It's not just the open source community; just look at Windows 8 and its Metro UI. That change isn't desirable or necessary to the userbase either, but just wait a few months, because Microsoft is going to force it on you whether you like it or not.
Or maybe we should get rid of separate countries, and all cooperate on having one master country? We can even let Ahmadinejad or Kim Il (new guy, can't remember his name) lead it!
There's a reason people splinter into different groups: it's because they can't agree on things. If you can't agree on things, and can't agree to a compromise, the only two solutions are violent conflict, or going your separate ways.
It's not just the herding cats problem, part of it is a fundamental disagreement about philosophy. Look at GNOME, for instance: their whole idea is to dumb everything down as possible and remove as much configurability as possible, because some "usability experts" and "usability studies" say this is a good thing somehow. Then look at KDE: it's completely the opposite, with as much configurability as they can pack in there, and also different UIs for different devices (plasma-desktop for desktops and laptops, plasma-netbook for netbooks, plasma-active for phones and tablets). There's no way to make two groups of people with such diametrically-opposed philosophies agree to merge projects, when they can't even agree on such fundamental items like whether users should be allowed to configure things or not.
The only problem with that is that the Sahara is already owned by other people. It's not like they're going to allow people living nearer the poles to move in and set up their own countries there.
With global warming, many vast areas (tundra areas, like Alaska and Siberia and northern Canada) which are currently uninhabited would become habitable.
Sorry to inform you, but your point #3 is invalid, in light of Windows 8 with the Metro UI. The big proprietary vendors (or at least MS) have shown themselves to be just as bad as the worst of the Free software groups in this regard.
Finally, KDE is actually the best in this regard, because they at least still have a traditional desktop UI (unlike Microsoft's Metro), and not something that tries to bring a touch interface to a keyboard-and-mouse system. The big offenders are GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity. KDE's big fault was releasing an alpha-quality release as "4.0", most of the distros adopting it as-is and dumping the stable KDE 3.5 series, and then users being pissed because nothing worked right; the entities most to blame were the distros, for not doing any quality control checking whatsoever. That was over 3 years ago, however, and KDE's up to 4.8 now, and it's stable and seems to work fine for the most part. Most people have stopped bitching about KDE's changes (though some people just won't let it go after all this time), and now everyone's bitching about Unity and Gnome (for good reason too; the problem there isn't really bugginess, it's lack of features, lack of configurability, and a totally different user interface that doesn't work well on a desktop system).
For your point #4, there's a good reason one hasn't died, it's because no one can agree on one. Just look at Gnome; they've decided to completely revamp their UI to something totally different, and people are abandoning it in droves and moving to KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and several others. What's going to happen with Windows 8 comes out? Except for the shills, everyone seems to hate it.
Finally, OSX is NOT well thought out. Putting menus at the top is stupid; it made sense in 1985 with a 9" screen, but it doesn't work on a 2 or 4-monitor setup or even on a single 24" or 30" monitor.
"Subtitles" does need to be encased in quotes, when you're referring to the word itself rather than actually using the word.
It's not the slang that's the problem, it's the accent. I'm sure British people have plenty of trouble understanding hillbilly twang and Southern drawl too; people with different accents have a hard time understanding each other. Aussie accents are even worse, probably because we Americans are less used to hearing them than the British accents. Of course, the Queen's English speakers are the most understandable by us, but the other accents, especially ones like Cockney, are very difficult.
Maybe at one time this was true, but it hasn't been true for a long time. DVDs have long come with selectable subtitles, in different languages, so you can switch between English, French, etc. People don't call these "closed captions"; they call them "subtitles". No one says they're watching the "closed captions" on a foreign-language DVD, but the subtitles are indeed selectable.
What ideology? With Unity (on Ubuntu), there's a clear commercial strategy there. I think it's going to fail, but still they have a plan that they're going to suddenly become really popular with regular users because of their supposedly easy-to-use UI; Mark Shuttleworth didn't make Unity out of some RMSian Free Software utopian vision. With Gnome3, the ideology is again trying to bring in nontechnical users by dumbing down the UI to a ridiculous extent (like removing the ability to turn the power off, unless you know a secret key combination, because "users don't need to turn off the power!").
Basically, what we're seeing on the Linux desktops is like herding cats: they're all going different directions, because they're someone's pet project, and no, Free Software ideology doesn't seem to have much to do with it. Compare and contrast with Windows 8 and its Metro UI; it's exactly the same mentality going on there, and obviously there's no software freedom there.
