Ha! I started with a Commodore Pet in about 1980 (I was 9 years old) so BASIC programming and lots of PEEKs and POKEs. By High School it was making high-res pictures on Apple IIs, learning to program LOGO, and making architectural drawings using AutoCAD back when you entered the commands instead of poking around on a graphical menu (I'm nostalgic for that version of AutoCAD to this day).
By university (89-93) it was Fortran 77 and Borland Pascal. Good stuff.
Holy cow, all of you need to get your butts *quick* over to the Dictator's Handbook http://dictatorshandbook.net/ and have a quick read. Nobody calls theirself a dictator anymore. There are too many creative ways to be "democratic."
As someone who follows corporate strategy a bit and who is enjoying watching Apple, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft slug it out, this is a move that makes sense. And I love to see anything that reduces the intoxication people have with Microsoft formats. Dependence on compatibility with Microsoft formats has set computing back by a decade - and the fight continues.
I otherwise wouldn't have posted but I see I took a different track from most:
Starting in 2000: SuSE 7.1 all the way up to about 9.1 when it got too heavy to run on my PIII with 128MB of memory. I tried Xandros for a while and also taste-tested Vector, Mandriva, Grml, and Mepis, but I always returned to SuSE.
That got me interested enough in Unix that now for anything serious (servers) I use FreeBSD, and no going back.
I've currently got FreeBSD on the server, openSUSE 12.2 on the desktop, and Bodhi on the netbook. I must be the only one on this site who skipped Ubuntu. I never liked their KDE install, never liked Gnome in any way, shape or form (especially now), and never really understood what the big deal was.
No, it cuts both ways. When I wrote and researched my book, The Dictator's Handbook, it was clear governments are able to make easy use of this data. There are numerous examples: governments planting trojans, tracking journalists, hacking email, sending out spear phish attacks, and worse. Rioters in Syria and Iran are frequently amazed when they are put in jail and their own email is read to them during the legal proceedings. Twitter is no better, and rogue governments create fake Facebook log-in pages to trap log-in credentials. Join us on the forum at http://dictatorshandbook.net/ for more, and you're welcome to read using NNTP protocol for increased anonymity.
1. Make coffee. 2. Log in. 3. Click on LOLcat. 4. Click on Derpy-looking kid. 5. Mouse-over raging liberal link to some stupid blog suggesting an undercover cover up. 6. Click on Rage comic. 7. Click on link to semi-interested article. Read two paragraphs, then 8. Click on bikini pic in the sidebar. 9. Goto 1.
I moved to Bodhi Linux with its Enlightenment desktop, and like it. That's the fun thing - everyone can find their own escape route from Gnome3 since Linux offers so many choices.
Bodhi is very lightweight and was easy to configure (though it took me a day to figure out E17's vocabulary). I'm very happy, and it's a simple CD download, which is good - I don't have much bandwidth.
DVD downloads are a hassle, in my opinion. When it comes time to download one I usually resort to purchasing from one of the companies that advertises on distrowatch.org.
I highly recommend Bodhi though - it's very sharp and polished.
I'm not sure invention of the new catchphrase "Junkweb" was necessary. It's subjective after all - one man's junk is another man's treasure. I'm also not sure the new phenomenon of text-on-picture is all that big a deal - when people get sick of it, the trend will die out. I'm old school by most measures - born in the early 70s, grew up on a Commodore Pet and later C64, remember Gopher and Telnet, etc. But I think the stuff getting floated on Reddit is pretty funny, and it makes me laugh.
If there's anything worth talking about at all, it's not the rise of something someone calls a "Junk Net," it's how the utopian promise of the Internet - liberated conversation, connection, and access to information - has been somewhat diluted by lots of other stuff, and as more and more people have gotten connected their tastes have swayed the general trend of what's on the web.
I've got a forum that runs on Usenet era technology (http://dictatorshandbook.net/ and it's not exactly been a blistering success. People find usenet and even the web-based front end to it to be too "texty" and dry. They want pictures and LOLcats and stupid memes. OK, fair enough - that's not the audience I'm trying to attract, and the folks that are interested in educated conversation about dictators will probably enjoy my site and its text forum while everyone else will go bugger off.
So if there's an issue here, it's just that increasingly people go to the internet not for information but for entertainment, and the companies have teed up to make that happen - look at the ipod ferfucksake, now I can watch TV in bed! YAY! I think this is a failure of society over all, not of technology.
