essentially blaming them after she behaved rudely to her family and friends

Apparently one person's "rude" is another person's common sense. (Invocation of "blame" is another red flag that common sense has left the building.) 100% of the rudeness here derives from unbalanced technology, because Facebook wants it that way.

Entire countries filter the internet. Yet as an individual, it's not practical for me to contract a public identity management agency which allows me to enact controls over what personal information I'm willing to see splattered into the public space on malign service hosts.

Nothing should go onto your social media pages that doesn't first go through your own appointed screening filter, if you choose to have one.

Had such an option been available, her personally appointed screening filter would have simply bouncing back a message to her uncle to the effect that "Janet doesn't wish to see her reproductive status conveyed on cloud services".

It's not rude. It's common sense.

Unfortunately, this entire line of argument sets a precedent for non-productive lines of argument. It usually turns out that the person advancing such an argument is rarely concerned with precedent after all.

The last standards-problem I ran into was that you can't template a class over a constant floating point value, only integer/boolean values

News update from planet math. You can template a class over an integer pair which provides a dense set over the Reals known as the Rationals.

If one couldn't do this, the argument at the standardization round table would have been a lot different.

Everyone knows 40% of C++. Unfortunately, it's never the same 40%.

What's the problem with that? It's been plenty good enough for religion for thousands of years.

Everyone knows 40% of the will of god. Unfortunately, it's never the same 40%, so far as we can tell.

I freely admit that the coefficient of groupthink in C++ is on the low end as modern programming languages go. That's what has always appealed to me about C++: that it was a larger church.

The value of having a larger church fluctuates in interesting ways, roughly akin to the Titanic. To the passengers on the upper decks, the rafts provided seemed more than adequate. A programming language takes a heavy toll in uncluttered vistas when it elects to support even the guy shovelling coal far, far below the fancy paint.

Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.

Yes, and wherever that experience is lacking because the progress and rate of change are related by a differential equation, what type of engineer manufactures the expanding putty? The Roman engineer or the von Neumann engineer?

The reason an older programmer is slower than a younger one is because of the number of answers he has to the question "what could possibly go wrong?".

Young engineers heap success. Old engineers bleed failure.

After I buggered with the classic restorer and other bits, it's not killing me.

The underlying problem seems to be that the UX people pretend to represent a consensus, but we seem to constantly get a consensus of platforms, rather than a consensus of users.

This is far from a great interview, but the basic idea deserves some thought: Searls on the Intention Economy

The only way out of this mess is to create a marketplace of pull. When we have the capacity to advertise for what we really want in how our UX behaves, only then it will be fully revealed that there's no master ring to bind them all.

Claudia Caswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Addison DeWitt: Because that's what they are

So then, why do all desktop UX updates since the adhesive iPad resemble psoriatic haemorrhoids?

Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Anyone ...

your Pebble watch will be ridiculously obsolete in less than 5 years

You doing it wrong. My Pebble watch is a substrate to run my custom watch face, which I need because my body runs a bespoke circadian rhythm. The equity here lies in the software, not in the physical object shackled to my wrist. Like every technology we've barely figured out how to build at all, it will shed some baby teeth before the permanent molars grow in.

If only the timer on my kitchen stove allowed me to reprogram it to mesh with my cooking practice. Once it goes off, it figures it needs to shriek at me once a minute until kingdom come, or thirty minutes, whichever comes first. I set it when I'm preheating the oven, then a call comes in and I'm tied to my desk, and it's off in the kitchen having a minute by minute hissy fit. Other times I have it set so that it's not more than two minutes ahead of the smoke detector. But the dumb thing doesn't know the difference, because in fine minimalist design tradition, one size fits all.

I suppose could use the timer on my wrist, but then anyone else who wanders into the kitchen is operating blind. A public timer works better in a shared kitchen. The real problem here is that the embedded stove timer is the wrong implementation of the right solution.

