Just one person's opinion; The math in Physics today might be good, but the imagination of the mechanisms seems horribly bad and lacking in "common sense."

1) The Uncertainty Principle.
One day we might use backscatter, or some sample of a radiation field that does not directly effect a particle and the "uncertainty" of mass, position and vector will go away. For instance; If people measured cows with cannon fire -- they would also be "uncertain."

2) Speed of Light.
I'll theorize that the Universe is 12 dimensional. In another set of 4 dimensions, perhaps light goes at a speed according to it's frequency, and what we see as frequency is "slope" -- for instance; if you have a ruler tilted to the line you are measuring, there are more points of measurement then when it is parallel to that line.

I also imagine that we can rationalize the Quantum Probability with the many Universe theory and at the same time explain why we have physical laws; all probabilities exist, and those that are equal and opposite and balance continue to exist while all others cancel out (but they can have influence). Movement then isn't so much a phenomenon of equal and opposite as it is a particle or field not existing in one position, but existing in another -- such that it behaved according to physics.

If we use m-Brane or Super Gravity, this might also mean there is a "carrier frequency" to Space/Time -- so Plank Length and Speed of Light merely are propagation limits were anything above the frequency of "Space/Time" is ignored -- or more accurately -- changes it's vector in a higher dimension and what we see as an increase in frequency is the increase in speed/energy (again, this brings us full circle to #1).

3 Plank Length;
This is the smallest we can measure right now. It used to be the human hair not to long ago and the Universe is not made up of human hairs. I suspect however, that everything is a field (just comprised of 12 dimensions), and due to the frequency of space/time (created by the Big Bang), there is again a "coarseness or resolution" to the Universe. Any smaller than that and you are looking at vertices below the threshold (which may in turn contain infinite pocket Universes -- this is a possibility if we are talking about folded space rather than particles -- infinite and fractal).

And the double-slit test can be proven with fields alone but not particles alone -- but that's another conversation. The point is; there are a lot of "impossible to explain" quantum phenomena that are actually easy to explain if you abandon some of the weird conventions. Like "why are there 'quantum packets' in the first place"? Because fields would only exchange energy on their peaks. The orbital electron shells around the atomic nuclei may be the frequencies or distances that particles interact with our space/time -- like a 3 dimensional screw being seen in a 2 dimensional world -- you might only see where the ridges hit -- and think it's many "string-like" objects. This would also explain quantum tunneling and other phenomena; the limits of our 4D point of view.

So while there might be phenomena that "look" like estimates, it's likely more about our resolving power. I do believe we can relocate objects using this "loose accounting" in the Universe, and we can solidify empty space -- because if it's all fields and space is a carrier wave -- that might mean that "solidity" is more about interference patterns than nuclear forces.

Don't the malware junkies make more money selling the patterns to the anti-malware firms on the side?

I mean, who buys Kaspersky if nobody gets paid to create the malware and Windows and Mac have "good enough" security?

Creating a market for malware is what keeps malware coming.

They'll suck like Hulu.

I mean damn,... experiment with not trying to wring ever escalating profit margins. Netflix is awesome -- and will get better with more original programming and the flood of Indie films that will go direct to web soon.

Adding commercials will just mean the same old suck of network television. The News Media already works for the people paying for the commercials -- not to inform the public. Netflix, your early adopters are the people who fled the lowering bar of network and cable TV.

Change costs money? Yes it does; businesses buy the new Microsoft product because they changed the file types integration with Outlook.

Microsoft has to change things enough so that they can justify the "new thing" to sell -- and often that's a cosmetic change because 98% of their users aren't going to be using that new, deviation feature on a pivot table.

I could show a whole slew of changes Microsoft made that MUST HAVE had a lot of rationale associated with the change but makes no sense to me. Also a major complaint is why they changed the names of standard words in desktop publishing to useless and vague terms so you could never get a Help to find it for you. "Leading" is a term, "Paragraph Space" is a vague rearrangement of common speech. OK, rant over - the point is they started using terms for functions in their programs while ignoring real conventions. Then they made interface conventions based on some religion of UI while ignoring users.

I've spent many, many years annoyed at bad choices in UI by Microsoft. My fingers have had to travel MANY many miles because they couldn't have one alignment command with shortcuts and had to have an icon for every alignment -- they were ten years after everyone else to finally add a context menu so you didn't have to travel to center an object.

