Making timezone calculations in an application is ridiculously painful even with helpful TZ libraries. In my last program I just decided to ignore DST in my calculations and just fudge everything. This is particularly annoying because it needs to calculate the time in New York, but the computer it lives on is currently in Norway and North America and Europe switch their clocks at seemingly random times each year.

For this particular program it doesn't matter *too* much, but it does lead to weird failures occasionally. Fortunately it's not in a production environment, it's just something that runs around the house.

What evidenced based arguments can you site? The rationale I have read for DLS involve saving electricity, but as this article suggests, not only does DLS not save electricity, it may actually use more. It also goes on to cite studies that suggest that DLS may actually cause heart attacks. Farmers tend to hate DLS because they get up when the need to get up with no relationship to the clock. When the time jumps around, they still get up when they need to get up, they're just suddenly one hour out of sync with the wall time.

Though to be fair, it may save some traffic accidents due to allowing more people to drive home in the daylight and it may provide more revenue for some retailers. Though there's plenty of evidence to suggest that sleep disruption (like moving someone's wake and sleep time) causes more accidents. The cited article studied shift workers, but it applies to anyone who's regular sleep cycle is suddenly disrupted.

All in all, it looks like DLS shifts on whole causes lots of hassle, probably costs money and lives and should its self die a quiet death in retirement.

Excactly!

There's no logical argument for the time change. None. The farming argument doesn't make any sense. Farmers don't give a rip what the wall-time is. They get up when it's time to get up and get the work done. They go to bed when the work day is done and they're sleepy. If you have to get up at 3:30 to milk the cows, you get up at 3:30. If the wall clock suddenly says it's 4:30, you still get up at the same time because the cows, corn, and sun don't give a flying FSCK what the wall clock says.

As far as providing more natural light in offices, that may have been true in 1930 when buildings were built without central HVAC with window access for everyone in mind. Though there's precious little evidence that DLS made a bit of difference in the then either. Now all but the "greenest" buildings (and some WalMarts) have their lights on during the work day weather the sun is shining or its pitch black outside.

And my rant continues with the horrible effects on your health. Suddenly changing humans sleep patterns is terrible for general healthfulness and sleep cycles.

In short take your DLS and shove it where the sun will never shine

I think that the United States has a vested political interest in controlling the sale of oil. Which is not to suggest that you are wrong per se, but I think that the US oil policies are better understood in the context of hegemony than fair trade. However, the oil industry has been putting all of their propaganda efforts towards lifting this ban; I mark a half-dozen articles in Forbes alone within the last two years. As long as they can keep away from any concerns about national security, they might get their wish.

The slides are here. While I respect the idea that video is an inefficient means to convey information but, since this is an issue that you seem to care about, you may want to take the time to educate yourself. I believe it is possible to speed up playback of youtube videos. This article conveys some similar points, but not much depth. Here is an architectural overview.

Why don't you go over some of this information, and we can take this conversation over again from the top. You should find most of your concerns answered. I'm not particularly interested in spoon-feeding it to you, however -- please accept my apologies on that score.

You must not be an X11 developer. You are also, if you can talk about Linux becoming somehow comparable to FreeBSD, not very aware of Linux usage. Linux sees far more use as a server than a desktop, and while it's possible that some other project starts eating up marketshare in that segment, I would be extremely surprised if that happened, and then we have the supercomputer, embedded, and mobile markets.

Your post is devoid of technical arguments for X11, because X11 is technically a clusterfuck. It does far too many things, and none of them well. The print server is probably the worst offense there, but by no means the only one. How many rendering interfaces are there, again? Tell me about why exactly I can't adjust my computer's volume while the screensaver is active, and how that is a good idea.

The only approximation of a coherent argument against Wayland is a repetitive drone of "network transparency means my ssh -X works as expected". Cool, but that's not what that means and that's not going away, and certainly not any time soon. Wayland is not ready for production, and not expected to be anytime soon, and it's blindingly obvious to everyone that it will not be considered ready for production until ssh -X works correctly.

