Something I find fascinating is the sheer political ineptitude of rolling up terrorism, immigration and refugees in to one big messy ball and acting against all three simultaneously, without a clear message about what the point was of all this disruption. Bringing people with valid visas into the action looks like a totally unnecessary own-goal. Do you think Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft would have teamed up together against a well-crafted, well-articulated action against possible terrorists coming into the country? Perhaps using an NSEERS-like system of profiling?

Nope, Trump, Bannon and Miller seem to think offending the maximum number of people possible would be helpful and the scale of the blow-back seems to show that was a miscalculation. (On the other hand, every other apparent miscalculation they made in the election campaign played out ok, so perhaps they really are the political Forrest Gumps they appear to be.)

'The only real solution is, as part of the development process, set aside time for third party user testing with feedback sessions. I've been through a number of them, they're humbling, surprising and educating.'

This. A *hundred* times this. The intuition of a good designer will minimize the surprises and changes, taking references from other successful designs will give you a good starting point, but NOTHING is as useful as getting user feedback, early and often. Real users, in the real world, not people on your team.

Start with sharing sketches, move to paper versions if you can. Never craft something beautiful and fall in love with your own creation before you've tested the basic concept and never put aesthetics before usability. Never blame users for being stupid, or say that they'll 'figure it out' or put it in the training manual. That's lazy and arrogant and will fail and frustrate. I'm sorry so many of you have such a low opinion of designers: I don't regard people who create a 'masterpiece' UI without leaving their desk or talking to users as real designers anyway.

Already implemented in Japan as an optional extra - here is a video of a Prius emitting a fairly cool whirring noise. I think sampling the Spinners out of Blade Runner is clearly the way to go.
https://youtu.be/3Vy42zphNp4

I'm as horrified about this result as anyone, but it's hard to argue it's undemocratic.
52% voting LEAVE on a 72% turnout is 37% of the entire population of the nation.
Even the most historic wildly popular presidential victory like Reagan in 1984 only got 59% on a 53% turnout: 31% of the nation. No-one would argue that Reagan didn't have a mandate to govern.
I wish it weren't true, but this is a mistake made decisively.

"Will facebook stop showing me ads?"
Interested fact: yes, at least in your stream/timeline. I persistently reported every single ad as 'Not relevant to me' for a while and eventually all ads masquerading as posts went away. Every six months or so they insert a few (starting with things like the Red Cross or WWF) and try to train me to accept them, but a couple of weeks of killing the ads makes them go away again. Obviously, I don't interact with any of the other commercial content (eg. liking Lexus' Facebook page - why would you?) and that seems to keep the neighborhood quite tidy. Easy to ignore the crap on the right-hand side of the page, I'm barely even aware of it.

I'm always surprised when I see what other people's feeds look like...

That's an interesting question - going by my experience with my dog and FaceTime, he doesn't have the ability to process a 2-D image as a representation of a living 3D thing. That's not a trivial thing - very young children can't do it either. Figuring out that a flat image at the wrong scale, with perspective distortion, lighting artifacts, reflections etc is equivalent to a real creature is (I think) a learned skill.

When it comes to dogs (and maybe bears) I always assumes that partly because although we are creatures where our visual sense is our primary sense (if it looks like a thing, I'm prepared to ignore my other senses), for dogs smell is much more important. Obviously, a flat screen image smells nothing like the thing it represents, so I suspect a dog will discard the vague similarity easily.

Still, I think other people have different experiences with their pets and Skype, so maybe it's possible. But dogs live in our world and have lots of opportunities to learn (eg. to recognize our voices). But it's a complex cognitive challenge.

ah, there's a paradox hidden in there. Journalists are not one homogenous mass. A journalist is essentially anyone who condenses and reports information (hopefully facts) to others. If you got excited about a given issue (oh, say, journalistic ethics) and put some effort into researching it and shared wha you learned, you'd become a journalist.

Isn't that a wonderful thing? The internet means it's available to all of us to be both citizen journalists and citizen politicians - politicians are simply people who have a point of view that they seek to gather people around. So it makes me sad when people say the problem *is* journalists, or the problem *is* politicians. It's not - the solution is good journalism and good politicians.

Support good journalism (subscribe, whitelist), support good politicians (yeah, I know. But if you look hard, there's someone out there saying something you agree with that is thoughtful and persuasive), denounce the bad ones. Don't tar the entire group with a brush because that is cynical and self-defeating: the least likely way to make the change that you want.

Congratulations!
You've either made the most pitch-perfect Mark-Twain-esque parody of a declinist argument I've seen in 15+ years of reading Slashdot, or one of the most crazy. The fact I just can't tell which is testament to your near-genius.

Yes, and creating a fission-powered aircraft would obviously be insane:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I've always wondered that. It would certainly be an efficient method for the NSA to track searches of people who are trying to hide. Trust is such a fascinating issue, and it comes down to this:
Do you trust, say, Google, who have stated privacy policies, some track record of resisting the NSA (likely unsuccessfully) or the dude who started DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg (http://ye.gg/) who kinda looks friendly and geeky, but could literally be anyone.

