What sites are so damned slow? It's not the Javascript in most cases, it's the asset loading. The tubes are still the bottleneck on the web.

If anything, Javascript is speeding things up. AJAX content updates without a full page refresh are commonplace now, and there are more and more sites that are mostly client-side, using frameworks like Backbone.

They would get a lot more done when they finish their transition over to Git (although they should seriously consider Github instead of whatever custom thing they're building). I've had things to contribute, mostly bugfixes for modules, but the whole community is still stuck on CVS and patch files, so it was too much of a pain to do.

There's one here in the US called the Franklin Mint that does the same thing.

There is something *seriously* wrong with a Content Management System if it prompts someone to write a book on how to use it for editing content.

Never mind the nightmarish coding practices that developers have to deal with, the always-one-version-behind modules, views in the database, or all the other things that make Drupal a pain to work with. The first thing a CMS should do is make content administration simple.

Hopefully Drupal 7 will solve some of these problems...

Being able to amend the Constitution is exactly what is meant by the term "living document".

I'd rather have Adobe create a 64bit browser plugin for non-Linux platforms. The x64 build of Firefox (Minefield) on MacOS 10.6 was nice and fast, but I couldn't use it for a surprisingly high number of sites just because of the lack of Flash support.

And the alpha version for Linux has been "in development" for what, 3 years now?

I know this is a bit late for a response, but...

They don't just mow down the field and turn it all into Cheerios, otherwise you'd have lots of leaves and stalks from the wheat plants in your cereal bowl.

Anyway, such monoculture is unsustainable, especially when combined with our current industrial agriculture practices. It ruins and erodes the soil, is dependent on petroleum and herbicides, and is beginning to require plants with genetic modifications.

It works much better without the sarcasm tags. Repeat that over and over, and perhaps you'll get it.

There is something wrong with such a lack of biodiversity, especially when you consider that approximately 40% of the land in the US is currently cultivated like this.

If only I had mod points today...

Would this affect legality of "normal" drinks like coffee porters/stouts? How about Irish coffee?

Maybe now that Thawte is making email certification less useful (and more expensive), clients like Thunderbird and Mail.app will start to prefer GPG/PGP. That's all I can hope for anyway, since GPGMail for Mail.app is now broken under Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future.

Only if you purchased a new computer from Apple after June 8th.

Are we so sure that intelligent life on distant planets will follow the same path as us? Especially after reading Daniel Quinn's books, it seems far more likely that intelligent beings are living in a similar way that ancient humans did. Complex monocultures like ours seem to be the exception, not the rule, and they are relatively very short-lived (ours was started about 10k years ago, according to Quinn, while the modern human species has been around for much longer).

I don't think there's any reason to assume that other beings will wipe themselves out so quickly (why shouldn't they survive and adapt for millions of years?), but since great technological achievements seem to require an unsustainable lifestyle of conquest and over-use of resources, we might not have much luck contacting or being contacted by them.

(As I'm posting this, I realized that this post is similar to mine, and is probably better written...)

Competition isn't the reason -- it's that we have far too many people on the planet at the expense of other species and our own well-being. I don't see the reason for specifying more than three, though, when the average is already below that, and it still results in population growth. Two should be the maximum.

However, according to people like Daniel Quinn, laws such as this would not do much good. Instead, the food supply must stabilize and slowly shrink.