If the damn thing would shriek at first activation, then once every five minutes, and on the minutes != 0 mod 5 it would gently warble, we'd have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, it's a fixed-function non-reprogrammable device, which will probably outlive my tenancy in this abode.

Physical permanence is overrated.

If you just s/Android/Google+/g the tone of that whole piece goes from being a hagiography to a funeral dirge.

The air pressure sets a limit on the height of both suction pumps and siphons.

For such a pedantic dialogue as this thread, I was hoping to see someone write "the air pressure and internal fluid tension set a limit ..." before I reached my pettifogger deFUDer saturation point, but it was not to be.

Yea, this inverter isn't very bright and violates the first rule of splitting with an axe (after wearing steal toed boots), don't let go of the axe handle during your swing.

No, the first rule of using an axe is to either use an axe with a long handle, or a hatchet, but never anything in between.

I'm not much worried about my toes wielding a long-handled axe, but I am worried about more distal objects (and people) in the plane of the swinging motion. Medium-handled axes are for crazy people who never much liked walking around in the first place, or who get an unbearable itch to perform a District 9 pedicure.

You'll kick yourself later if you hit a bug that was revealed by a warning which was ignored.

Yes, it's called highsight bias, and there's an entire subfield of psychology devoted to its study, and a related subfield of behavioural economics which applies cost/benefit analysis to the human self-kick behavioural reflex arc.

There are educated self-kicks and there are also blind mice self-kicks.

If we're randomly sticking pins into phrenological mutuality, how about this one? (my personal favourite):

Catholic sex abuse cases:

In 1994, allegations of sexual abuse on 47 young seminarians surfaced in Argentina.

In 1995, Cardinal Hans Hermann Gro(Slashdot alpha sucks)r resigned from his post as Archbishop of Vienna, Austria over allegations of sexual abuse, although he remained a Cardinal. Since 1995, over one hundred priests from various parts of Australia were convicted of sexual abuse.

From 2001-2010 the Holy See, the central governing body of the Catholic Church, has "considered sex abuse allegations concerning about 3,000 priests dating back up to 50 years" according to the Vatican's Promoter of Justice.

Pederastic institutions tend not to poll well. The only surprise is that it took this long.

Coincidence? I think not.

The keyword here is nearly, which means it can be broken.

OMG, I can't believe this tripe snipe got voted up to 5. This kind of thinking would set mathematics back by nearly 200 years.

Infinite doesn't mean what you think it means (continuum hypothesis undecidable in ZFC).

Continuous doesn't mean what you think it means (just for appetizers, the Weierstrass function, Cantor function).

If you're an EE who has never taken a course in measure theory, a unit impulse is not what you think it is (Dirac delta function); "Formally, the Lebesgue integral provides the necessary analytic device.")

Is the Dirac delta function nearly a function? I guess it must be, because it certainly isn't a function by any formal definition that doesn't look like Spock chess compared to naive algebra (subsuming, for starters, all that came before circa 1850), yet it takes you to where you want to go, regardless, so long as the first step on unfolding your algebraic briar patch is an implicit integration.

Sometimes "nearly" is employed to mean "without first having to enter into abstruse thickets that probably wouldn't change a damn thing anyway, but I don't wish to speak as carelessly as calling the Dirac delta function an actual function because those daft EEs might just start to believe in the fiction".

This is a naive estimate—typical of wide-eyed wanderlust—looking at one tiny piece of the problem.

I'd say a population of about a million is necessary to maintain working contact with human technological culture, and pass this working contact on to the next generation. There's a bit of a gap between a Wikipedia article on metallurgy and a guy who has practised the profession for several decades.

In anthropology, often when a smaller population contracts major technologies are lost, not because they are forgotten, but because there isn't enough bread of expertise to sustain the technological cycle.

Now a days you don't have to worry about [small sky falling], but you do have to worry about [large sky falling].

Once upon a time, real engineers solved the solvable problems in whatever order solid solutions presented themselves, so that presently unsolvable problems evolved into greater relief.

I thought it was a good system. Good engineering, RIP.