There seems to be a pattern emerging in all of these 'disruptive' business models, whether it be Bitcoin (banking), AirBnb (hotels), or Uber (cabs). We look around and see these industries burdened by regulation, which tends to create entrenched players and which seem to us to be inefficient. So we create similar peer-to-peer equivalents, only to start rediscovering the reasons for all those regulations in the first place. I would argue that one reason mature industries seem inefficient to us is that it's been so long since we've encountered the problems the regulatory 'inefficiencies' were meant to address, that we've forgotten why our ancestors put them in place. Peer-to-peer is not a new idea, it's how things worked back before we started using government to solve the problems inherent in the peer-to-peer model.

This seems to result in a large number of cases where the visual experience is pointless. The line separating the previous and next page is tiny and easy to miss, and I don't see the use in two torn half-pages on screen.

I agree that smooth scrolling long text is hard to read and trips up line scanning, but this UX seems be like playing an cruel game where I have to drag just enough to scroll a whole page. Any more or less and I get a torn page that's even harder to read than normal scrolling.

I have an alternate solution to this problem: just hit space or page down when you're reading a long web page. It scrolls a whole page, with just enough animation to help you track where you are.

That is an absolutely terrible lesson to draw from this episode.

First and most importantly, Airbnb and Uber are not disrupting industries burdened primarily by consumer safety regulations; they are disrupting industries burdened primarily by barriers to entrance that are designed to direct economic rents to politically favored actors. Huge difference.

There is no plausible 'consumer protection' story for preventing licensed livery cab drivers from picking up curb hails, whether on the iphone or otherwise. The law is there to protect the incomes of people who buy cab licences.

There is no plausible 'consumer protection' story that would explain why building codes for permanent residence are not good enough for temporary residence as well. The law is there to protect hotel operators from vacation rental competition.

So let's not compare Bitcoin with Uber and Airbnb, because they are completely different animals.

Bank security regulations, OTOH, ARE designed to protect consumers, although I'd argue that they're mostly unnecessary in practice. Legitimate banks don't get hacked because there are billions of dollars at stake for the banking institution, and their business literally depends on their ability to secure payments. The incentives are there with or without bank regulations.

Bitcoin sites, on the other hand, regularly get hacked because they are fly-by-night operations written by idiots who are probably also trying to steal from you. It's the fake-money equivalent of using www.send-monie-through-me.co.in and then being surprised when you get ripped off.

Bottom line: there is nothing wrong with regulation designed to protect consumers from actual threats. There is everything wrong with regulation designed to protect business from competition. The latter is what needs to be 'disrupted'.

I can't comment on the state of things today, but I was active an active KDE core developer at the time from that original message to the time of the Zack's blog post (and I'm friends with both Dirk and Zack):

There was a huge amount of excitement at the announcement that Safari would be using KHTML. At that time, it was almost a given that the OSS rendering engine was Gecko. KHTML was KDE's little engine that could. But nobody ever expected it to be picked up by other folks. One of the original parts of the KHTML-to-OS X port was KWQ (pronounced, "quack") that abstracted out the KDE API portions that were used in KHTML.

Folks were pretty ecstatic at first. It seemed very validating.

But that changed quickly. As Zack's post indicates, WebKit became a thing of unmergable code-drops. Even inside of the KDE community there became a split between the KHTML purists and the WebKit faction. They'd previously more or less all been KHTML developers, but post-WebKit there was something of a pragmatists vs. idealists split. Zack fell on the latter side of that (for understandable reasons: there was an existing community project, with its own set of values, and that was hijacked to a large extent by WebKit).

A few years later WebKit transformed itself into a more or less valid open source project (see webkit.org), but that didn't close the rift in the KDE community between the two, at that point rather divergent, rendering engines. There's still some remaining melancholy that stems from that initial hope and what could have potentially been, but wasn't.

It's hard to argue that WebKit being open source has been a bad thing -- in fact, I don't believe that in the slightest. But I can also understand that it's pretty head-turning to have have a project transform in that way, especially for the original contributors (though, it should be noted, the original author of KHTML, who wasn't really active at the time of the transition, did eventually fall into the WebKit camp).

Final note: this is just my somewhat fractured recollection of things from being in KDE community. My contributions to KHTML / WebKit were very minor (the original spellchecking support) so this may not jive completely with the folks that were closer.

Honestly... this made things confusing without improving my reading ability.

a lot of people actually like scrolling. So many people in fact, that they successfully pressured Apple to add scrolling as an alternative to pagination in iBooks.

I'm one of the people who uses that. I'm trying to be polite, but my honest reaction to this interface was, "oh god, this is awful," when I tried to use the mouse to scroll the page.

The Nokia Xpress Browser is not an HTTP web browser. It is a specialized client that talks to transcoding servers. It is designed for low-end phones in emerging markets. These phones have 128MB of RAM or less, they are not capable of running full web browsers. If a user has a phone capable of running a full browser (like the Lumia phones) and they choose to install the Nokia browser or Opera Mini to save on data usage, they are opting-in for the service. The compressing browser is not the default browser for Nokia phone running Windows Phone 7/8, MeeGo, Symbian^3, or S60. http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/User-Agent_hea...

There is no MITM attack. They are not spoofing DNS or forging SSL certs. They are providing a service that users are opting in to use.

If you don't trust Nokia, don't use their phones. Even with end-to-end encryption, the data (including voice calls) is unencrypted on your phone until the software and hardware encrypts it. The maker of the software and hardware always has the capability to add eavesdropping code if they want.