People keep suggesting things like this.

Sony puts a rootkit on a CD? Boycott. Apple tells you you're holding your iPhone wrong? Boycott.

Problem is it's nonsense. A boycott is the fiscal equivalence of silence. Your favorite restaurant changes the way they make ? Boycott is the equivalent of "go somewhere else." Well, that sucks. How about "tell the manager/owner you don't like the new recipe"? Try communicating that you're unhappy and why with them. Otherwise your absence means nothing. It's statistically lost in seasonal variance, for instance.

So, for this, send a letter to the company explaining your problem. Send them a "do not like" letter, basically. Boycott alone is meaningless.

No, no, you missed it... a homeless guy makes a dubious claim. Seriously, a guy who has been homeless for six years is the basis for this thing, with him concluding that technology is desensitizing non-homeless.

It's an even bigger chunk of turd than you thought. This guy isn't a long-time homeless person who might plausibly be able to compare today to the golden yesteryear of homelessness. He doesn't provide anything even resembling evidence, just "you know, e-mail makes people lose their empathy".

I call bullshit. Being homeless makes you notice that people are today - and always have been - insensitive to the plight of the homeless, on average. This dude just never noticed how homeless are treated six years ago when he had a mother, a wife, a house, and a rip-roaring drug habit.

Just because that's an interesting assertion, I'd be interested in the required citation.

Nobody lynched him. He spoke, he was told that what he said was shitty, he quit his job because he recognized saying shitty things was going to hurt his employer. Free speech happened.

Because there are serious legal situations that surround marital status.

Because when my wife isn't entitled to my health care benefits because we don't have a kid, it's your fault. Because when my wife isn't permitted the same power-of-attorney benefits when I am ill, infirm, and/or dead, it's your fault. Because when my wife isn't allowed to visit me in a hospital situation that permits "only family", it's your fault.

Don't you get it that impinging on these sort of "benefits" makes you a bad person?

This world is not wanting for more human beings. By not adding to the human burden on the planet we are actually being responsible. But you'll happily treat us as lesser people because we don't have the same biological imperative that you do. Did I mention bad person? Personally I can't see how a hetero couple that doesn't/can't have kids is somehow lesser than someone who knocks up his wife so she can birth a kid they can raise as yet another bigot.

I don't have a horse in the gay/straight race, being hetero, but I sure as heck can tell right from wrong.

If.

What a huge prideful assumption. That life has purpose at all is a huge assumption. Life has behavioral traits... that's it. We are no more Von Neumann sludge than we are amoeba. I'm sure you've disregarded sterile human beings as non-life all along, yes? And you've disregarded humans who simply choose to not have children as non-life, yes? I'm sure you're busy lobbying for laws that make it mandatory for every human female to be pregnant as often as is possible to guarantee healthy offspring for her entire fertile life, then be euthanized, yes? And every male needs to prove that he's impregnated a female every nine months or be persecuted and eventually terminated, yes?

Purpose. There is no purpose. Life - on average - breeds. That doesn't mean every instance of every living species must do so or even should do so. It doesn't even imply it.

Bullshit. Political correctness is referring to a gay man as "a person of alternate sexual proclivities". Political correctness is passing policies that mandate one fourth of your female workforce must be lesbians because one in four women have had a girl-girl experience.

This is a man who took a high-profile job and was outed as a bigot. A man who thinks that it's worth paying money to impose his opinions one where someone else sticks their dick. A man who doesn't believe that gay people are people. That's not rhetoric, that's the way it is. Being against gay marriage is almost always on the grounds that "marriage is a sacred bond between man and woman", directly indicating that any other coupling is wrong and bad, and that those who engage in such practices should be penalized by being denied the same rights hetero-married enjoy.

Modern, enlightened society caught up with this guy when he took a job with visibility. Sorry, but him and his cro-magnan-thinker buddies just aren't right for this kind of a job because they taint the brand they represent.

You don't understand... it is not expected, required, or desired that you know the law. It is expected, required, and desired that you pay a lawyer to do so for you. Yes, for everything you do.

