record, and previous recycling policies). But then again Apple is a giant amoral corporation while Mr. Gates is a private individual who is just associated with a giant amoral corporation.
Being rich doesn't make you an asshole, just like being poor doesn't make you magically noble.
Although understandably so, you are clearly getting emotional.
Nope. I just constructing an absurd, and admittedly exaggerated analogy to show that efficiency is not a proper ethical ends. If I was a space alien or time traveler I might have the ability to get truly emotional about this, but I grew up in this system and thus sadly accept it as the way things are.
Those people's skills are antiquated and need to adapt to a progressing, changing economy
This is true (my mother is the master of obsolete skills, paper and pen drafting, and paper and pen bookkeeping). But sadly this isn't always possible, and people get disenfranchised. My mom, for instance, was stuck in the cultural expectation that women stay at home and raise children, and don't go to school or continue careers once married (especially if they make more than the men-folk). As a result, when her marriage ended, she was 20 years behind.
Coupled with an uncompetitive education system propped up by government subsidy and you have further depression of economic growth.
I agree fully with this. I don't know if the government subsidy actually hurts much (I owe my education to governmental largess, as does most everyone I know). My state (Arizona) and many others are proving that without some degree of government money education moves far out of the grasp of many, mostly the poor who need the education the most.
Beyond this: I truly appreciate your attempt at trolling. Once in college I was forced to take a bullshit sociology course called "social problems". Most of the class was blaming me (a middle class white male) for all of their problems. We had to write a "solution statement" as the final project, mine was title "Mental Illness: A Swiftian Proposal" and involved eating the mentally ill. I got full points on it.
Isn't education grand?
Its an analogy, it isn't supposed to be a 1:1 correspondence (that would be rape&murder:rape&murder). Moreover, it was an analogy that was purposely constructed to be exaggerated to dramatically point out a double standard, and that mere efficiency is not a proper ethical ends.
Now, what we're complaining about is the fact that companies follow the laws. Laws that we democratically set, and which demarcate what's allowed and what's not. Well, if you didn't want a company to do X, it should forbidden. Don't leave X as "legal in court, but we're still going to blame you for doing it"
The problem is that we have (idiotically) decided that Corporations are people, and people (in the flesh and blood category) are generally moral and ethical entities, while corporations are not. While laws exist to cover some moral and ethical issues, they are not strictly necessary (if there was no law against rape and murder, I still wouldn't rape or murder). Most corporations don't have any ethics beyond "maximize profit". We would be forced to pass hundreds of thousands of extra laws to force corporations to act in an ethical manner (which is something that humans, mostly, just do).
I'm not a fan of passing millions of laws just to force a collection of people to behave decently towards other people.
I'm not anti-corporation, or anti-business, or anti-capitalist. I just think that the "profit at all costs" function of corporations might be one of the more hurtful philosophical constructs of our age. We shouldn't need to pass tons of extra laws just to make a "person" behave decently.
You realize the term "meme" predates its modern usage of describing "LOL cats", and other internet ephemera, right? The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, coined it to explain much larger phenomena, like the evolution of society as a whole, and pretty much all evolving intellectual and sociological phenomena that is not immediately traceable to genetics.
Efficiency often has a moral trade off. Why have 5 men do the work if it can be done by one robot? The robot will save money and be more efficient at the expense of giving 5 people work. If the company decided not to be efficient it would shortly fail to be competitive.
It would be vastly more efficient for me to shoot my neighbor and take his food, than have to go to work every day to earn my food. It would be vastly advantageous to me to run around raping women, than having to spend the time and resources to woo one in the traditional way.
These are sociopathic statements, when stated by an individual, but are valid corporate logic. It is more efficient to lay off 90% of my workforce, than to pay them a living wage. It is more advantageous to screw over 3rd world countries to sell fruit or designer water to American and Europeans, than it would be to have an ethical policy and treat people fairly.
You've hit the nail on the head. These are doctors. Doctors are generally bullies with some macho delusion that they're invaluable to the world and, well, just *better* than everyone else. They also like throwing temper tantrums and generally carrying on in the most unprofessional, childish manner imaginable with anyone below them. It is simply a broken, abrasive culture of macho bullshit.
