Just to play devil's advocate, maybe the accident rate would have gone down even more of people weren't using cell phones.

Also, there are 3 things worth measuring: number of accidents, number of injuries, and number of deaths. Cell phone use might lead to a rise in #1 but improved vehicle safety features might lead to a decrease in #2 and #3; enough to cancel out the increase in #1.

Many factors could influence any or all of those numbers. Example: My 2012 car has like 14 airbags: steering wheel/dash, A-pillars, and even in the seat itself. (We can't use seat covers.) They won't do a damn thing to keep me out of an accident but they'll lower injury & death rates. (Unless they give me a false sense of safety and cause me to take more chances behind the wheel because hey, I've got airbags, I'll be fine. In which case they could raise the accident rate.)

And the numbers could, possibly, get REALLY weird. Imagine a feature that reduces the number of low-speed collisions, but is no help at all in high-speed collisions, where all the deaths are. So instead of 100 collisions and 50 deaths, you have 90 collisions but still 50 deaths -- fewer collisions overall, but the deaths-per-collisions rate would actually increase. So yeah, lots of things can happen with statistics.

I'm too lazy to look at the moment and see which number(s) they actually studied. The slashdot headline says "crashes" which means there's about a 50-50 chance that's what the study actually says. :-)

> I wonder what their Prime Directive is.

To get laid.

Fun fact: it won't work.

Both Surface customers have been notified and the situation is under control.

> the man's handwriting... takes considerable effort to decipher.

So it could require a team to decipher his work on Beowulf? A "cluster", one might say? :-)

Here's a list of all the new UI features I've enjoyed that have come along in browsers since I first used Netscape 2, 18 years ago:
- tabs
- URL autocomplete/history search
- built-in search box (NEXT TO the location box, thankyouverymuch)
- being able to resize a <textarea>
- download manager
... and I think that's about it.

Dear UX/UI "experts" everywhere: the next best thing to an "intuitive" UI is a FAMILIAR one. If you're working on an established product, whenever possible, simply LEAVE THINGS WHERE THE FUCK THEY ARE.

Ask yourself this: if a study was done and it found that 51% of the time that people use sinks, it was right-handed people wanting to turn on the hot water spigot, would that mean that we should start making sinks with the hot water tap on the right? NO! Because 1) we've spent a LONG ASS TIME with this convention, and 2) there would be a LONG ASS TRANSITION PERIOD where people would have to deal with BOTH systems, which would SUCK INFINITELY.

You know the old Abe Lincoln adage, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt?" Well, it's better to leave good things alone and have people thing you're not much of a designer, than to fix it until it breaks and remove all doubt. The best designers (and this goes for many other fields, including I.T. and stage crews) are the ones you don't know are there. Shit should JUST WORK. And then CONTINUE to work.

> *cough* Slashdot...

I invented new curse words for Beta. DM me for a list...
 
... when Slashdot implements DMs. :-)

> So, should everything just be labeled v1.0 eternally
> (or v2.0 for the people who never trust first releases)
> based on the psychological effects of a version number?

Yes. And the price should end in 99. :-)

> I've never seen a camera on a phone that takes
> anywhere close to to as good pictures as a decent
> point and shoot digital camera.

And I've never seen a DSLR that weighs 4 ounces and fits in my pocket.

> I really don't understand why smartphones
> are so popular.

Really?

> Microsoft has had some really good ideas since
> Gates left, like OneNote and the Tablet PC.

Gates predicted in 2001 that "the tablet PC will be the most popular form of PC sold in America" and Microsoft introduced their OS for tablets the same year. Tablets were released by Compaq and others at the time. Gates had stepped down as CEO a year earlier but he was still around (serving on the board and giving keynotes and whatnot -- still very much the public face of MS) and it's not like MS made the tablet overnight once he wasn't CEO. The Tablet PC of the early 2000's was very much from Gates.

> The fact that MS has so many innovative products that
> do not sell well speaks to some kind of serious problem
> within the upper levels of their corporate campus.

MS Office makes tons of money. The Office guys wouldn't let the Tablet guys do anything really innovative or unusual with their baby. MS Office isn't anything special when you add a stylus but obviously it could have been. It just had some really basic pen features tacked on. Having given away the market, they're now struggling to catch up.

"But why does a billionaire even need to take out life insurance when he or she has so many other assets. The most likely answer to this question is taxes and estate planning. Upon death, an estate would be liable..."

Thanks a lot for stifling the need for lots of uninformed commentary, guys. I was looking forward to lots of basement-dwelling idiots spouting off about how stupid this billionaire must be. Now I have to find somewhere else to spend my morning.

To the reddit! /me gone

But my I.T. department sucks. Seriously. I've worked with them. A lot. For 15 years. 3 quick examples of current issues:
- the time on a production server is 1 hour 50 minutes off from actual time.
- things that work on the dev server don't work on the prod. And not, not because of weird interactions between different apps in different states of development -- I mean, little standalone apps that depend on nothing but the server's config.
- config on prod server mysteriously changes itself. we didn't request it, I.T. doesn't know how it happened. For example, PHP is set to allow 100 MB uploads. Works fine for months. Then, one day, it goes back to the default of 2 MB. They said they didn't make the change. AND THEY HAD TO ASK ME HOW TO CHANGE IT BACK. Which I knew. But I wasn't allowed access to that server. They wouldn't let me touch it. I had to tell them how to fix it. I am literally more qualified than they are to maintain this server but I'm not allowed to. So seriously -- fuck them.

What you are saying is correct -- IF you have a good I.T. department. Not everyone does. And it's not just "waaah, I.T. makes things hard and they suck" -- my I.T. department seriously, legitimately, objectively, provably SUCKS.

Open! Right?

It works both ways -- everyone else believing that lie is the only way I ever get anything done!
 
"Oh, I'm not allowed to build this trivial-but-handy data-driven web app in a day? I have to write a spec so I.T. can spend 6 months totally overbuilding it (and implementing it badly and no one will be happy with the result)? OK then... Well, it's very code-driven... I can actually make a working prototype and take screenshots faster than I could build a wireframe. Let me just whip up a quick prototype and let a couple people use it so we can make sure that my idea matches what they want, and then if they like it, I'll write up something that you can give to I.T."
 
... Years later, mine is still in use. And working just fine, thankyouverymuch, with nary a hiccup. And yet I still have to keep doing this trick, even after I point out my past successes. Luckily, they keep falling for it. I feel like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.

"The Beast is a massive vehicle, which means there would be plenty of room in the structure to have a long battery pack a la Model S... Obviously the battery pack would need to have extra protection so it wouldn't have any issues with road debris, but that's a minor issue."

lolol. Have you ever watched a show about the limo? There's TONS (literally) of extra stuff in there. It is NOT just a long car with thick windows.

Now my "disable advertising" checkbox doesn't work. :-(