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August, 2017:

First Amendment Rights?

Intended to those in charge.

As someone who has visited Auschwitz as a young man while traveling through Europe, who met people who were deformed from being concentration camp guinea pigs and saw the horrors that came because nobody would do anything about it before it became too late, I was utterly stunned to see how my all time favorite service appears to actually be taking a stance supporting extreme violence hate sites.

I’m guessing it has something to do with the 1st amendment which is generally a great thing to support, though one has to be aware that it only refers to what the government is not being allowed to violate:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Clearly free speech is a crucial part of society, but common sense can step in and say if, for example, you want to insult my wife in my own house, you must leave. If you want to proclaim death to my neighbors, you can’t stand on my stoop to do it from. If you try to promote violent rhetoric using my company – it will be removed.

Doing anything less is supporting what ultimately becomes criminal activities which at the very least is bad for business in the long run.

I also find it shameful. Certainly ignorance and stupidity alike can be very dangerous given the right situation. When I look myself in the mirror I much prefer to feel strength from doing the right thing, and not having acted from ignorance or misinformation.

There is a very real situation where people don’t bother to investigate what they are being told. They are commonly not very well versed with the world outside their own nor have a solid education. Thus being at a disadvantage frequently find themselves not finding any road to success but reasons to be unhappy. Some take advantage of that to misdirect their unhappiness towards people and activities that actually seek to help society. These “some” are stuck wanting to take the world down with them. Meanwhile the lesser educated and informed, but not automatically less valuable, fall pray to the lies and propaganda and with little to loose stand up ready to fight the false evil. Others even less educated about life become willing to meet the vestigial virgins supposedly waiting for them once they click the detonator. The price for freedom is constant alertness and willingness to fight back, not blindly supporting any activity or “right”.

Thus, I frequently assess who I associate myself with and as someone who has so far been a staunch supporter for a decade am now wondering what is your intention visa vie Nazi hate propaganda, and similar sites?

Gray Body Text Is Non-Optimum, Try This:

A number of developers and designers have gotten the idea that having dim text is the way to go. And I can see for a number of youth that stares on the screen all day long it might be annoying, even infringing. Especially if you sit in a dimly lit room where the only light comes from the monitor(s).

May I make the suggestion that black on white is not my first choice either, but rather than making it hard to read for a good percentage of people, use a different color, for example, a blue.

Blue would immediately change the impact to those with sensitive eyes. Not to say that dimming the monitor would create the same effect across the board.

It appears that too many developers are not fully considering who their public might be. Which of course also applies to any designers that use the same.

Now, I’m not at all totally against using gray to separate a section of text, or copy for marketing people. It does not require much change to stand out either, as you saw there.

How about a site function where you can store the color value in a cookie ensuring everyone can read it the way they like! Much like we can often choose different languages. Which is very handy when traveling to a country with a language you are not fluent in.

Point being making websites available for as many as possible is the goal for most websites wanting maximum return on investment, by attracting people with all kinds of eyesight on normal monitors. I’ve yet to try this out on the new 4K monitors, but I’d bet it is still true.

We have come a long way in making the web a universal tool that everyone can use, lets not go backwards by making it hard for a good swath of the population.