I'm talking about this study, not global warming in total. OTOH, if you want a study with a negative result, here's one right here. They're just presenting it as though it were a positive result. But AGW isn't falsifiable, so it's only a localized event, unless the result supports AGW, then we can generalize it.
(Frankly, I'm rather jaded about the whole issue since it's too politicized. I like science but arguing politics is exhausting. In science, one negative result can sink a theory, but in politics you have to fight until the proponents give up or lose popularity.)
So, in a scientific paper one computes "alpha", which is the probability that the results are due to chance rather than a true relationship. Thousands of papers are published each year, so we simply accept that 5% of them happen to be wrong by convention*. (Plus, alpha is inversely correlated with "beta", the chance that a relationship can be found if it truly exists, set at 80% usually.) The summary implies that these researches have an alpha level of 0.2, which supports the null hypothesis (no relationship). A one in five chance of being wrong is not acceptable.
IOW, how is global warming falsifiable if you're just going to call everything a positive result? Or is it that you release sensational information to the media if you can't get published in journals? (OTOH, I have no idea what level of evidence climatology journals accept, obviously randomized controlled double-blind trials are impossible, so the level of evidence is going to be quite low just by the nature of the field...)
* Technically, most studies aren't even reproducible if people later try (kinda rare given expense). Bias creeps in despite the many safeguards. Much of it results from researchers being passionate about their theory, not so great at math, and forced to "publish or perish". Researchers tend to be fairly smart, so even their bias may reflect reality, so this problem is somewhat masked.
Yep, it's all fun and games until a civil rights protestor gets killed. Or the targeted ads you see reveal a bit more about your private life than you'd like to everyone in your proximity. Plus there's the fact it's not that bad yet (Dolphin tracks you wherever you go on the internet, the others you mention are far more limited) so I'm seriously wondering why a browser plugin developer wants people to not care about privacy...
If you see someone commit a crime, but don't know who they are, then they're a perpetrator and there's no question of guilt or innocence. Once you track down someone you suspect is that perpetrator then they're a 'suspect' and presumed innocent until proven guilty. Vigilante justice is bad because it deals with the latter, whereas self defense is legal because it deals with the former. The distinction is lost on most people (especially TV reporters watching live feeds), but is critically important.
As for a thief, I agree that lethal force is a bit much. But for a robber it's perfectly acceptable. The difference, of course, is that a thief steals by stealth, whereas a robber threatens to hurt/kill you. That's why castle doctrines exist. Lethal force (threatened or actual) is dealt with by lethal force. Why trust someone to not hurt/kill you if they've proven they have no respect for your safety, society, or the law? Their demands (e.g. your stuff) are irrelevant, as you shouldn't have to play a psychopath's game before you or the police can protect your life.
And which leftist decided the TSA was not only something that should be preserved, but needed to be expanded? As I recall, they were much more liberal on 11/19/2001 than they are today.
OTOH, erosion of civil liberties is not really a left-right issue at this point. Politicians tend to expand their own power, and government expands at the cost of liberty. Right now, right-vs-left is more of a choice of which civil liberties we'll lose first: Personal and some economic, or Economic and some personal. Or at least that's what I though, it seems like we're losing a lot of both lately.
That's an interesting assessment. Personally, I learned programming through perl scripts, CGI scripts to be precise. First I modified the parts that I understood to accomplish things that were slightly different, then I combined parts of multiple scripts to do something new, then I was able to write CGI scripts from scratch, and eventually I learned how to write essentially anything (e.g. sockets, threads, GUI, etc.). The fact that perl is so flexible made that possible, but I suspect that you are correct in that I must have been learning from skilled programmers as their code was decipherable by a novice. Making something "look easy" is the tell-tale sign of a master.
Sadly, I, myself, have likely not achieved that level of mastery. If I have to look at someone else's code I usually get frustrated with deciphering their comments so I strip them out and "simplify" the code until it's concise enough to understand what it does at a glance. Given the hodgepodge of techniques I picked up, I can only imagine how "fun" it would be for someone to come after me and try to decipher my own uncommented and highly condensed code. (Actually, maybe that's why my CS teacher often used to write "I have no idea what this does, but I tried it and it works" on my written tests...)
Restricting an individual's ability to use their body to harm others is one of the major attributes of "society"...
