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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

> someone who wants JS to be off or blocked. Someone who is thus actually pretty tech-savvy

I disagree. Anyone who has JS disabled in 2012 is not tech savvy. They are a paranoid weirdo. They're the guy who refuses to buy a TV even though the Wire, Breaking Bad and Justified are on.

Nobody should have to waste their time trying to convince you to be sane.

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I use NoScript & Flashblock because it makes my web experience better. Pages load more quickly, they flash and blink and play advertising noises less, those intrusive pop-ins often don't work, and every time I go on to somebody else's machine to use the web I wonder how they put up with it all. At the same time, I never miss out on any actual features of the page because it's very easy to deal with turning things on.

I am pretty sure this qualifies as "tech savvy".

Nobody would have to waste my time convincing me to turn on Javascript if so very, very many sites didn't spend so much time using Javascript to degrade their site's experience. Don't bother trying to convince me this isn't the case, I have years of concrete experience proving the opposite. Theoretical arguments about how that might not be true aren't going to fly.

"Refuses to buy a TV even though -snipped- is on."

Forgetting about Netflix on your pc are you? In fact, watching shows on a specific channel as opposed to via an on demand service such as Netflix is actually a worse experience. Because I watch things when the TV channel decides, as opposed to when I want to watch things.

I have a TV. I haven't switched the channel off of my ps3 once. Everything I could ever want to watch is on there.

Netflix, really? The one with "Sorry, we are not available in our country" label on the homepage? Sure, all those good (and bad) series are also unavailable on TV in my country :) ...

PS: just about every legal streaming site is unavailable outside USA. Or outside 10-15 premium countries in best case.

I completely forgot about the level of availability of Netflix to people in other countries. I've heard it's going badly down the drain in the US but it just rolled out a couple months ago in the UK and it's been improving in quality ever since.

But that doesn't change the whole DVD solution.

Setting aside your vacuous insult-flinging...

Fobbing someone off to a patronising "how to enable JS" page is more of a waste of time than showing them a screenshot & paragraph description of what they're missing out on. It's about as much effort, and drives them away, while giving them a preview may actually earn you a customer - the very opposite of "wasting time".

So it's more sane to spend money just so that you can waste several dozen hours a year watching these shows, that will have ultimately no consequence in your life. If you want to do that it's absolutely fine, but there is no reason to deride someone for their views just because they don't match your own decisions.

P.S. I love Breaking Bad and Justified, but I don't have a need for a TV any more, still have one, but rarely turn it on. If I want to watch them, I just go to Amazon/iTunes/Netflix/Hulu and stream them.

Web browser exploitation is much harder without JavaScript.

Keeping my computer secure is more important than using the latest ridiculous web app that slows my computer to a crawl.

Not really a good comparison. A TV costs $1000 or so (for one that isn't bad). Then it costs about $50 a month to even be useful, plus whatever HBO costs to get a good amount of shows that aren't bad. Even then, the picture quality is worse than my iPad or Ultrasharp. If anything, I think that TV ownership is probably lower among "tech-savvy" people.

Enabling JS is free.

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