And that...is why you fail.

JS is NOT a big contender for PHP, because it isn't the functional equivalent of the double-clawed hammer.

The unwashed masses gravitate to PHP because it is very easy to get something running and imposes almost no restrictions on the developer. Thus, we get nightmares like phpBB and vBulletin.

I'm about halfway between the two extremes: I find ads jarring and disruptive to the narrative of programs. It is especially unpleasant to watch a movie on TV. A movie "enjoyed" in this fashion is essentially a butchery of the original picture, with TV commercials awkwardly inserted every 20 minutes or so. TV shows are slightly-less-bad in that the writers of the show at least know where the commercials will go, but that's annoying and makes shows predictable since you we've all, by this point, become adept at recognizing the rhythm of TV shows... how many times have you looked at your watch or phone and "known" it was going to end with a " To Be Continued..."?

It's because you know how shows work--their narratives all flow int he same basic patterns because of TV commercial breaks.

Yes, THIS.

I am stunned at how UGLY windows 8 and Office 2013 are. Last night my s.o. asked me to work on a 50-page doc on her new corp laptop with Office 2013, and the default layout/ribbon/color combo was so shockingly bad... it's hard to see the edge of the page in page layout, outline mode is hidden, strict styles are hopelessly broken, 30% of the screen is devoted to finger-pokey whitespace. Ugh. She hates the machine and usually uses it only for corp email.

So I mailed the doc to myself and picked it up on a Linux machine, and happily edited in Office 2010. But the thing that slays me is how really great MS Office 2010 (or 2003) works on top of Linux. Word 2010 is *faster* running in Wine on top of Mint or Ubuntu than it is on Windows 8 on the same hardware. Aside from corp websites that require IE10 for SSO, why in the world would I use Win 8 when it's slower and buggier than freely downloadable commie OS distros.... which have better-thought-out unified interfaces?

So the Surface is going to turn this around? With a flaccid keyboard, and a kickstand idea they ganked from Archos' android tablets 5 years ago?

I think MSFT remains in real trouble. Sure there's a mountain of money and Nadella is shuffling things like mad, but the company's become like a 10-million-horsepower Buick with a crap transmission, resulting in no torque whatever. It's comfy and we're going to coast for a long time, but nothing really interesting is gonna happen.

They have a vision, all right: About annoying human beings with advertisements at every waking moment. The part I suggested they were overlooking was the part where it is, at present, illegal to do what they're talking about doing. Yes, of course, they're google and they have scads of money to buy whatever laws they want, but I mean today.

For now, because there are so many of us old-fogeys from a time before advertisement skipping was possible/easily accessible to the masses.

Once we die off the advertisers are in for a world of shock: Young people do not tolerate advertisements. Without exception, NONE of the people I know under the age of 25 listen to the radio (and thus radio commercials) in their car, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of older people still do. Among that group, also, most won't watch TV without having the show recorded on DVR either entirely, or at least enough of it recorded to time-shift the start long-enough so they can zap the commercials.

They've been raised to be advertising-averse by the sheer volume of crap that's been shoved in their faces their entire lives. It's funny, but kids are actually smarter than us in a lot of ways.

You may be right, since by definition that person isn't "driving" anymore in his robot-car.

But since the other side of the robot-car equation is that most people won't own their own cars anymore because it would be essentially unnecessary, cars would become a much more communal resource--more like a taxicab that everybody owns. But unlike a taxicab, passengers are likely to be alone in the cars frequently, so it wouldn't surprise me if advertisement surfaces were regularly vandalized.

And if that means nobody can ride in the car until the advertising screen is repaired (because it's also the "enter your destination" screen) then I guess that's too bad, and maybe Google shouldn't be trying to skeeve more ad impressions out of us.

As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail: With the exception of navigation and car-control, the driver cannot be in a position to view moving video or flashy graphics--it's explicitly illegal to design a car in such a way that such garish distraction could catch the driver's eye at a critical moment.

As for the rest: I know of few people that would do anything other than smash the screen out of a refrigerator that was blaring ads at them every time they walked past (since what's the point of showing ads when the door is opened and, presumably, the "screen" is facing away from the person you're trying to show an ad to?) so I imagine that's going to cut-down on their response-rate on those ads.

In short, I'm fucking laughing thinking about how disappointed they're likely to be. Humans are already on advertising overload--it was 5,000 impressions per day per person TWENTY YEARS AGO, before the Internet even existed. I can't even guesstimate how much ad-crap we see now... Probably a fair-bit more than 5,000 impressions per day, though.

True enough, but not exactly the poster-child we'd like espousing the point of view that the government is fucked and needs desperately to be reformed.

Actually, he was a kook before this happened--his idea of fun was rape-trolling. Hardly an upstanding citizen to start with. It's part of the reason the feds felt so free to mistreat him--they knew his political views would make him toxic-waste for any activists trying to stick up for him. I'm also not discounting the possibility that they knew who this guy was and jumped at the chance to try and make anything stick just to see a world-class asshole get his comeuppance.

Here's what's likely to happen: He'll get a lawyer who will tell him 1) You have a good lawsuit here, perhaps several, but 2) they'll never pay you in bitcoin, ever, and 3) Shut your goddamn mouth so you don't poison every potential juror on earth, because these swine will ALL roll the dice on trials with "official capacity lawsuit" lawyers defending them, so your best hope is to have jurors not know you're "pro-toddler murder" until AFTER the civil trial is over.

Then he'll either shut up and collect his money and fade into obscurity or go for his 15-minutes-as-Cliven-Bundy and then fade into obscurity, but not before developing a lucrative right-wing/nutter following that he'll exploit through book sales and speaking fees.

I was with him right up until he revealed his love of deranged, hillbilly trash like McVeigh. Weev did get a raw deal, but it is worth mentioning that the people in the justice system (that run it) are in fact people, and people (flawed as they are) love seeing assholes (like Weev) get their comeuppance. And given what an asshole he is, I'd say that comeuppance was a long time coming.

But hey, good news for him: He now has a legitimate cause to fight for the rest of his life. If this keeps him from discrediting other causes through his support (this manifesto essentially makes Weev completely toxic to any political activism on any topic, forever, period) then we should consider it a net win.

Really? The label I'd apply would be "deranged hillbilly trash," but I guess to each their own, eh?

Actually, a couple of NSA's sub-programs relate specifically to industrial-espionage in the oil industry. So it is total hypocrisy.

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