I'm in the same environment but with clusters. Glueing lots of things together in an interpreted environment is very useful but isn't everything because it usually comes with a speed cost, which while irrelevant in some situations it can consume hours per run in others. Some libraries/tools can take away a lot of the pain (eg. NumPy) but the more your interpreted stuff does the more it becomes clear that seemingly arbitrary blocking conditions are stopping it from doing anything useful for annoyingly long periods of time.
I hit that problem frequently with a dotnet developer who is always complaining about "the network" when his tiny and trivial application runs dog slow instead of having the instant response you'd expect with 1.2MB of data in a CSV. He stopped letting me look at his code after I ran it with the data on the same machine and it was still dog slow (user staring at a blank screen for ten seconds or so, just like with the "network" problem). In that case things have been glued together very badly.

Offtopic a bit maybe, but the big problem of the larger "word processors" is that they try to supply half of a full desktop publishing system as well and it's not the useful half. You can spam pictures all over a page but can't place them precisely - you have to fuck about with other settings and hope they wobble into place.
IMHO it's the feature creep where the word processors approach DTP without getting there that gives that 90% that is marginally useful.
Similarly with IDE's that try to approach LabView but never get there - mainly because somebody points out that a LabView GUI is almost limited to a write-only approach for small and well organised bits of code and an unreadable spaghetti explosion beyond a certain size and complexity.

GP needs to stop playing daddy and let the newbs grow by fixing the problems themselves.

That's when you find users that don't exist in the group files (due to typos) and then when that didn't work a "fix" of setting the permissions of entire systems wide open. Next step some script kiddie has owned the system.
Newbs are often such newbs that they do not know that they should be making their stupid early mistakes on development systems (like we all did) instead of fucking up production systems for everyone - that's one reason to give them a hand even if you are entirely selfish.

Steel cases are still steel cases and can still have sharp edges if poorly designed.

Give me a 10 year old Lian-Li case

That's one of the early examples of the well designed stuff I'm describing. It seemed that around 2000 every new machine demanded a blood sacrifice before it would work :)

Used to use it on Xenix (a LOT) for general text and used it to do a Solaris root password reset about ten years ago but I'd never voluntarily go back if vi is available.

It's because xkcd isn't original content. It just takes existing observations,

Just like political cartoons and a pile of three panel strips. It's what they do.

Gedit is so slow to start that it has been used as a strawman as to "why X is bad" instead of the more accurate "why is this new gnome stuff so much slower than the old gnome stuff?"

Why would an app refuse to run on a jailboken phone - unless it was made by Apple or your carrier specifically to try to incentivize you to stay on their leash.

Yes. That is what an order of magnitude means. But that is not what magnitude means - it has its own definition separate from that one particular usage: size. Try reading that in the context of what I wrote:

>Meanwhile, NASA tests a related apparatus and does in fact detect thrust, but of a -magnitude- size inconsistent with the theory upon which it is constructed.

I say nothing about orders of magnitude. I only refer to the size of the effect, and note that the size is inconsistent with the theory. The fact that the magnitude of the thrust is inconsistent with the predicted magnitude by three orders of magnitude is especially damning, but even if the actual magnitude was only 30% lower than predicted it would still indicate a likely problem with the theory. Legends are made by fixing smaller discrepancies than that with a completely new theory.

Just to reiterate

Not that not one of those made any reference to a power of ten - the closest is the usage in astronomy where it represents a power of 2.512

I came to say this as well - it is when the number of votes per office is small that your voice as a citizen can be heard loudest. And if the next level up in the hierarchy pays any attention to the municipal offices then, through those officials, an active citizen's voice can potentially be heard more easily on that stage as well.

I'm sure he has no concrete evidence, Diebold made sure that was impossible. But the UN typically starts making noise about voting fraud when other nations show discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies as large as have been starting to show up in US elections. And I'm sure the US gov moved to block UN observers in the last election because us poor sensitive citizens would have felt intimidated by them, right?

Masterfully crafted after being purchased by lobbyists for the companies. The financial return of lobbying is massive -- more than making cool products people love.

We find firms lobbying for this provision have a return in excess of $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying, or 22,000%.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

That said, I think the nature of the parties in this instance is clouding /.'s judgment. Let's say it was a secure email provider who stored all data offshore, but was a US company. Would /. in general really be so willing to side with the Feds? I doubt it, and I see a lot of potential problems that could hurt real people as a result of this decision surviving appeals.

It's perhaps an easy mistake to make if you're not well-versed in the terminology of the field, but you are describing order-of-magnitude, a term having nothing to do with magnitude itself, which (in this context) specifies the "length" or "absolute value" of a vector value such as displacement, velocity, force, etc.

For example speed is an always-positive scalar (single-number) value that specifies the magnitude of velocity, which is a vector (multi-number) value independently specifying the speed along each axis.

Given that hotel keying tends toward assorted mag-stripe flavors, which are certainly more obscure than RFID/NFC(mag stripe readers and writers aren't terribly expensive or in any way controlled; but nobody is pushing to build them in to random consumer electronics); but which have only whatever testing the vendor gave them and security-through-obscurity, I'm not seeing why the security risks would necessarily be 'obvious'.

Yes, connecting anything to the network raises the stakes; but I'd be shocked if the existing systems are exactly flawless, even ignoring the human element of social engineering the front desk staff or the practice of finding the cheapest maids available and issuing them full access for room cleaning...

This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.

Well, technically you are still using expendable fuel - it's just in the form of the hydrogen being fused in the core of the sun with the power being beamed away as omnidirectional EM radiation. That you're operating a power antenna rather than a on-site reactor, or that the available fuel supply is projected to last for billions of years are incidental to the physics.

Of course, for most practical purposes on a human timescale, operating within range of a nigh-infinite near-constant power broadcaster is indeed functionally very similar to not needing expendable fuel.