Fact is, there are good, knowledge-intensive sites out there. Go hang out on them if that's what you want. And if you want a good laugh, enjoy the latest meme. It's all good.
I received that exact threat about a month ago. It was obviously horse sh*t so I didn't worry about it. I got it by email (at my work account) about three days after LinkedIn got its database hacked, so I assume they got my email address from LinkedIn.
Either these guys are a bunch of copycatters, or the same thing is happening. If I recall LinkedIn (like everyone else) wanted my cellphone number so they can contact me "in case of emergency." I f*cking hate that - I don't want everyone to have my cellphone number. That means Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Gmail can all bugger off.
So let's say LinkedIn gets hacked; they get email addresses but they also get cellphone numbers too. Badda boom, badda bing.
My family's house when I was growing up had a nice basement that stayed remarkably cool and comfortable, even on brutally hot/humid summer days. On the really bad ones we'd just kind of move downstairs to play games and read and do projects. Fun.
These days I like to kick it back in the cool room, and take a little reading material so I can lay low. My favorite is the latest couple blog posts from rabid Republican nutjobs insisting there's no proof of global warming and lobbying for more drilling in oil fields. That's the smell of America, baby.
On behalf of every would-be tyrant, autocrat, dictator, and fiend, I'd like to THANK Zuck. I mean Christ, who needs to invest in expensive and complicated counter-terrorism and surveillance services when you can just put a person in front of a computer and they'll happily blab away their every secret in exchange for links to silly cats and pictures with text over them?
Facebook is the best thing to happen to dictators in a while. It's a tremendous source of information, it's not hard to hack (and has BEEN hacked on numerous occasions), and gives the tyrant an almost complete picture of who you hang out with, when, where, and what you discuss. DickTater know what you like, what you do, where you work, where you studied, and who your co-subversives are.
So thanks, Zuck. Being a tyrant was never so easy. In fact "using Facebook" makes up a large part of chapter 9 (Communications & Media) of the Dictators Handbook (http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/). True!
On the contrary, some sites are far MORE usable using Lynx. www.linuxtoday.com is so clogged with advertisements (all graphic or flash) it's hard to even find the articles, and the page takes an eternity to load as it chugs through all the scripts, stat-counters, and whatever else. I read that site exclusively in Lynx, which ignores all the crap and gets me straight to the articles.
The articles often suck too, though. No browser can help you with that.
The modern web is so focused on targetted ads and heavy graphics illustration that there's no room left for content, which hardly anyone produces anymore anyway in an era of mashups and retweets.
Visit a site in Lynx just for kicks and you'll have a better sense of how much content is really in that Crap-Sandwich.
Sorry Minitel - I never knew you. But say hello to some friends of mine: BBS, Gopher, Usenet, and Telnet. All cool things at the time, all superceded by bigger and better. But at the time they were like magic.
And I should know, I wrote it. Chapter 9 (Media) goes into extensive detail on how to clamp down on the media, route communications through state systems through which you can monitor and track. Chapter 10 (International Community) goes into how to do one thing while stating the other; how to befuddle the donors and international oversight committees, and so on.
The point is, what Ethiopia is doing, and Eritrea too by the way, is nothing new. Nor is it specific to Africa. Belarus, Iran, China, Thailand, and a lot of other countries are capitalizing on state infrastructure to control communications. Have a look at http://dictatorshandbook.net/
I had a similar situation at work. Get yourself a VPS - there are hundreds of companies out there - and then tunnel into it for playing around. If you're lucky your company lets you use SSH. If you're not Pendriveapps.com has PuTTy on a pendrive version. Use that to connect to your server and there you can do whatever you like, from Python to Perl to Lisp to Haskell.
You can virtualize a lot of stuff in the data center. Some of it brings high return on investment and others don't. You want to do a needs analysis on existing infrastructure and expected resource level commitments over the medium and long term.
Then what you'll find is that you should definitely not virtualize your underpants. Underpants should definitely stay in the realm of the non-virtual, and preferably right there on your asset.
I remember when people started to have trouble differentiating between the Internet and the WWW, and nerds got their knickers in a twist pointing out the WWW was just a subset (hey, what about Usenet? What about FTP?)
Now we can enter a brave new kingdom where no one knows the difference between Facebook and the WWW.
