Smart phones killed dead time, if you have five minutes riding the bus or whatever and you can rather instantly find/read/check anything you might need which is rather convenient. It's rather limited how entertained you can get while driving a car, since your attention is legally required to be on the road. And if you're only two you're usually socially required to be in the front seat making conversation, not zone out in the entertainment system. Really it's most kids in the back seat who get to do that and then why not on their cell phone or tablet or 3DS or whatever? You need a significant value-add to make up for the fact that it's stuck in the car. And as long as you're driving, the car's handling is going to be a big deal.

Now if we're talking a self-driving car where it's really my en-route entertainment center that's an entirely different matter. You just tell the car where to go and it goes, how it is to drive doesn't matter. It probably doesn't even matter if it takes a few minutes longer because you got to play another round of Candy Crush. In this case, yes having an Android/iPhone dock so it could integrate with the rest of my entertainment world makes sense. Until then, I'll be busy limping along bumper-to-bumper listening to the radio....

Went on two weeks vacation to the US from Norway with my cousin when I was 16, zero parents seemed to work just fine. Of course I already had a passport, in Europe that's like travelling to another state. I'm assuming my cousin had some kind of permission slip though I never saw it, but that seems easy to forge. And with all sorts of long-distance relationships and immigrants travelling back and forth I really can't imagine crossing the border with one parent raising any flags unless the child's name already is on a kidnapping victim list.

Sounds like if they manage to make it lose data and corrupt settings upon upgrading the k* programs, they'll have kept the user experience consistent with 4.

Well, the article is just a fluff piece saying that how you build the interface affects the results and that this can have consequences. Which is actually not such an unreasonable thing to say, as long as you don't take the concept too far. For one concrete example I know of from a hospital system, the software said pretty much "Nothing more to register so closing healthcare contact" when it actually meant to say "Warning, hospital visit registered but no further patient follow-ups scheduled. If you proceed the patient's treatment will end and case will be closed."

This was in production code found in a review trying to find how the hospital could "lose" patients. The message was technically correct, but it was also extremely misleading when the nurse had forgot to register a follow-up. One seemingly harmless confirmation and the patient could end up not getting chemo for their cancer unless the doctor noticed the patient was missing or the patient followed up himself. So the developers of the system should absolutely take some responsibility for making sure the system makes it easy to do the right thing and very hard to do the wrong thing, not just technically correct.

Another much hotly debated topic is defaults, because people have a tendency to overuse defaults. The problem is when 99.9% are the default but the 0.1% is actually important to register. Did you skip past the point with allergies when the patient actually is hyperallergic to peanuts? Ouch. People are not machines, they hate doing things that are 99.9% unnecessary even if you tell them that you checking that box is their proof that you remembered to ask the patient and a default won't do that. Like security, completeness and correctness often comes at a cost in usability too. It all depends on what matters more.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeell.... not by persecution, but I'm not sure by persuasion either. Most of those fed up with religion consider it just a silly superstition and don't really see the point of discussing it any more than the Loch Ness monster or if a black cat crossing the road brings you bad luck. They realize they can't talk you out of an irrational belief, they just want it to go away and will probably act more with derision than persuasion.

For sure, there's plenty examples of people of the same religion going to war over various reasons like land, resources, geopolitical reasons, wars of oppression, wars of liberation, power and control with wars of succession and so on. But for most of the genuine atrocities you need more, you need such a burning hate for the opposition that you're willing to slaughter down women and children and burn their cities to the ground. Where simply victory isn't enough, only total submission or even extermination. Religion is a very common fuel for such hate.

When fighting for resources you're also looking for a "return on investment", you have to gain enough to be worth going to war. That you can usually defend against by rational investments in defense, making it too costly to be worth it. Irrational wars fueled by hatred often don't care, a civil war might tear the whole country apart and leave it in ruins as long as the infidels die. The Germans fought the allies all the way back to Berlin, the Japanese until they were nuked. Twice. Neither made sense, it was death before surrender.

Of course you can say that was mostly racism, not religion though I'm pretty sure the Holocaust was a good dose of both though Nazi Germany certainly fought a lot of other nominally Christian nations. Religion is also a very lasting divide. Germany fought most of Europe, now they're a key member of the EU. The US was at war with Mexico, the North was at war with the South but the wounds mostly die with the generation that experienced it. In the middle east they've been fighting for 2000 years and every conflict reopens a wound that never heals.

Of course religion has its good sides, I think a lot of people behave better than they might have because they think God/Allah is watching or it affects their karma. So it's not just irrational evil, it's also irrational good. Mostly just irrational and mostly harmless, really I don't care if you want to bend knee and pray to the FSM or have your own diet because FSM said eating something is unclean or the FSM told you not to work on a Sunday or whatever. As long as you got it dialed down to mostly quaint and charming.