Odd, most of the doctors I've seen (on a patient level), or known (on an acquaintance level) have been rather nice people. Most of whom are first or second generation immigrants who are trying to be better than their parents (you know the now dead "American Dream"). My family GP (of 20 years) is a Vietnamese boat person, devout Buddhist, and an all around nice guy, when my family faced a bit of hard time, he even did some work under the table for us. Sure, I've met a few asses, but there is a decent number of asses in every profession. Whatever your career is, I'm sure it is saturated with assholes too, should I judge you, and your whole profession based on them?
Hell, I had the same reaction to lawyers for years, I even eschewed going to law school (despite scoring very high on the LSATs) because I thought the experience would suck out my soul. But then I realized that most lawyers aren't rich, aren't sleaze bags (most of them are glorified clerks), and are generally normal people. The highly visible ones are generally asses, but why should that taint the whole profession? Should I base all of computer science on RMS, Steve Jobs, Steve Balmer, or Hans Reiser?
It's just sick, the whole thing.
Perhaps you should see a doctor about that.
Because a vote for either a Republican or Democrat is a vote for the rich multinational corporations. A vote for a Republican or Democrat is a vote against American and the American way of life.
I agree with you, most of the time. Though there still are some true liberals and conservatives kicking around in the rotting carcases of the Big Two still. I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, for example. Didn't have a chance in hell of winning, but I felt he was, at least, honest and actually standing for his beliefs (I don't agree with all of them, obviously, but they lined up more than most). The previous senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, was also a true liberal who was mostly untouched by whatever ails the rest of Washington.
There are still a couple true conservatives kicking around in the Republican party as well. I won't try to enumerate them, since I don't have as solid a grasp on that side of the aisle. Ron Paul, arguably, comes to mind, though.
The two parties aren't necessarily evil in themselves, their members have just been corrupted, or deluded, over time. Having a third, fourth, of 100th, party would be a marked improvement over having just two, but it wouldn't be a guaranteed fix. Look at most of Europe whose member states generally embrace tens of parties, which is also suffering from some serious political problems with corrupt, or overly idealistic, morons.
We probably won't ever escape having two main parties. As a disease it hit us early, and has pretty much been written into government. I'm sure we could someday allow a massive overhaul of how we do things, but I'm not holding my breath.
Ultimately, no matter how idiotic, corrupt, egotistic, authoritarian, or blindly dogmatic they are, the Democratic and Republican parties aren't really at fault. Its us, the voters, who vote them in. When they act badly, we will re-elect them, so there is no need to fear for their jobs, and no real feedback. We really can't blame them, until we STOP VOTING FOR THEM. Worse, we vote for their clones when we vote them out, see the Tea Party victories, most of the canidates had the same moral, ethical, and ideological failings of the people they voted to replace. Worse, most of them just changed their rhetoric from "Republican party line" to "tea party insane ranting" mode a couple months before the election, and we still bought it. Not a year back most of them were endorsing the same toxic policies that are bringing America down to the bottom of the First World, but we still voted for them...
Obama, there is another example.... An example I won't get into, since this already changed from a reply to a rant. Sorry about that.
Liberals? That would be, uh, who? Rather than voting for liberals, I have been choosing non-Republicrats for some time.
You realize that the Democratic party doesn't have a monopoly on liberal, right? "Liberal" really has nothing to do with "Democrat", yes, most Democrats are more likely to be liberal than Republicans are, just like the Republicans are more likely to be conservative than Democrats. I could draw a Venn diagram. Most Democrats are liberal, but not all liberals are Democrats. They aren't synonyms.
Of late, the Democratic party has drifted pretty far from its liberal, progressive, base and roots, and has turned into the centrist party, compromise party.
Both the Libertarians and the Greens could be called liberal. The Greens are pretty much just liberal. the Libertarians are socially liberal (for the most part), and economically conservative.
I think you mean libertarians. You know, the guys who actually give a damn about adhering to constitutionality and civil liberties, even when it doesn't directly suit the individuals personal gain in any way.
As long as you keep the "l" lower-cased, then they aren't mutually exclusive. I'm a liberal libertarian (also called a social libertarian), so we obviously can exist.
Most capital-"L" libertarians I met aren't about doing much of anything against their own personal gain (what, have they stopped worshiping the Rand?!), most of them use their politics as a post hoc justification for being greedy, entitled, egotists who think they have a right to their piece of the pie, all else be damned. Not all, just most of the ones I met. Same with the "adhering to Constitutionality" bit, this is true only if you recognize their particular reading of the document and completely ignore every other, equally valid, reading of it. As for "civil liberties" you mean only the ones that directly lead to personal financial gain. Most libertarians forget about anything that doesn't have a direct monetary value.