I have to ask if you're even a developer, because my limited programming experiences have led me to believe that if an experienced dev says that the entire approach is crap and needs to be scrapped, more than likely this is true. It is unreasonable to expect that the display solutions of 30 years ago are remotely appropriate for today. It's also a deeply held Unix principle that programs should have a limited scope; why anyone would complain about a "stripped down windowing system" is beyond me. Especially with all of the obsolete, unused crap that even X11's adherents cannot deny that it contains.

So one the one side we have technical and philosophical arguments, and on the other -- please, please have something better than "ssh -X won't work". If you haven't seen the video, it's amusing and informative. Also if you haven't seen the video, you don't know what you're arguing.

Adding RFID tags to equipment and encouraging people to swipe it out as it is used might be a good idea. But short of adding a supply clerk or using a badge system I don't see many other options. Maybe there's some work-study budget for a freshman to sit in the lab and check out equipment?

I heard on Freakonomics about putting up web cams and paying someone in a far-off land to ensure hand-washing compliance. Perhaps a system like that might work.

One of my arguments was Jefferson's, so you are bizarrely dishonest in claiming that it was based on any fallacy of mine. You are also incorrect in identifying said fallacies.

If patents prevent competition, as you assert, then why is it that Apple is not the first smartphone inventor, nor Microsoft the first OS inventor, nor Dell the PC inventor? I would be harder pressed to find markets that were dominated by a single entity by virtue of patents; perhaps you can suggest some. In the strict sense though I am afraid the case is unassailable, since unless a potentially-infringing party is competing there is no case to be made for infringement. One may force an entity to cease infringing, but you can't prevent it. Even getting an injunction during a lawsuit can be tricky, as evidenced by the Apple/Samsung litigations. I am not the world's most ardent capitalist by any means, but a for-profit, government-granted monopoly is a hard thing to justify in any circumstances.

I admit you didn't say explicitly what I ascribed to you. Your example however utilized in the positive sense an inventor and as adversary a MegaCorp, which is a strong case for patents but not the common one. The example you chose was one where patents were a good thing for the "little guy". Far more often, patents are held by "big guys", who need much less help in dealing with their competition. Even if it were not the usual case for patents to be used abusively, there's no use pretending they are not a two-edged sword. Disputing one with any entity having a $100M patent portfolio would be risky no matter how righteous your cause.

If you have the time, you might attempt a real response, but I suspect that you will have to succumb to a more nuanced view on patents; Jefferson makes a compelling case, the more so because he served as the first Patent Commissioner. I will also suggest that you might not need to ask why people require explanations of these things, if you actually read the counterarguments.

I submit I am the highest authority on this specific subject here on slashdot. I grew up in Valdez, AK, the closest town to the spill. I was there when it happened. There is some documentary footage somewhere of myself and my siblings at one of these oil-soaked beaches. I've known friends to go out and do these beach surveys looking for oil, and I've fished and kayaked throughout Prince William Sound.

Firstly I have to say that, unless one goes specifically looking for it, this oil is invisible. The environment has entirely recovered, the salmon run is healthy, and there are as many sea birds, sea otters, and sea lions as there ever have been.

Secondly, the other posters make a very good points about the relative safety of oil tankers vs oil pipelines. I will additionally say that tankers are better protected from deliberate damage than pipelines. I don't know where you're getting your costs from, but I make the average oil tanker to be in the $100M range, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System cost $8B.

I don't know if you know about it, but there is also a proposed natural gas pipeline which was intended to run through Canada to the States. Extrapolating from the cost per mile of TAPS, an oil pipeline would probably be in the range of $15B. Setting aside whether it is actually better for the environment, it is a lot easier to suggest that environmental concerns trump economic ones when it's not your $15B.

Nuclear power is probably a good option for Alaska, whereas solar is pretty much off the table. Hopefully one day someone will take advantage of the tidal energy in the Cook Inlet as well, one lobe of that (Turnagain Arm) having the third-highest tides in the world. There are one or two problems though with putting nuclear reactors in geologically active places though, and the NRC isn't exactly putting applications through quickly at the moment.

Personally though, from having witnessed one of the larger oil spills in history, I don't really find them all that concerning.

You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing. You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp. In practice, neither of these things are true, and the primary beneficiaries of patent litigation are lawyers.

