I think for some reason a lot of people find joy in finding problems with progress. They seem to want every advancement we make as people to have some dark side effect that will lead us to our doom.
I think it's more that people want to find a reason for the rise in autism rates other than the simple fact that doctors are more aware of it.
The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
Personally I don't even remember if I had heard that this couple had been accused of anything. Now I will forever remember them as the couple who gave a flying fucking rats ass what was said about them on the second most pointless forum on the Internet, Topix.
Seriously, grow the fuck up morons. No one with 1/16th of a brain gives a shit what any Internet troll has to say and no one, and I mean no one, pays any fucking attention to Topix what-so-ever. There really has to be a better way for this couple to waste their money, right?
Does this have any advantage over NemusSync? It doesn't require jailbreaking, but Nemus lets me maintain a calendar on my iPhone that isn't synced or erased when I sync my Google calendar data, which is a feature I do use. What does Google Sync have going for it?
Haven't you answered your own question already? While Jailbreaking is a cool hack and NemusSync works, I honestly don't see how you can think it's a viable application for the iPhone. Back when I was jailbreaking my iPhone, I did so solely for NemusSync, unfortunately the side effects of jailbreaking (applications randomly start crashing on startup one after another until they are all failing and require a reinstall) made it not so worthwhile. That and the fact that in order to have the sync happen automatically required quite a little hack to get going and I never found it to reliably sync on time.
Personally I'm much more comfortable with the Google sync route than I am with the NemusSync/jailbreak route. The only reason you would want to stick with that solution is if you're already using an Exchange setup on your iPhone and you don't want to lose the support for Google Calendar.
Please don't misunderstand... I ask for the input of the public and I really want to hear it. What I do not want to see are several comments, all from the same IP address, originating from the same Yahoo Mail referrer, using e-mail addresses which bounce, and giving words of praise about how awesome everything was for them.
If someone is an owner or otherwise affiliated with an establishment, I want to hear them say exactly that. They don't want to say that because they know how it looks to others reading their content.
I run a website that, among other things, includes local restaurant "reviews". I have found myself constantly combating not your typical troll (I get some of that, but for the most part it's minimal) but astroturfers. Restaurant owners rarely like what I have to say about their restaurant and being that I usually outrank them on Google, they are trying to get people's opinion swayed their way.
I have to pay close attention to logs including e-mail addresses and IP ranges as well as referrers to piece together their lame attempts. I wonder how many other people out there have a similar problem. Are you noticing an uptick in traffic from mailed URLs with friends, family, and others (sometimes paid via Amazon's Turk) to attempt and negate what is being said on your website/forum?
It seems a bit odd that you're actually trying to argue AGAINST saving money by using less energy.
I'm just saying it's having the opposite effect that it should. And I don't give a shit what reason the assholes give for raising the rates. They don't deserve to make profit when I don't have any fucking choice on which energy company to use.
Even though we are very energy conscious and pay very little for our natural gas and electric (our average gas bill is currently $41) we have already seen a 300% increase since 2006 (I don't have any data before then for this house on hand) and they are expecting it to now go up another $6/month?
You go ahead and keep thinking that you're saving the world and your wallet from the high cost of energy when the cocksuckers are raking you over the coals so they can continue to turn a profit. I love having exactly ONE option (mandated by the local municipality) for utilities and not having any choice to turn to when the rates become cost prohibitive.
Just because I was modded as "Insightful" doesn't mean it was meant to be anything other than "Funny". I suppose you should be stereotyping moderators, eh?
Hey, where's the roadside test for vicodin? Prescription codeine or morphine? Dextromethorphan?
I didn't bother to get into this discussion because the answer is obvious. Those chemicals are developed by commercial entities which pay big money to politicians to ensure that they are the only painkillers marketable to the masses. When an effective substance can be procured for next to nothing, they want to keep it off the market.
Plus, my original post, especially the part about the color of someone's tongue was, well, tongue-in-cheek.
I have yet to hear/see a rational reason why marijuana is still illegal.
