Nice. "The less reporting, the larger the conspiracy!" Even Infowars hasn't reported on Barack HUSSEIN Obama's quadrillion-dollar black budget for orbiting mind control rays ... that must mean they're already operating!

Ah, you must be one of those people who thinks there shouldn't be any laws against fraud, since all parties had to agree to the transaction for it to progress.

Yeah, pretty much that.

You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Oh, but that's Different, you see. It's always Different when the group being targeted is someone you personally dislike.

Also: Godwin! Godwin! You called Barilla a Nazi! Now anything you say is wrong, because Godwin!

It's for ideas like this that the saying "it's important to be open-minded, but not so much that your brains fall out" was coined. Tolerance and respect for the views of others are, on the whole, a good thing. But the views of people who believe that other people are in the wrong simply for living their lives as they see fit deserve not tolerance and respect, but scorn and condemnation. It's pretty much the verbal equivalent of another fine saying, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

Life on your planet must be very pleasant.

The werewolves are going to rip that guy apart.

I remember people who cracked early DRM calling themselves "pirates" long before I heard politicians using the term. There was (at least) one fairly prolific cracking group back in the early 1980s that included amusing ASCII art of a pirate ship with every piece of software they distributed. So while I agree that the current legal use of the word is ridiculous, the fact is that we the geek-people kind of brought it on ourselves.

He says, in a post currently modded to +5.

On practically every issue, you'll see thoughtful, well-written posts expressing practically every possible opinion on that issue modded up, and trollish or semi-literate posts modded down. To be sure, there are certain opinions held by the majority of Slashdotters on a lot of these issues, and the ones you name are among them (with the exception of religion, where we're all over the map; believers who complain about anti-religious prejudice online are mostly just whining because their beliefs don't get the deference in forums like Slashdot that they usually do in our overwhelmingly religious society). But rarely if ever are these majorities overwhelming, and minority opinions very often receive upmods as long as they're expressed well.

AFAICT, the whole "hivemind" thing really only exists in the minds of a small group of people who've convinced themselves that it exists, and take pride in all thinking alike on the subject. ;)

Standards are wonderful, and everyone should have their very own!

There is an option to set the font to bold, which does dramatically improve the thin fonts (though some of the larger text, like the lock screen clock looks odd), it's under the accessibility settings. There's also an increase contrast option (which is distinct from the invert colors option) though I haven't found where that takes effect.

There are a number of UX issues with iOS 7 that I'm frankly quite surprised made it through testing or that anyone thought these were good ideas. Ignoring the theme itself (lower definition icons means less context, especially with hi res screens, that context would have been very usable it's the whole reason we do things like image previews for icons in modern OSes rather than generic jpg icons).

1) The "partial shift" no longer has a distinct visible mode on the keyboard. iOS has 4 modes for the shift button. 1: The button is off, everything is lowercase, 2: The button is on, the next letter or symbol is uppercase / shift symbol (? vs /), 3: The button is locked on, all letters are uppercase, but symbols are not shifted, 4: The button is partially on, the next letter is uppercase, but symbols will not be shifted. Mode 4 is the mode the button goes into at the beginning of a line or after a period. It was also previously distinguished by a blue highlight around the shift arrow rather than the arrow being filled in. Now there is no visual distinction between modes 4 and 2.

2) Minimalist button icons. For buttons that aren't text, the icons are very minimalist and without previous knowledge give little to no clue about what they do. For example the "share" button is now a simple box with an up arrow. The bookmarks icon in safari is a weird divided rectangle that if you squint just right you could argue looks like an open book.

3) The ".com" button is now hidden behind the "." key for web address entry making is non-discoverable except by accident.

4) Folders only display a 3x3 grid, even on iPads and do not remember your last position (nor does there appear to be an option for that).

5) When you first open the OS, it tells you that spotlight has moved and to now simply swipe down from any home screen. That's good, it's great that the search functionality is available anywhere. What it doesn't tell you is that you don't swipe down from the top (which gives you notification center. You instead swipe from another place on the screen.

6) The keyboard seems slower and less responsive. This may be just my iPad for some reason, but it appears that the keyboard sometimes hesitates on displaying and coming ready when displayed.

7) Videos have a "make full screen" button, but no longer have a "leave full screen" button that doesn't stop the video from playing. The "Done" button remains, but this stops the video. The only way to leave full screen without stopping the video is to pinch the screen.

None of these are show stoppers by any stretch of the imagination, but they are the sorts of "little things" that apple (and steve jobs in particular) are noted for fussing over. For making sure that those little experiences add up to be a better experience than the sum of their parts.

Thank you for illustrating my point so neatly. Just as die-hard communists insist that real communism looks nothing like was practiced in the USSR, so do free-market fundamentalists insist that real capitalism looks nothing like what we have in the US ... both groups neatly ignoring the fact that in the real world, this is how their preferred system behaves. You can talk all you want about how it should work, or how you think it would work if certain conditions were met, but it doesn't make a damned bit of difference to how it actually works.

Yep. Anyone can describe a utopian economic system ("Under communism, everyone will work together for the common good!" "Under capitalism, competition and individual choice will lead to the greatest possible efficiency!") but in the real world, they all tend toward cronyism and corruption. Every single time.