Okay, Iâ(TM)m thinking of the strippers.

Did the article have the wrong planet name when OP copied the text?

And now I’m putting junk characters in my editorial metacomments. Look, gimme a break. I just finished my taxes.

âoePatterâ? I left off the âoenâ? Huh. Well, in my defense, the legalese does qualify as dark patter.

I used TaxAct for the last two years and ran into this, and the way they implemented it, it’s absolutely a dark pattern. The page where they harvest your consent to share information with third parties has extremely roundabout, legalistic wording that overall looks like they’re asking for your consent to simply process your taxes. The true details are in there if you read very carefully, but good luck if you don’t have training in logic or law. The form includes inputs for “Signature” (your name) and the date. The big, obvious “I Agree” button accepts their terms; a smaller “I Don’t Agree” text link skips forward and lets you finish your tax filing without approving third-party info sharing.

Text from a screenshot of last year’s consent form:

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Consent to use your tax information.

Plain Talk: In order for TaxAct to personalize your refund options, we need your permission to use some of the tax information you entered.

Federal law requires this consent form be provided to you. Unless authorized by law, we cannot use your tax return information for purposes other than the preparation and filing of your tax return without your consent.

You are not required to complete this form to engage our tax return preparation services. If we obtain your signature on this form by conditioning our tax return preparation services on your consent, your consent will not be valid. Your consent is valid for the amount of time that you specify. If you do not specify the duration of your consent, your consent is valid for one year from the date of signature.

By clicking “I Agree", I, [your name], authorize TaxAct to use the information I provide during the preparation of my 2021 tax return along with my prior year refund funding rate and similar information from prior years as needed to communicate with me and to evaluate and present refund and payment options available to me. By completing this form my consent will be effective until December 31, 2025.

[pre-filled input: "Signature"] [pre-filled input: "Today’s Date"]

If you believe your tax return information has been disclosed or used improperly in a manner unauthorized by law or without your permission, you may contact the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) by telephone at 1-800-366-4484, or by email at complaints@tigta.treas.gov.

[button: “< Back"] [text link: "I Don’t Agree"] [highlighted button: "I Agree"]

An example: I was a front-end developer for the Wall Street Journal five years ago. The home page was a shifting multi-column stack of dozens of internal content modules (developed by different programmers) that had no awareness of each other (also often the case with the programmers), along with dynamic ads and an astounding amount of additional crud that included externally-sourced content like spammy Taboola and Outbrain links. To conserve bandwidth, the module containers triggered just-in-time content loading when the user scrolled down to within a certain number of pixels. There was effectively no way for any part of the page to know the position of any other part. Sure, I declared the sizes for images within my module, but it had no effect on the rest of the page.

And as for American Football, it's just silly. You have 1 point, 2 points, 3 points and 6 points depending on what's done. And the stuff that scores 1 point CAN score 3 points and the one that usually scores 6 points can be 2 points instead. The only reason it makes sense is that you're used to it.

I suppose so. Now try to explain Cricket to an American. No, go ahead, I'll wait here.

Here in 2009, we have apps!

Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
I mean, I know many Americans like to believe the US invented absolutely everything and are ahead of everyone else technologically, but in fact they really didn't and aren't.

I think you'll find that technologies commonly found outside the U.S. don't see a lot of demand for smugglers to sneak them out of the U.S. illegally.

Power issue or not, the lack of FireWire now officially makes the portable consumer-level Mac incompatible with the standard DV camera interface. I guess Steve really is pushing those memory-card HD cameras.

Seems odd for such a non-technical article to latch onto a term like "micro-kernel" like it was all hot and new. OS X is built on a BSD which has it's roots in 60's and 70's OS design, just like the VMS roots of WinNT.

OS X didn't change the world by bringing some great new underlying architecture to the table. In fact, their kernel and filesystem are arguably getting long in the tooth. The value that OS X brought to the table was the fantastic Carbon and Cocoa development platforms. And they have continued to execute and iterate on these platforms, providing the "Core" series of APIs (CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, etc.) to make certain HW services more accessible.

There's very little cool stuff to be gained in the windows world by developing a new kernel from scratch. A quantum leap to something like Singularity would not solve MS's problem. The problem is the platform. What's really dead and bloated is the Win32 subsystem. The kernel doesn't need major tweaking. In fact, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning such that it could easily run the old busted Win32 subsystem alongside a new subsystem without needing to resort to expensive virtualization.

Unfortunately, the way Microsoft is built today it have a fatal organizational flaw that prevents creating the next great Windows platform. The platform/dev tools team and the OS team are in completely different business groups within the company. The platform team develops the wonderful .NET platform for small/medium applications and server apps while the OS team keeps crudging along with Win32. Managed languages have their place, but they have yet to gain traction for any top shelf large-scale windows client application vendors (Office, Adobe, etc.) Major client application development still relies on unmanaged APIs, and IMHO the Windows unmanaged APIs are arguably the worst (viable) development platform available today.

What Windows needs is a new subsystem/development platform to break with Win32, providing simplified, extensible *unmanaged* application development, with modern easy-to-use abstractions for hardware services such as graphics, data, audio and networking (which would probably look not entirely unlike an unmanaged counterpart to WPF/WCF/WinFS).