For what it's worth, Charms work great on a tablet; in fact, that bar is the easiest way to open Start, as well as being easy access to the Metro features. It is, however, somewhere between nearly useless and purely aggravating on a desktop, yes.
If I literally don't remember any of the words in the shortcut name, or the executable name, or enough of the letters that *start* any word in the program name, then I suppose you have a point. That is an... exceedingly rare scenario for me, though, despite both having a terrible memory for minutiae (I try to make the effort to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but I don't always succeed) and a wide, constantly-changing range of software I use. Maybe I'm better at remembering (or guessing)program names than I thought? in any case, I haven't had to do that in well over a year; I don't specifically recall the last time.
Windows Media Player and the (terrible) Windows Photo Viewer are still installed on Win8 (RT has Photo Viewer but not WPM, oddly). It's easy enough to reset the file associations to use them. For that matter, I *think* it prompts you to do so the first time you open such a file (with a pop-up toast in the corner). You can also, of course, use third party software (say, VLC and Irfanview) which have the ability to take the file associations for known file types if you want them to.
The "Start menu + tiles" thing is not, so far as I know, part of W8.1u1 (because "Windows 8.1 Update" is too damn long). It may be part of a forthcoming W8.1u2, but it's more likely going to be a Win8.2 or Win9 kind of deal. The main W8.1u1 features are the mouse improvements in Metro (context menus at the cursor on right-click instead of an app bar at the bottom of the screen, app title bars with minimize and close buttons on Metro apps when the mouse is bumped against the top of the screen).
If I'm wrong (possible, as I haven't followed very closely and TFA wasn't clear) then eh... what the heck does it matter whether it's called "Windows 8.1 Update" or "Windows 9"? Besides, I am *quite* sure they will still have the option of using the Start screen for those who prefer it (yes, such people exist, mostly tablet users).
You can easily get the 8.1 preview right now. It doesn't have all the new stuff linked in the TFAs, but it has a lot. Alternatively, just use Win8.x like you would Win7. If you're so hidebound you can't learn to launch programs by typing (way, *way* faster than using a mouse, but hey, people are dumb) then install one of the several Start menu replacements, including at least one F/OSS one. Avoid the crappy Metro apps and use the desktop as you would have done before.
1) What do you *need* "charms" for on the desktop? You are, I presume, using desktop apps (which don't interact with the Charms bar at all). For things like Settings - even the "Metro" Settings, if for some reason you want those - you can reach them using Start (more on that in a sec). Oh, and FYI, Win+C will display the Charms bar without any stupid mouse shenanigans. I believe you can turn off the hot corner entirely, if you want to.
2) Wrong, the Start menu was removed because they wanted to present the Live Tiles interface and the menu didn't have enough room for that (interesting that Win8 update 2 or Win9 or whatever they end up calling it will have a Windows Phone-like width of tiles as an option on an actual menu...). As for "better methods" that would primarily be Start search, which is much faster than using the mouse. It also generally works a lot *better* with rarely-used programs (or settings, or files, or direct links to settings pages you didn't even know were possible to link directly to...) than hierarchical menus do. Start search has been built into Windows since Vista (2006). They fucked it up a bit in Win8 (still worked for programs, but extra keypresses were needed for files or settings) but fixed it in Win8.1.
3) Assuming you use "Metro" programs at all (eww...) then yes, this is a problem (and is being fixed in an upcoming version). If you're like me, and prefer to just use Win8 as a more efficient Win7 with better multi-monitor support and the ability to run Hyper-V, this isn't really a problem. Aside from games (which I'd want to have running full-screen anyhow), the Win8 apps are worthless on a desktop.
See: Internet trolls. Tempted to mark Karmashock as a Foe right now just because it's hard to imagine anybody thinking that way *not* being a troll, but I suppose I'll wait to see if they actually act that way or just think it.
I think the main thing that js3 missed is that Adriel isn't a "he" at all... which says all that anybody really needs to know about Eir reading comprehension, doesn't it?
