Nah; the people who still use the web haven't seen much of anything "ruined". They see the web they've long seen, just with a larger set of web sites each month, and maybe a few new features in their browsers. It's just the suckers that succumb to the vendors' enticements into their Walled Gardens that think things have changed. If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets), they'd see that the web is chugging along as it always has, some parts of it good and other parts not so good.

The fact that the marketers have pushed their New! Improved! products for small, portable computers doesn't mean that the old products have suddenly lost their capabilities. It just means that some of the customers have been persuaded to switch to other things that may or may not be any better.

The biggest problem with "the web" from a tablet user's viewpoint is all the old sites built by "designers" who haven't yet learned that their sites need to work on whatever screen the visitor has, including the small screens that so many people are carrying around now. The days are past when a site designer could design only for people with screens as big as the fancy one sitting on the designer's desktop. If your site doesn't work on the small screens, you won't attract many of the billion or so people who weren't using the web 5 years ago, but are now.

This isn't the fault of "tablet focused design"; it's a problem caused by designers' contempt for people with such small, cheap and portable equipment. They've been essentially anti-tablet since before tablets even existed. But they're slowly coming around, as they slowly realize how crappy their sites really are, from the viewpoint of most newcomers to the Internet.

(Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers". Those built by people with an engineer's concern for usability have always been a lot more useful, and they tend to work pretty well on tablets, phones, etc. The "designers" usually don't think they look pretty. But people continue to use google a lot, for example, despite its blatant lack of "design". Or maybe because of it. ;-)

So, they're locking out things that can brick the card (flash ROM/fuses, screw up thermal sensors) and apparently a hint of OS security (the Falcons that respond to userspace commands can no longer access physical memory, only virtual memory). The latter sounds somewhat bizarre, considering the firmware should be fully under the control of the driver, not userspace (I guess/hope?), but not unreasonable. Maybe there are software security reasons for this.

Nouveau is free to continue using its own free blobs or to switch to nvidia's. If they start adding restrictions that actively cripple useful features or are DRM nonsense, then I would start complaining, but so far it sounds like an attempt at protecting the hardware while maintaining manufacturing flexibility for nvidia. This isn't much different from devices which are fused at the factory with thermal parameters and with some units disabled; the only difference is that here firmware is involved.

NV seem to be turning friendlier towards nouveau, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. If they wanted to be evil, they would've just required signed firmware for the card to function at all. The fact that they're bothering to have non-secure modes and are only locking out very specific features suggests they're actively trying to play nicely with open source software.

The obvious solution is to elect a President who will appoint a law-abiding AG. The obvious problem with that is, most candidates don't admit that they'll violate your rights while campaigning. :-P

Most of the ones we've seen. But, maybe there's a whole bunch that don't. Either of Spock's parents would have had trouble, medical intervention notwithstanding, making it with a Horta.

Yes, he is to blame. He might not have started it, but he sure hasn't done anything to fix it.

They'll probably censor Pepsi into *****

Your guess is way off.
Boys are mentally ill idiots from age 6 until age 30 as well. Want proof? Youtube has all the proof that is needed.

There are some exceptions, but they are very rare.

Is in outsourcing.... nothing bad can happen if you have everything made in China....

Between 20 to 24? I suggest you observe the ages below that from 14 years old my daughter has not stopped looking at her cellphone. not even for showering... She uses a ziplock baggie so she can take the phone in the shower.

Honestly, girls after age 13 are bat shit insane until about 30.

I DARE AT&T to not carry android phones.

And please tell me how Apple does not allow AT&T to bake in their crapware yet sold 22 million phones this past week. Yeah they flopped so bad by not allowing the carriers to add in crapware. Oh wait, they are one of the worlds most popular phones.

Google can certianly tell them, "go to hell, pure android with nothing baked in", and AT&T and Verizon will say... thank you mistress, may we have another.

What else are they going to sell? Windows phones and Blackberry? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That's a serious one - take it to the exec team. Used to be that if you mailed sjobs@apple.com and you had something valid, you would get a reply. I had my laptops sorted out in this manner.

It might be the address to use these days is tcook@apple.com, but I'll bet the same system exists.

It's a well-known software phenomenon: The time it takes to build and debug a program is proportional to the number of people involved. Some argue that it's closer to the square of the number of people (due to the number of interactions in the graph connecting the portions written by different programmers). If you want a bug-free app developed quickly, give it to one person, and make sure that one person understands the problem well.

Actually, a more fun analysis says that the time is really just a function of the (square of the) number of managers managing the development team. But that might be taking cynicism a bit too seriously.

I could burn it in the streets to get rid of it, I suppose.

I already paid the city garbage man to come over here and get it once via my taxes and he didn't do the job... I'm not going to pay a second person to do it.

If you instruct the garbage man to leave the garbage in the streets, you'll have to deal with garbage in the streets. Pretty simple. I'm not keeping it in my house.

So, garbage men in Seattle now have the authority to issue people tickets.

Here in Vancouver, they just leave the garbage there in the street in front of your house, I've recently learned.

God, I hate west coast culture.

I chose to respond by going out at night and spreading my garbage up and down the streets.

Fuckers wanna play passive aggressive games? I can play them too.

I last tried a Debian install around the time of Dayton Hamvention, so a few months ago. I don't have a bug #, I tried to debug GDM for a while but didn't have enough time. I can try another install sometime soon.