To me, there's a difference between critique groups, where people are giving criticism because someone asked for it, and public review areas. If somebody asks me for grammar critiques privately, I'm the editor from hell. I assume that they wouldn't have asked if they didn't want me to help them polish it, so I try to point out every little thing that I think could be better so that they can learn from it. But when I'm reading a book for enjoyment, I'm not analyzing it. I'm reading it. Unless I'm reading with editing in mind, I don't even notice the sorts of things you mention unless they're bad enough to confuse me or force me to reread a sentence.
And I'm not going to mention those things unless they're frequent problems. Even with well-established authors, every once in a while, I'll hit a sentence where I have to read it a second time, and I pause to wonder how the editor didn't insist on the author rewording that sentence. But such minor problems don't affect my overall enjoyment of the story, so IMO it doesn't benefit other readers to hear about it in a public review.
Now if you truly suck at writing—bad grammar on every page, lots of confusing sentences that I have to read two and three times, etc.—I might diplomatically suggest that the book needs editing. Even then, I will not typically point out any specific issues, because I'm not your editor. Of course, if you reply to the review and claim that your writing is perfect, I might just edit a couple of pages to humble you, but that's a special b***h slap that is reserved for only the most obnoxious people.:-)
The right way to handle that is to review-ban the relevant author, not review-ban the entire author community. Most of us writers aren't petty jerks who enjoy tearing other people down undeservedly. This is not to say that I haven't written a few scathing reviews, but when I write a scathing review, it's because there's something sufficiently wrong with the product that it destroys or significantly impairs my enjoyment of it (e.g. my harsh review of the Stargate SG-1 season collection because I had to buy combine pieces of something like six or seven sets to get one single copy where every disc was functional, my harsh review of Wargames 2: The Dead Code, which pointed out that there was a fatal technology comprehension error about every 15-30 seconds, and so on).
I don't even bother posting reviews if I'm luke warm on the product; minor nits like the occasional awkward wording aren't worth me taking the time to write a review. I certainly wouldn't write one because someone was ostensibly my "competitor" (as though there actually were such a thing as true competition in creative endeavors). That's junior high school behavior.
From my perspective, what Amazon is doing is basically useless. The sorts of people who were trolling your books can simply create accounts using different names and email accounts, and they can continue to troll your books. This Amazon ban will not have any effect on that sort of behavior. The only reviews it will prevent are the legitimate reviews written by authors—the sorts of reviews that are likely to actually be useful because they are written by someone who is well versed in what makes writing good or bad—the sorts of reviews that can significantly boost sales of a good book or (maybe) reduce sales of a lousy one.
Now I could see how some authors might be uncomfortable with the idea of another author making positive or negative comments about their works, simply because their names carry a fair amount of weight. That said, there's no real difference between other authors and any other famous people in that respect. They don't ban celebrities from making comments on products. Why should authors be treated differently?
Either way, even though I don't think I've actually reviewed any books on Amazon, if and when I do actually publish a book through Amazon, I'll be sure to use a separate account. It's probably good to separate my personal life and my professional life anyway. So folks won't know that another author wrote the review, which eliminates the extra weight, but it won't stop me from trolling your books^W^W^Wreviewing things.:-D
I wouldn't say that reviews from random people have no value. But their value is less than that of reviews that have been... reviewed.
In my opinion, they serve very different purposes.
A professional review is likely to be a great starting point if I want to hear an overall review of how well something works. They give a broad, overall opinion. The problem is that they rarely contain enough detail to fully describe the product, because different users care about different details.
On the flip side, individual reviews are a great starting point if I want to know about the behavior or usability of a particular feature that only some of the product's users care about. Individual reviews contain a whole lot of detail, but unless you're willing to read hundreds of them, don't necessarily provide a good overall view of the product.
Actually, you can develop resistance to what you call "physical means", too, up to a point. Just look at the rise of triclosan resistance since the proliferation of antibacterial soap. There are even reports of some UV-resistant bacteria out there.
The metaphor is all wrong. It's Christmas, not Easter. You're supposed to say that an updated version of the Debian m68k port was delivered by Santa, or that Rudolph helped them find their way back to the main branch, or that wise men brought Debian gifts of gold, frankincense, and m68k ports.
456 terabytes? That's peanuts. HD copies of just the Blu-Ray versions of TV shows currently on sale at Amazon (over 3200 shows at an average of probably three seasons apiece, at an average of five Blu-Ray discs per season, at an average of thirty gigs per disc) would be on the order of 1.3 petabytes by themselves.
So if that's your idea of a good tracker, then the GP was clearly correct in saying that only popular content is readily available.
It shouldn't take anywhere near three months to film a two-hour movie unless you're doing an insane amount of special effects that require very precise positioning of actors and actresses. In the soap opera world, they shoot one forty-minute episode per day except during hiatus periods, which is the equivalent of one two-hour movie every three days. Principal photography for an independent film averages somewhere around a week or two.
Of course, this assumes that the sets are already built, the locations are already scouted, the scripts are already written, the shots are planned properly to maximize efficiency, etc.
Hollywood, in contrast, has the budget to handle burning three whole months shooting a mere two hours of content, so they don't really care that much about the fact that they're slow as molasses in February.
Of course, that doesn't mean you actually need three months for principal photography, even for major Hollywood features. The Lord of the Rings averaged only a little over three months per two hours (based on the extended edition length). Most feature films don't even approach that level of complexity, with its ~70 cast members, 20,000 extras, thousands of weapons and suits of armor....
I think the comparison to the sex offenders map is apt. This map serves as a perfect counterbalance to that registered sex offenders map.
You see, there's a fine line between self defense and vigilantism. Whenever somebody gets raped or a child goes missing, there's a heightened risk of violence against people on the sex offenders list because everybody assumes they did it. Since random gun owners now know where former sex offenders live, it's only fair that the knowledge be mutual.:-)
Hence the rest of the very paragraph you replied to the first part of, where I pointed out that you can have all the weapons in the world, and it won't do you any good if they aren't with you or you aren't conscious.
Gut bacteria and other factors can change things up to a small degree, but you'll never get around the basic physics of your metabolism. Expend less energy than you consume, and you will gain weight.
That's very oversimplified to the point of being almost wrong. The problem is that your metabolism varies depending on how much energy is available. If you cut your calorie intake to try to lose weight, your cells slow down their metabolic rate to compensate, and you're still expending no more energy than you consume. When the system is calibrated correctly, people keep a fairly constant weight no matter how much or how little they eat. When the system is calibrated wrong, people can't lose weight no matter how little they eat. There are things you can do to improve your odds, such as starving yourself for one day every few days so that your body does not adjust to the reduced calorie consumption, but that only goes so far.
And although you are correct that consuming sugars and starches instead of fats and proteins makes this problem worse, high protein diets are hard on your kidneys, heart, etc. So that's not a fix, either. The right fix is to figure out why the whole system is out of balance and fix it.
Not to mention many out there feel a browser should not use more than 4 gigs of ram and is a light text and graphics reader.
Having a >4GB footprint is not the only reason to move to a 64-bit address space. As more software becomes 64-bit, those legacy 32-bit apps become more of a problem, both in terms of longer application launch times (because the 32-bit library stack that it uses isn't loaded initially) and in terms of added memory pressure (because of all those unnecessary libraries loaded into RAM).
Imagine - if she had a.357, or even a.38 at hand, she wouldn't have had to lunge. Pull that sucker out of her desk drawer, or handbag, take aim, and squeeze.
Now imagine some six-year-old kid pulling that sucker out of her desk drawer, thinking that it's a toy, and killing somebody. Even in the best case, more guns in the hands of teachers would just replace a handful of occasional massacres with a much larger number of accidental shootings. The body count doesn't decrease; only the concentration does.
Now if you had said an armed guard, I might agree—someone trained to use weapons, carrying that weapon on his or her person at all times. As soon as it is in the hands of someone who isn't physically in contact with the weapon at all times, however, it becomes a far greater threat to the children's safety than the threat it is trying to prevent, statistically speaking. Far, far greater.
There's no better proof of that than what happened last week. The very first victim was heavily armed. That didn't help her any; in fact, that's probably why she got killed in the first place. Weapons are only useful for defensive purposes if you have them out, in your hand, ready to use, and you're awake and not distracted. Locked away in a closet or cabinet somewhere, they're useless.
Put another way, the longer we take to eradicate the disease, the greater the risk of the virus mutating into a form that the vaccine no longer protects against, at which point we're back to square one worldwide.
Worse, within a given region, eradication of polio has to be completed within a fairly short period of time, or you risk the vaccine form of the virus mutating and causing some immune-compromised people to actually get a form of polio from people who received the vaccine. So stopping the immunization process in the middle is likely to condemn at least a few people to crippling paralysis and even death. In fact, this is exactly what happened in Nigeria just a few years ago. It is all but a certainty that the same thing will happen in Pakistan if the vaccination program does not get back up and running soon.
Comments that describe what the code is doing are useless. Comments that describe why the code does what it does are invaluable.
Depends on the level of granularity. Comments that describe what a single line of code does (or even a small number of lines of code in many cases) are useless.
Comments that describe the behavior of a suitably large block of code (e.g. a function or a block within a particularly complicated function) can help you quickly understand the structure of a program as a whole. This is critical when working with sufficiently large bodies of code, because you're unlikely to have time to read every line of code before you start hacking away at it. For sufficiently complex projects, they can also be pulled out by tools such as HeaderDoc or Doxygen and converted into documentation.
At a semi-coarse granularity, comments that tell you what a block of code within a function does can make it much easier to find the code you need to change when something doesn't work. Thus, even those comments can be useful, so long as each comment covers at least a handful of lines of code and so long as the "what" isn't instantly obvious at a glance.
The homicide rate in the US is about 5/100,000, so making a whole lot of sweeping assumptions, you would expect to see 9 homicides per year in airports and on airplanes past the security checkpoints.
The problem is that your sweeping assumptions are so wrong that they completely invalidate the statistics. First and foremost, your numbers apparently assume that homicides in the U.S. are roughly random. This is, of course, not the case:
More than half of homicides in the U.S. are drug-related, so you can start by eliminating all of those (unless we see drug deals going down on airplanes, that is).
Approximately half of all homicides are related to domestic violence, so you can also eliminate those (because those sorts of situations tend to almost invariably happen in the home).
The remaining single-digit percentage are mostly the result of failed robbery attempts. Nobody is going to be stupid enough do that in the presence of presumably armed security personnel, with hundreds of cameras pointing at them, in the presence of hundreds of people.
Therefore, you would expect to see approximately zero homicides every year beyond an airport checkpoint, within some small epsilon.
Who is arguing that the Westboro people should be locked up because of their beliefs? I think they should be locked up because of their actions. Words have power, and fomenting hatred and encouraging violence constitutes a terrorist act. By praising those who massacre innocent children, kill American soldiers, and commit other heinous crimes—by basically encouraging mass murder—these people are quite literally no different than overseas extremists who preach "Death to America" and other terrorist propaganda.
And there is really no difference between these people and the Nazis except in the body count. People die because of the words of people like this, and if these people lived anywhere but America, they would probably have experienced the business end of a cruise missile by now.
Even in America, there are limits to free speech that must be enforced in the interest of maintaining a functioning society. When you cross the line, you can and should be prosecuted. Westboro crossed that line a long time ago, and should rightfully be jailed.
There's a difference between being primitive and being hate-filled. Primitive people attack each other to survive, not because they hate one another. Humanity didn't know that back then. We do now.
You have it backwards. Having established that it is acceptable to call gays subhuman because their religious beliefs demand it, the rest flows naturally from there. We saw in Germany during WWII what happens when the seeds of hate are not weeded out.
No one is calling Westboro less than human because of their religion. People are calling Westboro less than human because their actions betray a decided lack of humanity.
People don't usually care what "application" a window belongs to; the fact that you care on the Mac is a holdover from the Mac's single tasking heritage (where the entire menu bar paradigm originated). What people do care about is that the menu entry they select operates on the document they are working on, and people get confused about that relationship on the Mac.
I think you have things backwards. I find myself having that problem in X11 every time I try to use it. On the Mac, there is exactly one non-pallette-style window that has focus at any time (bugs notwithstanding), and the visual style of the window's title bar makes it blindingly obvious which window you're working with. Therefore, when you pull down a menu, you can instantly see what window will be the target of that action. With floating palettes in X11, you have basically no idea what's going to happen when you click on it.
As for not caring what application a window belongs to, that's only true for very simple, document-based apps. As soon as you get into complex apps that involve multiple windows for a single task—multitrack audio apps, for example—it really helps to know that your menu bar is always going to be in one place and cannot ever be hidden, no matter how many windows you have littering the screen. The only good alternative is to waste space in every window with a redundant menu bar, and that's just bad UI.
The user isn't dumb, s/he just has better things to do than become a Software Engineer just to use what has become an everyday appliance. The problem here is bad design, period. Accept that and maybe we can move on.
And that attitude is precisely why we have the security problems that we do. Viruses and trojan horses are design problems. Phishing is not, unless you consider the fact that anyone can create a website without "adult supervision" to be a design problem. Short of removing the ability for arbitrary people to create websites without audits, you're never going to prevent phishing, because there will always be someone clueless enough to believe that a2342730872983.ru is really Chase Bank's website.
When it comes to phishing and other social engineering attacks, unless you did something really, really obviously wrong in your design, the core problem behind phishing is always lack of proper security consciousness on the part of the person who got attacked. Don't get me wrong, bad UI can make things worse by hiding critical information or making it too easy for people to hose themselves even when they do know what they are doing, but for the most part, modern software is way beyond that point already.
Sure, there are some UI design decisions and software design practices that can make it so that people don't have to understand as much, but the problem is that the farther you go down that path, the more your users treat the device as an appliance, and the more you need to protect them. (Ironically, the very ease of use that makes computers so great at transforming society also leads to the false confidence that makes phishing attacks possible, and thus makes computers seem harder to use.) At some point, protecting users from their own lack of skills becomes a vicious cycle that can only end in locked-down devices with no ability to tinker and no ability to access the Internet except through specific websites that are specifically designed to have no outgoing links—basically shutting off the Internet and going back to the world of curated BBS companies like AOL. I mean, if a Netflix viewer is what you want, that's fine, but it isn't a computer anymore at that point.
As long as arbitrary people can create arbitrary content without bounds, naïve users are not safe. Period. Heck, as long as users can add apps without each one going through a meticulous code review to look for backdoors, easter eggs, etc., there is at least some possibility that users are not fully safe (even if they are not naïve). The only way to completely and reliably prevent phishing and social engineering is to educate the users so that they are not naïve and do not make the mistakes that lead to their digital lives becoming compromised. Either that or make computers so hard to use that you need years of training to be able to use them, but that's probably not a change of direction that anyone wants to see.
My parents could never get used to global menus on the Mac, for example.
I would have said the reverse. The menu bar being at the top creates modality that makes it easy to discover which windows belonging to a given application. In the Windows/X11 world, trying to figure out which application a particular window came from can be a usability nightmare... except for apps that are designed so that all of your windows are subwindows of one big window, which makes your second monitor useless.
And remote system management on the Mac is also harder (the best you can do is try and set up remote desktop access).
Or SSH or iChat/Messages screen sharing. The latter makes more sense for home use, IMO.
And, of course, there is the obvious advantage that people using Linux can continue to use the hardware they are already used to.
Unless it is ancient hardware with a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, you can usually just plug their existing hardware into a Mac and use it. People aren't used to the box on their desk; they're used to the peripherals and the OS, and you're changing the OS either way.
Slashdot Mirror
*shrugs*
To me, there's a difference between critique groups, where people are giving criticism because someone asked for it, and public review areas. If somebody asks me for grammar critiques privately, I'm the editor from hell. I assume that they wouldn't have asked if they didn't want me to help them polish it, so I try to point out every little thing that I think could be better so that they can learn from it. But when I'm reading a book for enjoyment, I'm not analyzing it. I'm reading it. Unless I'm reading with editing in mind, I don't even notice the sorts of things you mention unless they're bad enough to confuse me or force me to reread a sentence.
And I'm not going to mention those things unless they're frequent problems. Even with well-established authors, every once in a while, I'll hit a sentence where I have to read it a second time, and I pause to wonder how the editor didn't insist on the author rewording that sentence. But such minor problems don't affect my overall enjoyment of the story, so IMO it doesn't benefit other readers to hear about it in a public review.
Now if you truly suck at writing—bad grammar on every page, lots of confusing sentences that I have to read two and three times, etc.—I might diplomatically suggest that the book needs editing. Even then, I will not typically point out any specific issues, because I'm not your editor. Of course, if you reply to the review and claim that your writing is perfect, I might just edit a couple of pages to humble you, but that's a special b***h slap that is reserved for only the most obnoxious people. :-)
The right way to handle that is to review-ban the relevant author, not review-ban the entire author community. Most of us writers aren't petty jerks who enjoy tearing other people down undeservedly. This is not to say that I haven't written a few scathing reviews, but when I write a scathing review, it's because there's something sufficiently wrong with the product that it destroys or significantly impairs my enjoyment of it (e.g. my harsh review of the Stargate SG-1 season collection because I had to buy combine pieces of something like six or seven sets to get one single copy where every disc was functional, my harsh review of Wargames 2: The Dead Code, which pointed out that there was a fatal technology comprehension error about every 15-30 seconds, and so on).
I don't even bother posting reviews if I'm luke warm on the product; minor nits like the occasional awkward wording aren't worth me taking the time to write a review. I certainly wouldn't write one because someone was ostensibly my "competitor" (as though there actually were such a thing as true competition in creative endeavors). That's junior high school behavior.
From my perspective, what Amazon is doing is basically useless. The sorts of people who were trolling your books can simply create accounts using different names and email accounts, and they can continue to troll your books. This Amazon ban will not have any effect on that sort of behavior. The only reviews it will prevent are the legitimate reviews written by authors—the sorts of reviews that are likely to actually be useful because they are written by someone who is well versed in what makes writing good or bad—the sorts of reviews that can significantly boost sales of a good book or (maybe) reduce sales of a lousy one.
Now I could see how some authors might be uncomfortable with the idea of another author making positive or negative comments about their works, simply because their names carry a fair amount of weight. That said, there's no real difference between other authors and any other famous people in that respect. They don't ban celebrities from making comments on products. Why should authors be treated differently?
Either way, even though I don't think I've actually reviewed any books on Amazon, if and when I do actually publish a book through Amazon, I'll be sure to use a separate account. It's probably good to separate my personal life and my professional life anyway. So folks won't know that another author wrote the review, which eliminates the extra weight, but it won't stop me from trolling your books^W^W^Wreviewing things. :-D
In my opinion, they serve very different purposes.
A professional review is likely to be a great starting point if I want to hear an overall review of how well something works. They give a broad, overall opinion. The problem is that they rarely contain enough detail to fully describe the product, because different users care about different details.
On the flip side, individual reviews are a great starting point if I want to know about the behavior or usability of a particular feature that only some of the product's users care about. Individual reviews contain a whole lot of detail, but unless you're willing to read hundreds of them, don't necessarily provide a good overall view of the product.
Actually, you can develop resistance to what you call "physical means", too, up to a point. Just look at the rise of triclosan resistance since the proliferation of antibacterial soap. There are even reports of some UV-resistant bacteria out there.
The metaphor is all wrong. It's Christmas, not Easter. You're supposed to say that an updated version of the Debian m68k port was delivered by Santa, or that Rudolph helped them find their way back to the main branch, or that wise men brought Debian gifts of gold, frankincense, and m68k ports.
456 terabytes? That's peanuts. HD copies of just the Blu-Ray versions of TV shows currently on sale at Amazon (over 3200 shows at an average of probably three seasons apiece, at an average of five Blu-Ray discs per season, at an average of thirty gigs per disc) would be on the order of 1.3 petabytes by themselves.
So if that's your idea of a good tracker, then the GP was clearly correct in saying that only popular content is readily available.
It shouldn't take anywhere near three months to film a two-hour movie unless you're doing an insane amount of special effects that require very precise positioning of actors and actresses. In the soap opera world, they shoot one forty-minute episode per day except during hiatus periods, which is the equivalent of one two-hour movie every three days. Principal photography for an independent film averages somewhere around a week or two.
Of course, this assumes that the sets are already built, the locations are already scouted, the scripts are already written, the shots are planned properly to maximize efficiency, etc.
Hollywood, in contrast, has the budget to handle burning three whole months shooting a mere two hours of content, so they don't really care that much about the fact that they're slow as molasses in February.
Of course, that doesn't mean you actually need three months for principal photography, even for major Hollywood features. The Lord of the Rings averaged only a little over three months per two hours (based on the extended edition length). Most feature films don't even approach that level of complexity, with its ~70 cast members, 20,000 extras, thousands of weapons and suits of armor....
I assume you mean Colombia. Although I do often wonder if Congress is on crack....
Interesting and Troll? Whatever happened to "Funny"? *sigh*
It began with the war on drugs. If everyone were stoned enough, that song would freaking rock.
I think the comparison to the sex offenders map is apt. This map serves as a perfect counterbalance to that registered sex offenders map.
You see, there's a fine line between self defense and vigilantism. Whenever somebody gets raped or a child goes missing, there's a heightened risk of violence against people on the sex offenders list because everybody assumes they did it. Since random gun owners now know where former sex offenders live, it's only fair that the knowledge be mutual. :-)
Hence the rest of the very paragraph you replied to the first part of, where I pointed out that you can have all the weapons in the world, and it won't do you any good if they aren't with you or you aren't conscious.
You're kidding, right? Every gun used was owned by the first victim. You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know that.
That's very oversimplified to the point of being almost wrong. The problem is that your metabolism varies depending on how much energy is available. If you cut your calorie intake to try to lose weight, your cells slow down their metabolic rate to compensate, and you're still expending no more energy than you consume. When the system is calibrated correctly, people keep a fairly constant weight no matter how much or how little they eat. When the system is calibrated wrong, people can't lose weight no matter how little they eat. There are things you can do to improve your odds, such as starving yourself for one day every few days so that your body does not adjust to the reduced calorie consumption, but that only goes so far.
And although you are correct that consuming sugars and starches instead of fats and proteins makes this problem worse, high protein diets are hard on your kidneys, heart, etc. So that's not a fix, either. The right fix is to figure out why the whole system is out of balance and fix it.
Having a >4GB footprint is not the only reason to move to a 64-bit address space. As more software becomes 64-bit, those legacy 32-bit apps become more of a problem, both in terms of longer application launch times (because the 32-bit library stack that it uses isn't loaded initially) and in terms of added memory pressure (because of all those unnecessary libraries loaded into RAM).
Now imagine some six-year-old kid pulling that sucker out of her desk drawer, thinking that it's a toy, and killing somebody. Even in the best case, more guns in the hands of teachers would just replace a handful of occasional massacres with a much larger number of accidental shootings. The body count doesn't decrease; only the concentration does.
Now if you had said an armed guard, I might agree—someone trained to use weapons, carrying that weapon on his or her person at all times. As soon as it is in the hands of someone who isn't physically in contact with the weapon at all times, however, it becomes a far greater threat to the children's safety than the threat it is trying to prevent, statistically speaking. Far, far greater.
There's no better proof of that than what happened last week. The very first victim was heavily armed. That didn't help her any; in fact, that's probably why she got killed in the first place. Weapons are only useful for defensive purposes if you have them out, in your hand, ready to use, and you're awake and not distracted. Locked away in a closet or cabinet somewhere, they're useless.
Put another way, the longer we take to eradicate the disease, the greater the risk of the virus mutating into a form that the vaccine no longer protects against, at which point we're back to square one worldwide.
Worse, within a given region, eradication of polio has to be completed within a fairly short period of time, or you risk the vaccine form of the virus mutating and causing some immune-compromised people to actually get a form of polio from people who received the vaccine . So stopping the immunization process in the middle is likely to condemn at least a few people to crippling paralysis and even death. In fact, this is exactly what happened in Nigeria just a few years ago. It is all but a certainty that the same thing will happen in Pakistan if the vaccination program does not get back up and running soon.
Depends on the level of granularity. Comments that describe what a single line of code does (or even a small number of lines of code in many cases) are useless.
Comments that describe the behavior of a suitably large block of code (e.g. a function or a block within a particularly complicated function) can help you quickly understand the structure of a program as a whole. This is critical when working with sufficiently large bodies of code, because you're unlikely to have time to read every line of code before you start hacking away at it. For sufficiently complex projects, they can also be pulled out by tools such as HeaderDoc or Doxygen and converted into documentation.
At a semi-coarse granularity, comments that tell you what a block of code within a function does can make it much easier to find the code you need to change when something doesn't work. Thus, even those comments can be useful, so long as each comment covers at least a handful of lines of code and so long as the "what" isn't instantly obvious at a glance.
The problem is that your sweeping assumptions are so wrong that they completely invalidate the statistics. First and foremost, your numbers apparently assume that homicides in the U.S. are roughly random. This is, of course, not the case:
Therefore, you would expect to see approximately zero homicides every year beyond an airport checkpoint, within some small epsilon.
Who is arguing that the Westboro people should be locked up because of their beliefs? I think they should be locked up because of their actions. Words have power, and fomenting hatred and encouraging violence constitutes a terrorist act. By praising those who massacre innocent children, kill American soldiers, and commit other heinous crimes—by basically encouraging mass murder—these people are quite literally no different than overseas extremists who preach "Death to America" and other terrorist propaganda.
And there is really no difference between these people and the Nazis except in the body count. People die because of the words of people like this, and if these people lived anywhere but America, they would probably have experienced the business end of a cruise missile by now.
Even in America, there are limits to free speech that must be enforced in the interest of maintaining a functioning society. When you cross the line, you can and should be prosecuted. Westboro crossed that line a long time ago, and should rightfully be jailed.
There's a difference between being primitive and being hate-filled. Primitive people attack each other to survive, not because they hate one another. Humanity didn't know that back then. We do now.
You have it backwards. Having established that it is acceptable to call gays subhuman because their religious beliefs demand it, the rest flows naturally from there. We saw in Germany during WWII what happens when the seeds of hate are not weeded out.
No one is calling Westboro less than human because of their religion. People are calling Westboro less than human because their actions betray a decided lack of humanity.
I think you have things backwards. I find myself having that problem in X11 every time I try to use it. On the Mac, there is exactly one non-pallette-style window that has focus at any time (bugs notwithstanding), and the visual style of the window's title bar makes it blindingly obvious which window you're working with. Therefore, when you pull down a menu, you can instantly see what window will be the target of that action. With floating palettes in X11, you have basically no idea what's going to happen when you click on it.
As for not caring what application a window belongs to, that's only true for very simple, document-based apps. As soon as you get into complex apps that involve multiple windows for a single task—multitrack audio apps, for example—it really helps to know that your menu bar is always going to be in one place and cannot ever be hidden, no matter how many windows you have littering the screen. The only good alternative is to waste space in every window with a redundant menu bar, and that's just bad UI.
And that attitude is precisely why we have the security problems that we do. Viruses and trojan horses are design problems. Phishing is not, unless you consider the fact that anyone can create a website without "adult supervision" to be a design problem. Short of removing the ability for arbitrary people to create websites without audits, you're never going to prevent phishing, because there will always be someone clueless enough to believe that a2342730872983.ru is really Chase Bank's website.
When it comes to phishing and other social engineering attacks, unless you did something really, really obviously wrong in your design, the core problem behind phishing is always lack of proper security consciousness on the part of the person who got attacked. Don't get me wrong, bad UI can make things worse by hiding critical information or making it too easy for people to hose themselves even when they do know what they are doing, but for the most part, modern software is way beyond that point already.
Sure, there are some UI design decisions and software design practices that can make it so that people don't have to understand as much, but the problem is that the farther you go down that path, the more your users treat the device as an appliance, and the more you need to protect them. (Ironically, the very ease of use that makes computers so great at transforming society also leads to the false confidence that makes phishing attacks possible, and thus makes computers seem harder to use.) At some point, protecting users from their own lack of skills becomes a vicious cycle that can only end in locked-down devices with no ability to tinker and no ability to access the Internet except through specific websites that are specifically designed to have no outgoing links—basically shutting off the Internet and going back to the world of curated BBS companies like AOL. I mean, if a Netflix viewer is what you want, that's fine, but it isn't a computer anymore at that point.
As long as arbitrary people can create arbitrary content without bounds, naïve users are not safe. Period. Heck, as long as users can add apps without each one going through a meticulous code review to look for backdoors, easter eggs, etc., there is at least some possibility that users are not fully safe (even if they are not naïve). The only way to completely and reliably prevent phishing and social engineering is to educate the users so that they are not naïve and do not make the mistakes that lead to their digital lives becoming compromised. Either that or make computers so hard to use that you need years of training to be able to use them, but that's probably not a change of direction that anyone wants to see.
I would have said the reverse. The menu bar being at the top creates modality that makes it easy to discover which windows belonging to a given application. In the Windows/X11 world, trying to figure out which application a particular window came from can be a usability nightmare... except for apps that are designed so that all of your windows are subwindows of one big window, which makes your second monitor useless.
Or SSH or iChat/Messages screen sharing. The latter makes more sense for home use, IMO.
Unless it is ancient hardware with a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, you can usually just plug their existing hardware into a Mac and use it. People aren't used to the box on their desk; they're used to the peripherals and the OS, and you're changing the OS either way.