The main issue is that people don't actually own the music they purchase, they own a licence to the music
No, the problem is that RIAA lawyers and propagandists have been spewing this ridiculous meme so long that some people are starting to believe them. It's nonsense.
I dont have, want, or need a license for any of the music in my collection, for any of the software, for any of my books, this is all ludicrous nonsense invented by the copyright business. You dont need a license to read a book (or to listen to music, or to use your software,) no matter how much publishers may wish you do, and you arent buying a license when you buy a book either. Don't let these lying thieves convince you otherwise!
A license is a way for a copyright owner to give permission to someone to do things otherwise illegal under copyright law. Things like making and distributing derivative works. Not for normal use, not for fair use, not for first sale - not for any of the things that copyright law allows you to do normally.
Your views on economics seem to come from the plutocrats' pet think tanks
You couldnt possibly be more wrong. 'Plutocrat's pet think tanks' are uniformly wedded to Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian economics. This is in no way a surprise, since Keynes gives them arguments to justify the policies they want, policies that aggrandize them and their friends and make them wealthier and more powerful at the expense of the common good. Big business and big government have become so inextricably intertwined it's often impossible to separate them even conceptually, neither has any interest in giving up the welfare-warfare state that makes them rich and powerful, and neither of them are interested in funding real economists whose prescriptions threaten their privileged positions.
Frankly, it is you who appears to be suffering from a bit of plutocrat-funded brainwashing.
We have had nothing but exponentially growing interference in the markets by the federal government since the 70s. That is not a free market. NAFTA has nothing to do with free trade, despite the name. You can figure that out without even reading it. Just glance at it. It's huge. Thousands of pages. You dont need thousands of pages for a free trade agreement, in fact there is no conceivable reason for one to ever run anywhere near that long. Opening our markets to the PRC is the only thing you mentioned that is consistent with free trade, but unfortunately it came with political entanglements that were unecessary and unhelpful.
I dont disagree with your rant against the racists. Racists are just another form of collectivists. A mental disorder humanity needs to grow out of.
The Chinese rulers are not free trade ideologues but pragmatists, it is true. But they are not who we should be looking to for role models, frankly. They are only winning because their half-hearted and insincere adoption of a free market is still more genuine than what has been going on in the USA since the 70s. Seriously, free trade? Are you out of your bloody mind? Mercantilism at best, fascism at worst, no resemblence at all to free trade. Watch their hands, not their lips - their lips lie.
Unlike the other fellow I think you made some insightful points that deserve an answer.
"Except that the employer is not going to pay as much as he can afford, he is going to be paying the minimum needed to fill the position."
This is definitely your best shot. It's perfectly true the employer will pay less than he can afford if possible. And it's perfectly true that there has been a lot of manipulation in our economic system to maintain a buyers market for labour.
The first isnt too important in isolation, but in combination the two are a huge problem. The solution? Doesnt it make sense that the only way forward is to stop the meddling and let the market correct? Anyone that says that wont be a somewhat turbulent period is a liar, but on the other hand the longer we delay it the worse it gets. It's not avoidable. So why not get it over with? The quicker you do it the quicker the market returns to a natural state, where supply and demand track and involuntary unemployment is practically eliminated, along with a general rise in real wages.
"If you honestly can't turn a profit when paying $7.50/hour, then I find it highly unlikely that your business is going to be around for long anyway since your profit margin must be pretty much nonexistent."
This, on the other hand, is actually a pretty ignorant thing to say. And I dont mean that offensively - it just makes it starkly clear you dont know much about business.
Now keep in mind that by business I mean a real business in something approximating a free market, not some big megacorp that has bought the legislature and can guarantee profits. Should go without saying.
But real everyday small businesses across this country struggle in the markets we havent been regulated out of and we cant do that crap. We have to compete. This means your profit margins are razor-thin. This is a good thing for "the consumer" which is really everybody, but especially those with less income because we spend more of our income on necessities. Anyway, the difference of $1.50/hr in wage can very easily make the difference between being able to project a profit on a new hire and not being able to do so.
"Also, if you are paying your workers too little to actually live on, then they are going to require public support, which means that I am in effect subsidising your company."
Even were that the case, they would at least require less public support if they have some income, however inadequate. But it shouldnt be the case - if the labour market is allowed to correct and go forward freely you will see real wages rise for labour across the board.
