Anecdotal evidence, used to "prove" it's black/white thing (oh really, 0% influence here?). That's just plain silly. I'm not making my gp position up, it's what the sales analysts have been saying and what caused Microsoft to start the Seinfeld campaign.
1. the old standby "predict a thing so nebulous and definite that it must happen" and 2. wrong.
I'm a collector of predictions. It became a schadenfreude hobby of me after growing up in the seventies and eighties and realizing at a point that they were all wrong, and we would not be getting flying cars soon. Your definition of Woz' prediction power can be applied to the whole population on earth throughout history, with the possible exception of Nostradamus and Peter Schiff. Predictions are fun. They tell you all kinds of stuff about the predictor.
This reminds me of an article on CNET by James Kim (r.i.p.). If you let people listen to mp3 players, they think the ipod is superior. When you let them listen to mp3 players in a blind test, Sony came out on top and the ipod came in last. Ouch!
Sure, but things have changed with Vista, which was a breakthrough in geek influence. The mouth-to-mouth trickle-down effect defined that OS as crapware.
I agree, data burial/haystacking and data sabotage are the most effective ways, although algorithms to filter out the weed may not be underestimated.
This is something that can be promoted to the masses, because it's a natural evolution from inserting bogus data in forms (I earn over $1m, am 99 years old and live on the north pole).
It could be as simple as a Firefox addition that mixes requests with bogus requests, and moreover, with certain requests/bogus requests swapped with other users.
They want data? They get data. Lots of it. Provide enough data and all of it becomes useless, and no information can be obtained.
Gotta battle evil with evil. If they want to do it, there's money it. That's a good sales rap for financing. Take their business case and monetize it for yourself or the community.
I'd like to add to that there are many different reasons why people write open source software, and some, including me, do it exactly to escape the commercial realities and constraints.
When I'm free from that, I can use the computer in the way I was drawn to it as a kid: the Ultimate Tool in the history of mankind. A lot of developers somehow forgot or lost that, earning a living working for boring companies. That wasn't the original appeal or what I dreamed about. Writing software without compromises, untainted, is so much fun and rewarding. I earn the money with the "boring" software. I wouldn't want to mix those two worlds (although I wouldn't mind getting rich or changing the world with my software of course - but you have to be realistic). I need them both to survive and stay sane. Funding in the way you experienced it would make it just another job with commercial restraints and clueless PHB's. I think that's tragic, although admittedly I'm spoiled (billions of people live in poverty so my hobby style open source is just luxury).
I'm surprised \. is posting this without referring to the Stallman interview that was all over the nerd sites like reddit yesterday. It is very relevant. You missed it? Come on guys, you're not always the fastest and I don't care, but this is a fail.
There's a difference between sexist or racist and people that in general feel superior because of the group they are part of, and general objective observation of the differences without assigning it as an instrument to higher yourself or put others down.
Plain fact is nature nor evolution has a concept of equality of gender and races. What works in dna-regeneration, works. Plain fact is there are differences, and that you can't dream it away. Most is determined by chance, gender and climate. If you take IQ for example, it's common knowledge that men have a curve with a flatter distribution, and Asians the highest iq on average, and cold is better (you're forced to be inventive). If it makes you feel better, differences are small and decreasing because of better education. And on an individual level, it's an open game. But there are inherent differences, whether you like it in your cultivated view, or not.
Bang! You're right and there is not much more to it. Unfortunate and a tragedy for women - if they maximize their efforts, the highest reachable seems to be a rule of middle management. But perhaps more tragic for the men at the other side of the curve, for they are the most used and abused, and no one fighting for them, because men don't need that, right?
I don't like the increase in size too, it used to be exactly right. One requirement for my ajax stuff is that page loading should feel instantaneous, not the feeling big libraries are loaded in the background, or even worse, show some ajax indicator. The 15K mentioned is indeed incorrect. That said, you confuse the minified version with the packed version. The packed version is much smaller, but has a relatively big client side penalty as decompression is done in javascript. When you have compression on the server end like gzip which is supported by the browser, the minified version is the one to go for. Then you should perhaps compare it to sending an image of half the size (I haven't checked the actual compression level). I think that is still on the edge of acceptable, although I rather see a little more functionality moved to modules, like the effects.
Moreover, these are different times. Balmer just admitted that Microsoft lost a generation of programmers who now build web apps using more open tools. They want to appeal to those developers. Embrace and extend is not an option, that is what scared them away, among others. We've seen the new two-faced MS before. I'm not sure where this limbo dance will take them. But I don't think it's a coincidence that this is announced just a few days later, it is exactly the new MS as Balmer likes us to see them. jQuery is no threat to.NET, just an addition. Their new strategy is simply: combine. I guess they're hoping that's good enough for a lot of developers.
