They're our a lot better things to test then spelling. Know, with modern technology, kids can relay on computers to pick up on spelling mistakes and tests can concecrate on learning what students really NO

It's not laziness, it's that the password system of authentication is fundamentally broken. You tell a person that they have to remember a long, unique, random string of characters that has no connection to anything they've done or anything about them in real life. They have to use a different one of these for each place they go to that requires a password and they have to change them frequently every few weeks/months. If you've got 10 sites you belong to and you change your password every month that's 120 random strings over the course of a year.

Remembering random strings that frequently change isn't something the human mind is made for. It's something computers are great at. It's a bad design decision that forces people to do a task that they aren't made to do. People are better (though still not great) at keeping physical tokens like keys and credit cards secure. Write you passwords on a card and keep it in your wallet. And don't bother using anything more secure that "password" or "12345" for sites like Gawker where the information you stand to lose is so low as to not be worth protecting.

Ironically, the most valuable thing most people lost in the Gawker hack was their passwords.

symptoms that appear only... on weekdays, not on weekends at home.

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia

Oh damn! I think we have that where I work. I'll forward this on to my boss to explain why I won't be there on Monday.

If you think it's important and it should be changed get up off your ass and do something about it. Is changing laws, culture and government easy? No, but considering in America both women and African Americans managed to change all of those things without the right to vote I don't have much sympathy for the "I want to download Avatar for free" crowd.

Either get off your ass and do something or shut the fuck up. Bitching on the internet that change is hard is LITERALLY the least you can do.

I get the history, but in the 200+ years since then the legal views around jury nullification have radically changed (see the wikipedia article linked above) in part because we realized that nullification would also be used to excuse clearly illegal and immoral acts (lynching in the South) that were somehow OK with a community. Currently, assuming the wikipedia article is accurate, it appears that the current state of jury nullification has moved from a necessary part of justice to a tolerated but not encouraged practice to now (and with precedent set in 2 federal circuits) something that will lead to your dismissal as a juror. Times have changed.

Just because we thought something was a good idea at the time of the revolution doesn't mean it's something we still do today. We let the girls vote and we count black people as more than 2/3 of a person now too.

You mean that thing that's been explicitely limited in 2 federal circuit courts and curtailed for over the past 100 years? Try reading more than the title of the article next time.

Recent court rulings have contributed to the prevention of jury nullification. A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[33] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[34] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[35] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[36] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification.

Arguing for jury nullification is like arguing that you don't have to pay taxes because they printed your name in all caps or you don't have to go to court because the flag has a fringe on it.

This is not to say you aren't justified in wanting more, especially from someone new and unproven but just to show that the open source community has at least the cost and trust issues to deal with if it wants to attract good designers.

damn fast typing

Those studies cost money. For a comparative study you want probably a minimum of 12 users and you probably won't get them in a room for an hour for less than a $20 incentive. If you want them to be at all representative you're also looking at either buying access to an existing list of pre-screened users from a research company or spending a good 100 hours on the phone doing surveys. Think another few hundred minimum. A cheap comparative study, starting from scratch could maybe be done for $1000 but more likely is about $2500. You can do friends and family studies and pay nothing but you can never be sure about the data. In my experience developers also tend to want much larger sample sizes to "trust" results (think 1000-3000, political poll sample size). Not saying this is you but it shows how far the gap is between what some developers expect to see in user research and what user research does.

Aside from the costs of research, in the corporate world as a designer I don't have to do a study to justify every design decision to the developers. I understand why you want more than "because I told you so" but showing my stuff will work takes a lot more time and money than showing yours will so it's cheaper and faster if you can work on trust for some things. This is not to say you aren't justified in wanting more, especially from someone new and unproven but just to show that the open source community has at least the cost and trust issues if it wants to attract good designers.

There's also an incentive thing. If you want to make your name as a programmer open source experience can demonstrate skills, wide interests and passion to potential employers. If a young designer wants to design software and demonstrate skills, wide interests and passion they can do something in print, create a web site or small app by themselves. Something that will show off their design as they intended. "I got the XXXX team to agree to make slight changes to their configuration UI to make it easier to understand" may actually be a more useful and relevant skill to show in an interview but the poster, web site, or flash app you did will probably do more to get you hired.

You're right, it's not a crime. In fact, it's good that we allow people to say stupid things like that because it helps us detects morons that we should completely ignore. Like the tea-partiers and you.

You're totally right, Facebook was completely wrong for you. A device like this sounds like it would really work for you. It's very focused on preserving privacy and giving lots of control over information, highly technical and sophisticated, allows you to write as much as you want, and is completely new and unknown. Unfortunately if you want to use it to socialize with the unwashed masses all of these reasons will stop them from using it with you. They LIKE all the stuff you hated about Facebook. For them it's benefits are:

Simple
They just type something and click the button and their friends can see stuff. Sometimes they change the UI and everyone spends a day or two talking about how the old way was better until they get used to it but it's still pretty easy. To find your friends you tell it where you grew up, where you worked or what your email is. You pick them by their names or pictures. Simple. The lack of lots of control and options are part of this. As more and more people are starting to notice or hear about how Facebook can expose your data they are having to add more controls but simplicity will always be more appealing to most people.

Popular
Everyone is on Facebook!!! (they love exclamation points too -- I know...). People you haven't seen in years are on there and sometimes someone you knew from a long time ago will find you. Isn't that great! Popularity and trendiness are a great feature of Facebook and other products for a lot of people. They love joining groups and knowing that lots of people love the same things they do. All of these things were popular pre-social networks and Facebook has done an adequate job of bringing them to the masses.

