I don't get this line of reasoning. People say, the original sucked. Ergo, I will excuse the new movie for sucking and say the new movie was good. This happens with all Sci-Fi remakes now. Like Transformers- well the TV show was awful, so I really enjoyed the new movie which was also awful. Why does that make sense? Crap is crap. If you didn't like TRON, and you found the new movie to commit all the same errors, you don't like the new movie. End of line.

Everyone does realize that backspace and delete actually have different functions, right? This keeps getting passed over. Backspace erases before the cursor, delete erases after. Forget key combos, both keys have very important functions as they stand. If you want to delete text, you only have to land somewhere in the block instead of clicking at one pre-specified end. Click the middle, backspace a few times, delete the rest, boom. Very convenient. My wife never learned what the Shift key was for until well after she'd learned to type in school. She'd needed a cap, one key said cap on it, logically she pressed the caps key and went from there. To this day, she still thinks of Shift as a punctuation key and Caps Lock as the caps key. She types 60+wpm like that, and it's hard to argue against. If I had learned to type that way, coding would probably be easier. My shift fingers could use some variety.

100% correct. Back in the day, I bought a lot more music, and that was at the height of my music downloading. I tried albums before I bought, I listened to music constantly, and it spurred my buying. (And music piracy does NOT deprive anyone of their own product). Now that I can't download music as freely, I don't purchase as much music either. A large part of that is screw you RIAA, but the larger part is that I just don't participate as much in music when I'm not downloading. Although, all the money I used to spend on albums, I now spend exclusively at the merch tables of my favorite small-label indy-ish bands (GWAR, KMFDM). I'll drop a whole year's music budget on GWAR T-shirts. I want to spend on music, I'm just not spending a damn penny on RIAA if I can possibly help it. They publish this as "piracy has caused us to lose sales", I publish it as "screw you RIAA I'm taking my business elsewhere".

Reading it on other websites does make it more clear, but TFA is worthless. Slashdot's longstanding reputation for always checking its sources with the utmost journalistic yeah I can't keep a straight face any more.

Data: There's a planet orbiting a metal-poor star. Conclusion: IT COMES FROM OUTSIDE OUR GALAXY. ....wait what?

How much different would these comments look if the article were about Apple and (new iDevice)? I'm guessing the f-bomb would be dropped much less frequently.

Er, this IS the baseline for this census, you can see where I'm going.

There have been other attempts to measure certain populations like plankton, so this is not the baseline for this census, but a confirmation when added to other studies that build a picture of a decline over time.

A census is an attempt to measure the populace. You can measure as much as you can, then guess at the rest, which is what every population census tries to do. (We measured X immigrants, and we know that's not all of them, but with reasonable certaintly we can assume there are between W and Y immigrants).

I stopped using OOo. It's slow, I constantly encounter compatiblity issues with simple documents moving back to Office and so on. I used to mention OpenOffice to people and they'd say wow, free Office? Now I mention OpenOffice to people and they say yeah, my dad uses it and I'd rather have MSOffice. Even the OpenOffice website is very unappealing. If you click "I want to learn more", your only options for user types are Business and Government and so on. What about "90% of our userbase that just wants a word processor that doesn't cost $100"? And the whole page is BOLDED walls OF TEXT. That's REALLY pretty horrible DESIGN. Ugh. Get it together, people.

Batten the hatches, we're running negative karma! Bloat is creeping into all development, and it makes me mad. MS scarily enough seem to be the only developer fighting it (or, not getting exponentially worse at it, just creeping up in linear fashion). Most new Linux OSs are more bloated than Vista- even Slackware is falling in line just tossing together all the latest versions of stuff and coming across as a totally generic package in the process. The leanest, meanest, while still being full-featured and stable OS is... Windows 7. OpenOffice is so bloated that I just type stuff in WordPad or Notepad and format it at work. Firefox takes so long to scan just a handful of plugins that I don't load it at all unless I have to run a specific plugin, so I use Chrome. Now Chrome's going to start throwing in useless features because they're the hot new stuff, while basic features lag behind. Thanks, PC dev community, you're slowly convincing me that Microsoft and Closed Source are the way of the future.

Yes, all these Android flavors spoil the platform, but not in the way most people are pointing to. Personally, I think the problem is that stock droid sucks. Stock droid sucks especially hard considering I can only get Droid X (I accept no substitute) bundled with a ton of Verizon bloatware that keeps running no matter how often I shut it down and I'm sure it's broadcasting my location information and lots of stuff. And the default launcher is slow, fairly ugly, and not entirely stable. LauncherPro is everything the stock launcher should be, but it bugs me constantly with pop-ups about paid features. If stock droid would learn more from the droid community, the droid brand would be faring better. Spending $200 on a phone just to hear "everything on your phone sucks- download these dozen programs to patch it up"... sucks.

I know it won't stem the tide, but this is good research. I'm sure there are a million other algorithms in the world that can benefit from this. Shortcuts they had to invent to make sure they were using minimal processing time, full understanding of how much money and time it really took to get this process done to make other projects more practical, etc etc. This sort of thinking, even if silly on its own, has a broad range of applications.

I wonder how many Apple users are desperately trying to find an excuse for Jobs' decisions when including flash on a mobile device really isn't that big of a deal, and as with the article, you can load the flash in a stopped state so it doesn't affect performance if you don't want it.