so we know a much better format than WebP is technically available *now*. [...] It doesn't seem like a good idea to try to move to WebP when we know a better format is coming fairly soon (probably within a couple of years).

So what you are saying is that for the next few years (plus the past 4 years), WebP was available for you to use, better than mozjpeg is even now (and having a bunch of extra features like lossless compression, animations, alpha channel), but you will not use it because you are waiting for some hypothetical file format that may exist in a few year and will provide better compression?

Can we please have the old Mozilla back that was more interested in building a great browser than having petty conflicts over formats?

The word plasma was never mentioned in my comment.

A better "run command" dialog, a much improved window manager with amazing compositing, better screen management, bluetooth support, network management that didn't suck, hotplug device support, a more configurable taskbar that also includes launchers ('pinned' apps), pervasive search, shells for small-screen devices .. I could go on and on .. and that's only Plasma. The libraries also delivered huge improvements all over the place.

Sorry, I had most of this stuff in KDE 3.5? Yes, it was under different apps, some of them not part of KDE, but worked fine for me. And if all of this is so much better, why does it work so much worse?

Of course, for people who have made up their minds to rag on the 4.x series will make ridiculous claims like "rotating widgets were the only new thing". Get with reality, even if it .. no, ESPECIALLY if .. it runs counter to your pet ideas.

Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!

However, one thing I want to make clear, I have been using KDE4 for years exclusively (right up to this day), I have liked it a lot despite all the shortcomings. I went to the conferences, I contributed to KDE Look (remember that? That actually had good content back when there were still users), etc. And only now that I've been back to KDE 3.5 for a bit, I realized just how shitty KDE has become compared to what it was.

Exactly, I recently needed some files from an old hard drive and found myself in a KDE 3.5 installation. It was absolutely brilliant: fast, stable, no 'usability improvements' that removed features. Apps like Basket that never had a stable release in KDE4. I honestly don't know what it is that we have gained with KDE 4. Rotating widgets? Anyway, I still love KDE 4, and KDE is still (IMHO) the best desktop out there, but was it worth the transition to 4?

Did you ever land in fog? Noticed that in commercial airports, they usually don't bother with removing the fog?

Planes land with zero visibility all the time.

Just use images with a proper license and a company that is willing to license to you under terms that are not so fuzzy. CC sucks because it is so unspecific and creative types just don't understand the ramifications and limits of their choices. The sad thing is that the world would be a better place if CC never came into existence, because then you would at least have had a chance for proper public licenses to evolve.

Otherwise, you are a company, so you could probably just open up a sixpack of lawyers if you ever get into problems.

As for your stated problem, if you documented it for yourself that this was some specific license, then the courts can probably entice Flickr to just state what license was valid at the time.

Yeah, because there's no way to abuse a USB port from a piracy perspective.

What's up with all the glorified pedometers these days? When I read 'fitness tracker' I was thinking about something that tracks your fitness, not just your steps. He could also install any of the thousands of pedometer apps on his android phone and be done with it.

Wish I had modpoints to mod this to -2, but Soulskill, you are definitely one of the top 3 best editors Slashdot has had, don't listen to these idiots.

We have this stuff here in Netherlands at one of the biggest providers (Ziggo). It seemed great to me at first, but turned out pretty much useless.

The problem is, these are home routers inside homes, this means they are low powered, not at ideal locations (not many homes in the mall, highway, train, etc), and also inside usually thick walls that stop a lot of the signal. It's just a frustrating experience, with your phone often falling in and out of connection and such. The 4G network gives a much better experience.

Actually it can get worse, especially if they have a relatively even split. There are different reasons for it, but the most obvious way that works is that it 'looks' more like a free market situation, tricking people into believing they are paying a fair price, and making it hard for monopoly watchdogs to do something to a party that has a minority share.

Moto X was a relatively expensive phone, with low specs. If you had $600 dollars to spend on a phone (either yourself or through contract subsidies), there would be very little reason to pick Moto X. The main attraction of the Moto X is that there are many variants in terms of colors and materials, and that's what you pay a premium for. Problem is, in this price range you already have lots of choices for very nicely designed phones, many with better specs. What's left is a niche market that is willing to pay a premium for stuff like a wooden phone back on a otherwise mediocre phone. That's still some market. However, I don't see how you can expect that to sell as well as a cheap phone with good specs like Moto G.

Also, the article suggests in tone that Moto X and phones like Moto X sell better in asia, but the fact is Moto X hasn't sold well anywhere. It's just completely different phones like Moto G that are doing well.

The comments back then were so much better that this link made me homesick for good old Slashdot. Still entertaining to read, but what happened?

I agree that most of what is written there sounds like nonsense, but to be pedantic, carbon as the name of an organic substance predates the discovery of atoms by a vast amount of time. To be even more pedantic, a common definition of an organic compound is that the molecule contains carbon.

Note the 'Virgin Galactic astronaut wings', not Nasa or US. Nothing is stopping you from handing out Mobydisk Astronaut Wings for playing Kerbal.

If you have a site where an attacker would have bothered with the elaborate process of getting the private key, and then do MITM attacks with it on users, and it would actually matter, you wouldn't have used StartSSL in the first place, and $25 would be absolutely nothing for you.

Hint: not you