Personally, I don't give two shits about live news on TV. If I want to hear breaking news, I can get that online at news.google.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, bbc.com, etc. It's much faster for me to skim through news articles anyway than to listen to some bobblehead speak, though many of these sites have video feeds available too if you really want that.
Of course, if your wife is the one that really wants that, then you're stuck. Been there, done that. Sometimes there's no reasoning with women.
Personally, I would really prefer it if closed-captioning were available on all Netflix instant videos. They already have it on the foreign movies (it's called "subtitles" there), but whenever I watch a British movie (or movie with British actors), I have a hell of time trying to figure out what they're saying, and subtitles would be a huge help. I'm already in the practice of turning on subtitles for many movies (esp. any British or Australian ones) on DVD.
The thing about the employer isn't FUD; they've had articles here on Slashdot about that very thing. The customs one, however, I've never heard of, though there've been plenty of articles about customs searching your laptop computer.
I should also mention that mobile touchscreens aren't completely to blame for everything; Gmail's new interface, sucks, and it's not because of touchscreens.
Not exactly, IMO. I think it's a little more complex than this.
For one thing, Windows has been catering to dumbasses for ages, yet even so, XP, with its Fisher-Price designed UI, isn't nearly as dumbed-down as Win8/Metro.
Secondly, two of the UIs I mentioned are the top two UIs on Linux, which most people still seem to consider a "hacker's OS", not an OS for dumbasses. Yet, they're going all out on dumbing things down there. (KDE has done a lot better in this regard, by maintaining separate UIs for different device classes, and sticking with the traditional desktop UI. But even so, most Linux users seem to be accepting Gnome3 and Unity, while some are jumping ship to XFCE, which seems to be more like Gnome2 than anything else, and Gnome2 itself was a big dumbing-down step from Gnome1.)
Heck, Macs, which have always catered to dumbasses (e.g., one mouse button), these days seem to be rather conservative; the desktop/laptop machines aren't making that many changes in trying to merge touchscreen UI elements in, unlike the others.
Fundamentally, what seems to have happened is that mobile touchscreen devices have exploded in popularity, and for some reason, UI designers have almost all decided that they need to have a single UI that works on both touchscreens and other non-touch devices, for some stupid reason. This intent is especially clear with Windows: the Metro UI is pretty much identical between mobile phones and desktops (Win8). However, the "dumb-asses" theory doesn't really work here either: just check out Windows Phone 7's adoption rates: it's been a disaster! (Just wait, a bunch of MS shills will reply to this saying that everyone loves WP7 and the Nokia news was all fabricated by Google.) Apparently, most people would rather stick with Android (which is really rather complicated compared to iOS IMO) or iPhone. I guess we'll see how it all pans out when Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 hit the market.
A little bit of global warming might give us more arable and habitable land, but on the other hand we have increasing desertification in many areas, which subtracts from that.
Also, we already have tons of people living in low-lying coastal areas, since centuries ago we thought it'd be a great idea to build cities in natural port areas, and back then no one thought much about geography changing over time. Now that we have giant cities in these places, packing them up and moving to other spots isn't exactly an inexpensive or easy proposition.
You're right, it is wrong. Lots of animals will overfeed their habitat if their population grows too large; of course, then they have a famine, their population dwindles, and the problem is corrected. Humans, OTOH, invent new ways to grow crops to increase yields or find some other way of allowing an ever-increasing population.
However, what is true is that humans are the only animal known to destroy their own habitat, while being intelligent enough to understand what they're doing. A herd of overpopulated wild deer eating all the available food probably don't actually understand the long-term effects of what they're doing.
No way, the rising sea levels are because of a rift in the space-time continuum caused by tachyon bursts from aliens who are mad at us for not taking better care of Nessie.
Global warming cannot be real, so any other explanation is plausible, no matter how far-fetched.
The user interface got worse and worse, each time the users accepted the new shitty UI and accepted it but it's getting to the point it's virtually abuse now.
To be fair, it's not just Facebook where the user interface is getting worse and worse, it's EVERYTHING computer-related. I can't think of a single place where the user interface is actually getting better; they're all becoming horrible and dumbed-down and ugly. Windows 8 Metro: ugly, dumbed-down. Gnome 3: dumbed-down. Unity: dumbed-down. Gmail: ugly.
Worsening user interfaces seems to be the big trend these days. I guess everyone's run out of genuinely useful things to do with their time (like actually improve their products), so now they're focusing on UIs to make their shit look "new", and in the process fucking it all up.