Other stipulations for what you must do to your body include clothing it, excreting waste in designated areas, not loitering in essentially any area that you do not own, paying for goods and services via labor, and you hardly get a choice about which industrial pollutants your body is exposed to. Your body is not a sanctuary free from legislation. Personally, I think that's unnatural (hence my own libertarian/conservative/anarchist leanings), but you can't deny reality. And so long as we cram as many humans into as small an area as possible, we need those laws to prevent a plethora of natural population density control measures.
Living in society is a choice, and it has a few requirements such as not hurting other people. Spreading communicable diseases is a danger to those around you. If you endanger people in other ways (e.g. shooting a gun in a crowded suburb) then you will be incarcerated and removed from society. I see no distinction, except that refusing vaccines is almost invariably out of ignorance, and being vaccinated doesn't impair your civil liberties in any way (unless you think you have a right to catch measles).
Personally, I can't recall Google doing anything too egregious with user data, and they seem to be able to secure it, so I've been comfortable enough using their services. The FTC, while a bureaucracy that may have a bark worse than its bite, seems to at least be trying to do good with net neutrality and such. Letting the FTC vet anything that passes Google's own muster seems like a major win for consumers, and subsequently Google, as this should instill a bit more trust.
16 GB is far more than any desktop user should need, and most laptops simply cannot hold that much, so it's creating a sharp demarcation between user and developer. This is bad. You want your advance users to naturally transition into becoming developers, and making your codebase inaccessible for them prevents that.
IOW, most people have suggestions for improvement for any tool they use. Ideally, it would be trivial for someone to download the source, modify it, recompile, test, and submit improvements. People start with simple things (e.g. misspelled words) and move to more advanced tasks as they gain familiarity. By requiring several hundred dollars of hardware and massive time investments, you are ensuring that users never become developers, just needy consumers whining about feature requests.
Actually, that's not a bad idea, although I'd propose adding a small shuttle to the ISS so you don't have to reorbit the satellite. Humans are far better than robots at this sort of work, remotely operated ones especially. Given launch costs and the typical single part failure, having astronauts fix satellites is an excellent (and likely economic) reason to keep humans in space. I'm sure the military would love to be able to upgrade its spy satellites periodically, and just recall all the work that was done on the Hubble.
What's there for a courtroom to decide? They're POWs, either de factor or de jure. A POW isn't what most people consider a criminal and there's no real question about innocence as they were captured in the act and identified later. US law shouldn't apply to foreign nationals, and opposing the US military isn't a crime unless you are an American. These people are (theoretically) considered a threat to the US, and are being detained for that reason. It's not "fair", but US military power exists to further the interests of the United States. OTOH, I don't think it's technically necessary for the US to even bother with POWs, so I suppose not killing them on the spot counts for something.
Now, all this assumes Gitmo is just holding POWs. I don't follow the news closely enough to verify that, and this speaks nothing of whether it is necessary or humane. Mostly, I am a little surprised at how people want to treat everyone like an American citizen, including subjecting them to our laws. While we're working on it, we don't exactly have a hegemony at this point.
OTOH, there's a profit incentive to ensure that your information isn't subsequently shared beyond the specific advertiser, and to hold back as much data as they can so to make a profit another day.
Argh, quit being reasonable! I was about to make fun of you for not noticing I'd addressed that possibility in my original post that you quoted, even putting it in italics for emphasis.
Jean-Claude Delage, secretary general of the APN, said that '[t]he judges have analyzed the situation perfectly—this site being a threat to the integrity of the police — and made the right decision.'
integrity/integrit/
Noun: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
It seems that they have a bit of a problem with their English. A site that shines light onto questionable behaviors promotes integrity, as you should be acting in private in such a way that you can defend your actions if they were to ever become public. It's an intrinsic quality. This is only a threat in newspeak, or if you think perception is reality.
I guess that statement might make sense if he were talking about the cohesion of the police, but that would imply far greater dissent within their ranks concerning what behaviors have been revealed...
"100 years away" is just pointless speculation. In 1911 I doubt anyone could quite comprehend our modern processors with their speed and ubiquity. And the rate of technologic advancement is increasing!
I think what you're hinting at is that one (food) Calorie is equal to 4184 Joules = 4184 Watts per second. Lighting a potato chip on fire is a good demonstration. Heat dissipation is a serious concern, as proteins cease to function outside of a narrow temperature range.
That said, the average human body dissipates 100 W of heat continuously, and nearly 1,000 W while running. Combine that with our evolutionary adaptations to endurance hunt in the African savannah (i.e. quite warm), and most portable electronic devices aren't going to be an issue. Biology is a very complex system that's difficult/impossible to fix when it goes awry, but it's not a fragile one. People still use substances like DNP for weight loss, and fatal overdoses are rare.
