Sure they're going to be against the hybrid parts- Don't forget who's working on this stuff.

Do you really want "Upgrade now to Microsoft Cornea 15" popping into your field of vision when you're trying to control your flying car?

God help us if they bring Clippy back: "I see you're trying to perform intercourse with a defective pecker- would you like to upgrade?"

Shhhush! You're taking all the fun out of beating the crap out of a straw man.

Hey, lighten up on the guy. He needs to make sure that his insightful yet under-appreciated reasoning brings the ignorant into the light, while the crowd surrounding him nods appreciatively (with polite golf claps) at his insights.

If it takes equating a popular petition to prosecute (that he doesn't care for) with fascism, well... the ends justify the means; that's the price that's gotta be paid for someone to -finally- appreciate the worth of his insightful insights & intellect.

Hey, there's no shortage of suckers that will buy into it. I would bet that Exxon could find idiots to crowdfund a refinery. At the $10-level, you get a t-shirt and a certificate of appreciation.

Don't be so short-sighted. We need stupid and selfish people- They're like honeybees: You make cute little boxes for them to live in, make sure they have enough flowers to play with, and every so often you blow smoke up their collective asses while you take their honey. Repeat as needed.

You are an idiot shooting off his mouth ignorantly at best

And, as usual, you're a hot headed asshole, and I don't give a fuck to read any of the rest of your bullshit.

You consistently act like a childish idiot, so go fuck yourself.

You want to use your big-boy words and act civil, great. Otherwise go back to fucking your sister.

Which is why Javascript also needs to be much more tightly controlled than simply running any damned thing on the page.

Your average web page has 10-20 3rd parties, all of which want to run javascript, flash, set cookies, and do a host of other crap. Advertising has pretty much fucked up the permission model of the internet by saying "you need to let every asshole run anything they want because you have no idea if it's part of the functionality of the site or an ad, but we just assume you'll let it all run".

Yeah, sorry, no. Flash is straight up disabled or uninstalled. I'll selectively whitelist sites who I trust, or at least temporarily do so. But almost no 3rd party scripts or content are EVER allowed ... because I don't want ads, and because I don't trust random web pages to run scripts. Because they're not trustworthy.

If Javascript has only one big namespace, then maybe that needs to be fixed? Security holes like cross-site scripting and other stuff are enabled by web sites insisting they be able to write the most presumptively insecure code and then let it be the user's problem.

This stuff needs to be sandboxed, treated like it's potentially hostile, and locked down from being able to do anything to the host computer. Instead what we have is stuff running which we have no idea what it is, which may or may not be malicious, and which can actively impact the host machine.

It's time we stopped treating web pages like they're trusted by default, because so much of the web these days simply can't be trusted.

Stop letting the advertisers tell us how the internet should work, and stop letting them be the ones who cause the damned thing to be insecure in the first place.

Why the heck should Uber be preventing free people from working?

Right, that way if some crazy guy goes on a shooting rampage or starts raping female passengers they can just say "why, we just let free people work and if passengers want safety and assurance we're not sending out psychopaths they're free to conduct their own background checks".

Sorry, but people do kind of expect when they request a cab -- oh, sorry, an illegal car-for-hire pretending it's an unregulated ride sharing service to which laws don't apply -- that a fucking serial killer isn't being sent to them.

See, one of the many fucking laws Uber claims don't apply to it are things like criminal background checks to protect the public safety. Oh, and commercial licenses, proper insurance, vehicle inspections, and shit like that.

Uber's entire business model is basically saying "you know all those laws places have enacted to ensure passenger safety and the life, well, none of them apply to us".

In this case, Uber straight up lied about the safety assurances they could give about drivers, and mislead passengers into thinking they conducted their background checks to a higher standard than other companies, and actually used terms like "safe" in their marketing.

So, yeah, when you lie to the public about how safe you are, and fail to do the level of background checks you suggest you do, people find out about it, and your dumb ass gets fined.

Funny, I use the back button for sites requiring Flash.

The only things I truly need Flash for are work related training, which periodically requires I re-enable it. But I won't even run my work browser with it enabled.

No way in hell I'd ever consider running Flash by default ... the idea of letting random websites let random third parties run arbitrary code is so utterly moronic as to defy belief.

To me Flash is primarily an ad platform. If there are useful sites requiring Flash to work, I'm afraid I've never seen them, or don't consider them useful. I don't use video on the intertubes, because I don't care.

It seems like Flash has had at least one major security exploit every month for over 15 years, which tells me the entire platform and its security model are so defective that it has to be in the "don't trust by default" category.

I have no interest in letting advertisers, or anybody else, have access to anything which runs arbitrary code on my machine just because I visited a web page.

Not a zero day exploit in Flash. Why, I'm utterly traumatized by this, my faith in humanity has been utterly ruined, why I ... oh, fuck it ...

