So people fiddle with the settings and the browser "breaks?" Is there some reason it wasn't possible to create a button reading, "Restore Factory Settings," in large, friendly letters? Or was that too hard?

The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications.

Please try to remember whose machine you're running on. You're a guest under my roof, and guests that behave badly do not get invited back. So no, you don't get to run code in my browser until you've earned a certain level of trust, and you certainly don't get to invite in your friends' code. (I mean, just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, anyway?)

For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways [ ... ]

The technical term for sites that behave this way is, "Broken."

Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites.

Firefox already works on a lot of Web sites. Is someone shipping FF with JavaScript turned off by default? What exactly is the alleged problem here?

Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."

These programmers are called, "Wrong."

Back in the 1990's -- in the days of sneaker-net, recall -- macros in Microsoft Word documents, originally thought to be oh so terribly clever, proved to be a monumental nightmare for their ability to spread viruses and generally wreak havoc. It was so bad that even Microsoft was forced to admit it fscked up, and no longer executed macros in a loaded document by default, but would ask first. So you'd think the lesson on embedding executable content in what was fundamentally a document would have been learned.

Then some allegedly clever person kluges together JavaScript in an afternoon, and suddenly executable content embedded in documents -- over a genuine network, mind -- becomes a fantabulous idea again.

Uh, no, it didn't. JavaScript was a stupid idea, and should never have been allowed to happen. Unless your site is trustworthy and useful, you DO NOT GET TO RUN JAVASCRIPT.

Let's look at another example. Suppose there were a billionaire who made his money making crappy products and pushing those products on people. Suppose that man decided to then dedicate his life to wiping out a series of specific species completely from their native environments. Sounds like a supervillain, right? Well, that man is Bill Gates, and the species in question are the four species of malaria.

This is a tautology; everyone already knows Bill Gates is a super-villain.

And like most power-mad super-villains, I'm quite certain Gates hasn't bothered to consider the possible long-term downsides to putting his fumbling thumb on the scale of evolution and genociding several species of pathogen.

Dr. Jafee:

Pursuant to your comments reported on 27 June 2013 on ZDNet.com:

You're fired, for cause, effective immediately. Please collect your personal belongings and vacate W3C premises no later than 17:00 local time today.

Regards,
The Web

Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible.

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Simpleton Edition.

Schwab

It seems like, in order to get these nosy little snoops to stop snooping on you, you have to explicitly visit their site, provide them with even more info, and hope they keep their word that they won't compile data on you.

For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?

The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [ ... ]

Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.

For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.

Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?

So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.

A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?

Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [ ... ]

That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.

For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.

When I was using a FreeBSD box as the gateway to my home network, the crushing majority of the spam relay and SSH brute-forcing attempts came from machines inside hinet.net. I ended up black-holeing as many of their subnets as I could in the firewall.

Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...

Schwab

Or, conversely, maybe it has a chance to thrive if it's being maintained by people who have an idea of what to do with it?

That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.

Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.

I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels :-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predators'_Ball
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_gate
2012 Election coverage of Bain â" Mitt Romneyâ(TM)s old stomping ground.

Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.

• American Pad and Paper
• KB Toys
• Bealls Brothers / Palais Royal (merged into Stage Stores)

We've seen this script before. The private equity firm forces the company to take out huge loans, which are then paid to the equity firm as consulting and management fees, and bonuses. Dell's largest operating cost becomes servicing the debt, which means everything else gets cut -- product research, product quality, staff, salaries. The market quickly realizes that Dell products have become shit(tier), and customers flee.

Four years later, the equity firm is several hundred million dollars richer, Dell goes bankrupt and is liquidated, and thousands of former Dell employees are out of work.

If you were a bank considering a loan to Dell (and not already in collusion with the private equity firm), you should be very very skeptical you will ever see your money again.

Just because you're buying "hardware" doesn't mean you're getting the privilege of installing whatever the hell you want on the device.

Incorrect.

When I buy a Chevy Volt, I am not forced to fill up with only one vendor's gas. I am not forced to charge up with electricity from a particular utility.

When I buy a Sony TV, I am not forced to watch content only from Sony/Columbia/VEVO.

When I buy a Sansa MP3 player, I am not forced to buy and load only music from Sansa's "content partners." Hell, on many of their players, I can kick out their clunky UI and replace it with an entirely different clunky UI :-)

There is no technological reason that a "Surface" tablet can't run Android or generic Linux. The only obstacle standing in the way is entirely gratuitous, malicious, and childish. To the extent SecureBoot improves platform security (it doesn't) or the integrity of the user's data (it doesn't), there is absolutely no reason that the root keys to such a regime be held by Microsoft, especially given their track record. SecureBoot is there solely as a very deliberate and calculated "Fsck you" to competing operating systems. Therefore, it is entirely correct and proper to call Microsoft out on it.

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, [Dodd] said that Hollywood and the technology industry 'need to come to an understanding' about new copyright legislation.

Here's the understanding, Chris: Computers copy data. Period. End of novel; no sequel coming. It is a fact of the landscape that is not going to change.

And that, as far as any clear-thinking technologist is concerned, is the end of the discussion. Business models must be constructed around this reality. (And if your business model is not based on reality, but instead on a la-la fairy land where every computer is under MPAA/RIAA/SPAA control, unsanctioned copies never happen, every view is metered, and directors and actors work for naught but "exposure"... Well, they have anti-psychotics that can help with that now.)

BTW, anyone hoping to debate the merits of copyright policy is REQUIRED to read this speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay -- it will easily be among the most enlightening forty-odd minutes of your life.

Schwab