On a side note, this is why the iPhone's Safari is far and away the best mobile browser at the moment.
Simply double-tap the paragraph or column of text you actually want to read, and the browser will zoom in so that all the annoying, animated ads (and really, everything else excepting the content) are pushed off the screen and out of your field of view. Now, I will grant you that having an ad-blocker would be superior, as it would prevent the downloading and execution of such ads in the first place and save my battery life, but the high-resolution zoom is so effective that I can live without the blocker. The iPhone doesn't produce any hover events, which is a mixed blessing, but in this context it means that those annoying embedded keyword ads won't ever activate.
Until Fennec is release-quality, anybody trying to avoid ads on the go should look into the iPhone or iPod Touch. For the record, I use a Nokia E71 every day, but its mobile browser crashes so often it's basically useless. I carry an iPod Touch and seek out WiFi, or tether my laptop to the phone when I need to browse.
I had a job *exactly* like this, and everything you've said is right on. In just a few months, I'd been promoted twice to the third level phone queue ("supervisor's supervisor"), started handling email responses, then started basically doing a manager's job by writing email templates, producing process documents, and even began writing a QA application for the center.
I was driving >40 minutes to get to this job, and sometimes I'd be due to clock in at 8:00, but I arrived at 7:50, causing me to "log in" to the queue software at 8:01 or 8:02. Never mind that depending on the time of day, it might take 8 minutes or more to find a parking space and walk in from the wilderness to the front door. When I found out I would be summarily fired under a new policy if this happened only two more times, and my manager couldn't figure out how to prevent it, I just quit.
If something was completely translucent, wouldn't it be either transparent or opaque?
No; Think about glass block used in bathrooms. It lets all the light through (completely translucent), but it scrambles the light, obscuring the view and therefore making it nontransparent.
A more likely possibility: the plane failed randomly, and scapegoating something was a more attractive alternative than saying "we have no idea why our plane failed, it could be anything really, maybe they all will fall."
But isn't this tantamount to the same thing? Essentially, they're saying "Someone turned on a run-of-the-mill device that they obviously thought was safe, and it randomly caused the plane to seriously injure a significant number of passengers." Now we can all be scared shitless that some idiot four rows down will use a bluetooth mouse to play Solitaire, and throw the plane violently off-course, maiming us!
The response that would allay my fears would be along the lines of, "We know the specific cause and have taken steps to mitigate its effects in the future."
Umm... How? Dead is dead is dead, or so it's been said. I'm not taking the position of condoning the behavior, but your argument doesn't follow.
If your argument is that it's better for them to be chronically malnourished than poisoned with metals, then you assume (a) that they can't be detoxified later, and (b) that they would prefer to starve now, instead of succumb to disease at some undetermined future time.
My counterargument would be that you're supporting a corrupt hierarchy of slave-masters — because the people "employing" these children keep the lion's share of the profits and use it to fund further "talent-seeking" operations, etc.
I KNOW! I won't even store my own SSN / Passwords, etc. on my personal computer on my desk at home, much less on a laptop or cellphone. And yet these people are in possession of what amounts to an "identity brief" for tens of thousands of their paying customers, and leave it all conveniently accessible in a single unencrypted file on an unencrypted drive in an unsecured laptop?
Here's hoping it's just a disgruntled employee trying to call attention to the insecurity, rather than actual criminals who will use this to persecute the victims.
The monitor does make a huge difference, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I've got a 24" iMac (early 2007, matte LCD) as my primary workstation, and the screen is beautiful. However, it is insanely bright. Even at the lowest brightness setting, it's still too bright for working with the blinds closed. I use a free program called Shades to cut the brightness in software.
But the things you can do to get better coding performance are:
Calibrate your monitor as well as possible. This ensures that your whites and colors have (if not equal,) correlatable levels of percieved brightness.
Reduce the brightness. Put a sheet of super-bright white paper on a desk or table, so the room's light sources are all able to shine on it. White on your monitor shouldn't seem brighter than this.
Explore a Zenburn-like theme for your text editor. The theme I use is in a screenshot here
The user wouldn't need to do anything. If you log in via SSH as a limited user, you could (theoretically) use OS X's "open" command to launch the file as if it was clicked, from anywhere in the filesystem. The catch is that your SSH login must be the current user of the Window Server (locally logged-in).
If people somehow manage to slow down their reproductive habits, we'll get an economic collapse that will make 1929 look like a golden age.
