It's hard to imagine the brass at Apple actually cares about side-loaded apps, security or privacy. What I imagine they really care about is competition. When Epic tries to release a side-loaded game store, which can add new apps outside of Apple's control or oversight, and Apple rejects that, it'll confirm my suspicions.

Crypto currencies are a conduit for money laundering and tax evasion. This one seems like a no-brainer.

>> Imagine going into a hotel room that has a bunch of empty wall frames with screens in them, and being able to just connect your NFTs to the hotel room walls, now you have a whole art gallery in a hotel room.

I could do the same thing with a set of JPGs or some URLs to hosted stuff, or some IDs from any given service. What makes NFTs special in this regard?

So, you think people should simply not be able to buy these parts? People need to be responsible for their own decisions. If they shouldn't be trying to fix their iPhone, that's on them to determine, not you, and certainly not Apple.

Mozilla has some resources, but they don't have similar resources to the Blink/Chromium projects. There are dozens of companies contributing to those projects, because of the way it's architected to be used in other contexts, like Electron, etc. It'd be a big lift, but Mozilla should consider rearchitecting their core so that it can be used the same way. This would help them get more stake holders on the project. Right now, they operate like a monolithic island, and that makes it hard to get dev and company buy-in.

They say there was a technical error on the outputs (the reports), which was skewing the results. That's what they say - but it's politics, and I don't believe them. A fool would.

The reason is simple - voting accuracy is not a technical problem. There was no competing concerns when we went to the moon - no one was trying to steal numbers from the calculations to change the outcome (and if they were, it'd be successful - just ask the Iranian nuclear weapons researchers). With voting, there's very little incentive to make the count accurate, and a lot of incentive to make it skew one way or the other, with competing concerns.

All putting everything in a black box does is centralize the attack surface for cheating. It makes it easier, not harder to change the outcome. There's a reason voter intimidation goes down when these machines go in - the intimidation is no longer needed for cheating. The best systems are the ones that create the most work for hackers and cheats. Hand counted paper ballots are the toughest to hack - you have to have large scale (visible) efforts to distort the results, or employ multiple agents to skew the count - agents with potentially loose lips, instead of one or two hackers who can be contained. Paper ballots is a better model given the political realities involved with voting. There is no technical solution, because it's not a technical problem.

The problem he has is ideological opposition to any kind of authority - aka, puritanical libertarianism. Market based media (without dominant monopoly power like we see today) is a competitive market drive system which is supposed to keep the various players honest - and if there are enough players, this mostly works, and perfectly suits tech libertarian ideals. But within those structures, and actually when those markets function well, there is an authority keeping it competitive, and applying some rules to keep the competition fair (and when they remove the rules, remove the authority - we get monopoly, or at least too few players for it to function right - duh) - and yes, even some internal and external authority making sure media companies don't distribute intentionally misleading propaganda. Like it or not, Facebook is a media company, probably more so than it is a tech company at this point.

The ideology is the problem - the solution is to stop with the puritarian ideology. We don't need absolute authority, and we don't need a complete lack of authority in unregulated markets. We need the right balance of these. These tech CEOs have got to stop with the libertarian ideological purity - we cannot solve their own problems within the bounds of that nonsense.

Firefox's mobile version isn't super terrible, but it's lacking in some important areas. Their canvas performance is not even close to Chrome for example.

That's Edge in branding only. It's running a version of the Chromium engine underneath. It'd be great if MS ported their own EdgeHTML to other platforms. I hate having to boot up Windows just to test that stupid input focus stealing browser (with it's horrid dev tools).

IE and now Edge have one annoying UI quirk - immediately after you start it, you can click into the address bar, then it almost always takes away focus for some damned reason (actually, Windows does this all over the place - it's the primary reason I can't use that OS).

If they'd fixed this one problem, I'd probably use it more. I suspect they don't use their own software at Microsoft. They'd surely have noticed and fixed it by now if they did...

Well then you are missing the way way back side. If productivity increases, and reduces the need for workers, fewer people have money to buy goods - even when they are cheaper (though that doesn't happen due to price stickiness and profit motive/greed). This causes a downward spiral that we've been living in for decades.

I'm so tired of market fundamentalism. It is a soulless religion.

China has seen an increase in their middle class because they use policy to build it. In the 40s through the 60s in the US rich people paid huge percentages of their income in taxes (and only the top 5% at first paid that), which was directly redistributed back to workers through public works and other programs. Wages and salaries were controlled with both floors and caps. This even lead directly to employer benefits such as health insurance - they couldn't pay more, so they needed to offer something else - and the economy was so good from these policies that there was a lot of demand for everything.

Europe and Japan acheived similar wonders with similar policy. We can look at those places today to see the countries where those redistributive policies are stronger, are weathering the shit-storm market fundamentalism brought us over the last decade, better than the free market states.

Everyone doesn't know that - in fact, schools seem to go out of their way to avoid teaching that. Ownership of the means of production is the way you turn 1 dollar into 2, in a capitalist society. Working for a living is for suckers, and public schools mostly train suckers.

All we need to do is democratically make policy to solve these problems. Aging demographic is harder, and is usually taken care of through immigration, but the wealth gap is easier. We have simple models to follow from the 1940s. Tax the crap out of the wealthiest, and hand out the money. FDR had to use a public works program, but the actual mechanism you use to distribute wealth is actually less important.

The missing part is a political movement that feels empowered to make these demands. After WWII it was an easier justification - countrymen sent their kids off to war, and they felt they deserved something in return. I don't feel the need to go to war, but we do need some similar justification to make the demand palatable. This damned right wing market ideology that is so effectively propagated is making this a hard nut to crack though - the free market religion has been very effective at conscripting folks to advocate against their own interests.