What you dont understand is that the only real affect of the minimum wage is to eliminate low-paying jobs. Well, it also affects the wages of certain union members who have that written into their contracts, of course. But other than that, it does nothing but prevent people (primarily young, unskilled, and minority people) from getting work, period. People whose market wages are higher than the minimum are completely unaffected by it in any direct sense (excepting those few under contracts already mentioned) by it - they make more money regardless. It is only those whose need is greatest that are affected - and NOT in a good way.
I know in liberal-topia this legislation would result in them getting paid more - that's the idea - but in reality it just doesnt work that way. If I can afford to pay $6/hour for your unskilled labour (thus giving you an opportunity not only to make a little money, but to develop skills on the job and improve your bargaining position) but the minimum wage is $7.50, that wont force me to pay you more, it will force me not to hire you at all. It will force me to scrap my plans to expand, and when you repeat that over and over again across the country the end result is a strangled economy and increasing unemployment.
In practice it is also has a disproportionately devastating affect on the economy in rural areas. The cost of living is lower out here, and wages are lower as well, so more people are kept out of work by minimum wage laws.
The breaking affect on the economy even knocks on to the point of reducing the jobs at higher wage levels as well, since there is just less going on economically and higher barriers to business viability which translates to a worse employment situation for everyone.
Contrary to the other posters, I would argue 'racist' is the correct word. After all, there are fertile mixed klingon-human marriages in the canon, so it would seem that humans and klingons (and vulcans!) are all the same species. Admittedly, the show is muddled and confused on the issue though.
And no, I don't want to make an archive file, because I want to access those files and folders while they are compressed.
Yes, actually you do, because once you do you can.
Anyhow back towards the 'article' such as it is, conflicting the the LSB is no reason not to do something, the LSB has never been relevant to anything. If you want a standard file layout just copy Slackware's - it's the most sensible and broadly compatible.
"Ahead" how? Your statement assumes that there is some sort of objective, linear measure of progress that is universally agreed on as such, and that is far from the case. People that work as 'UI designers' naturally want everything changing all the time to keep themselves in work, but *users* of the software might well prefer that they quit breaking things that work.
Most people I know that use it seem to think that KDE 4.7 has mostly "caught up" with 3.5, a statement based on the same faulty assumption, of course, but still an interesting one.
Kudos to the trinity developers. I just whish some developers would fork Gnome 2 and give the kiss of death to the Gnome 3 project
Gnome 2 is the root of the problem, actually. Gnome 3 is just following the (flawed) decisions and judgements that lead to Gnome 2 to their logical conclusions. If you really want a useable Gnome you need to go back to Tranquilty and fork from there.
I remember memory leaks, but I havent seen it happen in some time.
Of course having a bunch of tabs open, and history on, firefox takes a lot of memory. Don't get me wrong. And I do have it customised, with 'restart firefox' returned to the file menu for instance - there is a reason for that. But the old-school memory leaks (where the browser just sitting open with one small page would eventually grow to consume all available resources) appear to have been fixed some time back.
I understand when people don't like X or Y change, but the argument is often, as it is here, against change in general. Is the idea that Firefox should perpetually be stuck in the 2009? That Firefox 3.6 is the pinnacle of UI design, and that there's nowhere to go but down? Honest question.
No, certainly not. BUT. This is a big but.
There is such a thing in Engineering as 'good enough.' And there is such a thing as 'switching costs.' Once a UI has reached a point where it *just works* for a large audience, changing the UI around, even in ways that are in some sense an improvement, at best still imposes a real cost on the users for an improvement that is so tiny as to feel theoretical.
In short, people rely on it every day. When they start it up and suddenly they have to find and learn and remember a NEW way to do something, they are going to be annoyed. Even if it is some slight improvement in some academic sense, the fact that I just spent 15 minutes learning the new way to do something that I have known perfectly well how to do for years is extremely annoying, at best. Add to that the fact that I dont see any real improvements in my estimation, however slight. Perhaps they are just so slight I missed them.
To most people, the user interface *is* Firefox. We can't leave this static and expect to be relevant in three years.
When a new feature is added, which does happen occasionally, some interface adjustment has to be made. But other than that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep tinkering with something that people have already learned and rely on; repeatedly forcing your loyal users to re-learn stuff we learned long ago for no apparent reason doesnt make you more relevant, it's just annoying.
