I am not saying scientists are not aware other scientists are people (who are all imperfect one way or another), but they behave as if the scientific processes are more solid than they actually are. It is easy to hide behind science as being the true method of understanding the world, and scientific facts being better than everything else.

Failing to recognize that the scientific process is flawed, is similar to observing the universe through the Hubble telescope with a bad mirror, whilst either being unaware of or ignoring the fact that the mirror is not properly shaped. That is my problem with a lot of the science out there.

It is easy to see how it can happen. You come into science as a young idealistic student, then you suddenly get bogged down by political realities of competing for positions, getting publications and citations, getting funded, catering to eccentric professors, etc. And in the end the practicalities of the situations means that most make the trade-offs required to fit in - either that or leaving the scientific community to do something else. So those who remain are those who are willing to work the system.

In the areas where I find the scientific process to be flawed, I believe it is not self-correcting as you mention in your post - it is "correcting" yes, but it makes the correction in the direction of the flawed process.

It is easy to find examples of how research is biased. Research follows where the money is, and money is granted by institutions with agendas - either governments with all the politics which goes with that, or companies - even worse. Even history is subject to being twisted, as I was told by a friend who is a historian - the narrative of a country's history is selectively told so that it fits with whatever political gains can be made from that. If humans cannot get right even something as simple as recording and retelling what happened in the past, then that does not bode well for other scientific disciplines.

Let's be honest about it, every scientist is not Einstein and every scientist is not altruistic and truly pursuing the interests of mankind. There is enough mediocreness, politics and hidden agendas in the realm of science that being sceptical makes sense. Plus the public mostly get filtered access to scientists through "media", which looks increasingly less like media and more like a circus. And let's be scientific about it ... a lot of the "facts" we had 30 years ago have been replaced by new "facts". Most science seems to be about finding statistical correlations and then making confused and incorrect conclusions mixing cause and effect. A lot of the statements from scientists seems to be speculations outside their true field of expertise. And then there is "science" like some corners of cosmology which includes layers and layers of wild speculation which gets presented as things we "know".

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with science or scientists. I am just saying that scientists are people, with all the flaws that people have and all the problems with outputs of processes of people working together, and it would be unscientific to ignore that - as most scientists regularly do.

Newsflash: after analyzing recent world events, new astrological analysis of improved data on planetary bodies, measurement of comet gases from the Rosetta mission and observations of the direction of travel of a newly beheaded chicken as compared to the earth's magnetic field, scientists raise the Doomsdays Per year Index Scientifics (DPISs as defined by 1000 times the expected number of doomsdays per year) from 25 to 41. In related news, sales of canned food and generators are up 25%.

Here is a resource I came across a few years back, Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python. When I reviewed it back then it looked pretty good as a first starting point, but I don't have first hand experience. Might want to check it out.

I recently replaced my problem-ridden Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with a Motorola Moto G, and the switch has been pure joy despite lower spec and a low quality camera. But gone are all the Samsung customizatons, the extra apps that came with the phone which you could not be sure whether you could uninstall, and the annoying Samsung account. I would be more enthusiastic about their open source efforts if they built less cumbersome products, rather than taking stock Android and adding layers of unneeded and unwanted stuff - just so they can "own the customer" by bringing them into their own ecosystem.

With your lightning fast reflexes you are wasting your talent by making compromises about your gaming. And when I say lightning fast, I mean literally lightning fast, or at least within some small factor. Also, figure out whether this is really a PC noise problem, or a "I hate that he is always playing games" kind of problem. The first one is solved by bying different gear, the second one by talking to your wife.

Sounds better/funnier if you imagine it read to you by Scott Manley. Too bad batteries are not recharging, but I bet ESA still managed to unlock som new goodies in their tech tree with all the science they got.

Yet people die in parachuting accidents all the time, and there is no big fuss about it in the media. There are probably some brave guys trying out the new parachute designs for the first time as well. And no testing rocket designs it is not just about space tourism for the rich; this is just the first step towards whatever comes next. Plus I expect being a test pilot is something more than just a regular job; I would expect there is some adrenaline rush which comes with the uncertainty of the whole thing, which is part of the appeal. No risk means no excitement.

For me this news is about as interesting as if Tim Cook made a statement about being proud to be gray. As a fellow gray haired person, I wish someone would stand up publicly for the gray - we are just like everyone else, but too many people feel they have to hide their true colors from the public.

Being gay ought to be about as controversial as being gray.

It seems when it comes to mobile data, "unlimited" always means unlimited up to a point, when the service gets throttled unless you pay more. So "unlimited within the envelope of activity that we decide to allow". Even having no information about this particular offer, I would guess there is either a "reasonable use" clause hidden somewhere in terms of service, or somehow being able to throttle the service, e.g. by limiting upload bandwidth.

"Unlimited" seems to be one of those words that are used mainly for marketing, leading consumers to think it actually means there is no limit - but then redefining the meaning of unlimited in terms of service to something else. Just as misleading as e.g. offering "transfer speeds _up to_ 20 Mbps", "reliability _up to_ 100%", or being "guaranteed to be _possibly_ the best service available". At some point we should have laws against language which is intentionally misleading to consumers.

