> I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap.

It sounds like those conversations are with people you don't know. Which is odd, as FB an G+ are centred around networks of people who know each other. Hence the G+ invite-only thing. If you want to have meaningful conversations with people you *don't* know, the Internet has been providing that since it started (and BBSs before that). You already have it here on /. There's also Reddit. Heck, there are things called "forums" all over the place, which served as social networks decades before "social networks" came along.

I don't think G+ provides anything new in the way of meaningful discussions with strangers who share interests. The internet's had that covered in thousands of ways for a long time.

> some ridiculous ad immediately preceding a listening.

For Firefox or Chrome, use the AdBlock Plus addon.

> I'd also love to make the scourge of autoplay go away somehow

For Chrome, google "stop html5 autoplay" there are a couple of addons for that.

I use Adblock Plus in Firefox and never see ads in YouTube, ever. It's a must-have addon to bring sanity to the Web.

> study after study has shown that older programmers consistently outperform younger programmers

I'd like to read those, do you have any links?

> Why do women constantly get to claim they feel uncomfortable and expect the world to rush in and see to it that reality meets with their expectations?

Same reason racist jokes are not acceptable - after hundreds of years of conflict, hate and discrimination based on race.

Same reason antisemitism is a big deal - the deaths of millions of people.

So think about how women have been treated over TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS by men. Should we be somewhat conscious of that past? I think so.

We don't go around saying to black people, or gay people, "look it's all fine now, hey a black president, just move on!" So why do we think women should just suddenly be ok with everything and men don't have any responsibility for making them feel comfortable, welcome and safe? We do, simply because of history. Women have been treated a lot worse than blacks and jews and gays put together, over a much longer period of time, and still are.

Even if you think history doesn't count, just considering that women still don't get paid equally to men, makes any argument such as yours null and void.

> My guess is that after this sequel comes out, we'll be trying to 'unsee it' and waxing poetic about how original and thought provoking the original was, and how flat, and full of fail this film is.

The tragedy is, it's obvious that if they really cared about these movies, they wouldn't even attempt to make sequels. They don't care, they just see the sequels as bankable. Producing soul-destroying sequels to original masterpieces still makes lots of money, as Lucas very effectively revealed. The fact they're doing a sequel at all means they don't care, which is a shame. As such, it deserves to be shunned, but it won't be.

> To expand on this is there any plugin which can stop all canvas pop-ups?

Not that I've seen, but if it's a site you frequent then try using the Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus. Once you learn a little about HTML, enough to understand how the hiding works, I find it *very* effective at removing the popups, and anything else on a site that I want to remove for one reason or another (usually distracting sidebar stuff).

> Is there an extension that blocks these "We'd like your feedback" messages that seem to be popping up on every single site lately?

Not that I've seen, but if it's a site you frequent then try using the Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus. Once you learn a little about HTML, enough to understand how the hiding works, I find it *very* effective at removing the popups, and anything else on a site that I want to remove for one reason or another (usually distracting sidebar stuff).

> Elite Panic is big business.

Or perhaps they got to be the elite by being big thinkers, long term planners and utter realists. Any scientist will tell you that it's inevitable that a major disease, comet impact, climate change, etc. will come and wipe out millions of people. It IS inevitable. But most people hate thinking stuff like that, won't take such things seriously in their lives, and will never feel compelled to do anything. Most feel they couldn't do anything about it anyway. The elite, however, are used to thinking big, aren't afraid to try big things, and are more likely to look reality square in the face - that's how they got there in the first place. Yes, reality - reality is money and power in a human civilisation. (That they created that system themselves isn't a problem or irony in their minds - they are proud of it.)

> What always bothered me about the balloon analogy

That's because it's an analogy - they're not meant to be perfect representations of reality.

> By some measures of success, sure.

Well, by the ones that count. They can't be doing that much wrong.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gr...

But this is off topic I suppose, not about .NET specifically. It's just odd seeing people say "Microsoft is done", but praise Google, even though Google also made a lot of stuff that went nowhere in the market (Glass, G+), or makes no money. These companies get so much revenue across the board, they can afford to experiment and mess up here and there.

I think MS is just a popular punching bag out of habit, as this whole post demonstrates. I hardly ever comment, but still had to offer my 2c to this one. :)

> the very last piece of the technology business that Microsoft dominates

A business doesn't have to dominate a market to do well. That's a very recent perception, caused by the monster successes of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc - each dominating a particular market (or two), but not doing amazingly well in others. Microsoft is a different business to those, in that they have fingers in lots of pies. They can afford to be struggling in some markets. MS isn't just .NET and Windows. This is a quick list of MS stuff anyone would consider successful products in the marketplace:

Exchange Server
Sharepoint
SQL Server
MS Office / Office 365
IIS / Azure
Visual Studio
Windows Mobile (as a phone/tablet product)
Windows Phone (modest uptake but at least it's competition)
MS Hardware - keyboards, mice, game controllers, etc.
XBox

That's not a complete list, and then there's MS Research division. I don't think one can compare Microsoft to many other companies, except of course Apple and Google, who also diversify a great deal. You can compare open source products like *nix, Eclipse, etc. to *specific MS products* but to say MS as a whole is in trouble because of individual examples of market share is, I think, illogical. MS is a huge beast and has a lot of talent. They need to be more agile, but that can be done. We will see with the new leadership.

What I do is use the UAControl addon for Firefox, which lets you specify a browser User Agent string on a per-site basis. This lets me tell Google that I'm actually using an old, outdated version on Firefox, and tada, Google always gives me the older, "simpler" version of their search results, which I find much much easier to use.

https://addons.mozilla.org/En-...

Settings:
Site: www.google.com
UA string: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.1

Search now looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/Yo3neuU.png
Nice and simple, the way it used to be.
Note the lack of ads - just use the AdBlock Plus addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/...

> Is it just me or is Orbital Sciences' track record extremely poor?

I guess it's both of you then. :)

> Our leader removed the minister for science!

The U.S. doesn't have a secretary for science either. Some countries do, others don't.

> He has reduced funding for our science organization [sic]* CSIRO

organiSation - Australian spelling. Yes this is very unfortunate, as are the ABC funding cuts. Hopefully it's a temporary situation - force an organisation to re-think priorities, then later review. It's an "easy" (for government) way of forcing an organisation to cut things it doesn't really feel are necessary - forcing it to "re-focus". Very clumsy and "blunt instrument" way of doing it (as opposed to an actual independent review) but that's government for you.

> condemned renewable energy

He's said a lot of stupid things, but happily Abbott has now rejected cutting the renewable energy target.

> promoted coal

Because other countries buy it. One can't really tell a country not to market their natural resources.

> destroyed our manufacturing sector

That happened a long time ago, not caused by the current government.

> and is pushing to make university only for the rich.

Not intentionally, but "deregulation" is what the Liberal Party has always been about, like the Republicans in the U.S. People should know that and vote accordingly. You can't blame a party for being what it is. Deregulation should be expected from them, it's not Abbott in particular.

However, Abbott lied through his teeth about all their policies prior to the election, and that you *can* blame a party for. There should be a law to invalidate an election when that happens - how can you have voting and Democracy when politicians do the complete opposite to everything they said up to the election? That's the *real* crime here. If they had been honest and up front about everything before the election, they would not have gotten in at all. That shouldn't be too much to expect in a modern country.

> I just graduated with a degree in chemical and biological engineering

May I ask what country you studied in? In the U.S (and now soon in Australia) it is very hard to just "go back to school", if not impossible for many people, purely from a financial point of view. For many people, in terms of study & changing careers, there are only 1 or 2 chances.