The problem is actually bugs in the handling of tables and form data from .doc/.docx files in LibreOffice.

This. A thousand times this.

Businesses and people are used to MS Word. They don't like it, they simply cope and can be fairly sure a document created in it can be read and changed by another user without too many problems. It's the defacto standard, and any alternative needs to deal with that standard.

In spite of all the effort gone into Star/Open/LibreOffice compatibility over the past 15 years it has always been hit-or-miss when opening a Word document. As long as you can't rely on a compatible Office suite users will simply stay with MS Office, and thus Windows/OS X.

The average user uses their PC to browse the web, read their email and as a fancy typewriter. Get that working properly and you can play ball.

On the Autobahn things can indeed get rather tense when it's busy. But as everyone knows the speed difference between drivers going in the same direction is high (You have trucks plowing along at 60mph while Audi's in the left lane easily going 100-120mph) your average driver tends to be very alert and respectful. You have to be, because not checking your mirrors means you're going to cause a pile-up.

The clowns thinking they belong on the left lane are quickly corrected. If you're a poor driver feel free to take the highway but stick to the right lane.

Why not?

This isn't about making artificial jellyfish, it's about creating new organisms made out of both organic and inorganic material. Regardless of use, I think this is rather awesome.

I tend to use 'apg' when generating passwords, neat little tool. Aliased as 'apg -a 1 -m 12 -x 16' though, as the default generator goes for pronounceable passwords that are too short for my taste:

% apg
9&}v3Q/'n5O6UN
]%LE\!TLUt?Z]jjj
$i4&zmOxh-wmfGu
N6.H+i/^rcGo5`p ;a-_)wg}~*Xu~z
rKv4JoC6wO0`\6,j

If someone brute-forces those they have earned it.

My hash was on the list, in full. It was an old password, but a non-trivial long combination of (upper & lowercase) characters & numbers. Ouch!

Imagine typing only "google" into the address bar and getting google.

Even better: try it! I've seen too many people access Google via IE/Bing this way.

Between integrated search, bookmarks and Facebook pages these "exclusive" domain names are already rather redundant. Users will hit Google first when searching for something, they're used to it.

How will Ticketmaster inform users they can simply enter 'tickets' into their addressbar? "Shouldn't there be a .com behind that?" At least with 'tickets.com' it's clear you're talking about a domainname.

But I guess the internet marketing types are all drooling about even more TLDs that go nowhere.

Neat addictive game!

Except that the average life expectancy you quote is at birth... Roy was in his 40's when he started reducing his amount of calories, so his life expectancy would have been approaching 80 regardless of what he ate.

Pass me the steak!

A different model might hold the student back until they show proficiency. Once they have confidence in the material, the system "rewards" them and presents the next chapter. The student is motivated to get the next level of achievement, and their level of understanding is greater.

The Khan Academy uses this approach when one does the exercises: you start with the basics and gradually gain points and badges while you work through the various topics, using the video lectures when you get stuck.

All exercises are voluntary but the mentoring and statistics are very well thought-out so that student progress can be followed in detail. The next step up would be that only students that have shown their proficiency are allowed to take an exam.

I'm currently using the KA code to set up a similar academy for a local university (the focus of the content being grammar). The code is rather hairy but the concepts behind the site are very interesting.

In 75 years, should we survive, we'll look back on it with the same amusement.

Like most science fiction writing you mean?

I've always found this definition of 'space opera' a bit of a misnomer, as if true science fiction always follows the laws of physics or has a deep underlying message about the future of technology. If you look back at the works of Asimov, Heinlein, Lem and Clarke you know that this isn't always the case.

The reason Hamilton's works are lumped under space opera is because of the extensive focus on setting and characters. But there are plenty of 'hard sci-fi' nuggets in his work IMHO.

Any sort of interruption will snap me out of that trance state, even if it's wifey asking me where I'm going as I step out the door. It's all about maintaining that mental bubble.

Sounds very familiar. I've tried explaining but even her presence can snap me out of 'the flow', which makes me way too irritable.

Having our dogs around me doesn't though, so I tend to simply take a stroll with them and let that unconscious part of the brain do the heavy lifting.

Except that there are fields in any model that the user *shouldn't* be able to change via form. And lo, there is a mechanism in Rails to flag those fields in the model so that this sort of things doesn't happen: attr_accessible flags.

Madness... when defining the form you explicitly define which attributes of the model may be submitted and modified and everything else is ignored. Forms should be the filter between the crap a user may submit and your precious model.

Django does this right in my eyes: allowed attributes need to be stated in the Form if you don't want all fields displayed. If you have different types of users present those users a different form with corresponding list of attributes and additional validation. Subclassing forms makes this trivial to implement and you explicitly whitelist those fields that are allowed to be modified by a particular user.

Not that Django is perfect, but I'm amazed that RoR requires/required blacklisting model attributes instead of handling this explicitly in the form. Kudos to the hacker for outing this design-flaw.

This is probably the best way, avoid/ignore any priorities that don't come in from up top.

Even better is not using priorities at all: simply set milestones and allocate people to meet those milestones. If during the weekly meeting one of the dept heads wants something done quick let them fight it out with the dept heads whose pet project is currently underway and will be delayed due to "reduced resources". The impact of "pet project will be delayed by 4 weeks" is much more concrete than "pet project is now a minor priority instead of major".

Business people need to understand that, unless they bring additional resources to the table, they will simply have to wait in line until it is their turn.