Anyway, curmudgeon aside, I don't get all bent out of shape by a Facebook phone because I don't use Facebook, and if you don't take one seriously, it's impossible to take the rest seriously. This can only distract them from their main game, put a buggy phone on the market that further dilutes the quality of their brand, and waste time, money, and energy.
From the competition's point of view: woo hoo! Go for it, suckahz!
Remember back in the mid-1980s when we were all concerned with sexual lyrics in rock music? We sure fixed that one, eh? Remember when that show "The A-Team" was considered too violent for TV and we all marched to end the violence? How'd that one turn out?
Remember when we launched the "War on Drugs," and now as a result you can't get drugs anywhere at all and all the dealers and producers are out of work?
Good luck with the latest challenge. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
Call me a curmudgeon, but the immediate impact - after the shock and awe wear off - would be people learning how to elucidate complex points again. In the early days of Usenet posts were longer and better thought out. That trend carried into email when POP3 and offline clients meant you had time to compose your thoughts. Webmail shortened people's attention span, since you had to fire off your message before the page expired. Facebook shortened it again: you don't have to even have a coherent thought anymore as you really only need to stab blindly at the stupid "like" button and click on pictures people think are funny. Don't get me started on Twitter, but let's just say in a language where you only get 140 characters per thought you don't waste any of them on verbs (or often vowels).
If Social networking died in a firestorm, the 'net would be quiet for a bit. But perhaps people would get back in the habit of thinking about things more complex than whether or not they "like" the video of the funny cat.
Nah, who am I kidding? Those days are past, and each generation is stupider than the last one now. Yay us. Alright then, I'm off to wash my '68 Thunderbird while listening to Steely Dan on my transistor radio. Damn kids.
This drives me crazy as it stinks of "un-researched." Yes, broadband internet is probably useful and may lead to economic benefits of some sort. But I think in practice the way that broadband is going to be put to use is streaming TV over Internet, so, basically entertainment. Meanwhile, web pages bloat and you can enjoy Flash goodness in new craptacular ways.
To address the recession in the US the Obama administration prioritized the same. One of the sob stories was a rural farm owner complaining "with dial up it can take me 45 minutes to upload a picture of the horse I'm selling." FFS, you know she's uploading a 4+MB picture her camera took, with enough pixels to print the damn thing out at life-size. If she reduced it to, say, 900x600 she'd have a picture she could upload in a few seconds over a plain old dial up line.
My point is: it's easy to claim on the basis of no research at all that lack of access to broadband is a killer that will cause the economy to implode. But I don't think it's true, and suspect the big ISPs and cable companies are whispering this falsehood in the ears of gullible politicians. If the point of Internet is to access information I think you do a lot of what you need to do with very little bandwidth at all. You need more bandwidth to offer new services (like, ahem, a service that tints your digital photos and allows you to share them for free, cough). But you don't host a server like that in the woods, you host it at a hosting facility in the capital.
How's the view from the bike shed, guys? Figure out which color to paint it today? Screw the UI overhaul, some of the engine needs overhauling too, but that's no fun. We'd rather bicker endlessly over how curvy to make the soft curves, while the memory leaks and weird crashes go on, unabated.
The important stuff is hard to fix, and no one wants to do that stuff. Arguing over UI rehashes is more fun, and "feels" productive whether or not it actually is.
How about inventing mechanism so themes and plugins don't need constant updating and are so frequently uninstallable because of version issues? Wouldn't that be more useful - and thus attract more users - than a sexy new bit of graphics?
But don't mind me, I'll be over here using Opera, which I find more useful, and Chrome, which is way faster.
You know what color would be good for your bike shed? Fail-Red, with nice, soft curves...
Attention retard: posts like yours are exactly what this bill is supposed to facilitate tracking down. CISPA allows the govt unprecedented rights to get to the source of commentards making oblique threats against politicians, and since Congresswoman Giffords got shot in the head you should just assume no one is feeling overly sympathetic to would-be assassins.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! I started with a Commodore Pet in about 1980 (I was 9 years old) so BASIC programming and lots of PEEKs and POKEs. By High School it was making high-res pictures on Apple IIs, learning to program LOGO, and making architectural drawings using AutoCAD back when you entered the commands instead of poking around on a graphical menu (I'm nostalgic for that version of AutoCAD to this day).
By university (89-93) it was Fortran 77 and Borland Pascal. Good stuff.
