No.

By your own admission, you consider the world's literature and mythology to "illustrate basic truths" about human behaviour. So fucking what? Illustrations are useless, for every illustrated truth I can illustrate the opposite. Illustrations are a dime a dozen, the point you're missing about Science is that its statements are *difficult*. Laws of Physics aren't illustrations, they're incomparably more than that. They are the certainties upon which the world is built, bridge by bridge, skyscraper by skyscraper, etc. Religious myths can be (and sometimes are) invented by ignorant teenagers.

Apples and oranges, really.

at minimum a source that has very much already decided on their bottom line, which means one shoudl already take it pretty skeptically.

Why on earth would you say that? That's not a logical argument. If someone tells you some facts, and they happen to have already made up their mind on what those facts imply, that's still a perfectly valid source of knowledge to use.

You're not obliged to accept their conclusion, unless it logically follows from the facts. And if you don't accept their conclusion even when it follows logically from the facts, then you're a fool. So either way, whether someone else already followed the facts to some logical conclusion before you is irrelevant. You should accept the conclusion if and only if it follows from the facts.

I know!

I'll go the first time, and afterwards, if it was boring, I'll just stop by myself before I go and tell myself not to go at all. Problem solved!

Frankly, that's not good enough either. Popular articles often get the science wrong, and without any evidence that anyone can check (like an actual link to a freely available paper) that would be just spreading rumours and disinformation.

The policy should be: either link to a freely accessible version of the original research, or skip the story entirely. Anything else does more harm than good.

Why you have difficulty? Easy reading I can do for you, look! Is bank for assembling startups get it? Is open, turned on electricity, and paid job for you lookers of career get it? Is source style development no funny business! Great opportunity! Do not miss ok? Good for you.

Hogwash.

What keeps people using Google is that it puts its grubby little search boxes in all the major default locations. Face it, most people use the first text entry field they see, regardless of if it's a search box or not. And when it doesn't respond like they think it should, they say it's broken, rather than accept that they typed words into the wrong textbox.

Do not confuse ordinary people with the elite here at slashdot. We know which search engine we use, and we know the differences between them. But we're a tiny minority.

TL;DR summary: Google's success isn't based on quality, it's based on flooding the major entry points for text so that people use them without needing to make a choice.

Being depressed to the point of retreating from the world IS a form of insanity. The world is. You can be unhappy about the way it is or not, sure. But deliberately retreating from it is insane. You are literally crippling yourself, denying the facts of your own existence, ie that you are a human being embedded in the world around you, which includes as much the chair on which you sit and the society in which you live.

So yeah, deliberate retreat is insane, not quite as insane as suicide, but definitely not a reasonable life choice

I'll never change (probably) because MS Office is so much nicer than any of the alternatives, plus hibernation utterly fails on my laptop when running Ubuntu or Mint. I got tired of the OS wars years ago, why can't Slashdotters move on?

Talking about moving on, how do you disable wordwrap on messages in Outlook? The stupid thing is driving me crazy.

Please don't move to gaming. I don't want to meet your family and friends, I'm sure they're nice people and all, but damnit I don't have to meet everyone and they'll just complain about systemd and pulseaudio, and that'll encourage Lennart to piss in the pool some more.

Look, what's wrong with Windows or OSX or Android? They're not expensive, unless you're a cheapskate. They're designed for people like your family, and there are lots of nice people in black tshirts and turtlenecks who love to help out 24/7. Think of the children! Imagine their little faces as they realize Visual Studio is not available, and all they get is an empty black and white window that beeps on each keypress, unless they type ^]:q!

Linux doesn't need world domination, in fact it's been going downhill in the last 5 years precisely because too many people invite their friends and family, and they complain that they can't play games, or someone moved the Start Button That Stops The Machine. Then some busybody does something about it, without thinking.

The world doesn't need yet another gaming and browsing platform, there are enough out there already. The world does need a platform where everything is infinitely configurable and simple enough for dumb robots to understand, and people are forced to become experts. And that platform is dying.

So don't be a jerk, tell your friends about Apple before it's too late. Or Android, or whatever helps you fight your little hate war against M$ or whatever the latest shorthand for evil software companies is. I don't care, use the right tool for the job and so on, and leave Linux out of your ideological fight.

Going into a strip club and being "affronted" by the nudity is like going into a bar and being "affronted" by the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages...

Depends.... One could be walking into a stripclub and then realize, too late, that it's called The Blue Oyster Bar....

... but at least they mentioned sharks!

Designing public APIs is not a common role.

It's more common than you think. Arguably all open source projects do that implicitly. Also, commercial projects, where the customers get to programmatically interact with a service, or a library, require some form of it. That's a good deal of what cloud computing promises the world should look like, by the way.

Really the only types of products that I can think of just now which don't specify public APIs of some kind are traditional GUI apps intended for desktop work.

Still, I'd rather the lawyers leave the industry alone as much as possible, solving actual problems is hard enough.

I'm sorry, but your complaint is not convincing. You want to be specially rewarded just because you work hard? For real? There are millions of people in the world who work hard every day, and they don't get special rewards for it. What makes you such a snowflake?

The truth is, designing APIs is part of what programmers do every day. Yes, some programmers are better than others, some programmers work harder than others. That's something between them and their managers. It's not something where the law should step in and give copyright privileges in the form of API protections.

Suck it up, you're a working stiff, not the next Einstein who poops out beautiful APIs. Sometimes you spend months refining a bunch of things and it's not always properly appreciated. We all do it.

Unfortunately Google is too big. It is certainly bigger than Larry or Sergey or any group of like minded engineers. Any one person can be removed and the company will continue to do what it does, against the wishes of that person and the interests of the public. Larry or Sergey can either get with the program (bad) or not (and be replaced with someone who will). The incentive overall is always there, because as a single entity with a de facto monopoly on enormous quantities of information about people is a treasure too big to ignore for the power hungry.

What needs to happen is that Google must be broken up, deliberately, into sufficiently small pieces that they will compete and interfere with each others businesses, thus benefiting consumers, and at the same time preventing grand plans of world domination. Any company that collects a too big war-chest of information must be broken up.

ChromeOS does everything we've ever wanted to do on a small machine.

Soo not true. All *I* ever wanted to do on a Chromebook was have an xterm running off my headless box. With X11 forwarding. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so (*)

(*) I'm not talking about replacing the OS with Linux or doing a crouton hack. I don't want to flip desktops constantly, just simply run my X apps on Aura.