Please try to keep in mind, the rest of us aren't *professional designers* and we dont use a browser or any other application (outside of entertainment, at least) because we want trendy or shiny. We use it because we want to get something done. Changing the UI around gets in the way of getting our stuff done; it's a negative, not a positive.
Your last suggestion makes no sense. You do realise that both use Gecko, and that Firefox started as the cleaner, faster fork of Seamonkey?
I have used several khtml based browsers as well as Opera and while they have their place, nothing matches firefox for the simple fact of having abundant, truly powerful extensions. Things like tree-tabs, no-script, linky, adblock, and greasemonkey are what make firefox so useful. Not gecko vs. khtml country. Hell, figure out a way to use khtml but preserve the extensions and you're in business so far as I am concerned. Gecko schmecko.
Hey, I am still using 3.6.23.
It's not that I mind 'UI Improvements' but as the guy you were quoting phrased it 'UI changes.' It is common to act like the two are synonymous but to me it seems like the vast majority of 'changes' are not 'improvements.' A lot seems to be tinkering for it's own sake. Which is fine in it's place. The world's defacto standard web-browser just is not the place for it.
I have always liked google and I still do, but their browser is not for me.
And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.
This article isnt too meaty, but it seems to be saying that google has indeed (as I suspected) refused to implement the necessary functionality, but the author of the notscript add-on found a way to hack a different system to achieve roughly the same effect.
That might make *possible* for me to switch to chrome, but it sure doesnt motivate me to do so. Firefox is still working fine, and developers dont have to hack unrelated subsystems to give me critical functionality there.
Well you can presumably google the same as I do, I was as my choice of language indicates discussing something I dont have much specific knowledge of. But I will throw a few links out.
Here for example is a bug report related to the issue, opened January 2009, marked 'fixed' Feb 2010, but it was 'fixed' only in after being interpreted extremely narrowly and there are plenty of comments left after that pointing out that it was not fixed at all.
Another link that's a bit dated, this was one of the ones I remember reading during the brief period of time I was trying to use Chrome, before I said screw this pos and went back to firefox. (A POS in it's own right in other ways, granted, but it works.)
And here is another interesting bit of question and answer. I particularly love the answer by Eice: "The reason you don't feel safe without NoScript is because you're used to an insecure browser. Chrome features a multi-process architecture and a strong policy sandbox that resists malware beautifully without needing the user to whitelist all the sites they visit. " - Um no. Not even in the ballpark with that. I am not 'afraid' of what is generally acknowledged as malware, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with moronic webpages trying to take over my computer in what another idiot commenter called 'a normal browsing experience.' If a 'normal browsing experience' means letting the remote computer take control of my machine and hijacking my pipe to bombard me with sounds and flashing lights and videos and all this other garbage some idiot 'web designer' thinks is attractive, opening popups or worse yet redirecting me away from the page I am trying to read and insistently loading up one I dont want to see instead, and all the other typical ways of wasting my pipe, my processor, my memory, and most importantly my time and focus instead of just settling down and letting me see the content I came to their site to see, then I dont want it. Ever.
You are right and wrong. These days SOME of the page resources are not downloaded at all, but they still can't get rid of the last ones, because permitting that is not in Google's best interests.
Just a nitpick, but if your second sentence is true (and I believe it is) then I am not right and wrong, simply right.
Most malware and viruses expliot no flaws of any kind. Most often they expliot gullable users and the execution environment within which they find themselves. Open me to win $1000 instantly!!
Sorry, no matter how true it is that end-user idiocy is an issue here, that's no excuse for fscking up something so simple as email to the point where simply opening a message can take over your computer!
We had email, you know, for many many years, and no one ever once got a virus by opening an email. It was a persistent urban myth, but it didnt happen. Then Microsoft wrote an email client and the myth became reality.
They deserve to be sued for every cent they ever made for that alone.
The firefox extensions actually do their job - they screen out what they are supposed to screen out from the first reference. Scripts that you refuse to run, for instance, arent even downloaded.
The chrome versions are cosmetic only. They still download all the crap (ultra-annoying when on a slow connection,) and from what I understand even execute much of it, they simply remove the results from the final rendered page. This is not an acceptable substitute, and I have been told that because of basic design decisions true no-script on chrome is impossible.
As corporations go, google has a pretty good reputation, and they have earned it for the most part. But they make their money from advertisers, and therefore they have to play to what the advertisers want. The last thing advertisers want is for you or I to have any privacy from them. It would be stupid to expect google to put our interests above the interests of the people paying their bills. So I dont even blame google for making chrome the way they did. I just wont use it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the problem is that RIAA lawyers and propagandists have been spewing this ridiculous meme so long that some people are starting to believe them. It's nonsense.