Holy cow, all of you need to get your butts *quick* over to the Dictator's Handbook http://dictatorshandbook.net/ and have a quick read. Nobody calls theirself a dictator anymore. There are too many creative ways to be "democratic."
That's the game, of course.
As someone who follows corporate strategy a bit and who is enjoying watching Apple, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft slug it out, this is a move that makes sense. And I love to see anything that reduces the intoxication people have with Microsoft formats. Dependence on compatibility with Microsoft formats has set computing back by a decade - and the fight continues.
On the other hand, as a consumer and someone who's very wary of getting locked in, I've gotta say, that's a Dick Move. (http://dictatorshandbook.net/memes/dmb.jpg/)
I otherwise wouldn't have posted but I see I took a different track from most:
Starting in 2000: SuSE 7.1 all the way up to about 9.1 when it got too heavy to run on my PIII with 128MB of memory. I tried Xandros for a while and also taste-tested Vector, Mandriva, Grml, and Mepis, but I always returned to SuSE.
That got me interested enough in Unix that now for anything serious (servers) I use FreeBSD, and no going back.
I've currently got FreeBSD on the server, openSUSE 12.2 on the desktop, and Bodhi on the netbook. I must be the only one on this site who skipped Ubuntu. I never liked their KDE install, never liked Gnome in any way, shape or form (especially now), and never really understood what the big deal was.
No, it cuts both ways. When I wrote and researched my book, The Dictator's Handbook, it was clear governments are able to make easy use of this data. There are numerous examples: governments planting trojans, tracking journalists, hacking email, sending out spear phish attacks, and worse. Rioters in Syria and Iran are frequently amazed when they are put in jail and their own email is read to them during the legal proceedings. Twitter is no better, and rogue governments create fake Facebook log-in pages to trap log-in credentials. Join us on the forum at http://dictatorshandbook.net/ for more, and you're welcome to read using NNTP protocol for increased anonymity.
I also like SpiderOak. Very easy to set up, already in the Ubuntu repositories, and all your data is fully encrypted on the remote server.
Social media is pretty easy.
1. Make coffee.
2. Log in.
3. Click on LOLcat.
4. Click on Derpy-looking kid.
5. Mouse-over raging liberal link to some stupid blog suggesting an undercover cover up.
6. Click on Rage comic.
7. Click on link to semi-interested article. Read two paragraphs, then
8. Click on bikini pic in the sidebar.
9. Goto 1.
I moved to Bodhi Linux with its Enlightenment desktop, and like it. That's the fun thing - everyone can find their own escape route from Gnome3 since Linux offers so many choices.
Bodhi is very lightweight and was easy to configure (though it took me a day to figure out E17's vocabulary). I'm very happy, and it's a simple CD download, which is good - I don't have much bandwidth.
DVD downloads are a hassle, in my opinion. When it comes time to download one I usually resort to purchasing from one of the companies that advertises on distrowatch.org.
I highly recommend Bodhi though - it's very sharp and polished.
I'm not sure invention of the new catchphrase "Junkweb" was necessary. It's subjective after all - one man's junk is another man's treasure. I'm also not sure the new phenomenon of text-on-picture is all that big a deal - when people get sick of it, the trend will die out. I'm old school by most measures - born in the early 70s, grew up on a Commodore Pet and later C64, remember Gopher and Telnet, etc. But I think the stuff getting floated on Reddit is pretty funny, and it makes me laugh.
If there's anything worth talking about at all, it's not the rise of something someone calls a "Junk Net," it's how the utopian promise of the Internet - liberated conversation, connection, and access to information - has been somewhat diluted by lots of other stuff, and as more and more people have gotten connected their tastes have swayed the general trend of what's on the web.
I've got a forum that runs on Usenet era technology (http://dictatorshandbook.net/ and it's not exactly been a blistering success. People find usenet and even the web-based front end to it to be too "texty" and dry. They want pictures and LOLcats and stupid memes. OK, fair enough - that's not the audience I'm trying to attract, and the folks that are interested in educated conversation about dictators will probably enjoy my site and its text forum while everyone else will go bugger off.
So if there's an issue here, it's just that increasingly people go to the internet not for information but for entertainment, and the companies have teed up to make that happen - look at the ipod ferfucksake, now I can watch TV in bed! YAY! I think this is a failure of society over all, not of technology.
