You sound like you're giving too much of a fuck.

Try re-imagining the headline more properly as: "Filthy Rich People Robbing Some Other Filthy Rich People Using a Stupid Fucking Game of Chance and Lax Security" and you will finally feel just how stupid and irrelevant the story is.

FUCK YOU! Your stupid fucking theories are fucking STUPID! Anybody who lets god damned TROLLS direct the traffic in their little fucking teeny-tiny brains is a fucking MORON. And YOU'RE a moron for writing this stupid, fucking, DRIVEL. ... There!

Now, the effects described in the article will be effectively canceled out by the direction of my negative comments against the theory. People will no longer be swayed by trolls. Talk about short-cuts! You fucking idiot!

Their name /is/ "Google".

I believe AC's point was that an interrogator can also lead the questioning. This is actually endemic in the U.S. justice system.

I wasn't aware of all that. So Holmes wasn't just blazing mad with his guns in the theatre? I figured they would have picked him up based on some kind of witness testimony. Now I think I understand why some people are harping on and on about "two shooters". I simply dismissed it as confusion on behalf of the addled victims. But now it seems to be an important detail, especially considering this guy is actually in court on what sounds like dubious "evidence". And, yeah, the guy was super-drugged the first time we saw him in court. I dunno what they changed it to but he's pretty much not-there this time around, either.

The difference between you and the first Independence Day is that PEOPLE ALREADY EXPECT YOU TO KILL EVERYONE. You have no element of surprise!

You *ARE*, the frigging... Red Coats, in the war -- the imaginary war, going on in entirely inside of your delusional mind!

Your "enemy", the government that "PRotectz you", is *already* a guerilla trained paramilitary contingent that considers this their home that they're protecting!

You're just a sack of shit sitting in a fucking Lay-Z-Boy, with, a fucking, out-of-this-century, Tri-cornered fucking Hat on, of plus-three insular and self-indulgent ass-hattery, whining about :

1.) Your ponies

2.) Your cartoons and comics

3.) Your vampires, dragons, and I would say unicorns BUT YOUR PONIES ARE ALREADY UNICORNS, NOT 4-H PONIES -- PREPARATION-H PONIES

4.) Your fucking video games

5.) Your mom

Nobody cares! Fuck your mother!

[GAMER (MODE="ON")]

Durrrrrrr huhhhhhhh? Uhhhhhhhh. I gotta right! ...

To, uhhhhhhhhhh. Tooooooo. Uhhhhhhhhhh. ...

I GOTTA RIGHT MAN! I GOTTA RIGHT TOO YOU KNOW! UNGH! UNGH! *pounding you in the top of the head* *dangerously close to having a heart attack*

[/GAMER]

My parents didn't teach me programming until I was eight, and I didn't even begin to do anything really useful with it until I was a teenager. I used it to hack ATARI games (for the ATARI home computer), sure, but that's at eight years old.

The girl in the story is three years old. So you aren't even really setting a fair standard.

What's worse, you're completely ignoring the gender-politics and DIY lessons learned. If you think there's no difference between Shigeru Miyamoto getting the job done and "Dad" getting the job done, then maybe Shigeru Miyamoto's your dad. Well, aside from you, most children (since they learn from their parents' example) would realize the connection: the game doesn't have to be made by a toy maker, it can be modified by "Dad" -- and that means it can eventually be modified by the child.

We're all supposed to be geeks, here, especially computer geeks.

Computer geeks are supposed to be the ones who have to repeat ad nauseum and hammer home the fact that no, email is not secure (or private).

Shouldn't the story just be "shrug [link]"?

Shouldn't the comments just be all speculation about how the fact that this made "news" could possibly mean we face further uninformed and draconian measures in legislation?

oops, sorry:

Clover, Charles. "The End of the Line." New York: The New Press. 2006. Print.

Cousteau, Jacques and Susan Schiefelbein. "The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus." New York: Bloomsbury. 2007. Print.

[from an academic paper I wrote in 2010]

During the 1990's, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization stated fish catches were increasing yearly. In 2001, two researchers revealed catches actually declined since the 80s. Chinese officials had overstated their national statistic, their operations of government subverted beneath operations of industry: the officials were promoted only if statistics reflected increased production. The Chinese officials had recorded "by-catch" (a term for unsalable fish) as productive (Clover; Cousteau, 149). As a direct result of their inventiveness, fishing was not done as if a scarcity were underway, which it was. Jacque Cousteau (page 94) explains the cause of overfishing between 1950 and 1985, "by including vast tonnages of 'trash fish', authorities camouflaged collapses of the major commercial fish stock." ...

Cousteau gasps that "such lapses by those who lead nations bewilder explorers who have led a team", and illuminates that the world catch statistics are misleading in another way: they did not reflect that the number of fishermen needed to catch each next year's harvest have had to grow significantly (between 1971-83, growing from 136,500 to 223,000 fishermen in America alone, aboard over 8,000 more vessels managing to catch statistically less fish than were caught in the 1950's), nor did they account for increasing technological prowess.

[/paper]

I'm not saying Brin can't control his company. I'm saying Brin didn't create the cultural/behavioural phenomenon that he's catering to.

I usually welcome hearing Tyson's latest addition to lay science understanding.

I sort of like character-celebrity-scientists. Mister Wizard, Bill Nye, and local college instructor / news-show scientist "Chemical Kim" are just a few of the scientists I applaud for their work in bringing science to the masses as a fun and interesting subject.

I don't like the stand-in experts like Michiu Kaku or Tyson, who take a different tack of bringing science to just a large audience, not really packaged for the masses at all, often with their own opinions added, and typically very pompously presented.

Tyson manages to keep my respect by being relatively sane and mainstream, basing his conclusions and projections on "establishment" science.

I can't say the same for Kaku, who I haven't heard from in awhile because I purposefully stop visiting web sites and stop listening to radio shows that give him a podium (no, this is not a viable way to get me to stop visiting /.)

But Tyson also manages to capture my interest by doing the same thing Bill Nye does: making comments about human affairs and human nature. They both humanize science.

But Tyson's pomposity sort of makes it hard for me to "like" him. And I just read something about him recently, so now it's like a second serving of buttered scallops when I clearly had trouble finishing the first serving.

I don't know if I would restrict your use to a single-task desktop. That seems counter-productive.

I think I might enjoy planning or coding something to this end, though, because I've felt the need for the exact same thing.

You would have to dedicate yourself to it somehow. Either going to the app and opening your "target / focus" app through the anti-distractor, or else have it load at login and then monitor what applications you are opening. As you open each app, it will take focus and come to the front of the desktop, and ask you to prioritize what you're working on.

Once it has a top-priority app, it could bother you to keep working on that.

You could attach opened apps to a node tree under other opened apps when it queries you. Or just maybe have it do that for you based on the assumption that whatever you're using (in the foreground) when you open another app is the priority-parent of that app.

When you close an app, it should put that app's prioritized parent in the focus and foreground immediately, and give you a reminder "this is what you were working on when you had the inkling to open the other app that you just closed, so you must be back to this again."

Something like that? What operating system or environment are you working in?

I resemble those remarks you made about (*ahem!*) "cavemen". Cavemen are people, too. In fact, we were people before you were.