'Minimalism' is driven by Marketing, so that you can hide the UI for a nice pretty glossy magazine ad or catchy TV advert.

'Minimalist' is not useful. It's photogenic. Period.

It's already in my fucking car. I went to go buy an aftermarket stereo "upgrade" and every goddamned one has all of the options and controls accessed by a menu navigated with one pushbutton knob. Not a single choice was available with the [enter] and [exit] command functions on separate controls from the [select/scroll] functions.

That's right. Want to change the time and date, press the knob, then spin the same knob until you get to SYSTEM (not SETUP or FUNCTIONS mind you), then press the button again to select TIME SET, then again to set the hour, spin it until the hour is set, then press it again, then spin it to set... and oh shit you hit a bump and pressed the knob accidentally so you're advancing the AM/PM now, exit all the way to the SYSTEM menu and start over...

It's the same way with things you need to access frequently: audio quality controls, station settings, etc. They're all buried two or three layers deep in a menu accessed by this press/twist control that is very easy to accidentally bump. And if you aren't watching what you're doing, a single bump will activate one of the options (RFDS?) that resets every fucking station preset to the factory defaults. (If you've seen someone on CA-101 suddenly scream at his car stereo and trying not to smash the faceplate in rage, that was me or another Pioneer customer.)

In addition to being susceptible to bumps (unheard of in a moving vehicle, right?) you can't dead reckon -- and you can't see what the next/previous selection is going to be. You have to constantly keep your eyes on the display not the road. And the fucking things are all so dim you need a second hand to shade the display from the sun, so now you're using both hands and both eyes to operate the goddamn radio.

It's the shittiest idea to come along in user interface design since the god forsaken Office 2007 toolbars. Worse.

I think the same pissant who worked on the Office UI team in the mid-2000's went to work for Pioneer shortly thereafter. He wasn't finished fucking with people's heads.

Now, apparently, he's at Mozilla.

Agreed. Does EVERY generation of commercial software designers* have to re-learn the hazards of conflating instructions with data?

A search term is data. A url is an address/instruction. FFS, don't try to combine the two!

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*Cause you know for damn sure these constant unnecessary UI updates aren't pushed by code developers. It's all marketing and people who feel like they constantly have to leave a visible mark in order to justify their existence.

How does one shop for something like that?

Last time I looked into changing providers (was stuck at 3Mbps DSL with constant disconnects) all I could find was cable and AT&T resellers and DSL Reports database listings nearly a decade old. Search results for business internet solutions seemed to just bring scammy results.

The only good thing to come out of it is that I believe somehow my provider got word that I was shopping around and within a week of asking an agent to put together some proposals for business speed internet options, my provider doubled my d/l speed to 6 Mbps... it was enough to make me put it off again. (This was about two years ago.)

I'd be happy with 50 or even 25 Mbps down and a block of fixed IPs - I really just want to cut the cable TV cord and host a minecraft server or two on a spare machine. I know I'm getting a piss-poor deal on DSL, but a significant reason I haven't been in a hurry to change is because my provider isn't cooperating with the Six Strikes B.S. and I have family members who are heavy torrent users. I was holding out to hear the Aereo SCOTUS decision before trying again, but after reading the comments here, I figure I must have been overlooking something when I shopped around last time.

Read moar Vernor Vinge, less Iain M. Banks.

(Not that The Culture novels aren't a fun read...)

So let's say you're an advanced interstellar civilization looking about for other worlds with life for trade and/or colonization. You have system spanning optics capable of resolving individual planetary systems and resolving the atmospheric spectra thereof. And you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets, including a couple of respectable gas giants and three rocky planets in the habitable zone. Two of those rocky planets clearly have stale atmospheres that have long ago achieved chemical steady state. But the third has an interesting mix of O2, CO2 and CH4, along with multiple other hydrocarbons, all apparently far from a stable state.

But alas, that planet has a HUGE moon... a well-known explanation for the spectra, and the cause of many, many failed planetary exploration missions.

The investment bureacrats HATE uncertainty. If you take a risk and it fails, it will cost your entire clan their wealth and status. You instead decide to commit your finite resources to explore planets with more exploitable natural resources than humongous gas giants and small rocky planets deep within the stellar gravity well.

Mod Parent up, I'm gonna post instead.