Going by your UID, I'm guessing you were too young to have been there. The glory days of pixel art was the 80s and early 90s with resolutions of 320x240 and less as well as 4-256 colors simply because you had no other choice. Those were very visible, even on the CRT. A good example is comparing TES II: Daggerfall, released in 1996 which was the last of the "pixelated" generation with 320x200x256 color and TES III: Morrowind in 2002, which was a damn beauty with up to 1600x1200x16.7mio color and all of this while CRTs were dominating.

Of course you could still see here and there that it was pixels and not retina-class, anti-aliased super smooth ultra realistic graphics - it's not hard to see it's a computer game and not real life, but clearly they were going for being as realistic as possible and not a stylized "pixel art" form. LCDs might have raised the standard a bit on the level of detail you need, but they aren't very relevant at all as to why pixel art exists in the first place. It's more like a game board piece, enough to see what it is and make it an interactive part of the game but not even trying to be realistic.

Of course the usual way has just been to use Flash, Java, Silverlight or some other NPAPI plug-in to provide the DRM. That API is 20 years old from Netscape Navigator 2.0 and honestly nobody likes it much. Microsoft has always pushed ActiveX for IE, Chrome prefers their PPAPI they launched 6 years ago and Firefox calls plug-ins a legacy technology. Many mobile browsers don't support traditional plug-ins of any kind. But it's not going to go away as long as it's the only way to play DRM'd content under Firefox.

So it's a compromise, you get the EME which is going to be a far more limited API isolated in a security sandbox to decrypt DRM'd video and audio streams and with that Firefox hopes to deprecate NPAPI and proprietary plugins for everything else. No flash, no java, no silverlight or anything like that just HTML/CSS/Javascript (open source) + EME (sandbox + closed source). It's just that it has never been in Mozilla's nature to compromise when there's overwhelming evidence they can't win, they'd rather stick by their guns and lose.

According to StatCounter, they had 32% marketshare in November 2009, now they're down to 17%. If you add in mobile where they have nearly no presence they're now fourth after Safari and IE. They're not going to achieve much of anything by pushing their remaining users away from them, it's the curse of populism. To actually be in a position to change anything, you must have the support of enough people to enact change. And in this particular case, I don't think they'll get many to join them in a boycott of Netflix and other DRM-using services.

Oh, there will be plans. Realistic plans? Well.... I've worked in a supporting role to some fairly big projects and there's a few things that strike me:

1) Huge projects generally have the biggest uncertainties. It'd be easy to think the opposite, the bigger the stakes the more sure you want to be that you're right but that's not really the case. While small to medium projects have some rather tangible goals under current conditions, the huge ones generally involve more conjecture on where the company, market and technology is going and is heavily mixed up with the corporate strategy. In addition they're a lot more one of the kind, unlike smaller projects where you have a lot more guidance and experience on how similar projects have been.

2) Huge projects typically involve a lot of major decisions that may be a boon to some parts of your organization while negatively affecting others, obviously this a major factor in political decisions but also internally you get a lot of actors who act in their own interest rather than the business as a whole, for example because it plans to eliminate or centralize some functions or focus on some technologies, products, services and locations in favor of others. Don't expect your SQL Server guru to be happy for a move to Oracle or vice versa.

3) As a consequence of points 1) and 2) above, you often get a lot of bad data as input. In particular, you tend to get a lot of overly optimistic estimates of costs, schedules and quality or that casually neglects to mention related costs that it is likely to incur and that are hard to fact-check while sales and savings are wildly exaggerated. Naturally the other side is equally biased in the other direction, so real neutral assessments are hard to come by. It doesn't help that the time scale is such that by the time failure is obvious many of the ones who made the decisions have left for other jobs or retired.

What's even worse is that in many cases the people who grossly oversold their position are the ones rewarded because it's incredibly hard to back out of a high visibility project, it's expensive and it makes the executives who agreed to it incompetent. Lesser projects and their owners/managers have the chance to be chewed out by their superiors, but when it goes all the way to the top you're way more likely to throw good money after bad to keep the project going rather than wave the white flag and declare it a miserable failure. That's how you get overruns of hundreds of millions of dollars and up.

NoCrack seems extremely vulnerable to a crack since they create decoys on the fly. It should be fairly trivial to pick it apart and tell when you're getting a real password from the vault. As for the stateless password managers, they operate without any kind of wallet which is their problem. Also you can't change password for any reason, that's a problem too. If you have a wallet most the problems go away. I'm thinking as follows:

The wallet stores a PRNG value to avoid various rainbow attacks. For each site/login the wallet stores a 128-bit PRNG and how to extract the the password from the hash.