Also, no, TV shows don't need drama. There are lots of shows, and even big-budget movies, with very little interpersonal drama. You can get by on excitement (action, sports, etc.) or interest pieces (documentaries, anything with a specific topic like "cooking" or "travel") or suspense (mystery, horror, etc.) or romance (self-explanatory), any of a number of others. Usually there's some mix of these, and yes, drama is *usually* part of that mix... but it's not the only part, and often it's not even an important one. Personally, I dislike drama and *hate* over-dramatized shows (which has largely pushed me away from traditional TV, which seems to be oversaturated with shallow people being nasty at one another).
This was *supposed* to be a documentary about the process of indie game development, specifically a particularly fun kind of short-time development called a "jam". It metamorphosed into a competitive "reality" show, but at least it was still supposed to be about a game jam. If you can't get all the drama that you could want out of a few clips of team members deciding what goes into the game and who does what parts and all that, then you are not the intended audience. The rest of us are more interested in what indie game design is like, and what rapid development is like, and what a development jam is like, and so on.
Did you actually read the article? Yeah, I know this is/. but if you're going to throw around phrases like "obviously more too[sic] this" then you should try having some idea what you're talking about.
The guy was a mix of everything wrong about reality TV (which the project wasn't even originally supposed to be) and marketing scum. Mix in a dash of the worst of "brogrammer" culture (not that he knew anything at all about it, except that women clearly didn't belong in such a setting...) and put him in charge.
In fairness, you're kind of right: Matti was the reason it all fell apart, but the people who hired him and gave him free reign to do so (up until they fired him, after letting him wreck everything) bear some responsibility as well. That's largely the point of Adriel's blog post: accountability.
TL;DR: Start at the section titled "The Set-Up" for actual content.
The first ten paragraphs are personal background for the point of... I'm not even sure, actually. The section "The Press" is at least tangentially related to the actual topic, but the introduction is not. You're not the only person to find it really hard to read, either.
I don't know what the fuck the author is smoking, but I can only imagine this is supposed to be some hipster version of reporting, "oh, comprehensible language is totally a sellout, it's so mainstream". Actual I-shit-you-not comment from the original author "Writer here. I work in a writing style called gonzo. It's extremely polarizing..." He doesn't *quite* say "you've probably never heard of it" but I, for one, sincerely hope I never do so again!
To be fair, the only notable impact I noticed from the takeover of OKC was the removal of one of their blog posts wherein they slammed for-pay dating sites using math and logic to make their argument. They may have moved a few mostly-trivial features behind their own paywall as well - I think you used to be able to easily see everybody who had rated you highly, and now that's slightly less convenient - and they advertise the paid accounts more heavily, but they have preserved most of the rest of their casual and largely irreverent attitude towards corporate issues. I always get a chuckle out of one of their survey questions, which reads:
Right... because while there is no benefit to Mozilla or its CEO from using their software, using JavaScript heavily supports Mr. Eich. Oh, and there are no alternative browsers so it wouldn't be practical to tell people to switch anyhow, while there are any number of near-universally supported scripting languages.
What the fuck? What color is the sky on your world? I don't much want to live on this one anymore, but I sure as hell don't want to wind up on one where people "think" like you.
Well, I wouldn't *use* it if it did that, but it would be "all right" in the sense of being entirely within their rights.
It's even open-source software, so I could go in and remove that behavior, fork it, ("Flamingfox"? "Rainbowfox"? "Firethebigots"?) and release that fork for other people to use. Alas, I do not have the ability to edit out the things I find defective in either Mozilla or its new CEO.
Logically inconsistent (like so much in religion, but that's another topic...). Being gay has *nothing to do* with whether it is socially or legally accepted. Publicly being gay, sure, but gay people have been "practicing homosexuality" since even before the old testament, much less the new, regardless of society's treatment of them. It is a completely natural phenomenon that is effectively "hardwired" into those people; it even occurs in non-sapient animals.
If you accept the axioms that God created man in His own image, then A) God is approximately 10% gay (I don't know what the exact percentage of gay or bi men is, but it's around there, depending on where in the spectrum you place the cutoff point). B) God created around 10% of the human race with a biological imperative to sin. Arguably this undermines the entire concept of original sin (itself a sick and nasty concept; if God is supposed to be a father figure...) which is supposed to be that humanity (in the person of two individuals) *chose* their sin; contrary to what the church would have you believe, being gay is not a choice.
Then again, as I said above, much of religion (not just Christianity, or even just Abrahamic religions) is logically inconsistent. If that had been likely to sway the believers, I suppose it probably would have done so before this particular topic came up.