And Word still has major issues for anyone trying to do real page layout with it, or try and overlay high resolution graphics. It's a bloated text editor, no longer efficient and speedy at the first thing, and still hobbled by legacy to be good at graphics and page layout. But it's good at some email macros, and automation, as long as you don't have too many. Lot's of features, as long as you don't depend on them.

I just get really annoyed at bad designs -- it's not like I didn't KNOW how to use these product, or try and find better methods. It was the repetitive nature of using a damn baby hammer when I could see 50 ways they could have done it better. Why did someone get paid to make this lackluster app?

So now you are saying it's all driven by the touch screen. Well that's great, but I'm not using Windows on a touch screen and Surface is a tiny, tiny part of their market. Why not make a Surface interface for the Surface, and then a different one for the Desktop and marry the two when they've finally figured out the touchscreen and the desktop?

I'm not interested in researching Microsoft UI, because I've been too annoyed by their past efforts. Making icons big enough for a finger to touch them is NOT something I'd call a huge innovation, nor is it something that should have made Windows 8 such a bad hybrid.

I would really love to get into UI design -- actually "back into it" would be more accurate. But I did this stuff before they had degrees and certifications and NOW the UI is some sort of formal "it's done this way because WE KNOW these things." It's like the old "psychology for management" they used to teach in business school I suppose.

There are some things you can codify for "concepts" of a good interface, but it's really about a designer and a tool user crafting something that makes sense. There has to be a logic AND an aesthetic, it needs to let you know where you are and where you are going. It needs to be simple and elegant at the same time, and powerful should be one or two clicks away. It needs to be forgiving and let you know before you mess up.

It seems to me that UI designers are trying to create more and more UI, when really they should be like special effects in a movie; "There, but part of the story, and if possible, not even noticed." Strip away everything you can but no more from a UI and now you've got a tool.

Microsoft doesn't seem to have the mindset to to this; they look at the customer as something to market to and a touch screen as something to do LOTS of touching with. So I think whatever their UI is going to be, it's going to reflect the corporate culture, and then someone will "rationalize" in the new babble of UAX why it made kinesthetic logic to annoy everyone once again.

The Ribbon is awful UI.

I never "scanned" through those menus -- I just put frequently used action buttons in a palette. The Ribbon pretends to be "friendly" but takes up space and hides what I need to access with little hard to press triangle in the bottom right corner of each pane.

It takes me more time than the same function used to. I'm teaching myself to use High end 3D animation apps these days, so I am not afraid of change or complexity. I just get annoyed at bad designs when they've had 30 years to make Office products right.

Apple's products may have fewer features, but they are much faster to use for both novice and advanced users. Adobe Indesign is even better for page layout, but inexplicably, I find Illustrator to be annoying and it overcomplicates layers and complex vector illustrations -- but nobody remembers any other vector illustration programs so they think it's the best.

Microsoft's fans seem to suffer from the "don't know any better designs so they think this is awesome" syndrome.

I'm a veteran user of MicroSoft Office products -- so much so that I still spell it "PowerPoint." I've noticed that for MOST of the functions I've used, the advances are usually not huge (2008 brought a color sampler tool so I could mage colors -- hooray!), and for the most part, the icons get re-arranged. I could deal with that by creating my own menu for most common features.

The Ribbon sucks -- it truly absolutely sucks. It takes up a lot of space, disorganizes where I need to click and ruins context, and manages to make simple, common tasks more confusing. I've used more than a few hundred Apps, and I can tell you where the interfaces are good and bad. Adobe still screws up on their bezier pen tool and have yet to catch up to FreeHand's "one tool does it all" for lines and their easy "paste inside" for masking.

And then Metro really, really sucks, because simple OS tasks are now a series of actions. Sliding to hot corners is context sensitive with no indication of what the context is. Icons are either icons for buttons, or a picture of the family dog -- or an advertisement. The Xbox is NOT a design for getting things done -- it's a video game interface, that usually gets inbetween you and a game, or you and Netflix, and tries to sell you aftermarket crap that they kept out of the game in order to sell to you later.

So, yeah, I'm going to whine about that damn Ribbon, because I can use Office 2008 faster than any of the later Ribbon additions. and I could use Keynote with more proficiency in 2 weeks than 10 years with PowerPoint. The little floating panel with a few tabs (LOGICALLY organized) allowed me to make changes quickly. Because of the superior interface, I'd import presentations into Keynote, get the work done, export it to PowerPoint and then clean it up again -- because THAT was quicker than using the Ribbon interface.

Slow clap.

