They should leave a long-lived cookie to let the page know that you've already seen and closed the banner.

Is the Google in my Internet? I don't think I have the Google. My Internet is Comcast.

Our justice system only works (for certain definitions of "works") because we threaten insane sentences to force less-insane plea bargains.

We can't afford to have more than a tiny number of cases go to trial, or the system would break down. Not enough money, not enough judges, not enough lawyers.

I tried to be careful not to lump all libertarians in with them, nor even to take the maybe-controversial-to-some step of naming them libertarians (I only pointed out how they tend to identify themselves).

Sorry if I didn't convey that very well.

There are lots of very prolific posters on Slashdot (and the Internet in general) who think that "Caveat Emptor" should be our national motto, and that because you could become an expert on everything, information imbalances in our economic system aren't a huge problem, or, indeed, a problem at all.

Most of these people call themselves libertarians. I call them dipshits.

Yeah, in the last year or so especially they seem to have gone to shit.

I have to quote half the words I type in, and then it still sometimes decides to only give me three or four results for what I wanted, then a second section full of crap that has nothing to do with it.

The only new thing I like is the typo/misspelling detection, and that's only because it's actually helpful and very easy and straightforward to bypass entirely.

I think they're trying to make it easier for people who don't know how to search properly (I'm continually amazed by what a rare skill that is) but considering the hoops I have to jump through to keep it from fucking up, I can imagine how worthless it must have become for someone who doesn't know the "just do what I goddamn told you to" tricks.

The idea is that you can share code (say, data models) between the client and server. IMO this is an awful reason to suffer through Javascript, though.

Node in particular handles async IO for you, which means it saves you from learning threading, or an async IO framework in some other language like Python or Ruby, or learning Erlang, or any number of other better things you could do with your time. The cost is callback soup, and having to use Javascript.

Node's package manager, NPM, makes it super-easy to set up 5-line demos of WebSocket echo servers and such, which pulls a lot of people in. Tends to be messy as hell once you get past 100 lines or so (of Coffeescript, mind you, which is what you'll have to use to maintain your sanity even that long), especially if you need more than one source for IO (say, read from RabbitMQ and Redis, output over Websockets and XMPP, or whatever—basically anything you could use it for that's interesting). You pay for the up-front ease with constructs that get excessively complex later on, IMO.

Also, there's no excuse whatsoever to use it in a case where you're simply writing a REST api or a typical website. There are way, way better tools for that kind of thing, namely anything that's not NodeJS, with an appropriately-designed cache in front of it, and a well-configured webserver.

Are you talking about the book, or NodeJS itself?

Corporatism

It's because gaining 20 days a year of mandatory vacation time would mean infringing on the rights of people who want to work every single weekday. People who want vacation time are expected to bargain for it, probably making disproportionately large sacrifices to gain it (assuming they succeed at all).

I wish I were joking, or even exaggerating. No-one here gives a damn about the practical ability of most people to exercise their freedoms, so long as those freedoms exist in theory.

Last time I used it, it was far more prone to weird rendering problems and crashes (possibly a result of bad markup/code, but as a user of the browser I don't really care why those things happen) and the GUI still felt, as it had for years, like something out of Windows 95.

Not terrible, but a distant third for me. I could have put "*shudder*" next to Safari too, since the only browser I actually enjoy using right now is Chrome.

Maybe Mozilla's creative process will turn out to be cyclical and there'll be a new Phoenix project that'll give us a super-light-weight, plugin-friendly browser that renders pages reasonably well, and lacks a ton of UI fluff. Then in six or seven years that one will completely lose its way, and a few years later, after losing market share, they'll do it all over again.

I hope so, anyway, because I'd prefer something Mozilla backed to something Google backed.

All I know is launching Chrome with two dozen tabs open is faster than launching Firefox with two, and doesn't make my system fan kick on. It also doesn't make my other heavyweight applications less responsive like having FF open does; I get way more busy spinners and unresponsive GUI elements system-wide when FF is running. I can open a new tab without delay with tons of other tabs open, while FF is always sluggish to do the same even with only a couple tabs open.

Everyone where I work has noticed the same thing, and switched away from FF to Chrome or, occasionally, Safari, as a result. I don't think we have one FF fan left; it's joined the class of programs that we only open because we absolutely have to, and close as soon as possible.

Maybe it uses more memory, but I know that Chrome respects my time and the needs of other running applications much better than FF does. Don't know why, but it's not a subtle difference; more than once the answer to "why the hell is my system running like crap?" has been "oh, because I accidentally forgot to close FF".

Phoenix through Firefox1.x were light browsers.

Modern Firefox is so damn bloated that it might be the fattest browser on any system I own.

On my work laptop, only three things kick on the system fan: 1) compiling, 2) opening Eclipse or doing anything in it whatsoever, 3) launching Firefox with one or two tab set to auto-open.

Which is why I use Chrome now, and if I couldn't for some reason then I'd run Safari or (*shudder*) Opera.

Firefox is a browser of last resort, like IE. It's a clunky beast like Netscape/Mozilla used to be. It's as if they've forgotten why they created Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in the first place...

What does "help" mean, in an evolutionary context?

Seems to me that culture is just another factor to which an organism may, over generations, adapt.

Interesting, didn't know that. Probably falling in to the error of mixing up (part of) a common definition of a word with a technical (legal, in this case) one.