I'm not surprised, alleging that the telegenic interests of assorted groups just so happen to be aligned with your bottom line is an old strategy; but this is pretty incoherent even by the low standards of the genre.

Yes, if there were a fast lane, one could theoretically put special-deaf-packets in it (or just as easily shove them into the slow lane, if they can't afford to pay); but this ignores the more pressing question of "What, pray tell, is currently suffering for want of special bandwidth and how demanding must it be if your existing service can't cope?".

I can imagine that certain disabilities might drive modestly higher bandwidth demands (the deaf, presumably, don't get much use out of VOIP, which is lower bandwidth than video good enough to make lip reading or signing an option; but last I checked uploading and downloading video wasn't exactly a niche case, even if it is one where Verizon can't seem to get Netflix working...); but nothing that exceeds the current or near-term demands of most internet users.

They obviously won't prefer this interpretation; but just how awful is Verizon planning to make the non-fast lane if these special disabled services will need to be fast-laned to work? Anyone?

Well, the most obvious step is to distinguish between "That's not true of me" and "That's not true". The first statement(while not always accurate) is much easier to confirm or deny. Plus, you aren't immediately put in the position of having to 'win' the debate in order to lay out your own position. If you immediately conflate population-level complaints with personal complaints, you end up taking on a markedly larger and more challenging position.

It may also be true that you suspect the harassment to be the work of a vocal and dedicated minority(and it would actually be rather interesting to see what the logs say about troll distribution in various internet locations) rather than a general thing; but you still gain nothing by tying the desire to defend yourself with the desire to defend a population.

As demonstrated by our victory in the war on drugs, clearly we can just step up enforcement to solve the problem!

Wiring costs can add up as well. At low voltages the amount of copper or aluminum you have to throw at the problem to get resistive losses down can be pretty significant.

They deliberately make this difficult to calculate, but by my reckoning the current version should probably be Firefox 7.6.

"Malware blocking" = yet another bad signature/reputation based scanner. If I wanted one, I would have one installed - and Firefox versions without this misfeature would still use it to scan, so in what universe was this worth doing?

If you really want to do something about malware, disable javascript by default.

"Automatic handling of pdf and ogg files" - I have a pdf reader already. I dont need another one, and I dont need one 'integrated' in my browser, period.

"loaded with new features for developers." Pretty sure that means for advertisers.

More projection. Unlike you I got a full-time job and an apartment all of my own.

And your logic still doesn't follow. You're trying to prove that one very specific abuse of this data (Guys sharing it with each-other) is inevitable. Your only real example of them doing so is has a motive that is totally irrelevant to a text file about airline tickets.

In other words your generalization is so broad it's meaningless. For example every cop has a gun. This means that he could theoretically go out and kill the local First Grade Class. By your generalization it's totally inevitable this will happen at some point, which in turn means we should disarm the police.

Most cops have cars. These could be misused in some unlikely, and totally destructive way, such as a mass campaign by Cleveland Height PD to run down the entire Kindergarten class at recess. therefore, per your generalization, it is inevitable that the Cleveland height PD will eventually try to run down the entire kindergarten class at recess, and Cleveland Heights cops should walk.

One of the first things you learn when you leave your mom's basement, and start dealing with the real world, is that people do bad things when they have a motive to do said bad things. These particular abuses are unlikely because there's no emotional payoff to killing small children.

By the same token, the emotional payoff from reading a supremely boring text file about a supremely boring plane trip is completely different then the payoff of seeing a good nudie, therefore the fact agents at a completely different agency shared nudies had no bearing on whether TSA guys will share travel documents.

Dude, I'm not talking about the NSA. I'm talking about one specific TSA database. I'm specifically avoiding talking about the NSA because that's all anyone talks about on Slashdot today.

The specific database in this case is the one that includes all the information your airline has about you.

And this particular database has a lot of arrests. Just about any time a TSA agent finds contraband (which can be anything from illegally imported animals to drugs to bombs) he did it partly because this particular database told him something that didn't quite check out when the arrestee went through security.

This is actually exactly the kind of decentralized database you say you want law enforcement to have. It's targeted for one very specific legal use, it's quite effective at getting bad guys. Abusing would be extremely complicated because TSA has no motive to share any of this information with literally anyone, and it lacks the capacity to do anything more nefarious then hassle innocent people at the security line of the airport. Moreover the data just isn't that interesting.

Mostly because they are a newer profession and a trickier one to quantify.

Time and motion studies, along with 'scientific management' were already a serious hit in terrifyingly invasive performance enhancement for blue collar labor around the turn of the 20th century(Taylor and the Gilbreths being the poster children, with many successors). The workers who haven't been replaced by robots yet are likely still subject to a descendant of it. Though less amenable to automation, service sector jobs are also rationalized more or less as tightly as available technique allows.

Software development is still a work in progress because it only started existing comparatively recently and because it takes more technology to dismiss any "Oh, what we do here is unquantifiable skilled craftsmanship" positions.

