Yeah, this triggered a WTF flag in my head, too. Most of the web servers I've worked with do just the opposite of this: If a web file is non-executable, anyone can download a copy of it. But if it's made executable, attempting to download it causes the server to run it and send you its output. So executable files are the ones that can't be downloaded by anyone.

I wonder how they have their servers configured. Maybe they've figured a way to reverse the meaning of the "x" bits, so that only non-executable files are run, while executables are sent as-is to the client. Ya think?

(Actually, I do have some directories with a .htaccess file that declare nothing there to be executable. I sometimes used that to provide an easy way for clients to download the source code rather than execute it and get its output, as happens in the main directories. But somehow, I don't think this is what that idiot was talking about. I suspect he's clueless about web servers and their capabilities, and was just making stuff up that he thought might mean something to someone. ;-)

Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.

Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?

It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?

I was working as a developer when the news of the Therac 25 problems broke, so I remember it well. You actually have it backwards; it wasn't bad UI design at all.

The thing is mere functional testing of the user interface would not have revealed the flaw in the system. What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.

If the UI was bad from a design standpoint the fundamental system engineering flaws of the system might never have been revealed.

Why not Forums?

VBulletin/phpBB style discussion boards are great, and there's usually one for basically-whatever you're into - cars, computers, pets, food, crafts, wedding planning. It's not uncommon for a given user to be a part of at least one such community. The problem is that it's a bit more difficult to 'channel surf' that way. If a user participates in a discussion thread in Alpha Forum, they'd have to log in separately to Bravo Forum to participate there. This limits the scope of topics that can be viewed at a given clip. Similarly, different forums have different rules or customs. Some are particularly strict about citing sources for claims, others are super strict in the profanity, others use a 'reputation' point system while others simply use 'thanks' or nothing at all; Reddit is at least a smidge more consistent site-wide with its rules.

Why not Usenet?
I'm still a fan, personally. comp.misc has some interesting discussions, and misc.legal.moderated is frequently some fascinating reading. There are a few groups related to video games and Doctor Who that have interesting discussions, the latter particularly after new episodes air. The fact that a user identify is basically universal is helpful to keep the playing field level. Usenet has its own list of problems though. First and foremost, usenet is something that itself needs to be sought after to a certain extent at this point; few ISPs offer access to it, and neither Windows nor OSX ship with a client. This is further complicated by the fact that a "binary client" and a "text client" are frequently different pieces of software, usually cost money on top of existing internet subscriptions, few real-life friends tend to be able to share the experience, and the search results for the term in Google are usually affiliated with warez, so getting people into it is its own challenge to begin with. Moreover, usenet is much more susceptible to spam, it's not possible to share in-line images or youtube clips (like it or not, responding with memes and animated GIFs is a common practice these days), and it's not possible to 'upvote' posts as to indicate the quality of a particular contribution. Put it all together, and Usenet is a wonderful niche that Reddit simply does better for the majority of internet users.

... and plenty of the crawling robots also ended up falling over.

But why no love for the videos of robots failing and falling? There are plenty of videos of legged robots not falling, and they are positively terrifying for the humans vs. robots crowd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The problem in the U.S. is not people who don't have skills. People have skills. The problem is that skills aren't valued. If you have skills, you will get paid shit. If you manipulate money, you will get paid a lot. This is why there's been such a geek brain drain into the financial industry. The U.S. does not value working for a living. We value gambling for a living.

You don't even actually understand who pays for things, do you?

Which is necessarily true in any kind of fashion, even if it's anti-fashion. Hipsterism is a kind of contrarianism; the attraction is having things that most other people don't even know about. But strict contrarianism is morally indistinguishable from strict conformism.

Now outside of major metropolitan centers like Manhattan when people say "hipster" they mean something else; there's not enough of a critical mass of non-conformity to cater to an actual "hipster" class. What they're really talking about is "kids taking part in trends I'm not included in." In other words its the same-old, same-old grousing about kids these days, only now by people who've spent their lives as the focus of youth culture and can't deal with their new-found cultural marginalization.

As you get older the gracious thing to do is to age out of concern, one way or the other, with fashion.

No, those things are actually anti-hip. As soon as something gets big enough for Buzzfeed it's for a different audience.

