I honestly don't have too many gripes about the redesign. You can still get to the old menu by hitting alt and the drag and drop UI customization flows are better than before. The tabs? meh, they were fine before, they're fine now. Moving the old orange firefox drop-down to the right side and re-arranging the buttons ala Chrome? Meh. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I still use it because performance is decent, it's reasonably stable and I feel like Mozilla is slightly less interested in spying on everything I do than Google is.

Also, I've noticed that Firefox has lost a lot of market share in the past few years, which probably means it will be less of a target for hackers going forward.

> This exact sort of behavior made Detroit the smoking crater it is today.

Not really.

There may be some parallels, but Detroit was mostly a different situation. The Detroit lower classes did not actively try to push away those with money the way the SF leaches are trying to do. In Detroit, there were decades of major race relation problems that culminated in black riots in the downtown core. This scared the white middle-class who pretty much all picked up and moved to the suburbs willingly.

In SF, the complainers are a small group of mostly young, white folks who are bored, unemployed and looking for handouts to sustain their leach-like lifestyle.

Oh and I'm never traveling outside of a tour group in Central or South America. Just the thought of having to come up with the right incantation and bribe for a dollar-a-day cop on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere gives me anxiety.

What I really want in the new design, is easier access to SlashDataCenter and SlashCareers.... oooooh and SlashBI. I really can't get enough 'Business Intelligence' news formatted as a two paragraph article with a large stock image and zero comments!

"The Premium package gives you access to all your streaming favorites like YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix along with dozens of foreign movie sites you've never heard of.
The Friends & Family package gives you access to the people you want to keep in touch with, when you want to keep in touch with them, over your favorite NSA-sponsored proprietary social networking site: FacePalmSpace.
Our Adults-Only package allows you to stream all your favorite German Scheiße porn tube sites!"

Don't think so? Bookmark me, wait a couple years, then come back and mod me "Insightful".

> "This could have great applications in sound insulation of motorways"

Last I checked, the screams of children within neighborhoods protected by motorway sound barriers were not a major nuisance or safety hazard for motorists.

Or are we just brainstorming ideas without any thought behind them?

A one way sound barrier makes sense if you have an application where you actually need sound to go through in one direction. If you don't, then a wall is a better and almost certainly cheaper solution.

Are you familiar with the flying spaghetti monster? That is also a theory of creation. Using your logic, it must also be taught.

So to be an upstanding Atheist in your world, one must equally trash all religions all the time, regardless of the issue or region?

The issue here is that Christian fundamentalists have commandeered science curricula in publicly-funded schools to teach creationism. If we were talking about cartoonists in Norway caricaturing Mohammed and still bashing Christians, then you'd have an actual point.

Creationism is a concept, I might add, that both Judaism and Islam are proponents of, however, neither Jewish nor Muslim groups or schools are pushing creationist content to children in publicly-funded schools anywhere in this country (USA). It's Christian fundamentalists that are overstepping their bounds. Hence the desire to single them out.

Furthermore, Christians are the majority in this country and have enjoyed an historically unequal sway on government and policy, so you damn well better accept the fact that Christians will take more heat when overstepping their bounds as it affects more people.

Mod this up. This is a good analogy. How many people die annually in this country of obesity-related causes? Automobile accidents? Murders (with or without guns)?

Now compare that with all terrorist deaths in the past 20 years.

You can't justify what's being done (wars, unconstitutional laws and practices) in the name of protecting us from this albeit scary sounding, but relatively inconsequential threat. Dismantle the war machine.

Because I and a million others could have (and often did) tell you this would be the case back when I first tried a late Win8 preview build. MS could have had multiple times the current market share had they simply not *forced* Metro on people who didn't want it. You know, like do a quick check upon install to see if the PC is a touchscreen tablet and then default to the desktop with a classic Start Menu if you weren't on an appropriate device.

Instead, they chose to piss off tons of people by forcing their phone interface on people who use office applications. And now two years later, they get the market share they more or less deserve.

Don't forget:

http://www.mondelezinternational.com/brand-family

Look, his uncle was probably as much a despicable character as any in the NK ruling party, likely performing or being complicit in any number of crimes against humanity, so no real loss to the human race here in all likelihood. What I find disturbing though is that Jong-Un has displayed callous disregard for human life in recent months in order to maintain complete control over the population.

I had high hopes for him when I learned that he'd been schooled in Switzerland, spoke English and had made positive comments in the past about the plight of the NK people. I figured he was young, idealistic, and maybe not all that different from myself -- had I been placed into a very difficult situation due to my family lineage. If placed in such a situation, I imagine that for a year or two I might have acted the part (whatever that means) in order to maintain control long enough to come up with a plan to bring some level of reforms to the country and ensure a longer-term transition to democracy.

Then again, you never really hear about a dictator who had a change of heart and became 'sane' after being able to operate with complete impunity for a while. I guess it's true when they say absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It seems that his age and boyish looks belie the fact that Jong-Il chose and groomed his successor very carefully.

It's true. The overall rate at which Firefox adds features is not really much different than in the past. The difference is that they trickle the features out every 6 weeks instead of a big dump once a year. That's just fine with me, as plugins rarely break anymore and overall stability and speed is much better than Firefox 4.0 and older. Yes, I said that and believe it to be true.

between so called 'legitimate software' and botnets these days anyway?

Each is used to collect data that can be analyzed for profit in various ways. Legitimate software, you might argue, provides actual value to the end-user, is not surreptitiously installed and doesn't exploit software vulnerabilities. However, if that's all it takes to be legit, then witness the gobs of commercial software (not to mention greyware) out there that fit the definition of 'legit', but in actuality provide only the thinnest veneer of value behind a EULA so broad that it allows the software vendor to pretty much do as they please across your hard drive and Internet connection.

Won't work because most stockholders don't care enough to vote and even if they did, most shares are owned through proxy via mutual funds so most of the voting rights are in the hands of a few major players anyway.