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That's what happens when you don't throw away everything in the old universe.

Hiding the extensions, is quite frankly, a slow motion disaster. Thousands and thousands of people clicking on the wrong file, staring in bafflement as to why they have multiple duplicate filenames. It cost, I'm sure, millions of hours of lost productivity worldwide over the years, all because some 20-something C++ programmer had a brainwave. That guy should have been fired the day after the release.

Moral of the story? STOP HIDING STUFF! I need to know where my folder is. I need to know what the filenames are. I need to know if they're read-write, read-only and what the permissions are. I need the IMPORTANT stuff easily available. What I don't need to know about are the friggin' media extensions, the color, font, size or any other trivial fact about the file.

I see that one a lot. The assumption that because the software vendor did it one way, That's. The. Way. It's. Done.

It's nonsense of course. Our testing system was designed for the most common use case. Maybe 50 dialogs with 5 or 6 controls each. Our system has thousands of dialogs, some of which have as many as 50 controls on a dialog (It's old, legacy, badly designed. I know....). To make that system scale, we had to develop our own abstraction system, an API and a different object mapping system.

In the end, it worked quite nicely. Had we just used it as was designed out of the box, we'd have scrapped it by now, or quadrupled our staff running on that maintenance treadmill. Vendors can be pretty bad at scaling or special cases.

In a high tech world, we can no longer afford to be governed by the innumerate, technically challenged and the uneducated. Democracy as currently constructed is failing.

I'm sorry about your reading difficulties. Here's a simplified definition that you might be able to follow. DSM-V-TR has the complete version. FYI, despite my current job as a software designer/programmer and system administrator, my degree is in psychology. What's your's?

Greedy sociopaths worldwide manipulate the aggressive en masse via the media, monetary reward and punishment systems, and if necessary, brute force to further their acquisitive nature, which has no end, and ultimately, no point.

Anyone who wants to code, will learn to code. It's a self selecting group.

And thus we demonstrate the kind of ecological problems that can happen as we try and scale solar up to industrial scale levels. That's 2,900 acres of local ecological disruption through lack of sunlight.

While solar has many strong points, and is great for small scale local power, you have to be careful about how you grow it, and where you put it.

With cameras, phone tabs, smart phone monitoring, and computer monitoring.

Seriously. Let's turn it around. Make sure the watchers are watched, from the lowliest policemen to the president of the USA. I'd be in favor of monitoring all corporate transactions too, and banning cash or otherwise untraceable transactions for corporations.

In a democracy, citizens need privacy. As a society, we can't afford to have it for politicians or corporations.

Or so all other evidence indicates. That said, is there any reason why what we call the "big bang" represents nothing more than an unmeasurable atemporal interval between otherwise quite mundane spatio-temporal domains? That would satisfy the condition of "eternal existence" and leave room for the big bang.

In other words, big bang, followed by big crunch some xx billion years later. Rinse, lather and repeat.

The theory assumes limited interaction between simulations. They're probably using RS-232 cables because that's all the budget would pay for.

And provide a little training to experienced programmers who want to learn new skills. Their faux shortage of experienced, competent programming staff would disappear in a year.

Of course, this is beyond the comprehension of a newly minted MBA or HR director. They want money-saving flashy miracles that will get them their next bonus in the next quarter, before they move on to avoid the next re-org. Solving problems is irrelevant - to be avoided if it interferes with the next crazy bonus scheme and all of its unintended consequences.

It's the only way to be sure....

Seriously though. C++ is one of the most powerful, complete commercial languages.... with a code interface and syntax designed by Satan. You couldn't have *designed* a coding system that would better encourage missteps, fuck-ups, obfuscation and a plethora of errors.

It's a product of 90s math nerds whose machismo came from knowing more and better than regular folks. It was never designed to get work done efficiently; it was designed to feed the egos of C++ programmers.

Better to take a relatively sane language like C# and make it scalable to the point where it can do everything C++ can do with a more restricted syntax and structure that ensures consistency and readability.

Here's the reality.

Men and women are different. They *come out* different. How many of you parents out there have noticed that their little girls usually play with dolls while boys play with trucks, despite your best efforts to equalize?

You're fighting human programming. Testosterone does things to the human nervous system that make it act in certain ways, like enhancing spatial reasoning, agression, and so on.

You can try and jimmy social structures all you want. You won't change this, unless and until you get to genetic and/or neurological programming at a level we haven't achieved yet.

When the terminators finally arrive, they'll be naked, hot and serving bacon.

I, for one, welcome our new sexy, gastrointestinal over... ladies