Ah, suddenly I remember why it is I can't really be bothered to take part in the debate here, for the most part. You choose to ignore the fact that I recognise the genuinely good of the American people and instead prefer to take offence where there is none to be found; if this was just something that occurred once in a while, that would be OK, but it seem that most of the time people don't even make the effort to read posts before starting the rant.

You seem to have missed (or just ignored) that I recognise that capitalism has brought us much good. Why is that? Any mature person with a nuanced outlook on life knows that nothing is either good or evil - capitalism has good sides, but it also has its flaws. It gives us incentives to improve our lives and reach higher - but it also encourages selfishness; that's hardly open to debate. "Englihtened self-interest", isn't that the phrase they use? And that is not necessarily all bad, except that so very often the "enlightened" part gets left behind, and we have the sort of capitalism that I was talking against: the CEOs that focus on short-term gains, that will give them a higher bonus, even if it harms the company's long-term prospects. The corporations that consider "barely legal" equivalent to "morally right". And so on. These people have far too much influence, not least because people like you don't stop to think and understand, but just go with whatever your "gut instinct" tells you - without realising how easy it is to manipulate you with the right soundbites.

I don't think I need to be more careful than I am already about my opinions, because I do in fact stop an think and make sure I understand. It is a shame that most people don't.

The most important concern should be how your target audience will respond to your web application - among other things how it depends on Javascript (is your service useable if the user turns off Javascript?), and the use of AJAX (I don't think many people like it if the whole page has to update when you change an option). Whichever language or set of languages you use should support a sensible design-pattern like MVC.

I would agree that PHP is probably a poor choice for web development (based on my probably outdated experience of the language). The way I remember it, you sort of write an HTML document with embedded PHP code, so unless you are very disciplined, you easily end up with a mess that is hard to maintain, especially if it has to be picked up by a new developer.

But I wouldn't go with .net - not simply because I'm anti-Microsoft, but because you end up tied to Windows, and Windows seems to be increasingly a niche-OS, that has had to move closer and closer to Linux as the de facto standard. What I would go for, personally, is Java Enterprise - I know it is controversial in many circles, but Java is in a way in a similar position as COBOL and FORTRAN: a lot of time and money has already been invested in it, and it is deeply embedded in many places, so I don't think it will go away. Plus, despite whatever critics have to say, it is a good language surrounded by a lot of useful tools and standards.

Is this something you know - as in being able to present clear, convincing data on? I suspect this is yet another case of "don't know, don't care" - or perhaps "don't wanna know, don't wanna care". I too don't know if this is an imporant species for the ecosystem, but my attitude is different; I care, and I want to know before I make a decision that I will potentially regret later. And I don't think lining the pockets of the already extremely wealthy is more important that protecting vulnerable species and habitats. If there weren't so much welath in the pockets of a very few, perhaps the rest of us would be a little better of, and much happier.

America and even capitalism, although I hate to admit it, have brought many good things to the world (although not as many as some of you guys like to think); but it has also brought with it a surge in narrowminded and shortsighted egotism that taints everything. As long as "I" am successful, nothing else matters - society, the environment, the next generation, they can all go and screw themselves, as long as I have what I want. I don't think most Americans are like that, actually - the ones I know, colleagues and friends, are kind, generous people, who care a lot about things, even if we disagree about nearly everything else; they aren't rats and weasels. But somehow it has become unacceptable to disagree with the "me and only me first" ideology - if you do and talk about it, you are branded that lowest of low creatures, an "SJW", as if that wasn't something to be proud of.

I can't be bothered to answer this nonsense, to be honest. I was originally attracted to slashdot because it was about technology, and you would often come across comments from people with real insight into things, but it has gone downhill - and now it is dominated by people, who prefer to deny simple, observable facts, and who display a strange sort of impenetrable stupidity, assigning perversely twisted meanings to words - like in this comment, where "leftist" apparently means "doesn't agree with me", or perhaps even just "bad". Who knows? Who cares?

One can only waste so much time - I don't mind losing arguments or being proven wrong, but I do mind wasting my time on blind, wilful stupidity. So, I will now log off, delete the bookmark that points to slashdot and move on. I leave without anger or bitterness - so why the parting shot? Well, I know there are some that will agree with me, and who knows - maybe this can be a small nudge in the right direction, and though it is very unlikely, perhaps it can eventually be part of something that will lead to a change I won't know, but others may benefit. That's it - bye now.

Snake oil is a kind of oil too, isn't it? Big data is very important in science, or rather, the ability to work through huge amounts of data and fish out the important bits. And of course you can use the same technologies on user data from Facebook, Twitter etc, and the wet dream of all these internet companies is that by figuring out how each individual thinks and moves, they can sell us all more products. The flaw in this reasoning is that our lives are all already oversaturated with stuff we don't need or want, and the average household is tightly squeezed for money. No amount of clever, targeted advertising is going to make people buy more, when they don't have the money, and even if people began to be better off at some point, I think there is a growing sense of loathing towards all this stupid fluff they are trying to sell as "life style choices" and what have you.

Very much my question - is it worth the money, not to mention the effort of turning on the telly? If the recent Star Trek movies are anything to go by, it will be little more than special effects, testosterone and a thin story line from a soap opera. IMO, what made the old Star Trek good was the fact that they were a bit provocative - even challenging - for the time and dared to address slightly difficult issues; they weren't just entertainment.

Oh, I think we get it, but you have left out the other, big factor: the massive, largely self-inflicted ignorance of those that fell for the populist scams. And funnily enough, you also left out one remarkable election result that can be attributed to the disillusion with the well-fed middle class: Corbyn's support in UK, which nobody - not even Corbyn's supporters - had expected.

