Most of the time the managers want to ship the product by the due date, and usually decide that they're smarter/cooler than the users anyway. "You'll take Feature X and suck it, luser." is the motto.

FTFY

Read Society Of The Mind by Eric Harry, an awesome book about 8 foot tall robot astronauts and other AI themes.

It is mind boggling that people are evidently buying this stock without having looked at their finances, easily available from Google. Surely they would have noticed that Twitter has negative net income of -$64M. Worse, it looks like have had net losses in each of the last three years and their losses appear to be accelerating downward (see graph on top of the page) even with increasing revenue. I have no idea how anybody came up with a $20 market cap value. To me they look like an overpriced loser on their way to bankruptcy.

This card is only $700. And how much are you paying for that iPhone and its data plan that you almost never use?

I used to spend days in the library, but lately all the information I want is easily accessible online, wikipedia or google. I haven't been to the library in years. What's it been now, 5 years? 7? I don't even remember. For all I know, it may have been demolished since then. I would guess that soon they all will be.

Try the "word association test". A very GOTCHA kind of a test, that can prove anything you want it to prove.

According to the EPA, sea level rise is predicted to be 30 to 70 inches over the next 100 years. That sounds much closer to all the other estimates I have heard. That sea level rise is enough to cause hundreds of millions of people and the corresponding infrastructure to relocate. And there's no reason that the sea level will magically stop rising after 100 years. It'll keep rising unless we can somehow scrub the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Google has an excellent opportunity here to abolish software patents altogether. All they have to do is nothing. Let the courts rule against them. Pay the fine and close the business. Completely. Larry and Sergei walk away with a cool $50 billion. The main losers will be search users and those dependent on search to be found. In other words, everybody. You want to kill Google? Fine. Let's do it. Let's see how long the world can survive without it.

Are you seriously comparing Ashton Kutcher to Hedy Lamarr? Seriously? You ought to be banned from ever posting again on any forum.

> . . . and what's wrong with IMAP and POP?

They don't support calendaring. For the manager types, life revolves around meetings and conversation, so mail and calendaring are pretty much the same thing. There ought to be a separate protocols for the calendar and contacts.

Let's not forget the most important advantage GMail has over all other providers: spam filtering. Nobody else comes close in this area, and it is pretty much the only reason I still have a gmail account - as a pure forwarder, to filter spam from email addresses I have to make available publicly. Good search capability is what makes this possible.

You are absolutely right. Here are the top ten similarities between politics and programming:

• Design is always better than the implementation.
• Our number generators are random. Really.
• Polling is a lousy way to gather information.
• Codes always have bugs and loopholes. When they are found, lawyers are often involved.
• Old codes never die and never fade away.
• After failure, always blame the third party.
• Paying for support is expensive.
• DRM and vendor lock-in are the best means of increasing sales.
• Never listen to your your customers when they say they want fewer features. They must be lying.
• Power corrupts. That's why we have checksums and balancing.

That sounds retarded. Why would anyone wanna change to that?

We want to change to "that" because basic idea is a good one. The ability to start services in parallel, socket activation, and cgroups for process group management are all good things. The problem with systemd is not so much these ideas, but the implementation. To put it bluntly, the developers are all "superstar" jerks who wouldn't know usability if it hit them over the head.

They designed an ugly interface with way too much automatic magic that no doubt is perfectly obvious and correct to them, but abstruse and incomprehensible to anybody outside their little circle. Then they wrote a couple of "howto" articles on complex sysadmin tasks that almost nobody has to do, and declared documentation complete. To do a simple task, like writing a service file, or God forbid, changing the getty program you want to use, requires a monumental effort of sifting through disconnected, unintuitively named man pages.

systemd: good idea, horrible implementation.

I fucking hate this new system. Its a mess of scripts that call on more scripts.

Actually, that's how sysv init works. To get a program started by systemd you have to create a service file full of magic commands and put it in the magic systemd directory. Then you have to type systemctl --abracadabra enable yourservicename.service. Then you have to go and add an [install] section to your service file, because nobody actually remembers that you have to write one or how to do it. Then you do the systemctl again. Then you check the log files to see if the thing actually started, because nothing gets output to the console during boot (except the filesystem mount messages and the big fat warning that my root fs is readonly).

Since I replaced most of the bulbs in my house to CFLs, I'm changing light bulbs far less often. They last far longer than incandescents in my experience, exactly as claimed on the box. I've also bought several 65W LED floodlights, and they produce light just as good as incandescents, turn on to full brightness nearly instantly, and use about an eighth the electricity of incandescents.