Also I think his moderation is unfair, it's clearly sarcasm. Either that or we've finally found Paris Hilton's slashdot ID.

You couldn't find anything about fashion online

This pretty much makes my point in 7 words. Thanks.

You know, there was a day, not so long ago, when the internet worked just fine and had very few ads. The ads aren't paying for "the internet". They're paying for people to "work the internet" full time, and it's not very clear how much value they're adding. I'm sure there'd be a loss if we found an effective way of stopping ads, but I don't think it'd be that great for the parts of the internet that make the ISP fee worthwhile. Every loser with a blog and a webcam now loads his page with as many ads as he thinks he can shove down at you, ideally before you see that hte content wasn't what you thought it was, was inane, or was otherwise useless.

20 years ago you could come online and find useful information. Now even the mighty google takes some working over to get through the corporate cruft, click baiting and paid advertisements to get what you came looking for. Even if you could pay to have the ads shut off, you're basically paying ransom to a criminal who holds all the cards.

I think it's because I have my ebook with me wherever I am and tend to read in line somewhere, or while my wife runs in to the store, while on a treadmill or stationary bike at the gym. In short bursts, while I don't feel I get any less enjoyment of the book (trivial fiction usually), I do have a harder time placing each of the little bits I read together properly.

But I don't think it has to do with the medium at all, I think it has to do with how the medium was consumed and what sort of behaviors it enables.

St. Peter: So, what brings you here?
Ex-Parrot: UK firmware update pushed to my car in New York.
St. Peter: Bummer. We haven't seen so many show up at once since Hiroshima. Well, go stand in line.

Since lots of businessmen are macho, domineering types

Who usually make decisions based on "gut feelings" and aren't used to people calling them on it because they're making such decisions on things that can't be weighed and measured very well. They don't know what to make of people who make decisions on things that have some absolutism involved, and frequently will not make "gut decisions" when the data is missing and they are asked to.

The message that indicates that MS hasn't learned anything and IE is worth ignoring is that they're trying to get DEVELOPERS to give the browser another look. That whole "design for me, lock out the competition" mentality that sensible people ignore. If IE11 is that good, people should willingly use it, not be coerced...

But would you have realized it as a child?

Yup. Back in the day I had a fist fight or two, and learned young that even if you win the fight you still get hurt. It really doesn't take being exposed to horror to figure out what happens when you let people go all out with the most destructive forces at our disposal.

Kids are way smarter than you think. Even my 6 yo sees an explosion on TV and tells me "But dad, this is fiction, but they really made that explosion right? Couldn't someone get hurt?".

Why would this cure anyone of FPS BS? What correlation is there between FPS and real war? Who plays an FPS because they wanted to go to war, but didn't like travel?

I don't mind shooting up some virtual people, I want to be as far away from real war as I possibly can be. You can like, die there. And I hear that's not the worst possible outcome by far. Down here in Texas the number of people with missing limbs and purple heart license plates is staggering, especially considering what wars we're in aren't really that large scale.

Kids are going to grow up and say "Yeah, Dad is kind of a stick in the mud. We wanted to CoD:BLOps on a new XBox, and he took us to the West Bank and showed us decapitated people. We just went over to friend's houses to play games after that."

We squeeze it out with inflation.

Additionally, it's still not clear why we can't continue to deal with trolls as we always have and just ignore them. Why is it that contrasting views, even if intentionally ignorant, dim, hateful or hostile annoy people so much? If your posts can't survive the human waste that might respond to you, then perhaps they should not be posted.

"I see you're in Florida, hide the body in plain sight and say you stood your ground."

Education has (with a few notable exceptions) reduced ignorance, and better educated people have been shown to be more forward thinking and progressive. Education is usually paid for by property tax. Property tax is paid for by working people with jobs.

So you've argued effectively for the case of locating a factory in a place with unemployed and ignorant people, to most effectively alter the country to your political specification.

Ignoring the droves of marketing, finance, accounting, HR, operations, customer support and sales a company like Apple would require, all of which require degreed and (theoretically) non-degreed workers in fields that are not quite the white/asian sausage fest that engineering is.

Usually engineering is the smallest part of any company. While I do not agree with the cause of diversity for diversity's sake, nor hiring lesser qualified individuals based on their genitalia or ethnic background, nor hiding behind diversity when attempting to "globalize" a workforce with the intent of reducing wages, it is possible that they can diversify using the existing labor pool without requiring engineering "unobtanium".

I'm pretty sure he ultimately retired.