Not to mention the most popular.

And the least corrupt.

....So I guess you weren't highly productive in that last half hour, then?

During WWII, the British rail network took a very heavy pounding from the German bombers. And yet, somehow it managed to continue providing the service of transporting goods around the country.

The reason was that it had excellent built-in redundancy. Multiple available routes between all the major destinations made it remarkably robust. Sure, some routes are quicker than others, but the ability to keep things moving even if two or three main lines were knocked out was critical.

So history shows your argument to be incorrect. Rail can be just as robust as roads when it comes to network reliability.

And in fact, your counter point that trucks can be routed onto any number of roads is also incorrect, as heavy vehicles can only go on roads that are suitably robust. You may look at the map and see a whole network of roads, but filter it down to the routes that could be used by significant number of trucks, and you'll see that in fact it wouldn't take nearly as many road blockages as you might think to severely affect the country's ability to transport goods.

Sadly the British rail cuts in the 1960s removed a lot of the "unnecessary" lines, which left the UK today with a much more efficient network, but one which would not survive a similar bombardment now.

And this points to the final part of the discussion: maintenance costs. Both rail and road networks require significant maintenance. Many will point to the roads as being cheaper in this respect, but in fact heavy trucks cause a lot of road damage. The main reason roads appear cheaper is because the cost is not direct, but the two are comparable. Subsidies and taxes also mask the real costs.

The real solution to the problem is to make the experimental features more obviously experimental.

It should be mandatory that a pre-standardised feature be disabled by default in the browser, and enabled via a preference setting for developers to try them out.

Most non-developer users would not bother to fiddle with these prefs, and thus the features would remain truly experimental until they were standardised.

Yes, this would mean that developers would get frustrated by stuff they want to do which is tantalisingly out of reach in terms of being able to use it for mainstream development. But on the flip side, I believe it would also act as an encouragement to all parties involved to get the features through the standardisation process at a decent speed (this has been a large part of the underlying cause of the problem, not the prefix policy itself).

It isn't just programming languages that have changed in the years since you changed career 10 years ago (or 30 if we start from when you first cut your programming teeth).

Back then, the concept of unit testing your code was unheard of outside of financial institutions (though I bet they didn't call it that back then), and the phrase "design patterns" would have made you think more of knitting than programming. (The actual practices described by the common design patterns have been around for ages, but the names given to them are relatively new and have quickly become part of developer jargon. You need to know them).

In short, whatever language you learn, try to also get a handle on some of the most current programming practices and the terminology around them.

Developing the infrastructure and technology to achieve the goal would provide you with a huge collateral resource. Don't under-estimate the money to be made from selling technology developed on the back of a bigger project. Even if the bigger project itself never actually comes to fruition, they could still make money from this.

Wow.

Now you've told me how brilliant it is, I feel compelled to go out immediately and watch every episode.

I never would have imagined there might be a brilliant comedian I'd never heard of in a foreign country. If only you'd told me sooner.

You say that, and yet..... I've never heard of him.

And I enjoy a good comedy show as much as anyone.

My guess is that he's pretty famous.... in the US, but completely obscure anywhere else.

(and yes, I know of Jerry Seinfeld, but I don't think I can remember the last time I actually saw him on TV)

Not if you also want an internet that maintains any kind of privacy.

Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.

If it was really that good, someone would have forked it.

Even KDE (which is a *much* bigger project than Firefox) got forked successfully when sufficient numbers of users disliked the move from KDE3 to KDE4. KDE4 is now pretty good, but the Trinity project forked from KDE3 is still holding its own.

So if Firefox 3.6 is such an fantastic browser, and so much better than the subsequent versions, then why has no-one forked it?

Answer: because there's no need to -- the current version of Firefox is so much better than FF3.6 that there really isn't any argument to be had.

Storage may be cheap, but that's hardly an excuse for being cluttered.

Ask yourself: When are you ever going to read all those email again? When is *anybody* ever going to read them again. And the more you have, the less likely it is that they ever will be read, because the more you have, the more time it will take to go through them.

And don't tell me that doesn't matter because it's easy to run a search -- the same still applies, and you'd only bother running a search if you had something specific you wanted to search for. Is there anything in your 2003 email archives that you are likely to want to search for? The answer to this question may well be 'yes'; you know your archives better than I do; but I'll tell you this: if you haven't found the need to search an archive over the last five years, then the odds are diminishingly small that you'll need to in the future.

My advice is to keep your archives, but take the time to filter out the stuff you really don't need or want any more.

First, sort the list of emails by size.
This will give you all the ones with attachments. The odds are most of the big stuff can be deleted. Most of the stuff you want to keep you'll already have extracted from your email and saved somewhere else. So feel free to delete them. There will also be obsolete software, video and flash attachments that were funny five years ago, and other junk. Deleting all this stuff will free up a substantial portion of your disk usage.

Next sort the list by name of sender.
This might sound odd, but it's a very quick way to see who you were talking to all those years ago. There might be a few surprises in there. People you'd lost touch with an virtually forgotten about. Maybe this is your chance to remind yourself to get back in touch? If so, then the exercise has been worthwhile even if you don't delete anything. Or maybe you know you don't want to talk to them. In that case, you do really want to keep those old emails from them? Get rid of them. It's cathartic.

Next, check if you've been subscribed to any mailing lists over the years.
Possibly you'll want to keep some of those archives, but equally there can be a lot of pretty mundane chatter on these things, and the bits that are relevant are often only relevant for the moment. It depends a lot on the individual lists, but my experience is that content five years old or more is unlikely to still be of much value. And in any case, most good mailing lists have their own archives online. So your own copies in your archives may be pretty pointless. Be ruthless and delete them.

My guess is that if you followed that advice, your email archives are now about a quarter of their original size. And nothing of value was lost.

In fact, doing an exercise like this every now and then can actually be helpful. Not because it saves disk space, but because it means that you do actually go back every now and then and look at what you were doing a few years ago. It's remarkable the things you forget over time. Sometimes its good to be reminded. Other times you may not want to be reminded, but that's what the delete key is for; delete it, and you won't need to be reminded of it again when you do this same process next time.

And if you run it in a modern browser, it would still run faster than javascript in IE8.

There are good reasons for the two layouts. They're lost in the mist of time, but they are good reasons.

Calculators derive their layout from a strictly mathematical perspective, and is probably the most sensible layout to work with if you want to practice your muscle memory.

The phone layout is that way due to the mapping of letters to the digits, which was defined back in the days of rotary dial phones. Putting the 'ABC' key at the top of the keypad made it easier to read. In addition, the in old pulse-dial system, the zero digit actually represented ten, not zero, and on rotary dials it was placed at the end after nine. That also helped to make the chosen key layout for phones seem more logical at the time, both for the phone manufacturers and for users who were used to rotary dials.

One thing you certainly aren't going to achieve is to get calculator or phone manufacturers to change their layouts. Both layouts are highly ingrained in the collective consciousness of their users, and no-one is going to buy a product which deviates from the norm. You may as well try to persuade everyone to go and buy a Dvorak keyboard.

So the short answer to your plea is: no. It ain't gonna happen.

But I can see hope for you: Smart phones.

While you aren't going to get calculators to change, smart phones have touch screen interfaces. I don't see any reason at all why there couldn't be an app that displays the phone keypad in calculator-like style. It may be the opposite of what you're asking for, but it would achieve the consistency that you're looking for between the two.

The only problem then is if you ever have to use someone else's phone to make a call....