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.

I think the mean Excel as in "Charmin".

Word has an understandable formatting model. That is, all the formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark. You can select a paragraph mark, copy it, paste it somewhere else in the document, and you have a paragraph formatted identically to the original. In OO, your text may take on different formatting depending on whether you backspace away a paragraph mark vs deleting it. No kidding. Also, there's no way to reliably copy a paragraph from one place in a document to another and retain the formatting without adding sacrificial paragraphs before and sometimes after the text you are trying to copy. Seriously. OO's formatting model is just broken.

Until this basic problem is addressed, people will -- rightly -- prefer using word. I've been fighting oo's formatting for years, and frankly, I'm sick of it.

I say that as a dedicated Emacs user.

There is no other kind of successful Emacs user.

Unity follows the Emacs philosophy into the graphical desktop - the fewer times I need to reach for that damned mouse, the better.

Exactly the point. You don't need a graphical interface. You already know the names of all the apps you want to run. But my mother and father do need a graphical interface, and they don't know the names of all the apps -- however few they are. They can't touch type and look at the screen at the same time. They need to nudge the computer with the mouse toward useful operations. They could do that before, and they can't with Unity, or with the GNOME Shell.

So, no you aren't a lone voice, but you are in the extreme minority. If I want to run my computer from the keyboard, I'll open a terminal. I like the terminal. And I like a real GUI. I don't much care for screens that are too short and too wide playing animations in response to undiscoverable key strokes, which as far as I can tell is the point of both Unity and the GNOME Shell. (I know you were just talking about Unity, but personally I'd toss them both in the same bin.)

Because what the world needs now is a better E. coli.
Science: Is there nothing it can't do?

No, the trick is to find the 1% of the 1% who will influence the other 99% of the greater 1% who will then get everybody else on board and get them on board.

You were doing good right up to your last sentence. (I'm joking, but not really.)

I repeat (though why I have to wonder): It's not a flood zone. It's the ocean. We aren't talking about flood insurance. Floods are when the water comes then the water goes. When the water comes and stays, that's... the ocean.

I'm just having fun in the surf and sand here. Please don't take me seriously. I certainly don't take you seriously.

Who said anything about flood insurance? Sea level rising is not a flood. You won't be able to get _any_ insurance. (Although, I guess fire insurance is a pretty safe bet for the insurance companies on property that's under water -- in the literal sense.)

That's public sector planners. Insurance companies will use whatever sources they think are reasonable, so some of this to-be-planned development may be hard to insure.

If by "the government" you mean "we the people", that's exactly where it should be. If you're proposing that we should bust it up and distribute it amongst private entities for profit while removing accountability to the public, I'm not so much ready to support that.

For the record, I've very happy with what our public schools have done for my kids. I realize not everybody is so lucky, and others may have quite different opinions for good reasons.

Education isn't broken.

Some parts of society are ill, public financing has issues, expectations are sometimes out of whack, but those are different issues. Many schools and their students are doing just fine.

I was a big fan of the text editor "DME" that he wrote and maintained in those days. Good to know he's still kickin' bits.

Don't be ridiculous. The exhaust would kill us all!

When I'm king, I'm going to solve this problem. No more short term capitol gains taxes, because there'll be no more short term capitol gains. How? I'll impose this one rule: Any stock, bond, security, whatever, has to be held for at least one year before it can be sold. There's no end of problems this one rule will fix. When I'm king. Oh well.