You realize that plenty of people put up pages telling IE users, and even Windows users, to fuck off, right? I've had to spoof my user-agent to visit some sites, on account of such tactics. Nothing to do with web standards, they just didn't like Microsoft. Granted, these were much more marginal sites than OKC, and it was years ago, but if you seriously believe that "Once this Pandora's box is open, it will be impossible to close." then why the fuck complain about it now? As I said, this has been happening for years!
Most of us who actually care about issues (rather than political parties) hold Obama in very low regard as well. I donated to his campaign when he swore to block any bill that included retroactive telecom immunity WRT warrantless wiretaps. I cut my support when he did not uphold that promise, and have voted third-party since. (Not that it matters, in the Presidential race my state always goes blue by such a landslide they call it as soon as the polls close.)
If your point is that people's opinions can change, then A) that was a terrible example, as Obama's voting record as of five years ago was also enough to kill my support for him B) there's still a matter of degree; I can at least see the arguments for things like warrantless wiretaps (I do not accept those arguments, but they are not inherently invalid) but there's absolutely no justifiable reason to institutionalize discrimination against a harmless minority, and I hold any competent adult who willingly promotes doing so as despicable.
Seriously though, it's actually a pretty great site for the nerdy crowd (which their demographics strongly support). Yes, I met my girlfriend through there (as did my roommate, who I know from when we were both in CS together).
Well, aside from the fact that being gay is not a matter of religion (there are gays in all religions, and gays who have no religion).
Oh, and the fact that being religious is a choice, whereas being gay is not (this is not only obvious from a basic perspective of self-interest, it has been demonstrated in the lab that gay peoples' brains react differently to sexual stimuli than the brains of straight people).
Or the fact that it is a simple truth that denying gay rights causes harm to people, while it is merely a belief (not in any way a demonstrable fact) that gay marriage is "bad".
Also, you fail reading comprehension. The antecedent of "those beliefs" was quite obviously "other people's personal religious beliefs" (since the religious beliefs of the gay rights activists was never mentioned or even implied to exist) which means that the only logical parsing of the sentence requires the antecedent of "they" be "other people" and not "Gay rights activists".
But hey, logical reasoning doesn't seem to be your strong point. How about religion instead; stoned any adulterers recently?
I highly doubt *you* could abstract yourself thoroughly enough to avoid any bias (you might attempt to compensate, but most people have no idea how much to compensate *by*). Jurors haven't switched their brains off any more than anybody else (although it might sometimes seem that way, "jury of your peers" does not guarantee them to be in the same intelligence range, for example). Despite this, everything from billboard ads to product placement in movies *does* have a measureable impact on people's opinion of a product. It is typically subconscious, making it hard to explain (and thus compensate for or ignore) why one product just seems "better".
Sadly, my phone and tablet do not have Gig-E ports (I could add one to the tablet via dongle, but eww). My friend's phones don't either. My laptop does, as do the laptops of most (though not all) of my friends, but that's really inconvenient to set up when they come over.
My desktop and my roommate's desktop are wired, as is my Xbox. Nothing else is both sufficiently out-of-the-way and non-portable that it makes sense to wire it in, especially in an apartment where nearly all areas are easily served by a single central router even at 5GHz.
There are ways to fix that without throwing the whole thing out. You actually touch on it yourself: in a fast-moving field like computing, the lifetime of patents is far too long. By the time they expire the patent owner has either long-since gotten enough return on investment to justify the research and development, or they never will because the inherent value of the "invention" is low. The result is a field in which a lot of profitable lines of research move slower than they should, because when it only takes a few years to develop a newer and better version of something, bring it to market, and recover the investment, there's no incentive to iterate on that cycle faster than once per patent lifetime.
Make the patent lifetime actually reflect the time requirements for profitable R&D in the relevant industry (i.e. quite short, in software), and you'll get a scenario in which it's profitable to begin climbing to the giant's shoulders as soon as the patent is published (which is probably around the same time that the product it's attached to releases), with the patent owner having only a short-term advantage rather than flogging their patent until the invention it covers is completely obsolete and the entire industry has had to ignore that avenue of research or risk legal trouble.
