You can't take a recent grad willing to work for beer and hot dogs and have them design the next system.

Hey, Dice! Are you listening to this?

have unique and difficult to find skills (which you should have by that age).

Firstly, if you can learn these magic skills then so can other people - so you won't be unique.

Secondly, it's very difficult to predict what will be hot in a few years time, and even if you could your workplace might not use it.

Similar statements could be made for desktops, where tray icon pop-ups for updates, email and chat notifications distract and interrupt workflows.

Or websites where the number of responses (and sometimes one or more category icons) obscures text you're trying to read.

*POTY*

I used to read and post a lot on Usenet back in the 80s and 90s when it was the biggest game in town. (To the point where I felt guilty about it, and needed my usenet 'fix' every day.) When Usenet degraded I felt an acute sense of loss. I got on slashdot, which is slightly reminiscent of old usenet, and I also was on IMDB for awhile, slightly reminiscent of another part of usenet. (That , the IMDB, is where I got tired of all the BS from fatuous, self-important posters). Nothing quite replaces Usenet back in the glory days though. (Or maybe it just seems that way because I was relatively young then.)

Slashdot's moderation system helps filter out a lot of noise, though I'll admit that here too, it seems harder to pan for those golden nuggets of insightful comments than it used to. Mainly, in my opinion, too much snarky schoolboy humor gets modded 'up' nowadays.

Anyway, getting back to the original topic, I keep hearing how 'nobody' watches broadcast TV anymore. I guess that makes me nobody. Digital TV has excellent video quality, and you see those programs on PBS like Nature and Nova in glorious detail. Even the quality of the commercial shows is , for the most part, better than it was 'in the old days', and for me the old days goes back to the 50s.

downtime to accomodate ads.

I swear I've never seen any of those.

is it possible that they coincide with beer replenishment intervals?

Millions of people pay more than $100 per month to watch all of that crap with commercials .

At the risk of giving them ideas, how much does it cost to not watch it at all?

It's no more an oxymoron than UX designers.

Umm, hang on ...

That's last year. It's been replaced by systemd.

JavaScript guru, you say? Impostor, say I!

Your percentages add up to 100.

Then perhaps it should be.

Do you think that if having one icon partially obscuring text is good then three is better?

(if you are the person who designed this site, just read the title. It'll probably take you all day anyway)

Well what you wrote before was

while there's oxygen aplenty bound up in the soil

which must be the worst typo ever.

Still, it's refreshing to see an astronomy story that isn't from StartsWithABang.

If he'd written it, the title would be "Why NASA should have made Voyager visit Jupiter" and the article would be a rambling string of ad hominems, baseless assumptions, and Monday morning quarterbacking.