Maybe so, but blocking all javascript by default just results in a poor browsing experience devoid of any real capabilities.

The vast majority of CRM platforms and internal web sites use it as well. So obviously your business system allows javascript otherwise you would never get any work done with SAAS vendors.

Stuff I would want to do with my own landing pages is impossible without it. I absolutely need the ability to perform AJAX calls and modify the DOM without reloading the page. There is some truly interesting and beautiful websites that simply cannot make do with just HTML and a style sheet.

Download DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery, Ad Blocker, and a comprehensive hosts file list for blocking at the system level. You'll find that you are still pretty safe, not downloading objectionable content, and enjoying a better web experience.

Don't be to hard on us. While I don't do a tremendous amount of front end work, I do listen to the developers and understand that it's not that easy at all.

You want near perfect rendering on all screen sizes, all devices, and all browsers. Dude. Seriously. Just ask NASA to set you up with your own private Moon Base and Death Star Laser.

It would work 10000000000000x better if it was a native program instead. That costs money. So the only thing I can do as a developer is use a fucking shitty retarded document markup language that instructs that fucking shitty retarded browser to download external code to be run client side on fucking shitty retarded client side code libraries and frame works.

THEN... THEN...

I need to somehow automagically figure out what device you are using, the screen sizes, interface capabilities, etc. and CUSTOMIZE my style sheets (one more nail in the fucktard coffin) just for your device.

And.... it all needs to work with whatever frameworks I have seamlessly. No. It really is a bitch and a half to make a website that dynamically renders and sizes itself to screens. The tech is JUST NOT THERE for me to do it cost effectively at all.

Personally, I would just say fuck it all. Give you a single page when it detects a mobile browser saying mobile browsing is not supported by anything other than our app.

Then I would write that SOB in something like PhoneGap and make it native. Give you what you REALLY want, which is an interface designed for your device.

Mobile web development is HARD and EXPENSIVE and I seriously question the wisdom of even expending the resources on it when everybody and their mother wants a mobile app anyways.

I don't have a problem with javascript, as I do make stuff with it. Done right, you don't have as much impact on the bandwidth as you think. If you have megs of javascript libraries being referenced from external CDN's, you're doing it wrong.

It's going to go down that road anyways till the end. Web browsers have ceased being about document markup and rendering, which is how it started, to running external code in complicated sand boxes. You can't put that genie back in the bottle.

The issue is being able to trust that javascript, which is really about trusting the sandboxes to not allow malicious code to be run. Tracking is a problem of course, but that is mitigated by blocking software that stops those specific scripts and domains from working. Once a Big Data company like that gets big enough, they'll just get shut down by the blockers, which is a very good thing. It protects our privacy as well as our computers.

If you don't want javascript and external code libraries you're only other option is to have a single universal API developed that ALL browsers adhere strictly to. Blocking tracking software is simple as a permissions setting at that point to not listen to any tracking tags or events set up in the page. AJAX type events would need to be classified accordingly and secured. An event going toward a different domain than the page? Blocked by permissions. Image not from the domain? Don't even download it based on permissions. CDN's should be registered in the browser as an alternative for any file that needs to be downloaded for a "page".

Above all, that API should have plentiful RBL's that outright disable all external calls. We want accountability? How about within an hour of malware being downloaded those RBL's are proactive like some email services and browsers start blocking that particular site or CDN automatically? That would make propagation of malware a real bitch in production. Not to mention if you are a big outfit and that happens people will start getting fired till it's fixed. I've been in a major company that got their email shut down by Cisco IronPort (Over half the vendors they dealt with were rejecting mail). Some yahoo in the data center thought it would be cool to run his own little server which got hacked and delivered out 9 tons of spam that shut down corporate email for 4 days till IronPort finally cleared it up.

Can you even imagine what would happen if one of those RBL systems blocked Yahoo by default a week or two ago? Shit storm indeed, but a needed one.

We don't have any of that.