Congratulations to Adobe, as I would congratulate a fellow human being (since the supreme court ruling that corporations are people), for truly living the hardcore capitalist version of the American Dream. Doing whatever you can legally or illegally get away with to make more money, and not giving a [your favourite naughty word for excrement goes here] about anyone you walk over in the process.

It is the spyware part which bothers me the most. It is like having a plummer come to fix your toilet, you step out of the house for a few minutes, only to find when you come back that he is going through all your stuff - in order perhaps to understand you better as a person so that he can service you better in the future - or figure out if you are rich so he can charge you more. Or perhaps sell a list of your inventory to someone, for whatever purpose which is no longer the plummer's concern once he gets payment.

I should probably be upset about this whole Adobe thing, but after watching John Oliver's Last Week Tonight show from yesterday about how the police in the US can cease assets and bring cases against physical objects such as money or houses on a guilty until proven innocent basis, and proudly spend the money on whatever they want including machines for making frozen margueritas in the office - I just give up. How can you expect companies to do the right thing when the whole system is rotten to the core.

Compared to osx and linux distro updates, Windows (at least Win 7) is a true dinosaur. Imagine how many man-hours are wasted worldwide while waiting for Windows to update, with a reboot required pretty much every single time. Even if you don't consider the time spent applying a patch during shutdown, there is often the additional waiting during boot, and more often than not it seems Windows want an additional reboot during startup. Which sucks hard if you have default dual-boot into Linux, because you fire up the PC, choose Windows, go grab a coffee, and when you come back ... behold, there is the Linux login. Because Windows of course decided to do some additional rebooting.

Yes, osx some times goes offline for a while when applying a large system patch, but this happens only every few moons, whereas with Windows you know you are in for a system update ride if you haven't touched that particular install in a couple weeks.

If it's not part of the Win 10 sales pitch, then my 99% confidence answer is no. They are not going to invest in some feature that no customers will know about (because noone is talking about it).

Plus, as someone else pointed out, it may very well be part of the master plan, that system rot leads to users wanting to upgrade. And there definitely is some system rot going on - someone wrote in another post that this is no longer a problem since Win 7, but I have experienced this countless times with Win 7 over the years, with just standard installs without any fancy tinkering on my part.

It makes sense embedding into the identity itself the means to prove that identity. Linking a public key identity to an email address would be simple; you just put a self-signed certificate somewhere which claims "this email address belongs to me". There could be public, distributed lookup services for this.

To make things simpler, instead of using complex schemes for carrying private keys around, better just to use a deterministic key generation scheme which builds the identity from a passphrase. It is easy to use slight variations of this data to create alternate identities for different services and "ID spaces". There exist implementations of this concept, e.g. search Google for "decentral identities". There would be no need for password based login to services, because you would log in with the public key of your identity, and you would use the private key to prove your identity. Server side password theft is no longer possible. With such a scheme, you could possibly maintain only one single very complex password, and all identities are generated from that password, by adding e.g. service name. No need for any password manager or such.

If the key is compromised, then the identity is effectively lost. The identity would have to be revoked by distributing a self-signed revocation certificate, and the user would have to register a new identity to associate with service accounts and for contacts.

Or perhaps, an alternative ... Simplification (Software): the act of modifying software so that it offers an efficient, intuitive and "good enough" user experience for a broad range (and possibly various groups of) users, with minimum complexity in UI and design.

Simplification is not so much about removing features, as it is about transforming user experience into something leaner. Simplification does not have to be a bad thing, it is all about how you do it. Simplification is really hard; it has to do with how a piece of software is structured, from the ground up. E.g. stuff that is not encoded into the data model, you will never be able to do in the UI. If you have a data model that does not fit the problem, the UI will never be a good one. You cannot simplify an UI just by rearranging icons. Well, you can rearrange, but it does not necessarily get any simpler - you are only giving it a minimalistic appearance, which "fakes" simplicity.

I organize my kitchen on a Huffman-style principle. The stuff which needs to get accessed more often, is more accessible. Why should a UI be any different. You want the stuff you need more often to be readily available, thus minimizing the total number of user actions. That does not mean you cannot have layers of functionality, or possibly alternative UIs (click to enable/disable wizard menu mode).

"Power tech users" are doing themselves and communities a disservice by inisisting on cumbersome, archaic, complex UIs in order to be able to fully wield their power in the UI they know already. Why? Because it hurts general adoption, which hurts software usage, which makes it less attractive as a software ecosystem, which gives it a competitive disadvantage vis a vis other platforms. You want lots of users, so the platform can live on for years and years.

Don't misunderstand me here; I hate ribbons as much as the next guy, and after I recently had to try out Office365, that interface had me going absolutely bonkers, having to send off an angry user feedback in order to vent.

I consider myself a power user, but tech is not my day job, and I am getting old enough that I no longer wish to spend evenings sitting in a basement learning the ins and outs of every piece of program I come across. I spent years creating complex high tech infrastructure setups at home, only to change it all into something simpler because I cannot be bothered to maintain it anymore when it breaks. Life is too short, and even as a "power user", you may not want to have to be an expert on everything. These days, I will choose the program which just works without having to spend too much time figuring it out.