Unfortunately, you're right. This new TLD is an ICANN scheme to bring in more money from their existing customers; to be more precise, they just decided that ICM Registry should get 10% of the porn market investment in domain names.

But... there are no ads on that page. It must be a fake!

Maybe you should focus more on an outside-in architecture. You start with what the user wants and end doing what you need to achieve that. Otherwise, you might start with what you think the user wants and end up with an interface for controlling that, instead of an interface dedicated to the needs of the end-user. Having a well designed back-end is very important, but not as important as a well designed front-end, because the user will care that something isn't work properly, but he will care about it a lot less than he will care about the fact that the option isn't even there! You just teach the user that bugs will always be fixed and he'll be happy to know that the next iteration will include the option he wants. If he doesn't even see the option on the screen, he just can't imagine it and he will think that you don't care about his needs. Users need slick front-ends and they don't give a shit about OOP, layering and all the other "details" involved in the process of programming quality applications. Maybe the company which wanted to pay for that project knew this and they knew that there would be time and money to re-factor the back-end as soon as the users saw a shiny interface and started paying for what they got.

In other words: Computer programming is very difficult, but that (unfortunately) doesn't work as an excuse for not packaging your product properly. Packaging is the only indicator that the user has to judge if your product is well done or not, because regular people just don't give a shit about any kind of abstract notion such as "performance."

The only performance the user cares about is how much faster he will be able to do his work using your product.

So what if they get lower test scores? Have you ever stopped to think that maybe your tests suck? You know, maybe they've adapted to new ways of thinking and you're still following the old ways. Maybe their ways are better, maybe not, but as long as we consider that "test scores" tell how good you are at doing something in life, we have no chance of improving our way of thinking. Maybe they are smarter than everyone else and the tests were designed for stupid people. That's what happened in my country: the tests were so fucking dumb that you just had to learn stuff instead of learning to figure that stuff out on your own. The quantity of information flowing through our world has increased drastically since the appearance of the Internet and it is a very convenient way to find information. Why the fuck would anyone bother to learn whole novels word by word (including punctuation) is beyond me. It took my country decades to realize that making people learn whole books word by word was a stupid idea, when they realized that a person could just not learn enough books they needed in a lifetime. I suspect something similar is happening here: those kids have gotten lazy (not that it's always a bad thing) and they're using their computers to research stuff and they just present other people's ideas. The old tests don't fit with this way of working/thinking and I personally consider that in this case the tests suck. Why learn all the resources when you just have to learn how to find them?

I am currently renovating my whole house (five rooms, two bathrooms, one kitchen and other stuff). I had no idea how to do this when I started and I wasn't afraid. Thanks to YouTube, I'm moving even faster than I expected and thanks to forums and reviews I've learned what the best products are in the price range I am looking for. Things come out a lot better than I initially hoped and I had no clue about renovating. Thank you technology and fuck you, technology teacher in middle school that taught me how to bake cookies - yes, I am a man and the teachers suddenly decided that women should learn how to cut wood with a saw (they learned that for weeks) and men should learn how to bake a single kind of cookies (we did that for weeks).

Darwin 1 - God 0

You can just click on "Parent" and you will see the parent. That's also a hint that the comment has a parent, so if the parent is low-scored you don't see it by default, but you can choose to do so if you want.

You won't believe how dumb people are on IRC! Their dictionary is rather limited, which made tuning the question generator quite simple.

Why funny? Sounds cool to me. Now it would be a great time to invest in anti-virus software.

I did something similar for a friend, helping him pick up women on IRC. The bot learned his usual questions and if they answered about 10 questions, it meant they were interested in him and the bot would forward the conversation to him and he continued it. Another time, I wrote an IRC bot for myself; it would act as a man-in-the-middle to pick up women by getting female nicknames and then forwarding the messages it got to other female-like nicknames it detected. If the conversation went long enough, it forwarded everything to me and I would pick up the chat from there.

Only 7 million people on the US afford to spend over $300/month on console games?

I'm sorry the mods missed your comment, because I think it is very interesting. Words like "please" and "thanks" will probably give you links to sites with content generated by polite users.

Google should implement this policy. You should have to add "please" at the end of all your search queries.

Wow... The headline is more informative than the summary. And it's not even misleading (only the actual story is)! *thumbs up @ slashdot*

404

Wrong! Ask them what they want to learn to do with the computer. Or ask them what they do most and give them an open-source software solution, where they can easily learn by improving existing code.