But note that the question wasn't about understand mathematics or computer systems design; it was about diplomas or certificates in programming. It's fairly well understood that those are orthogonal quantities. ;-)

Well, a few years ago, I'd have said the same. But then I got involved with several of the latest "smart" phones and tablets. As a result, I now think "Undo Send" sounds like a fine idea.

The reason, of course, is all the times I've been typing a message, when suddenly it blinks out in mid-word, and I find that the partial message has apparently been sent. My muttered "WTF!?" has no effect. I've generally had no idea what I may have done (if anything) that caused the software to act that way. This happened once today on my Android (HTC ONE) phone, and I've seen it on several iPads and Android tablets. My wife reports the same behavior on her iPhone.

Of course, this wasn't a case of me clicking Send, so perhaps your "never regretted clicking send" does apply. But it'll be useful if a Send triggered by the software itself when I didn't want it to send anything will suffice as grounds for wanting an Unsend capability.

The only problem is the 30-second window. The email (and IM) interfaces are getting progressively more baroque, and that may often not be enough time to understand what has gone wrong inside the goofy software. What we really need is a way to tell it "Don't ever send anything unless I explicitly hit the Send button." But the clever software "designers" also seem to be eliminating things as mundane as buttons with words on them, replacing them with idiosyncratic icons (different in every email/message app) whose behaviour can be hard to remember if you routinely work on several different machines, as many of us do.

(Just today, I tried to back out of a messaging app by using what looked a lot like the usual left-pointing "Return to previous screen" button. It sent the message, though I'm not sure who it went to, and I hadn't even intentionally been trying to make a reply. Things really are getting this messed up. ;-)

It has been banned for all but the very rich, thanks to a wave of new regulations. 90 percent, yes 90 percent of my industry is gone and we are paring back.

Capitalism used to be a fun game to play in America.

The biggest clue is that the large European manufacturer of airliners actually calls it an Airbus.

But if you don't need the allowance, Ryanair is still the best price by a country mile.

I keep thinking of converting a ski jacket so I can pack 2 weeks clothing in the lining (they never check the size of coats!) and go on a fortnight's vacation hand luggage only...

A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.

There have been changes. Standards for pilots of the tiny airlines have been raised a bit, extra restrictions were put on their schedules, and loopholes that allowed reducing pilot pay have been closed.

But most importantly, the big airlines are now held responsible for those tiny regional/commuter airlines they're contracting with. The big guys no longer get to take your money and book you on a tiny turboprop (with their logo on the side) while washing their hands of the poor safety record of those "regional" airlines. Their own big pockets will be the target of any future lawsuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

However, the practice has continued:

"A government study recently found 61% of all advertised flights for American, Delta, United and US Airways (now merging with American) were operated by regionals in 2011, up from 40% in 2000." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

If you're smart, you avoid regional airlines. The accident rates are dramatically higher, and you're saving little, if any, money booking flights on them.

One of the most popular cafes in this town is successful in great part because of their lack of background music. It's not a fancy place at all, just a deli-style counter with fairly good sandwich and salad makings, lots of good pastries, and a variety of (non-alcoholic) drinkables. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen groups decide to go there explicitly because conversation is possible.

Of course, I can see other restaurant owners deciding to go with the music because it interferes with conversation, so people will just eat and then free up the table for the next customers. Groups that are talking tend to stay around too long for a truly "commercial" establishment. This may well be the main reasons that eateries pay for licenses to play music. They want you to eat and get out in as short at time as possible, not sit around and talk.

The local cafe mentioned above is frequented by the local political crowd, and by the leaders of many local organizations. My wife is involved in organizing an upcoming music & art & food festival, and most of the organization's meetings have been held in that cafe. The cafe's owners presumably like serving this local function (and they also cater events in your home if you prefer). Maybe there's only enough of that sort of business to support one such eatery locally, or there's nobody else that wants to get into that niche.

There will always be poor countries. Those are the ones without all the shiny planes and nuclear bombs. We know ways to create our own.

The TV is across the other side of the room, though. It doesn't matter that the TV screen has a lower dot pitch than the phone, I don't use the TV 18 inches from my face. All that matters is can I see jaggies or individual pixels on the TV from across the room? The answer is no. Anything more than 1080p on a TV screen is rapidly going into diminishing returns.

Now a computer monitor on the other hand is a different story altogether. So is VR due to the apparent size of the screen in a VR headset.

A shed-load of grave robbing is a shed-load of grave robbing, damned for an ounce or a shed-load. Amazing what passes for science now.

I happen to know where there's a grave with a Ferrari in it, can I get the car in the name of Science?

Right; they're called Mathematical Physicists. ;-)

Joking aside, this isn't necessarily bad science. It could be viewed as a mere division of labor. Actual science needs experimentation, observations, etc. to verify good hypotheses or reject bad hypotheses. But there's no real reason this all needs be done by the same person. One could easily argue that, if you have a good theoretician (textbook example: Einstein), it might be to everyone's benefit if they sit off in some ivory tower churning out their equations, while others with good knowledge of current technology work out the testing protocols, and yet others who are good in labs do the actual hands-on work. This might work better than trying to have one person do it all.