Watch Japan. T Minus ~5-10 years and counting. The only way to grow the working population when the birth rate is low and declining, is to extend the useful, healthy, mentally-able life of productive elders. Efforts are underway, so we'll see if technology can overtake the problem.
There's a special stylus you can get for the iPhone. I ordered one a few weeks ago but it hasn't arrived yet, so no review (sorry).
I have a Nokia E61 with PuTTY, but for as seldom as I need to log in and restart a random service or change a database schema in an emergency, I think I would put up with 5 minutes of error-prone typing every few months to get the rest of what the iPhone has to offer. If it's going to be more work than that, I'm going to get to somewhere I can sit down and use my laptop anyway. YMMV.
If you're typing English prose every day for email and PDA-type tasks, the built-in keyboard is actually quite good. Bluetooth keyboard support would still be beyond welcome though, especially with the very nice aluminum keyboard Apple themselves sell.
I bought my Nokia E61 (which is very similar) from an importer I found through froogle two years ago, and the phone has worked flawlessly on T-Mobile from day 1 (when it automatically downloaded the configuration from the network and I was up and running). It worked very well with their Blackberry Email server when I had that service, and it has auto-configured beautifully on every network it's been on, including Softbank's UMTS 3G network in Japan (with a rented USIM, no less).
I really don't think you have anything to worry about.
Then, where do we draw the line? At what point does the specific technology compel you to participate? Who decides which habits are ultimately constructive or destructive?
A hundred years ago, we had the technology for running water and dental hygiene. If you didn't go in for this "technological enhancement" of your body, that is to bathe daily and have fresh breath, you would be at a distinct disadvantage for certain types of work. At the same time, we also had Tobacco. If you chose not to smoke, you were at a similar disadvantage in social situations.
Now, we know that tobacco has distinct drawbacks. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any terrible drawbacks to these performance-enhancers. But it seems obvious to me that at some point in the future, there will be drugs whose benefits are clear and the drawbacks are non-existent. Where will you draw the line, and decide that it's OK to exclude those who don't participate?
At some point, we will be able to implant or wear patches for drugs either designed from or for our own genetic profile to maximize mental performance. Will you accept this as requisite for a position of academic research?
At some (possibly much) later point, nonbiological neurons may be available. Will you accept a requirement that your brain be capable of some minimum number of calculations per second (that far exceeds any biological human brain) to be considered a candidate for a position? Would you accept a requirement to connect your brain directly to additional processing, even if it left you feeling empty and depressed when you unplugged to go home? I think many will choose to comply, and the moral implications are murky at best.
Such choices will expose the opposing nature of many philosophies in new ways. These questions have to be given serious treatment, and using a snap moral judgement to conflate illegal drug use with (immoral) drug abuse is avoiding the issue.
So, to sum up, you propose interpreting the phrase "drug abuse" as 'drug-induced abuse of others and/or social institutions'. To criminalize the very act of use is different, and should be rightly called "illegal drug use".
The problem is more constrained than that. Think about it more like this: You're in a town that's been planned very carefully. At any intersection, the possible roads away from that intersection are labeled with colors. I'll assume three colors, and that each intersection has exactly three roads leading away from it (the number of roads that lead into the intersection doesn't matter).
Your friend tells you that his address is "Red-Blue-Blue". This means that, no matter which intersection you start from, by repeatedly following these directions, you WILL end up at his house.
Just throwing this out there, but I actually don't like getting drunk because I like being mindful and aware. Sure, I enjoy a beer or two watching TV at home with the wife, but I dislike the feeling of inebriation. Relaxation and social openness are one thing, but losing a measure of control over one's mind, even temporarily, is still more likely to frighten me than make me feel good. Solving a problem, however, is (to me) a high with no downside.
Insider, outsider. It's all a big game. But the thing is, the business's operations are not. There's a much more important moral distinction going on here, and I think we passed an inflection point about 10 years ago. We're about to see the consequences as long-term capital investments have been consumed in the pursuit of steady, short-term profits.
When the CEO's and C*O's and Boards of these companies can redirect some of their attention from manipulating and/or exploiting the company's stock price, and actually put some thought and effort into the fucking day-to-day operations, I might buy back into stocks. Until then, the greater evil is the poor business decisions and lost attentions as so many bad to mediocre managers scramble to exercise their lucrative options. Tying a CEO's pay to performance should have little or nothing to do with the price of its stock in a secondary credit market.
