#1, quit requiring an Apple/iTunes login to download free apps. Which Apple will never do.
#2, filter by "free". Which Apple will never do.
#3, filter by "requests no privileges not directly related to its function". Which Apple will also never do.
#4, just give me a damned list of apps ordered by price and rating, instead of making me swipe through every...single...hit on my search.
#5, quit disallowing apps just because they compete with your own crApple. I don't like most of the native apps.
#6, make 50% of all ratings directly based on what percent of users (try to) uninstall it within the first week.

Do you know any complex software that succeeded in avoiding documentation by having significantly improved usability?

To answer your direct question: Yes - Games regularly do this, because no one reads the manual (if they even have one).

That said, no one reads any manuals until they get stuck. So realistically, time invested in useability will provide far, far more benefit than time spent on a book that never even gets opened.

However, games have the rare luxury of forcing you to play a tutorial when you start. As much as I wish I could force most of my coworkers to "play" an Excel tutorial every time they start a new spreadsheet, I doubt "serious" users would have the patience to put up with that level of handholding (even when desperately necessary).

They essentially are making biological weapons in violation of international treaties, but they're saying it's all OK because it's for research?

The difference between using explosive in mining and construction, vs using them to make a bomb, reduces to nothing more than a matter of intent.


The hubris of thinking "it's OK, I'm a trained professional, nothing bad can happen" is mind boggling.

Much better to naively pretend that if random microbiologist guy can do it, ISIS can't?

IMO, only a matter of time before some rogue state or terrorist group manages to breed their own superbug. We therefore have a race occurring that we must win, at all costs. Engaging in this sort of core functionality research gives us a fighting chance when something eventually makes it into the wild. Not doing it means the 1% of the human race that survives the plague won't even know what the hell just happened.

Actually, the latest events on Jezebel proves the point of many of Jezebel's authors, which is that much of the internet is openly hostile to women.

No. Much of the internet is openly hostile, period. That has nothing to do with women, beyond the fact that Jezebel panders to a certain type of mock-indignation-queen so the trolls serve up relevantly offensive volleys of crap.


Jezebel is an awesome blog and has fantastic stories about the crap that women have to put up with in this country and around the world every single day.

Jezebel is a misandristic rag that pays the bills by targeting a niche demographic, no different than any other specialized news aggregation site out there. They get a pass on shit that would get modded into oblivion, or outright get the poster banned, on most other websites because patriarchy, grar!

Note that I don't specifically hold that against them (though not my cup of tea, personally). Slashdot does the same pandering to geeks, with attitudes toward certain areas of established law that sound borderline insurrectionist. Metafilter does the same with taking the progressive liberal stance to such an absurdity it almost bends around and becomes a parody of itself. 4chan... Well, let's just not go there. And Reddit has pretty much cornered the market on having subreddits that allow them to both pander to and offend every group all at the same time.

All that just pays the bills, nothing more, nothing less.

Welcome to the internet, ladies. People here don't play nice, your university's PC police have no power here, and you can't do a goddamned thing about it. Adapt or leave, simple as that.

No, that's not how reality works. Sorry.

Perhaps you could explain that to the stock market(s)?

Look at the price of Apple for the year - Notice that sudden drastic jump in late April? They did a 7-to-1 stock split, which has no effect whatsoever on the underlying value of the asset. And yet, people rushed to get in on "cheaper" Apple stock, driving the per-share price up by 12% in three days.

Whether it makes sense or not, in any activity dependent on human behavior, you need to factor in how humans respond to stupid things like big round numbers (DJIA at 17000), to fake "discounts" (like Apple stock at $75), even to days of the week (look at volume for Fridays vs any other day).

Yes IPv6 still uses BGP, but in a way that favors greatly reduced fragmentation.

Take a look at BellSouth's list of announced prefixes for a pretty egregious example of this - Notice anything "funny" about it? They could reduce that list of almost 3000 down to under a hundred.

This is going to do...absolutely nothing! The scammers will just find some other way to create their automated email garbage.

You kidding? Thanks to allowing these new email addresses, I have an entirely new category of auto-deletable spam. These won't "confuse" me because I'll never see them. Win/Win!