Fact is, there are good, knowledge-intensive sites out there. Go hang out on them if that's what you want. And if you want a good laugh, enjoy the latest meme. It's all good.
I received that exact threat about a month ago. It was obviously horse sh*t so I didn't worry about it. I got it by email (at my work account) about three days after LinkedIn got its database hacked, so I assume they got my email address from LinkedIn.
Either these guys are a bunch of copycatters, or the same thing is happening. If I recall LinkedIn (like everyone else) wanted my cellphone number so they can contact me "in case of emergency." I f*cking hate that - I don't want everyone to have my cellphone number. That means Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Gmail can all bugger off.
So let's say LinkedIn gets hacked; they get email addresses but they also get cellphone numbers too. Badda boom, badda bing.
The Summary says, "the implications for privacy are uncertain." I say, what, are you blind? The implications are certain - certainly BAD.
My family's house when I was growing up had a nice basement that stayed remarkably cool and comfortable, even on brutally hot/humid summer days. On the really bad ones we'd just kind of move downstairs to play games and read and do projects. Fun.
These days I like to kick it back in the cool room, and take a little reading material so I can lay low. My favorite is the latest couple blog posts from rabid Republican nutjobs insisting there's no proof of global warming and lobbying for more drilling in oil fields. That's the smell of America, baby.
On behalf of every would-be tyrant, autocrat, dictator, and fiend, I'd like to THANK Zuck. I mean Christ, who needs to invest in expensive and complicated counter-terrorism and surveillance services when you can just put a person in front of a computer and they'll happily blab away their every secret in exchange for links to silly cats and pictures with text over them?
Facebook is the best thing to happen to dictators in a while. It's a tremendous source of information, it's not hard to hack (and has BEEN hacked on numerous occasions), and gives the tyrant an almost complete picture of who you hang out with, when, where, and what you discuss. DickTater know what you like, what you do, where you work, where you studied, and who your co-subversives are.
So thanks, Zuck. Being a tyrant was never so easy. In fact "using Facebook" makes up a large part of chapter 9 (Communications & Media) of the Dictators Handbook (http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/). True!
On the contrary, some sites are far MORE usable using Lynx. www.linuxtoday.com is so clogged with advertisements (all graphic or flash) it's hard to even find the articles, and the page takes an eternity to load as it chugs through all the scripts, stat-counters, and whatever else. I read that site exclusively in Lynx, which ignores all the crap and gets me straight to the articles.
The articles often suck too, though. No browser can help you with that.
The modern web is so focused on targetted ads and heavy graphics illustration that there's no room left for content, which hardly anyone produces anymore anyway in an era of mashups and retweets.
Visit a site in Lynx just for kicks and you'll have a better sense of how much content is really in that Crap-Sandwich.
Sorry Minitel - I never knew you. But say hello to some friends of mine: BBS, Gopher, Usenet, and Telnet. All cool things at the time, all superceded by bigger and better. But at the time they were like magic.
And I should know, I wrote it. Chapter 9 (Media) goes into extensive detail on how to clamp down on the media, route communications through state systems through which you can monitor and track. Chapter 10 (International Community) goes into how to do one thing while stating the other; how to befuddle the donors and international oversight committees, and so on.
The point is, what Ethiopia is doing, and Eritrea too by the way, is nothing new. Nor is it specific to Africa. Belarus, Iran, China, Thailand, and a lot of other countries are capitalizing on state infrastructure to control communications. Have a look at http://dictatorshandbook.net/
I had a similar situation at work. Get yourself a VPS - there are hundreds of companies out there - and then tunnel into it for playing around. If you're lucky your company lets you use SSH. If you're not Pendriveapps.com has PuTTy on a pendrive version. Use that to connect to your server and there you can do whatever you like, from Python to Perl to Lisp to Haskell.
I'd kick it old school, beyatches:
Limit the entire internet to: .soc, .rec, .comp, .humanities, .news, .sci, .talk, and .misc
If you can't fit the Internet into Usenet, you just trim off the edges and delete what hangs over the edge.
You can virtualize a lot of stuff in the data center. Some of it brings high return on investment and others don't. You want to do a needs analysis on existing infrastructure and expected resource level commitments over the medium and long term.
Then what you'll find is that you should definitely not virtualize your underpants. Underpants should definitely stay in the realm of the non-virtual, and preferably right there on your asset.