So... not to say I support the system, because I don't (although my solution is more intermediate than yours: software patents have a lifetime reduced to something like 4-5 years), I'm going to have to disagree with your #2 claim.
Patent trolls ("non-practicing entities" or "non-producing entities" or whatever - that is, companies who buy spend money to buy patents and to pay lawyers, and make money getting settlements or winning lawsuits) do create something other than lawsuits. They create a market for patents that aren't currently being used.
Hypothetical adventure time: let's say I am a mathematician with a really good understanding of audio (I'm not). I create an audio compression scheme that has incredible audio fidelity at 1/10th the bitrates of current codecs (let's say for general-purpose human hearing: everything from music to court recordings to nature sounds). However, the algorithm for this codec is extremely computationally expensive; even with economies of scale, a dedicated chip that can implement the decoding (never mind encoding) in real time would cost $40 to produce today, and in software you'd end up consuming an entire typical desktop CPU. Encoding is even 3x as expensive. As such, there just isn't enough demand for this algorithm right now; storage is cheap enough that people will use the vastly less efficient codecs rather than pay for this. It took me a year of work (2000 hours) to produce this. Situation #1, no software patents: I earn nothing from the work I did, because I can't commercialize it. Even if I could, somebody would reverse-engineer the algorithm in far less time, and be able to compete without needing to recoup the investment. If I simply publish, I'll never recoup that investment at all. Situation #2, no NPEs: I earn nothing from the work I did any time soon. If I want to recoup my investment in a few years when Moore's Law brings the price down into line with current audio codec chips, I need to start manufacturing them or I'm not allowed to sue people who do so without licensing my patent (the algorithm is public because it's patented) *or* I have to never publish at which point the innovation may as well never have occurred. Situation #3, as it is today: I can sell the patent to an NPE, who buys it on the expectation that within a few years, people will either start wanting to license it or will start using it without licensing. I get an immediate windfall of cash to support my continued work inventing better algorithms. The world gets to benefit (not for free, but they do get to) from the innovation. The NPE gets to employ a lot of lawyers. OK, win-win-lose isn't perfect but I'll take it.
As I see it, the problems with patents are different from what the vocal majority here on/. seems to think. 1) Patents on overly broad things need to go. A patent should specify a specific invention. If somebody wants to use the same concept in a different use case, and they think of that before I do, I can't sue them for it. Caveats: The patent owner can add other use cases ("ON A COMPUTER!" to the patent, but that doesn't grant a *new* patent or extend the lifetime of the current one. Somebody else cannot be issued a patent for the same idea in a different use case, unless there's enough work adapting it to that use case that the adaptation itself is innovative enough to be patentable. 2) Better checks for "obviousness" in a patent application. Some kind of jury pool of experts either with academic credentials or other recognized ability to contribute should be asked "what are the obvious ways to do X?" where X is the use case in question (note that the request is not for the *most obvious" only; things which seem impractical today may become practical in the future) and anything that covers the patent in sufficient detail would get it thrown out. 3) Better checks for prior art, both at application and after granting. This would be similar to #2, but would also make it easier to invalidate a patent on the basis of older publications.
Or, you know, maybe 7 of every 9 people whose phones get stolen have insurance which covers it, so 3.5 times as much money goes to theft insurance (the estimated portion of that insurance which goes to theft is $2 billion, not $4.8 billion, you illiterate troll) as goes to out-of-pocket replacements.
God *damn* people are bad at basic analysis and comprehension. This is like something from a 6th grade standardized math test: poorly written, but with an obvious intended meaning to anybody who doesn't use their head to store old rags and sports trivia.
Lemme guess, you don't live in the USA? There are very few independent shops that sell contract-free smartphones. Radio Shack, Car Toys, Best Buy, and so on will happily sell you a phone, but they'll require you buy a contract with it; they aren't permitted to sell them contract-free in most cases. You can order them online - although not many people know this - but then you're phone-less until the order arrives.
T-Mobile is the only major carrier in the US that doesn't lock new customers into a contract, and even they sell their phones SIM-locked. It's really hard to find same-day sales of non-SIM-locked phones in this country.
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For what it's worth, Charms work great on a tablet; in fact, that bar is the easiest way to open Start, as well as being easy access to the Metro features. It is, however, somewhere between nearly useless and purely aggravating on a desktop, yes.