I dont have, want, or need a license for any of the music in my collection, for any of the software, for any of my books, this is all ludicrous nonsense invented by the copyright business. You dont need a license to read a book (or to listen to music, or to use your software,) no matter how much publishers may wish you do, and you arent buying a license when you buy a book either. Don't let these lying thieves convince you otherwise!
A license is a way for a copyright owner to give permission to someone to do things otherwise illegal under copyright law. Things like making and distributing derivative works. Not for normal use, not for fair use, not for first sale - not for any of the things that copyright law allows you to do normally.
Umm, no it didnt. Sorry.
You couldnt possibly be more wrong. 'Plutocrat's pet think tanks' are uniformly wedded to Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian economics. This is in no way a surprise, since Keynes gives them arguments to justify the policies they want, policies that aggrandize them and their friends and make them wealthier and more powerful at the expense of the common good. Big business and big government have become so inextricably intertwined it's often impossible to separate them even conceptually, neither has any interest in giving up the welfare-warfare state that makes them rich and powerful, and neither of them are interested in funding real economists whose prescriptions threaten their privileged positions.
Frankly, it is you who appears to be suffering from a bit of plutocrat-funded brainwashing.
We have had nothing but exponentially growing interference in the markets by the federal government since the 70s. That is not a free market. NAFTA has nothing to do with free trade, despite the name. You can figure that out without even reading it. Just glance at it. It's huge. Thousands of pages. You dont need thousands of pages for a free trade agreement, in fact there is no conceivable reason for one to ever run anywhere near that long. Opening our markets to the PRC is the only thing you mentioned that is consistent with free trade, but unfortunately it came with political entanglements that were unecessary and unhelpful.
I dont disagree with your rant against the racists. Racists are just another form of collectivists. A mental disorder humanity needs to grow out of.
The Chinese rulers are not free trade ideologues but pragmatists, it is true. But they are not who we should be looking to for role models, frankly. They are only winning because their half-hearted and insincere adoption of a free market is still more genuine than what has been going on in the USA since the 70s. Seriously, free trade? Are you out of your bloody mind? Mercantilism at best, fascism at worst, no resemblence at all to free trade. Watch their hands, not their lips - their lips lie.
Unlike the other fellow I think you made some insightful points that deserve an answer. "Except that the employer is not going to pay as much as he can afford, he is going to be paying the minimum needed to fill the position." This is definitely your best shot. It's perfectly true the employer will pay less than he can afford if possible. And it's perfectly true that there has been a lot of manipulation in our economic system to maintain a buyers market for labour. The first isnt too important in isolation, but in combination the two are a huge problem. The solution? Doesnt it make sense that the only way forward is to stop the meddling and let the market correct? Anyone that says that wont be a somewhat turbulent period is a liar, but on the other hand the longer we delay it the worse it gets. It's not avoidable. So why not get it over with? The quicker you do it the quicker the market returns to a natural state, where supply and demand track and involuntary unemployment is practically eliminated, along with a general rise in real wages. "If you honestly can't turn a profit when paying $7.50/hour, then I find it highly unlikely that your business is going to be around for long anyway since your profit margin must be pretty much nonexistent." This, on the other hand, is actually a pretty ignorant thing to say. And I dont mean that offensively - it just makes it starkly clear you dont know much about business. Now keep in mind that by business I mean a real business in something approximating a free market, not some big megacorp that has bought the legislature and can guarantee profits. Should go without saying. But real everyday small businesses across this country struggle in the markets we havent been regulated out of and we cant do that crap. We have to compete. This means your profit margins are razor-thin. This is a good thing for "the consumer" which is really everybody, but especially those with less income because we spend more of our income on necessities. Anyway, the difference of $1.50/hr in wage can very easily make the difference between being able to project a profit on a new hire and not being able to do so. "Also, if you are paying your workers too little to actually live on, then they are going to require public support, which means that I am in effect subsidising your company." Even were that the case, they would at least require less public support if they have some income, however inadequate. But it shouldnt be the case - if the labour market is allowed to correct and go forward freely you will see real wages rise for labour across the board.
You are making no sense. Decades of unfree 'mixed economy' tinkering have gotten us here. How does that make an indictment against free trade?