Of course, I'm really just suggesting that we continue with what we've been doing for a few centuries. Theoreticians have always turned out lots of ideas that were wrong, while occasionally being right. Sometimes they do some of the experimental/observational verification, but most of that has always been done by others.

The main problem is with educating the media and general public about it all. History says we haven't done a very good job of that. But again, one might argue that that's a part of the scientific enterprise that's best handed over to specialists in such communication. This is also not a very new idea. (Textbook examples: Sagan, Tyson.) We mostly just need more people who are good at that task.

It's been long understood that scientific conjectures and hypotheses must be tested independently by people other than the ones that developed the ideas. Thus, Einstein didn't really much bother with experimental confirmation; that was the job of all the other physicists who (quite properly) didn't accept his ideas and were trying to disprove them. Real science does require verification, of course, but there's no reason to insist that it be done by the people who do the theoretical work. Also, there are known problems with people trying to experimentally verify their own hypotheses, which is why we so often read calls for independent testing.

So what's new about all this today? It sounds like Science As Usual to me. A lot of the hypotheses will never be tested, but that just means that they'll never graduate to the class of "theory".

A parallel that I've found instructive: In the publishing industry, it's well understood that proofreading must be done (if it's done at all ;-) by someone other than the author. It's difficult to proofread your own stuff, because you tend to read what you know should be there, not what actually is. I've seen this myself, with people pointing out typos in things I've put online that I know I proofread. I generally just fix the error, and send them a "Thanks" message, then go about what I was doing. Similar comments probably apply any time you're trying to actually get something right in any subject area.

One might be tempted to make the extreme suggestion that people shouldn't bother checking their own work. Just send it to an independent checker, perhaps someone who is willing to send you their work for checking. Send it to several such checkers, who have an understanding that you'll do the same for them. This way, people can concentrate on producing stuff that they're good at, and pay for it by spending time similarly checking other people's work that might not be so close and familiar.

I've seen evidence that this has sorta happened in a few fields. The idea is that you keep all the stuff you're working on online, in a semi-hidden place that your colleagues know how to access, but which isn't really "public". You might send email out occasionally asking them to read through a new document that you're putting together. This sort of setup happens a lot in software development, typically as online repositories clearly labelled as "development" to warn away non-technical "users". A mailing list or blog helps get people together who are willing to download and test new versions and send in bug reports. When you get enough colleages saying it seems to be working, you announce a new public release. This is not really very different from the old scientific concept of independent verification.

Well, yeah, I've done that when I can find the setting. But I need to do a lot of web testing, and have lots of browsers installed on my various test machines. With most of them, I can't find any such setting anywhere. This doesn't mean they don't have such controls, of course; it could just mean that I don't recognize whatever they call it. Terms like "click to play" don't seem to exist on any of them, and for the few that I know how to do it, they all use different terminology.

So does someone have a list of where to find the click-to-play setting on lots of browsers? Googling finds a few very short lists, but doesn't seem to have any info on the hundreds of others that are out now. Thus, I just installed Vivaldi on this Macbook Pro, its settings seems to have nothing at all to control active content, and google seems to just find questions about it, not answers. Again, this might just be because I don't know what Vivaldi calls their click-to-play setting.

So if you think that everyone should have click-to-play set by default, you presumably know how to do this on every browser, or you know where there's a list of explanations. Can you give us a link to this list?

(Curious web testers want to know ... ;-)

There's really just one major reason they haven't succeeded yet: The world's financial system, including your bank and/or credit union, now uses the internet for most of their communications. If encryption is outlawed, all your account information will be going over the wires unencrypted, for anyone along the route to intercept and store for later usage.

This is probably the main reason that encryption is still legal nearly everywhere (and used without prosecution in many places where it isn't legal). True, it doesn't matter to our rulers whether our account info is flying around unencrypted. But they understand quite well that encryption is what keeps their own large bank accounts safe from raiding by all the world's con men and identity thieves, not to mention their political opponents. Outlawing encryption for The Masses' account info while keeping it legal for anyone with economic or political power is pretty much an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem, so in most countries encryption remains legal.

Of course, they can put pressure on the suppliers of the software, and persuade them to supply encryption that's decodable by their own spy organizations. But this is subject to all the usual gotchas, since decryption keys and code are easily accessible via the usual bribes to the right low-paid admin flunkies in the appropriate organizations. This is something that all our politicians inherently understand, and to protect their own information, they easily decide that their own communications (and their funders') have to remain encrypted.

We can be fairly sure that our banks and other financial institutions will continue to educate our government leaders about all this, as they have done in the past.

(Actually, I keep reading that in much of the world, cell phones are now a major tool for handling financial transactions. I'd guess that this requires effective encryption to prevent interception by the crooks, including those inside the phone companies and government agencies. I haven't read good technical articles about how this actually works, especially dealing with local encryption laws. I wonder where the best docs on the topic might be. Perhaps someone here on /. might know .... ;-)

And 12 or 13 will also think this is a good idea. The rest won't. Like New Coke.