Hey, it's the joke variant of the ad hominem argument. Good job laughing it all away without providing actual arguments (and no, "I got nothing to hide" is not one of them). If it weren't for people like you, how would they be able to dilute our privacy and rights? And your work is for a good cause. They must be defeated, these fanatics, in the finest of contemporary American anti-intellectual of styles. Knowledge, path! Intelligent debate, pah! Sir, you must be proud, I congratulate you for your accomplishments.
What worries me more is companies like Apple and Google gaming sites like Slashdot, reddit, etc. I seriously doubt it is only the fan boys who counter and mod down even the best of arguments, just because they dares to criticize their infallible darlings. The worst part is that they all call themselves liberal in the good sense of the word. I'm not sure who are more dangerous. Both are entities that dilute our privacy and rights step by step, because, you have nothing to hide, right?
It reminds me of how European governments apply open source. Say you have 1m euro for open source, what do you do? Well, they don't give it to the open source projects they're planning to use, they spend it on the enormous service/consultancy sector circling them. So they spend it all on an investigation/report by a consultancy form, whether for example Open Office can be successfully introduced. While I guess some of this is necessary, there's great irony in the fact that all the money goes to people who don't produce and often lack the experience for sound judgment.
The problem of these screenshots is that they show us nothing that wasn't there in Windows 95. Of course, I'm talking functionality, not looks. The Windows 95 dull beveled style interface is more usable too, I'm afraid. Beveled is the most usable interface style in history, ironically because it is boring, and outrageously because it offers more depth than UIs developed for higher resolutions, with their flat buttons and all.
The problem of MS is that the desktop metaphor works. You have a desktop, you have icons on it, you click an icon to launch a program. From an UI point of view, there's not much too it. So how do you sell a new cycle of your product when you're unable to offer true new stuff like a history machine or database file system?
These screenshots show nothing but that same ability to launch the same old programs in windows. With one exception: the ribbon (or tabbed toolbars or whatever you want to call it). There even seem to be mini ribbons on things like IE8. This, I think, is an interesting development, as MS seems be be targeting differentiation from Linux and Mac style UIs. I for one think both the old menu style is kind of broken (but easily fixed if the standard lineup is updated to our times) while the new ribbon style also has many problems. Problems are: abandonment of all the sweet we got from IBM Common User Access standards (less consistency throughout applications-but better, optimized usability for single programs you mastered), less screen estate for the content, too many options in view for basic users (by adding lots of icons/functionality to the normal view, it weirdly seems for power users - yet then they remove the menus from standard view to reduce complexity). One of its strongest points is context-changes. The weakest that one app will have ribbon, the next traditional menus, and it's a mess now with two systems. Overall, it has some advantages and disadvantages, and it will be interesting to see MS pursue this idea and use it on their user base, and see what happens. Me, as a View->Toolbars option I'd never object to it, but I'm not sure about defaulting it because I rather dislike CUA being lost. I don't like the mess with the hiding of tradional menus/alt key, perhaps they should go for a single topbar on the desktop, Mac OS style.
Overal, I'm not entirely convinced yet this is a real improvement, or just another alteration to defeat the problem of the 2nd paragraph, which reminds me too much of football teams slightly changing their kits every season, to sell "new" kits to their fan base. But I applaud MS for at least trying to combine it. I guess this is one of the good side-effects of MS becoming less relevant. They will have to innovate.
In the process, compatibility is thrown out of the window - don't try to view any of those pages with an unsupported browser, and don't try to analyze the page with a web spider; you will only end up with garbage. Even if you have a supported browser, you will need a pretty powerful computer to get anywhere near decent responsiveness from what are really very primitive user interfaces. This is why I have opposed the wave of AJAX websites.
While there's substance to most of your arguments, you -are- getting old, I'm afraid. It reminds me of times when one was flamed for using C over assembly. It reminds me of the time when I was a student and Mosaic 0.9b was released, and it was a non-event because of the above sentiment: slow, resource hungry, and in a time when it was undone to send sigs over 4 lines not regarded a good thing.
