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Comment But what do the users want? (Score 3, Insightful) 91

Mozilla's VR research team is hard at work making virtual reality native to the web. The group wants more than a few experimental VR-only websites, they want responsive VR websites that can adapt seamlessly between VR and non-VR, from mobile to desktop, built with HTML and CSS .

I'm not really concerned with what Mozilla's VR research team wants, I want to know why Mozilla doesn't care what their users want. I want to know why the slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint that millions of people switched to because it was a slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint has turned into a bloated behemoth that now includes such essentials as a built-in video chat client. The list of things I have to manually disable on a fresh Firefox install is bordering on inexcusable these days. Just filtering on about:config for enabled, there are 24 options I've changed from their defaults.

If I wanted Firefox to be my fucking operating system, I would buy a device that runs Firefox OS. I don't, and I haven't. I, as a user, want a browser.

Mozilla's continued race to become Chrome makes me question more and more with each Firefox update why I don't just give in and run Chrome itself. At this point I really have to wonder if the Firefox project isn't being intentionally torpedoed by some Google plants on Mozilla's payroll. There seem to be few explanations left.

Comment Re:Exactly. (Score 2) 318

I haven't paid for a magazine or newspaper subscription in at least 10 years. Companies like Mercury Magazines and FreeBizMag exist to put eyeballs onto print magazines and papers. Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream, Flying, I get those for free and have had various others over the years. In exchange, I encounter a few easily-skipped ads for Viagra, Harbor Freight, Sporty's, and Dr. Winnifred Cutler's Athena human pheromone love potion. I used to get the WSJ tossed into my yard every morning for free as well, but found I didn't have the time to read it, so I cancelled.

I wouldn't pay to get any of those with ads. I might pay to get them without, but they don't offer such an option, they sold their souls to advertising.

Comment Re:Not ignoring the story is a good start! (Score 1) 384

Have you been to Arstechnica, Phoronix, and The Register? Browse their headlines and you'll see a 12-24 hour preview of what's going to show up on /.

I've never heard of Phoronix, and since Ars came to be, I've considered it a good companion to Slashdot. As for El Reg, their stories used to be a daily thing on the front page here, but I rarely see them referenced anywhere anymore.

15 years ago, Slashdot was a very good source of timely tech news. They'd have news before CNet's news.com did. It's slipped a little; now most of the stories are at least a day old and have been reported in many other places. Here's the thing, though. Slashdot is a news aggregator. People submit links to things that are reported elsewhere. Even long ago, it was rare that any news "broke" on Slashdot. That simply isn't how this site works.

The web has evolved to become a far more real-time medium than it used to be. When I started on Slashdot, things like Facebook, Twitter, and reddit didn't exist. There were no smartphones, there were no apps, "going viral" wasn't a thing. Now a lot of people get their news in a massively crowdsourced/swarmed manner through social sites and apps, so by the time anything gets here it's bound to be "old news" to a large part of the audience.

Slashdot still offers a unique enough community that I keep visiting every day, even if the news is a bit stale.

Comment Re:Seems to Be a Pattern of Behavior (Score 1) 384

I used to hate that I never knew what my Karma was. But now I'm glad I didn't. It just turns people into narcissists as they try and go for more link and post karma. "Excellent" is all I needed to know.

Has this changed on Slashdot? "Excellent" is still all I see. I know there used to be a hard cap of 50, but if that's changed and my "Excellent" translates to something >50, I don't see what that number is.

Comment Re:Pay Settlments from Police Pension Funds (Score 5, Insightful) 201

We do need to find some solution that holds the police themselves financially responsible for their misdeeds, otherwise the ones who behave recklessly have no incentive to stop doing so.

I suggest 50% from the officer responsible, and the other 50% from his collegues to help incentivise them to police themselves

I'm afraid that taking settlements out of the pension fund might have the opposite effect of what's intended. If you think it's hard getting cops to report or testify against one another now, imagine how bad it would be if their collective retirement benefits were at stake. The blue wall of silence would grow ten times as tall and ten times as thick. Officers would never speak ill of one another, knowing that if another officer is found guilty of a crime, their own pension fund takes a hit.

Perhaps it's time we require all police officers to take out insurance policies for this sort of thing. As an example, many states require real estate brokers to maintain an errors and omissions (E&O) insurance policy covering a minimum of $1M. To sell houses. Surely it's not unreasonable that a police officer, authorized to use deadly force under color of law during the course of their job duties, could be made to carry insurance against the mistakes they might make... Mistakes which often have far more severe consequences than messing up a real estate contract.

Comment I'm oddly torn (Score 2) 649

I'm not sure how to feel, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

On the one hand, I'm no fan of the death penalty, because I've read about far too many cases where such a sentence was handed down and the accused turned out to be innocent. We're freeing death row inmates on a regular basis now, paying them millions of taxpayer dollars for the period during which they were wrongly incarcerated. Worse, we've executed some who were convicted and later, posthumously, exonerated.

On the other hand, in this particular case, part of me wants to say "let him die, and if you can't figure it out, I'll drive up and do the deed." I don't know any of the victims. I wasn't on the jury. I don't know all of the facts. I presume him to be guilty (why?) and assuming he's guilty I want him executed (why?). It's not very often that I find myself contradicting my own strongly held principles.

This case raises an internal moral conflict that I'm neither used to feeling nor comfortable with. I'm very grateful that I wasn't on that jury. It isn't my place to hold another person's life in my hands.

Comment Bob Sullivan's article (Score 1) 124

If you're going to quote Bob Sullivan's article in the summary, the least you could do is link to his article instead of a re-hash on IT World.

Oh, wait. Submitter jfruh sure has modded up a lot of firehose submissions by user itwbennett, and vice versa. No sense questioning what the "itw" stands for, as ~itwbennett's profile links straight to IT World. Thankfully it doesn't appear to be "our" Bennett, but come on. If you work for IT World, and you have a Slashdot account set up to promote IT world, submit the IT World article from your IT World account. Plenty of astroturfing makes the front page these days, there's no need for subterfuge.

Comment Re:H. C. Andersen died more than 70 years ago (Score 1) 90

Disney respected Andersen by giving him and his heirs the requisite 95 years to make money from his story.

That's an awfully nice way of framing the fact that Disney routinely poaches ideas from the public domain, while simultaneously lobbying to extend copyright terms so that no Disney work will ever fall into the public domain. Mickey Mouse is 87 years old now, but no one else will be allowed to use him when he's 95, or when he's 120. By then they'll have bribed enough lawmakers to codify the Constitution's "limited Times" as being "limited" to the existence of the company and its successors, assignees, and receivers in perpetuity.

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