Awesome. I also like how you angry because this should drive people angry. This "anti terror" error is stupid, and we had more REAL threats when we were facing armies.

If anyone CARED about American lives they'd improve mass transit, do something about crappy and addictive prescription medicines, and make sure every American had health care and a decent job.

I had to explain to my kids a few years back about yet another news story about kids abducted on the way to school; "There are 330 million people in this country, and you will hear mostly about anything horrible happening but not a status update that 99.9% are doing OK today." (Yeah, and they really didn't get the risk percentages so I had to calm them a bit more).

The News has to keep people watching, so it hypes whatever the fear du jour is. The net result is we get more secure and and the same time more worried -- resulting in early onset "wimpy-ness." So I keep the News shows off so my kids can maintain some perspective; "Eat your broccoli and look both ways when crossing the road -- you've just solved most of the threats to your life."

The car's owner was located and arrested for driving on a revoked license.

So they blow up his stuff, maybe ruin his car and to CYA they smelled gas. And in order to justify whatever, they arrest the guy for being poor. The car isn't being driven folks -- it's there because the man ran out of money. He COULD HAVE had it towed or any number of responsible things -- but, he didn't have money.

Being poor has been a criminal act -- let's face it, you can slip on all kinds of licenses, and run around without insurance because you trade feeding a family or medicine for taking a few legal risks 9 times out of 10. But now it's terrorism?

They should just admit they were a bit overzealous and compensate the guy for the pot -- maybe give him a tow or sell his car for him. The public interests are not served on this hyperbole.

While the Boston bombing did use a pressure cooker -- the average killing spree with a gun is far more dangerous -- and we've accidentally killed more people with prescription drugs and nobody is blowing up jars of Oxycontin (but who knows what bored people might do?)

The really annoying thing here is that the Police put out statements and the Press repeat them, that have anyone with functional BS detector saying; "Oh come on." This is more crying wolf and pretty soon, a real or fake terrorist attack is going to be huge, just so people don't treat the issue as a joke or a jobs program.

I'd say that Greenpeace is arguably the good guys, in the same way as these "let Galapagos species die because it's natural" is a bad idea. Extinctions DO seem to serve a purpose in the grand scheme -- but only to wipe the slate clean for new designs. The earth has come close to becoming lifeless and either too hot or too cold, and that's been largely due to imbalances that cause species die off. So YES, more diversity = GOOD. And that's a provable statement in many subjective and objective ways.

I just admire Greenpeace activists because they aren't fighting for some invisible God, or ego - they risk real adversity. Maybe in the future people will treat them as larger than life heroes -- but you and I discussing this on a blog, not so much -- we stay comfortable.

And I'll defend Hippies because they believe in peace and love and equality -- and what could be wrong with that?

We, as a self-satisfied SUV driving culture want to preserve our status quo AND pat ourselves on the back. Are we another myopic death cult? It seems; nobody sees themselves for what they are in the culture that created the problem. Archie Bunker becomes a sex symbol because instead of progress, we believe the marketing that being a stupid cow eating stupid cows is some kind of achievement.

How do you think history will judge the American culture by and large in 50 years?

I have to roll my eyes at this concept. The logic seems to be based on a sock puppet concept of what will most annoy Environmentalists, or Hippies, or whatever is trying to "force humans to behave". Humans have an impact, merely by being a successful organism. If mosquitos killed off the dinosaurs, do we "blame" them? No.

However, humans are in the position of mitigating their effect -- not only that, but we can PICK WINNERS! Human interference, or perhaps symbiosis, has elevated dogs to family pets and helped cows to become more plentiful (jury is out on whether they enjoy the honor). The simple truth is we are in the middle of a massive extinction rate that is as fast and as massive as many of the great ones in history -- so why not preserve whatever we can to maintain diversity? Everything we choose to do or do not do will decide winners and losers, so helping out the Galapagos species even though a Volcano might doom them is not necessarily "bad". Sure, it's unnatural -- but what does that mean anymore when human's are, by their nature, effectors of change on a planetary scale?

It's time to recognize that we may be in what could be called the "post evolutionary stage." Or perhaps the "directed evolutionary stage." We are busy tweaking ourselves, bioweapons, antibiotics, and glow in the dark cats. Terraforming or building resort islands will be part and parcel with choosing to keep building more roads or build more trains and paint rooftops white to reduce heat absorption.

Environmentalists might have to come to terms with what is "natural" -- but since economics is most of the decision making process -- being environmentally conscious is either useful or useless but rarely damaging, the next GMO food has more impact than a thousand activists and it's time we looked at things in the larger context.

