zeveb

> If you'd like to standardise a way to require DNS-over-HTTPS in supporting software, and convince operating system distributors to generally ship it, I'm fairly sure Firefox would be up for using that rather than its current mechanism, similar to how it uses system proxy settings. As it is there is no such standard.

There already is a standard way for me to tell all the programs which run on my system which DNS servers to use: /etc/resolv.conf. Any program which does not respect the values I set there is disobeying me.

> I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice.

I imagine that developers would prefer mice if people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably prefer mice, and I suspect people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably do prefer mice, the same way that I believe we prefer good keyboards and good monitors.

> In 2011, Apple released Mac OS X Lion which introduced an enhanced scrollbar behavior that made scrollbars hidden by default.

I don't think hiding scrollbars can really be termed an enhancement; 'mistake' at best or 'user-hostile behavior' at worst seem more appropriate.

The original Macintosh GUI succeeded so well because it made it so easy to see what was possible. It laid an awful lot of stuff out right there on the screen in front of the user, and what was hidden was easy to get at. They spent a ton of time testing an improving usability. Modern macOS, OTOH, just doesn't feel right anymore; I suspect it is designed to look good, not to be usable.

> I have a set of both - China and Silverware. I've never used either … I want the practical stuff they used every day.

Many china patterns may be used every day (not all: some are not dishwasher safe), and almost all silverware is usable every day (there are a few tricks, like not leaving it in contact with water and iron). Seriously, give it a shot!

> I never understood the appeal of china or any of these antiques. I think they just look terrible.

It depends. Surely some styles are not wonderful, but others are quite beautiful. Some styles are very of their time (and look horrible later), while others are timeless.

I like the timeless stuff. Lenox Federal china will never, ever look bad. Chantilly, Fairfax or Strasbourg silverware will always have a place at a table. A good Baccarat or Waterford crystal will always sparkle. Sure, one could go for 2020-trendy, but in 2025 or 2030 it will look old & crusty — but the classic never grow stale.

As a counterpoint, I really enjoy all the family heirlooms I have inherited; I love that I get to honour those distant, barely-remembered or unremembered family members by enjoying the items I have inherited. I don't look at taking care of those items as a chore any more than I look at taking care of the items I have bought as a chore. And I use them: I eat off of the plates, I sleep in the bed, I use the table, the pictures grace my walls.

> At its core, "meritocracy" is eugenics: the belief that some people are just intrinsically better than others (that's why you often hear plutocrats boasting of their "good blood" – think of Trump here).

> As with all eugenics stories, meritocracy is trivially disprovable pseudoscientific nonsense.

Eugenics is not nonsense; it is immoral. It is possible to selectively breed animals for desirable traits; a monstrous regime could do the same thing for men. That something would be evil to do does not make it impossible.

Given that mankind has employed selective breeding for literally millennia, on both plants and animals, the burden of proof has to rest on those who claim that it cannot (rather than may not) be effective on men.

And it is trivially obvious that some people are intrinsically better than others: look at any professional sports team. Or any chess player. Or any artist. Yes, all of those folks have spent hours in honing their natural talents — but they had natural talents to begin with.

I don't mind 'ping me': that one has a clear reference to submarines and networks.

What bothers me are 'ask' and 'lift' used as nouns. They add nothing to the language, and are just ugly. Maybe my father felt the same the first time he heard 'sweet' to mean 'cool.'

It is excellent and easy-to-follow … right up until the denotational semantics piece, which I found very difficult to understand. Maybe someday!

> What prevents you from writing a patch for Firefox then?

'I never, never want to write C++.'

Seriously, I can't say how much I want not to write C or C++. Life is too short to use unsafe languages.

That's exactly what I want: an Emacs for the web. Or enough web-browsing capability built into Emacs to just browse every site in Emacs.

Seriously, though, I want the software I run to obey me, not someone else: not Microsoft, not Apple, not some government on the other side of the world — and not Mozilla. I want to be able to modify its functionality in a straightforward manner, in a reasonably-sane garbage-collected language (so, not C, not C++, not Java and not JavaScript).

I would like to be able to add pull data from sites I visit and plumb it through the rest of my system using something like Plan 9's plumber. I don't want a browser which says, 'sorry, I won't trust you to choose the extensions you like.'

My issue is simply that I want an extension mechanism which I can use to do anything to my browser. For me, 'extension security' means 'I must write C++ to add the functionality I want,' and I never, never want to write C++.

> Outrageous is the entitlement of the current generations for not paying for their tools.

Sure, but in the case of an open-source developer working on macOS, he has already paid for his operating system; if he is using GCC, he has already paid everything the GCC developers require; why then must he pay extra money to Apple in order for other people to run his software in a straightforward manner on their machines (or, in the future, at all)? How is Apple even a party when two people wish to transact, when one writes and compiles free software on his hardware (paid for) and software (paid for) and the other runs it on his hardware (paid for) and software (paid for)?

> I think that most people throughout the developed world believe that ensuring the general welfare of a country's citizens is an essential function of government.

State governments are sovereign, too, and have far fewer constitutional restrictions on what they may do. I may not agree with the social-welfare schemes dreamt up by Texans, Michiganders or Californians, but they do not effect me, so it's not really my business. OTOH a federal social-welfare scheme effects me and is patently unconstitutional.

And why is Reddit so obsessed with its redesign? I cannot think that more than single-digit percentages prefer the slow, ugly, comment-hiding redesign over the fast, attractive, useful old design.

Just write the redesign off as a failed experiment and build a new design off of the old one. Seriously, even at Reddit what proportion of employees and developers use the new design when given the option?

The 'common defence and welfare' provide the reasons for taxation, and are enumerated in the following items. Note that James Madison — who wrote much of the Constitution — vetoed a federal works bill because he found it unconstitutional. The Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen... is pretty good.

