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I wonder how much of the bad decision-making that led to the US's wasting more than 2 trillion dollars failing to effect any permanent change in Afghanistan can be ascribed to the …

>all this energy . . . might be better focused into social disapproval of the portrayals of murder, rape and the rest of the violence we inundate ourselves and our kids with on a d…

ACR == Automatic Content Recognition "ACR is a technology that (with device-owner permission) reads pixels on a smart, internet-connected device screen as it delivers content to a …

Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulner…

It is just as cheap to access a telnet server half way around the world as one next door, so bringing up telnet is changing the subject.

I'm not convinced that the US government is more broken than the others you list. Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies a…

I would call the scientific revolution a blossoming, and although democracies (notably the Dutch Republic) participated, most of it happened in monarchies and principalities.

Are you sure it was 1992? Wikipedia says that there were only 50 web servers in the world in January 1993, and my recollection is that were all at educational and research institut…

Interesting. (But the Pixel 2 was discontinued 11 months ago, and there is no replacement, i.e., no Pixel 3.)

Sleep deprivation would be a bad idea for me because sleep helps the immune system, and my immune system needs all the help it can get (because of my chronic infectious disease). I…

That's fair. I now wish I had resisted the temptation to post something sarcastic. Is the following comment any better than my previous one? The greatest cultural strength of the U…

Well, that's a relief. I was worried about the possibility that a fraction of Apple's workforce would not accept the results of the election. OK, sorry for the sarcasm; please allo…

They were homogeneous for centuries, then non-homogeneous for a few decades. Maybe it takes a few decades for the adverse effects of the non-homogeneity to become apparent.

I still like computers, but dislike this decade's web . I wish I could access all of the web's text , images and hyperlinks without running Firefox, Chrome or a similarly massive c…

I'm okay with the fact that I spend more than half of my waking hours staring at screens . It's the web I worry about. (And maybe smartphones, but I've yet to own a smartphone. And…

Not only does Pao expect everyone she works with to agree with her on her Important Concern, but also she expects the Important Concern to override all other potential consideratio…

I'm skeptical that Europe will ever be as united by culture as the US is as long as Europe is divided into different language communities. (Although there are millions of Americans…

>Even though I'm Emacs-inclined (though not living in Emacs), orgmode is too unwieldy and complicated for me I do live in Emacs, but I prefer the mouse to the keyboard for tasks th…

This seems like a good place for me to react to the dozens (hundreds?) of comments I've viewed here over the years that value passion and cool coworkers very highly. I would prefer…

Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla enemies of public discourse on the internet. What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a …

One point not mentioned in the OP: the people in charge of Firefox, Opera and Chrome have been and will continue to be a hindrance, not a help, on net to users who agree with the m…

One thing I do to try to slow down the rate of change on the web is to upgrade my browser less often than most people. Specifically, I use Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR). M…