Exactly. All of these points are completely subjective and some even lead me to believe the author is stuck mentally in the dumbphone era. I mean 2. wtf? This is something teens did in the early 2000's, texting with thumbs and even most of them did it with two thumbs. It'd probably need a _bigger_ screen to even be able to do this as my thumbs are large and I'd probably hit more than key most of the time.

As of 1), I have an actual lock for my unlocking, aka a pattern as I'd really really really hate to lose my phone AND have all my personal information, accounts etc totally unprotected. I'd really don't understand why this doesn't worry more people.

And 3 is a placement issue more than anything else, as parent already pointed out.

"An owl signifies intelligence in most of Europe, evil in parts of latin America, and stupidity in much of Asia, yet it used to be a very common icon for help screens."

I'd say intelligence, evil and stupidity nicely sum up the possible qualities of a help function.

"*I'd argue it's in its longer-term self interest to pay attention to the interests of its employees, and probably its home-community. But to the 'public in general'? None whatsoever."

So, what about customers? Neglecting the interests of your customers will make them turn to another, and will ultimately hurt all the stakeholders of a company. This near-sighted emphasis on shareholders in the anglo-saxon businessworld is STUPID. Even from the most extreme money grabbing greed perspective. I mean, your collective customers have more money combined than the shareholders for sure. Fucking them over might be a short-term win, but in the long term it'll kill your company every time.

Apart from that, government, besides being a customer, is a stakeholder in itself. It provides critical infrastructure and organizations that allow a company to even exist. Without wanting to argue how 'the public' relates to 'the government', it's really really stupid for a company to alienate itself from the government of its home country.

This CISCO overselling is just a plain stupid policy all around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_(corporate)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

Average for EU as of Q3 2012 is 85% of GDP. Only five nations of the 27 EU members have a debt of above 100%.

The US are highly in debt. Especially if you consider absolute numbers, not the ones relative to GDP.

English might not be his first language, you don't have to be rude.

Ok thanks, point taken that Bowman is actively testing Monsanto's right to second generation seeds. Even though linked article does not assert he used Roundup, just 'a herbicide'. Your statement that he used glyphosate is not proven by the cited article. It might have been any kind of traditional herbicide used on soybeans.

You are obviously a paid shill. Because for someone demanding citations you are very light on facts yourself. Printing it in bold doesn't make it true.

Amuse me. Just cite ONE ARTICLE claiming Bowman actually used Roundup/glyphosate on the second generation seeds he bought from the elevator.

"took full advantage of the GMO by spraying their crops with glyphosate"

Please show sources for this assertition. It is not mentioned in TFA. What is, is this:

"However, farmers are able to buy excess soybeans from local grain elevators, many of which are likely to be Roundup Ready seeds. One of Bowman's trips to such a grain elevator put him in Monsanto’s sights.
“We have always had the right to go to an elevator, buy some ‘junk grain’ and use it for seed if you desire,” Bowman explained."

He'd be pretty stupid to use Roundup if he wasn't sure 100% of his seeds where resistent, wouldn't he?

I hate to say it, but you sound terribly much like a shill for Monsanto.

Had a Brother HL-1440 here for about ten years or so, would recommend to anyone. Replaced toner once, print around 500-1000 pages a year.

"Compared to the alternatives the author suggests? Ruby and Python combined are doing less than Perl. PHP is the runaway favorite [w3techs.com], but if you dig into the numbers, you'll find that most of the change is due to Content Management Systems which by and far have been developed on PHP. So these massive zomfg numbers PHP is pulling in isn't due to people programming with it as much as they are copy-pasting it en masse."

Yes, because somehow all of those PHP sites are running 'copy-pasted' code and all those Perl sites are running custom code ... you're clawing at straws here. These sites are using PHP because obviously it's the better choice. It's just as easy to 'copy-paste' a Perl CMS as a PHP CMS. However, nobody's doing that, judging by the numbers.

And then again: 'copy-pasting' as you call it is a perfectly legitimate reuse of code. I'd rather call it installing a tried-and-proven system. Ever heard of DRY and not trying to reinvent the wheel?

Regarding the unnoticed custom back-end stuff: PHP does fine on CLI. I've loads of PHP scripts running as cronjobs. BASH scripts as well. No Perl. Why not? Not because I can't program Perl, it's because the syntax is so head-splittingly different from the whole C family AND (here it comes) Perl has _absolutely_ no advantage over either PHP/CLI for database batch jobs and such or BASH for shell scripting. It might be faster than PHP, but on batch jobs involving large datasets your database is always going to be the bottleneck, so who cares?

Perl has been at a standstill compared to PHP and other scripting languages. I know PHP is not very popular here on slashdot but it has made some pretty serious advances in the last few years. Decent frameworks like Zend, Symfony and Laravel have made develop very much quicker. Stuff like Doctrine and Propel ORM's have given PHP access to some pretty powerfull data modelling and storing/retrieving methods. Integration of Solr and Varnish have given it very fast searching and caching solutions. And finally, whilst PHP consistency in syntax still sucks (stuff like function arguments and naming are terrible) improvements to the OO capabilities in PHP5 have taken away a lot of the rough edges it once had.

Otherwise, can't remember. A long, long time ago, that's for sure. Traditional PTS over copper is rapidly disappearing here.

IMHO the issue is the prices people are actually buying this stuff at. It's an open invitation to get cheated on and as wrong as it is that almost _all_ supermarkets and food chains have raped words like 'fresh' and '100%' and 'healthy' and whatnot it's just plain hypocritical and stupid to expect reasonable meat for prices like the 1 pound for eight beefburgers.

Or you'll just make animals suffer more for your cheapness by forcing farmers to further reduce quality of life for their livestock under pressure from the huge conglomerates food chains have become.

"Both products cost just £1 a box, as do similar frozen burgers sold by Iceland. The Oakhurst 100% Beef Quarter Pounders, sold by Aldi and implicated in the scandal, cost £1.39 for a box of eight."

What do you expect for that price? You can't buy cheap and expect quality?

Buying meat at those prices is just an open invitation to getting conned, one way or the other. Shame on the buyers!

Yes and this is why we eat pigs and keep dogs ... oh no it isn't because pigs and dogs are generally considered to have about the same level of intelligence ...

I'm following your train of thought but it just isn't as simple as that. Horses aren't especially bright compared to other livestock, it's just that they have a special relationship with humans because they are individually owned, not as a herd. And of course there's the whole girl-horse romance thing ...

I sure hope the computer is better than the website:

http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/fully-rugged-laptop-toughbook-31.asp

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01fb'

An exception occurred: 'application' /business-solutions/includes/cache-include.inc, line 32