Please. While I have nothing against people getting as baked as hell and staring at their ceilings all night long while listening to Pink Floyd, I do realize that it is an intoxicating substance that is difficult to detect the level of intoxication.
So, you get pulled over and they decide you're baked. They can't really prove it because there is no "immediate intoxication test". They can tell if you have THC in your body but you could have ingested marijuana in some form or another weeks ago. Yeah, the cops have such great tests as green tongues and glassy eyes but a lawyer would destroy those in court.
So, while I have no problems with it becoming legal, I do see one of the reasons why the government doesn't want it to -- aside from the trillions they've put into the pointless "Drug War".
I would bring me great joy to see a video of an average Windows user trying to use Lynx.
Yeah, I mean, using those arrow keys and pressing enter is way beyond the comprehension of anyone who has ever used a computer regardless of OS. Oh how the laughter over frustration will spread! Haha!
I didn't say I didn't question it. I don't believe a word any politician says but I have *never* witness the number of people following along with the campaign promises of a candidate/president like they are with Obama. Even people I would normally believe to be levelheaded are acting like 13 year old girls after their first kiss.
I don't know what to be more frightened of, Bush's right-wing, conservative, religion wackos or the mass of people that Obama has mobilized into believing that something will be vastly different with him in charge.
You know, as a geek and an American who's concerned with his personal privacy, there was a single issue which I really took to heart during GWB's presidency and that was telecom immunity (a retroactive law mind you). When Obama went back and ended up supporting it and then continued to support it even into his presidency, I really had to take the whole "Change" mantra with a big grain of salt.
While I have been watching my Twitter log scroll by with people saying they are in tears over this historic moment and the supposed changing of the guard as President Bush left office, I just have to wonder how much really will "Change". And obviously, at least one very important issue, which should be a priority of all Americans, is being overlooked because someone is promising a whole bunch of shit which probably doesn't matter much.
Yet, something which goes against the Constitution is going to be swept under the rug as not all that important because we have a great speaker who appeals to the masses with his great voice, speeches that blow the out-going fool's away, and his supposed "fit" chest as was shown round the world via the media's obsession with the man.
I'm all for a new leader, God knows we needed someone better than GWB 4+ years ago. But man, "Change" is relative I guess. YMMV.
Err, the 2008 Debian was a walk in the park compared to RH 5.2 and Slackware in 1996. It's too early to be posting shit about Linux installs to Slashdot I guess.
I love Linux and would still use a raw distribution if I really had to.
Debian is not "raw" in the least. In fact, when I did a fresh install of etch recently, I was honestly surprised at how easy the installation process had become (the last time I did a full reinstall was probably 2002 when I bought the machine that I was replacing).
I am not going to claim that I walked uphill both ways when I started with Linux but after looking at the differences in installing Debian in 2002 vs 2008, it certainly made Slackware's 1996 install and RedHat 5.2 for Alpha look like a fucking walk in the park.
My request is to those that are in the know to show me some example code, that does something useful. Then later, compare that code to code from other languages to accomplish the same task.
Would you ask someone who utilizes SAS or SPSS to do the same thing? Because that's more or less what R is -- a free version of SAS or SPSS. I work in SAS all day long and I have been planning on using R to automate some of my personal website statistics/graphing that I run regularly because I don't really like doing the queries in MySQL on the console, copying the data to Excel, and graphing the results.
As anyone knows, you should utilize the best tool for any particular job you're doing. There's no sense in recreating the wheel in C or Perl or Foo when R, SAS, SPSS, or whatever does stats, mining, and graphing well.
From what I've seen people do primarily play Tetris to decompress and reduce stress.
It doesn't reduce stress for me! Especially when some high ranked asshole comes into play me on Tetris Party for the Wii and quits after I beat him and before his ranking is affected. Fucking cocksuckers. If I ever find one of those motherfuckers I will pound them in the head with a Wiimote repeatedly until death occurs.
Oh, is that what you meant by reducing stress? Sorry, I got distracted.