If I literally don't remember any of the words in the shortcut name, or the executable name, or enough of the letters that *start* any word in the program name, then I suppose you have a point. That is an... exceedingly rare scenario for me, though, despite both having a terrible memory for minutiae (I try to make the effort to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but I don't always succeed) and a wide, constantly-changing range of software I use. Maybe I'm better at remembering (or guessing)program names than I thought? in any case, I haven't had to do that in well over a year; I don't specifically recall the last time.
Windows Media Player and the (terrible) Windows Photo Viewer are still installed on Win8 (RT has Photo Viewer but not WPM, oddly). It's easy enough to reset the file associations to use them. For that matter, I *think* it prompts you to do so the first time you open such a file (with a pop-up toast in the corner). You can also, of course, use third party software (say, VLC and Irfanview) which have the ability to take the file associations for known file types if you want them to.
The "Start menu + tiles" thing is not, so far as I know, part of W8.1u1 (because "Windows 8.1 Update" is too damn long). It may be part of a forthcoming W8.1u2, but it's more likely going to be a Win8.2 or Win9 kind of deal. The main W8.1u1 features are the mouse improvements in Metro (context menus at the cursor on right-click instead of an app bar at the bottom of the screen, app title bars with minimize and close buttons on Metro apps when the mouse is bumped against the top of the screen).
If I'm wrong (possible, as I haven't followed very closely and TFA wasn't clear) then eh... what the heck does it matter whether it's called "Windows 8.1 Update" or "Windows 9"? Besides, I am *quite* sure they will still have the option of using the Start screen for those who prefer it (yes, such people exist, mostly tablet users).
You can easily get the 8.1 preview right now. It doesn't have all the new stuff linked in the TFAs, but it has a lot. Alternatively, just use Win8.x like you would Win7. If you're so hidebound you can't learn to launch programs by typing (way, *way* faster than using a mouse, but hey, people are dumb) then install one of the several Start menu replacements, including at least one F/OSS one. Avoid the crappy Metro apps and use the desktop as you would have done before.
1) What do you *need* "charms" for on the desktop? You are, I presume, using desktop apps (which don't interact with the Charms bar at all). For things like Settings - even the "Metro" Settings, if for some reason you want those - you can reach them using Start (more on that in a sec). Oh, and FYI, Win+C will display the Charms bar without any stupid mouse shenanigans. I believe you can turn off the hot corner entirely, if you want to.
2) Wrong, the Start menu was removed because they wanted to present the Live Tiles interface and the menu didn't have enough room for that (interesting that Win8 update 2 or Win9 or whatever they end up calling it will have a Windows Phone-like width of tiles as an option on an actual menu...). As for "better methods" that would primarily be Start search, which is much faster than using the mouse. It also generally works a lot *better* with rarely-used programs (or settings, or files, or direct links to settings pages you didn't even know were possible to link directly to...) than hierarchical menus do. Start search has been built into Windows since Vista (2006). They fucked it up a bit in Win8 (still worked for programs, but extra keypresses were needed for files or settings) but fixed it in Win8.1.
3) Assuming you use "Metro" programs at all (eww...) then yes, this is a problem (and is being fixed in an upcoming version). If you're like me, and prefer to just use Win8 as a more efficient Win7 with better multi-monitor support and the ability to run Hyper-V, this isn't really a problem. Aside from games (which I'd want to have running full-screen anyhow), the Win8 apps are worthless on a desktop.
See: Internet trolls. Tempted to mark Karmashock as a Foe right now just because it's hard to imagine anybody thinking that way *not* being a troll, but I suppose I'll wait to see if they actually act that way or just think it.
I think the main thing that js3 missed is that Adriel isn't a "he" at all... which says all that anybody really needs to know about Eir reading comprehension, doesn't it?
Also, no, TV shows don't need drama. There are lots of shows, and even big-budget movies, with very little interpersonal drama. You can get by on excitement (action, sports, etc.) or interest pieces (documentaries, anything with a specific topic like "cooking" or "travel") or suspense (mystery, horror, etc.) or romance (self-explanatory), any of a number of others. Usually there's some mix of these, and yes, drama is *usually* part of that mix... but it's not the only part, and often it's not even an important one. Personally, I dislike drama and *hate* over-dramatized shows (which has largely pushed me away from traditional TV, which seems to be oversaturated with shallow people being nasty at one another).