"Hip" implies arcane knowledge possessed by a select few. A great band with a small local following is "hip"; when they make it big they're no longer "hip", although they may still be "cool". The iPhone is pretty much the antithesis of hip, no matter how cool it may be. If I were to guess what hipster phone model might look like, it might be something low-cost Indian android phone manufactured for the local market and not intended for export -- very rare and hard to get outside of India. Or even better, hard to get outside of Gujarat. Or even better only a few hundred were ever manufactured then the company went bankrupt and the stock was sold on the street in Ahmedabad. Provided that the phone is cool. Cool plus obscure is the formula for "hip".

It follows there is no such thing as "hip" retail chain. It's a contradiction in terms. A chain may position itself in its marketing as "hip", but it's really after what the tech adoption cycle refers to as "Early Majority" adopters.

Hipsters reject being the leading edge of anything; as soon as something becomes big, it is no longer hip. This means they're not economically valuable on a large scale, which some people see as self-centered and anti-social. Compare this to cosplayers; the media always adopts a kind of well-the-circus-is-in-town attitude when there's a con, but while they're condescending toward cosplayers the media can't afford to be hostile because those people are the important early adopters for economically valuable media franchises.

Let me give you a more authentic hipster trend than the one you named. Last year there was a fad for hipster men to buy black fedora hats from Brooklyn shops that cater to Hasidic men. While as soon as something gets big enough to draw media attention it's dead to hipsters, this fad illustrates the elements of hipster aesthetic: (1) resurrecting obscure and obsolete fashions; (2) exoticism or syncretism; and (3) authenticity.

Now from an objective standpoint there's no good reason to favor or disfavor fedoras as opposed to, say baseball caps. It's just a different fashion. Likewise there's no practical reason to value a hat from a owner-operated store in Brooklyn over an identical one purchased from Amazon. But it does add rarity value, and that's the key. Something has to be rare and unusual to be hip. As soon as hipness is productized it appeals to a different audience.

I'm guessing it was an unanticipated race condition. Everything works correctly, everything passes all tests, but for some extremely rare constellation of input values software module "B" is able to complete its calculations and report its results before "A" can-- which has a probability of occurrence so low that it rounds to zero-- and that screws the pooch. If the probability of this happening again approaches zero, it would be fair for NASA to say there was no error in the programming, but instead an unexpected glitch in operations that is unlikely to ever recur.

You can never test for every possible corner condition. More than that, in probably every real world situation, the longer the time since the last hard reboot, the more likely it is that the software will encounter some corner conditions. That Pluto bird has been running for quite a while.

You must be nude here.

It's been on the rise for a while now. It's been on the rise with UKIP in the UK, the FN in France, Golden Dawn in Greece and others elsewhere.

It's an inevitable reaction to global financial turmoil stemming back to 2008, so yes it can certainly be eliminated by improving the health of the world economy, but I don't think that in itself justifies giving Greece a free ride because the implications of giving Greece a free ride could in themselves cause more problems elsewhere.

Greece has long been a hot bed of far right and far left nationalism- from various terrorist groups, through to a disturbing amount of Greeks that went to help commit atrocities in former Yugoslavia including the Srebrenica massacre. As awful as it may sound, it is perhaps better to simply let Greece return to it's status quo and contain it and let everyone else ditch the nationalist sentiment than it would be to give Greece a free ride and give cause for nationalism to take hold through the rest of Europe.

There are also cases, as with Russia, whereby we tried to help bring them aboard the global economic boom over the last 15 years, but whereby all it meant was they got stronger and used that strength to drive their far right nationalism through their neighbour's backyard. It seems preferable therefore that Russia is poor and far-right nationalist, than wealthy and far-right nationalist. In some cases like with Russia, you couldn't win either way if you wanted to when the majority of the population are fundamentally just far right in their views.

So yes the rise of nationalism concerns me, but I don't think we can assume we can rid ourselves of it any time soon. I think the best option is to eliminate it where we can, and contain the rest of it. There are promising signs - in the UK for example Scottish nationalist ambitions were thankfully struck down in a referendum that was even slanted towards the nationalist view and UKIP underperformed at the general election.