The problem may actually boil down to something simple: Americans (and the whole world, for that matter) are over-invested in the stock market. Nearly everyone you take your money to advises you, without reservation, onto the stock markets. It gets so much attention in the news and in popular discourse, that it becomes self-amplifying. With so much money floating around, no amount of compensation offered by the company can compete with the rewards of well-exercised stock options. All the CEO has to do is make the company temporarily more (or less!!) popular with market participants. Not with his customers, or existing stockholders, or the board of directors, or employees, or even institutional creditors. He doesn't have to plan for the future. And too often, even when he is focused on pleasing the board, major owners, or institutional creditors, their payday comes from the market.
But, back to the main point. Insider trading regulations are the last stronghold against the utter abandonment of productive business in favor of market speculation. If insider trading were allowed, a good proportion of businesses would fail as the boards and upper management spent all their time attempting to manipulate the stock price instead of doing real work.
That's a difficult question, isn't it? I mean, I have an iPod Touch and it's quite awesome, but the lead-up to the iPhone's launch was ridiculous. I think Apple's engineers should be flayed for not offering a keyboard peripheral, or at least supporting bluetooth keyboards in some capacity, and on something that purports to be a smartphone.
That may change this year, though. I'm rooting for a new version of the iPhone based on the Atom processors (and with 1GB or more DRAM) that can support continuous speech recognition, or at least something with physical keys. If all you're doing is correcting mistakes, then the onscreen keyboard is fine. But short of that, forget it. And in light of how big of a pain in the ass text entry is, why the hell wouldn't you support copy and paste? I'll stick with my aging Nokia E61.
I'll partially rebut you both. I think that his question includes its own answer. The interfaces are supposed to be an extension of our minds, right? Well, 30 years ago when the first WIMP-y interfaces were developed, the closest we could get was to approximate things that our brain had developed to interact with.
Our brains are perhaps the most plastic knowledge-based system we currently know of. Over those twenty years of widespread use, our minds have become accustomed to the interfaces available. We expect everything to adhere to that interface model, both good and bad. Why do you think so many people seek out Windows (and Windows Mobile, for crying out loud!)? Why would anyone want XP on a UMPC? People want the quirks and inconsistencies they've become familiar with. Product quality or fitness to a purpose has very little to do with this kind of decision.
I think the resurgence of interface innovation is because we've recently gotten used to computing for leisure and fun. Most people wouldn't play around with unfamiliar, quirky, or bare-bones interfaces when there's work to be done, and I can't imagine their bosses would be happy if the a minor version software upgrade required retraining from scratch. This is where your above argument comes into play. But the general public is starting to use computers for leisure and socialization, and as an end in and of themselves. And this gives people time, opportunity, and a comfortable setting in which to use new interfaces.
We should change the interfaces because the new ones are better. If you want to write the bible for the Church of 70's Interface Design, and indoctrinate acolytes to protect the faith, realize that this is dogma, and nothing more. It's as useless to our progress as any other, and a straw man in any case. No-one is advocating the introduction of less efficient interfaces, or change for change's sake.
Actually, you're completely wrong. Try seeing the article for The Pareto Principle, instead of trolling for other, largely unrelated observations that are named after the man.
I would also like to point out that this is a very common pattern of how things freaking actually work in the real world. You can find probably on the order of tens of millions of examples for this disparity in the real world. It's the Pareto Principle (aka, the 80/20 rule), and the concentration is basically fractal in nature. The smaller the sample you choose, the greater the disproportionality is likely to be.
Some possible examples (this is a thought experiment. I don't know the actual stats, but all of these are believable, at least on the face of it):
Over 50% of all adultery is committed by less than 1% of the population
More than 50% of all food is grown by 1% of all agricultural companies
Over half of all charitable contributions are made by less than 1% of the people who took charitable deductions on their taxes
More than half of all hours logged on WoW are attributable to 1% of its user base
More than half of all Slashdot posts are submitted by less than 1% of its user base.
This does not a scandal make. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot more surprising if something of Wikipedia's nature didn't follow this statistical pattern. To me, it only proves that Wikipedia is genuinely organic, instead of an artificial system of quotas and coercion that tries to force everyone to submit equally. Would we even want a Wikipedia where the apathetic masses are forced or paid to submit information?
