Well, the auto makers have "fixed" that problem in their latest models. They now have those little "onboard computers" that constantly scan many of the controls and figure out how to map them to physical actions. This means that any "upgrade" to the software can change the functioning of all the controls. You can think you're just getting an upgrade to improve the mileage, but that upgrade can flip the meaning of the turn-signal controls.

Some of the latest models have wifi, so they can do upgrades while you're traveling. We'll probably soon be hearing of accidents caused by a sudden change in meaning of what the driver did with the controls. (Yes, they may say the upgrades won't happen while the car is moving. What that means is that if you stop at a stop sign or light, when you start moving again, the controls may have silently changed. And if you think they wouldn't do upgrades without your permission, you haven't been paying attention.)

If computer-industry history is any guide, it'll probably take decades for all this to settle down to an intuitive, reliable auto UI. And the security problems still won't be solved, so your car can be taken over at any moment by "hackers" - or the police - or your insurance company.

(I wish I were joking ... but I'll probably get a "funny" mod for this anyway. ;-)

Nah; if we do that, they'll all just agree with each other. (Haven't you been paying attention. ;-)

Well,yeah, but that's balanced out by the large population of native English speakers with a poor command of the language. ;-)

We're seeing a bit of that here on /. these days ...

Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco. ;-)

The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.

Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)

Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.

In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.

Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly. ;-)

Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.

In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.

Heh. That would really baffle anyone in the 95% of the human population who's not a literate, native speaker of English. (Just imagine a tourist staring at their dictionary, trying to make sense of that set of three simple English words. ;-)

Of course, it's not at all unusual for people to put up signs with this level of clarity, nearly anywhere in the world. There's a nice web site, engrish.com, that has a large collection of similar signage, mostly from east Asia, but also from most of the rest of the world.

(Shhh!!! Don't let on that you know something about explosives, especially high explosives. They'll be after you next. ;-)

That's why the (nearly empty) cup of coffee on the table next to me was made in a small saucepan on the stove. Actually, it's mostly because it makes better-tasting coffee than any of the coffee makers that we have stored in the basement, to be brought out when we have a crowd. And I can easily make just one cup, which is normally all I want. (My wife doesn't drink the stuff; she prefers tea, which she also makes in a cup or in a small pitcher for groups).

Of course, there's a potential danger that the authorities will hear about this, investigate, and decide that I'm making coffee via a Middle-Eastern method, which makes me a terrorist suspect. OTOH, I actually learned the method from my Scandinavian friends and relatives in the Mid-West, so maybe it's OK. And on the third hand, Scandinavians are all liberal socialists, don'cha know?

In any case, it's getting hard to find anything that can't be considered part of bomb making. Are you breathing oxygen? Don't you know that most explosives work via a reaction with oxygen in the air?

Hmmm ... Do you know a time and place were you could trust them?

If you think this is something new and unusual, you haven't read much history ...

For their entertainment value? ;-)

Here in the Boston area, we're still making jokes about the 2007 bomb scare caused by a set of "art works" (actually ads), small electronic displays hung up mostly along main streets around the city. Even the Marathon bombing didn't stop the humor surrounding the police takedown of this "art". Rather, the bombing is generally understood as a major bit of evidence that all the supposed security precautions are worthless. "They can stop street artists (or ad agencies ;-), but they can't stop actual terrorists." We also hear versions of what this story will no doubt trigger: comments to the effect that it's no surprise that the US can no longer match the technology of most 3rd-world countries; just look at what they do to a kid trying to become competent in some technical specialty. They obviously don't want us turning our kids into chemical engineers, or any other kinds of engineers. To the authorities, that stuff looks a lot like terrorism, y'know.

Stories like this are much of what led to the rise of the phrase "security theater". (If you're not familiar with it, just google it.)

Actually, this particular bias is to be expected, for both sexes. You'd expect women to worry mostly about unprosecuted rapes, since they're more likely than men to be raped. And you'd expect men to worry mostly about false rape accusations, since they're more likely that women to be falsely accused of rape.

Similarly, you'd expect people with large bank accounts to be more worried about identity thefts than people who store all their money under their mattress, while you'd expect poor people to be more worried about armed robbery of what little cash they have.

People tend to worry mostly about things that can effect them, for obvious reasons.

Basically good advice, but the reality is often subtler than that. Sometimes, you need both a good memory for the facts, and also a good memory of exactly what you really said. Ask anyone who's ever run for an elected audience. Your opponents will extract a portion of what you actually said, tweak it just a bit, and claim you said something rather different from what you really said.

And publicising what you actually said, with the expectation that it'll expose your opponents' trickery, isn't always helpful. Google "invented the internet" for a nice example of how poorly exposing the facts can work. At least in the political arena, it's unlikely that anything will have much effect on the prevalence of brazen liars.

Mark Twain also said "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

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. ;-)

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. ;-)

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.