A few years ago I thought it would be nice to be able to compose an email in a new tab instead of a separate window. I found a Bugzilla entry proposing adding this to Thunderbird that had been open for several years and had had a couple community members offer to address it, look into it for a while, and ultimately give up. The way Thunderbird's UI is implemented was just too intertwined with the code to let this happen without a major re-work. I feel like this kind of a change should be easy to do in a well-designed application and likely would be for something written with technologies.
I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.
Meh. If H1B were reshaped to actually be for specialist workers as it was intended (at least by some), then that's a lot easier said than done. I got to the US on a temporary work visa (not H1B because of loosing the lottery), and I'd find positions for somebody with my and a bunch of other specializations several times over.
By auctioning based on salary you're preferring areas with absurd costs of living - which is a) not where you necessarily need to get more people making the problem worse b) reinforcing economic inequality between areas of the country.
If there's a company needing some specialist somewhere with a saner cost of living, and they tried to find such a specialist, offering above market wages, what exactly is the benefit of not them having to pay twice or thrice the effective salary of somebody in SF/NYC?
If you read the whole article, the author mixes in caveats throughout and says that it requires a special set of requirements for the usenet backup to be worthwhile. At some point, he addresses your point by saying that in some cases (possibly requiring careful coordination between all of the servers) you could backup many different servers with the same usenet account whereas services like Backblaze and Crashplan usually restrict the number of machines.
That said I still think the point you make is the most important critique. Online storage/backup is such a crowded market (Google, Amazon, DropBox, Box, Backblaze, Crashplan, Carbonite, Mozy, tarsnap, Spideroak, rsync.net, OneDrive, etc) that if you go with something significantly cheaper than all of the mainstream options you are probably going to get what you paid for.
This is the best feature of tmux. It's worth pointing out here though (in a post about making the terminal act like an IDE), that you can split the terminal into two panes so you can have an editor and a REPL open at the same time similar to many IDE's. There are even some projects that make it easy to pass code between the editor and the REPL in the other pane, though I have never gotten them to work very well.
vim (and emacs) can do that without the need for a terminal multiplexer (though in vim you need to use a "plugin" for it, or, at least, you used to, and I'm sure the new async functionality in vim 8 has improved the experience quite a bit)
It's a little surprising because a lot of advocacy groups focus their resources on problems with a significantly disproportionate impact the people they represent, and it's not obvious at first glance why this issue would disproportionately impact retired people.
Coloured people and gun owners also print things out, but I don't see NAACP or NRA putting their names on this amicus brief :)
Still, when it comes to supporting common sense amicus briefs like this one I say the more the merrier! If NAACP and NRA want to sign the brief too, let them :)
I suspect it was a deliberate usage based on the expansion of the NAACP acronym, rather than a term one would normally use. In _this_ case, that seems relatively harmless.
I've definitely seen the acronym POC - people of color - used by awareness advocates in a non derogatory way. I don't think GP's usage is terribly archaic.
A friend of mine is a Brand Ambassador for AARP and they are working to reverse this exact perception. She teaches "technology" classes -- basically, how to use a tablet/smartphone -- to seniors.
I have followed the situation fairly closely, and I agree with your assessment. I haven't seen anything that makes me think either Pentadactyl or Vimperator will survive the deprecation of XUL. The most promising vim-like addon is VimFx (followed by the Chrome addons like Vimium and cVim which maybe will work in Firefox one day as WebExtensions -- I try on Nightly every couple months but they don't work so far). The reason I say this is that it has active development and developers committed to the WebExtensions transition (plus has less features so it is easier to port). You can follow the progress here:
I am willsALMANJ. The Pentadactyl devs never responded to repeated attempts to engage them on the continued distribution of the addon. I could have posted it to addons.mozilla.org, but it didn't feel right to package their work unchanged when they had an official account and could have done it themselves if they wanted to. I made the GitHub repo partly so that my own browsers would get the compatibility updates and partly to help out others who wanted to keep using Pentadactyl. I like keeping the working xpi available for those who want it but I don't think it is worth promoting Pentadactyl any more because it is only a matter of time before Firefox changes too much for it to keep working.
You can't categorically remap some key sequence to Escape in VimFx (not sure if you meant Vimperator where you can do this just like in vim). However, you can open the preference and add whatever alternative you want to all of the commands that are mapped to Escape by default.
This is a nice feature. The downsides compared to Vimperator/Pentadactyl is that you can tab-complete the search term and you can't get search suggestions as you type (or at least I haven't gotten either of these things to work).
I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.