Impossible, unless maybe you're going to set up this fictional piece of hardware on an always-on internet connection (which doesn't work too well with most ISPs, where they give out dynamic IP addresses and you're not guaranteed to get the same one, and you certainly can't get a domain name).
The whole point of "social media" is to share all the intimate details of your life with everyone you know (and by extension, everyone they know, etc.). In the old days, socialization was all about physically talking to other people, first in person and later on the phone (which wasn't all that great for multi-party conversations). But with the internet, once you post something up on a website, it's there forever, for everyone to see. If you don't want the whole world knowing something about you, don't post it on the internet.
It was different back then, because all your friends lived in the same little town as you. Now, with people moving thousands of miles every time they change jobs (which happens every 2-3 years), it's not so easy. Before the internet, we tried to keep in contact with telephones, but that didn't work so well; how do you find someone you lost contact with? If you couldn't contact a mutual friend, or didn't know which city they lived in to look them up in the white pages (or they were unlisted), then you were out of luck. With the internet, a few things got easier, but finding people still wasn't too easy; email replaced telephone calls and snail-mail letters, but again if you didn't already know their email address you were out of luck. Facebook made reconnecting easy since it was basically like a giant internet-wide phone book.
Unfortunately, they've gone from just being a way of allowing people to reconnect and interact, to being a bunch of control freaks that make Apple look like they're not control freaks.
One thing I've wondered - it seems to me that a rowing motion would enlist more of a body's muscular resources - why use hand and foot pedals?
That's pretty easy. Two reasons: 1) they need rotational motion since it's a helicopter, and it's easy to translate hand and foot pedals, which generate rotational motion, to spinning bladed rotors. Using oars would require more complex mechanics, which might increase weight. 2) hand and foot pedals and bicycle chains are readily available and dirt cheap; you can get them at any bike store, or take them off a junked bike. These university research projects are usually on shoestring budgets.
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It's not just the open source community; just look at Windows 8 and its Metro UI. That change isn't desirable or necessary to the userbase either, but just wait a few months, because Microsoft is going to force it on you whether you like it or not.
Or maybe we should get rid of separate countries, and all cooperate on having one master country? We can even let Ahmadinejad or Kim Il (new guy, can't remember his name) lead it!
There's a reason people splinter into different groups: it's because they can't agree on things. If you can't agree on things, and can't agree to a compromise, the only two solutions are violent conflict, or going your separate ways.
It's not just the herding cats problem, part of it is a fundamental disagreement about philosophy. Look at GNOME, for instance: their whole idea is to dumb everything down as possible and remove as much configurability as possible, because some "usability experts" and "usability studies" say this is a good thing somehow. Then look at KDE: it's completely the opposite, with as much configurability as they can pack in there, and also different UIs for different devices (plasma-desktop for desktops and laptops, plasma-netbook for netbooks, plasma-active for phones and tablets). There's no way to make two groups of people with such diametrically-opposed philosophies agree to merge projects, when they can't even agree on such fundamental items like whether users should be allowed to configure things or not.
The only problem with that is that the Sahara is already owned by other people. It's not like they're going to allow people living nearer the poles to move in and set up their own countries there.
With global warming, many vast areas (tundra areas, like Alaska and Siberia and northern Canada) which are currently uninhabited would become habitable.
Sorry to inform you, but your point #3 is invalid, in light of Windows 8 with the Metro UI. The big proprietary vendors (or at least MS) have shown themselves to be just as bad as the worst of the Free software groups in this regard.
Finally, KDE is actually the best in this regard, because they at least still have a traditional desktop UI (unlike Microsoft's Metro), and not something that tries to bring a touch interface to a keyboard-and-mouse system. The big offenders are GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity. KDE's big fault was releasing an alpha-quality release as "4.0", most of the distros adopting it as-is and dumping the stable KDE 3.5 series, and then users being pissed because nothing worked right; the entities most to blame were the distros, for not doing any quality control checking whatsoever. That was over 3 years ago, however, and KDE's up to 4.8 now, and it's stable and seems to work fine for the most part. Most people have stopped bitching about KDE's changes (though some people just won't let it go after all this time), and now everyone's bitching about Unity and Gnome (for good reason too; the problem there isn't really bugginess, it's lack of features, lack of configurability, and a totally different user interface that doesn't work well on a desktop system).
For your point #4, there's a good reason one hasn't died, it's because no one can agree on one. Just look at Gnome; they've decided to completely revamp their UI to something totally different, and people are abandoning it in droves and moving to KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and several others. What's going to happen with Windows 8 comes out? Except for the shills, everyone seems to hate it.