Go ahead, spammers, get cute. Just makes my life thaaat much easier.

Hasn't held true for 30+ years? Success rate of 90% and up? Where are you pulling these numbers from? Citation please.

Testicular cancer has a 95.3% survival rate.
Melanoma, 91.3%.
Thyroid, 97.8%.
Prostate, 98.9%.
Breast, only 89.2%.
Overall, cancer today has a 66.1% survival rate.

You'll also notice I very specifically said "and caught early enough"... While the SEER stats (above) include all diagnoses of that type of cancer, the rates drastically improve when caught early. I mentioned bladder cancer as a good example of that - despite having an overall survival rate of only 77.4%, According to the ACS, that goes up to 88% if caught at stage I and 98% if caught at stage 0.

the only thing your contact can buy you is priority treatment (getting put top on the stack) and possibly having an advocate with the hiring manager.

While technically true, that alone means the difference between at least having a shot at getting the job, or getting lost in the stack of 400 applicants.

Yes, HR always has and always will count as the single biggest obstacle to getting the right people in the right seats; but having an inside "champion" always has and always will count as the single best shot at getting the right people despite HR's best efforts.

Applications and confidentials are usually built by people who don't have a clue. That's the norm these days and you should know that by now. The non-sense I've seen in the last 15 years in this area is bizar beyond words, both in type and amount, and I'm sure every slashdotter here has an evening full of stories to contribute on that subject.

I personally wouldn't even fill out such an application. If I can't talk to the team beforehand to evaluate - for both sides - that an application would make sense, I don't even bother. And a short 2-liner E-Mail is enough to lead up to such a phonecall.

My 2 cents.

Are you sure of the legal basis of this? Or is it just logic?

Just logic, and yeah, I know, law != logic.

Interestingly, though, Washington (one of the 10(ish) two-party states) specifically addresses and allows the loophole I mention.

Just about every call I've ever made to a sufficiently-large company has started with the automated disclaimer that "This call may be recorded for quality assurance".

Well then, thank you. They just gave permission. This call may be recorded. Thanks, Comcast!

Most of the time chemo doesn't work, in which case I could see this being used instead.

That myth hasn't held true for 30+ years.

When used against appropriate cancers and caught early enough (which doesn't mean "before you have any reason to suspect you have a problem" anymore), chemo has a very high success rate, on the order of 90% and up. Bladder and testicular cancer, most skin cancers - considered almost perfectly curable. Most leukemias, either curable or sustainable.

The question you pose applies more out of desperation than practicality. Very few people, when told they have an untreatable cancer, will decide to just sit down and die. No, they ask the doctor to try anything, however nasty, on the off chance it will work.

We don't complain about antibiotics as a complete failure, despite the fact that they don't treat viruses. The same applies to cancer treatments: use the right drug at the right time.

COBOL was better than JavaScript.

Yeah, right. ...
Dude, give me a break, you're being silly.

Sure, JS it's a tad more ambiguous than PLs from back when we used punchcards, but, come on!
So, yeah, JS has lose typing. Newsflash: That is a *feature*. You have to know how to handle it though (hint: COBOL style isn't going to get you anywhere here).
So it would be tricking writing ERP, because JS has more rope with which you can hang yourself - so, yes, you do actually have to watch out what you are doing in different way nowadays. And yes, there are a lot of non-programmers out there today writing code - I'm trying to write an extension for Typo3, so tell me about it.

So JS uses Protoyping instead of Classes - that's a feature too - get with the programm.

I don't like the syntax of JS either, it's ancient by todays standards and I'd prefer Python. But I can test my JS on the nearest computer, because the runtime is everywhere.

Truth is, JS runs everywhere nowadays, and allthough you should expect callback hell when writing larger serverside apps, that's actually an encouragement to do things unix-style for non-trivial projects. That's why so many people use it. Even those that can't programm. ... Yeah, that's anoying, but repairing their shite earns us the bucks, so go figure.

I suggest you sit your ass down, take a deep breath and get yourself aquainted with some non-amature JS code. There's a nice Oreilly called "JavaScript - The Good Parts" to get you started nice and easy.

But don't forget to chase the kids of your law before.

My 2 cents.