You're missing the point - writing them is the easy part. If the problem is suitable. It's just too easy to get into an unmaintainable mess.

<quote>A particularly nasty vim change is that</quote>
Indeed, i've been bitten by this a few times. Worse is: the redo will be seen as an edit, so all your undo's could be lost. I like finding an old piece of text by doing undo, yank, and redo, but the redo will break if you edit after undo of course. Perhaps vim is clever enough to store the whole tree of redo's/undo's - would be a great feature i guess - but I didn't look it up, just cursed vim that it ate my work, something that could have been avoided by doing the sensible thing: don't change such fundamental behaviour by default.

I liked reading your reasoning on vim - especially the "Hell, even using the arrow keys to move around is a needlessly inefficient waste of motion, since the arrow keys are usually far from any other useful key on the keyboard," as that's exactly what i was thinking. Then I used 'j' and 'k' to try to scroll up and down accidentally ;)

"Christians in Egypt are in a pretty bad situation"

That's not what I heard when I was on holiday there. The Christian minority holds a disproportionately large fraction of powerful positions.

<quote>And yes there are <a href="http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20101019/season-of-birth-may-affect-kids-allergies">real studies</a> on this.</p></quote>

Even if I trusted your average study; which I don't; this one would still be meaningless in the context of zodiac/horoscope discussion.

I don't think so; I have sigs turned off and still see it. And indeed offtopic. So it's spam, imho.

How was your interest in the scientific processes caused ;-) ?

Excuse me? Electromagnetic fields interfering with the brain? Never heard of this. Not of people sitting near MRI machines, sitting near powerful radio transmitters, etc. What are you talking about?

Ok, I admit Xerox and Hoover aren't dead, but they're not the top dogs in their field by a long shot, so in that sense they haven't "won."

I guess this discussion is doomed to fail given how vague fucking something up is.. Somethings tells me you'd like to see it mean 'not winning,' in which case your original point is unassailable ;-)

Nonsense. There is such a thing as 'first mover advantage,' but it doesn't mean you'll win if you don't fuck it up. There are countless counterexamples. Who uses a Xerox photocopier, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, the Altavista search engine, etc.?

Aha, I was surprised at NASA's use of "Now open to the public in a searchable, linkable format." - I thought, well, that's mighty brilliant of you to realise how good that is, and why didn't you do it in the first place ;-).

It would be wonderful to be able to hear the audio linked with the quote / range of time on spacelog.org. Actually that's what I hoped this was.

Congratulations on a great project.

True, but it seems to me that it's overused, as I often read 'price point' when the distinction isn't relevant. I always suspect the author of just wanting to sound fancier without knowing what the difference is.

What similarly drives me nuts is the use of 'mark,' as in "At the <bla> <dollar/second/mile> mark." Mostly just sentence stuffing; the opposite of good writing. Certainly the opposite of pleasant reading.

Indeed. When I read that I thought, "Speak for yourself buddy. I'm always irritated having to choose from 8 queues (or so) at supermarkets and then getting stuck in a slow one."

The bank isn't financing.

The dots in the graph there's actually a 6 months gap in the data, and the line is still drawn to suggest perfect linear growth; horrible visualisation.