This is confusing.
Actually, it's easy. All governments are bad guys.
Well, maybe a few aren't, but if you start by assuming they're bad guys then you'll be pleasantly surprised if you turn out to be wrong.
One has to wonder just how hard the petroleum industry will fight these developments, though.
Until we have a better means of producing the carbohydrates, I'm guessing you'll see more death throes from the people who are starving because of the food we'r'e not growing.
And don't bother telling me to not use such PDF's in the first place... that sort of hand-waving hardly addresses my point.
Uh, don't use those stupid PDFs in the first place.
I wasted about two hours this week because my bank used those dumb PDFs for the sake of saving a few milliseconds creating a new PDF file with the content hard-coded. Since I didn't want to have to infect my Linux install with Adobe I had to boot into Windows for the first time in weeks, install all the updates, install Adobe PDF crap, reboot three or four times while doing so, find the Windows 7 x64 driver for my printer, which I assumed I could get from HP but their web site just said 'drivers are installed with Windows 7', which, duh, they're not unless you go to Windows Update to search for them and finally was able to print out the receipt I needed.
So yeah, please don't force your users to install Adobe crap just for your convenience. Next time I'll know to always pick 'send me all my paperwork in the mail, you idiots' option when I apply for anything there.
Splash screens had their time and place back in the floppy-disc era. Now days they seem kind of quaint.
They don't seem quaint when they take up a quarter of the screen and force themselves to the top so I can't continue to use other apps while I wait for the bloated monster to start up.
The catchpa is worthless against an army of Indians being paid just pennies a pop to break them. The only thing they do is annoy the script kiddies.
No, They also annoy your actual, real human users. I often have to try three or four times to get the bloody thing right.
why are we so hell-bent on destroying all the progress we made over the past 50 or so years?
'We' aren't. Governments are.
Fortunately most of them are bankrupt and can't sustain a war against their people for long. The EU is collapsing, the USA is reliant on China buying their bonds to keep them afloat, and most Western nations have only sustained their economy over the last decade by printing money to fund non-jobs.
The great thing about economics is that you can only ignore reality for so long before it comes back and bites you.
Name-calling aside, I think Parent has a point. I'm pretty sure it's the responsibility of the people to keep government power limited
And how do you plan to do that? Labour were authoritarian scum, and they were replaced by Tories who are authoritarian scum.
There is no electable party which is not full of authoritarian scum, which is why so few Britons bother to vote any more.
As for this law, well thats being pushed by a Tory government. The last Labour government were also quite right-wing & like most of your US politicians in the pockets of big business.
The suggestion that either Blair's Labour or Cameron's Tories are 'right wing' makes me laugh. They're only right wing when compared to Stalin and Mao, and not by much.
Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software.
Webapps suck. Slashdot is a glaring example.
As for being 'the future', good luck running a Webapp on Earth from the Moon with 3 second ping times. 'The Cloud' is a temporary fantasy that will be destroyed by the speed of light limits.
The counterargument to that would be that you can vote out politicians, but corporate monopolies last for generations.
You can't vote out politicians. You can only vote in another politician, and if they're not as corrupt as the one you threw out they probably will be after a few years.
We're STILL dealing with a Windows monopoly.
Thanks to copyright, patents and other monopolies granted to them by governments.
Hempstone's Question: If you have to travel on the Titanic, why not go first class?