As a society, we've been making decisions as if if we explicitly wanted to make the outdoors unsafe and unwelcoming and predatory. We let cops kill people for no reason, we let polluters go right on polluting, we let civilians buy and carry all the guns they want, we sell off state and national parks to oil companies.

I can't say I'm shocked that people don't go outside as much under such conditions.

Bah. I think it's fun to see what people come up with here in universe B. For years, the actual news has been chock full of stuff easily more ridiculous than this; we have much work to do if we are to develop the levels of satire and parody necessary to stick out in this twilight zone of a reality.

This is far more fun, in any case. If we're going to have a story about followers of something obsolete team up with followers of something remarkably ignorant, this is a nice light-hearted chuckle compared to, say, oh I don't know, Republican leaders joining with neo-nazis.

It's just a matter of time before an exploit is found that will trick devices into "upgrading" to a malicious image. Once that happens, boom, it can't go back to using a "legitimate" image. Gee thanks!

Small picture: I need to figure out how to go back to not having a phone. None of them respect us as owners, especially since webOS went away.

Big picture: So much effort is being put into locking down hardware instead of opening it up. We're making it difficult _not_ to imagine nightmare scenarios involving AI and weaponized robotics. I wish I were kidding; DRM is going to start costing human lives at some point, if it hasn't already.

"That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."

True. It's my computer and those are my shiny discs full of bits. Using a blocker to customize the way I interact with web pages is no more wrong than moving my music from a CD to a more-convenient file. Since blu-rays I own refuse to play on my secondary TV (an old CRT), pirating those movies gives me no moral hesitation whatsoever. Nor does turning off flash, blocking ads, or doing any of the dozens of things I do with my browsers and my other software on my computers.

If somebody wants to call what I do "stealing", well, fine. I never put my monitor up for rent as a billboard, so I could say anyone who tries to use it as such is trespassing and vandalizing my property. :^) The fact that ads are so far out of control that people will use non-free (and non-Free) blockers to avoid them is pretty telling.

To anyone. Certainly not to anyone who's got such varied motives as Apple.

Providing good, untracked, unbubbled search is its own worthy end; please let's not distort it by bending it to serve the latest iFad or getting all wrapped up in some specific ecosystem. How about we continue to build on open standards and make stuff that's useful for everyone? Apple used to understand that (so did Google) but the whole point is that their like can't be trusted at this point.

Anyway DuckDuckGo has been my default engine for a few years now, and I've been very pleased with how good it's gotten. I hope they keep up the good work and manage to avoid falling out of touch with what made them special to begin with.

To be fair, conducting a study about distracted driving in Utah is like hosting a philosophical debate in the mosh pit of a Gwar concert. It can be done, but the noise is going to be overwhelming.

I lived and drove there for ten years, which taught me fear as I have never known. Utah drivers don't need any help being terrible, but they welcome it anyway.