HP never invented a round mouse.
A fantastically expensive cube floating on perspex.
A slippery "which way up is it" remote for their TV appliance.
Keys so flat they're worse than typing on glass.
RAM so expensive you'd think you were in a fancy restaurant whose only profits came from side dishes and the wine list.
The dysfunctional disaster that was MobileMe.
And, why... yes, I am an Apple fan.

Another perspective, not corporate, is that I reported to them an unintuitive behaviour trap in their app store, and their support people agreed, and it was fixed a year later. And another anecdote, a Store employee suggested to me that I cite my EU rights, and therefore they'd have to fix my thing.

I'm not saying corporations aren't inherently inhuman, dehumanising machines, where the systems and silos become anti-pattens, just that to some extent maybe they're not the worst.

It does cost too much when the penalties are so small.

"Encrypted email providers" had several lists/reviews on the first page that included Tuta, though their own site wasn't near the top.

On a discussion board I ran, I started a long running thread "Is this real, or The Onion?" challenging people to decide whether a headline was fictional.

It was hard. On one occasion it was both a real one and an Onion parody.

We are in Heinlein's Crazy Years, except he didn't foresee how weird.

This is outline-ish, maybe not what you call a real history.
https://rusmania.com/central/k....

"Why does this happen? Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves."

And if their superpower is advancing themselves, mere merit has no chance to compete.

https://bobshea.net/empire_of_...

Fair question. Testing it with nothing else around would determine for sure whether it's reacting against something nearby or whether it's breaking conservation of momentum.

Before spending money on that I'd insist on independent ground tests.

We have an overwhelming set of experiments and observations about momentum being conserved. But if someone can show a replicable exception someday, we'll have a huge overhaul to do.

My questions about this would include whether the inventor has given enough information for other people to build one. Then I'd look around to see if it's, by some unknown mechanism, reacting against something in the environment.

Everything that happens building an airframe should be a documented process. Calibrated torque wrenches are expected, jumping on things is not.

Sign in window:

Klein bottles for sale.
Inquire within.

I guess that's an inside joke.

Standardized tests can benefit minorities.

One of my online friends is non-white and immigrated to Australia as a child. She had a thick accent and racist teachers labeled her stupid.

Then one day she had the chance to take a standardized test. Her very high intelligence showed, and she got tracked into a selective school and moved into a high-paying career.

Also, it isn't just whether it can replace one person with something automated, but whether it can replace the thousands of other similarly low-skilled but different jobs as well. Can the great machine do everything?

There's also something about the principle of rewarding or at least protecting or honouring the people who have skills and dedication, rather than treating them as an annoyance.

That, and the compiler really is slow. Understandable given the extra work it does, but I am imagining this as a productivity effect: https://xkcd.com/303/