While many of the enhancements in Firefox 3.0 are good ideas and much welcomed, this release suffers from the same phenomenon as many new releases of platform-type software. That is, lack of 3rd party support. With supposedly over a thousand add-ons available out there, Firefox has, after all, become essentially a platform. This is by design, as extensibility is one of the basic value props Mozilla promotes for the open source browser. I’m highly acclimated to (and now dependent on!) the ten extensions that I use with Firefox 2.x (not counting the DOM Inspector and Talkback). So when I activated a Firefox 3.0 layer and cranked it up, I was dismayed that only two of my extensions worked (or had an update available). One of the broken ones (the Unified Back-/Forward Button) has been incorporated as a feature of Firefox 3.0, but w/o 70% of my add-on functionality, my browser was effectively broken by this user’s reckoning.
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LordJeb just posted a paper that talks about the adverse effects of the Seventeenth Amendment. In his intro, he touches on a topic near and dear to my heart — the tyranny of majority, and how the US founding fathers hoped to protect against it by establishing our country as a constitutional republic, not as a democracy. The definitive document on these concepts is Federalist No. 10, which it just so happens I wrote a (shorter) paper on when I was taking political science classes back in the previous century. So in the interest of discourse, here is my little piece on Federalist No. 10, written May 23, 1995:
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