I like to call it the "Fisher Price: My First Computer" syndrome. It's a pandemic on mobile devices, and has recently jumped the species barrier to desktops. Symptoms include:

- Completely flat and simple user-interface made from a small color palette
- Simple shapes comprised of 90-degree angles
- Uninspired colors and themes made up of primary colors so as not to distract from learning exercises
- Huge buttons and other user-interface targets, designed to make it easy to use by those with undeveloped eye-hand coordination
- Utter lack of gradients, transparency, translucency, or any other hints as to Z-order, which are confusing to children that haven't developed spacial awareness
- No way to perform complex actions (even if necessary) to prevent accidentally making the computing toy inoperable

Additional symptoms can be found in this article, but if you encounter any of the above I strongly suggest you discontinue use of the affected product, and find a replacement not yet affected by this crippling illness.

There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!"

After several people in my family got bitten by advertising malware, primarily due to clicking the top Google result after searching for popular open source projects such as "firefox" or "open office" or "vlc" (I literally watched as this happened to one of them), I helped them install Firefox if they didn't have it, and AdBlock+ with an auto-updating subscription. The two more tech-savvy I showed NoScript and explained how it use it.

Since then they've had next to no problems with this kind of drive-by malware. They also really love ad-free YouTube videos and a much faster annoyance-free browsing experience.

In the (distant) past I would have felt a little bad about this kind of carte blanche blocking advertising. Not anymore. It's defensive driving for the Web, and the only smart way to use it.

Well hey, now -- I've seen some wobbly straw men in my time, but that one might just take the cake.

The hostility Apple fans have for those who still want computers (even hand-held ones) to be general purpose computing devices that are actually owned by their owners never ceases to amaze me.

You're missing the whole point of what the founding fathers and the US constitution was attempting to create.

These inalienable rights "come from" nowhere. They exist innately and the constitution was written largely to express this, and to prevent laws from being created which would stifle or try to remove them. The social construct aspect applies insofar as to how to balance things when the desires or actions of one person impact the rights of another person. They certainly don't come from a god.

Even the creation of the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments to the Constitution) was criticized by several high-profile people of the time because they were concerned that it would be interpreted as a "list of rights", and if a specific right wasn't in that list, then the People didn't have that right. A concession was the Ninth Amendment:

One of the dissenters of the Bill of Rights was Hamilton, who said, among other things:

One of the biggest differences between the newly created United States versus other old-world countries was this very thing. The recognition that all people have innate and inalienable rights, not bestowed by society or god or privilege or bloodline, but simply because they are a living, thinking human being.

High ideals, perhaps, and we slipped badly sometimes (slavery probably being the biggest), but every time I see people say things "gay marriage isn't listed in the Constitution" I cringe because they have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the country they live in.

This is hardly surprising:

- It seems like an unwritten rule that the tools and websites (third-party and homegrown) that business use for hiring are horrible. I have to assume they're designed to be a gauntlet so that only the most stubborn and persistent candidates make it to the end.

- Automated tools that scan resumes looking for specific things have led to people putting all sorts of crap on their resume, just in hopes of getting a foot in the door. This leads to interviews like "So it says you have a lot of experience in SQL. Can you elaborate on that?" Candidate: "Oh, yeah, I took an online class a few years ago and I did some SELECTs!"

- Most recruiters have a clear conflict of interest and some of them take a scattergun approach that interviewers need to filter through.

- Wishy-washy managers always want to wait and put off giving an offer "in case something better comes along" (I've heard that many times in post-interview discussions).

- Internal politics when there's any kind of restriction on how many open seats will be filled leads to infighting between groups, delaying an offer because nobody knows who they'd work for yet.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say that HR at most places is filled with depressing things, but the hiring process is one of the worst.

The difference between project hosting and a "service to host and edit source code repositories" is a few wiki pages for a description and documentation. They closed down Google Code claiming competition and saturation from sites like GitHub and BitBucket, but now they're starting a new service that still directly competes with those?

I can only assume the primary problem with Google Code which caused its closure was the lack of "cloud" in the name.

I put together a user style that attempts to undo some of the recent changes, including this one. It might be a little rough around the edges, but it's made the site much more usable for me.

I'm planning on maintaining it (at least for a while), so any suggestions are welcome. It's also public domain if anyone wants to go nuts.

Completely agreed. And moving the "number of comments" link to the title bar was just batshit, since now you can't just scan down the page seeing what stories are popular.

A bit rough around the edges, but I put together a userstyle to adjust these two things. It looks like this. Feel free to fix/adapt it:

@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
    #firehose article header span.topic {
        top: 45px;
    }

    #firehose article .comment-bubble {
        right: auto;
        top: auto;
        left: 30px;
        bottom: 5px;
        border: none;
        background-color: inherit;
        font-size: 90%;
        width: 38px;
        height: 25px;
        line-height: 1.6rem;
    }

    #firehose article span.comment-bubble::after {
        border-color: rgb(1, 103, 101) transparent transparent;
        border-width: 5px 5px 0 0;
        bottom: -5px;
    }
}

I have a feeling that we're seeing the start of a very gradual rollout of Beta. Fuck that noise.

True, but the end result is the same. All the same people will continue to pretend that the language is built for classes and ignore prototypes, but now even more will just use the classes interface since it's "official" now. This leaves projects or developers who do use prototypes even farther out in left field, since classes have become an even more common practice.

I'm not going to say it's good or bad thing in a productivity or business sense, since classes are clearly more common and familiar to most people. But from just a language identity standpoint, it's a loss and that's too bad.

So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.

Here's a rundown of the new features if anyone else hasn't been following ES6 and is curious. A few of note are

scoped and const declaration via let and const,
lazy iterators and generators,
format/heredoc strings,
and varargs ala Lua.

Overall this looks like a good step in bringing Javascript closer to being on par with more modern languages.

Not on that, but it was collapsed to just the title of the post (at least for me). I skipped over it earlier as an inane Idle post, but looking over again decided to expand the title to at least RTFS.

Why are you guys trying to kill polls?

Which is the beauty of the Firefox addon system. The baseline browser as a framework is extensible in an almost unlimited fashion, which should allow them to keep the default web browser lean and focused on browsing the web. If someone wants add chat client or "read it later" functionality, users can choose to install that addon. Mozilla could even show a "suggested addons" page the first time a user runs Firefox that includes stuff like Pocket and the absurd Firefox Hello crap. For that matter, they could even bundle addons for things like Hello, making it easy for users to remove addons they have no interest in.

But no. Mozilla is filled with people hell-bent on destroying Firefox the web browser and and replacing it with Firefox the Platform. I'm just waiting for them to start decommissioning the addon framework, which they've already started by requiring all addons to be signed by Mozilla, or they won't be loaded. It's sickening.

Unfortunately, somebody must have actually finished the game in order for it to be eligible for entry into the Hall of Fame.

Um... that's based on GDP, not land area. Last time I checked, Canada wasn't the same size as New York state.