We do, it's called Open ID, which is what Google leverages for their single-signon (not sure if FB is their own solution or not). It was a really popular thing about 5-10 years ago and got a ton of attention. I think even MS enabled it.

The problem with it is this: everyone was willing to let open their servers be the authenticating source for OpenID, but no one was willing to trust a 3rd party's servers to do the same.

So I can create identity authentication galore at mydomain.example.com, but if Google isn't willing to trust mydomain.example.com, then it's not very useful as a unified login authenticator.

Humans are very predictable when attempting to be random. Just using your dictionary example, the vast majority of people (say 75-95%) would pick something in the middle third of the dictionary, because opening to page A or page Z would instinctively be considered not random enough.

Just ask people to cut a deck of cards. It will be exceedingly rare for the the person to cut the deck anywhere but close to the middle 25% of the deck. It's clearly not a sufficient act of randomness, which is why we shuffle, not just cut the deck when playing card games. We have someone other than the dealer perform the cur operation as a simple test to limit the dealer's ability to cheat.

Same thing with a dictionary. Your approach can work, if everyone had sufficiently random dictionaries to begin with. But to the average person, picking a "random" word will result in word association, something psychologists have a field day studying.

The thing is, with a good password manager, there's no reason to have a weak password, even for the sites that you aren't worried about.

And there you hit the nail on the head. There is no *good* password manager. Safari's password generator and keychain comes close because it follows you between desktop and mobile devices, but it limits you to Apple's browsing products. Chrome is next best, but again, only works in Chrome browsers, and doesn't have built-in password generation.

I use Keepass and keep the secured file on dropbox to sync across devices. But yet again, limited to where I feel safe pulling from dropbox, and requires a 3rd party app that will be unavailable (or insecure) on shared devices. Plus, it's tedious to open, try to find what you're looking for, and copy/paste out. In-browser integration is required feature to actually get widespread adoption.

Have you ever needed to implement side-wide search functionality? (note, this is not the same thing as a global web search company like Google, Bing, etc)

If you have, and it involved anything more than turning on a checkbox in your platform, then you have almost undoubtedly encountered or considered Solr.

I'd blame most of the problems with CSS on the lack of support across browser vendors. It took soooo long for even the most basic features to be supported, that rendering differences lead to a culture of hacks (remember when people would put in explicitly invalid CSS to trigger certain IE behaviors?) because styles couldn't be built the right way.

Event today there are some fairly cool pieces of CSS (background-position: center center; background-size: cover) that are amazingly useful, but because of incomplete browser support, people end up with lots of extra HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Because using tables for layout was itself a hack.

Tables were meant for tabular content. You know, the kind of thing you might get out of a spreadsheet or report. The nice thing about tabluar content structure is you can have sort controls, or headers, footers, etc.

Try to achieve today's web designs with tables, and then try to place tabular content in the page.... yeah, good luck separating them and styling properly without CSS.

The worst part about table based layouts was that if you needed to remove or add something to the layout, you had to rework the entire layout table to make it work.

And even worse, once you start nesting languages within each other (like HTML inside a JSP, JS, PHP, etc...) then any attempts at consistency for indentation is completely unachievable.

There is a spectrum of opinion [wikipedia.org] on what "animal rights" means. At the very least, I think animal rights include the right not to suffer needlessly at the hand of humans. I doubt anyone would argue that is also a human right. So, continuing in that direction, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that many human rights can be accorded to animals also.

After seeing cats toy with mice to levels that would unquestionably be considered torture by every nation on Earth if a human was the victim, I have come to the conclusion that "animal rights" is inherently fictitious. Much like "innate rights" or "inalienable rights" for humans, we are merely appeasing our culturally-developed sense of morality, ethics, and guilt.

That's not to say those motivating factors aren't good things. In fact, quite the opposite. Clearly there is an evolutionary advantage to social cooperation and baseline rules of morality, otherwise we would not have developed these sociological phenomenon, let alone have the capacity to articulate and discuss them.

More tangibly, this reluctance to abuse other species with certain characteristics is what lead to the domestication of cooperatively useful species (dogs, cats, cattle, etc). But our moral compulsion should not be mistaken for some sort of universally true innate "right".

Order cable, or satellite TV.

Watch how the installers run lines around the outside of your domicile and then punch a hole through the wall to get into the specific room.

Do the same thing yourself with ethernet (use the right rating of cable, and add conduit if necessary).

** Bonus points: Do your research and check out a neighbor or friend's place instead of ordering services.

I don't have any active cooling in my home, but I get your point.

The savings I realized were just the direct power consumption of the fridge itself.

Living in a small studio apartment after college, I reduced my monthly power bill by about 20% simply by switching one of my 2-3 computers from a beige-box Celeron to a Mac mini.

This past summer, I reduced the power bill in my condo by 30% just by replacing the aging Energy-Star fridge with a new one.

Don't underestimate the impact of changing out appliances and optional items. Yes, heating/cooling is important. But outside of the month or so at opposite ends of the temperature spectrum, the majority of power consumption by things that can easily be changed with minimal lifestyle impact.

I think you're right... my coffee-addled brain was thinking of Windows 98SE

The code that turns up in most of the search results is trying to determine the correct executable and arguments to execute a command line (i.e. it picks the right one of "sh -c", "command.com /c", or "cmd.exe /c"). How would you propose doing this without determining what operating system you're running on?

In a parallel to Javascript approach, you do a quick check to both in a user-invisible way at initiation of runtime. If one (or both) errors out, then you set a flag indicating whether the call is available or not.

Apparently the JVM takes the OS reported info and constructs marketing-friendly variables.

So, blame Oracle as well! Between them and Microsoft, I'm sure there isn't anything they couldn't screw up.

Yes. Microsoft provided an API for version detection.

Developers were too lazy (or uniformed) to use it.