In the meantime the world will move on, javascript already got great cross-browser libraries that make sure it works from IE6 to webkit, and data exchange will be unhyped and improve over time. But no, you can no longer view it on Lynx, and the web -will- be expanded from the dom/request&response model to a dom+javascript (the natural companion) model with more sophisticated means of data exchange. It's a development the noscript-ers can forget they can stop it. It's not like accessibility is not important though, this is an area of development and research as well. Google wants to be able to index that. Also, it's not a xor situation. Google's search pages work on everything. For their apps you need javascript. It's just an extra option (sure it's abused for badly degradating bling - but the web will always be 99% pulp). On the interface site I don't expects any standards soon, but the improvements of the APIs of the big players are big from version to version.
I think you'll be surprised how good and smoothly it will work and already can work if you look for the right examples. It's easy to have formed an opinion on this stuff a while back and freeze it (especially as you can always choose and pick from millions of examples of bad implementations or use), and mine would have been roughly the same. First of all, I'm a nut for graceful degradation. And I hate those first gen web office apps, all with their scruffy custom interfaces, endless ajax loading indicators, curvy orange and cyan "look how cool I am" cliches involving the marketing term web 2.0, and in general wanabee behavior which makes you think "why? WHY on earth do it in the browser", and "oh noo, not reinvent the wheel again by taking steps backwards". Forget that. It's moving on, and soon all your objections will be as relevant as someone who says you should use assembler over C or even C over Python.
It depends on who you're dealing with, but I think you're right for some;) I've been a web developer for over 10 years, and you have to compete with the local kid with frontpage, with a pool of cheap talent from India, and with the self-educated. That wouldn't be so bad if most your customers and employers would have a clue what's good and what's not - and they usually just go for price. But if you move away from that market/level, it's just like an environment you'd propose. For example, if you'd hack javascript for google, you won't be competing with the frontpage kid. Me, I'm self-employed and got myself a great little niche which combines my own projects/apps and a few projects for customers who are exactly looking for quality. Doubt if the grass is much greener elsewhere. As a kid, I wanted to create games, if I would be a kid a few years back I would probably want to work for Google - look at it now and both careers look boring and neither look good.
I would go a little further than that, realizing this is difficult to swallow for many following the javascript/ajax bashing meme here on Slashdot for so long, but in their desire to snub it as something "real" software engineers wouldn't touch (or is it fear of change from an aging community?) the clear reality IMHO is that javascript is taking over the role on the client side that java was supposed to be, and it is to be the platform for Google and such to compete against MS on the desktop. You can choose to ignore that, but I doubt it's a good career move, especially considering some of the powers behind it, pushing the technology. Kids today, where they used to make MS apps, they now make apps for the browser. MS is shitting its pants by hanging on to a non auto-update of IE6, while IE8 seemingly will sabotage canvas and whatever it can target. They can't keep behind forever with IE6, so it seems the strategy with IE8 will be to battle all that with Silverlight, working best on IE8 of course, to keep the audience on the MS world. I wouldn't underestimate them either whatever you think of that strategy, for the mere fact 25% still use IE6 and seem to be in their hands to start with.
Hmm, although I can't really be bothered about this particular problem of Slashdot, I do find the pattern interesting the post shares with other sites, where it was actually used as some form of FUD or ad hominem argument against critical users. You ridicule a few who deserve to be ridiculed, so you can safely ignore the rest. Pah, critical people...
That said, I think the people that wrote the examples shown here, failed to realize the true nature of their observations (putting on my alu hat..), which is that many big companies are actively performing pr activities on posts concerning them. And I even left out the fan boys in this or mere employees down modding any critical reply about the company they work for. It's a real thing. Setting the mood in discussions where it matters can swing things around and be very profitable.
Because that would be a technological solution to the problem.
That would mean the giant deficit is also a technology solution to the problem?
Great. No, the problem is we, on multiple levels, be it financial, energy, trash & pollution, are living off the future generations, and that my friends, makes us extremely low class. It started with the baby boomers, and they will take this behavior to the grave, making sure all the hard decisions about pensions will pass their generation. Before that, it is said, people actually worked for the futures of their children in the opposite of our ego-centric ways. But seemingly we now get at a stage were these "rights" to live off them are taken for granted and that that is not ok, even forgotten. We -do- have obligations. That said, I know it's naive to expect us to behave otherwise, as many would rather grab what they can out of life with the least effort, and leave a burning planet behind than bore themselves with obligations when they're no longer here. As a species, we're going for the Darwin award.
Slashdot Mirror
When you walk in with a laptop that makes the suits stare [...] power point [...] it's why all our salespeople have them.
Were you arguing against or in favor of the machine you described here as MacDouchebag?
