This shit is so evil as to be ... actively funny.

Hey, you know what else would be funny? Tracking down the muppets that pull this crap and breaking their knees on video. It'd be a great testimonial for the baseball bats used. "See, they smash over and over without splintering! Buy Sweet Revenge brand baseball bats today!"

This behavior is why we need no-nonsense laws forcing car manufacturers to release the exact specifications, including manufacturing costs, for all of their car parts, right down to the weird little plastic part that holds the windshield shade in place up after it's been flipped down or up. If OEM prices for replacement parts rise too high, then third-party manufacturers who've been watching like a hawk with sophisticated analysis software for this kind of piggish gouging can jump quickly into the fray with better, much less expensive alternatives. I'm strongly libertarian in most realms, but raping consumers once they're stuck with their expensive investments is just nasty and strikes me as inherently fraudulent.

By all means let the robber barons play fast and loose with their prices as long as they understand that the free market will then smack them down fast and hard. That specifically means no disingenuous games with stuffing proprietary software and firmware into many automobile parts and then using the DMCA to forbid exact duplication of those parts. It also means design patents are null and void against third-party suppliers for precise drop-in replacements. By selling their products to the public, car manufacturers have automatically agreed to forgo shithead games with patents, embedded firmware and software, or any other conceivable method as part of basic consumer protections that guarantee that vehicle owners will be able to make the most of their private property without subsequently running into piggish grunting and squealing from the manufacturers as they grab for every last possible dollar.

More than that, having tried once to rape car owners on any replacement part should lead to a cloud-based red-flag warning on all parts thenceforth from that manufacturer. "Warning: This manufacturer does not adhere to the guidelines for pricing replacement parts as set down by the American Fair Commerce Association. Parts from third-party suppliers are likely to cost substantially less."

(Yeah, I know the DMCA parts aren't exactly related to the original article, but it's part and parcel of the whole stinking load of slobbering greed.)

At the risk of arousing any short-tempered teenager present at Slashdot into a brief, indignant rage followed by a momentary fit of existential angst followed by a sudden burst of inane remarks about the latest fusion garage band to explode onto YouTube this week, the youngsters have always wanted to natter and chatter about nothing that matters. I'll offer the pop-psychology explanation that taking and posting short videos to YouTube has become so quick and painless in an age of powerful cellphones with excellent video resolution that it beats struggling with the "felt" complexity of Facebook.

Mary sees a bee-YOO-tiful horsie galloping around a local farm pasture and snaps a quick video with lots of giggling and wavey "hi theres" to her besties. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL. Why not?

Dan snaps a nice video of his totally rad dragster with selfie views of him grinning and punching out the "V" for victory sign from the driver's seat. Off it goes to YouTube, and texts fly with the video URL and "see-CRET" information about the next impromptu venue for screeching rubber and distant, wailing sirens. Why not?

It's rich media, and it's easy. Plus, YouTube is more happening than the Facebook with the disapproving grannies and the old farts who want to sell stuff. It's all in good fun! At least, I hope so. If it's an alien plot by the Betelgeusians to somehow subvert the next generation, then I'd prefer to be left alone with my little social illusions and my quaint notions about the general application of Ockham's Razor. And my vodka.

I'm an old(er) fart who has been watching the absolutely fascinating phenomenon of social media for decades. (Yes, I do mean decades -- Google "FidoNet" for interesting reading if you're into that dusty historical stuff. I arrived a little late in the game with my pokey 300-baud modem, but I was there. I even bought my first domain name when Network Solutions -- colloquially "NetSol" -- was still the only game in town. Network Solutions charged $70 a year per domain name and offered a horribly unintuitive user interface -- faugh!)

I've accumulated a few observations from watching the long rise of Google and Facebook as well as the rise and fall of other successful or not-so-successful social media and web search platforms such as AOL, MySpace, AltaVista, GeoCities, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., etc., etc. Shall I include hoary old Usenet in that list? It's virtually a tautology to attribute the wild success of the web to the absurd simplicity of posting a simple website with basic HTML tags. Nor does the swamping of the modern web with extremely complex frameworks meant to overcome profound design flaws in the web detract from this point.

Anyways. For whatever it's worth, I've noticed that once a web service, be it a search engine or a social media platform, moves beyond obviously useful and non-confusing features into self-important "lookit what we can do now" frippery, it starts losing its original appeal and eventually its regular visitors. Facebook currently holds immense power as the default destination for hundreds of millions of people, but the company isn't immune to the fickle mindsets of customers for its brand of free and paid services (advertising in particular). The recent antics of the ultra-liberal leaderships of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in subtly or obviously silencing prominent conservative and libertarian voices and thereby gradually alienating a wider audience constitute only one of several serious problems.