I think it's pretty obvious that the narrow view is the only defensible one.

Because a military is one of the few things that the United States government has the constitutional authority to do (the list is extremely limited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...).

> When you already have another 145 billion? More than you could possibly spend in your lifetime?

Allstate's market cap is currently $30 billion. Maybe Mr. Bezos would want to buy it, and still have the rest of the money he currently has. Maybe he wants to do something else with that money.

Regardless, the fact that you or I might not be able to imagine spending that much money has no bearing on whether or not he could. To be honest, I bet you & I could figure out how to spend that much, too.

> It could certainly be done in a regressive way, but I don't see that as innevitable or any worse than the status quo, since income taxes can be raised just as easily.

I am not (here) worried about it being regressive: I am worried about it being yet another mechanism for the state to take a larger fraction of GDP (about 2½% in 1900; almost 20% at the height of the Second World War; about 17% now, according to Wikipedia).

> Either way - I think we fundamtally agree that there needs to be more tax on the rich, be it investments, wealth tax, inheritance, or that sort of thing.

I certainly don't! I agree that we need a government; I agree that we need taxes to fund the government (I disagree with those who think that we can fund the government on a voluntary basis); I agree that taxes need to be fair in some sense.

I suspect that fairer taxes would be higher for the middle classes, to be honest. Certainly the countries with effective welfare states seem to have more taxes on the middle than the U.S. does.

Citizens United was not about buying politicians: it was about a group of citizens wishing to show a movie critical of a politician. How is that not legitimately-protected speech?

If it taxes the income of normal people at a higher rate than they deserve, why do you think it would refrain from taxing the wealth of normal people higher than they deserve?

> So he'd currently be worth $145B instead of $188B.

> PG is saying Bezos would have left the US because of that?

I think most human beings would do most things for $43,000,000,000. Whether they morally ought to or not is beside the point: almost anyone would do almost anything for 43 billion dollars.

> Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million.

The very first U.S. income tax, imposed during the Civil War (the nation's bloodiest conflict), was 3% on income over $12,720, rising all the way to 5% on income over $159,000 (in 2020 dollars). This was unconstitutional at the time, and was eventually repealed.

The first income tax imposed after the ratification of the 16th Amendment was 1% on income over $78,510, with an additional 6% on income over $26,170,000 (2020 dollars).

The current U.S. income tax ranges from 10% to 37%, with a standard deduction of at least $12,200. There are also payroll taxes under FICA, which are even more.

I recount all this riveting history as evidence for my contention that there is absolutely no way that a wealth tax would remain at 1% for anything above $50 million. I guarantee that within a few years to decades most citizens would be required to pay wealth taxes, and that they would amount to a considerable amount even before taking into account their compounding nature.

> This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via a wealth tax.

The only floor is zero: a government can, if it chooses, take everything from its subjects — or just from some of them.

> They haven’t, NYC is also boring now.

Not as much as it was. De Blasio has been an unmitigated disaster, and NYC is rapidly approaching 90s-level (if not 70s-level) squalor. Only time will tell if the voters will throw him out and elect someone who can effectively manage the city government, or double down on failure.

> If you consider a post-covid world 5 years from now, do you think that SF with its museums, bars, restaurants, and proximity to nature will be an unattractive place to live?

As long as the city & county and state governments are as bad as they are, yes. San Francisco was easily the most disgusting American city I have ever been to. It somehow has managed to land in an anti-sweet spot of repressive laws aimed at the middle classes, while not enforcing any laws against the mentally ill who do things like defecate in public, urinate on the floors of even nice bars, accost one on the street and so forth.

San Francisco needs someone to do for it what Hercules did for the Augean stables.

The suburban area was much nicer, but still hellaciously expensive, way out of proportion to the quality of life. There's a reason why people are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular.

I hadn't figured out why my Amazon notifications no longer include details; this theory makes a lot of sense.

Yet another step down the road of user-hostility. Or perhaps 'serf-hostility': in 2020 we are digital serfs.

I use X11 and a custom keyboard firmware: both of my hyper keys generate USB left super and both of my super keys generate USB right super (or vice versa), and X11 turns left super into hyper and right super into super.

Same here, particularly with the latest release of GNU Emacs.

That is not an argument for more non-modifier keys; it is an argument for more modifiers. Why? Each added non-modifier key adds X more modifier+non-modifier keybindings (e.g. C-n) and X-1 more modifier+modifier+non-modifier keybindings (e.g. M-C-n), where X is the number of modifiers. In practical terms, a keyboard with control, alt, shift and super only gets four two-key and three three-key bindings with each additional key. That is not great.

Adding a modifier, OTOH, add Y modifier+non-modifier and Y modifier+modifier+non-modifier bindings, where Y is the number of non-modifiers. So adding a hyper key means adding , say 104 additional keys (on a keyboard with 52 non-modifier keys). Adding a compose key means adding … another 104 additional keys.

My current keyboard has control, alt, super, hyper, compose and shift. A lot of folks add raise & lower, for even more modifiers.

Utter claptrap.

1. I cannot imagine why anyone would think that the Free Software Foundation would ever sign anything to assist in the production of proprietary software. Signing an affidavit always exposes one to risk; why would they assume risk to assist a software hoarder?

2. The GNU/Linux thing has been argued and argued and while I once fell in the author's camp I now realise that the FSF had it right all along. It was when I heard someone refer to Cygwin or macOS as 'Linux' that I understood that people really do confuse the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel. Since then, I have tried to be careful to refer to it as GNU/Linux.

3. The GPL does a better job of achieving the FSF's goals than the LGPL; it is appropriate for the FSF to recommend it.

Who is this JOTTINGE guy?