I mostly agree with you. But the devil is in the details.

Equating "opt-in" with "just don't use these UI elements" is too coarse-grained to be a useful rule of thumb. At the top of that slippery slope is stuff like freemium applications - until you give them a credit card, various buttons/features just show you an ad and a buy button. I think this is perfectly acceptable, even if it feels a bit tacky to me. But once you accept getting a little more adversarial with your UX design, it isn't all that far from arranging buttons such that you can count on a predictable percentage of misclicks, Zuckerbook-style privacy-settings, and other shitty behavior like that.

I'm not some gnu-eyed idealist, but I do expect software I run on my machine to behave in ways that align (or can be made to align) with my slightly idiosyncratic interests. Software that behaves like a tireless nagging 3 year-old or tries to trick me in to doing what the developer wants is garbage that doesn't belong in my house.

It is harder to express, but I really think the bar for an application like Firefox needs to be, good-faith accommodation of a very wide range of people, in basically every relevant dimension, which is a lot, because browsers touch nearly everything. "I don't want to (I don't want my kids/people at this kiosk/whoever to) interact with your robots" is a perfectly reasonable accommodation to make. None of this is new - discussion about (un)ethical patterns of human-computer interaction goes back decades.

Now think about having this same argument over a feature that inserts free clipart into documents or saves the current page to a clipping service. The fact that this sort of discussion about UI is even controversial is a testament to how much the money people are desperate to shovel this stuff at you are.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the last of those who lived through WWII are about gone. People don't have a grandpa talking about killing Nazis or a grandma talking about when she made tanks.

It isn't just US Americans, Europe has forgotten, too. Which is why Russia is walking all over them and they can't seem to respond.

And I fear we are going to refresh the antibodies, or to say it in a more American way, water the tree of liberty.

They have been selling a Google API that Google itself refuses to sell for years.

I've wondered how they hadn't been sued before.

That's exactly what everyone needs - Oracle's avarice buoyed by the UAE's psychotic oppression game, refined by China's carefully engineered oppression.

That's the GOP's vision for the country - From each according to their ability, to each according to my whim, and shut your fucking yap if you don't want to be dismembered, serf.

Oh, that explains why I didn't read it.

It is right there on the label. Their sympathy is always on the side of capital.

They're up-front about it, and if you're aware of the bias, they're probably the best national paper in terms of factual business reporting. Just skip the editorial page, it consists of almost entirely of indulging the resentments of the geriatric rich.

I agree that in theory it is entirely possible to reuse DC cooling water.

I also maintain that this will not, in fact, happen.

This is the same game politicians constantly play. Sure, passing this law means closing the factory which will will put thousands out of work. But we could offer retraining opportunities! We won't, but we could.

I can't tell if you're intentionally being dense or not.

Suppose that water headed for California almond farms instead was diverted to Arizona golf courses. What's the problem, right? Not like the water was destroyed or something.

You may as well ask, what's the problem with inflation? Not like money is destroyed when you spend it.

"GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill"

I always love this ploy. "You are part of a small percentage of users whining about this, but our price changes are actually good for everyone else", as if you're supposed to take one for the good of humanity. Or Microsoft.

The word "independent" in this context has specific legal meaning.

Arguing about plain-use definitions is a waste of time; intentionally trying to confuse people with bullshit is malicious.

Someone at the FCC was watching and modified the website right after that exchange.

For those of you playing stupid games centered around the word "independent", I will suspend disbelief and assume you are simply ignorant of what the word means in context.

In a narrower sense, the term refers only to those independent agencies that, while considered part of the executive branch, have regulatory or rulemaking authority and are insulated from presidential control, usually because the president's power to dismiss the agency head or a member is limited.

Exactly that is a big part of the goal - do the same thing to CNN that has happened more widely at CBS.

It is a Hungary-style media rollup attempt. Buy up, intimidate out or (eventually) sure competing voices into submission.

The land of the free, baby.

And vice-versa.

He has complete control of the company. If he doesn't know what is going on somewhere in the company, it is because he isn't paying attention or doesn't want to know.

And this has been his only job. His entire adult life has been dedicated to manipulating people through a screen to make line go up.

Why would he care about people getting scammed when the line can go up?

Dynamic typing is a design choice, trading speed of development for large-scale development features. (Advice: if you demand static typing in your language, never, ever look at Perl...) Doesn't mean you have to like it, but not every language needs to be statically typed.

But if we want to grouse...

I hate python's ecosystem. It is effectively impossible to run multiple nontrivial python applications on the same machine without encapsulation of some sort (virtualenv-type hacks, Docker, separate VMs). And even then, experimenting with anything involving switching libraries requires setting up new throwaway environments to handle, otherwise doing completely normal development stuff risks breaking the "system" python (whatever is packaged and probably used by the package manager).

Just a fucking mess.

I propose Stasivision. All the cool narcs wear them!