It have as much contempt for capital-"L" Libertarians as I do for Democrats and Republicans. Actually as any named party; by adhering to any of them you pretty much prove that you don't want to think rationally about your political stances, you just want to subscribe unthinkingly to a ready-made ideology. All of them put their bullshit dogma above the only thing that actually matters, the individual humans that compose our country, and our world.
* or some limited subset thereof
Chromium would (IMHO) benefit greatly from having a UI identical to firefox 3.x.
Welcome to the world of subjective taste! I like my Chrome looking like Chrome, but I'm going to miss my Firefox looking like Firefox (and instead looking like an off-brand version of Chrome). I wish people would stop changing looks/functionality just for the sake of changing looks/functionality. I love Chrome, it is now my primary browser, but is there any actual metric stating what is wrong with Firefox's previous way of doing things? Is "Chromifying" their UI really needed, does it improve the software in any real way? This question is one that EVERY damn developer should ask themselves before doing an superfluous UI rewrite.
I'm sure the logic is that Chrome is, currently, the fastest growing browser, user-wise, so Firefox should at least make itself look like Chrome, hoping some of that popularity rubs off.
Why isn't there room for more than one style of interface, and allowing users to pick which best serves their needs?
Also, why the hell did Mozilla add Panorama, then remove the status bar? Sure, I understand that moving things to addons is fine, but why not develop Panorama as a damn addon instead of foisting more bloat upon me, and not just bloat but crappy UI design ("lets hide tabs in a non-obvious way!").
Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion.
My experiences differ from yours. Perhaps I'm just cursed, though. I installed 4 beta 9, and while it was stable in the "does not crash every 3 seconds way" it was pretty nasty feeling. The full interface lagged to hell, this persisted even when I downloaded the latest daily Minefield. After going through some bouts of extension hell (no CSlite?, grrr...), things got a little better, tabs would actually load in under a second, and Panorama would open in slightly less than two, but it still was a bit aggravating. Firefox 3.6 is still much faster, and much more "complete" feeling (i.e. I can use it for 10 seconds without cussing), and Chrome will remain my new default browser until the Mozilla folks can convince me otherwise. (Why use a clone, when you can use the original... I jest, but only slightly.)
The latest Daily is a bit better, but still takes around 2 seconds, on a warm start, to load up all the chrome and widgets. Tab performance might be a bit impoved (though still not "snappy" feeling), but open Firefox preference tabs sucks.
There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none.
As a happy Chrome/Chromium user, I disagree. Also as a person who had the status bar set to auto-hide on his laptop, I disagree.
I find how Firefox 4 handles displaying links a bit wonky now, however. I like how Chrome just pops it up where the statusbar used to be, you still get the functionality, but save the real estate. Firefox 4 handles extension icons a bit better than Chrome, though.
Only in the last decade or so have we seen powers such as PATRIOT and Obamacare come to be - even when against the will of the people... We the people are indoctrinated from a very young age to believe that we are in control of our government.
We DO have control. We vote. We voted Bush back in AFTER the Patriot act, we knew damn well Obama would do something like "Obamacare" before we ever voted for him.
Thats what gets me about a lot of the rhetoric, it often is anti-Democratic with a bit of analysis. Basically it amounts to "people with my political opinions are the only people whose vote should count, the other group of Americans are anti-American.". The rhetoric after Obama was elected was very prone to this, the Tea Party loves this line of reasoning, that the other 50% of Americans HATES America and only exists to violate their liberties... (Democrats are also prone to this, just so it doesn't sound like I'm attacking the right exclusively).
This is the design. Unfortunately this isn't even close to what's being practiced. The reality of things is that the parties and the corporations that donate to them are in control and the people are powerless.
But we vote them back in, over and over and over, while complaining about how evil they are. This makes no sense. We aren't powerless, we just vote stupidly. The fault lies on the backs of American citizens.
It is very depressing that success in elections is strongly correlated with the amount spent on advertising (and thus general funds...).
Most of the rhetoric I've seen has been about the general nature of politics themselves. Your comment was insightful, and worthy of a decent civil debate. Most of the comments are about how the opposition party (and the roughly 50% of the population it represents) are the enemy, anti-American, and their only goal is to destroy the American way. This is hurtful rhetoric, whereas your comments were not.
