Yahoo has been terribly managed, and Mozilla Foundation is rapidly getting worse.

It appears that Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than saved before.

Other obvious bugs were introduced. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released.

If many windows and tabs are open for a long time, Firefox now crashes in a way that does not cause a crash report to be sent.

"Robots don't kill people. Robot programmers kill people."

In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of police officers trained and deployed on the streets and hiring Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (thanks to the efforts of former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted children made possible by Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally in all major cities -- "[e]ven in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing"."

However, it looks like the drop in crime is most closely correlated with the fall in environmental lead (mostly from reducing the used of leaded gasoline). Since other places have seen their crime rate fall without drastic changes in policing, what do you think of the lead and crime connection? See also:
"America's Real Criminal Element: Lead; New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

I was one of the original Kickstarter funders.

I threw my money into the pot because I got so much fun and game play out of the original Elite. Basically I thought David Braben and his team had already earned it. Am I disappointed that there's no single player offline? Yes, I am. My home internet connection has a long ping time (it's via satellite) so multiplayer combat was never going to work for me. It may be, for that reason, the game won't work at all - FOR ME. But I'm not making a fuss.

Basically if you back a kickstarter you're taking a risk. This kickstarter has enabled an amazing game to be built, and lots of people will get a huge amount of fun out of it; as far as I'm concerned, my money's well spent.

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

I've been thinking about translating it to JavaScript...

Thanks for being an (indirect) inspiration, Raymond. Hope you are on to even better things!

http://www.seedsavers.org/ "Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Since 1975, our members have been passing on our garden heritage by collecting and distributing thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. "

"The best analogy in the Windows world for systemd is the Win95 registry..."

The Windows registry was designed to make it very, very difficult for people to make copies of software to use on another computer. The Windows registry was intentional obfuscation, and very much against the needs of users, because of the huge amounts of time it takes to understand and fix problems with the registry.

A comment below says, "SystemD is RedHat's version of embrace and extend." That seems a better explanation. The way it is being done is certainly deliberate. Starting a big hassle that damages the reputation of Linux is certainly against the needs of the users.

It seems that the entire U.S. culture is becoming more adversarial. For example, there are health care insurance policies that are written in such a way that the insured will not understand that they aren't being fully covered.

Companies are deliberately over-billing. Many people cannot afford the time to find all the ways they are being treated badly.

First step: Make providers publish their prices on a government web site, and actually charge those prices. Have big fines for charging more. That would help prevent over-billing.

Seven minutes to fly up and down three feet; that's almost impossible to imagine.

Insert union labour joke here

In 2008, banks arranged bank failures that caused job loss. That allowed companies to fire 10% of their staff and make the other 90% do the work because the 90% were afraid they would lose their jobs, also.

People are so overworked that they don't feel they have time to investigate over-billing. Companies take advantage of that by being as difficult as possible. It's deliberate dishonesty and becoming a standard way U.S. companies do business.

(I imagine that English is a 2nd language for the parent commenter.)