if you don't like most the native apps, why the fuck do you use an apple product in the first place?

I could have put that a better way - The native apps work okay, but in many cases, better alternatives could exist. Apple looooves minimalism, and hard; some apps (like the frickin' task manager) should have far, far more detail and options available. Which I would add as a point #7, quit disallowing certain types of "system" tools.

#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).

What is mind-boggling is that anyone takes a virulently anti-science organization like the dishonestly-named "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" seriously as a source of news about anything.

All you have to do is look at the source, and dismiss the claims as hysteria and lies.

This is not to say there might not be a story here, or something worth discussing, but until it is sourced from something other than an outlet for anti-science, anti-technology political shills it is all noise and no signal.

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.

like feeding the poor and ensuring children have health coverage.

Yup, and such things belong in novels, not scientific papers: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

Asteroids are believed to be aggregations of relatively loosely bound matter. They have likely experienced some local melting due to collisions, but it is very unlikely that they ever were entirely melted into a single mass. As such, they are quite peculiar bodies, much less akin to a mountain than a pile of rubble, and they likely aren't even all that close to a pile of rubble because the individual components they are made from were never part of a larger, more coherent body.

If you think about asteroid formation, you have to start with dust that accretes into small pellets, which then collide to form semi-melted rock-like-things, which then clump into asteroids (all the while suffering more collisions which produce local melting but not whole-body melting of the kind planets experienced.) This is all a consequence of the collisional statistics and dynamics in the early solar system.

So the proposition "Asteroids are loosely bound" is pretty plausible, and ones with high spin are therefore interesting because require us to revisit that plausibility, and who wouldn't want to do that?

There's nothing at all wrong with that explanation. It is neither better nor worse than any other explanation that is less than a full solution to the Navier-Stokes equation, and it provides a naive and surprisingly practical guide to interacting with airfoils, which the vorticity explanation, for example, does not.

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, but now you have one, maybe two (hopefully super-smart) guys onsite with a deep systems knowledge, instead a fleet of screwdriver wielding guys with an A+ certification who are as likely as not to screw up your system. Once it's up and running you just have to keep that machine and it's backup going, and everyone can build on top of that in software, from anywhere in the world.

Did they retain any of the technology/staff, or did they just buy the toxic OCZ brand? With failure rates for the entire brand above 5%, and approaching seventeen (17%) percent I wouldn't use an OCZ branded SSD at any cost. Imagine debugging a system with a failing drive, and then the labor required to RMA, replace, replace again, and finally buy a quality drive. Screw that.

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.