I wasn't referencing the linked articles, but commenting on the summary.

The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung.

The term "propaganda" may have inoccuous roots, but clearly holds a sinister connotation and it is juxtoposed in the same sentence with the bit about the North Korean year. This is the xenophobic fear mongering I was referencing.

its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103

So what? Is this supposed to be some menacing thing that one group of people use a different date system than I do? Should I be concerned that in Japan the state writes Heisei 26 as the year on official documents? There are serious problems in North Korea, but we don't need to stoop to xenophobic fear mongering to illustrate it.

Having worked in office environments, the amount of effort office workers could reserve by having access to a decent scripting language is immense; I once saw someone renaming over three thousand files by hand in order to change a date format. The potential drawbacks are also fairly obvious since businesses tend to do a terrible job of managing their IT tools and anarchistic coding is going to make this worse. However, the potential for productivity enhancements is there and it seems like a challenge which can be largely overcome, particularly if the workforce had these skills which were languishing. If this is the reality we should to push for, then some sort of programming experience which can be linked to useful activities seems like it would be worthwhile for many, from the drones in the office to automated farm equipment and CNC operators.

As a big fan of Ruby generally, I hate to take this side, but Ruby is definitely no longer for the 'cool' kids and the community has been shrinking a bit for a while now.

Your Google query chart is a bit wonky as it captures all sorts of oddities. Here is a revised chart which only looks at Computer + Electronics related searches using Google's categories for everything except Python, which I can't seem to figure out how to get it to appear.

The hopes underlying Bitcoin rely on the belief that this currency has qualities which other currencies lack, namely anonymity and freedom from government manipulation. This hearing seems to be a bunch of government officials saying that they love Bitcoin, but the government is already getting good at figuring out who is participating in transactions and wants to figure out how to regulate it, which would be a trick to pull off without making it vulnerable to government manipulation. What is left if these are no longer credible advantages?

It is this sort of uninformed armchair policy making which is the greatest obstacle to legitimate education reform. We defer to engineers on how to best keep a bridge from falling, but everybody seems to be an expert when it comes to knowing what is best and what works in education.

The biggest problem with your assertion that educational methods at the turn of the twentieth century had indisputably better results than schools today is that schools which produced artifacts of their success weren't in the business of educating all of their students to their fullest potential. The grading system, which we maintain, was designed as a system of discrimination intended to sort students by academic capability and eventually into different tiers of work performance. These schools set a rigid standard and those who failed to meet it were simply marked as inferior. The entire system was designed around conformity to a standard and those who failed to conform were tossed aside. By this measure, dropping out of school is not only accepted, a low rejection rate was considered to be a sign of poor standards. This entire mindset is incompatible with our modern vision of an inclusive education system with an intended goal of raising everyone to their maximal learning potential.

I honestly don't care too much about my phone's specs, but build-your-own laptops have never seemed to surface despite BYO desktops being an important surviving part of that shrinking sector. I just want to be able to buy processor and graphics upgrades and not have to purchase a new monitor and keyboard whenever I want a new mobile computer.

I don't think I could agree with this any more. I didn't intend to take sides in the pro/anti skeuomorphism debate; I'm simply annoyed to see /. consistently framing skeuomorphism as fundamentally flawed instead of something which newbs and the artistically inept (e.g. suits) will rely on too heavily and apply when inappropriate.

Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth /.'s concern. Please stop.

I want my automobile, and the cars of everyone else who lives in an urban environment, to move away and never return so that we can reclaim the horrendous amount of wasted space and inconvenient placement of services. Cars for city folk should live in parking structures in the urban/rural interface where they can be rented and taken for work or recreation. The money we save by drastically reducing the number of vehicles we own and reduced infrastructure costs directly through roads and indirectly by placing things so far apart from each other can be used to build mass transit systems which don't suffer a large host of problems which plague them in automobile-centric communities.

Arguments of this sort should help us understand that talking about this problem as a matter of jobs numbers is a flawed strategy. We should be talking in terms of how economic production is distributed and how much of the risk workers should be expected to assume to provide the workforce flexibility required to accommodate these productivity enhancements. There is only a dilemma between protectionism and innovation if we are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic outcomes which give the vast proportion of productivity gains to the investor class.

I want people to be able to create IOUs which they promise to reclaim in the future in exchange for goods and services. I want these IOUs to be fungible, so that I am not up a creek if any particular debtor fails to service his or her debt. I want the entire scheme to require that regulated institutions be responsible for managing the risk of the system so that those who do default are offset by greater contributions from those who do not. These institutions could be rewarded for securing particularly good debt and punished for securing bad debt.

Hmmm... all of this sounds vaguely familiar.

As mentioned elsewhere, you seem to think that people don't actually use their screen real-estate. You are throwing away nearly a quarter of my browser's horizontal space for empty regions which fail to contain my gaze in the information I care about. You then go and give two-fifths of the used space to the right-hand side-bar which contains your adverts, yes, but it also means that the region remaining for the story summaries is inadequate. If I have the images on, many summaries require scrolling to get through.

The stalking header bar is useless. It contains links to things which I might want to utilize upon visiting, but when I am paging down to read stories, I'm not suddenly going to think, "I need to submit a new link." or "I can't remember what site I am on and need a link to it.". It just steals vertical space in a world where people have an excess of horizontal space on their screens. Stalking elements also break the idea of a web page of being a page which the user is examining through, which is not only creepy, but it makes it more difficult to maintain a spatial awareness on the page.

There is insufficient visual hinting regarding the boundaries of stories. Visual hinting allows people to more efficiently navigate information by ignoring what isn't important to them. In particular, the story titles are in a font which takes up too much space (too many stories have multi-line titles) and the font weight is so low as to not give them sufficient contrast. Speaking of contrast, the light grey frame is far too weak to create a box for the story. You also are trying to use white space to organize the data within a story element, but it just means that nothing in it anchors the reader's gaze requiring constant reevaluation.

Comments are just fucked. You have thrown out a somewhat successful threading system for an unnavigable mess. Even more than stories, the ability to skip comments is essential to find the parts of a conversation the reader finds interesting. The lack of width and size of overhead for each comment, plus the fact that auto-minimizing of comments isn't functional makes it just a stream of awful.

For all of the slamming of skeuomorphism and seeming praise for iconocentric user interfaces which gets promoted on this site, this pedestrian redesign to look like an AOL blog site is utter crap. Are there improvements to be made to the old design? Absolutely. It would be less offensive if this particular redesign was actually trying something new instead of regurgitating the crap which is already out there.