This is where you're confused. The citizens of this country shouldn't have had to pay *ANYTHING* to buy a converter. The spectrum was sold for BILLIONS of DOLLARS to third parties and being that the citizens OWN the spectrum and the government does not, the money gained by this sale should have gone directly to us. I promise you that the $80 in coupons (which I didn't even get and they won't replace even though they didn't send it in any trackable manner) won't cover what we should have been given.
It's sad that people don't understand the simple fact that we got fucked on this deal all around.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I've been there and done that to no avail:
1. Jailbreaking causes applications on my iPhone to randomly stop working. Once one goes south, eventually all the applications on the phone do -- one at a time. The only option is to continuously reinstall the applications that stopped working -- except when it gets to something like your contacts or phone. Then you're more or less fucked. Removing the jailbreak stopped this.
2. I tried the backgrounder and while you had no noticeable impact, I surely did. Not only in battery life but in processor life. Applications that were backgrounded were grinding the phone to an absolute halt and we're only talking about stuff like Pandora and AIM. I was spending more time killing the backgrounded applications or restarting the phone entirely than I was using it. Not such a great solution.
It is a nice device. It reportedly works very well.
It's just like every other device out there... It has its good points and it has its really bad points. What it does really well is viewing webpages as they were meant to be seen and playing music/video. These things are second to none on any device I have used.
What it doesn't do well are too numerous to list. Do I own one? Yes. Why? Because I ride the bus every day to work and I wanted music/video as well as good web surfing. Unfortunately what it doesn't do is type with ease, which I am used to from the 4 years I used a Sidekick, and run applications in the background. Seriously, that is the hardest thing for me to get used to (what do you mean I don't have IM running all the time?)
If T-mobile didn't suck so hard and the Sidekick wasn't marketed to douchebags, I'd probably go back to owning one in a heartbeat over the iPhone. But for now, it does most of what I want it to and I'm about 50/50 with the device.
The one item that was damaged from Amazon, out of the 30 or 40 I bought, they had the replacement in my hands 2 days after reporting it - and I haven't even returned the damaged item yet! Amazon is getting my money next year.
I ordered something to finish a collection of ~300 romance novels I found all over the place (EBay lots, used bookstores, etc) for a special wedding gift for my wife. When UPS decided to deliver it into the void and blame me because the UPS man marked that he had delivered it to my door when he in fact had not (which it seemed was a regular problem as I have had those idiots deliver my packages all over the neighborhood forcing me to search front doors looking for it when it says "delivered" and the doorbell hasn't gone off), Amazon shipped me another book no questions asked. I mean, it was a $9 item but that kind of service has caused me to go back to them again and again -- even if I wasn't so pleased with them for my holiday shopping this year.
When the metro newspapers finally figure out that a lot of folks actually like non-national stories again, they may be able to save themselves. Uniqueness and specialization are the drivers of everything online.
My website is basically an aggregation of local news sources from all over our area and encompasses some 15 different local news sources. These newspapers have relatively small distribution areas and a lot of fluff. Very little of what comes out of them are "news" by any means and while they may break their news stories before the metro newspapers do, they are usually limited in scope and depth. Just because you have a paragraph blurb about some local happening doesn't mean it was worth beating the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune to the punch.
While I don't have print readership (one of the local papers sends out a weekly copy free of charge to your doorstep) I do have more regular reader than these papers do and I more or less just print blurbs of what they already covered and give my own opinion. While I have plans to do a little more than that, it really gives people something other than the fluffy horseshit that these papers provide (they are usually the "official newspaper of foo city" which is apparently mandated for public notices and thus their stories are fucking bullshit and always pro-city). People seem to want that and while I wish I wasn't leeching I just don't have the budget, time or staff (I'm one person doing this in 1.5 hours a day) to "report" on stuff.
Traditional media needs to get around to doing more editorial that's obviously non-biased. People don't give a shit if the official newspaper of the local school district believes that the renewal of the superintendent's contract was a great idea, in fact, most people disagree with the decision but here in Minnesota are too "nice" to admit it publicly.
Some of these local papers are trying to reach out the modern age with RSS support but refuse to move to full feeds because it would impact their measly ad revenue (of which anyone with an RSS reader probably isn't going to click anyway). I guarantee that I make 10x what they do in their online ads but trying to explain that to them is like speaking to the wall. These people have no idea how to function in the modern news world and I doubt that they ever will.