Possibly more critical to the futures of these companies is the constant, ruthless manipulation of their audiences for maximum profitability. Mind you -- I say "maximum" profitability and not an enlightened "optimum" profitability. The former is the attitude of a greedy robber baron, and the latter is the attitude of a cautious business that knows what its customers want. Put simply, Facebook and Twitter in particular have become seriously annoying. Google isn't all that far behind. Their hundreds of programmers scamper here and yon in an unending effort to add features with little regard to how they clutter up the user experience. Hey, they've got to justify their salaries. Students of private and government bureaucracies learn this in Governance and Corporate Culture 101.

Most people want to talk to their friends and share pictures and videos without having to fight and kick and struggle against manipulative, intrusive, self-serving algorithms that keep nudging and prodding them into buying this and that or forcing them to interact with their friends in certain ways and not others. Let's not even get into the absurdities of a grossly oversimplified "like" system at Facebook that permits no subtleties of approval or disapproval. Beyond a certain point -- don't ask me where that point lies -- they silently and almost invisibly become ready and willing in their tens of millions to to suddenly abandon an old, familiar platform for a better platform that does exactly what they want it to do and nothing further.

Please note the concept of "non-confusing," which isn't quite the same thing as the older and more limited concept of "user-friendly." "Non-confusing" encompasses everything about the user experience. It means the platform only does what it absolutely must for the mainstream experience while making side trips like photographic manipulation as obviously simple as possible -- in and out and done. Visual triggers are okay but only if they quietly hover in the background with nil annoying behavior like flashing, blinking, sliding, jittering, or anything else that sparks ancient brain reflexes against tigers stealthily sneaking up on a hapless and very edible monkey ancestor.

That slides naturally into "non-annoying" territory. It means not jerking people around with algorithmic weirdness meant to push them into buying stuff by utterly wearing them out. Ooh, look -- you've been discussing cutting the grass. Click here to bypass this annoying inline video on motorized lawnmowers. Wait! Wouldn't you like to know right now about the leading brand of high-end fertilizer for your lawn? Say, don't miss that flood of advertisements we'll be sending your way about super-terrific landscaping products across all subcategories for ensuring a lush, healthy lawn that makes your neighbors gasp in envy. Our customer-friendly network of deeply interconnected web trackers will ensure you cannot escape, so you might as well relax and enjoy them.

This kind of relentless stalking and harassment is tiring and discouraging. Selling stuff per se is okay, but taking advantage of a captive audience to inflict inherently abusive tactics is not okay at all. Forced auto-play videos, jiggling side boxes that grate like sandpaper on the brain, and the whole panoply of aggressive web marketing tactics just tick people off and make them yearn for a nicer alternative. I imagine the great majority of Slashdotters already ameliorate this problem with a custom "hosts" file, JavaScript-control browser plugins such as QuickJava, tracker-control plugins such as Ghostery, advertising-control plugins such as uBlock Origin, and so forth. Most folks ain't quite that wired, though. They just feel the pain all day. BTW, before you scold me, I know I'm behind the times on plugins. Please do suggest better alternatives if you have some in mind.

I think that's enough for now. I won't even go into personal reputation control or the ongoing uproar over extremely liberal data sharing practices amongst Big Data firms that even the Wonderful Wizard of Oz would have trouble grasping. I'm sure I'm missing a laundry list of even more urgent problems.

Too long, didn't read: Facebook (and Twitter to a lesser extent) are now too complicated, too annoyingly self-serving, and too confusing. Plus, they gleefully shadow-ban or outright kick conservatives and libertarians. Watch for an abrupt market replacement for Facebook and Twitter to erupt from the shadows. Google will suffer too but not as quickly. Its search-engine interface is still simple, and its results are increasingly biased but not so obviously that the company will soon lose visitors en masse. Bonus thought: Google has so many other irons in the fire that it's not going anywhere near bankruptcy in the foreseeable future even if it somehow stumbles badly in search.

Yeah, okay. I spent too much time writing this instead of working. Maybe I'll program that abrupt replacement for the web giants and chuckle all the way to the bank. Will vodka help? Only one way to find out!

The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.