Damage control. In politics it doesn't matter what you, the politician thinks, it matters what the media spins it into.
It is sad that she doesn't regret her rhetoric, regardless if it had anything to do with this tragedy or not, though.
If I had a giant laser, I would carve "BE CIVIL" onto the moon in 10,000,000 point comic sans. Its really depressing that we even have to argue FOR basic civility these days. Civility is a DEBATE? The mind boggles.
Now lets talk about this socialism, you know there is a cure for that? It's called the Constitution.
That depends on if you find socialism to be compatible with the Constitution. I'm not the hardcore type that believes in a full redistribution of wealth, I'm the nice kind that thinks that we, and our Government, as Americans, has a certain obligation to help elevate the less fortunate among us. This must be balanced with individual rights, with them always taking precedence. Our government, along with its other duties, was charged with overseeing "the general welfare", and holds some responsibility for this as the Government is a societal body and not a private one. We, as citizens, obviously have some responsibility towards this end to, since we do exist in a communal body. This must be balanced with individual rights, with them always taking precedence, obviously.
Yes, I'm a (lowercase "L") libertarian socialist.
Thank you for being honest and having integrity, there are many on your team who have neither.
As a spectator of the American discourse; the cynic in me has to say that most people these days, regardless of team, have neither.
He also spewed anti constitution rants against things he didn't think were right, just like Kelly.
He didn't need to be a Tea Party/Republican believer, to side with the enemy of his enemy.
Like being the treasurer of a new currency (since it is "1/infinity", as opposed to "1/1"), something about the second constitution... Something about controlling people's grammar, and something about "conscience dreaming". I knew the Tea Party was odd, but not that odd.
Why the hell does everything have to be some stupid big poltical talking point, or related to it? I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, I obviously do this because I'm a democrat...
It also saddens me that the partisan rhetoric has been put so far ahead of the victim's lives. It saddens me that last night's memorial was less of a memorial, and more like a political rally. I mean, memorial...T-shirts?
This might be a bit of flamebait... but I'd blame Tuscon for that. Tuscon is a very strange place. The politicos there, to their credit, looked very uncomfortable at the whole atmosphere. Outside of that, I was a bit sickened by it, on top of being sickened by the whole treatment of it.
I really do think some pundits and politicians thought this was one of the best things ever, and completely lost sight of the fact that five people were murdered for no reason, and some poor woman might never regain her full functioning. That should be the story, not "the Dems said... but the Republicans said...".
Glenn Beck and the Tea Party folks have been telling people to go buy gold. I just went out and bought some gold. I must have been influenced by Glenn Beck, then?
Either that or I'm a jeweler, or about to propose to my girlfriend, or a specimen collector, or a numismatist, or thousands of other reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with political statements.
As you say, we are discussing it in definite terms somewhat prematurely, but it's not right to simply dismiss the logical haze produced by misinformation from those quarters.
This is true, we shouldn't dismiss them, but we also should discuss it like a fact. Reading the news, it seems like it is perfectly clear that there is a direct causal relationship between the Tea Party and this action. There isn't. If it turns out that there is, it isn't going to be a clear cut "Fox News hinted around x, therefore I will do x", its going to be a very indirect thing, and probably not overtly political. If it is that nebulous, it might be difficult to separate out the violent political rhetoric, from the general acceptance of violence that permeates our culture.
I would be willing to admit that it's possible Palin et al honestly thought nobody would take their tough talk seriously. But then they would have been proved very, very wrong on Saturday, and would probably serve us best by getting out of politics and finding work somewhere they can't hurt themselves or anyone else.
No, they weren't proven "very very wrong" Saturday. We don't know if he took Palin's rhetoric seriously, we don't even know if he cared one bit about Palin (looking at accounts of his politics, I doubt it). We don't know his politics, we don't know his motives, we don't, really, know anything about him outside of the fact that he has some serious mental problems. Nobody has been proven wrong, because nothing has been proven at all.
While they didn't create a dangerous world in which armed maniacs act on illogical impulses, they certainly did fan its coals.
Was this even politically motivated, in a conventional sense? I don't really see it, reading his writings, and looking at interviews with his friends. I've tried to read pretty much everything about him (sick, I know, but this sort of thing fascinates me), and haven't really seen anything that could be called a clear political ideology. Much less a "tea party" ideology.
If you really want to use this as a mere political speaking point, at least wait until the facts are in and the bodies are buried.