If their "needs" are to have every app look and behave exactly like some obsolete physical object, then frankly yes. Old people are not incapable of learning or adapting, and they've already had to do just that for many years now.

Bit of a strawman, there. When Apple revamped the Address Book app for Lion, they made it into a "book". Gee, sure looks nice! But suddenly you couldn't use the old three-pane view (which showed more information and was just better at navigating many contacts) because it didn't fit into the "book" metaphor. Not only that, but being a "book" implies lots of things that you couldn't actually do with Address Book. As John Siracusa wrote in his Lion review:

The three-pane view is kinda back in Mountain Lion, but you still can't adjust the relative sizes of the panes (presumably because the two sides of a real book are always the same size). This restriction makes no sense for a digital contact app and makes the app less useful, but it's dictated by the designer's slavish devotion to the book metaphor. A minor thing perhaps, but as a designer, you should know that these little things can quickly add up to make a product utterly (and needlessly) frustrating to use.

Exactly right. Any idiot can make a model that fits past data, but these models all mysteriously disappear when their predictive power is put to the test (only to be replaced by newer, "better" models that simply reflect more recent events).

The fact that these guys released their model before it had a chance to predict anything doesn't inspire confidence.

I was poking fun at your misuse of the word "literally". Maybe you shouldn't have cut English class so much?

So is he standing on it, or flying over it? Or perhaps he's using it as toilet paper?

Is your one-hour estimate based on anything, or just a guess?

Can we? I'd suggest that most people are unaware of any such trend, perhaps because it has happened too gradually and too unevenly. Indeed:

Exactly. Consumers don't know or care about low latency, so the market doesn't deliver it (that plus lack of competition among ISPs in general, but that's another kettle of fish).

We need a simple, clear way for ISPs to measure latency. It needs to boil down to a single number that ISPs can report alongside bandwidth and that non-techies can easily understand. It doesn't need to be completely accurate, and can't be: ISPs will exaggerate just like they do with bandwidth, just like auto manufacturers do with fuel efficiency, etc. What matters is that ISPs can't outright make up numbers, so that a so-called "40 ms" connection will reliably have lower average latency than a "50 ms" connection. That should be enough for the market to start putting competitive pressure on ISPs.

What kind of measure could be used for this purpose? Perhaps some kind of standardized latency test suite, like what the Acid tests were to web standards compliance? Certainly there would be significant additional difficulties, but could it be done?

In the general case, that's extremely unlikely to happen barring threat of violence (by the racists or by the government). It takes only one entrepreneur, looking to scoop up easy profits ignored by the racists, to crack a market wide open. At that point the racists face the choice of being out-competed, or dropping their prejudices and adapting to reality.

In the case of a trade secret that a single company holds, there are several responses. One is that the rest of the market is likely to reverse-engineer or otherwise duplicate the secret quickly, given all the potential profits at stake. Another is that such a cure is more likely to be discovered by a non-racist than by a racist, because the market punishes irrational discrimination as described above (meaning there should be few successful, racist drug companies). Yet another is that if such a racist company discovered a miracle cure today and was prevented by law from selling it only to certain races, mightn't it just destroy the formula instead (since we're assuming it's willing to ignore potential profits)?

It's a bit like the what-if objection to private property: "What if some rich guy buys up all the land in the world, becoming its de-facto ruler?" Yes, that's "possible" in the sense that the definition of private property doesn't preclude it; but it has never come close to happening and is so unlikely to ever happen (for various reasons, including that the price of the last few parcels of land would be near-infinite) that it doesn't constitute a realistic objection.

Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games have been doing it for decades.

The way I read that announcement, Red Hat is donating $100,000 total, divided in some unspecified way among those four beneficiaries. Still a nice gesture, though.

I thought it was "He who writes the Checks tips the Balance". I guess that's why they're having trouble adopting it in Europe, since they'd have to spell it "Cheques" instead.

I don't think the media industry execs are ESR's intended audience; it is likely impossible to convince them. As Upton Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Unfortunately, this is the exact reason why the letter will also have no effect whatsoever upon its intended recipients.

Let's step back a moment and examine the bigger picture. Lots of people support patents because they believe patents encourage innovation, and indeed that's more-or-less the Constitution's stated purpose in granting Congress the power to issue them:

But here's the question I have never, not even once, seen a patent advocate address: where is the evidence that patents actually promote innovation (i.e., that they cause a net increase in inventions, discoveries, etc.)? Indeed, there are some compelling arguments being made against patents and other forms of intellectual property, like Boldrin and Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly, mentioned previously on Slashdot. Should we not demand that such a costly and disruptive regime as the patent system be supported by hard evidence that it actually does what it's intended to do?

Really? The snarky "I bet you don't read much" retort from the person who apparently hasn't learned how to capitalize?

Don't ignore Fitts' Law-- the menu bar at the top of the screen has an effectively infinite height, so even though you have to move your mouse farther, you can just slam it to the top of the screen and only have to aim horizontally. This is actually more important with higher-resolution screens, as the UI elements are smaller (at least until we finally get a resolution-independent UI, any decade now...).

Besides, the idea is to use keyboard shortcuts for menu items you use frequently. Much better than having to aim for a tiny rectangle on the screen, wherever it's located.

For better or worse, Apple is trying to do away with making users know or care about whether an app is running, much like how things work on iOS. For example, there's a new API in Lion called Automatic Termination that allows apps to let the system automatically terminate them when the system needs to free up resources. See John Siracusa's Lion review for more details.

Oh, come on. How common do you think it is for users to want a second instance of an application, rather than just another window? I mean, I've only wanted to do it maybe once or twice in the five or so years I've had this Mac, and I'm very much a power user.

Your perspective is very hard for me to understand. I couldn't care less about the story, or the characters and their motivations. Take a modern game, cut out all the dialogue/cutscenes, remove all the pretty textures etc., and it would still be the same game as far as I'm concerned. If I wanted story or characters, I'd be reading a book.

It's like when I hear people praising the lyrics of a song-- it's incomprehensible to me, since I view the human voice in song as just another instrument. I don't really care about what the artist is trying to "communicate" to me; it's all about how the music strikes my ear. Otherwise I'd be reading poetry.