Neither, it's all about money. The Mozilla Foundation is given "donations" in order to implement features that make you easier to track and monetize. Why do you think that Adblock isn't an official Mozilla subproject? Why isn't that functionality enabled by default?

Look at who gives money to Mozilla and your answers are right there.

I suppose it's easier than improving the algorithm, which is just pathetically bad at this point in time.

I can just imagine all the billionaire eugenics pushers working through and with the UN like Bill Gates laughing at the filthy peasants eating bugs and lining up for his sterilization "vaccines," just creatures created for his own amusement and pleasure.

Why the fuck not eat bugs? Next up, human shit. There's some undigested corn in there probably!

Your mistake was buying the wrong phone. Another phone has been eating Nintendo's lunch for years and years...

Stewardess is perfectly acceptable when referring to a female. The only people who should be offended is the males, who have their own word - steward.

It's really strange that we need to come up with neuter terms for everything. This doesn't actually increase anybody's chances for success or failure in life, it just makes language less precise.

More exactly, "flight attendants" should be called waitresses, because all they really do nowadays is get food and drinks. Their little pantomimes with the seat belts have been replaced by video recordings.

What with having the grad students do all the research and teaching, and hiring testing services to provide the books, syllabi, and even testing materials, what's the point of even having University professors any more?

I think it would be more efficient for everybody if you could just purchase degrees directly from Pearson.

I hear lots of numbers being thrown around by mainframe guys but unfortunately they always seem to tell only part of the story. This is a recurring theme.

256 simultaneous DMA transfers of what word length on how fast a bus?

"Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it."

DEC thought they had the customers' balls in the vice of lock-in. So did IBM.

Business logic can be moved, systems can be emulated or virtualized, things change. It may take some time and an initial trajectory change, but there is no law of nature that says Windows will go forever.

Perhaps the only choice is choosing not to buy a next-generation console. I have this sneaking suspicion that from now on all consoles will require persistent net connections. This much was intimated during the PS4 intro as well.

Steam games will still work without Internet access, so the Steam Box may be the console of choice from here on out.

It only makes sense to trim unused legacy code from any library. If Google isn't using Webkit any more, why leave their own specific stuff in there?

It isn't a problem to fork code and remove legacy stuff. It was done when KHTML was forked into Webkit, and it will probably be done again. The only losers in the event of a fork like this are possibly the independent developers who contribute to Webkit, but it is doubtful that they were contributing code that is Google specific.

PARC has an incredible legacy, but the problem is that there wasn't much follow through. Through the short-sightedness of Xerox, they sold off everything they had that was worth making money with.

Back in the early 1980s Smalltalk was be seriously pursued by Xerox and about a dozen computer companies in partnership, as the next generation platform / OS / language. Programs would be portable across architectures without any special effort, the user / programmer paradigm would blur, and we would all be in control of our machines.

Meanwhile Alan Kay has been giving speeches about the good old days, working at both Disney and Apple as a research imagineer, and while he did manage to release Squeak 25 years too late, the cathedral nature of its development process made its progress go very slowly. Thankfully it has been forked which kicked the Squeak dev team in the pants. Anyway Kay had his chance.

Bitcoin is not money. It is an imaginary commodity.

The Google cultists are so thick on Reddit that I suspect that one of the terms of employment at Google is ten Reddit posts a day hyping the Google brand. And of course, three on Slashdot.

Nations don't just "have" rights, they make them depending on their ability to get away with things. Who grants nations rights? The UN? Feh.

Nations will do whatever they wish to do, within the limits of their abilities, just like they ALWAYS have.

I know (not believe, kow) that Google is doing anything and everything it can to build up profiles of everybody who uses any Google service - visible or not - all of the time. This is their primary job. They are advertisers, trying to make money by selling targeted ads (and perhaps information that allows targeting) to anybody. And yes, I know they were purposefully targeting this Safari bug.

I do not believe that it is possible for advertisers, attorneys, loan brokers, and certain other classes of people to have souls, morals, or a conscience. I personally know some of the highest ranking Googlers, having grew up with them and gone to school with them, and they are not fully human. I know how they think. I know how Google works, and I think it's funny that you mention tinfoil hats in this age of total surveillance on the Internet. By resorting to such a cheap tactic you are basically admitting that I am correct.