This explains why I must keep my phone on the left side of my desk to avoid tangling the handset cord. When it's on the right, I give the handset nearly a full twist to get it from the cradle to my left ear (to keep my right hand free for writing/mousing) -- and then another twist back to set it back down on the cradle. Since I'm grabbing with my right hand, the right hand twist is "counter to its initial chirality," which is left handed for most cords I've seen. (Left hand rule - wire coiling in the direction of the left fingers advances in the direction of the left thumb.) After only a few months, it's twisted into such a perverted state, it won't stretch without tangling, and I have to replace it.

Keeping the phone on the left seems to prevent this... the half turn picking up the phone is left-handed, concurrent with the chirality of the coil. Also it's closer to a half twist than a full twist.

Nice to finally have an answer to why this works the way it does.

From the bottom up, of course...

Next up: flinging poo at mach 25.

Well if you're gonna go there, then ultimately, pretty much everything is radiatively coupled to interstellar space.

This.

I switched to recording America's Funniest Videos on Sundays after the sloppy wet one they gave Amazon last year. They were on probation after the propaganda microphone they gave to the NSA last year, and the string of soggy panty pieces Lara Logan has been giving for their coverage of the US military abroad.

There's more truth in 60 seconds of AFV than there is in an entire episode of 60 Minutes.

I voted (3), but really, the answer depends on the purpose of the mission, and the overall purpose of the space program.

If the point is to colonize other worlds, open new frontiers, escape the confines of this single planet in order to ensure the survival of humans and other terrestrial species, then there's no point. If you can't establish a viable colony, then you're not ready yet. Send robots until you are. Build and expand in stages.

If the purpose is commercial, then the answer is similar but for a different reason: it has no ROI. If you can't return, then the investment required just to get humans to Mars alive is too great. Again, send a robot.

If the purpose is PR (which is one of NASA's priorities) then the answer is maybe -- as in yes, but only if the PR is positive and promotes the kind of optics the agency wants. This kind of mission is more of a stunt, a spectacle, than promoting science and exploration. Right now, NASA's PR mission is more of the latter than the former, but who knows -- perhaps NASA needs more of a spectacle. Look at how much attention the Mars rovers get, and it's because they're more than a little bit spectacular.

If the purpose is pure science and exploration, then yes. If there are volunteers, why not? Plenty of explorers throughout history have taken huge risks and paid for their lives to expand human knowledge, and we've benefited. If they're willing, then who are we to judge?

In my city, every signal-controlled intersection has sensors, even though most intersections between heavily trafficked streets appear to work on timers. The side streets with signals, however, use the sensor to interrupt cross traffic - usually after some combination of delay and count of waiting cars.

Unfortunately this combination appears more often than not to waste fuel and create more pollution. This is because the algorithm doesn't coordinate between intersections, or use cross-street sensors to detect a break in the cross traffic that will allow the one or two side street cars cross. Instead, Murphy's law reigns, and one or two cars needing to cross the main boulevard will be forced to wait at a red light while gaps in the cross traffic go by, and then several dozen cars will be forced to stop while the one or two cars use the intersection, and then several dozen cars must accelerate from a stop again.

My city is home to JPL and Cal Tech. We can send robots to Mars and spacecraft into interstellar space. But we can't coordinate sensors across the city to prevent me (and 30 others) from having to stop at a red light so that one car can pass, and then watch the intersection go unused for another 90 seconds... again and again and again as I cross town. Even more frequently, I see people sit at lights on side streets waiting thru gaps in traffic clearly long enough for crossing.

We have the necessary high bandwidth wireless communication, mesh networking technology, and computing power to change this. But it isn't happening.

I know that the only reason it's not already done is because it's not important to the people who manage this sort of thing, not important enough to spend the necessary money on R&D and implementation, anyway. But air quality and pollution are very important in Southern California. Isn't it important enough for something as solveable as this?

Surely someone in Pasadena or Cambridge or Santa Clara or Pasadena or Austin or Raleigh or Atlanta -- name your tech hub -- has an interest.

In my city, I've seen numerous instances where the countdown timer gets to zero and the flashing "Don't Walk" sign goes back to "Walk."

My initial response was "WTF? Is the designer just fucking with the peds' minds?"

Since then, I ignore them.

If I could do that, I'd never leave the house...