Patents are the right to squash competition. Competition in the ideal sense is a very efficient way to allocate resources. If one company is first to market, and a competitor makes a product which is "better, faster, and shinier," what exactly is wrong with letting the market decide who gets rewarded?

Your argument hinges on the role of patents in encouraging people to bring products to market, which is actually an orthogonal process. Patents are intended to promote the disclosure of ideas. All well and good, but maybe an automatic monopoly isn't necesarily the best way to accomplish either of those things.

There are two really big problems with patents. The first is that almost all knowledge is derivative of other knowledge. Certain persons with an excess of self-interest will argue that such a thing as originality exists in some distinguishable form. I submit that even for the invention of fire there was prior art, and every invention since then was either an incremental adaptation or based on some other preexisting knowledge. Keep in mind that the ones who add to our knowledge of the world are called scientists, not inventors.

The second problem is embodied in the phrase "intellectual property." Jefferson noted that there is nothing less suited to ownership than an idea. I could not possibly improve on his argument.

Patents are a granted right, not a natural one. You are as free to pursue financial gain by sweat of the brow or toil of the mind with or without their existence. I'm not, frankly, interested in pursuing a discussion of whether there is some better way to encourage inventors, but the discussion is not advanced by conjuring a trivial and misleading hypothetical situation, ignoring actual practice, and presupposing the necessity of some legal instrument unknown through most of human history.

You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.

The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.

I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?

Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.

Not so much, actually.

Most people leveling do it alone or maybe in a small group. No need to think about 90% of the abilities a class has while doing that because the leveling content needs to be tuned to people who are novices. Most people don't want - despite playing an MMO - to be forced to play with other people in a group at all times in order to level, so you can't touch this leveling content.

Most people leveling don't even set foot in a dungeon in WoW. A dungeon being fundamentally different than world questing, and yet still not requiring a player to be very good with their class or understand their class.

A tiny percentage of players set foot in a raid EVER, let alone while leveling - even with new things like a very content-tourist mode like the Looking for Raid feature that was added. Raid mechanics are fundamentally different than dungeons or world questing, so really, require you to play your class in a very different way than you would have experienced while leveling; abilities that seem pointless while leveling suddenly make sense to use, and patterns that made sense while leveling suddenly become counter to survival.

What IS true is that, if you want to raid you need to learn how to play your class. But, I don't think 20-100 hours of doing things that bear no real relation to how you will end up playing your class is the way to do it. Personally, I think the idea of having proving grounds (which they kind of do now) wherein the player is hand held by NPCs and given tons of feedback on how to play their specific class, what abilities to use and why, in game, would be the way to go.

"Hey, new paladin person in a tank role - I'm going to make that big guy over there very, very angry in a moment, and he can kill me but he won't hurt you as much, so I want you to press that flashing button on your screen - it's called a taunt - when he starts chasing me; it'll make him go after you, not me!" If you fail? "It's okay, fortunately we have people around who can make everything better when I get beaten to a pulp... Let's try this again..."

"Hey, priest type person in a healer role - I'm about to fight several small creatures that individually don't do much to me but hurt me slowly over time. Cast that spell that's flashing on me once every 10 seconds or so in order to throw a spell on me that will heal me up slowly over time."

"Hey, shooty damage type person, I'm going to beat up 4 things, but I want you to focus on hurting ONLY the one that is my primary target." "Hey, so these guys aren't stupid, they're going to try to hurt you - see that purple stuff on the floor over there? If it appears under you during the fight, MOVE AWAY FROM IT!"

Etc. and so on. Have people go through that, have it be so that a veteran player who is familiar with game mechanics could complete all the tasks in under an hour, but where a newbie player who knows nothing might wind up taking 10 hours or so to do the quests well enough, and you're good.

The problem WoW has - and most MMO's have - is that the designers assumed that other players would give solid feedback to people on their teams in dungeons and so on. Unfortunately, most people are assholes and not willing to take any time with newbies to straighten them out. Since the playerbase by and large won't help other people learn, there needs to be an in game process for it.

tl;dr: There needs to be a way to teach people how to play their class, but the current way of doing it (leveling) doesn't teach them anything that is actually relevant.

Because I can't see these kinds of shoes being the type we could wear on airplanes.