Anecdotal evidence, used to "prove" it's black/white thing (oh really, 0% influence here?). That's just plain silly. I'm not making my gp position up, it's what the sales analysts have been saying and what caused Microsoft to start the Seinfeld campaign.
1. the old standby "predict a thing so nebulous and definite that it must happen" and 2. wrong.
I'm a collector of predictions. It became a schadenfreude hobby of me after growing up in the seventies and eighties and realizing at a point that they were all wrong, and we would not be getting flying cars soon. Your definition of Woz' prediction power can be applied to the whole population on earth throughout history, with the possible exception of Nostradamus and Peter Schiff. Predictions are fun. They tell you all kinds of stuff about the predictor.
This reminds me of an article on CNET by James Kim (r.i.p.). If you let people listen to mp3 players, they think the ipod is superior. When you let them listen to mp3 players in a blind test, Sony came out on top and the ipod came in last. Ouch!
Sure, but things have changed with Vista, which was a breakthrough in geek influence. The mouth-to-mouth trickle-down effect defined that OS as crapware.
I agree, data burial/haystacking and data sabotage are the most effective ways, although algorithms to filter out the weed may not be underestimated.
This is something that can be promoted to the masses, because it's a natural evolution from inserting bogus data in forms (I earn over $1m, am 99 years old and live on the north pole).
It could be as simple as a Firefox addition that mixes requests with bogus requests, and moreover, with certain requests/bogus requests swapped with other users.
They want data? They get data. Lots of it. Provide enough data and all of it becomes useless, and no information can be obtained.
Gotta battle evil with evil. If they want to do it, there's money it. That's a good sales rap for financing. Take their business case and monetize it for yourself or the community.
I'd like to add to that there are many different reasons why people write open source software, and some, including me, do it exactly to escape the commercial realities and constraints. When I'm free from that, I can use the computer in the way I was drawn to it as a kid: the Ultimate Tool in the history of mankind. A lot of developers somehow forgot or lost that, earning a living working for boring companies. That wasn't the original appeal or what I dreamed about. Writing software without compromises, untainted, is so much fun and rewarding. I earn the money with the "boring" software. I wouldn't want to mix those two worlds (although I wouldn't mind getting rich or changing the world with my software of course - but you have to be realistic). I need them both to survive and stay sane. Funding in the way you experienced it would make it just another job with commercial restraints and clueless PHB's. I think that's tragic, although admittedly I'm spoiled (billions of people live in poverty so my hobby style open source is just luxury).
I'm surprised \. is posting this without referring to the Stallman interview that was all over the nerd sites like reddit yesterday. It is very relevant. You missed it? Come on guys, you're not always the fastest and I don't care, but this is a fail.
Ouch. Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we can declare a winner in the javascript library wars.
There's a difference between sexist or racist and people that in general feel superior because of the group they are part of, and general objective observation of the differences without assigning it as an instrument to higher yourself or put others down.
Plain fact is nature nor evolution has a concept of equality of gender and races. What works in dna-regeneration, works. Plain fact is there are differences, and that you can't dream it away. Most is determined by chance, gender and climate. If you take IQ for example, it's common knowledge that men have a curve with a flatter distribution, and Asians the highest iq on average, and cold is better (you're forced to be inventive). If it makes you feel better, differences are small and decreasing because of better education. And on an individual level, it's an open game. But there are inherent differences, whether you like it in your cultivated view, or not.
Bang! You're right and there is not much more to it. Unfortunate and a tragedy for women - if they maximize their efforts, the highest reachable seems to be a rule of middle management. But perhaps more tragic for the men at the other side of the curve, for they are the most used and abused, and no one fighting for them, because men don't need that, right?
I don't like the increase in size too, it used to be exactly right. One requirement for my ajax stuff is that page loading should feel instantaneous, not the feeling big libraries are loaded in the background, or even worse, show some ajax indicator. The 15K mentioned is indeed incorrect. That said, you confuse the minified version with the packed version. The packed version is much smaller, but has a relatively big client side penalty as decompression is done in javascript. When you have compression on the server end like gzip which is supported by the browser, the minified version is the one to go for. Then you should perhaps compare it to sending an image of half the size (I haven't checked the actual compression level). I think that is still on the edge of acceptable, although I rather see a little more functionality moved to modules, like the effects.
