Actually they're sold the cheap stuff by contractors, since by and large they don't have the real-world experience to know the difference.

Of course you could always go the "large company CEO's office" route, which frequently is a steel-cored door weighing several hundred pounds, coupled with Kevlar between the drywall and the wall studs.

Depending on how deep in the Earth's shadow the effect can be more or less pronounced. I saw one eclipse where the moon was pretty close to black several years ago, apparently this one will be deeper in the Earth's shadow so will be lit up better.

I suspect the reason that this one is getting so much publicity (it's not an uncommon event) is because there are several moderately popular books out about supposed biblical prophecies with that title. There's also a detective novel, a vampire novel and a werewolf novel with that name, and some others. Something about the name drew a lot of attention on Farcebook too.

So does Michigan.

shoots a laser at the moon and bounces the beam off of five retroreflectors.

Big Bang Theory quote time:

Zack: One question. How can you be sure it won't blow up?

Leonard: The laser?

Zack: The moon.

I have noticed that motorized scooters have been granted a status in some places of "absolutely magical". It is apparently legal to park them at no cost at bicycle racks, even if they prevent actual bicycles from parking there. They are, by association, legal to ride (or at least, push) on the sidewalk as well. You can carry whatever or whoever you want with you on it, seldom need a proper helmet, and if you have enough power you can go ahead and drive on the freeway as well. They generally need less insurance and registration to boot.

Why bother with a bicycle at that point? We don't really embrace fitness in this country anyways.

I would pay money for a parking app that can tell me which towing company tows cars from there. Where I live, car theft is 100% legal if you are a towing company - it has been demonstrated repeatedly on camera and in court - and some companies are far more frequent offenders than others. I am willing to pay more to park in lots that are not patrolled by certain crooked towing companies.

And you need to learn to look at papers which don't share your bias. There is still question about what the breakdown products of Thimerosal actually are. And since it has actually been used for flu shots for schoolchildren in the USA since it wasn't supposed to be, it's still an item for discussion.

Yes, but when you die, some of the mercury is always missing. Where did it go? Did it just vanish into the aether? Or was it released from your tooth with hot beverages? I love a hot cup of coffee with extra mercury in the morning, every morning, for the rest of my life. With my 11 silver fillings.

It's not. It always loses mercury.

OK but you would agree that with your profile i.e. using a mid 1990s setup with a few slight advances, you fall pretty squarely in what most people would call the "hating change" camp.

OK yes, but I'd say that was ignorance from those people and is every bit as bad as those that do genuinely hate change. I don't hate change: I embrace it when it benefits me. I try to avoid changing things for the worse. I'm not a fan of churn for its own sake.

This I think is the problem with quite a few people at the forefront of change. They are so invested in it that they assume everyone who doesn't like what they've done must be a luddite nd therefore has an invalid opinion which is best ignored. In that case they're all too eagar to dismiss other opinions.

  Obviously you have been around long enough to deal with change better than the people freaking out about Gnome, you mostly ignore it, but I certainly don't think of you given that description as a change enthusiast or anything.

Perhaps not an enthusiast. I like new tech and seek it out. I don't however adopt wholsale change merely for its own sake. Some things I've fond were done very very well a long time ago and it's going to take something quite exceptional to improve on them.

As far as C++/BTRFS those would be examples where you clearly are a change enthusiast. A different areas of computing.

Again, I'm not sure enthusiast is right. The new things are for me just better. BTRFS is much less faffy than LVM, so makes multi-disk stuff a breeze. C++11 is just plain great. Actually, I feel the C++11 committee are quite close to me philosohically. They do adopt new stuff, but only when it really does help and try not to break old stuff without a really good reason.

Well the big changes in terminals for English speakers are transparency and tabs IMHO.

Two things I can leave, TBH. I did download one of the early terminals with transparency support then went and found a really cool desktop pic (a martian frying the thunderchild iron clad---yes it was the 90s and yes I was a teenager then) and set it up so it looked just so and (to my mind) super awesome. Then I tried to code and realised that a plain black background was actually superior. :)

It is mainly with other languages

Yeah fair enough. Though even the venerable XTerm and Fixed Semi-Condensed font are now far better in their unicode support than previously. I wouldn't know correctly rendered Hindi if it ran up and bit me on the leg, however.

Terminology, is just an Enlightenment app from the 1990s.

The first release was August 2012. It's the terminal that allows embedding of images and videos etc within the text amongst other things. It's a real GUI terminal.

  Were you using Tizen I'd see more of a move towards a GUI and away from an admittedly cool windows manger. But you aren't even using Enlightenment across the board.

Nope, I'm using FVWM since I like the way I can set things up. I'm only dimly aware of Tizen. What would it change?

Ah now I see what upset you. A windows manager is a component of a GUI but a window manager is just a small fraction of a GUI. The widget set and the interaction subsystem (event handling) are mostly not part of window managers.

I'd say barely at all. Almost all events go straight to the program in question. A very few get bounced via the window manager (basically only ones to do with window placement) so that it can draw borders etc. The compositor now eats a few extra positional based ones so it can deal with funny window placement. The WM itself has no influence on the main path of most events, or the widget set. Some WMs don't even use any widgets at all.

This is the debate that happened with KDE 1, whether wanted a GUI or just wanted fully featured window managers. If I were to ask you "what facilities does FVWM2 provide for database access over a network?" or "how does FVWM queue QoS video streams vs. non-QoS video streams?" you get an idea of what FVWM2 doesn't do that means that it isn't a GUI at all. This isn't zealotry but rather the very definition of the word "GUI".

