The tendency of Firefox to preserve its own DNS cach means I cannot use it when hopping from VPN to VPN with split DNS running. unless I configure and install my _own_ local DNS server to auto-reconfigure every time I activate a VPN. I'm afraid it's become unusable for me for real work and testing when switching from internal to external website access as I debug network and configuration issues: it's the only browser that fails this way.

The European Union has been far more effective than the Maginot Line. That was one of the first mistakes France made that lead to WWII: being too harsh to Germany at the end of WWI, so that the German people were ripe for radicalization. The French should never have needed to defend themselves at all. Diplomatically, it's terrible. Highly provocative, loud in announcing distrust of a neighbor, and it looks weak next to a robust military.

But since the French couldn't bring themselves to make a lasting peace with Germany then, they had to think of defense. The Line is still a bad idea. When Germany reoccupied the Ruhr, all France had to do was rattle some sabers and they would have pulled right out. Instead they cowered behind a wall. When the war at last broke out, suppose the French had figured out that the Ardennes Forest was passable and had to be covered, either by the Line or the army. The Germans in turn would know this, and could get past the Line in many other ways-- paratroops, or another front the Line does not guard like maybe Switzerland or even Spain, or possibly a surprise amphibious assault via u-boat. They could also assault the Line. It can't dodge artillery. Punch through at a few points, and ignore the rest.

Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it.

The beauty of crying that the sky is falling is that if you say it long enough, eventually you'll be right.

While I'm a bit skeptical of the study after reading TFA, they avoid that particular pitfall and put their money where their mouth is. They conclude that if things don't change, we're looking at about 15 more years before collapse.

If you want to commit suicide, why not ditch the plane straight down? Why would you plot a course somewhere into the middle of the Indian Ocean?

Note: I'm extremely skeptical of the suicide theory. If you want to kill yourself, you just go and do it. You don't kill a planeload of passengers with you unless you've got a serious axe to grind. But since we're discussing what ifs...

What if you're Muslim, and your religion frowns upon suicide? Pointing the plane straight down is kinda like active suicide. Flying a plane into the middle of the ocean until it runs out of fuel, leaving you no way to save it (and yourself) is more like passive suicide. Same difference between putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger, vs. swallowing a hundred sleeping pills. Same end result, except you are not in direct control of what actually kills you in the latter.

Another angle I haven't seen (haven't seen it much since the 1980s in fact) is the insurance scam. You're in dire financial straits (credit card bills, gambling losses, whatever). You can't see a way out of it but you don't want that burden to fall upon your family. You take out a life insurance policy which would pay for all your debts and then some. Then you kill yourself in a way that seems like an accident. Or in the case of an airliner since they have black boxes, kill yourself in a way that those black boxes will never be found.

As an older programmer, I'm fond of some very good quality, older tools such as "webmin". Not all the modules added to it are excellent, but its very clean and very flexible for many core system utilities such as BIND based DNS. It's also much more robust than any configuration tool that relies on a separate, manually configured back end database.

I'm afraid that this usually means two entirely different interfaces, with overlapping features and writing to the same configurations. That is more than twice the development cost, since they involve distinct styles and expertise to develop or manage and the _negotiation_ between the two styles is an added cost. And it makes debugging more than twice as expensive, since tests have to involve both sets of interfaces and switching between them.

This is prohibitively expensive: the result is usually that the "plain" interface lacks critical features that are only available in the more sophisticated tool.

In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.

"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."

Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.

However, the idea that the WinRT / Modern App platform needs to go away in a future Windows version is also misguided. What you refer to as "Metro" fills a useful function that isn't otherwise served on Windows, which is enabling touch screen use, and it does a very nice job of that.

If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).

Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.

And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.

Imagine if you wanted an Apple computer you had to buy it through Best Buy or Radio Shack, and dealing with their personnel. The companies that do business this way are maddening.

Questionable analogy. Apple's laptops are actually made by Quanta. Almost no laptop manufacturer actually makes their own laptops. The vast majority are made by a handful of Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) who do both the design and manufacturing (as opposed to an OEM who only does the manufacturing). In essence, Apple, HP, Dell, etc are the "dealers" who handle sales and aftermarket service. Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Pegatron are the "automakers."

'No one could possibly fail to understand my simple user interface.'

One of my first website coding projects was a simple survey. I modeled it after the numerous like/dislike surveys you see everywhere, both on the web and on paper. "Dislike" at one end, 5 radio buttons in the midde, and "Like" at the other end. Totally obvious how to use it, right?

About a third of the testers sent me email asking me what they were supposed to do.

we will NEVER get a cellphone that is perfect for "geeks" not in the sense of a tiny pocket device.

The problem isn't that nobody is willing to make a "perfect" cellphone for geeks. The problem is that when you design something for a limited market, its design cost has to be amortized over fewer sales. Consequently it costs a lot more.

Unfortunately the same geeks who clamor for these features also demand rock-bottom pricing. They look at your expensive "geek" phone, complain why it's priced so high compared to "consumer" phones, and refuse to buy. The geek phone maker then goes bankrupt, causing the geeks to complain that nobody makes phones that suit their needs. The industries where the limited markets do not have this cost bias - the customers are willing to fork over the extra money - are all doing well (performance car enthusiasts, off-roaders, PC gaming enthusiasts, audiophiles, "prosumer" amateur photographers, etc).

Wall Stree with its immoral eye on profits at any cost ends up calling the shots.

Profit is what the economy translates improved economic efficiency into. So if you improve the efficiency of a useful mechanism or process, the economy converts it into profit for you. Calling it immoral is equivalent to calling all technological progress immoral.

The problem is things other than improved efficiency can also translate into profit (e.g. a scam or con job). Those things deservedly need to be labeled as immoral. But it's also immoral to not even attempt to distinguish between the two. Like calling all men rapists just because they've used their penis.

It may be my eyes, the angle at which I use my screen, the brightness and contrast I prefer, or something else, but the background color has always been almost undetectable to me.

Google's background is white - 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The old sponsored links background was 254, 247, 221 (RGB). Our eyes are pretty bad at detecting differences in blue, so it didn't take much of a bad monitor or settings to clip the colors to where you couldn't distinguish the two backgrounds. This mostly happens on poor quality low-gamut screens (laptops!) where the colors are so pale, the manufacturer or user pushes the saturation to try to make them stand out more. So 0 => 0, 100 => 125, 200 => 250, and anything 205-255 is clipped and the same shade since that's the most saturated color the screen is capable of displaying.

The new "Ad" icon is 234, 176, 53 (RGB). If you can't see it, you either need to replace your monitor (and marvel at all the wonderful pictures on the web you've been missing out), or get your eyes checked.

And they opt for a small yellowish graphical element that is barely different from the background color?

I just pulled the new layout into Photoshop. The background is 255, 255, 255 (RGB). The yellow "Ad" label is 234, 176, 53 (RGB), or since we're talking about a white background, 0%, 32%, 92%, 0% in CMYK. If that is "barely different from the background color," you need to throw away your monitor and buy a new one. No don't try to sell it used; it'd be a crime to inflict such a poor screen onto anyone.

Good to know--I will have to try again. Glad they fixed this, as it was really a bummer