I'd argue that traditional design relies on the principles of traditional media. Much of that also applies to digital media, but much of it does not. Dynamic textual media has been mainstream for, what, 20 years? Nobody knows much about it, it's a new field. Heck, I'm certain sites like Facebook employ a great many "skilled" designers, but each new design is met with legitimate criticism. In established fields there are the rare masterpieces with the rest being "good" but not standing out enough to be great, which clearly does not describe the current state of web design.
The only real thing we understand is that a programmer with little artistic experience or an artist with little programming experience are both terrible at making webpages. From what I've seen of "professional web designers", their traditional design background makes them a bit too much of the latter, and static designs are an effect of that. OTOH, I don't design webpages for anyone else to use because I know I'm in the former camp, so I'm quite harsh when usability is compromised for "useless" aesthetics. A true master would be able to create something that avoids compromising either aesthetics or usability, and synergistically exploits both. Static designs are not a means to that end.
Reflowing text is the default. Open any plain HTML page and resize the window. Developers have been intentionally overriding this so their page looks the same on every device, whether it has a width of 200 px or 1920 px (methinks most didn't think that one through). I'm not quite sure why this is the favored approach, but I suppose it might be because people like to make webpages like magazine pages, where everything is statically positioned, rather than coming up with something that looks good on a variety of browsers, screens, font and color settings. It's lazy programming to design for a single machine, but apparently that's easier for novices and very widespread (e.g. Android VS iPhone apps).
Orwell was primarily an essayist, and virtually all of his works take a stance against totalitarianism. People aren't just talking about a single book, they're talking about the life's work of a well known author.
If you're falling from 30k feet it doesn't really matter what you hit unless you get extremely lucky. Water's surface tension makes it as hard as concrete to someone falling at terminal velocity. IIRC, the only cases of people surviving such falls are when they hit a snow-covered or swampy mountain at an angle and slide down. OTOH, you'd be surprised at how many people routinely survive 50 - 75 foot falls onto hard surfaces, so if you have suitable anatomy (e.g. a firmly attached aorta), and hit with something that can absorb a lot of the impact without impairing a vital structure (e.g. clavical) then you may stand a chance of survival. Of course, at ~200 mph you have virtually no time to correct your position the moment before before landing, and the low atmosphere will probably render you unconscious anyway.
Amusingly enough, the core CyanogenMod developers have made it abundantly clear that they vastly prioritize the ability of vendors to spy on users over the user's right to control who has access to personally identifiable data.
(Sorry for using biased language, but I think that denying a user control over hardware they own, especially by an open source project, is just asinine.)
Well, there is a fair bit of variability in the weather. Assuming it follows a normal distribution, about half of places are warming at this precise moment, while the other half are cooling. The theory of global warming would suggest the distribution is slightly skewed, but it's still going to be close to 50/50. People get suspicious when someone mentions a warming spot, which "proves" global warming while a counterpoint that some other place is cooling is "just a localized event". No falsifiability. Plus, observations without experimentation are a quite low level of evidence, below serious consideration in harder sciences, as they're far too prone to bias and confounding effects.
1) Programmers are not qualified to make security decisions about a user's data. They know nothing about it. It should be up to the user whether the program has access to both their documents and the internet, and any moron can figure out why giving a program access to both would be bad. This sort of behavior is generally handled upon or directly after installation, which is a sufficiently rare event as to be unobtrusive.
2) Webapps aside, people generally use different programs for different things (the trend for bloated apps pretending to be an OS notwithstanding). A browser views webpages, an e-mail client sends e-mail. By giving each application the minimal permissions necessary you limit the risk. A browser needs outbound TCP ports 80 and 443, perhaps arbitrary port access if you do deep packet inspection for HTTP. An e-mail client needs completely different ports and it's absolutely trivial to make generic rule sets for such things (firewalls have done it for ages). The browser should be able to communicate with an e-mail client, but not control it.
This is a moot point, however, because so many programmers feel entitled to have complete control of the user's computer, and corporations would never want anything that interferes with their data mining. The trend in programming for the past decade or two has been to treat the user like an idiot, so users stay idiots. Heck, if programs were consistent (rather than "easier") we could teach the folder/file/menu/program paradigm in school, but there's no uniformity.