Mine says it's okay for me to hit Submit so here goes...

You know that birth rates are highest in areas where mortality rates are highest, right? It's not the stable, healthy, wealthy nations that are producing huge numbers of humans. It's the struggling, starving and poor nations that are breeding in excess. Part of longevity assumes appropriate availability of heath and nourishment resources. There's a strong reason to suspect that if we were effectively immortal, our birth rates would drop to sustainable rates, or less.

And then there's the simple fact that it frequently DOESN'T WORK. I frequently - as an administrator - use command prompts. So I press the Start button and type "cmd". Maybe three times out of ten on various systems owned by my customers, if I do this too quickly, Win7 simply gives up. It displays nothing. It looks like it's maybe thinking about it, but meanwhile I'm waiting. And waiting. And it doesn't work. So I hit backspace to go back to "cm". That usually doesn't help. So I add the "d" again and usually I get the search to find CMD.

Yay.

Just a guess, but if Columbia itself had less than 4% of the delta-V required to match orbits, I'd think another ship with about 4% of the delta-V required nets you nowhere anywhere even remotely near "meet half way". Worse, once you've met half way, what's your next move? You've burned at least ten times as much fuel as you actually have just to get there. You've got (up to) twice the crew chewing up consumables in an orbit that's nowhere near anything else.

I don't think so. Regulated fund-raising might not be such a bad thing. Certainly it'd reduce fraud if folks had to demonstrate a legitimate need accountability structure.

On an unrelated note, since I don't live in Finland I was wondering if you'd like to donate to my cause? It's called:

Prevent Children From Getting Sick, Ever BBMAH*
Insert a bunch of statistics here about how kids get sick all the time, from all sorts of preventable causes. Seriously, a big wall of text going on and on about the needless suffering of children throughout the world. Add a bunch of pictures of kids with sores on them, maybe flies crawling around. Basically National Geographic meets Apocalypse Now.
*By Buying Me A House

Now if the new improvement was that you only needed half of the detergent to get your whites whiter and therefore you'd spend half as much per load, sure, there'd be an argument.

This isn't that. This is the digital equivalent of "the box now has toxic printing on it, and the detergent inside has each granule conveniently packaged in concrete. But we provide you a small hammer."

Look, this is unpleasant to look at in at least four ways. The horizontal layout wastes a massive amount of screen space. The vertical layout wastes a massive amount of screen space. The background colour together with the default font reduce readability. And despite all of this, less information is shown at any given time.

Would you like us to disable UAC, DEP, and our antivirus software in order to use this too? Do we need root/administrator rights to view your site? Perhaps we need the latest beta of .NET or JRE?

My point is that this is a huge step backwards in usability. The point behind Chrome, Firefox, and IE reducing the amount of UX is to make it possible to display more content. Don't take the increased screen space created by making the status bar, menu bar, URL bar, title bar, tabs, buttons, and in fact UI of the browser and then show me reduced content.

You. Are. Doing. It. Wrong.

I. WILL. Leave.

Am I in some way unclear here? I'm not threatening. I'm calmly explaining. The content value of this site is not so high that I will tolerate this reduction in functionality. I know, I know. You've got some assclown marketing guy who tells you that we'll all just... give it one try, because we can't go without our fix. And we'll get used to it.

I'm informing you that I won't. On principle. Because if you're willing to say "fuck you" this loudly to me, I'm willing to say the same right back.

You're missing that people do want their product. Avoiding the product altogether sends a false message that the product isn't wanted. What we don't want is the packaging.

The closest equivalent to buying a physical product and throwing its packaging away is buying a DRM product and pirating the content. Once I've paid for the content, it's mine morally, ethically, and logically. It's just the law that needs work.

Throw away the packaging and tell the manufacturer why.

Two things:
1} Healthcare is truly important while this TSA nonsense isn't. So yeah, that'd be good.
2} Just because one project authorized by a group is done improperly doesn't mean that all - or even any - other project will be done improperly.