Wrongo, but funny story. I did get a debit card a couple of years ago and eventually got rid of all my credit cards. Last month I tried to buy something to discover that it is ONLY possible to buy it with a credit card. So far I've wasted a couple of weeks trying to find out why, but my top theory is that they insist on having an "active" credit rating for reasons still unclear. Or might be a PI abuse scam? Also spent some of that time researching the options for credit cards, but that's paradox-of-choice territory now. I remember one particular credit card company website with a list of 70 different credit cards... Talk about head games.

However I was mostly thinking about grocery stores. There are four local ones that I do business with, and each of them has wildly different loyalty card schemes with various kinds of points and bogus incentives. Lesser thinking was about Rakuten Mobile, which uses a bizarre mix of coupons and points and special offers to confuse the bejesus out of wannabe customers. (Or a former wannabe customer in my case, but one who can't yet find a better option...)

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Funny deserved, but I think the real problem is with human clones. I'm "pert' shure" some of those rich puppeteers have cloned themselves already. The first clone to take over will claim to be a son who just looks unusually like his father, but after he has a string of clones in the pipeline he'll just start swapping in a fresh one every year or two. The rest of them will be hiding on an island somewhere...

Quoted against censor trolls with mod points.

However my take on this stuff is that I'm sick and tired of playing games when I want to buy something. All of these points and bonus loyalty programs and time-limited coupons and kitchen sinks are just false economy. If you didn't actually want to buy it, then it's a waste of money at ANY price and it doesn't matter how you paid for it.

Small world syndrome? Just a few pages from finishing A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. No, the name is not a joke, though he does do a rather funny webcomic. So any excuse for a short book review? Any Slashdotters still read books?

Summary is that they want space colonies with humans but are quite persuasive in arguing that it's a bad idea at this time. Basic premise is that anything we can do to live in space is much more likely to succeed on earth and we are still quite far away from space colonies that will be able to sustain themselves if earth is destroyed. But a desperate grab for outer space at this time might make things much worse on earth, possibly even destroying the earth. The book covers a lot of turf, and a lot of interesting history in particular, but there were two omissions that did bother me.

Minor one is that their power options didn't include steam turbines using solar power. Solving the water problem is a prerequisite for any space settlement and turbine technology is quite machine and much less expensive than the options they discussed.

Major omission involves the Fermi Paradox. Barely touched on in the book, but I think there probably are some civilizations that survived past our current crises. However I think they did that by becoming AIs, and if so, then they are already here and watching us. Curiosity and insurance against a paperclip crisis.

Not just the Web. But there are too many examples to pick from... However just recently I was meditating on how cosmetic and beauty product advertisements have harmed women in particular. Easy to create fake demand using comparisons against the extremes of beauty.

Yeah, I'm "pert' shure" you were focusing on the business model of advertising for "free" websites. TANSTAAFL, and businesses always wrap themselves around their revenue streams, but I just want a joke and I'm not seeing any good angles.

"Whatever you can do, AI can do better." Is that funny yet? Or still premature? The joke should wait for Elon to get his $1-trillion bonus for unleashing the robot hordes (controlled by AI, of course)?

People believe what they want to believe. He believe iPhones are super-sexy.

Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops. Good intentions under the old motto of "Justice delayed is justice denied." Instant "justice" for each of our crimes, and homo sapiens should be extinct within a week or two.

Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.

NAK

I do recognize his name and would like to find a book he's written, but pretty sure I've searched a number of times.

I think I was about as explicit as I could be about going for funny. How about this attempted joke:

You couldn't pay me to fly when the ATCs aren't being paid to keep my plane in the air. (But I haven't flown since around 2005...)

I would say the timeline matches, but I don't care nearly that much about the presentation to spend time on such aspects as forcing things to look differently. I prefer tools that are easy to use. Again from the funding perspective, why would I want to buy an annoying tool?

(Why did you [beelsebob] propagate the vacuum?)

My reaction to any "federal" mention these days is to wonder if they are getting paid for their work. If not, and they are just doing it for love, why should we ever bother to pay them? But I think it will be funny if the shutdown lasts until the next election...

Just joking, but...

Good comment and too bad you weren't FP--and thank you for your relevant Subject.

I still approach it from the perspective of "Would I donate money for that?" And the answer is a partial yes for some of your suggestions. Some of them would take some creativity in describing the project in a way that would attract my donation. But I also have a workaround for some of the other stuff. A fraction of my donation could be reserved for the Mozilla people to assign based on their "unsexy infrastructure" needs. Or maybe the time limit on donations would be sufficient? In the context of the imaginary CSB (Charity Share Brokerage), I would have deposited my donation up front and then selected projects for the CSB to route my donation to. So if the time limit runs out before I've selected a sufficient number of projects, the CSB (as part of its project management mission) could route that money to the "unsexy but necessary" stuff.

Just the ACK and mostly concurrence, though I think most names these days have no recognizable semantic value, in contrast to your two examples. In Japanese most kanji can't lose their meanings. (Exceptions are "illegal" or imaginary kanji.)

Thanks for additional hints about the latest Firefox bloat.