So, why don't you go in front and show us the kind of well-balanced, fact based kind of discourse that we are all longing for? Starting with not singling out what you call "the left", since the rather infantile level of discussion especially in the US comes from all over the spectrum, not least from mr Trump and his supporters. Also, tell us all what you define as "the left", because I have no idea, and judging from what gets called "left" or similar by different people, seems to be anything that isn't uninformed and biased in the same way as whoever uses the word.

As someone on the left - in fact rather far to the left of what Americans call "the left", since I am European - I agree fully; we could do with a lot more transparency in politics and government on all levels. And not just with China, Russia and N Korea, but with any foreign nation. Just because government and big business find it comfortable to snuggle up to some foreign nation, doesn't mean that the population agrees.

Well, I tend to agree, but I also think that before we get up in arms, we should try to understand this in a wider context. This is in fact something that has been in the news several times recent years - not about piracy, but about politicians not following the advice of their own experts. Most notoriously, the furore about David Nutt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt), who was dismissed as a government advisor for criticising the UK drugs policy. He was IMO 100% right in his criticism, but I think we have to accept that policy is a matter for politicians, and although the science advice is very clear, there may be other reasons why it is deemed right to dismiss that advice, and what should ask first of all is: what were those reasons?

I absolutely agree - as I think I already stated in my original post. And as I spend some effort on saying, medical researchers are now studying whether e-cigarettes are actually as harmless as we expect them to be. The gp seemed to suggest that it was fundamentally wrong to even research this question, and I tried to put forward the arguments for why we must research these things rather than take it on faith. We haven't studied it in depth, so we don't know yet - what is so wrong about wanting to know the truth?

And that brings me to perhaps a more important subject, namely why are people especially here on /. so on the jump to take offence of anything they don't agree with - or maybe haven't quite understood after a first, superficial reading? Personally, I don't really mind that my comments here get modded down, but it is deeply worrying that a forum that is notionally about "news for nerds - stuff that matters" (or used to be) is now dominated by people that appear to be unable to read and understand a thoughtful and factual text, simply because they think they disagree with it. I have seen this several times - I have written something, and then people think they contradict me by putting forward the same arguments I just gave. Or the opposite: I write something that is clearly insulting and provocative, and get modded up and people "agree" with me with opinions that are clearly the opposite of what I said. So what is the point of trying to communicate on /.? (That was a rhetorical question, by the way)

So, in a word, you are saying that e-cigarettes are less dangerous than real cigarettes, and you are trying to sell the idea that the difference is enormous ("400k deaths" vs "a couple"), which is something you simply know nothing about, but which researchers are working on finding out. Nicotine is a known nerve agent in the same generic class as Sarin and VX, just point out the scary ones; it is worth studying the health effects of long term, recreational use of it. So far there appears to be little reason for worry, but not knowing simply means that we don't know - it doesn't mean there is no reason to worry, it just means we haven't found out yet. It took us long enough to accept that things like tobacco and alcohol were incredibly harmful - as well as expensive for society.

I think, from the way you are up in arms over this, that you are using these products yourself and want to protect your addiction, which is quite natural, but perhaps not the best starting point, if you simply want to find the facts about e-cigarettes. Both the industry and their customers/victims are strongly motivated to exonerate e-cigarettes and nicotine as much as possible; medical researchers on the other hand, are more likely to simply want to find out about the health effects. In your statement you have already decided what the outcome of such research must be, and that not logically sound; that way, you will end up throwing away any evidence that doesn't lead to your preferred conclusion.

Claiming that "attacking e-cigarettes will cause thousands of deaths" is simply unrealistic and wildly overhyped. It is true that they are somewhat less harmful than real cigarettes (although we still don't know how much), but without good evidence to the contrary, one must expect that consuming poison is going to cause harm. Add to this the evidence we are beginning to see, that e-cigarettes seem to be turning into a gateway to smoking for young people, and the situation seems rather more sinister. Finally, I don't think the aim of this kind of research is to hound nicotine users, but to arm everybody with better knowledge and encourage responsible use. Recreational drug use is part of human reality, and although it does cause some harm, it is perfectly possible to figure out what is a responsible way to use these drugs; I think that is where these researchers are coming from.

Exactly - which is why it makes a lot of sense to design GUIs as thin(-ish) front-ends to a collection of commands, at least as a guiding principle; the real functionality should be in the back-end - the system commands, the relational database etc - not the GUI. Also, the term "user friendly" is too vague, and should be replaced by something like "functional".

Just another "Clippy", I suspect. They are all the rage at the moment, but I think they will turn out to be just another irritating fad that will be gone in a few years' time. The underlying research into things like voice recognition and AI are scientifically valid and will be valuable at some point, but trying to commercialise it by stuffing it into all kinds of consumer products is just stupid; people in general do not think or speak in a careful and disciplined way, which I think is going to clash with what a virtual assistant has to offer, so it will become a nuisance and an obstancle rather than a help.

Not to mention naive - with criminals blowing up people on the London Underground from time to time, it seems likely that we will end up going through the same sort of security checks in a high-profile mass transport system like the Hyperloop.

That is funny - I usually have to repair my wife's presentations, that she has made in Windows - and I use Impress for that. It may be she is just very bad at it and/or I'm very clever, but just saying. How compatible and what is best probably depends on the person and how they use it.

Perhaps that is so - although, I am not a fan of always heaping more and more functionality onto a program that is mostly meant for writing smaller documents and that sort of thing. Of course, I don't actually write much that would fit into any word processor - I mostly write maths, so use LaTeX.