The enormous growth of computing power guarantees that this kind of seamless video and audio fakery will become mainstream faster than you might think. Heck, I'm looking forward to 2020 or 2021 at the latest as the year I can browse to a free spoofing website to make up a video of Hillary Rodham Clinton staggering in a drunken haze into the welcoming arms of Vladimir Putin on the steps of the Kremlin. Next, I'll play around with videos of Donald Trump soaring like a bird around the dome of the United States Capitol, whooping loudly and dropping dookies on passersby below. Then I'll gussy up an ultra-realistic video showing a mean neighbor porking a horrified dog and send that along to the ASPCA and to the local cops. They might not believe an unverified video in the age of universal fakes, but hey. Fun days!

I didn't know Blender could be used for that purpose. I'll look into Blender's CAD features and OpenSCAD both. I'd be happy to take advantage of your offer to print out these stupid little parts at a nominal cost for each plus shipping. (I looked again, and the top hinge also needs to be replaced as soon as I can figure out how it looked originally.) It might take me a while to overcome the learning curve for one or both of these CAD programs, though. I need to become thoroughly familiar with CAD anyway for other reasons, but the work queue is rather crushing at the moment. ^^;

Also, I goofed slightly in my original post and wrote "undoubtedly" as "undoubted." The writer in me winces at the inability to edit this appalling typographical error. -_-

I know this makes me a boring person who should be stripped of his nerd card, but I'd really like to use this or a similar service to get a small replacement part printed for an old refrigerator's freezer-door hinge. It broke a long time ago, and I've been propping the door on the remnant of the bottom hinge. Needless to say, the needed part is no longer available, and trying to hack a crude replacement for it promises to be just enough trouble that I've been putting it off for lo these many years. If I could somehow translate what I see of the part into a simple CAD model for Amazon, I'd be happy to pay $10 or so just to avoid the fuss of trying to drill and hammer and cut my way to a solution.

In the classic Slashdot tradition, of course, I haven't paid much attention yet to Amazon's pricing structure, which will undoubted turn out to be unreasonable for such small matters. Still, I'm looking forward to an eventual explosion in availability of quick three-dimensional approximation scanners and small-scale solid-matter printers in corner stores where I can take the pieces to be translated into a reasonable facsimile of the original part.

I have karma to burn, and anti-Jewish, anti-Christian Islamist terrorism really, really ticks me off, so what the hell.

If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't slurped off tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to build terror tunnels and hundreds of terror rockets instead of paying attention to the decaying infrastructure that was the specific target of the humanitarian aid, then that power plant would have been in much better condition. If the murdering thugs from Hamas hadn't insisted in raining rockets on innocent Israeli citizens for months and years, then the Israeli military wouldn't have been forced to fight yet another war to cut down on the growing threat to the lives and safety of said Israeli citizens. If the murdering thugs from Hamas didn't insist on using mosques, schools, hospitals and private residences for stockpiling weapons and for firing on Israeli troops, then the death toll and damage to critical infrastructure would have been vastly lessened.

The Israelis already have lost a significant number of troops specifically from having been so careful to conduct pinpoint strikes and to put their troops in harm's way rather than simply flatten every possible Gazan target from afar. My sympathies lie utterly and totally with hard-pressed Israeli troops and not with the disingenuous apologists for murder and terrorism who frantically, convulsively and endlessly vomit pro-jihadist propaganda.

The squirming slugs who hysterically refuse to recognize Hamas and other Islamoterrorist groups as constituting quite literally 100 percent of the source of all war and misery in the Middle East should crawl back under their rocks and quietly excrete their slime until they suffocate and fossilize in dried crud.

We already knew ourselves to be essentially colony life forms riddled with remnant retroviruses and ancient symbionts such as mitochondria, but it's damn interesting to see just how deeply integrated we are into the extremely complex biosphere all around us. It's a little depressing, perhaps, but eventually the boffins will accumulate a body of knowledge that may finally sort out all the ridiculous little things that can and will go wrong with human bodies in the murk of general ignorance. Obesity, cancer and all manner of weird and supposedly unexplained ailments -- they could simply be unknown quirks of how our innumerable symbionts and parasites interact with our basic DNA programming. -_-

I'm not surprised by this discovery. Evolutionarily, we're all really complex support systems for long meat tubes that ingest energy and building materials and excrete whatever is not useful. Even the mighty brain only exists to increase the odds of the tube surviving. Bacterial strains that also increase the chances of a meat tube surviving will be favored by simple Darwinian logic. Naturally, they will influence every body system, including the brain.

Admittedly, one doesn't like to feel like a puppet. I wonder what this means for the free will that humans supposedly possess.

