I've been contributing to a project over the last 20 years (which happens to be a text editor) which has 80+ pages of documentation in texinfo. I'm not specifically recommending texinfo; it's what the project started with and it works. The point is, the build process renders a plain text version of the texinfo documentation, then a script reads the formatted docs to build several of the program source files, including hash tables of the commands, static text for the internal "help" commands, enums (it's C code), etc. You literally cannot add a new command to the program without adding it first to the documentation. It's a slick way to keep the documentation in sync with the code. The same idea could surely be implemented with many other document source formats. It's a step towards Knuth's Literate Programming without going overboard.

Programmers certainly can and should write documentation.

The lower classes (the 98%) don't care about default because they see it as comeuppance for the robber barons who have all the money to lose anyway. It's only a catastrophe for those with something to lose. For the rest, it's an inconvenient equalizer. (Actually probably much more inconvenient than equalizing; hope we don't find out.)

With a period!

I didn't realize how luck I was that Ubuntu quit supporting non-PAE (i.e. all of my) machines. I was forced back to Fedora/MATE (GNOME was jumping the same shark) and it's nice to just use the machine again. They drove me off before I had a chance to hate Unity. So, thanks for that!

I wonder if this is the same thinking that went into screwing up paging in Evince (a GNOME project). I find lately that middle-click in the Evince scroll bar does nothing, and left clicking causes a jump to that location (like middle-click is supposed to do, and does in other apps) rather than a page forward. And then there's replacing the menus with buttons on the right like chrome. Ugh.

Fortunately, I've moved to MATE (and mate-doument-viewer a.k.a atril).

I wish GNOME would switch to EBCDIC. Then we could finally sweep its dust from the floor and get back to having fun. Bye, GNOME.

I have no problem with licensing of patents. What I find absurd is the notion of transfer of patents. If someone invents something they ought to be able to profit from it even if they don't produce. But what sense is there in allowing trolls to buy innovation rights from others?

"Patents: license them or lose them. No sales or transferes allowed." Soon as they make me king.

It's a state politician screwing up a state law. Do you want federal politicians to be able to overturn state laws on a whim?

Since you mention it, the same Republican legislature (North Carolina) is pushing a proposal to repeal any local ordinances that go beyond federal regulations. This is their broad stroke approach to "doing away with anti-business regulation". This same bunch that's been screaming "states rights" for years is now doing just the opposite now that they've finally gained power.

Humor detectors exists though. Most people have 'em. Obviously not everybody though.

"Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 PJ or 4.5 ×10^17 J or 125 billion kWh, without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be either generated on-board from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances."

Or you can borrow it from the future, where it will be generated conveniently enough in exactly the right quantity by slowing that one ton down. We just haven't figured out how to shift the energy equations in the temporal dimension yet.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Orth has also now switched his Twitter account settings to private.

...or as we like to call it, "not-always-on".

We've found evidence that our closest neighbor was once hospitable to life

Mexico?

So how would his knowledge of passwords from when he used to work there be of any use? Do they not immediately change all the passwords he had when he left the company? Did they let him keep his keys to the building as well? The real villain here is the victim's IT department.

The saddest part of this whole story to me is the screenshot itself. I'm looking at it on a 10-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42, and there's considerable blank space in my browser window both above and below that screen image, plus my browser's title bar, menu, location bar, bookmark bar, my gadgets at the top of the screen, and my bar thingy at the bottom of my screen... The ancient screen is 1050 pixels high; the screenshot is768 pixels. Modern laptop displays are missing a quarter of their vertical pixels! Why did people ever stoop to buying this crap? Nobody sells any laptop with anything close to the 10 year old standard in vertical pixels in any reasonable price range these days.

I guess it matters more now than ever how good a UI is, because it has to work in such tight vertical spaces -- rather like a coal miner. With so many other aspects (pun intended) of computers improving year after year, this one thing -- vertical pixels -- seems to have taken a turn for the utterly stupid. It makes me sad.