Fun
Pictures and games!!! You get to see pictures of other people doing silly things. You get to see pictures of your sister's kid building a snowman and strange places where old friends go on vacation. And they have games too! Not complicated games or games that take a long time but simple things that you can play with your friends if you have a minute or two. Casual gaming's appeal is that you can learn the rules quickly, play during breaks at work or home, and play with people you know (Farmville and the like).

You have different values and interests than the average person on the street but you probably know this already. I hope this gives you a little insight into some of the reasons why Facebook is appealing to a lot of people out there.

My problem with this product is that I think its audience will naturally be limited and that will decrease its value as a social networking appliance for a lot of people. If it only appeals to a small and technical audience why bother with hardware at all? Just make a software version of it and call it a server. The people who will use it will know that means put it on a machine you leave on and connected and they might already have one around.

Depending on your skill set you might even be able to put something like this together out of existing tools. If you have a couple of friends who share your interests and are into technology a solution like this could work for you. You'd give up randomly bumping into that kid you knew when you were 9 but you may not see this as a valuable feature anyway.

If there was a "Canonical's Ultimate Network Test suite", "Sun Human Interface Toolkit" or "Hulu's Interactive Television & Live Entertainment Room" all of those would be descriptive names. However, naming those products after their acronymns would be just as stupid as calling it GIMP.

I say let people install it on any Intel box they want, and if they run into problems, they're on their own.

Given the amount of bitching when Apple broke Atom support for netbook or when they stopped Palm from syncing with iTunes the idea that Apple could just release an OS for sale and people would accept that if anything doesn't work or stops working they're on their own doesn't seem to hold up.

I wonder if you recognize it but your position here is not that much different from a criminal gang. "Snitches get stiches" and all that.

It's neither cowardly nor immoral to report someone for breaking the law, especially when not doing so could lead them to scapegoat you. Let the BSA deal with them and laugh all the way to the bank. Pirates deserve what's coming to them.

Someone who wasn't too great at making graphs designed some slides talking about the problems with O-rings and temperatures. That means an Engineer felt strongly enough about the problem that they raised it as an issue. Are you telling me that management's failure to grasp the simple point he was making, colder temperatures break O-rings, was his fault? The title on his slides is "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints", but his poor graphical presentation meant that the misfortune but competent managers couldn't understand his basic point? Then you declare that all that was required was a curve fitted using statistical modelling techniques far outside the scope of most engineering courses. Are you so sure they wouldn't have required some 3D coloured graphs with sound and a soundtrack or an animated Chuck Jones short in order to get the point across to a group of people so unmercifully stupid.

Yes, this is exactly the engineer's fault. They held critical information unknown to management (o-rings will fail below certain temperatures resulting in catastrophic failure) and failed in making that point. They titled their slides "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints" and made a bunch of bad charts when they should have used a graph and titled it "Below Certain Temperatures, Shuttle go BOOM!". If they felt it was a life-or-death situation it may have called for, dare I say it, clip-art. You expect management to go "Oh wow, one of these genius engineering types showed us these charts and I'm not sure what they meant but we should call off the launch because I think he said it was bad or something". I expect an engineer who believes they are in a situation where loss of life may occur to put at least a bullet point at the end saying "If you don't do this, you could risk the shuttle and its passengers" or "Because of this, launches below X degrees have a XX% increased risk of catastrophic failure".

If they haven't been taught the skills to do that, then this is where MIT focusing on liberal arts and communication skills can come in to teach new engineers how to avoid those mistakes. Think of it as an engineering problem. If you study how bridges fail because of their structure, also study how bridges fail because of communication breakdowns amongst the design and build crews.

So what you are saying is that if you cannot convince someone who 1) doesn't understand, 2) doesn't really care and 3) who actively seeks to implement bad ideas, then your idea's and recommendations aren't worth a danm?

Yes, exactly this. The world is full of geniuses who never accomplished a damn thing because they couldn't convince anyone their ideas were worth a damn. They piss everyone off or talk over their heads and they sit and wonder why they never got anything done. It's precisely because they thought that coming up with the great idea was the finish and not the start. The world will very rarely recognize the genius of your idea and come flocking to your door. You need to be able to explain it to the non-propeller-heads in the world in a way that they can understand because, unless your idea is trivial, you'll need lots of those people to pull it off.

The space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its crew, not because engineers had failed to communicate the dangers, but in spite of their warnings.

No one was claiming engineers failed to communicate dangers, only that they were in no way effective at communicating them. There's a difference between just communicating something and persuading or influencing someone to change a position. The former is the "I sent an email" model of communication while the later requires communication skills.

NASA management wasn't tied to the idea of killing astronauts so I think the idea that they were completely unconvincable is a silly and defeatist point of view to take. Even Feynman agrees:

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them.

This is a direct call for engineers and scientists to inform management of technological problems, and that role requires the ability to write far more than a 500 word essay.

Modern managers and executive peddle in lies, exaggeration and general bullshit. It is the hallmark of their profession. Engineers and scientists by contrast deal in precisely the opposite commodity; they seek the truth.

And this speaks volumes. Interacting with others under the assumption that "I seek the truth while they peddle in bullshit" is precisely the attitude that will get you sidelined and ignored. Technical ability isn't worth a damn if you can't convince anyone your ideas are worth listening to. If your idea is so important, your insight so invaluable or your invention so world-changing why not spend 25% of the time you spent on the technical side of things figuring out how to convince others of its merit?