Basic incentive structures are a serious problem that will only grow worse over the years. The more successful become edge businesses such as for-profit streaming video providers and monetized social networks that go heavy on large images and video advertising, the more the data carriers will enviously demand a cut of the big pie that other businesses are dividing up.

I wish I knew of a good solution to this problem that still shows reasonable respect for the free market. Perhaps it's time to give heavy federal and state tax incentives to businesses that do absolutely nothing *but* provide consistently reliable, high-speed data-transmission channels. That means no end-user content provision or end-point Internet connections for individuals, businesses or other organizations. Let the innovators scramble to implement gigabit capabilities that end-point ISPs can resell to their customers. No doubt there are sorts of problems with this idea, but my brain has nothing better right now. :/

I've been observing this sort of greedy corporatism for years. We seriously need to first set up a nationally recognized, "voluntary" standard that at least four competing broadband providers should be available in each jurisdiction and then start a national nonprofit organization that relentlessly pressures non-compliant local and state governments into abolishing laws and regulations that discourage or outright prevent this kind of minimum coverage. Constant lawsuits that dig up dirt about payoffs to politicians and expose semi-monopolies would be an excellent idea as well. It may be a little early to truly establish the idea that universal access to low-cost, high-speed Internet communications is a basic human right, but it's a good propaganda tool.

I'm a dreaming fanatic about free markets, but we don't have free markets for broadband Internet access. We have utterly corrupt corporatism. It's high time to savagely fight back against the greedy parasites at Time Warner and Cox and the rest who absolutely hate the idea of having to give up their bloated, government-protected profits.

I tried to dream up a clever bon mot to utter about this scientific curiosity, but all that came out of this effort was a stupid joke about poor old Earth having peculiar skin problems across the geological ages. I'm sowwy. I weally am. -_-

At the risk of enraging automatic supporters of bloated government programs like the old Space Shuttle, it doesn't surprise me that lean, privately funded space-exploitation outfits do so well. Reliable execution of rocket science is difficult enough already without burdening the principals with all the artificial fears and running annoyances of a crusty bureaucracy. "Could I be fired for departing from the top-down plan if I do this instead of that? Does this possible change meet the 400-page outline set down by a large committee run by political appointees?" Every millisecond squandered on peripheral distractions is a millisecond lost to the subtle considerations of consistently productive and reliable thought.

Additionally, the people who work at the private firms tend more strongly to be there for the love of it than with any government agency. That counts for a lot when it comes to repeatedly avoiding those little errors of ennui and fatigue that can build up into a disaster. Enthusiastic workers are also more prone to realizing with a joyful start that a small change that could make a real difference will likely be actually used by a quick, responsive management team. Rocketry is often about very small changes marking the difference between a successful mission and a flaming ball of fuel and rocket parts.

Along these lines, I've always thought that China has consistently lagged behind the West in leading-edge technology for much the same reasons. The Chinese have no lack of smart people, but they're subtly and powerfully burdened with the habit of "self-censorship" to avoid offending the Communist Party and with the Confucian habit of observing "face-saving" deferment to the opinions of their alleged superiors. Sounds similar to and worse than just about any government agency in the West, eh?

These are my own thoughts, and only one puppy was temporarily scared into hiding under the couch during the production of this post. I also killed a small spider, but the dratted thing was trying to crawl into my coffee cup.

I checked out the website for the Mitsuku chatbot and took a rather pessimistic poke at it.

Chatbot: [boilerplate noises omitted] ... "What is your name?"
Myself: "I'm the fiddler."
Chatbot: "Who made you the fiddler?" [A reasonable, albeit somewhat peculiar, response.]
Myself: "I took too long once to feed my peckish cat."
Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Instant FAIL.]
Myself: "I took it to new heights of frustrated noises." (Bonus straight-man response.)
Chatbot: "Where did you take it?" [Parrot-like repetition raises the chat to new heights of FAIL.]

As always, two lines were enough to trip it up. The third line was a bonus that only amplified its shortcomings. I'll admit to cheating a little by using a couple of words ("peckish", "frustrated") that might have required contextual glossing by less educated individuals, but those words were still relatively common. All known chatbots seem to rely on fairly simple-minded word triggers, and even a minor requirement for context sensitivity is enough to make them fall flat on their nonexistent faces. Anyone possessing even remote familiarity with efforts at artificial intelligence knows this, of course, but hope springs eternal.

(Notes for the lazy: The word "peckish" is a common slang term for "hungry", and http://www.mitsuku.com/ is the website for the chatbot in question.)