What you dont understand is that the only real affect of the minimum wage is to eliminate low-paying jobs. Well, it also affects the wages of certain union members who have that written into their contracts, of course. But other than that, it does nothing but prevent people (primarily young, unskilled, and minority people) from getting work, period. People whose market wages are higher than the minimum are completely unaffected by it in any direct sense (excepting those few under contracts already mentioned) by it - they make more money regardless. It is only those whose need is greatest that are affected - and NOT in a good way.
I know in liberal-topia this legislation would result in them getting paid more - that's the idea - but in reality it just doesnt work that way. If I can afford to pay $6/hour for your unskilled labour (thus giving you an opportunity not only to make a little money, but to develop skills on the job and improve your bargaining position) but the minimum wage is $7.50, that wont force me to pay you more, it will force me not to hire you at all. It will force me to scrap my plans to expand, and when you repeat that over and over again across the country the end result is a strangled economy and increasing unemployment.
In practice it is also has a disproportionately devastating affect on the economy in rural areas. The cost of living is lower out here, and wages are lower as well, so more people are kept out of work by minimum wage laws.
The breaking affect on the economy even knocks on to the point of reducing the jobs at higher wage levels as well, since there is just less going on economically and higher barriers to business viability which translates to a worse employment situation for everyone.
Contrary to the other posters, I would argue 'racist' is the correct word. After all, there are fertile mixed klingon-human marriages in the canon, so it would seem that humans and klingons (and vulcans!) are all the same species. Admittedly, the show is muddled and confused on the issue though.
Because the bar for impeachment is rather high and the legislators themselves are nearly all compromised at this point.
Yes, actually you do, because once you do you can.
Anyhow back towards the 'article' such as it is, conflicting the the LSB is no reason not to do something, the LSB has never been relevant to anything. If you want a standard file layout just copy Slackware's - it's the most sensible and broadly compatible.
"Ahead" how? Your statement assumes that there is some sort of objective, linear measure of progress that is universally agreed on as such, and that is far from the case. People that work as 'UI designers' naturally want everything changing all the time to keep themselves in work, but *users* of the software might well prefer that they quit breaking things that work.
Most people I know that use it seem to think that KDE 4.7 has mostly "caught up" with 3.5, a statement based on the same faulty assumption, of course, but still an interesting one.
It may be filled with gadgets, but it doesnt crash and burn just because a pencil tip gets broken off.
"The Desktop" is and has always been nothing but a very poor metaphor anyway. Get your damn desktop off my root window! ;)
Gnome 2 is the root of the problem, actually. Gnome 3 is just following the (flawed) decisions and judgements that lead to Gnome 2 to their logical conclusions. If you really want a useable Gnome you need to go back to Tranquilty and fork from there.
I am really thinking the submitters should try out Emperor Linux. ZaReason might also be a good place to look, or possibly System76.
I remember memory leaks, but I havent seen it happen in some time.
Of course having a bunch of tabs open, and history on, firefox takes a lot of memory. Don't get me wrong. And I do have it customised, with 'restart firefox' returned to the file menu for instance - there is a reason for that. But the old-school memory leaks (where the browser just sitting open with one small page would eventually grow to consume all available resources) appear to have been fixed some time back.
No, certainly not. BUT. This is a big but.
There is such a thing in Engineering as 'good enough.' And there is such a thing as 'switching costs.' Once a UI has reached a point where it *just works* for a large audience, changing the UI around, even in ways that are in some sense an improvement, at best still imposes a real cost on the users for an improvement that is so tiny as to feel theoretical.
In short, people rely on it every day. When they start it up and suddenly they have to find and learn and remember a NEW way to do something, they are going to be annoyed. Even if it is some slight improvement in some academic sense, the fact that I just spent 15 minutes learning the new way to do something that I have known perfectly well how to do for years is extremely annoying, at best. Add to that the fact that I dont see any real improvements in my estimation, however slight. Perhaps they are just so slight I missed them.
When a new feature is added, which does happen occasionally, some interface adjustment has to be made. But other than that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep tinkering with something that people have already learned and rely on; repeatedly forcing your loyal users to re-learn stuff we learned long ago for no apparent reason doesnt make you more relevant, it's just annoying.
Please try to keep in mind, the rest of us aren't *professional designers* and we dont use a browser or any other application (outside of entertainment, at least) because we want trendy or shiny. We use it because we want to get something done. Changing the UI around gets in the way of getting our stuff done; it's a negative, not a positive.