Moreover, these are different times. Balmer just admitted that Microsoft lost a generation of programmers who now build web apps using more open tools. They want to appeal to those developers. Embrace and extend is not an option, that is what scared them away, among others. We've seen the new two-faced MS before. I'm not sure where this limbo dance will take them. But I don't think it's a coincidence that this is announced just a few days later, it is exactly the new MS as Balmer likes us to see them. jQuery is no threat to .NET, just an addition. Their new strategy is simply: combine. I guess they're hoping that's good enough for a lot of developers.
Hey, it's the joke variant of the ad hominem argument. Good job laughing it all away without providing actual arguments (and no, "I got nothing to hide" is not one of them). If it weren't for people like you, how would they be able to dilute our privacy and rights? And your work is for a good cause. They must be defeated, these fanatics, in the finest of contemporary American anti-intellectual of styles. Knowledge, path! Intelligent debate, pah! Sir, you must be proud, I congratulate you for your accomplishments.
What worries me more is companies like Apple and Google gaming sites like Slashdot, reddit, etc. I seriously doubt it is only the fan boys who counter and mod down even the best of arguments, just because they dares to criticize their infallible darlings. The worst part is that they all call themselves liberal in the good sense of the word. I'm not sure who are more dangerous. Both are entities that dilute our privacy and rights step by step, because, you have nothing to hide, right?
It reminds me of how European governments apply open source. Say you have 1m euro for open source, what do you do? Well, they don't give it to the open source projects they're planning to use, they spend it on the enormous service/consultancy sector circling them. So they spend it all on an investigation/report by a consultancy form, whether for example Open Office can be successfully introduced. While I guess some of this is necessary, there's great irony in the fact that all the money goes to people who don't produce and often lack the experience for sound judgment.
They should just run Vista on them to use as a benchmark. That will effectively flood bottlenecks on all kinds of levels.
The problem of these screenshots is that they show us nothing that wasn't there in Windows 95. Of course, I'm talking functionality, not looks. The Windows 95 dull beveled style interface is more usable too, I'm afraid. Beveled is the most usable interface style in history, ironically because it is boring, and outrageously because it offers more depth than UIs developed for higher resolutions, with their flat buttons and all.
The problem of MS is that the desktop metaphor works. You have a desktop, you have icons on it, you click an icon to launch a program. From an UI point of view, there's not much too it. So how do you sell a new cycle of your product when you're unable to offer true new stuff like a history machine or database file system?
These screenshots show nothing but that same ability to launch the same old programs in windows. With one exception: the ribbon (or tabbed toolbars or whatever you want to call it). There even seem to be mini ribbons on things like IE8. This, I think, is an interesting development, as MS seems be be targeting differentiation from Linux and Mac style UIs. I for one think both the old menu style is kind of broken (but easily fixed if the standard lineup is updated to our times) while the new ribbon style also has many problems. Problems are: abandonment of all the sweet we got from IBM Common User Access standards (less consistency throughout applications-but better, optimized usability for single programs you mastered), less screen estate for the content, too many options in view for basic users (by adding lots of icons/functionality to the normal view, it weirdly seems for power users - yet then they remove the menus from standard view to reduce complexity). One of its strongest points is context-changes. The weakest that one app will have ribbon, the next traditional menus, and it's a mess now with two systems. Overall, it has some advantages and disadvantages, and it will be interesting to see MS pursue this idea and use it on their user base, and see what happens. Me, as a View->Toolbars option I'd never object to it, but I'm not sure about defaulting it because I rather dislike CUA being lost. I don't like the mess with the hiding of tradional menus/alt key, perhaps they should go for a single topbar on the desktop, Mac OS style.
Overal, I'm not entirely convinced yet this is a real improvement, or just another alteration to defeat the problem of the 2nd paragraph, which reminds me too much of football teams slightly changing their kits every season, to sell "new" kits to their fan base. But I applaud MS for at least trying to combine it. I guess this is one of the good side-effects of MS becoming less relevant. They will have to innovate.
In the process, compatibility is thrown out of the window - don't try to view any of those pages with an unsupported browser, and don't try to analyze the page with a web spider; you will only end up with garbage. Even if you have a supported browser, you will need a pretty powerful computer to get anywhere near decent responsiveness from what are really very primitive user interfaces. This is why I have opposed the wave of AJAX websites.
While there's substance to most of your arguments, you -are- getting old, I'm afraid. It reminds me of times when one was flamed for using C over assembly. It reminds me of the time when I was a student and Mosaic 0.9b was released, and it was a non-event because of the above sentiment: slow, resource hungry, and in a time when it was undone to send sigs over 4 lines not regarded a good thing.
