Contrary to the popular belief on slashdot us professional web developers do not sit around thinking of ways to use new browser features to make sites as slow as shit.

Instead clients come to us as some graphic designer has mocked up this amazing new site for them with tons of flash animations they created, psd files that represent all aspects of the site with each layer representing a different page and some notes on which bits of the site need to be easily editable by the client, which bits obtain dynamic data from another site (like the companies aher price) and finally, with a detailed list of which tracking they want to use to track users journey through their website.

Yup. much of this tracking crap is actually added at the clients request because they want to track how their users browse the site and what advert they clicked on a different site which brings though the clients who buy and what adverts on other sites just generate them click throughs but none that result in a purchase or sign up or whatever they want from the site.

Web developers have to work through this crap and try and convince the designer that some of his design elements are going to kill the page loading time and are uttterly pointless. The ones that have to stay they try their best to make efficient by re-implementing it completely in JQuery or whatever. Try and convert the pointless flash object into a much smaller animated GIF or PNG since it is has no interactivity and is only flash as that is what the designer has tools to create.

They then finally try and steer the client to only implementing the tracking shit on the pages that that are REALLY important (index, basket, purchase complete, etc). But no, the client first insists on the third party tracking be used to track every goddamn product so they can have all the analytics in the system their marketing chumps like using and not forcing them to login in to your site as well. Then they decide that the site is too complicated or something so you need to add the tracking to every page in the help section, then they notice that loads of people get to the index but never buy anything so you have add tracking to find out why (they load the index and decide it loads too slowly then fuck off to a quicker site probably due to the analytics shit).

Finally, the client realises that when the get stuff demoed to them it was done in a designers office with fibre to the back of the demo PC, tests their web site at home and realises everything is slow as shit and asks you to find out why. You tell them, and they say that blaming Google or whoever does the tracking is just passing the buck as the google home page loads really quickly, you must have messed up in creating their site instead.

At this point the web developer realises he can't win and shoots himself in the head :)

Without the shitty marketing products Google and Facebook would cease to exist.

Money makes the world go round and neither of these companies would exist without some way of making money, however great Google search and Facebooks social network is. They both now need huge internet pipes and servers which does not come cheap.

Have you read this thread? There are tons of people talking about want Netflix to work without paying for an Xbox Live subscription, they are not using their console just for gaming are they?

Always on internet definitely not needed according to this: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-21-xbox-always-online-the-answer-is-no

As to music and movies you must realise that if they did not build in a blueray player then the vast majority of people would have opted for the PS4 or whatever it will be called (myself included as I don't have a blueray player yet). Also, Bluray drives are so cheap now there is almost no point in using a DVD drive instead. You are very much in the minority if you do not use a games console for watching any sort of movies or other multimedia so betting on everyone being like you would be a sure fire recipe for MS going bankrupt.

As to used games I doubt any of the companies that create games want you you to be able to do this, so they have been lobbying to make sure this is not possible. There will never be another console that supports this unless they can come up with a cast iron DRM system that ensures the same licence can be used on two different machines at the same time, this would probably require an always on internet connection.

Personally I get annoyed by games on my old Xbox360 making get up off the couch to swap disks when both games are installed on the hard disk just so they can be sure I have not sold one of them to a second hand shop (something I would never do as the second hand or trade in cost of a game is a pittance and I buy everything off the web). If they can use an always on internet connection to ensure that two copies of the same game are not being played at once that might fix this and let me stay on the couch but I bet a crap load of other people here would go mental at such an idea so the it is very likely that second hand games will be blocked.

The only way to keep everybody happy in this regard would be to trust their customers to not pirate stuff and the chances of that happening are somewhere between slim and none since the existence of any software piracy whatsoever proves that some people cannot be trusted. This is not saying that piracy costs them a sale, just that people who produce games don't want it to happen even if it doesn't.

Actually I just checked and it seems you will have to pay an additional fee to play a second hand game so you might be able to buy a second hand disk but the licence to use it's contents will be extra and always on internet will be down to the games developers. Seems like they are ignoring no-money cheapskate gypos like you to make it easier for me to stay on the couch, good move MS!

I would hope that the savegames go in both places in a similar way to steam does it although steam seems to screw this up too often for my liking so I don't trust it 100% but if they made it always work it would be perfect. Steam tries to sync the save games to the cloud when you launch and exit a game. This enables me to play on both my gaming PC's (I have been hovering between my own pad and my girlfriends for years and they are a few hundred miles apart).

That way if you have no internet then you can still play but only if you played last on that PC. I don't think it is only people like me who find this functionality useful, I reckon people who play games in internet cafe type places would find it useful too.