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I'm talking about this study, not global warming in total. OTOH, if you want a study with a negative result, here's one right here. They're just presenting it as though it were a positive result. But AGW isn't falsifiable, so it's only a localized event, unless the result supports AGW, then we can generalize it.
(Frankly, I'm rather jaded about the whole issue since it's too politicized. I like science but arguing politics is exhausting. In science, one negative result can sink a theory, but in politics you have to fight until the proponents give up or lose popularity.)
So, in a scientific paper one computes "alpha", which is the probability that the results are due to chance rather than a true relationship. Thousands of papers are published each year, so we simply accept that 5% of them happen to be wrong by convention*. (Plus, alpha is inversely correlated with "beta", the chance that a relationship can be found if it truly exists, set at 80% usually.) The summary implies that these researches have an alpha level of 0.2, which supports the null hypothesis (no relationship). A one in five chance of being wrong is not acceptable.
IOW, how is global warming falsifiable if you're just going to call everything a positive result? Or is it that you release sensational information to the media if you can't get published in journals? (OTOH, I have no idea what level of evidence climatology journals accept, obviously randomized controlled double-blind trials are impossible, so the level of evidence is going to be quite low just by the nature of the field...)
* Technically, most studies aren't even reproducible if people later try (kinda rare given expense). Bias creeps in despite the many safeguards. Much of it results from researchers being passionate about their theory, not so great at math, and forced to "publish or perish". Researchers tend to be fairly smart, so even their bias may reflect reality, so this problem is somewhat masked.
Yep, it's all fun and games until a civil rights protestor gets killed. Or the targeted ads you see reveal a bit more about your private life than you'd like to everyone in your proximity. Plus there's the fact it's not that bad yet (Dolphin tracks you wherever you go on the internet, the others you mention are far more limited) so I'm seriously wondering why a browser plugin developer wants people to not care about privacy...
If you see someone commit a crime, but don't know who they are, then they're a perpetrator and there's no question of guilt or innocence. Once you track down someone you suspect is that perpetrator then they're a 'suspect' and presumed innocent until proven guilty. Vigilante justice is bad because it deals with the latter, whereas self defense is legal because it deals with the former. The distinction is lost on most people (especially TV reporters watching live feeds), but is critically important.
As for a thief, I agree that lethal force is a bit much. But for a robber it's perfectly acceptable. The difference, of course, is that a thief steals by stealth, whereas a robber threatens to hurt/kill you. That's why castle doctrines exist. Lethal force (threatened or actual) is dealt with by lethal force. Why trust someone to not hurt/kill you if they've proven they have no respect for your safety, society, or the law? Their demands (e.g. your stuff) are irrelevant, as you shouldn't have to play a psychopath's game before you or the police can protect your life.
And which leftist decided the TSA was not only something that should be preserved, but needed to be expanded? As I recall, they were much more liberal on 11/19/2001 than they are today.
OTOH, erosion of civil liberties is not really a left-right issue at this point. Politicians tend to expand their own power, and government expands at the cost of liberty. Right now, right-vs-left is more of a choice of which civil liberties we'll lose first: Personal and some economic, or Economic and some personal. Or at least that's what I though, it seems like we're losing a lot of both lately.
That's an interesting assessment. Personally, I learned programming through perl scripts, CGI scripts to be precise. First I modified the parts that I understood to accomplish things that were slightly different, then I combined parts of multiple scripts to do something new, then I was able to write CGI scripts from scratch, and eventually I learned how to write essentially anything (e.g. sockets, threads, GUI, etc.). The fact that perl is so flexible made that possible, but I suspect that you are correct in that I must have been learning from skilled programmers as their code was decipherable by a novice. Making something "look easy" is the tell-tale sign of a master.
Sadly, I, myself, have likely not achieved that level of mastery. If I have to look at someone else's code I usually get frustrated with deciphering their comments so I strip them out and "simplify" the code until it's concise enough to understand what it does at a glance. Given the hodgepodge of techniques I picked up, I can only imagine how "fun" it would be for someone to come after me and try to decipher my own uncommented and highly condensed code. (Actually, maybe that's why my CS teacher often used to write "I have no idea what this does, but I tried it and it works" on my written tests...)
Restricting an individual's ability to use their body to harm others is one of the major attributes of "society"...
Other stipulations for what you must do to your body include clothing it, excreting waste in designated areas, not loitering in essentially any area that you do not own, paying for goods and services via labor, and you hardly get a choice about which industrial pollutants your body is exposed to. Your body is not a sanctuary free from legislation. Personally, I think that's unnatural (hence my own libertarian/conservative/anarchist leanings), but you can't deny reality. And so long as we cram as many humans into as small an area as possible, we need those laws to prevent a plethora of natural population density control measures.