It's truly unfortunate because, as you said, they are doing a lot of legwork (even if it's more or less pointless) to get a blurb and beat out the bigger outlets to the punch.
They're working on it. If you dare you can take a look at a nightly and see for yourself.
I have run the nightlies and had been running Minefield (as suggested here once before) for a while before I realized that WordPress 2.7's admin panel wasn't saving drafts of my posts automatically. Thinking it was a WordPress issue I reported a bug and then later found out it was a Minefield issue. I "upgraded" to Shiretoko (I believe that's what it was) and it worked again but other failures in basic functionality appeared (e.g. not being able to submit a web-based tweet on twitter).
I like the add-ons and find them useful but for them to completely ignore speed (which was the original goal of the browser) and develop something else (which wasn't) is wasteful.
BTW, while the nightlies might appear faster, they're still a huge hog and nowhere near the speed that Chrome offers. I find it spectacularly odd that you would get a +5 for your comment which is little more than a rehash of what others have suggested.
I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.
The thing about Chrome that is the most attractive is its small footprint (aside from the god damn GoogleUpdater running in the background) and speed in loading. My main machine at home is an underpowered laptop and Chrome is smoking the living shit out of a fresh install of Firefox (i.e. no add-ons installed) speed wise, especially in booting up.
Do you remember when Firefox came out as an alternative browser and its main focus was being on slim and fast? Well, those days are gone and we now have a bloated monster which takes for-fucking-ever to boot on my slower machine. Why is this, I really want to know?
While I don't install Chrome on all my machines (I like GreaseMonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus), it is very useful on a machine where I don't need it swapping out to load the application and three windows/tabs. Firefox really needs to step back and say to themselves, "do we need to continue down the path that so many other browsers have taken up and failed with?" Google needs to heed those words for future consideration as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think for some reason a lot of people find joy in finding problems with progress. They seem to want every advancement we make as people to have some dark side effect that will lead us to our doom.
I think it's more that people want to find a reason for the rise in autism rates other than the simple fact that doctors are more aware of it.
Apparently, the court system is Texas *does* give a shit what someone says online.
This is also the state where patent trolls go. I guess they only like one type of troll down there in TX.
The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
Personally I don't even remember if I had heard that this couple had been accused of anything. Now I will forever remember them as the couple who gave a flying fucking rats ass what was said about them on the second most pointless forum on the Internet, Topix.
Seriously, grow the fuck up morons. No one with 1/16th of a brain gives a shit what any Internet troll has to say and no one, and I mean no one, pays any fucking attention to Topix what-so-ever. There really has to be a better way for this couple to waste their money, right?
Does this have any advantage over NemusSync? It doesn't require jailbreaking, but Nemus lets me maintain a calendar on my iPhone that isn't synced or erased when I sync my Google calendar data, which is a feature I do use. What does Google Sync have going for it?
Haven't you answered your own question already? While Jailbreaking is a cool hack and NemusSync works, I honestly don't see how you can think it's a viable application for the iPhone. Back when I was jailbreaking my iPhone, I did so solely for NemusSync, unfortunately the side effects of jailbreaking (applications randomly start crashing on startup one after another until they are all failing and require a reinstall) made it not so worthwhile. That and the fact that in order to have the sync happen automatically required quite a little hack to get going and I never found it to reliably sync on time.
Personally I'm much more comfortable with the Google sync route than I am with the NemusSync/jailbreak route. The only reason you would want to stick with that solution is if you're already using an Exchange setup on your iPhone and you don't want to lose the support for Google Calendar.
Please don't misunderstand... I ask for the input of the public and I really want to hear it. What I do not want to see are several comments, all from the same IP address, originating from the same Yahoo Mail referrer, using e-mail addresses which bounce, and giving words of praise about how awesome everything was for them.
If someone is an owner or otherwise affiliated with an establishment, I want to hear them say exactly that. They don't want to say that because they know how it looks to others reading their content.