The problem is they have tons of cash. When you become that rich you end up bypassing the crap that the little people have to deal with as you can always pay someone else to deal with that for you.

He does not have to worry about ever being refused health insurance or the exorbitant cost of it as he has no sense of perspective when it comes to money any more.

It only costs a few extra quid per month to get a Bupa (private company) top up to smooth out all the areas where the NHS is a bit rough. The end result is that we still end up paying less than you do in the US since the Bupa cover does not have to worry about the really expensive stuff as the NHS covers that.

With a Bupa policy I can leave work now and go and talk to the private clinic just down the road with no appointment. Even without a Bupa policy I can still go and talk to them and then just pay cash for their time (I have done this to get some jabs for going to South America on short notice).

Then why didn't you: http://www.bmihealthcare.co.uk/hospital/description?p_hosp_id=294&p_hospital_page_id=163&in_page=Emergency%20care%20centre

It took me about 30 seconds to find that link via Google. I bet they have other clinics all over the country.

I know A&E is awful on a Friday night through experience, but that was when I was a poor student dropout and I broke my hand (cleanly snapped third and forth metacarpals). If I had been in the US at that time I probably wouldn't have had any cover either as my family are not that well off so god knows what would happened.

As it was though I was in surgery within 16 hours and then discharged within 36 at no cost apart from the taxes I had paid as a checkout boy in a supermarket (the only job I had ever done at that age). Now I happily pay my taxes as I am grateful to be able to type this using both hands and go climbing as a hobby thanks to my 100% recovery because the NHS pinned my hand back together.

In the US I very much doubt I would have been able to get my hand reconstructed the same way without paying a fortune, instead they would have just patched me up so it did not get any worse but left me with limited movement.

we?

Do you really expect anyone to believe you work in the "financial trading industry" and hang out on slashdot?

It is worth remembering that the only treatments for Pancreatic Cancer are: Surgery, Radiation Therapy or Chemotherapy. Ok, he probably should have gone down the surgery route sooner than he did (he waited nine months) but the other two options both suck.

Many people choose to die of cancer rather that go through the shit of Chemo or Radiation Therapy as they both utterly ruin your quality of life for the time you have left for a very low probability of success anyway. By choosing to avoid these two treatments you can actually make the most of the time you have left and remain relatively active.

Most medical research nowadays is done by drug companies. They are not interested in "cures" they are interested in finding a drug to manage a particular condition, that way they get to make tons of money from all the repeat prescriptions of their creation. If they came up with a cure for that condition they only get the money from a single prescription.

If they created a single pill that would cure and vaccinate you against all the worlds diseases they would all go bankrupt within a decade, even if they could sell the pill for $1 million.

So who knows what is possible when the corporations who fund (and hence choose the direction of) most medical research are not interested in looking? Instead they come up with crap like Viagra as that is where the money is.

In next weeks slashdot I expect to see something about Moxie Marlinspike being asked to deliver a nice shiny yacht to Saudi Arabia and it going horribly wrong when he gets arrested for piracy :)

Only if you happen to be an immoral twat trying to justify their argument.

The truth is that thing like paying sales taxes on mail order goods involve you going out of your way to pay more tax. Setting up a dodgy offshore arrangement involves going out of your way to pay less tax. There is a massive difference between these two things in that in one case you are just taking the path of least resistance, in the other you are investing a shitload of extra effort in order to hide money from the taxman. The effort involved is key.

Also, there is the minor difference in terms of reward. By not paying the odd bit of sales tax you can probably save a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars at most. By hiding money offshore you can save millions if you have it.

Is that fair though? Just because you can find another government that you can pay to take that shit off your hands does not mean the people in the country actually want the damn stuff.

Also, what happens if the country in question falls apart and someone decides they want to give it back to you later in the form of a dirty bomb? Even though you shipped that crap abroad you still have to keep an eye on the stuff to stop it falling into the wrong hands.

Apt is fine for the OS, they even said so. What they want to come up with is something completely different I think. This is not a replacement for apt, it is to complement apt. It actually sounds like this is really designed as a competitor to the APK file you use under android for distributing applications.

However great apt is, it is utterly useless from the point of selling commercial software as there is the possibility of software not installing due to dependency issues. This is not an option with commercial software as the (stupid) end use will blame the software he just bought for not installing, not the fact that his machine is not able to download a dependency package because it is not available upstream. As many have pointed out this wastes disk space, but who cares as it is cheap now.

It sounds like their grand idea is to come up with an additional application wrapper format that will always install everything for a particular application in a single directory also making uninstalling much easier.