Fortunately, we have an atmosphere
Not for much longer, if we have anything to do with it!
It composition may become not very useful to us but its not going to escape the gravity well anytime soon.
There are really three uses of cursive.
One as a sibling post pointed out is so that quill pens don't blot, which with ball point pens is quite useless.
The second is cursive forces letter grouping for words. With cursive you break the line when the when you switch words. The result is if you don't space your words far enough apart you can still pick out the words with out resorting to solving the text like a one dimensional word search where you don't have a word list and the words could be spelt wrong.
The third is you can write faster with cursive because of reason two, if you start overlapping letters you just need to follow the lines and you can still read the words (albeit a bit slower going), where as if printing start to overlap it looks like someone scribbled on the page.
Related to three there are letters that I have seen from one of the world wars that had the writing on both sides and in two directions. Four pages of text on one sheet!
I attempted to use it. I found that it did not work very well. The UI was vary packed and difficult to use. I had to remove the chat window just to see the ships controls. All in all, it was so poorly done that I didn't use more than a few hours of the 14 day trial account.
What you are describing is how everyone describes the general UI for EvE itself. The UI is just as horrible on windows as it is on linux. The players only put up with that for basically two reasons: 1) the UI is very dense so that it can communicate all of the information that the game generates, and 2) EvE is the only game like it.
With open source the file format is always documented, at least in the code itself.
As great as that is, I believe it's a bad idea to use this as a selling point for OSS. I mean, the theory is great - everything is open, all the information you could ever want is documented in some way and if you happen to find a bug or whatever, you can go in and fix it yourself.
But what if you're not a programmer? What if you're just an average Joe who knows an average amount about computers? (I.e. not a lot short of turning it off and on and maybe running the odd Virus scan).
A car is open, if you're a Mechanic and something goes wrong with it, you can just open it up and replace or fix whatever is broken - but of the millions of car drivers out there, how many know how to do more than change the odd flat tire?
I think if you presented OSS in this way, the average person is more than likely going to get scared off by the prospect of having to be a programmer just to write a letter or whatever.
Sure your not a programmer, thats fine. The advantage of having the source code applies to all users of the software. For example, if it is important to you pay a programmer to fix it for you. This is no different than a support contract with a appropriator software vendor. The advantage of having the source code thought is that *any* programmer that can code in the language that the software is written in, can write the fix for you.
This is why a smart company that is having another company build them a core system will have the contractor put the code of the system is escrow in case the contractor gets hit by a bus, fails financially, etc. The other company then gets the code from escrow and hires another company to continue building the system.
To go back to your car example, okay so you are not a mechanic and so the open specifications of the car are useless to you personally (as in you can't fix it yourself), but as with my previous example, you can hire any mechanic that is qualified to work on your car and understands the specifications of the car can fix it for you.
Don't forget about opportunity costs. While some people are able to use what the specifications of the stuff they buy or the source code of their software that they use. It may cost them less to have someone else fix their problem for them, while they are doing their higher paying normal jobs.
The only thing interesting about this whole situation is the "news" coverage it is getting.
It might seem like some sort of big deal because so many people are involved, but this sort of thing is a core element for the higher level play of the game. Maybe if the game didn't focus on this aspect of the gameplay as one of its main selling points to get new players, this would be interesting. This is just a "water is wet" story.
I doubt it really has much to do with the number of people that it potentially affects. The real reason that this is news in the game is BoB is the enemy of enemies in the game. BoB is the evil empire in the game, especially since the t20 incident (dev spawned stuff for them but apparently they never used it). The players of EvE focus on what BoB, Goonswarm and Red Alliance (or whatever there allaince is called now) are doing because they are the Goliath (BoB) and David.
The real headline could be about how one alliance managed to use sites like Slashdot to wave the flag that their rival's outposts are now conquerable. Going so far as to get pseudo news sites with large followings to function as a communications tool and a rallying cry for a virtual world battle is actually pretty interesting.
This is an interesting idea, and I imagine we will see more of this type of stuff in the mainstream media because of the increasing number of people playing. EvE is especially poised for this because there are more and more players playing in one world
Oh, and the bigger ships are persistent and cannot be stored and do not disappear when you log out, and neither do these player space stations ("POS" in Eve lingo, player-owned structures.) So you'd better have some good defense, a big alliance with someone always around to sound the alarm, or be damned good at security-through-obscurity.
No ship is persistent, the super-capitals (titans and mother-ships) can not dock in stations, but when the pilot logs out the ship does do the warp and vanish (eventually, the align takes forever). But as with all ships the aggression timer does apply, so the if the ship was aggressed, the ship itself does not disappear for up to 15 minutes (this is how the first couple of titans were destroyed, pilot logged before the timer was up)..
That being said the POSes are persistent but they can also defend themselves in a limited fashion.
That may very well be true, after all some people, especially ofter a lot of training are still high level functional with blood alcohol levels that are almost deadly.
As for the interrouter technologies, not that I have every used them in a practical environment, it is entirely possible that you fixed the problem at hour 32 and didn't even realize it, because you were focused on something else.
The other thing to keep in mind, is something that psychology has noted regarding peoples multitasking ability. After so much practice (they figure 1000+ repetitions) a person can a task without consciously thinking about what they are doing. A good example of this is with driving, experienced drivers can reach the state where they are no longer consciously thinking about their driving and the vehicle is being controlled by the subconscious. In this state the driver does not remember how they got to where they are now.
So theoretically this effect applies to higher level skills as well (writing, protocols, configuring devices). Based on the way that you referred to Level3 have had to do the same/similar procedure many times, the situation you describe could have gone to the subconscious level. If you are able to do the same time doing something that you don't normally do, write a book or code a module for example, the result would not be as good.
No, the great-grandparents attitude is why all of the jobs are going off-shore or to the Mexicans. After working for that long, someone who hardly knows anything will be able to do a better more consistent job then he can at that point. The great-grandparent poster is hardly functional after his first 12-18 hours.
The grandparents attitude, in moderation, is what makes keeping the jobs on-shore worth it, because a normal worker can do a better job more efficiently if he is working normal hours.
(are there any consumer NAT routers still sold that are wired only?)
There are, but they are normally more expensive and quite often have fewer features software features. I know that both Linksys (by Cisco Systems, Inc.
They are normally buried under/behind the Ethernet cables and Ethernet switches.
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