I run a website that, among other things, includes local restaurant "reviews". I have found myself constantly combating not your typical troll (I get some of that, but for the most part it's minimal) but astroturfers. Restaurant owners rarely like what I have to say about their restaurant and being that I usually outrank them on Google, they are trying to get people's opinion swayed their way.
I have to pay close attention to logs including e-mail addresses and IP ranges as well as referrers to piece together their lame attempts. I wonder how many other people out there have a similar problem. Are you noticing an uptick in traffic from mailed URLs with friends, family, and others (sometimes paid via Amazon's Turk) to attempt and negate what is being said on your website/forum?
It seems a bit odd that you're actually trying to argue AGAINST saving money by using less energy.
I'm just saying it's having the opposite effect that it should. And I don't give a shit what reason the assholes give for raising the rates. They don't deserve to make profit when I don't have any fucking choice on which energy company to use.
Yeah, you will be when your utility companies start raising rates because they aren't making enough money due to conversation and energy efficient hardware.
Even though we are very energy conscious and pay very little for our natural gas and electric (our average gas bill is currently $41) we have already seen a 300% increase since 2006 (I don't have any data before then for this house on hand) and they are expecting it to now go up another $6/month?
You go ahead and keep thinking that you're saving the world and your wallet from the high cost of energy when the cocksuckers are raking you over the coals so they can continue to turn a profit. I love having exactly ONE option (mandated by the local municipality) for utilities and not having any choice to turn to when the rates become cost prohibitive.
Just because I was modded as "Insightful" doesn't mean it was meant to be anything other than "Funny". I suppose you should be stereotyping moderators, eh?
Hey, where's the roadside test for vicodin? Prescription codeine or morphine? Dextromethorphan?
I didn't bother to get into this discussion because the answer is obvious. Those chemicals are developed by commercial entities which pay big money to politicians to ensure that they are the only painkillers marketable to the masses. When an effective substance can be procured for next to nothing, they want to keep it off the market.
Plus, my original post, especially the part about the color of someone's tongue was, well, tongue-in-cheek.
I have yet to hear/see a rational reason why marijuana is still illegal.
Please. While I have nothing against people getting as baked as hell and staring at their ceilings all night long while listening to Pink Floyd, I do realize that it is an intoxicating substance that is difficult to detect the level of intoxication.
So, you get pulled over and they decide you're baked. They can't really prove it because there is no "immediate intoxication test". They can tell if you have THC in your body but you could have ingested marijuana in some form or another weeks ago. Yeah, the cops have such great tests as green tongues and glassy eyes but a lawyer would destroy those in court.
So, while I have no problems with it becoming legal, I do see one of the reasons why the government doesn't want it to -- aside from the trillions they've put into the pointless "Drug War".
I would bring me great joy to see a video of an average Windows user trying to use Lynx.
Yeah, I mean, using those arrow keys and pressing enter is way beyond the comprehension of anyone who has ever used a computer regardless of OS. Oh how the laughter over frustration will spread! Haha!
I didn't say I didn't question it. I don't believe a word any politician says but I have *never* witness the number of people following along with the campaign promises of a candidate/president like they are with Obama. Even people I would normally believe to be levelheaded are acting like 13 year old girls after their first kiss.
I don't know what to be more frightened of, Bush's right-wing, conservative, religion wackos or the mass of people that Obama has mobilized into believing that something will be vastly different with him in charge.
You know, as a geek and an American who's concerned with his personal privacy, there was a single issue which I really took to heart during GWB's presidency and that was telecom immunity (a retroactive law mind you). When Obama went back and ended up supporting it and then continued to support it even into his presidency, I really had to take the whole "Change" mantra with a big grain of salt.
While I have been watching my Twitter log scroll by with people saying they are in tears over this historic moment and the supposed changing of the guard as President Bush left office, I just have to wonder how much really will "Change". And obviously, at least one very important issue, which should be a priority of all Americans, is being overlooked because someone is promising a whole bunch of shit which probably doesn't matter much.
Yet, something which goes against the Constitution is going to be swept under the rug as not all that important because we have a great speaker who appeals to the masses with his great voice, speeches that blow the out-going fool's away, and his supposed "fit" chest as was shown round the world via the media's obsession with the man.
