Luna 3 was an amazing mission for the time. Give the Soviets credit where credit is due.

Your Freudian slip suggests you need a vacation.

I've written music generators that produce "pleasant" music from scratch (by following time-tested harmonic, chord, and rhythm patterns and ratio's). The music may pass the Lovelace test, but will probably never win any awards.

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

So if we finally figure out how the human brain works, it will fail the Lovelace test just because we know how it works? A silly rule.

Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Jerry Sanders (Heads of MicroSoft, Intel, and AMD, Advanced Micro Devices) were in a high-powered business meeting. During the serious, tense discussion, a beeping noise suddenly is emitted from where Jerry is sitting. Jerry says, "Oh, that's my beeper. Gentlemen, excuse me, I need to take this call." Jerry lifts his wristwatch to his ear and begins talking into the end of his tie. After completing this call, he notices the others are staring at him. Jerry explains, "Oh, this is my new personal communication system. I have an earpiece built into my watch and a microphone sewn into the end of my tie. That way I can take a call anywhere."

The others nod, and the meeting continues.

Five minutes later, the discussion is again interrupted when Andy starts beeping. He states, "Excuse me gentlemen, this must be an important call." Andy taps his earlobe and begins talking into thin air. When he completes his call, he notices the others staring at him and explains, "I also have a personal communication system. My earpiece is actually implanted in my earlobe, and the microphone is actually embedded in this fake tooth."

The others nod, and the meeting continues.

Five minutes later, the discussion is again interrupted when Bill emits a thunderous fart. He looks up at the others staring at him and says, "Somebody quickly get me a piece of paper... I'm receiving a fax!"

But I like my buns crispy on top.

uh, don't read too much into that.

I invented the "One Click" wheel.

Earth used to be a cute little sun.

But you are thinking logically, not like a PHB.

Military = Republican Welfare

I realize that there is an overlap between "document layout" issues and GUI issues, but believe that perhaps we have to separate these issues in order to focus on doing each well.

My draft GUI markup suggestion(s) uses HTML as a base because it's established and does initial layout "good enough". (Although I'd like an MDI option added: true sub-windows.) It's mostly the interaction between parts and pages that is lacking, such as drag-and-drop, scrolling tables, and value or element refreshing without re-rendering the entire page (AJAX-like without AJAX).

You can see some of these suggestions at: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiMark...

Darwin is wrong wrong wrong about global warming! Government scientists have hit a line-drive touchdown in their level of deceit.

Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources.

I don't think that will sell. Nuclear power has a bad rap despite the fact that objective studies show deaths per watt or medical costs per watt to be equal to or better than most alternatives.

Nuclear just gives voters the jeebies; that's the way it is.

"Big dust" is "sand". Big sand is pebbles. Big pebbles are rocks. Big rocks are boulders. Big boulders are mountains. Big mountains are planets. Big planets are stars. Big stars are something you don't want to be around.

Work on your grammar, moron.

Tools are simpler and easier to use than ever

They are? Only if you or your boss are willing to live with a generic out-of-the-box template or style. In some cases one can say, "That's all the tool allows me to do", but often the customer wants to custom-fit it to their needs and work patterns, not the example prototype. Otherwise, they'd use FileMakerPro and skip you and you'd never know about it.

And if you go outside of the box, you will realize the web is indeed "just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks". Web GUI's that attempt to approach the power and flexibility of desktop apps are often a real pain to make, have jittery movements, break in the next browser version, and use frameworks the new guy is likely unfamiliar with because there are so many. Time for a new web GUI standard; the existing attempts keep falling on their face and try to turn JavaScript into a GUI OS language, which it wasn't meant for. We need fresh standards, dammit! Stop making excuses for the f8cking kludgeWeb. Think Different, Think desktop GUI, and Think Right.

I've kicked around ideas for a "GUI markup language" on the c2 wiki which basically takes the common desktop GUI idioms which have been around 20 odd years, and make them markup declarations so that one does not have to micro-manage GUI handling when making applications. (Granted, portable devices have created a new set of popular UI idioms, but they are not too different from prior ones.)