Seriously, it's kind of nuts that the best tool available for privacy is to blindly trust *some random guy on the internet*.

Funny thing is that the original 'AGILE Manifesto' wasn't 'theory' or even a methodology: it was really a set of observations on what did and didn't work for them.
I think the 'universal solution' aspect of AGILE is let your smartest people work the way that they find most efficient - trust your (best) people. Many of the core concepts are not revolutionary: don't get bogged down in planning, work in small teams, prepare to adapt rapidly when your spec cannot be fixed.

The AGILE guys were inspired by the obvious wastefulness and inefficiency of the big enterprise software projects they had been on, so to that extent their observations were dead accurate. But now people are acting as though the *specific methodology* that's grown up around it is precious, holy and applies to everything, everywhere.

It's exactly like the scene in 'The Life of Brian; where Brian loses his shoe running from the crowd: one guy argues that they should all hold one shoe in the air, and the other guy wants to gather shoes together. The shoe is not the point (SCRUMS, Pair programming, backlogs), it is the idea of working intelligently.

Strongly agree. It seems odd that desktop UI designers haven't taken that route (although if you look at the default MS Office icon suite, there's a clear intent to consistently visually separate data and executable files.) Ultimately, the user doesn't want to decode a three-letter extension, so why are we even considering forcing them to? The actual problem is simple and only needs to deliver a simple binary distinction between two specific classes of file.

The days of computers being 'for' techies are long, long gone. I strongly suspect that the .TLA solution wasn't invented for the non-technical user's benefit but created by coders, for programming/filesystem ease. Just because people at Slashdot have it imprinted on their subconscious doesn't make it the best solution, just an arbitrarily chosen decent solution from decades ago. Could you possibly explain to a regular human being why that was the best possible way of distinguishing data from applications? Images are rich and information-dense: that's why icons exist: you can understand the meaning of them much more quickly than text.

Remember the way old iOS icons used to use a very distinctive button shape and highlight across all iOs apps? That kind of approach would work well to make applications stand out, and then do something similar, but distinctively different for all data formats. Apple have had no problem with setting strong UI guidelines in the past. I'm not advocating the specific glossy-button - just a consistent aesthetic approach.

I took exactly the opposite approach: rather than relying on Slashdot's it admin for my anonymity (they probably have the IP address you posted from for a start), I figured off I'm safest posting with my real name and assuming no anonymity in the first place. That way I protect myself by thinking about what I'm saying and always remembering that just because a site tells me that I'm anonymous, it doesn't mean I really am, or will stay so.

I don't see any need to invent anything beyond what's in the public domain:

Snowden reckons as Hong Kong as the most developed/politically-stable/safe place to be when the shitstorm blows up, from which extradition will be the least likely. Seems like a reasonable guess. If he'd been working with Russia, it'd be easier to go to Russia - they've extracted agents from the US before.

Say what you want about Russia (economy/industry/military) but they have a large, competent spy agency in the FSB. As soon as this blows up, they are certain to try and get some of their agents as close to Snowden as they can, just in case. I mean, they aren't going to sit back and watch CNN with an asset this big: they don't know what he has, but it's clear he's valuable given the noise the US is making.

Things unfold and it becomes clear China are not as resilient to US pressure as Snowden hoped, and he needs an exit. Cue FSB/SVR offering him a way out. They aren't going to announce themselves as "Hi! We're spys" but as diplomats, the time-honored cover for spying. But unless Snowdenn is naive (he's not) he would have been pretty clear that a spy agency was behind it: it's what they are for.

Now the FSB/SVR really want to rub it in to the US and there's few enough success stories they can bring to the Russian public these days. Spying tends to be secret. So spin the story this way. It's pretty close to the truth, except you make Snowden sound a dumber than he is. What do they care?

Oops. my bad. Just noticed that under "Related US Application Data" it calls out that this is a division of another patent, filed Oct 2, 1996. Now that *is* interesting.

Are you sure that this idea was 'obvious' in 1996? I was in college studying bending beams at that time and sure as heck hadn't thought of downloading episodes of comedy podcasts. I can't say what everyone else was up to.

For reference, the claim on this patent is pretty much the same:
1. A player for reproducing selected audio program segments comprising, in combination:
means for storing a plurality of program segments, each of said program segments having a beginning and an end,
means for receiving and storing a file of data establishing a sequence in which said program segments are scheduled to be reproduced by said player,
means for accepting control commands... means for continuously reproducing said program segments in the order... [+ bunch of controls for navigating media]

Again, IANAL, but this seems to be a description of something that might well have been a new idea in 1996. I dunno. The obviousness test is an interesting one, and I still can't figure why they can go after media producers, when the patent sounds like it would result in Apple, Sony and the software/device people infringing.