What we *do* have is a clusterfuck of technology that developed from an interesting idea to effectively share a word processing screen at universities that is fundamentally toxic to us. We spend billions cleaning it, defending it, and developing it, etc.

It just needs to be scrapped and start over.

So no, blocking javascript is not the answer either. Unless you want to be left behind with non-working pages because people like me are getting really tired of needing to expend those resources for graceful failure. We don't have the time or the money to do that anymore (not in this economy) and javascript and JQuery (along with the other JS frameworks) are here to stay. So many of the "shiny" features out there only work in an event based framework where I can modify the DOM without reloading the entire page.

The whole mess is just terrible and we keep refactoring code to old email and document markup systems without addressing the underlying issues at all.

The performance issue was a constant check for updates.. for another program notorious for performance issues....

This is why I really wish that Microsoft was *truly* forced to allow IE to be ripped out of their operating system completely.

At this point, just give it up guys. You had over 10 years trying to make a browser. Let it go....

By social programs I partly mean social medicine with heavy reforms to bring it's efficiency up from the high 20's to at least the 70's. Emphasis on preventative medicine. We really do have enough money to pull it off if we were just more efficient at it. A healthy populace is happier and more productive.

People can argue about health care all they want. It's a complete failure when you compare it to the rest of the world. Not only are we horrifically obese plagued with health problems, but we spent over 3 times more to achieve that failure than other countries noted successes.

Obviously welfare as well, although I don't want to give hand outs. I love food stamps and EBT. Instead of giving somebody $800 for the month that they can waste on Luxury items, the only thing they can use it for is approved food at the grocery store.

The rest should be better. I can't argue that they are plagued with problems with now, but scrapping them entirely is not an option, and talking about them is not a slippery slope to Communism either.

Call me crazy, but I seem to remember some coward of a President talking about jobs being created to attend to our woeful infrastructure. There are so many damn small jobs that need to be done too. Why not pick people up from the wellfare office, outfit them with work clothes, and pay them to clean up the streets and the graffiti? You can put millions to work repairing and creating new infrastructure, but you can also put millions to work just doing general repair too.

Social programs are not just about taking money from the rich Republatards and giving them to the slackers who never applied themselves in school or got a haircut. It's a strategic move to keep our lower classes from having food riots. Why Republicans think that people deprived of food stamps can magically find a job to feed their kids instead of resorting to desperate crime to eat is beyond me. How shortsighted is that? What about the middle class and people who have worked really hard such as myself, only to lose quite a bit in this recent Great Depression? I don't think it's such a good idea to be punishing them and if anybody deserves some assistance to becoming a productive member of society again it's a member of the middle class. We need them. The upper class cannot exist without them, and the lower classes would have no hope at all without the middle class propping them up.

Social programs are just a smart compromise to keep public safety at a minimum level.

You misunderstood. I had prefaced that list with what the military industrial complex was taking away from NASA and science with their unreasonable budgets. If anything we should increase those budgets by at least an order of magnitude. NASA is hands down one of the best investments this country has ever made. The ROI is insane.

That's because of an over emotional reaction that saying that means you don't support America or your troops. Kind of like the question, "So how long have you stopped having sex with your sister?"

What makes me feel safe is the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, Canada, and Mexico. Canada? HAAHAHHA. They're not a threat to us and they could care less. Mexico already has an attack under way, and that is from their people and economy against ours. Which is not something I'm going to kill somebody over either or get unreasonably upset. Those oceans are significant buffers for protection. We only need a fraction of our current budget to operate the air craft carriers and battle groups in those two seas to make an invasion fleet really really sorry.

The greatest military weapon has already been created. Globalization. China is not going to really attack us, North Korea might bruise us up pretty good but completely die in the process, and nobody else really cares. Any country actually posing a threat is locked into an economic stale mate with us.