Grabbing some animals and flora off an island to survive an eruption is tampering in a positive way, whereas using pesticides on food crops is tampering on a much larger scale. I don't see the problem or contradiction with mitigating the effects of natural disasters when we do far more to wipe out species -- it's a small attempt to restore balance.

I came for the stretch marks.

Why do we always have to discuss the manner in the way data is presented when it's pretty well known that Global Warming is changing the poles? Much better to spend our time on "what's next" and "how fast?"

The stretch marks are obviously and indication of movement that is "faster" than what we usually see; and how fast is that? A meter per day?

I'm thinking something the size of New Jersey is going to slip into the ocean in the next few years and "what happens" after that? Do we get a tsunami?

Couldn't agree more. I went for years not being able to use UNIX man pages on command lines or common documents with apps because the switches never gave examples that made it clear. Was the bracket part of the command, was there a space or comma after the -p or do the letters run together? So many possible combinations that a novice or causal user is often left clueless how to use it so they go search on the web for a complete example and the man page lays dormant and useless.

And even though I've done some programming or scripts that use the command line -- I still don't know how to use most switches in UNIX because the man pages all follow the same example of "let's keep this opaque as possible and never, ever explain anything simply."

You beat me to it. this is pretty much the system I would suggest to verify "e voting." The "ticket" is just to let you know what your vote token is. Nobody knows who you are -- they only know that person X was eligible to vote and did vote in election Y.

The vote tally would have to be made of a series of private/public key encrypted files and there would be spot-checking with exit polling to check back with token owners to see if they voted how the token indicated. Anonymously and randomly.

You'd also need a verification of the person from time to time to create the voter ID -- kind of like a social security number with it's own password. And this is what is used to create the vote token.

I think it's totally do-able and in fact, there is already a system like it with Apple Pay. The Vendors and the Voting location don't verify or know the vote cast -- just the tally machine at the end. They just verify that Person X was person X and voted. So even if we stay with voting locations -- we should move to a token system because our current "black box" -- privately programmed touch screens are not verifiable, no matter what garbage we are being told today because their is no way to match up the vote with the voter -- only a tally, and the individual vote, with no guarantee that THAT vote is part of the tally.

The other absurdity is to get a slip of paper or a card with "your vote" that you hand in. And there's someone with a badge there to protect it. I feel embarrassed by how stupid they have to think I am as a voter that this gives me any confidence at all that they can't just write down whomever they wanted as the winner of the vote. Our old paper and pencil system was 100% better than the electronic one we have now and cheaper as well (because crooks had to be paid, no doubt).

I would have agreed with this about a decade ago, but then I thought about how I became sick and tired of the process -- I feel the vote machines are rigged and the choices pre-approved by the lobbyists, yadda, yadda. I still vote, but I do so out of duty and absolutely no delusion that my candidate is EVER going to win. We vote in the most corrupt person we can, and that's the way it's going to be.

But I thought about WHY the ancient Greeks forced people to the poles and would even fine them and mark their necks with a purple die (wrapping around a cloth to secure the print). It's the disenfranchised that you WANT to vote because otherwise the game is won by whomever can disgust everyone about the other candidate. Either they believe the much thrower and vote with him, or they don't vote -- says the logic of reality as we've seen it in modern voting patterns. The more negative, the more independent voters and the fewer people show up to vote overall. Winner; muck thrower.

I just took a course on Scrum/ AGILE and it was refreshing to learn that "the hardest thing to figure is how long things take on a complex project."

So an AGILE PM would say; "How complex do you think task X is relative to Y?" You'd then break things down into units of labor and try and attack the priorities and the lowest number units. This will of course, come as no shock to anyone in AGILE development -- but I'm repeating this stuff for the benefit of anyone who hasn't, and myself to reinforce the concepts.

Over time and consistency, your work units will translate to "time" -- but not until a while with a team and working on the same types of projects.

The point is; a business needs to hire the labor that they need, and get as much done as they can in a reasonable amount of time. No matter what they do, they can't get an unreasonable amount of work done with a small amount of labor -- they can only fail to produce good work or timely work.

AGILE fails because companies and or management do not adhere to it's principles. Unless workers are empowered to do all that they must do to accomplish a given task -- it isn't going to work. And if you want a timescale of less than 6 months where you can predict the rate of output -- that's also going to fail

Management has been blowing smoke up the rear of executives for decades now, and I suppose everyone still likes the breeze it makes.