The rest of the stuff? Meh.
Ahem. (puts on curmudgeon hat). That's better.
I remember when people started to have trouble differentiating between the Internet and the WWW, and nerds got their knickers in a twist pointing out the WWW was just a subset (hey, what about Usenet? What about FTP?)
Now we can enter a brave new kingdom where no one knows the difference between Facebook and the WWW.
Anyway, curmudgeon aside, I don't get all bent out of shape by a Facebook phone because I don't use Facebook, and if you don't take one seriously, it's impossible to take the rest seriously. This can only distract them from their main game, put a buggy phone on the market that further dilutes the quality of their brand, and waste time, money, and energy.
From the competition's point of view: woo hoo! Go for it, suckahz!
Remember back in the mid-1980s when we were all concerned with sexual lyrics in rock music? We sure fixed that one, eh? Remember when that show "The A-Team" was considered too violent for TV and we all marched to end the violence? How'd that one turn out?
Remember when we launched the "War on Drugs," and now as a result you can't get drugs anywhere at all and all the dealers and producers are out of work?
Good luck with the latest challenge. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
Call me a curmudgeon, but the immediate impact - after the shock and awe wear off - would be people learning how to elucidate complex points again. In the early days of Usenet posts were longer and better thought out. That trend carried into email when POP3 and offline clients meant you had time to compose your thoughts. Webmail shortened people's attention span, since you had to fire off your message before the page expired. Facebook shortened it again: you don't have to even have a coherent thought anymore as you really only need to stab blindly at the stupid "like" button and click on pictures people think are funny. Don't get me started on Twitter, but let's just say in a language where you only get 140 characters per thought you don't waste any of them on verbs (or often vowels).
If Social networking died in a firestorm, the 'net would be quiet for a bit. But perhaps people would get back in the habit of thinking about things more complex than whether or not they "like" the video of the funny cat.
Nah, who am I kidding? Those days are past, and each generation is stupider than the last one now. Yay us. Alright then, I'm off to wash my '68 Thunderbird while listening to Steely Dan on my transistor radio. Damn kids.
This drives me crazy as it stinks of "un-researched." Yes, broadband internet is probably useful and may lead to economic benefits of some sort. But I think in practice the way that broadband is going to be put to use is streaming TV over Internet, so, basically entertainment. Meanwhile, web pages bloat and you can enjoy Flash goodness in new craptacular ways.
To address the recession in the US the Obama administration prioritized the same. One of the sob stories was a rural farm owner complaining "with dial up it can take me 45 minutes to upload a picture of the horse I'm selling." FFS, you know she's uploading a 4+MB picture her camera took, with enough pixels to print the damn thing out at life-size. If she reduced it to, say, 900x600 she'd have a picture she could upload in a few seconds over a plain old dial up line.
My point is: it's easy to claim on the basis of no research at all that lack of access to broadband is a killer that will cause the economy to implode. But I don't think it's true, and suspect the big ISPs and cable companies are whispering this falsehood in the ears of gullible politicians. If the point of Internet is to access information I think you do a lot of what you need to do with very little bandwidth at all. You need more bandwidth to offer new services (like, ahem, a service that tints your digital photos and allows you to share them for free, cough). But you don't host a server like that in the woods, you host it at a hosting facility in the capital.
So, what is the need again? Does anybody know?
How's the view from the bike shed, guys? Figure out which color to paint it today? Screw the UI overhaul, some of the engine needs overhauling too, but that's no fun. We'd rather bicker endlessly over how curvy to make the soft curves, while the memory leaks and weird crashes go on, unabated.
The important stuff is hard to fix, and no one wants to do that stuff. Arguing over UI rehashes is more fun, and "feels" productive whether or not it actually is.
How about inventing mechanism so themes and plugins don't need constant updating and are so frequently uninstallable because of version issues? Wouldn't that be more useful - and thus attract more users - than a sexy new bit of graphics?
But don't mind me, I'll be over here using Opera, which I find more useful, and Chrome, which is way faster.
You know what color would be good for your bike shed? Fail-Red, with nice, soft curves...
Attention retard: posts like yours are exactly what this bill is supposed to facilitate tracking down. CISPA allows the govt unprecedented rights to get to the source of commentards making oblique threats against politicians, and since Congresswoman Giffords got shot in the head you should just assume no one is feeling overly sympathetic to would-be assassins.