Things I didn't do with my PC eight years ago, whose availability and convenience is aided in large part by models of deepening abstraction and programming "shortcuts":
Watch YouTube videos embedded in news articles
Make local documents using a personal wiki
Umm. Now that you mention it, this sucks. Where is my natural language speech-recognition? And free-form local queries? Speech recognition (according to MS) was supposed to be a snap once processors hit 500MHz, which was about four doublings ago. I fully expected that, by now, I'd be telling my computer what files I want to work with and it would transform my natural language into database queries for the database filesystem behind the scenes. The closest thing I have is Spotlight on my Mac, but that's hardly the same beast.
Actually, screw that. Other than some AJAX web stuff, there's not really anything I do on my computer that isn't possible on a circa-1995 PDA. I had an Apple Newton Messagepad that could keep lists and checklists, compile native software, send and receive faxes and email, browse the Internet, print to local and network printers, and even use wireless networks (although, at the time they were infrared). Is it really possible that OS cruft and memory management have robbed us of (or delayed) the transformative computing revolution?
I disagree about the Object orientation comment -- I think it's right for coders to have it, but it should be discarded at the compiler level whenever possible. I remember hearing a talk a few years ago about an extension to Mathematica that would keep an online repository of general-form compiler optimizations; Perhaps something like this, along with some design-by-contract notation, would allow the reduction or removal of a lot of unnecessary crap (like allocating memory and instantiating an object to get access to an algorithm instead of typing a function name).
Seems to me, you must have grown up around a neutered form of religion where people impose their own moral sense upon the bible instead of actually taking their depraved morals from the bible and imposing them on others. The ID movement and its ilk is nothing more than a weak smokescreen for a jihad against rational thought and intelligent artifice.
I, however, grew up around plenty of idiots who would think nuclear weapons going off on US soil are harbingers of the destruction of man's sinful pride and a golden age of Christian reign (and indeed wanted to believe this about 9/11). Eventually, the fundies hope to destroy pretty much anything useful we've learned about the world -- and most of them think violence and murder are the way to achieve this (it's in their infallible bible).
If you don't get your morals from the bible, straighten up and realize that you don't need it, or any other voodoo claptrap, to live a decent life and treat others well. Stop supporting these genocidal sociopaths who would prefer we live like animals. If you do get your morals from the bible, then you're a far worse person than you purport to be, and nobody here has an obligation to take your moral posturing seriously.
Religion and dogmatic ideas are far from harmless. Stop trying to demoralize the good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
On a side note, this is why the iPhone's Safari is far and away the best mobile browser at the moment.
Simply double-tap the paragraph or column of text you actually want to read, and the browser will zoom in so that all the annoying, animated ads (and really, everything else excepting the content) are pushed off the screen and out of your field of view. Now, I will grant you that having an ad-blocker would be superior, as it would prevent the downloading and execution of such ads in the first place and save my battery life, but the high-resolution zoom is so effective that I can live without the blocker. The iPhone doesn't produce any hover events, which is a mixed blessing, but in this context it means that those annoying embedded keyword ads won't ever activate.
Until Fennec is release-quality, anybody trying to avoid ads on the go should look into the iPhone or iPod Touch. For the record, I use a Nokia E71 every day, but its mobile browser crashes so often it's basically useless. I carry an iPod Touch and seek out WiFi, or tether my laptop to the phone when I need to browse.
I had a job *exactly* like this, and everything you've said is right on. In just a few months, I'd been promoted twice to the third level phone queue ("supervisor's supervisor"), started handling email responses, then started basically doing a manager's job by writing email templates, producing process documents, and even began writing a QA application for the center.
I was driving >40 minutes to get to this job, and sometimes I'd be due to clock in at 8:00, but I arrived at 7:50, causing me to "log in" to the queue software at 8:01 or 8:02. Never mind that depending on the time of day, it might take 8 minutes or more to find a parking space and walk in from the wilderness to the front door. When I found out I would be summarily fired under a new policy if this happened only two more times, and my manager couldn't figure out how to prevent it, I just quit.
If something was completely translucent, wouldn't it be either transparent or opaque?
No; Think about glass block used in bathrooms. It lets all the light through (completely translucent), but it scrambles the light, obscuring the view and therefore making it nontransparent.
A more likely possibility: the plane failed randomly, and scapegoating something was a more attractive alternative than saying "we have no idea why our plane failed, it could be anything really, maybe they all will fall."
