IF the people in charge are asking for it, find and suggest a solution that can do it safely.

I'm with you so far.

If they are not willing to pay for your solution, find another, albeit less safe solution and present it with a list of assumed risks. Rinse and repeat until you have a solution they are willing to pay for with risks they are accepting, then do that.

In my experience, any "solution" that you present will be understood to do everything that they wanted.

Even if you say that they cannot have X at $Y. They will give you $Y and then demand X.

When you cannot do so, a contractor will be brought in to set up a flawed implementation that will reduce your security BUT will provide X at a price point that you said could not be done.

Which is why we see this story pop up over and over and over again.

Coherence & single wave length. A laser has all the waves in lock step.

Good UIs should be designed to work with a single mouse button, because that means that they'll also work well with a touchscreen. There's nothing wrong with making some things faster with the right mouse button, which is how most Mac applications work. The right mouse button for the context menu was inherited from NeXTSTEP, where the 'normal' menu was a floating version and you could cause a copy of it to pop up wherever the mouse was with the right mouse button (RISC OS took this further and didn't have any kind of menu bar, using the middle mouse button to produce the menu on demand. Using RISC OS with a touchscreen or pen tablet was... interesting, and it only just counted as discoverable because the machines shipped with a mouse with the buttons labelled).

When I'm reading a document, I'll do two-fingered scrolling on the trackpad to navigate. I only use home/end and page up/down when I'm typing, to navigate within the document, and then I already have both of my hands on the keyboard. The function key can be pressed with the knuckle of the little finger of the left hand, so is pretty easy to hit.

Windows-R brings up the run dialog, which will autocomplete program names and used to be the fastest way of launching programs on Windows (it's well over 10 years since I last regularly used Windows, so I don't know if this has changed). Windows-D showed the desktop and Windows-F the system find dialog. All of these were pretty useful, but the key was still quite under-utilised.

Control and alternate already have well-defined meanings. Control is for entering control characters, alternate is for entering alternate characters. OS X uses both. UNIX keyboards used to come with a meta key, but this fell out of use as software was written for PCs without such a key. On OS X, the usage of the command key is inherited from classic MacOS: It's the modifier that you hold for commands. This means that the OS X terminal is the only graphical terminal that I've come across that doesn't suck for copy and paste. On OS X, every single program including the terminal uses command-C for copy and command-V for paste. The terminal is therefore free to use control-C for sending the character that they terminal recognises for SIGINT. Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac). Most desktop environments for Linux inherited a load of bad UI design from Windows before adding their own mistakes.

Drones are subject to the same rules that RC aircraft are subject to.

It is however extremely hard to enforce. RC users are generally pretty responsible - they've probably spent many hours building their aircraft, and during this time it has sunk in the dangers they can pose, and usually they've joined a local club to help them learn to fly their new expensive aircraft and the club will also coach them on safely operating their aircraft.

Drone users not so much. Many of the ready-to-fly drones require pretty much zero skill to operate, so people can take off and cause mischief pretty much straight away.

Or put simply: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have an extraordinary claim here - highly extraordinary - but the evidence falls very very far short of being even just ordinary, let alone extraordinary.

The difference between persistent and temporary storage is important. Being able to have 128GB of RAM in a laptop that consumes no power when not being read or written would be a huge win (one of the reasons phones have limited RAM is that DRAM draws power all the time) would be very nice.

Oh, I agree - you'd have added a lot of hardware complexity and probably more than you'd be able to fit if you wanted to keep 7 of them in the thermal envelope of the Cell.

It's mostly opinion, formed from watching Google's interaction with standards processes and browser development communities.

If people can't write good commit messages, what makes you think that they'll write good commit messages in a separate document?

I believe in quality over quantity, and /. doesn't have the intelligent conversations with knowledgeable people that it once did. They've nearly all fled.

I learned a huge amount from submitting stories to Soylent and Pipedot, and comparing them to the crud was on Slashdot at the time... Namely, /. likes to publish a completely inaccurate and twisted stories any idiot knows is slanted and wrong, and then 99% of the comments are made-up of people correcting (and ranting about) the bad story. If you don't publish such crap, you can have informative discussions with 1% of the audience...

In addition, it's the very few, high-quality commentors that make the site, not the rest of the horde. You can have a very small community, as long as it contains a few very smart people, and have just as much insightful conversation. I saw it working wonderfully back in the early days of /. but there's nothing of value left here, now. If Pipedot can continue to maintain the high signal-to-noise ratio as it grows, it *could* be better than /. ever was. But who knows what the future may hold...

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I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.