Living in society is a choice, and it has a few requirements such as not hurting other people. Spreading communicable diseases is a danger to those around you. If you endanger people in other ways (e.g. shooting a gun in a crowded suburb) then you will be incarcerated and removed from society. I see no distinction, except that refusing vaccines is almost invariably out of ignorance, and being vaccinated doesn't impair your civil liberties in any way (unless you think you have a right to catch measles).
Personally, I can't recall Google doing anything too egregious with user data, and they seem to be able to secure it, so I've been comfortable enough using their services. The FTC, while a bureaucracy that may have a bark worse than its bite, seems to at least be trying to do good with net neutrality and such. Letting the FTC vet anything that passes Google's own muster seems like a major win for consumers, and subsequently Google, as this should instill a bit more trust.
16 GB is far more than any desktop user should need, and most laptops simply cannot hold that much, so it's creating a sharp demarcation between user and developer. This is bad. You want your advance users to naturally transition into becoming developers, and making your codebase inaccessible for them prevents that.
IOW, most people have suggestions for improvement for any tool they use. Ideally, it would be trivial for someone to download the source, modify it, recompile, test, and submit improvements. People start with simple things (e.g. misspelled words) and move to more advanced tasks as they gain familiarity. By requiring several hundred dollars of hardware and massive time investments, you are ensuring that users never become developers, just needy consumers whining about feature requests.
Actually, that's not a bad idea, although I'd propose adding a small shuttle to the ISS so you don't have to reorbit the satellite. Humans are far better than robots at this sort of work, remotely operated ones especially. Given launch costs and the typical single part failure, having astronauts fix satellites is an excellent (and likely economic) reason to keep humans in space. I'm sure the military would love to be able to upgrade its spy satellites periodically, and just recall all the work that was done on the Hubble.
What's there for a courtroom to decide? They're POWs, either de factor or de jure. A POW isn't what most people consider a criminal and there's no real question about innocence as they were captured in the act and identified later. US law shouldn't apply to foreign nationals, and opposing the US military isn't a crime unless you are an American. These people are (theoretically) considered a threat to the US, and are being detained for that reason. It's not "fair", but US military power exists to further the interests of the United States. OTOH, I don't think it's technically necessary for the US to even bother with POWs, so I suppose not killing them on the spot counts for something.
Now, all this assumes Gitmo is just holding POWs. I don't follow the news closely enough to verify that, and this speaks nothing of whether it is necessary or humane. Mostly, I am a little surprised at how people want to treat everyone like an American citizen, including subjecting them to our laws. While we're working on it, we don't exactly have a hegemony at this point.
OTOH, there's a profit incentive to ensure that your information isn't subsequently shared beyond the specific advertiser, and to hold back as much data as they can so to make a profit another day.
Argh, quit being reasonable! I was about to make fun of you for not noticing I'd addressed that possibility in my original post that you quoted, even putting it in italics for emphasis.
Jean-Claude Delage, secretary general of the APN, said that '[t]he judges have analyzed the situation perfectly—this site being a threat to the integrity of the police — and made the right decision.'
integrity /integrit/
Noun: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
It seems that they have a bit of a problem with their English. A site that shines light onto questionable behaviors promotes integrity, as you should be acting in private in such a way that you can defend your actions if they were to ever become public. It's an intrinsic quality. This is only a threat in newspeak, or if you think perception is reality.
I guess that statement might make sense if he were talking about the cohesion of the police, but that would imply far greater dissent within their ranks concerning what behaviors have been revealed...
"100 years away" is just pointless speculation. In 1911 I doubt anyone could quite comprehend our modern processors with their speed and ubiquity. And the rate of technologic advancement is increasing!
I think what you're hinting at is that one (food) Calorie is equal to 4184 Joules = 4184 Watts per second. Lighting a potato chip on fire is a good demonstration. Heat dissipation is a serious concern, as proteins cease to function outside of a narrow temperature range.
That said, the average human body dissipates 100 W of heat continuously, and nearly 1,000 W while running. Combine that with our evolutionary adaptations to endurance hunt in the African savannah (i.e. quite warm), and most portable electronic devices aren't going to be an issue. Biology is a very complex system that's difficult/impossible to fix when it goes awry, but it's not a fragile one. People still use substances like DNP for weight loss, and fatal overdoses are rare.