But isn't this tantamount to the same thing? Essentially, they're saying "Someone turned on a run-of-the-mill device that they obviously thought was safe, and it randomly caused the plane to seriously injure a significant number of passengers." Now we can all be scared shitless that some idiot four rows down will use a bluetooth mouse to play Solitaire, and throw the plane violently off-course, maiming us!
The response that would allay my fears would be along the lines of, "We know the specific cause and have taken steps to mitigate its effects in the future."
Umm... How? Dead is dead is dead, or so it's been said. I'm not taking the position of condoning the behavior, but your argument doesn't follow.
If your argument is that it's better for them to be chronically malnourished than poisoned with metals, then you assume (a) that they can't be detoxified later, and (b) that they would prefer to starve now, instead of succumb to disease at some undetermined future time.
My counterargument would be that you're supporting a corrupt hierarchy of slave-masters — because the people "employing" these children keep the lion's share of the profits and use it to fund further "talent-seeking" operations, etc.
I KNOW! I won't even store my own SSN / Passwords, etc. on my personal computer on my desk at home, much less on a laptop or cellphone. And yet these people are in possession of what amounts to an "identity brief" for tens of thousands of their paying customers, and leave it all conveniently accessible in a single unencrypted file on an unencrypted drive in an unsecured laptop?
Here's hoping it's just a disgruntled employee trying to call attention to the insecurity, rather than actual criminals who will use this to persecute the victims.
The monitor does make a huge difference, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I've got a 24" iMac (early 2007, matte LCD) as my primary workstation, and the screen is beautiful. However, it is insanely bright. Even at the lowest brightness setting, it's still too bright for working with the blinds closed. I use a free program called Shades to cut the brightness in software.
But the things you can do to get better coding performance are:
No, no no. WTFWJD
Unfortunately, I can't use it anyway, so somebody have fun with this.
The user wouldn't need to do anything. If you log in via SSH as a limited user, you could (theoretically) use OS X's "open" command to launch the file as if it was clicked, from anywhere in the filesystem. The catch is that your SSH login must be the current user of the Window Server (locally logged-in).
Watch Japan. T Minus ~5-10 years and counting. The only way to grow the working population when the birth rate is low and declining, is to extend the useful, healthy, mentally-able life of productive elders. Efforts are underway, so we'll see if technology can overtake the problem.
There's a special stylus you can get for the iPhone. I ordered one a few weeks ago but it hasn't arrived yet, so no review (sorry).
I have a Nokia E61 with PuTTY, but for as seldom as I need to log in and restart a random service or change a database schema in an emergency, I think I would put up with 5 minutes of error-prone typing every few months to get the rest of what the iPhone has to offer. If it's going to be more work than that, I'm going to get to somewhere I can sit down and use my laptop anyway. YMMV.
If you're typing English prose every day for email and PDA-type tasks, the built-in keyboard is actually quite good. Bluetooth keyboard support would still be beyond welcome though, especially with the very nice aluminum keyboard Apple themselves sell.
I bought my Nokia E61 (which is very similar) from an importer I found through froogle two years ago, and the phone has worked flawlessly on T-Mobile from day 1 (when it automatically downloaded the configuration from the network and I was up and running). It worked very well with their Blackberry Email server when I had that service, and it has auto-configured beautifully on every network it's been on, including Softbank's UMTS 3G network in Japan (with a rented USIM, no less).
I really don't think you have anything to worry about.
Then, where do we draw the line? At what point does the specific technology compel you to participate? Who decides which habits are ultimately constructive or destructive?
A hundred years ago, we had the technology for running water and dental hygiene. If you didn't go in for this "technological enhancement" of your body, that is to bathe daily and have fresh breath, you would be at a distinct disadvantage for certain types of work. At the same time, we also had Tobacco. If you chose not to smoke, you were at a similar disadvantage in social situations.
Now, we know that tobacco has distinct drawbacks. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any terrible drawbacks to these performance-enhancers. But it seems obvious to me that at some point in the future, there will be drugs whose benefits are clear and the drawbacks are non-existent. Where will you draw the line, and decide that it's OK to exclude those who don't participate?
At some point, we will be able to implant or wear patches for drugs either designed from or for our own genetic profile to maximize mental performance. Will you accept this as requisite for a position of academic research?