If a world war is going to happen, it will be over a shortage of resources and desperate people making attempts to secure resources for their people to keep up an unsustainable way of life 2 minutes longer. At that point, loss of life and the difficulty of getting over to America will be secondary to securing the natural resources. I think that is inevitable at this point with my cynicism. We simply lack the will and morality to suffer and build a sustainable world to avoid that future.

As an American I don't feel safe because of my military. The opposite actually. The expenditure takes away from:

- Education. Makes me feel safer if I'm not in a nation of idiots with faith based anti-science education (Texas). An educated and sophisticated population is far more capable than an Idiocracy.
- Infrastructure. I really do like crossing over bridges. So much more convenient than spending a half a day going around. It would be nice to do that without dying.
- High speed efficient transportation systems. Well... we don't even have that. We should have that. We don't have that. We're left with an aging rail way that is not even sophisticated enough to transport people across the entire country in viable time periods and is reduced to freight. Planes are used for most shipping now, and that's just hugely efficient. Pretty sure that in the last 10 years we could have dedicated a trillion towards high speed rail criss crossing the country. Would choose that over flying ANY day.
- Science. Less funding for NASA and research that is highly beneficial to our way of life and might even solve some of the upcoming resource shortage problems.
- Social programs. Yes. Nothing says safety like taking away all hope and mercy from people that aren't going to just die in a gutter, but come over to my gated community and rob/murder/rape me and my family in home invasions.

Lastly, our most recent wars have shown us that we don't even spend that money on the military, but on private contractors like BlackFuck that get immunity from prosecution and kill and rape innocent people in countries that we are terrorizing. It's not even going to soldiers and outfitting them with advanced battle armor.

I'll personally feel safer with a better economy, better educated people, comprehensive social programs (that I have no problems paying for) keeping the lower classes from pure desperation (dangerous), and an infrastructure that is new and up to date.
 

Brain Drain and woefully inadequate expenditures on infrastructure.

For whatever reasons, electrical engineering is done by foreign companies. Many engineers received education in the US and then fled back to their countries to work in companies servicing us. I don't really blame them either. America has to compete fairly as a place people want to desire to live. If we were so damn good they would stay.

This is just a side effect of all of the brain drain going on for decades. Less electrical engineers needed to support research, and less shops in the US needing those engineers, to provide high tech products to the rest.

The rest of the world isn't stupid. Other countries have the engineering capability to do these things and the economies to compete with ourselves.

With respect to electrical engineering in particular, the US simply does not spend enough on infrastructure to stimulate that part of the economy. Which is sad. We need to not just create new transportation and material sciences, but implement them on a wide scale.

Not doing that, so the engineers shouldn't hold their breath waiting for a game changing high tech rail system being deployed across the US.

I'm not like emotionally invested in the button dude :)

Just pointing out that I did actually use it. I know there are alternatives and that might not even be the best. It's a tool.

I wanted to add that it could very well be profitable and Google took it away and might soon release an alternative adding to their other services.

Don't be a dick.

Unless I am very familiar with the area, I only know:

- information from one of upwards of four directions I approached from.
- lesser reliable information about the direction directly ahead.
- the sides of the street I approached from prohibit me from seeing beyond many times. Therefore, I have not seen everything and unless I take a side street, this means I can't know everything on my own side of the map either.
- General knowledge about how often gas stations are distributed, fast food places, etc. Commercial park, expect more office buildings.

Using Google to tell me that just the next side street over to my right and down a 1/4 mile is a Chili's. Information I had know way of knowing beforehand by observation. I would have otherwise been directed towards a far less preferable alternative the aforementioned Denny's.

So I think the squishy stuff between my ears is working just fine and got me a Triple Dipper for lunch instead of some sort of sad pathetic excuse for a sandwich and fries that make one pine for the old days, when they didn't wish they were dying and not old as fuck.

There but for the grace of God, go I...

If you wanted to kick it up a notch say, "wittle" instead of "little".

As well they should have. Stuff happens, and I bet NASA did try to make it safe, but they failed horribly in this case.