Yawn, yet another zero day exploit in a steaming turd of a technology which has been an endless series of security holes for almost 20 years now.

And, having been largely Flash free for at least 15 of those years, all I can say is "enjoy your quality software, suckers".

Honestly, the only thing which has cumulatively had more security holes than Flash is Windows. I honestly don't know why people keep trusting it, because it really has been a terrible security risk forever, and disabling it is usually the first thing I do in a browser.

Once we become a space-faring civilization, this rarity value attached to non-Earth rocks will seem very quaint.

What a strange way of thinking of it ... so we have a Venn diagram, and then it's Earth and non-Earth. That's a little too simplistic.

In your scenario, we'll have Earth, Mars, Venus, Alpha Centauri, Vulcan, Ceti Alpha V, and what have you. But they'll all be boring because they're "not Earth".

They may not be universally valuable, but like people collect souvenirs, they'll have some sentimental attachment. Or they'll be sufficiently rare as toe have a degree of uniqueness.

Even if we were space faring, a rock from the furthest planet in the universe is worth more than the one you're standing on, because it's harder to get another one.

The reality is, there's a relatively small amount of material we call "non-Earth" which we can access. You're right, they are deemed special because they come from someplace else, and not everybody can have one.

But you'd have to be a space faring species who can instantaneously travel anywhere in the universe to say that rocks from further away and harder to get won't have some cachet to them.

It's not like we'd become a space faring civilization (assuming we ever actually do before we go extinct) and suddenly all sense of distance and place of origin disappears.

But you sounds jaded about space rock to an extent that seems to imply you figure you'll have access to rocks from the entire universe within a few weeks. Right now, here on planet Earth, in any meaningful sense of the word ... "space rocks" are very rare, and to people who really want them, quite valuable.

But it will always be true that the further away it's from, and the harder to get it is, the more value people will assign to it.

The Free Market relies on the fact that is a product is overpriced, consumers will pass it up.

No, the free market relies on suckers who don't know any better getting hoodwinked.

And then makes the absurd claim that a sufficiently large number of suckers will fix the problem of lying bastards hoodwinking suckers.

There is not, never has been, and never will be a free market -- informed consumers making intelligent choices based on good information will simply never happen ... and hoping that industry players aren't lying, thieving assholes who do their utmost to deceive, hide information, and collude to rig the game ... well, that's simply impossible.

The impossible premises of a free market defy logic, human nature, and reality. You might as well believe in the tooth fairy.

People who talk about the free market are either part of the con game, or have been so utterly conned as to think they're making sense.

The links will look like "m.me/yourusername" and let anyone quickly add you in Messenger without looking up your Facebook account

So, any random idiot will be able to spam you without trying hard?

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong on that one ... sorry, you should have to look it up to prove you're allowed to send to me.

The usernames and profile links will also be available to businesses, which are starting to use Messenger as a way to deliver customer support and let you buy things through chatting.

Just any old business gets this because they say so?

Yeah, whatever, yet more crap from Facebook to ensure gets blocked so I don't have to deal with it. Just like I don't consent to being tracked by these assholes, I don't see why I would want any form of interaction with this.

I'm betting the amount of unwanted messages will be epic.

By American Vernacular English, that's not wrong. People frequently substitute "should of" in place of "should've".

Please, don't confuse illiteracy with 'vernacular'.

"Should of" is NOT 'vernacular', it's making random meat noises to approximate language and failing to grasp something they taught you fairly early in school.

It is hearing sloppy speaking, turning that into a sloppy understanding of the words you're using, and then using that in a written form which demonstrates you think the incoherent mumbling you do in the real world corresponds to speaking the language.

"Should of" is so wrong it defies belief.

Linux on the desktop is almost perfect now, and certainly leagues ahead of Windows and macOS.

Do you sincerely believe that crap? Or have you convinced yourself of it and need to convince the rest of us?

It certainly isn't leagues ahead, and there are things where the ability to manage via GUI is pretty much non-existent.

I've been using Linux since the mid 90s, FreeBSD since the late 90s, and Windows (grudgingly at first) since the early 00's ... I've used Android, iOS, and others ... and unless Linux has jumped forwards in the last few years by huge amounts, it is in no way "leagues" ahead of anything, and the absence of certain things except in a toy OSS version which may or may not work is a big limiting step.

I can't take you seriously as someone who isn't a raving fanboi. Because the last I saw, the Linux desktop still has some glaring holes and stuff you can't do from within a GUI, doesn't do auto-detection of things nearly as well, and still requires you to drop down to being root in a command line for many things.

When you can put my mother in front of it, and every admin task she could ever need to do is intuitive, easy to find, and accessible via GUI, and she can buy something at Staples, plug it in and use it withing 15 minutes ... Well, I might believe you.

Until then, you're way over stating the facts.