At some (possibly much) later point, nonbiological neurons may be available. Will you accept a requirement that your brain be capable of some minimum number of calculations per second (that far exceeds any biological human brain) to be considered a candidate for a position? Would you accept a requirement to connect your brain directly to additional processing, even if it left you feeling empty and depressed when you unplugged to go home? I think many will choose to comply, and the moral implications are murky at best.
Such choices will expose the opposing nature of many philosophies in new ways. These questions have to be given serious treatment, and using a snap moral judgement to conflate illegal drug use with (immoral) drug abuse is avoiding the issue.
So, to sum up, you propose interpreting the phrase "drug abuse" as 'drug-induced abuse of others and/or social institutions'. To criminalize the very act of use is different, and should be rightly called "illegal drug use".
I think I agree.
You would keep repeating them until you ended up at the intersection named "Red-Blue-Blue". That is the address, after all.
The problem is more constrained than that. Think about it more like this: You're in a town that's been planned very carefully. At any intersection, the possible roads away from that intersection are labeled with colors. I'll assume three colors, and that each intersection has exactly three roads leading away from it (the number of roads that lead into the intersection doesn't matter).
Your friend tells you that his address is "Red-Blue-Blue". This means that, no matter which intersection you start from, by repeatedly following these directions, you WILL end up at his house.
That's 13.73 billions of years old. Age of the Universe
Just throwing this out there, but I actually don't like getting drunk because I like being mindful and aware. Sure, I enjoy a beer or two watching TV at home with the wife, but I dislike the feeling of inebriation. Relaxation and social openness are one thing, but losing a measure of control over one's mind, even temporarily, is still more likely to frighten me than make me feel good. Solving a problem, however, is (to me) a high with no downside.
Insider, outsider. It's all a big game. But the thing is, the business's operations are not. There's a much more important moral distinction going on here, and I think we passed an inflection point about 10 years ago. We're about to see the consequences as long-term capital investments have been consumed in the pursuit of steady, short-term profits.
When the CEO's and C*O's and Boards of these companies can redirect some of their attention from manipulating and/or exploiting the company's stock price, and actually put some thought and effort into the fucking day-to-day operations, I might buy back into stocks. Until then, the greater evil is the poor business decisions and lost attentions as so many bad to mediocre managers scramble to exercise their lucrative options. Tying a CEO's pay to performance should have little or nothing to do with the price of its stock in a secondary credit market.
The problem may actually boil down to something simple: Americans (and the whole world, for that matter) are over-invested in the stock market. Nearly everyone you take your money to advises you, without reservation, onto the stock markets. It gets so much attention in the news and in popular discourse, that it becomes self-amplifying. With so much money floating around, no amount of compensation offered by the company can compete with the rewards of well-exercised stock options. All the CEO has to do is make the company temporarily more (or less!!) popular with market participants. Not with his customers, or existing stockholders, or the board of directors, or employees, or even institutional creditors. He doesn't have to plan for the future. And too often, even when he is focused on pleasing the board, major owners, or institutional creditors, their payday comes from the market.
But, back to the main point. Insider trading regulations are the last stronghold against the utter abandonment of productive business in favor of market speculation. If insider trading were allowed, a good proportion of businesses would fail as the boards and upper management spent all their time attempting to manipulate the stock price instead of doing real work.
That's a difficult question, isn't it? I mean, I have an iPod Touch and it's quite awesome, but the lead-up to the iPhone's launch was ridiculous. I think Apple's engineers should be flayed for not offering a keyboard peripheral, or at least supporting bluetooth keyboards in some capacity, and on something that purports to be a smartphone.
That may change this year, though. I'm rooting for a new version of the iPhone based on the Atom processors (and with 1GB or more DRAM) that can support continuous speech recognition, or at least something with physical keys. If all you're doing is correcting mistakes, then the onscreen keyboard is fine. But short of that, forget it. And in light of how big of a pain in the ass text entry is, why the hell wouldn't you support copy and paste? I'll stick with my aging Nokia E61.
Socipathology, indeed.
I'll partially rebut you both. I think that his question includes its own answer. The interfaces are supposed to be an extension of our minds, right? Well, 30 years ago when the first WIMP-y interfaces were developed, the closest we could get was to approximate things that our brain had developed to interact with.
Our brains are perhaps the most plastic knowledge-based system we currently know of. Over those twenty years of widespread use, our minds have become accustomed to the interfaces available. We expect everything to adhere to that interface model, both good and bad. Why do you think so many people seek out Windows (and Windows Mobile, for crying out loud!)? Why would anyone want XP on a UMPC? People want the quirks and inconsistencies they've become familiar with. Product quality or fitness to a purpose has very little to do with this kind of decision.
I think the resurgence of interface innovation is because we've recently gotten used to computing for leisure and fun. Most people wouldn't play around with unfamiliar, quirky, or bare-bones interfaces when there's work to be done, and I can't imagine their bosses would be happy if the a minor version software upgrade required retraining from scratch. This is where your above argument comes into play. But the general public is starting to use computers for leisure and socialization, and as an end in and of themselves. And this gives people time, opportunity, and a comfortable setting in which to use new interfaces.
We should change the interfaces because the new ones are better. If you want to write the bible for the Church of 70's Interface Design, and indoctrinate acolytes to protect the faith, realize that this is dogma, and nothing more. It's as useless to our progress as any other, and a straw man in any case. No-one is advocating the introduction of less efficient interfaces, or change for change's sake.
Actually, you're completely wrong. Try seeing the article for The Pareto Principle, instead of trolling for other, largely unrelated observations that are named after the man.
I would also like to point out that this is a very common pattern of how things freaking actually work in the real world. You can find probably on the order of tens of millions of examples for this disparity in the real world. It's the Pareto Principle (aka, the 80/20 rule), and the concentration is basically fractal in nature. The smaller the sample you choose, the greater the disproportionality is likely to be.
Some possible examples (this is a thought experiment. I don't know the actual stats, but all of these are believable, at least on the face of it):
This does not a scandal make. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot more surprising if something of Wikipedia's nature didn't follow this statistical pattern. To me, it only proves that Wikipedia is genuinely organic, instead of an artificial system of quotas and coercion that tries to force everyone to submit equally. Would we even want a Wikipedia where the apathetic masses are forced or paid to submit information?
Things I didn't do with my PC eight years ago, whose availability and convenience is aided in large part by models of deepening abstraction and programming "shortcuts":
Umm. Now that you mention it, this sucks. Where is my natural language speech-recognition? And free-form local queries? Speech recognition (according to MS) was supposed to be a snap once processors hit 500MHz, which was about four doublings ago. I fully expected that, by now, I'd be telling my computer what files I want to work with and it would transform my natural language into database queries for the database filesystem behind the scenes. The closest thing I have is Spotlight on my Mac, but that's hardly the same beast.
Actually, screw that. Other than some AJAX web stuff, there's not really anything I do on my computer that isn't possible on a circa-1995 PDA. I had an Apple Newton Messagepad that could keep lists and checklists, compile native software, send and receive faxes and email, browse the Internet, print to local and network printers, and even use wireless networks (although, at the time they were infrared). Is it really possible that OS cruft and memory management have robbed us of (or delayed) the transformative computing revolution?
I disagree about the Object orientation comment -- I think it's right for coders to have it, but it should be discarded at the compiler level whenever possible. I remember hearing a talk a few years ago about an extension to Mathematica that would keep an online repository of general-form compiler optimizations; Perhaps something like this, along with some design-by-contract notation, would allow the reduction or removal of a lot of unnecessary crap (like allocating memory and instantiating an object to get access to an algorithm instead of typing a function name).
Seems to me, you must have grown up around a neutered form of religion where people impose their own moral sense upon the bible instead of actually taking their depraved morals from the bible and imposing them on others. The ID movement and its ilk is nothing more than a weak smokescreen for a jihad against rational thought and intelligent artifice.
I, however, grew up around plenty of idiots who would think nuclear weapons going off on US soil are harbingers of the destruction of man's sinful pride and a golden age of Christian reign (and indeed wanted to believe this about 9/11). Eventually, the fundies hope to destroy pretty much anything useful we've learned about the world -- and most of them think violence and murder are the way to achieve this (it's in their infallible bible).
If you don't get your morals from the bible, straighten up and realize that you don't need it, or any other voodoo claptrap, to live a decent life and treat others well. Stop supporting these genocidal sociopaths who would prefer we live like animals. If you do get your morals from the bible, then you're a far worse person than you purport to be, and nobody here has an obligation to take your moral posturing seriously.
Religion and dogmatic ideas are far from harmless. Stop trying to demoralize the good guys.