I'd argue that traditional design relies on the principles of traditional media. Much of that also applies to digital media, but much of it does not. Dynamic textual media has been mainstream for, what, 20 years? Nobody knows much about it, it's a new field. Heck, I'm certain sites like Facebook employ a great many "skilled" designers, but each new design is met with legitimate criticism. In established fields there are the rare masterpieces with the rest being "good" but not standing out enough to be great, which clearly does not describe the current state of web design.
The only real thing we understand is that a programmer with little artistic experience or an artist with little programming experience are both terrible at making webpages. From what I've seen of "professional web designers", their traditional design background makes them a bit too much of the latter, and static designs are an effect of that. OTOH, I don't design webpages for anyone else to use because I know I'm in the former camp, so I'm quite harsh when usability is compromised for "useless" aesthetics. A true master would be able to create something that avoids compromising either aesthetics or usability, and synergistically exploits both. Static designs are not a means to that end.
Reflowing text is the default. Open any plain HTML page and resize the window. Developers have been intentionally overriding this so their page looks the same on every device, whether it has a width of 200 px or 1920 px (methinks most didn't think that one through). I'm not quite sure why this is the favored approach, but I suppose it might be because people like to make webpages like magazine pages, where everything is statically positioned, rather than coming up with something that looks good on a variety of browsers, screens, font and color settings. It's lazy programming to design for a single machine, but apparently that's easier for novices and very widespread (e.g. Android VS iPhone apps).
Orwell was primarily an essayist, and virtually all of his works take a stance against totalitarianism. People aren't just talking about a single book, they're talking about the life's work of a well known author.
If you're falling from 30k feet it doesn't really matter what you hit unless you get extremely lucky. Water's surface tension makes it as hard as concrete to someone falling at terminal velocity. IIRC, the only cases of people surviving such falls are when they hit a snow-covered or swampy mountain at an angle and slide down. OTOH, you'd be surprised at how many people routinely survive 50 - 75 foot falls onto hard surfaces, so if you have suitable anatomy (e.g. a firmly attached aorta), and hit with something that can absorb a lot of the impact without impairing a vital structure (e.g. clavical) then you may stand a chance of survival. Of course, at ~200 mph you have virtually no time to correct your position the moment before before landing, and the low atmosphere will probably render you unconscious anyway.
What was the offsite backup? A shoebox in his closet?
Obviously it was his car. Now, they've 'outsourced' that to "the cloud".
Amusingly enough, the core CyanogenMod developers have made it abundantly clear that they vastly prioritize the ability of vendors to spy on users over the user's right to control who has access to personally identifiable data.
(Sorry for using biased language, but I think that denying a user control over hardware they own, especially by an open source project, is just asinine.)
Well, there is a fair bit of variability in the weather. Assuming it follows a normal distribution, about half of places are warming at this precise moment, while the other half are cooling. The theory of global warming would suggest the distribution is slightly skewed, but it's still going to be close to 50/50. People get suspicious when someone mentions a warming spot, which "proves" global warming while a counterpoint that some other place is cooling is "just a localized event". No falsifiability. Plus, observations without experimentation are a quite low level of evidence, below serious consideration in harder sciences, as they're far too prone to bias and confounding effects.
Counterpoints:
1) Programmers are not qualified to make security decisions about a user's data. They know nothing about it. It should be up to the user whether the program has access to both their documents and the internet, and any moron can figure out why giving a program access to both would be bad. This sort of behavior is generally handled upon or directly after installation, which is a sufficiently rare event as to be unobtrusive.
2) Webapps aside, people generally use different programs for different things (the trend for bloated apps pretending to be an OS notwithstanding). A browser views webpages, an e-mail client sends e-mail. By giving each application the minimal permissions necessary you limit the risk. A browser needs outbound TCP ports 80 and 443, perhaps arbitrary port access if you do deep packet inspection for HTTP. An e-mail client needs completely different ports and it's absolutely trivial to make generic rule sets for such things (firewalls have done it for ages). The browser should be able to communicate with an e-mail client, but not control it.
This is a moot point, however, because so many programmers feel entitled to have complete control of the user's computer, and corporations would never want anything that interferes with their data mining. The trend in programming for the past decade or two has been to treat the user like an idiot, so users stay idiots. Heck, if programs were consistent (rather than "easier") we could teach the folder/file/menu/program paradigm in school, but there's no uniformity.