This was *supposed* to be a documentary about the process of indie game development, specifically a particularly fun kind of short-time development called a "jam". It metamorphosed into a competitive "reality" show, but at least it was still supposed to be about a game jam. If you can't get all the drama that you could want out of a few clips of team members deciding what goes into the game and who does what parts and all that, then you are not the intended audience. The rest of us are more interested in what indie game design is like, and what rapid development is like, and what a development jam is like, and so on.
There's actual content. Skip the first 10 paragraphs (no, I'm not kidding). The real meat about the event starts in the third section, "The Set-Up".
Did you actually read the article? Yeah, I know this is /. but if you're going to throw around phrases like "obviously more too[sic] this" then you should try having some idea what you're talking about.
The guy was a mix of everything wrong about reality TV (which the project wasn't even originally supposed to be) and marketing scum. Mix in a dash of the worst of "brogrammer" culture (not that he knew anything at all about it, except that women clearly didn't belong in such a setting...) and put him in charge.
In fairness, you're kind of right: Matti was the reason it all fell apart, but the people who hired him and gave him free reign to do so (up until they fired him, after letting him wreck everything) bear some responsibility as well. That's largely the point of Adriel's blog post: accountability.
TL;DR: Start at the section titled "The Set-Up" for actual content.
The first ten paragraphs are personal background for the point of... I'm not even sure, actually. The section "The Press" is at least tangentially related to the actual topic, but the introduction is not. You're not the only person to find it really hard to read, either.
I don't know what the fuck the author is smoking, but I can only imagine this is supposed to be some hipster version of reporting, "oh, comprehensible language is totally a sellout, it's so mainstream". Actual I-shit-you-not comment from the original author "Writer here. I work in a writing style called gonzo. It's extremely polarizing..." He doesn't *quite* say "you've probably never heard of it" but I, for one, sincerely hope I never do so again!
Well yeah, no shit.
To be fair, the only notable impact I noticed from the takeover of OKC was the removal of one of their blog posts wherein they slammed for-pay dating sites using math and logic to make their argument. They may have moved a few mostly-trivial features behind their own paywall as well - I think you used to be able to easily see everybody who had rated you highly, and now that's slightly less convenient - and they advertise the paid accounts more heavily, but they have preserved most of the rest of their casual and largely irreverent attitude towards corporate issues. I always get a chuckle out of one of their survey questions, which reads:
Right... because while there is no benefit to Mozilla or its CEO from using their software, using JavaScript heavily supports Mr. Eich. Oh, and there are no alternative browsers so it wouldn't be practical to tell people to switch anyhow, while there are any number of near-universally supported scripting languages.
What the fuck? What color is the sky on your world? I don't much want to live on this one anymore, but I sure as hell don't want to wind up on one where people "think" like you.
Because promoting gay rights is all about punishing a blameless minority on account of the acts of the majority, right?
Idiot.
Well, I wouldn't *use* it if it did that, but it would be "all right" in the sense of being entirely within their rights.
It's even open-source software, so I could go in and remove that behavior, fork it, ("Flamingfox"? "Rainbowfox"? "Firethebigots"?) and release that fork for other people to use. Alas, I do not have the ability to edit out the things I find defective in either Mozilla or its new CEO.
Logically inconsistent (like so much in religion, but that's another topic...). Being gay has *nothing to do* with whether it is socially or legally accepted. Publicly being gay, sure, but gay people have been "practicing homosexuality" since even before the old testament, much less the new, regardless of society's treatment of them. It is a completely natural phenomenon that is effectively "hardwired" into those people; it even occurs in non-sapient animals.
If you accept the axioms that God created man in His own image, then
A) God is approximately 10% gay (I don't know what the exact percentage of gay or bi men is, but it's around there, depending on where in the spectrum you place the cutoff point).
B) God created around 10% of the human race with a biological imperative to sin. Arguably this undermines the entire concept of original sin (itself a sick and nasty concept; if God is supposed to be a father figure...) which is supposed to be that humanity (in the person of two individuals) *chose* their sin; contrary to what the church would have you believe, being gay is not a choice.
