Wait, what? Supreme court justices have political opinions? Who would have thunk it.

The first fallacy of HCI is they start with things like user surveys. Users always say they want contradictory things like "make the same interface work well on a desktop and a phone". Anybody can see these are mutually exclusive things, but users say that sort of thing all the time. Users can never tell you what they actually want/need until you give them what they ask for.

The second fallacy here is that HCI is somehow scientific. HCI types try to sound scientific, there are statistics and measurements, and even so called laws, but interface design is not scientific because its acceptance is based on individual preference. Its sort of like saying "We have statistically analyzed popular music and produced the ultimate song based on users requests and what they listened to before". So these UI's are the UI equivalent of the Monkees or Milli Vanilli.

Designing UI's based on telemetry, user studies or Fitt's "Law" does not insure a good UI, some common sense must be used as well. The New and Improved Windows 8 interface, for example, does not permit multiple overlapping windows and the browser does not run plugins. Those are considered features not bugs. Statistics will not fix stupid.

...because I can't block the ads in them like I can in my browser (Mercury Browser on iPhone).

Yes the catalog of movies (films suck, I want movies) is bad. I want popular movies not some drek with subtitles. Truly there is nothing entertaining to watch that isn't at least 10 years old, and I've seen all the 10 year old movies I wanted to see about 9 years ago.

...suck it Trebek?

...I don't view ads on the internet. Ever. Not on my phone, not on my desktop/laptop, nowhere. The only advertising I see is on live sporting events on TV. Otherwise I watch TV delayed on my DVR and zap through the ads. They can waste all the money they want on me. I'm not looking at ads.

1) Pinned pages in Windows 7 are a great feature, but addons are disabled for pinned apps. It seems likely to me that MS is saying to online developers that if they customize their pages for pinning MS will grant them full control of the look and feel of the pages (including if ads are displayed) and what functionality the user can access in that window (spell checkers, password databases, etc). This makes the feature all but unusable for many pages that would be great as pinned pages like Gmail and Facebook or even Slashdot

2) The absence of a built-in spell checker. I would be willing to make a small wager that more people write more words in browsers today than in dedicated word processing programs. Think how many people use a web browser as their primary email client. Think how much stuff is written daily on Slashdot and other community sites. The browser is a major tool for creation of text content. It should have built in tools to aid in that process.

... that today, more people will write more words in a Web Browser than in a Word Processing program. And MS does not think its a good idea to include a spell checker in IE.

I don't see any ads, ever on the internet. Yet one more compelling reason to use adblock.

...when science says they know something it means they know it provisionally. Think how long the weight of a Proton has been "settled science". And now? Not so settled. Think about some other things people might talk about as "settled science".

This is not a knock on science, science is supposed to consider everything it knows provisionally and test it constantly. What it is a knock on is people who fail to consider the provisional nature of scientific knowledge when it comes to setting social and government policy.

Is this how screwed up NASA is, reduced to releasing video games as opposed to sending people into space?

Death,

By snu snu!!

Carry on.

They've built one of these things, flown it around and measured its fuel consumption. No you say? Then all there are artists' renderings of speculative aircraft that on some computer models appear to perform in the manner stated. Nothing to see here, move along.

I initially thought the article was saying google was going to answer questions its users had about its service like, why is Gmail down and when will it be up. Or why can't I turn off threading in Gmail? Or why does the gmail address book look like a refugee form 1998? Just a few questions I'd like answered directly as a Google Apps premium user.

Its in gconf. To change it do the following: ATL-f2 gconf-editor to open gconf-editor Navigate to: /apps/metacity/general/button_layout edit text to put : in front of string (instead of at end) if you just want the tools moved to the right. if you want the tools to be rearranged like they used to be the string should read :minimize,maximize,close Pretty easy fix, but annoying. You also will have to do this each time the themes package is updated. Changing themes will not solve this problem, but this gconf edit will.