Richard Feynman ripped NASA a new butthole too. After listening to him it became readily apparent that there was a huge disconnect between the administrators and the engineers. In some cases the administrators decided to go with estimates that were several orders of magnitude different.

I can give NASA a pass when it's really difficult to engineer and design a controlled explosion to get you into space, *and* then how to work, survive, and come back.

However, everyone of those people that got fired deserved that and more for their "acceptable flight risk" mentality that was in hindsight unreasonably reckless.

It's so damn useful though. You locate yourself on a map from an intersection (or geolocation if you don't care about your privacy at all) and search nearby places.

Example: I'm at a tire store and it will take 45 minutes before my car is ready. I plug the address of the tire store into Google and search for nearby restaurants within a 10 minute walk. It tells me that up the street, which I did not come by from, has a Denny's.

That's fucking important. I need to know where those Denny's are to avoid them more than Battlestar Gallatica tried to avoid the Cylons, or a salad avoided Jabba the Hutt. I think most sane and rational people have used Google this way right?

As far the maybe is concerned, perhaps, it's that Google really did find a lot of people doing that and figured it was an additional commodity to sell. A local business would pay quite a bit actually to steer real time requests for businesses towards them. I know some businesses well enough to say they would test it out and shift funds away from other marketing budgets.

A half a dozen times in the last 3 years I've found myself in meetings with the local telephone book companies pitching SEO and their own web based directories as the primary product instead of their dead tree publishing. Those companies see the writing on the wall and are not trying to sue or regulate the Internet into compliance with their old business model, unlike some creeps we know. They would jump on that in a second to offer local foot traffic to a retail brick and mortar store as an added service they provide.

Google could make money doing that. Google doesn't service the Internet user except with a glove going you-know-where, they service their real customers and those are the advertising industry and Big Data consumers.

Got a funny feeling that it will play out just like that. A new NearMe(tm) feature with sponsored search results on a revamped directory page.

Google could knock off Eat24.com and Groupon in an afternoon with their search tech, map tech, and payment processing tech.

There's money in it. A lot of it.

Why on Earth is BOFA monitoring activists again? They were categorized as undesirables by those shit eating executives. That's right.

This is why privacy is so crucial to our well being and survival as a society. You cannot view all violations as equal, and you must evaluate the relative power of the different actors.

We need to get our privacy back, and I don't know how many more examples like this need to come up. How many activists here have been denied services by BOFA, had their privacy further invaded, just because some executive didn't like their sociopolitical views?

When you can no longer freely speak because it endangers your ability to get a job, or secure a home loan from BOFA, that is when we have less freedom and ability to have open dialogue about controversial topics.

Make no mistake. This has nothing to do with national security. It's purely abuse of those without power by those who have it because those that have it, disagree with those that don't.

BOFA just happens to be run by sociopaths, but it's another mistake to think that kind of behavior and corporate culture is an isolated event.

Sorry for the double post, but I reconsidered it.

If it was a 150 inch screen, with like 8k, and I could get streamed porn, then yes, I would consider getting a cable subscription again.

Industry. Take Note.

So basically, look horrible, look like it was streamed.

Kind of defeats the point of the 4k investment though. Only local content is going to be played. On demand will need one hell of a buffer for full quality. Piracy is going to be difficult (a plus for them) since it can only be larger than BluRay, and that can be upwards of 35 gigs. Most people can't be patient enough to max their connection for several hours to get a movie.

Now we have a whole other format for 4k that we can pay extra for to Netflix or Best Buy.

It seems like that's what I get for laying down cash in this economy for a 4k display system.

- Limited expensive options for content
- Much lower quality if I do streaming. Not all that much better than 1080p with the compression.

Only way I see this working is if the cable companies get on board and start pushing out set top boxes that can process 4k content delivered across that bandwidth instead.

For somebody that cut the cord, 4k ain't good enough to make me plug back in :)