Then again, as I said above, much of religion (not just Christianity, or even just Abrahamic religions) is logically inconsistent. If that had been likely to sway the believers, I suppose it probably would have done so before this particular topic came up.
You realize that plenty of people put up pages telling IE users, and even Windows users, to fuck off, right? I've had to spoof my user-agent to visit some sites, on account of such tactics. Nothing to do with web standards, they just didn't like Microsoft. Granted, these were much more marginal sites than OKC, and it was years ago, but if you seriously believe that "Once this Pandora's box is open, it will be impossible to close." then why the fuck complain about it now? As I said, this has been happening for years!
Most of us who actually care about issues (rather than political parties) hold Obama in very low regard as well. I donated to his campaign when he swore to block any bill that included retroactive telecom immunity WRT warrantless wiretaps. I cut my support when he did not uphold that promise, and have voted third-party since. (Not that it matters, in the Presidential race my state always goes blue by such a landslide they call it as soon as the polls close.)
If your point is that people's opinions can change, then
A) that was a terrible example, as Obama's voting record as of five years ago was also enough to kill my support for him
B) there's still a matter of degree; I can at least see the arguments for things like warrantless wiretaps (I do not accept those arguments, but they are not inherently invalid) but there's absolutely no justifiable reason to institutionalize discrimination against a harmless minority, and I hold any competent adult who willingly promotes doing so as despicable.
Hey man, sometimes I used both hands!
Seriously though, it's actually a pretty great site for the nerdy crowd (which their demographics strongly support). Yes, I met my girlfriend through there (as did my roommate, who I know from when we were both in CS together).
Well, aside from the fact that being gay is not a matter of religion (there are gays in all religions, and gays who have no religion).
Oh, and the fact that being religious is a choice, whereas being gay is not (this is not only obvious from a basic perspective of self-interest, it has been demonstrated in the lab that gay peoples' brains react differently to sexual stimuli than the brains of straight people).
Or the fact that it is a simple truth that denying gay rights causes harm to people, while it is merely a belief (not in any way a demonstrable fact) that gay marriage is "bad".
Also, you fail reading comprehension. The antecedent of "those beliefs" was quite obviously "other people's personal religious beliefs" (since the religious beliefs of the gay rights activists was never mentioned or even implied to exist) which means that the only logical parsing of the sentence requires the antecedent of "they" be "other people" and not "Gay rights activists".
But hey, logical reasoning doesn't seem to be your strong point. How about religion instead; stoned any adulterers recently?
I highly doubt *you* could abstract yourself thoroughly enough to avoid any bias (you might attempt to compensate, but most people have no idea how much to compensate *by*). Jurors haven't switched their brains off any more than anybody else (although it might sometimes seem that way, "jury of your peers" does not guarantee them to be in the same intelligence range, for example). Despite this, everything from billboard ads to product placement in movies *does* have a measureable impact on people's opinion of a product. It is typically subconscious, making it hard to explain (and thus compensate for or ignore) why one product just seems "better".
Sadly, my phone and tablet do not have Gig-E ports (I could add one to the tablet via dongle, but eww). My friend's phones don't either. My laptop does, as do the laptops of most (though not all) of my friends, but that's really inconvenient to set up when they come over.
My desktop and my roommate's desktop are wired, as is my Xbox. Nothing else is both sufficiently out-of-the-way and non-portable that it makes sense to wire it in, especially in an apartment where nearly all areas are easily served by a single central router even at 5GHz.
Loser-pays for legal fees would solve a lot of that...
There are ways to fix that without throwing the whole thing out. You actually touch on it yourself: in a fast-moving field like computing, the lifetime of patents is far too long. By the time they expire the patent owner has either long-since gotten enough return on investment to justify the research and development, or they never will because the inherent value of the "invention" is low. The result is a field in which a lot of profitable lines of research move slower than they should, because when it only takes a few years to develop a newer and better version of something, bring it to market, and recover the investment, there's no incentive to iterate on that cycle faster than once per patent lifetime.
Make the patent lifetime actually reflect the time requirements for profitable R&D in the relevant industry (i.e. quite short, in software), and you'll get a scenario in which it's profitable to begin climbing to the giant's shoulders as soon as the patent is published (which is probably around the same time that the product it's attached to releases), with the patent owner having only a short-term advantage rather than flogging their patent until the invention it covers is completely obsolete and the entire industry has had to ignore that avenue of research or risk legal trouble.