Your last suggestion makes no sense. You do realise that both use Gecko, and that Firefox started as the cleaner, faster fork of Seamonkey?
I have used several khtml based browsers as well as Opera and while they have their place, nothing matches firefox for the simple fact of having abundant, truly powerful extensions. Things like tree-tabs, no-script, linky, adblock, and greasemonkey are what make firefox so useful. Not gecko vs. khtml country. Hell, figure out a way to use khtml but preserve the extensions and you're in business so far as I am concerned. Gecko schmecko.
Hey, I am still using 3.6.23. It's not that I mind 'UI Improvements' but as the guy you were quoting phrased it 'UI changes.' It is common to act like the two are synonymous but to me it seems like the vast majority of 'changes' are not 'improvements.' A lot seems to be tinkering for it's own sake. Which is fine in it's place. The world's defacto standard web-browser just is not the place for it.
Seriously, this extension is a must: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
I have always liked google and I still do, but their browser is not for me.
And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.
This article isnt too meaty, but it seems to be saying that google has indeed (as I suspected) refused to implement the necessary functionality, but the author of the notscript add-on found a way to hack a different system to achieve roughly the same effect.
That might make *possible* for me to switch to chrome, but it sure doesnt motivate me to do so. Firefox is still working fine, and developers dont have to hack unrelated subsystems to give me critical functionality there.
Well you can presumably google the same as I do, I was as my choice of language indicates discussing something I dont have much specific knowledge of. But I will throw a few links out.
Here for example is a bug report related to the issue, opened January 2009, marked 'fixed' Feb 2010, but it was 'fixed' only in after being interpreted extremely narrowly and there are plenty of comments left after that pointing out that it was not fixed at all.
Another link that's a bit dated, this was one of the ones I remember reading during the brief period of time I was trying to use Chrome, before I said screw this pos and went back to firefox. (A POS in it's own right in other ways, granted, but it works.)
And here is another interesting bit of question and answer. I particularly love the answer by Eice: "The reason you don't feel safe without NoScript is because you're used to an insecure browser. Chrome features a multi-process architecture and a strong policy sandbox that resists malware beautifully without needing the user to whitelist all the sites they visit. " - Um no. Not even in the ballpark with that. I am not 'afraid' of what is generally acknowledged as malware, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with moronic webpages trying to take over my computer in what another idiot commenter called 'a normal browsing experience.' If a 'normal browsing experience' means letting the remote computer take control of my machine and hijacking my pipe to bombard me with sounds and flashing lights and videos and all this other garbage some idiot 'web designer' thinks is attractive, opening popups or worse yet redirecting me away from the page I am trying to read and insistently loading up one I dont want to see instead, and all the other typical ways of wasting my pipe, my processor, my memory, and most importantly my time and focus instead of just settling down and letting me see the content I came to their site to see, then I dont want it. Ever.
Just a nitpick, but if your second sentence is true (and I believe it is) then I am not right and wrong, simply right.
Most malware and viruses expliot no flaws of any kind. Most often they expliot gullable users and the execution environment within which they find themselves. Open me to win $1000 instantly!!
Sorry, no matter how true it is that end-user idiocy is an issue here, that's no excuse for fscking up something so simple as email to the point where simply opening a message can take over your computer!
We had email, you know, for many many years, and no one ever once got a virus by opening an email. It was a persistent urban myth, but it didnt happen. Then Microsoft wrote an email client and the myth became reality.
They deserve to be sued for every cent they ever made for that alone.
Sorry, you are wrong.
The firefox extensions actually do their job - they screen out what they are supposed to screen out from the first reference. Scripts that you refuse to run, for instance, arent even downloaded.
The chrome versions are cosmetic only. They still download all the crap (ultra-annoying when on a slow connection,) and from what I understand even execute much of it, they simply remove the results from the final rendered page. This is not an acceptable substitute, and I have been told that because of basic design decisions true no-script on chrome is impossible.
As corporations go, google has a pretty good reputation, and they have earned it for the most part. But they make their money from advertisers, and therefore they have to play to what the advertisers want. The last thing advertisers want is for you or I to have any privacy from them. It would be stupid to expect google to put our interests above the interests of the people paying their bills. So I dont even blame google for making chrome the way they did. I just wont use it.
The monitors are human beings. In what dreamworld do you think they can be something else?