I'm all for a new leader, God knows we needed someone better than GWB 4+ years ago. But man, "Change" is relative I guess. YMMV.
Err, the 2008 Debian was a walk in the park compared to RH 5.2 and Slackware in 1996. It's too early to be posting shit about Linux installs to Slashdot I guess.
I love Linux and would still use a raw distribution if I really had to.
Debian is not "raw" in the least. In fact, when I did a fresh install of etch recently, I was honestly surprised at how easy the installation process had become (the last time I did a full reinstall was probably 2002 when I bought the machine that I was replacing).
I am not going to claim that I walked uphill both ways when I started with Linux but after looking at the differences in installing Debian in 2002 vs 2008, it certainly made Slackware's 1996 install and RedHat 5.2 for Alpha look like a fucking walk in the park.
My request is to those that are in the know to show me some example code, that does something useful. Then later, compare that code to code from other languages to accomplish the same task.
Would you ask someone who utilizes SAS or SPSS to do the same thing? Because that's more or less what R is -- a free version of SAS or SPSS. I work in SAS all day long and I have been planning on using R to automate some of my personal website statistics/graphing that I run regularly because I don't really like doing the queries in MySQL on the console, copying the data to Excel, and graphing the results.
As anyone knows, you should utilize the best tool for any particular job you're doing. There's no sense in recreating the wheel in C or Perl or Foo when R, SAS, SPSS, or whatever does stats, mining, and graphing well.
From what I've seen people do primarily play Tetris to decompress and reduce stress.
It doesn't reduce stress for me! Especially when some high ranked asshole comes into play me on Tetris Party for the Wii and quits after I beat him and before his ranking is affected. Fucking cocksuckers. If I ever find one of those motherfuckers I will pound them in the head with a Wiimote repeatedly until death occurs.
Oh, is that what you meant by reducing stress? Sorry, I got distracted.
This is where you're confused. The citizens of this country shouldn't have had to pay *ANYTHING* to buy a converter. The spectrum was sold for BILLIONS of DOLLARS to third parties and being that the citizens OWN the spectrum and the government does not, the money gained by this sale should have gone directly to us. I promise you that the $80 in coupons (which I didn't even get and they won't replace even though they didn't send it in any trackable manner) won't cover what we should have been given.
It's sad that people don't understand the simple fact that we got fucked on this deal all around.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I've been there and done that to no avail:
1. Jailbreaking causes applications on my iPhone to randomly stop working. Once one goes south, eventually all the applications on the phone do -- one at a time. The only option is to continuously reinstall the applications that stopped working -- except when it gets to something like your contacts or phone. Then you're more or less fucked. Removing the jailbreak stopped this.
2. I tried the backgrounder and while you had no noticeable impact, I surely did. Not only in battery life but in processor life. Applications that were backgrounded were grinding the phone to an absolute halt and we're only talking about stuff like Pandora and AIM. I was spending more time killing the backgrounded applications or restarting the phone entirely than I was using it. Not such a great solution.
It is a nice device. It reportedly works very well.
It's just like every other device out there... It has its good points and it has its really bad points. What it does really well is viewing webpages as they were meant to be seen and playing music/video. These things are second to none on any device I have used.
What it doesn't do well are too numerous to list. Do I own one? Yes. Why? Because I ride the bus every day to work and I wanted music/video as well as good web surfing. Unfortunately what it doesn't do is type with ease, which I am used to from the 4 years I used a Sidekick, and run applications in the background. Seriously, that is the hardest thing for me to get used to (what do you mean I don't have IM running all the time?)
If T-mobile didn't suck so hard and the Sidekick wasn't marketed to douchebags, I'd probably go back to owning one in a heartbeat over the iPhone. But for now, it does most of what I want it to and I'm about 50/50 with the device.
The one item that was damaged from Amazon, out of the 30 or 40 I bought, they had the replacement in my hands 2 days after reporting it - and I haven't even returned the damaged item yet! Amazon is getting my money next year.
