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Huh? There's no right and wrong! The functionality of a UI is subjective.

You're thinking of morality. In UI there are right and wrong. Right is what's easiest for the untrained user to arrive at without prompting, wrong is everything else. There are very clear rules, carefully arrived at over many years.

That said, I obviously don't know much about what the rules actually are or I wouldn't have an ugly website. :-D

Whoring so you don't have to,
Monkey Angst

Is anyone complaining because their new Toyota doesn't have to be cranked before driving?

No, of course not, but let me ask you this -- if your car got to the point where it was no longer road-worthy (say, the minimum highway speed was changed to 75MPH and your little Yugo just couldn't hack it) and the new ones all had joysticks instead of steering wheels, you would be right to grumble. It probably wouldn't take too long to get used to, but in that time period, your productivity would suffer.

UI is organic. Changing it up means one of two things: You were doing it wrong before, or you're doing it wrong now. Customers are more keenly attuned to this than a lot of people think.

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We all live under Monkey Law.

Perhaps I should have a regional domain, but a TLD is easier to work with. I considered it for my site, but that idea was killed by all the post-911 advertising that says stuff like "Show your patriotism! Get a .US domain!" Even though .us is probably the most appropriate since I'm definitely not a .com and not really an organization, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I wonder, does anyone mistake .uk or .nz people for being overly patriotic?

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We all live under Monkey Law.

I could never get used to typing slashdot.com.

Exactly what I was talking about! www.slashdot.com takes you to -- you guessed it -- Slashdot! They own both variations. (They don't seem to own slashdot.net though. Odd.) So which is it, CmdrTaco, is SlashDot a money-grubbing whore site, or is it a bastion of hipster iconoclasm resisting the commercialization of our internet?

:-D

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We all live under Monkey Law.

Of course! Why didn't I think of it before? Who better to serve the best interests of the public, than private enterprise? After all, I'm sure that they can be trusted to put civic duty above profits, in the extremely unlikely event that the two should ever conflict...

</sarcasm>

I completely understand when people talk to me about how they don't trust big government. They totally should. But then these same people talk about turning around and putting the administration of this country (my country being the U.S.) in the hands of for-profit corporations. To which I can only muster a "whhhaaa?"

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We all live under Monkey Law.

They could then be migrated to a new ".sellout" TLD! No problem!

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We all live under Monkey Law.

I had always been under the impression that .org was actually reserved for non-profits. It was disheartening to find out that this is not the case, the registrars will sell one to anyone (and indeed, apparently a lot of people buy both the .com and .org names for their sites). I would like to see the administration of .org go to someone willing to enforce a policy of "no businesses allowed," but I'm not naive enough to think this will happen.

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We all live under Monkey Law.

I'm not sure this is really analogous. I think a better analogy would be the move from silent movies to talkies rather than the move from literature to movies. The experience is the same, just rendered more life-like.

I am not sure there is much intellectual stimulation going on in the process of reading depth into a 2-D scene, at least not the same way there is in imagining the scene in the first place. But then, IANAN.

(I am not a neurologist)
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We all live under Monkey Law.

Leaving aside the civil-liberties issues for a moment, I don't even know how these biometric methods of ID are supposed to work. Say you've got a retinal print, is is still the same if you, say, develop glaucoma? Do you still have the same voiceprint after being hit in the throat really hard?

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Monkey Angst
We all live under Monkey Law