I'm not really following to be honest. Surely the network susbystem of the kernel or router deals with QoS. The only thing the WM does is deal with placement of windows on the screen. The compositor on Wayland fills a very similar task. The components are well separated and none of the WMs including the GNOME and KDE ones have any part in playing video streams.

Exactly. FVWM2 has no idea how cut and paste works. Object communication is what GUIs have to do.

But copy/paste is handled by the X server (along with DnD). The mechanism is well specified and it's quite easy to implement. The window manager is purely a device for arranging windows on the screen. That's one of the nice parts of X is that the WM can be switched out easily and none of the mechanisms are affected. In fact it's possible to run X with no WM (unpleasant but possible), and copy/paste still works.

But if the tools actually make use of graphical objects that falls apart.

Well, to some extent yes, depending on what facilities are on offer.

Cut and paste being a perfect example of where reducing everything to commandline fails terribly.

Well, copy/paste commands which extract text from the X11 clipboard and echo it do exist (I've even written one of my own), but I've never had much use for them to be honest. Copy/paste generally stays in GUI land for me. Though I mostly use it within a single editor instance.

In all fairness. C++ is a rather traditional language. GCC is a rather traditional system... Using gvim rather than a IDE to do C++ programming is super traditional.

Kinda. C++ still has ideas in it that most other langages have yet to adopt. Additionally, the new versions have all the modernish goodies like type inference, lambdas and so on. It's a system with a long history, to be sure, but then so is the Linux kernel. From a practical point of view, modernidiomatic C++11 is almost unrecognisable compared to what was state of the art 20 years ago.

Even vim itself is a long way different from the vi clones of years gone by. You can get a LLVM plugin now for instance which does fully integrated C++ autocomplete for example, something traditionally which is an IDE feature.

Mixed paradigm dynamic languages with libraries that tie them to web and database (i.e. 2010s equivalent of 4GLs) are newish.

Only vaguely. Ignoring the libraries part, I remember tinkering with Python in the 90s. And TCL fits the dynmic, mixed paradigm bill fine, even if it is in most ways truly hideous. As for libraries, well, PERL was there first. I'm not doing down the new ones, PERL is also vile, but the ideas and even the languages are not that fundementally new. That said, if I was going to be doing some sort of web service development, I'd probably reach for one of the newish dynamic languages with loits of libraries.

If you are talking performance then languages that take better advantage of today's processors than C++ make more sense.

Mostly I do image and data processing. Performance is generally important, but also C++ is about the best development environment for the type of thing I'm doing. I've tried matlab, octave, numpy/scipy and others and I keep coming back to C++.

Look at your setup and ask yourself what couldn't you have been doing 20 years ago? What fundamentally is different about what you are doing and what you would have been doing 20 years ago?

20 years ago was 1994. I was still using a BBC Master then (checking on wikipedia, they were discontinued in 1994 so I guess they were available cheap which is why I had one). If you're not British, then filling you in, that's one of the more capable 8 bitters. At work I used some HP thingy running CDE. Oh and the SGI. Oh the sgi. Seeing that demo stuff in 1994 was -mind blowing-.

But I'm not sure what you mean. Then as now, I spent most of my time typing code into some sort of editor. But the sort of things I can do now are much more advanced. The quality of languages has improved so I can write bigger, more complex things single handed. I can collaborate far better than I used to be able to (another thing---I'm a DVCS evangalist now). I regularly use algorithms invented only in the last decade. I can process whole videos, something almost unimaginable 20 years ago. My computer is also my music player as well, which is nice.

If you're asking if I would give up all the modern features, the answer is no, not a chance. Even with my 1994 era FVWM config (yes really, I started configuring it in 1994 at my first job and have been tweaking it ever since which is why I still have pre Win-95 syle window decorations).

Like I said, I don't hate change when it's for the better. I've been keeping up to date with the latest developments in GUI land, and I'm glad that people finally got around to implementing Copy/Paste as the ICCCM specified all those years ago so we could move more than just plain text around. But in terms of placing windows, FVWM has yet to be beaten.

For other parts of my setup, on the electronics end things are amazingly different. Were now awash with sub 3V devices whith integrated SPI or I2C busses which can be strung together to an insane number of different microcontrollers. This makes tiny low power coin-cell powered devices with in the range of a low-end commercial engineer or even or hobbyist. Though vendor tools have often not improved much since the 90s. But the stuff I can build now and the vendors and the tools available to help are just incredible.

On the hardware end, 3D printers are a complete game changer for me. They are just wonderful machines.

I believe you mean psuedorandom. (*bang*)

Yes, places full of complete idiots. Note the names of the plates. Now note that people who think there is one continent called America are ignorant at best.

Why shouldn't I change them to make them more fun?

Nope. You're just presenting a more subtle version of numerological bullshit.

Having only one significant digit means that the actually value for 10 is somewhere between 6 and 14 and the value for 30 is somewhere between 26 and 34. Measurements were not that inaccurate (you don't really think they only have a 15 foot rope to measure with and absolutely nothing else, do you?).

10 and 30 have 2 significant digits even if you assume that they rounded to whole numbers and didn't want to use fractions or decimals. Rounding to whole numbers, a circle with a measure of 10 cubits across will measure 31 cubits around.

That passage of the bible is incorrect. Period.

Unless a programmer is working for a very large company, there's a good chance they're in pretty direct contact with their users.

Throwing someone into contact with users doesn't help someone become good at UX. Just look at the multitude of Open Source projects -- most of them interact directly with users and still end up with pretty atrocious UX that is designed based on the programmer's workflow and how easy it is to implement.

Every time I hear this from a developer, I cringe. Good UX is a choice. You can train in it, but until you really alter your mindset towards user interaction and embrace it, your projects will suffer. It's so easy, too: