As someone who used to be one of those part time professors, I completely agree - I quite frequently recommended quality students either to my own employer, or to our clients when they were looking for someone with related skills.

I'll also add that even though I was in Computer Science, one of the biggest things I looked at before even considering recommending them was written communication skills - if their emails to me tended towards "Cn U Hlp Me?" there was no way I'd be putting them forward as a candidate for anything. (Seriously people, when you're typing out an email on your laptop, you've got a full keyboard, and plenty of time to find the "y" and the "o" on the keyboard - they're both within an inch of the "U"!)

Out of University, I stupidly started up a business with one friend, and one backstabbing scum-bag, and along the way, wound up back at the U teaching as a side job - I'm still not completely sure how that happened. One day, after having a particularly heated disagreement with my boss at the U, he asked me "Oh, while we're talking, you do Unix sysadmin stuff, right? Have you got a resume handy? I work with a group that needs someone..." Which lead to me getting a job that pays more than twice what I was getting before at my previous day job, doing work I'm better at, and enjoying a lot more.

Apparently, as a Philosophy PHD, my boss really enjoyed a good argument.

The non-DUI accidents you're talking about eliminating are the ones where cars are running into eachother. The problem is, even though regulations would be created to try to prevent those things, similar regulations being in place do nothing to prevent cars in 2-d from running into eachother, pedestrians (I've been hit three times, once on the sidewalk, twice in a parking lot while standing still in plain sight, wearing an orange and yellow vest since I worked there), and non-mobile obstacles like trees, buildings, and rivers. The problem isn't with regulations and planning, it's with people not paying attention to those regulations, or to what they're doing at all.

Added to that is maintenance - right now, airplanes are the safest way to travel, but that's partly because they get maintenance and checks done on them every single time they land, and right before every time they take off. Cars, not so much - as evidence for this, I would point out the street I used to live on, which was littered with car parts that had fallen/flown off of cars as they went over the bump from the local train tracks. Most often hub caps, occasionally a mirror or door handle, once an entire fender, which the owner of just left, laying in the middle of the road where it fell. You want these people going over your head? Are you completely insane? The first bit of turbulence they hit, and they'll be dropping a wing strut into your pool, then wobbling off like it's not important, and trying to sue the maker of their flying car when they fall out of the sky and crash on a school playground.

Not only that, but soon after this outrageous manoeuvre, the vast majority of these new ISO members Microsoft had bought never showed up for another meeting - meetings requiring of course, a minimum percentage in attendance to actually approve anything, which then, due to the bulk of members having no interest in the committee except for casting their pro-MS vote in order to receive their bribes, did not have enough members present to actually do anything.

And this is the story of how Microsoft broke the ISO, so they could fake their way into government contracts by falsely claiming that their office software supported an ISO standard (which even Microsoft didn't actually support).

Of course not - pine is a non-gui mail program! Also, there have been improvements, but this poll is about nostalgia, and you can't have nostalgia for things that are new, only for things that are old and may not even work anymore/the way you remember them. Most of my fond old memories of ancient GUIs were about the feeling of accomplishment I got when I actually managed to get them to work (at all) and then work the way I wanted them to. You just don't get that feeling with things that work already when you install them, but instead you get that other good feeling of "being able to use this thing I just bought".

OLVWM was the GUI on my first linux workstation, back in 1995. Once I got graphics working at all that is. (Yay slackware 0.(somethingorother), had do download a half-tonne of floppy disk images, and install it with a lot of disk-swapping, and even then I still had to compile almost everything myself, including kernel drivers for my video card, network card, and mouse.)

See, that's the problem with LCARS - it's not cheap (Paramount ownership issues, license would have to be paid before it could be distributed), it's not readily available (nobody's paid for the license, so they always get shut down via DMCA), and it's not actually comfortable (which is why UI experts regard it as a poor UI). The largest problem is the massive waste of available space for those giant thick menu bars to the sides that don't go away. The main advantage of LCARS is it's distance-visibility, meaning that you can see it over the shoulder of someone in the background on a TV screen, and see that they're doing something.

      Sadly, what makes a good "TV show computer interface" and what makes a good real computer interface are totally separate qualifications. The best example of this that I can think of would be the movie "Hackers" - seriously, nobody who is doing any kind of systems work or programming has a screen that looks like that, but if they'd used what those screens would really look like, nobody would have found it interesting to watch.

It doesn't have to be for sale to get taken down by a DMCA order, just available to the public. Anyone who's started working on one gets shut down, so nobody's ever finished anything decent.

As interfaces go though, it's very bulky - the menus and such take up far too much space on screen, meaning that though it's great for watching someone else using it on a TV screen, since you can see that they're doing stuff, it's not very efficient for actual use.

Agreed - my GUI interface on my 2650x1600 display mostly consists of 20 or so open text command shells, and/or text editors. The web browser runs on a much smaller screen off to the side, along with all of the other graphical programs. I rarely even use the mouse, since I can just alt-tab between windows.

Sounds like something that would have been in a '90s Zima commercial. "Zima... Zo Ztimulating..." (Man that makes me feel old...)

But you only get mod points if you've commented recently, so if he hadn't commented, he'd get no points with which to be unable to mod.

Back in highschool, I got an A on an art project that was composed entirely of solder melted and shaped with a soldering iron, and then polished up nice and shiney and sprayed with varnish. It was a . . . you know, I _made_ it, and even I'm not sure what it was, but the teacher liked it. It happened because I had a giant pile of solder, and after I fixed the circuit board for a toy gun that was supposed to make "Zzzap!" noises, but was only making "click" noises instead, I got bored and started seeing how high I could get the pile of molten drops to stick together. Then I made more little towers, linked them together, added cross-bridges, and before I knew it, I had to go out and buy my father a new roll of solder, which he still has, unopened.

Really? The early Slashdot polls I remember were very similar to these ones, but usually had a Cowboy Neal option added on.

Is that the thing where the battery spontaneously swells up and bursts? I had that happen once. Destroyed the phone and cracked the sim card, but at least I only had about $2 worth of minutes left on it, so it wasn't a major loss. Fortunately, as it was swelling, the shattering plastic of the phone made loud cracking noises, so I noticed, pulled it out of my pocket, saw the bulge and tossed it into an empty trash bin before it popped.