In the meantime the world will move on, javascript already got great cross-browser libraries that make sure it works from IE6 to webkit, and data exchange will be unhyped and improve over time. But no, you can no longer view it on Lynx, and the web -will- be expanded from the dom/request&response model to a dom+javascript (the natural companion) model with more sophisticated means of data exchange. It's a development the noscript-ers can forget they can stop it. It's not like accessibility is not important though, this is an area of development and research as well. Google wants to be able to index that. Also, it's not a xor situation. Google's search pages work on everything. For their apps you need javascript. It's just an extra option (sure it's abused for badly degradating bling - but the web will always be 99% pulp). On the interface site I don't expects any standards soon, but the improvements of the APIs of the big players are big from version to version.
I think you'll be surprised how good and smoothly it will work and already can work if you look for the right examples. It's easy to have formed an opinion on this stuff a while back and freeze it (especially as you can always choose and pick from millions of examples of bad implementations or use), and mine would have been roughly the same. First of all, I'm a nut for graceful degradation. And I hate those first gen web office apps, all with their scruffy custom interfaces, endless ajax loading indicators, curvy orange and cyan "look how cool I am" cliches involving the marketing term web 2.0, and in general wanabee behavior which makes you think "why? WHY on earth do it in the browser", and "oh noo, not reinvent the wheel again by taking steps backwards". Forget that. It's moving on, and soon all your objections will be as relevant as someone who says you should use assembler over C or even C over Python.
It depends on who you're dealing with, but I think you're right for some ;) I've been a web developer for over 10 years, and you have to compete with the local kid with frontpage, with a pool of cheap talent from India, and with the self-educated. That wouldn't be so bad if most your customers and employers would have a clue what's good and what's not - and they usually just go for price. But if you move away from that market/level, it's just like an environment you'd propose. For example, if you'd hack javascript for google, you won't be competing with the frontpage kid. Me, I'm self-employed and got myself a great little niche which combines my own projects/apps and a few projects for customers who are exactly looking for quality. Doubt if the grass is much greener elsewhere. As a kid, I wanted to create games, if I would be a kid a few years back I would probably want to work for Google - look at it now and both careers look boring and neither look good.
I would go a little further than that, realizing this is difficult to swallow for many following the javascript/ajax bashing meme here on Slashdot for so long, but in their desire to snub it as something "real" software engineers wouldn't touch (or is it fear of change from an aging community?) the clear reality IMHO is that javascript is taking over the role on the client side that java was supposed to be, and it is to be the platform for Google and such to compete against MS on the desktop. You can choose to ignore that, but I doubt it's a good career move, especially considering some of the powers behind it, pushing the technology. Kids today, where they used to make MS apps, they now make apps for the browser. MS is shitting its pants by hanging on to a non auto-update of IE6, while IE8 seemingly will sabotage canvas and whatever it can target. They can't keep behind forever with IE6, so it seems the strategy with IE8 will be to battle all that with Silverlight, working best on IE8 of course, to keep the audience on the MS world. I wouldn't underestimate them either whatever you think of that strategy, for the mere fact 25% still use IE6 and seem to be in their hands to start with.
Heh, you might be right. Wasn't this an argument a while back why there's nothing but silence from space?
Hmm, although I can't really be bothered about this particular problem of Slashdot, I do find the pattern interesting the post shares with other sites, where it was actually used as some form of FUD or ad hominem argument against critical users. You ridicule a few who deserve to be ridiculed, so you can safely ignore the rest. Pah, critical people...
That said, I think the people that wrote the examples shown here, failed to realize the true nature of their observations (putting on my alu hat..), which is that many big companies are actively performing pr activities on posts concerning them. And I even left out the fan boys in this or mere employees down modding any critical reply about the company they work for. It's a real thing. Setting the mood in discussions where it matters can swing things around and be very profitable.
Because that would be a technological solution to the problem.
That would mean the giant deficit is also a technology solution to the problem?
Great. No, the problem is we, on multiple levels, be it financial, energy, trash & pollution, are living off the future generations, and that my friends, makes us extremely low class. It started with the baby boomers, and they will take this behavior to the grave, making sure all the hard decisions about pensions will pass their generation. Before that, it is said, people actually worked for the futures of their children in the opposite of our ego-centric ways. But seemingly we now get at a stage were these "rights" to live off them are taken for granted and that that is not ok, even forgotten. We -do- have obligations. That said, I know it's naive to expect us to behave otherwise, as many would rather grab what they can out of life with the least effort, and leave a burning planet behind than bore themselves with obligations when they're no longer here. As a species, we're going for the Darwin award.