I got some Vibrams around Christmas and have been wearing them solidly for about 2-2.5 months (since the weather warmed up). The harder layer of rubber has already worn through on the heel, exposing the softer layer. I'm not so sure I'll be getting another pair.

You might consider changing your walking style. Children most often walk middle-footed or even forefooted when barefoot, and this is considered the most natural way of moving. Setting down the rear end of the foot before lowering it completely is a necessity when wearing normal shoes, but it's not natural. Before I adapted fully to the Vibrams my soles even started burning on the heels when I ran longer distances. I read that it's best to just set down the whole foot plainly (or forefoot first) when walking/running with Vs.

The issue isn't what format the content is in, but that it's retrieved through client-side logic rather than as part of the query response.

Also, what's wrong with HTML/CSS that is in any way resolved by XML/XSLT? I'm genuinely curious why somebody would put their content into a format with no default, well-understood display semantics.

Maybe I misunderstood how the xml/xslt-paradigm works, but my idea was that you have a serverside api serving up raw data, and the display is controlled by some code on the clientside that can be easily customised. So the server could serve up something like <shoe> <images> <image>foo.com/x.jpg</image> <image>foo.com/y.jpg</image> </images> <description>This shoe is very advanced bla bla bla</description> <fancyintroanimation>foo.com/intro1.swf</fancyintroanimation> </shoe> <shoe> ....

and the client could use the default xslt if they were happy with that, and a custom otherwise.

If you turn off Javascript and cookies, a ton of sites that serve what at least could be static content and which you don't need to log into simply stop working.

What happened to graceful degradation? Is it not agile enough to expect a server to be able to work at least minimally with any browser?

It is my belief graceful degradation got discarded when the "ditch ie6 movement" began to get full over-blown coverage.

It's a gradient, not a binary.

Adding colors to the metaphor adds words with no increase of understanding.

Understanding is not disjoint from emotion.

What is this, arguing for the sake of arguing? He answered your question perfectly. Adding color for "emotions" makes absolutely no sense in this context.

The metaphor isn't broken. What you propose is broken.

The word "gradient" isn't even part of the metaphor, so I don't see how that would cause confusion. What comes between black and white? Gray. Not millions of color hues. Shades of gray makes sense and fighting to try and get colors in the mix somewhere is only serving to muddy this up.

Edit: Actually, here's another perspective: millions of color hues come between black and white only if you're thinking about colors to begin with. (Black and white aren't strictly considered colors even.) So while I can see where you're getting this from, I still think it doesn't serve anyone well to try and spice it up from the very well understood meaning of the phrase.

> they are still inherently hypocritical in that they shift that oppression to the opposing class.

Calling affirmative action oppression of the "opposing class" (by which you presumably mean the privileged group) is serious decontextualization, ignoring the entire history of the two groups of people and pretending that the moment in which you compare two individuals is all that matters. The fact is there is a systemic bias against un- or under-privileged groups such that the privileged person will almost always perform better on even an objective assessment, so affirmative action is a systematic correction.

In order for a privileged person and an un-privileged person to be even within spitting distance of one another academically or professionally requires a hell of a lot more work on the part of the un-privileged person, no matter how hard the privileged person worked. Affirmative action recognizes this and rewards that work despite the decontextualizing "objective" assessments that would give the reward to the higher achiever, basically placing a bet that in aggregate, giving these people more opportunity will result in better results.

Will there be errors? Sure. But it's a bit rich to complain about white boys being oppressed by women and minorities.

To mangle a famous quote, "The greatest trick privilege ever pulled was to convince the privileged it didn't exist."

One of the toughest problems with structural inequalities is that they hide themselves from those who are benefited, largely because they are not directly and adversely affected by the inequality. This is exacerbated by the fact that on the whole, privileged people are not bad people, and coming to grips with how much the system favors you by virtue of being born into the right family can certainly make you feel like an undeserving wretch, profiting off of the misery of countless others. It is vastly more comfortable not to think about these things, particularly when thinking about them often makes you feel even worse when you realize there's no easy way to correct them.

But that discomfort is one price we, as privileged people, should pay. We should live in a shameful awareness of how we benefit from a system that undervalues and exploits people to greater and lesser degrees. We should recognize that denigration of things through sexist, ablist, racist or heteronormative language is an expression of indifference to the suffering of people. We should live our shame because it cannot match what we collectively allow to happen to other people, because otherwise we are passive participants in the continued oppression of other people, and because maybe being painfully aware of what we are doing to them will also make us aware of steps we can take to end the structural oppression.

Once more, with feeling: pagination is an inappropriate paradigm for most web content.

While I appreciate that they did not take advantage of the multiple page views to just get more ad impressions, it's still a pain in the ass to view a single item of content like that.

Are people really under the impression that Google and Facebook opposed SOPA for surveillance reasons? SOPA would have broken the Internet so fundamentally that they couldn't continue operating without special immunity from the US Government. Failing something that serious, I wouldn't expect them to be on my side, generally speaking.

Personally, I like Adblock Plus (Good Karma Edition). By default, it allows ads through, but blocking them on a website that uses them badly (which for me means flashing or making noise) is only a click away. My reason for using adblock is aesthetic, not paranoiac, so I'm willing to give sites the benefit of the doubt.

Nothing terribly new, but it's good to see it on Forbes. Maybe finally these arguments, which have seemed patently obvious to those of us on the consuming end, will penetrate the business and legislative classes.

Yeah, it's very interesting to see that the mainstream media has started picking up the opposite view and started asking questions instead of just blindly repeating the propaganda from the copyright industry. It's definitely a welcome change.