Flash was (almost) what Java applets could have been. In any case, creating Flash apps was fairly easy. The documentation was decent and one could do things without using complex libraries that are hard to understand. Of course, it did have its shortcomings but compared to the rest I liked it better. Finally, it is less bloated than HTML5 and had faster motion animation last time I checked. R.I.P.

My advice is to get 2 sets of progressive glasses. One for outside and reading (far and near) and another for inside and reading (medium and near).
The second ones are called "indoor" or "workspace" lenses and do have other properties that distinguishes these from "outdoor" lenses. A good optometrician knows about these, else look it up on the Internet.

In any case, it's not possible to have a single "fits-all-situations" solution (long, medium and close range). A cheaper solution (as others pointed out) is to use fixed under-corrected far-sight lenses for computer work, e.g. old glasses you may find in a dusty cupboard from the times when your far-sight was better.

Method for buying "workspace" glasses: When you visit your optometrist, bring along a small newspaper (tabloid size). Sit down. Rip off some pages and place them on the table to the right and the left, close and not so close. Hold the newspaper in front of you with your arms stretched out (but not too much). Top should be a bit higher than your head. In addition, move the newspaper you are holding from from left to right, down and up (you got two large LCD monitors + two laptops). You must be able to read the tiny newspaper print in all these situations: front, left, right, down (laptops) plus the ones that are spread over the table, without straining your neck (!!). In addition, you must be able to read larger (but not just huge) text (e.g. brand names of expensive frames) that is further away in the shop. If you can't do all of that, refuse to accept a solution that the person is suggesting to you. Simple simulation of workspace conditions, isn't it ?

You also need a third pair for close-up repair/bricolage work if you are into this sort of work....

When I was younger (over 30 years) I had a TA job in political science. If I recall right, even back then it was understood that you get different results depending on what questions you ask and what research tools you use. Most influential (US) books back then were probably:

Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2, 202-210. (decision making -> democracy)
Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (reputation -> oligarchy)
Mills, C. Wright. The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press. (network/positions -> oligarchy)

Maybe good extra reading, didn't really check:
Domhoff, G. William. 2007. "C. Wright Mills, Floyd Hunter, and 50 Years of Power Structure Research." Michigan Sociological Review 21:1-54.
Extended online version: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

Simpler solution if you can't stand Unity: just replace this desktop by Cinnamon. Solved my problems. Installing Cinnamon doesn't require much work. In addition, you always can pick Unity again, in case you regret. Unity will stay on the machine and you can switch back to it before you log in. Tested with Ubuntu 12.04:
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Agreed, but the problem is more complex I think.

To start with, Wikipedia doesn't allow for debate within the article. Most knowledge in soft sciences is controversial and will remain so. A good Wikipedia article that deals for instance with "user experience" might have to be written as "user experience (1)", "user experience (2)", etc. Each of these chapters would have to be signed by its authors since the first thing an academic does when reading something on the web is finding out who (i.e. what kind of global frameworkd) is behind.

Academics need recognition, Wikipedia should come up with a scoring system that could identify contributions (something like "A" wrote about 30% of a really cool introduction and he also wrote the first draft). So its about signing again.

Now *my* *main* argument against doing something in Wikipedia (I am an academic): I want a wiki to be place where anything goes. Crazy ideas, new ideas, unfinished stuff, biased tutorials, etc. For half-serious papers we got conferences and various academic peer-controlled wikis or other CMS and for serious ones journals. Wikipedia can't (and should not) be used as place where I can do notetaking, explore ideas, write tutorials that fit *my* requirements, have students writing, etc.. So I got my own wiki and since my own wiki is there, I'd rather add "encyclopedia-like" pieces to my own. Makes it an integrated whole. In addition, most of my pages show up very high (much too high actually) in google search. I.e. I can actually sell this as minor contribution to the world in my CV.

After working on my own wiki, there is just no time left for Wikipedia. Other academics also produce a lot of open contents and in a different way than I do, but they probably have the same reaction: An Encylopedia like Wikipedia is cool and useful but it's not a fun medium and it does not cover our most important needs, i.e. be some sorte of public external hard disk where everything but serious publications could go ...

Finally, there is wikibooks and the agonizing wikiversity. Wikibooks seem to me a good place to contribute. And there you can see some more academics I think.

IMHO there must be a solution to that. As others pointed out, a human can spot "nothing-but-links-sites" AND "sites-that-grab-random-contents-from-other sites" fairly easily. To spot the second ones, one would have to come up with some pattern matching algorithm (find the source and rank down the copy) and also not index web sites that just show short paragraphs of information. True content is always longish and structured and it is linked internally. That kind of policy might hurt legitimate sites like DMOZ, Delicious and many blogs. So how about letting the user decide in the advanced settings: [] links sites (yes/no), [link sharing sites] (yes/no), [sites with with short contents] (yes/no) ? Of course, the war will then escalate. Crooks will just start stealing contents in order to have a google ranking again. Again, there are parades like giving extra points to sites that adopt the Wikipedia strategy (no follow links) or looking at the copyright of the source and blasting away web sites that don't replicate it (that could be more difficult). How about adding a BIG tag next to a suspect site that says "Google believes that this content ain't the original"?) I am not a real programmer but I am convinced that Google could do more. After all, they manage to run Google Scholar quite flawlessly. I just believe that Google as of today doesn't optimize content search, but revenue from google ads and this may kill them ultimately. Yeah they also should favor web sites that don't have ads ;) Final thing: Pages in webservers that we run in our little research unit (e.g. a wiki on educational technology) show up very high. Most pages are top 20, which is actually too high :). This means that Google still works for specialized subject areas. Or in other words: Google maybe should apply a different algorithm for "popular" phrases, i.e. be much tougher on link farms for everything that is popular.

Cory Doctorow, Scroogled, reprinted short story, October 2007 issue of Radar magazine. Excerpt: Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he'd made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. [....] Four hours later in the customs line, he'd slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him. "The marvels of modern technology," said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration — Powered by Google.