Certain kinds of products are moving online. But I have a feeling the electronic retail stores are making their money on selling refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs and everything else too big to fit an ordinary parcel. A lot of other goods are selling on look and feel where people want to see the actual product in person, I got burned on this before Christmas when I bought something that... I mean all the specs and images were correct, but it was just underwhelming in reality. I certainly don't think they're worse off than specialty stores. The thing is, when people look at specialty stores what they often want is the selection, not necessarily the service. Online stores can often have an even wider selection and really there's no better service than getting what you want. I guess if you really want useful help but I suffer from a general distrust of clerks/salesmen, are they really helping me or their profit margin. Most of the time I'd rather trust my own judgement.

I've can't decide if you're a troll or just lack sane opinions, you seem to hate on most things except AMD for which you have a major boner. The average person doesn't use an encoder, ever. The only reason they care about decoding formats is because they download stuff off the Internet want their MKV to work on their gizmo, not just their computer. Both "DivX 3.11 ;-)" and MKV gained popularity that way.

Ordinary users upload videos to YouTube, but they don't have any say in what codec/settings/resolution/bitrate Google chooses to use. The people who edit video want it in their save/export dialog of whatever editing software they use, which Google can do fuck all about and those who transcode for "the scene" are 99% fine using a CLI. They just don't give a shit about legality so if WebM beat H.264 they'd use it and it'd be popular. Absolutely nobody cares about encoder GUIs.

OK, when you put it like that it sounds pretty awesome. And delicious.

I'll bring the sauce, aloe vera and skin graft kit.

Isolated speaking, yes. However, you can consider it a cross-subsidy to enable other and presumably more worthy causes for high speed broadband than watching YouTube. Or you can assume that at some point we'll want higher bandwidth anyway for 4K TV so using a less efficient codec now means you're doing most of the roil-out for later when you'll use a more efficient codec. It's hardly unusual that creating less favorable conditions for some individuals may benefit the group as a whole or that different short-term incentives benefit the long term result.

Personally I consider broadband to be the electricity, telephone and running hot water of the 21st century, if you're not online you're more or less detached from contemporary society. Not that we all need to be on gigabit fiber, but dial-up just isn't cutting it anymore. Not like necessity of life because people lived without 100+ years ago and I guess in poorer parts of the world many do but it'd just not the way I'd like to live now.

And the ISS will help how, exactly? The entire ISS came from the Earth's surface. Unless you have a really fancy plan to do asteroid/lunar mining, that's where all future materials will ultimately come from too. The ISS is way, way down in Earth's gravity well so if you could do mining you wouldn't build it there anyway. We can assemble a ship in orbit with or without the ISS, nothing really gets easier. What we're building must have a crew module, so any astronauts working on assembly can just live there. Not that I really see the need, the assemblies could dock like spaceships do and just interlock with bolts.

Star Trek has ruined a generation's sanity when it comes to space stations. The only reason you'd want a space station is so you can have a ship come in for maintenance, repair, upgrades or refueling in orbit so they don't have to go down the gravity well. If all you're doing is sending ships out never to return, it's a total waste of time. Unless you get to the point where you have a shuttle taking things from Earth orbit and Mars orbit and returning for a refuel it doesn't make sense. And it probably doesn't make sense unless you can refuel in Mars orbit. Which means it's not happening in this century.

Space stations are not like gas stations where you just drop by as you pass one by. Unless you're planning to be in Earth orbit, entering Earth orbit to dock with the ISS and deorbiting to get to your destination costs a helluva lot of fuel. And that is the crux of the issue, it almost never makes sense to build a waypoint into your route as opposed to just going to whereever you were planning to go in the first place. If possible you might not even want to assemble in oribt, just launch multiple rockets on the same trajectory and have the bits assemble in zero g before firing off to their final destination.

That is wildly unrealistic with our current capabilities and well in the realms of fiction. In space you have countless problems when trying any kind of significant production, ranging from access to work force, access to hardware, having to lift all components and all machinery from the planet's gravity well into orbit, to things like power supply problems, cooling problems, highly hostile environment problems, and countless others.

Even if we had the technological capability to do what you suggest, the costs would outstrip making same things on the ground and then lifting them to orbit by what is likely order(s) of magnitude.

One should not throw stones when one lives in a house of glass. US is currently massively leading in top politicians making stupid talking points just to advance certain agenda, ranging from the entire Iran ordeal to the current conflict between branches of government that made country half-ungovernable.

The problem with that theory is that productivity gains have meant that we don't need twice as many people to produce twice as many goods.

Not true. Adjusted for inflation, the poor are less well-off than they were 30 years ago.

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

Did he file assault charges? Not discriminating means nobody gets a free pass for common assault.

SJWs see society as "us-vs-them." That will always end up badly. This lawsuit (Ellen Pao) was the same sort of shakedown her husband used to do, complaining about being discriminated against because he was black.

Well, if reddit fires her as CEO, she can always try DICE. :-(

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

I take it you don't use a charcoal barbecue

I'm not sure how you do it where you're from, but up here in the North we generally don't barbecue from 30 feet away.