There are good reasons for the two layouts. They're lost in the mist of time, but they are good reasons.

Calculators derive their layout from a strictly mathematical perspective, and is probably the most sensible layout to work with if you want to practice your muscle memory.

The phone layout is that way due to the mapping of letters to the digits, which was defined back in the days of rotary dial phones. Putting the 'ABC' key at the top of the keypad made it easier to read. In addition, the in old pulse-dial system, the zero digit actually represented ten, not zero, and on rotary dials it was placed at the end after nine. That also helped to make the chosen key layout for phones seem more logical at the time, both for the phone manufacturers and for users who were used to rotary dials.

One thing you certainly aren't going to achieve is to get calculator or phone manufacturers to change their layouts. Both layouts are highly ingrained in the collective consciousness of their users, and no-one is going to buy a product which deviates from the norm. You may as well try to persuade everyone to go and buy a Dvorak keyboard.

So the short answer to your plea is: no. It ain't gonna happen.

But I can see hope for you: Smart phones.

While you aren't going to get calculators to change, smart phones have touch screen interfaces. I don't see any reason at all why there couldn't be an app that displays the phone keypad in calculator-like style. It may be the opposite of what you're asking for, but it would achieve the consistency that you're looking for between the two.

The only problem then is if you ever have to use someone else's phone to make a call....

The suggestion as it's been put in the main article is pointless.

The fact is we already have UTC (or GMT for those of us who still insist the British invented it so we ought to get to keep it), and it's perfectly easy for anyone in any country to use it. If you want to communicate with someone in another time zone, you are perfectly free to use UTC as a common reference point when deciding what time to meet.

But while it does indeed work very well as a common reference point, it doesn't solve any of the practical issues of communicating between time zones. If I want to talk to someone in another country, we have to arrange it at a time when we're both going to be at the office -- or at the very least, when we're both going to be awake.

The simple fact is that physics dictates that different parts of the world have different daylight hours, and biology dictates that people prefer to be awake during the daylight hours. There is nothing you can do that will change this; no amount of meddling with the time system will make it any easier to talk to someone on the other side of the world.

Regarding the suggested adjustment for DST simply meaning that everyone adjusts their schedule by an hour while the clocks stay the same.... I can't even begin to describe how wonderfully naive this is. If it were really that simple, we wouldn't have invented DST in the first place.

So let me get this straight.... the objection to having roundabouts is that being nice to other people is un-American???

Great. That really makes me want to go out and meet more Americans.

Wow. This is coming from the land that makes saying "Have a nice day" into a national slogan.

Right. So you can understand that a business would be cautious of going IE7 -> IE8, but you don't get it when they take the same approach with FF4 - > FF5.

The whole point of major version numbers is that they're ... uh... major versions. Big things have changed. By bumping the version number, Mozilla is telling the world "hey, this is a big thing we've done here, with lots of changes!"

And somehow you expect businesses to just shrug their shoulders and run the upgrade? Riiiight.

Firefox (and Chrome for that matter) are either being disingenuous with their version numbering, or else they are being arrogant with dropping support for older versions too soon.

Personally, I say they're being both. I'm getting fed up with this now. A few short months ago, I was dead excited about the future of the web, where we might finally have some good standards compliant browsers and sufficient people using them that we could write good standards compliant sites. But now I'm starting to get pretty jaded about the whole thing: it's the browser wars all over again: this is how it started the first time, and I for one really don't want to go through that again.

This article deals with what happens when GPS is disrupted due to a localised jammer. Sounds like some serious chaos.

So... what happens when we have a major solar flare that disables a few GPS satellites entirely? Can we expect entire nations to suddenly lose their ATM networks, shipping navigation and air traffic control?

Oh goody. I can't wait for the solar cycle to get going again. And there was me thinking the only thing we had to look forward to were better aurora. :-/

You say: "very few people should be allowed to view credit card numbers".

In fact, for them to be PCI compliant (which I would assume a company the size of Vodaphone must be), no-one should be able to access customer credit card numbers. Its shockingly bad practice if they're even on their database, let alone widely accessible.

I think taking the software down is a very boding/bodeable/bodeful/whatever thing to do.

I completely agree. The guy who posted the original story was just wrong to say it "doesn't bode well".

By saying that, he was basically condemning Microsoft's actions before they'd even done then. I dislike MS as much as the next guy here, but - please! - what have they done in this case to warrant not boding well? As soon as they found out there was a potential problem, they pulled the software so they could investigate. Absolutely the right action.

What would you have preferred them to do? The only two other options were (a) ignore the problem, and (b) release the code. Ignoring the problem was clearly never going to happen -- even MS isn't that arrogant. And while I'm sure we'd have loved them to have just released the code, they would certainly need to check it first, because there's a very high probability that it also contains code which is licensed in a way that can't be released (especially since this is a DVD tool). So pulling it while they investigate is the right thing to do.

The most likely scenario I would suggest is that MS will re-launch the tool in a few months with the GPL parts replaced so they don't have to release any code. Not what the masses of slashdot would want, but likely to be the most sensible and pragmatic way for MS to deal with it.

how would one go about contributing to such a project?

The exact details depend on the project, but in general:

(1) Visit the project's website.
(2) Download the source code. There should be links on the site for this.
(3) Study the code, start tinkering with it, learn how it works.
(4) Possibly subscribe to the developer's mailing list. Find out what the hot topics are for the project.
(5) Also, study the issue tracker to find out what bugs need fixing.
(6) When you feel comfortable with the workings of the code, start thinking about how you can improve it. Think small to start with. See if you can fix a few bugs.
(7) Submit your fixes using the instructions on the site. This will usually be via a code repository system like SVN.
(8) Hopefully your fixes will be accepted by the project leadership. If not, don't panic -- maybe you missed something? Maybe you didn't stick to their coding style? Whatever, talk it through with them, find out the problem, and try again. (and if you do get accepted first time, don't let it go to your head!)
(9) Congratulations you have now contributed to an OSS project.

You've hit the nail on the head with the question about relevant experience -- it's the first thing people look for when hiring; it's way more important than qualifications.

I see two ways to get in:

(a) Contribute to some OSS projects that are relevant to the sort of coding you want to get into. Bear in mind that it will take you some time to build up enough experience doing this for it to really count for anything.

(b) Look for coding jobs in the industry you were previously in -- ie a cross-over job. For example, if you were previously a sales person for widgets, and you know loads about the various types of widgets and how they work, etc, you might find that a widget manufacturer or sales company might be willing to hire you as a coder based on your expertise in widgets rather than in coding. You'll still need to know how to write code of course, but I'm guessing you know enough already to be able to get through an interview once you've managed to get one.

This whole market thingy seems to work.

You say that, but it took five years of market stagnation after MS cornered the market for anyone else to rise to challenge them.

So yes, the competition is good, and it does seem to have stung MS back into life developing new code, but it's hardly a ringing endorsement of the free market.

It's one thing to block your callerID from being presented to the end user - in that case, the intermediary telcos will still be able to see the callerID; they pass it between themselves, but just don't pass it to the final end user. That's how this system works -- because they're a telco, they get to see the callerID, but unlike other telcos, they've decided to pass the information on regardless.

But what about spoofed callerIDs? They're the ones that I feel would be genuinely useful to unmask. But sadly, this system won't work in these cases. If the callerID is tampered with at source, that tampered value is what gets passed between the telcos, so there's nothing useful that can be unmasked.