I ordered something to finish a collection of ~300 romance novels I found all over the place (EBay lots, used bookstores, etc) for a special wedding gift for my wife. When UPS decided to deliver it into the void and blame me because the UPS man marked that he had delivered it to my door when he in fact had not (which it seemed was a regular problem as I have had those idiots deliver my packages all over the neighborhood forcing me to search front doors looking for it when it says "delivered" and the doorbell hasn't gone off), Amazon shipped me another book no questions asked. I mean, it was a $9 item but that kind of service has caused me to go back to them again and again -- even if I wasn't so pleased with them for my holiday shopping this year.
When the metro newspapers finally figure out that a lot of folks actually like non-national stories again, they may be able to save themselves. Uniqueness and specialization are the drivers of everything online.
My website is basically an aggregation of local news sources from all over our area and encompasses some 15 different local news sources. These newspapers have relatively small distribution areas and a lot of fluff. Very little of what comes out of them are "news" by any means and while they may break their news stories before the metro newspapers do, they are usually limited in scope and depth. Just because you have a paragraph blurb about some local happening doesn't mean it was worth beating the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune to the punch.
While I don't have print readership (one of the local papers sends out a weekly copy free of charge to your doorstep) I do have more regular reader than these papers do and I more or less just print blurbs of what they already covered and give my own opinion. While I have plans to do a little more than that, it really gives people something other than the fluffy horseshit that these papers provide (they are usually the "official newspaper of foo city" which is apparently mandated for public notices and thus their stories are fucking bullshit and always pro-city). People seem to want that and while I wish I wasn't leeching I just don't have the budget, time or staff (I'm one person doing this in 1.5 hours a day) to "report" on stuff.
Traditional media needs to get around to doing more editorial that's obviously non-biased. People don't give a shit if the official newspaper of the local school district believes that the renewal of the superintendent's contract was a great idea, in fact, most people disagree with the decision but here in Minnesota are too "nice" to admit it publicly.
Some of these local papers are trying to reach out the modern age with RSS support but refuse to move to full feeds because it would impact their measly ad revenue (of which anyone with an RSS reader probably isn't going to click anyway). I guarantee that I make 10x what they do in their online ads but trying to explain that to them is like speaking to the wall. These people have no idea how to function in the modern news world and I doubt that they ever will.
It's truly unfortunate because, as you said, they are doing a lot of legwork (even if it's more or less pointless) to get a blurb and beat out the bigger outlets to the punch.
They're working on it. If you dare you can take a look at a nightly and see for yourself.
I have run the nightlies and had been running Minefield (as suggested here once before) for a while before I realized that WordPress 2.7's admin panel wasn't saving drafts of my posts automatically. Thinking it was a WordPress issue I reported a bug and then later found out it was a Minefield issue. I "upgraded" to Shiretoko (I believe that's what it was) and it worked again but other failures in basic functionality appeared (e.g. not being able to submit a web-based tweet on twitter).
I like the add-ons and find them useful but for them to completely ignore speed (which was the original goal of the browser) and develop something else (which wasn't) is wasteful.
BTW, while the nightlies might appear faster, they're still a huge hog and nowhere near the speed that Chrome offers. I find it spectacularly odd that you would get a +5 for your comment which is little more than a rehash of what others have suggested.
I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.
The thing about Chrome that is the most attractive is its small footprint (aside from the god damn GoogleUpdater running in the background) and speed in loading. My main machine at home is an underpowered laptop and Chrome is smoking the living shit out of a fresh install of Firefox (i.e. no add-ons installed) speed wise, especially in booting up.
Do you remember when Firefox came out as an alternative browser and its main focus was being on slim and fast? Well, those days are gone and we now have a bloated monster which takes for-fucking-ever to boot on my slower machine. Why is this, I really want to know?
While I don't install Chrome on all my machines (I like GreaseMonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus), it is very useful on a machine where I don't need it swapping out to load the application and three windows/tabs. Firefox really needs to step back and say to themselves, "do we need to continue down the path that so many other browsers have taken up and failed with?" Google needs to heed those words for future consideration as well.