So... not to say I support the system, because I don't (although my solution is more intermediate than yours: software patents have a lifetime reduced to something like 4-5 years), I'm going to have to disagree with your #2 claim.
Patent trolls ("non-practicing entities" or "non-producing entities" or whatever - that is, companies who buy spend money to buy patents and to pay lawyers, and make money getting settlements or winning lawsuits) do create something other than lawsuits. They create a market for patents that aren't currently being used.
Hypothetical adventure time: let's say I am a mathematician with a really good understanding of audio (I'm not). I create an audio compression scheme that has incredible audio fidelity at 1/10th the bitrates of current codecs (let's say for general-purpose human hearing: everything from music to court recordings to nature sounds). However, the algorithm for this codec is extremely computationally expensive; even with economies of scale, a dedicated chip that can implement the decoding (never mind encoding) in real time would cost $40 to produce today, and in software you'd end up consuming an entire typical desktop CPU. Encoding is even 3x as expensive. As such, there just isn't enough demand for this algorithm right now; storage is cheap enough that people will use the vastly less efficient codecs rather than pay for this. It took me a year of work (2000 hours) to produce this.
Situation #1, no software patents: I earn nothing from the work I did, because I can't commercialize it. Even if I could, somebody would reverse-engineer the algorithm in far less time, and be able to compete without needing to recoup the investment. If I simply publish, I'll never recoup that investment at all.
Situation #2, no NPEs: I earn nothing from the work I did any time soon. If I want to recoup my investment in a few years when Moore's Law brings the price down into line with current audio codec chips, I need to start manufacturing them or I'm not allowed to sue people who do so without licensing my patent (the algorithm is public because it's patented) *or* I have to never publish at which point the innovation may as well never have occurred.
Situation #3, as it is today: I can sell the patent to an NPE, who buys it on the expectation that within a few years, people will either start wanting to license it or will start using it without licensing. I get an immediate windfall of cash to support my continued work inventing better algorithms. The world gets to benefit (not for free, but they do get to) from the innovation. The NPE gets to employ a lot of lawyers. OK, win-win-lose isn't perfect but I'll take it.
As I see it, the problems with patents are different from what the vocal majority here on /. seems to think.
1) Patents on overly broad things need to go. A patent should specify a specific invention. If somebody wants to use the same concept in a different use case, and they think of that before I do, I can't sue them for it. Caveats: The patent owner can add other use cases ("ON A COMPUTER!" to the patent, but that doesn't grant a *new* patent or extend the lifetime of the current one. Somebody else cannot be issued a patent for the same idea in a different use case, unless there's enough work adapting it to that use case that the adaptation itself is innovative enough to be patentable.
2) Better checks for "obviousness" in a patent application. Some kind of jury pool of experts either with academic credentials or other recognized ability to contribute should be asked "what are the obvious ways to do X?" where X is the use case in question (note that the request is not for the *most obvious" only; things which seem impractical today may become practical in the future) and anything that covers the patent in sufficient detail would get it thrown out.
3) Better checks for prior art, both at application and after granting. This would be similar to #2, but would also make it easier to invalidate a patent on the basis of older publications.
Or, you know, maybe 7 of every 9 people whose phones get stolen have insurance which covers it, so 3.5 times as much money goes to theft insurance (the estimated portion of that insurance which goes to theft is $2 billion, not $4.8 billion, you illiterate troll) as goes to out-of-pocket replacements.
God *damn* people are bad at basic analysis and comprehension. This is like something from a 6th grade standardized math test: poorly written, but with an obvious intended meaning to anybody who doesn't use their head to store old rags and sports trivia.
Lemme guess, you don't live in the USA? There are very few independent shops that sell contract-free smartphones. Radio Shack, Car Toys, Best Buy, and so on will happily sell you a phone, but they'll require you buy a contract with it; they aren't permitted to sell them contract-free in most cases. You can order them online - although not many people know this - but then you're phone-less until the order arrives.
T-Mobile is the only major carrier in the US that doesn't lock new customers into a contract, and even they sell their phones SIM-locked. It's really hard to find same-day sales of non-SIM-locked phones in this country.