It is selection bias, in that you apparently haven't heard of it happening to basically everyone it can reach; but the world does actually hate you, and is actively working on making software development absolutely as soul crushing as seems economically desirable.

"There are those who say you need to use RequestPolicy and Ghostery and AdBlock and NoScript (and some other stuff, like a cookie blocker) to catch everything...."

It's a sign of utter insanity among the browser maintainers.

All this crap should be guaranteed off by default, and require an extension to enable, rather than the reverse.

Yes go read Marx. Marx described a transition to communism in which there would be a dictatorship of the proletariat... which in effect is still a dictatorship. So, technically you are correct in that the end-goal of communism was an idealistic society based on free-will and free-participation, but in order to get to that promised land Marx also described what was in effect a brutal transition period where force would be used in order to level the playing field and bring production up to levels that would eliminate scarcity. Laudable end goals in some respects, but terrible means which did in effect play out in countries claiming to be communist... countries which ended up stagnating in what was supposed to be the transition state of repressive dictatorship because they never got past scarcity of resources and because it is human nature for some people to want to hang on to power over others when they are given that power. Giving communism a pass simply by saying that the end goals justify the means is not realistic. Maybe those countries weren't in an end-state communist society, but some of them were at least initially following the Marx playbook for a transition to one.

In other threads I have been arguing along those lines in defense of libertarianism, which if implemented gradually and as something to be striven for in degree and not absolute or immediate, then I argue that moving towards libertarianism can lead to a more prosperous and freer society.

But communism doesn't call for a gradual change towards a communist society and doesn't really allow for a peaceful transition. It just says step 1 dictatorship of the proletariat (which in practical terms means the proletariat chooses representatives to act as dictators on their behalf), step 2 dictatorship declares end to need for dictatorship after redistribution of wealth and re-education of population and end of scarcity, step 3 communist utopia. Getting stuck at step 1 seems like it is always going to be the most likely outcome of that plan.

Compare that with Socialism and libertarianism which in practice can be implemented in more of a matter of degree of moving towards those respective value systems since they don't prescribe a means of transition. Where communism envisions a transition period of dictatorship which is fundamentally unlike the end state of a communist society that is envisioned.

Well if popups, popunders, auto-playing audio and video files and the like are what you call fun, you can keep it. For me, getting directly to the content I was looking for without navigating a maze of insulting crap is more conducive to fun.

The issue of economic coercion is a tough one to reconcile. Because not all trades of goods and services are really free exchanges and could be considered more akin to physical force when one party is holding the other person's life or livelihood in the balance. I think there is a good argument to be made that someone not acting in good faith in the market, creating a monopoly on some essential good and service and then hording it and withholding it is an act of force in the similar way to the way that an embargo or trade sanction could be considered an act of war. In that way I think the government has a legitimate role to play in ensuring a well functioning free market with competition. So I fully support antitrust laws and it is one area where I wish the government were more active in breaking up (or otherwise restricting when a break-up is not desirable) large companies which are exercising monopolies in essential goods and services.

But the there has to be some clear relationship to physical harm for economic "coercion" to be regulated and prohibited by the government. Simply offering someone a really high salary could be considered economic coercion, but as long as there is a plentiful job market and there is no other threat associated with that offer, then that is a willing transaction. The essential part of evaluating whether a market is free is whether the participants are willingly engaged in commerce. So, for instance I disagree with laws and regulators that tell individual farmers what they can and cannot grow on their land, but I see a legitimate role for government to try and keep large corporations from buying up too large a percentage of land so that they restrict production in order to raise prices.

But in that example the government should be focused on the return to a free market with competition rather than just shrugging and accepting the monopoly and using it as an opportunity to expand its own powers to regulate that market. Essentially using the growth of monopoly as a symbiotic excuse to grow government oversight and control rather than honestly seeking to restore more balanced free market conditions. I think that is where we are now. Government agencies are allowing corporations to grow too big and using those unhealthy market conditions to justify expanding their own powers rather than honestly trying to address the core problem of loss of competition in the marketplace. Put simply instead of creating barriers to entry for small businesses, government regulation should be focused on creating a steeper curve for the largest businesses.

"So how much is your family worth?"

An emotionally resonant argument but not a rational one.

Cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, and diabetes are the leading causes of death in Israel. Rockets fired by Hamas is waaaay down the list, and it would still be waaaay down the list without the interceptors.

Let's say you can spend a billion dollars to save one person from death by rocket, or the same billion to save 250,000 from cancer, but of course you cant do both, once the money is spent it is spent. Which is the wiser use of the money?

Unfortunately, since this technique is almost certainly being used alongside a suite of others, it's tricky to know what tactic is most privacy-maximizing. Canvas randomization would ensure that your browser's canvas fingerprint does not remain stable; but if the attacker is able to determine that you are randomizing(by making multiple runs, possibly even from different domains, that ought to be identical but won't be if your canvas is randomized), that may also be a behavior distinctive enough to be useful.