Upon entering a password, the software shows you:
a) The fingerprint of SHA1(unique key+password) in some user friendly way so you might realize a mistyped password
b) For each site/login SHA1(unique key + password + site/login key).toBase64().substring(startPos, length)

For example,
When I generate the wallet, there's a random seed. Lets say it's
1234567890abcdef.
I add a site/login called "Slashdot" and it generates a site key:
1122334455667788

My password is "go fish"
When I type it in, it generates SHA1(1234567890abcdef + "go fish") = "PFr7t9qfAP9PFVG0+Vvbez82rW8=" and I know that if I type the password right it should start with PFr... something.

My hash for slashdot is SHA1(1234567890abcdef + 1122334455667788 + "go fish") = "8ktw2l8XVdI81/6TvEcg5EbxJ90="

I pick some part of that which satisifies this site's requirements like "ktw2l8XV" and the wallet stores (openly) that it'll take startPos = 2, length = 8. If nothing works because the site is weird, I can always generate a new site key and I'll get a new string to choose from.

If you type something other than "go fish", you'll get a different set of passwords but no indication whether it's right or wrong. Some of those passwords might fail the site's passwords requirements, but that's a very weak elimination.

I have to disagree with that one; I doubt that this is an advantage. I think that small geographic reach can be an advantage if the region is sufficiently populated.
I haven't listened to a lot of radio in years, but when I did, there were lots of adverts by local businesses or the regional branches of bigger chains; you don't have e.g Ford advertising how awesome their new trucks are, you have some car dealership with a couple of local branches promoting zero interest payment plans.

I don't think there are many brands where it's a selling point that a stream is really popular in New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Vienna; even with globally operating brands it's likely that there isn't a global marketing department paying for spots, but national ones who might want to tailor the ads they're paying for to the local market (not to mention language).

It's a potentially(!) large audience of people lots of ad buyers don't care about

Pretty much this.
And IMHO a lot of the perceived hostility was people getting treated like they treated others by making the crime fit the punishment or simply holding up a mirror:
If you're by definition the tolerant, "aware", good person fighting bigotry for the greater good, you can't possibly behave like a bigot yourself and people pointing this out must be haters attacking you.
Most telling were the complaints about how Fark "has recently become" more hostile.
"Mommy Drew, the kid whose hair I've been pulling all week has started punching me!"

I've stopped commenting in certain threads and just use them to add people to my ignore list.
My problem isn't even with that PC policy, but with the posters who applauded its introduction and felt it was necessary - I recognized a lot of names whose level of "discourse" and reaction to well-reasoned arguments I've come to associate with "lalala-I-can't-hear-you-lalalala"

Among them there are some of the most intentionally(?) obtuse, hypocritical people on the internet.
They don't even realize that they act exactly like people they complain or make fun of in other threads.
On certain issues they seem to switch off their brains, argue purely from emotion, apparently misinterpret everything to fit their views or emotional state and blindly attack everyone who doesn't echo their sentiments.

They made it impossible to have actual, reasonable discussions because they're e.g. apparently incapable of differentiating between trying to understand why some bad thing happened and endorsing it.
They also give the impression that showing the correct amount of outrage about a problem and the correct distribution of blame is much more important than actually fixing problems or preventing shit from happening again.
I gave up on Fark when I clicked on the profile of one of the densest, most hypocritical, most vocal, personal attacks launching, reasonable discussion killing douchebags - and saw that someone thought it a good idea to make this massive all-around asshole a moderator.

If 9/11 had happened with todays Fark, the first comment would be "in before some victim blaming terrorism apologist explains why the people in the WTC deserved it" and then you can watch how the first poor sod posting something like "I wonder what reaction Osama was hoping for" or "how do you brainwash 20 people to commit those acts" gets assigned the aforementioned "in before.." role and torn to pieces for shit that was never said or even remotely implied.

I don't know when you last posted a picture on Fark, but Fark has been rehosting posted images on their servers for some time now.

Isn't that what this really boils down, not some bullshit about masculinity? Women watch soap operas because it's more exciting than their boring life, men play video games so we can be greater than the insignificant little peons that we are. And in porn the most beautiful women will perform for you even if you're fatter than the marshmallow man and uglier than a troll. We have immersive enough solutions that the body is fooled to play out almost all its chemical registry with endorphin, adrenaline, dopamine and so on letting you fake all the excitement and rewards as you slay imaginary dragons.

The problem is that it's addictive and desensitizing, if you're on a constant rush of awards and achievements and level-ups and whatnot then real life is a real downer. Not entirely unlike how I hear people on drugs describe coming off their high or how fat people act when they come off a sugar rush. So through a combination of actual reality check, batting outside your league because of failed self-perception and being poor at handling disinterest or rejection the result is often a painful face-plant. Once bitten, twice shy so you rather watch porn and play video games than try again.