Finally, OSX is NOT well thought out. Putting menus at the top is stupid; it made sense in 1985 with a 9" screen, but it doesn't work on a 2 or 4-monitor setup or even on a single 24" or 30" monitor.
"Subtitles" does need to be encased in quotes, when you're referring to the word itself rather than actually using the word.
It's not the slang that's the problem, it's the accent. I'm sure British people have plenty of trouble understanding hillbilly twang and Southern drawl too; people with different accents have a hard time understanding each other. Aussie accents are even worse, probably because we Americans are less used to hearing them than the British accents. Of course, the Queen's English speakers are the most understandable by us, but the other accents, especially ones like Cockney, are very difficult.
Maybe at one time this was true, but it hasn't been true for a long time. DVDs have long come with selectable subtitles, in different languages, so you can switch between English, French, etc. People don't call these "closed captions"; they call them "subtitles". No one says they're watching the "closed captions" on a foreign-language DVD, but the subtitles are indeed selectable.
So if your sibling or your parents move to another town (or state), you won't bother to attend their wedding or funeral or other important event?
What ideology? With Unity (on Ubuntu), there's a clear commercial strategy there. I think it's going to fail, but still they have a plan that they're going to suddenly become really popular with regular users because of their supposedly easy-to-use UI; Mark Shuttleworth didn't make Unity out of some RMSian Free Software utopian vision. With Gnome3, the ideology is again trying to bring in nontechnical users by dumbing down the UI to a ridiculous extent (like removing the ability to turn the power off, unless you know a secret key combination, because "users don't need to turn off the power!").
Basically, what we're seeing on the Linux desktops is like herding cats: they're all going different directions, because they're someone's pet project, and no, Free Software ideology doesn't seem to have much to do with it. Compare and contrast with Windows 8 and its Metro UI; it's exactly the same mentality going on there, and obviously there's no software freedom there.
Personally, I don't give two shits about live news on TV. If I want to hear breaking news, I can get that online at news.google.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, bbc.com, etc. It's much faster for me to skim through news articles anyway than to listen to some bobblehead speak, though many of these sites have video feeds available too if you really want that.
Of course, if your wife is the one that really wants that, then you're stuck. Been there, done that. Sometimes there's no reasoning with women.
Personally, I would really prefer it if closed-captioning were available on all Netflix instant videos. They already have it on the foreign movies (it's called "subtitles" there), but whenever I watch a British movie (or movie with British actors), I have a hell of time trying to figure out what they're saying, and subtitles would be a huge help. I'm already in the practice of turning on subtitles for many movies (esp. any British or Australian ones) on DVD.
The thing about the employer isn't FUD; they've had articles here on Slashdot about that very thing. The customs one, however, I've never heard of, though there've been plenty of articles about customs searching your laptop computer.
I should also mention that mobile touchscreens aren't completely to blame for everything; Gmail's new interface, sucks, and it's not because of touchscreens.
Not exactly, IMO. I think it's a little more complex than this.
For one thing, Windows has been catering to dumbasses for ages, yet even so, XP, with its Fisher-Price designed UI, isn't nearly as dumbed-down as Win8/Metro.
Secondly, two of the UIs I mentioned are the top two UIs on Linux, which most people still seem to consider a "hacker's OS", not an OS for dumbasses. Yet, they're going all out on dumbing things down there. (KDE has done a lot better in this regard, by maintaining separate UIs for different device classes, and sticking with the traditional desktop UI. But even so, most Linux users seem to be accepting Gnome3 and Unity, while some are jumping ship to XFCE, which seems to be more like Gnome2 than anything else, and Gnome2 itself was a big dumbing-down step from Gnome1.)
Heck, Macs, which have always catered to dumbasses (e.g., one mouse button), these days seem to be rather conservative; the desktop/laptop machines aren't making that many changes in trying to merge touchscreen UI elements in, unlike the others.
Fundamentally, what seems to have happened is that mobile touchscreen devices have exploded in popularity, and for some reason, UI designers have almost all decided that they need to have a single UI that works on both touchscreens and other non-touch devices, for some stupid reason. This intent is especially clear with Windows: the Metro UI is pretty much identical between mobile phones and desktops (Win8). However, the "dumb-asses" theory doesn't really work here either: just check out Windows Phone 7's adoption rates: it's been a disaster! (Just wait, a bunch of MS shills will reply to this saying that everyone loves WP7 and the Nokia news was all fabricated by Google.) Apparently, most people would rather stick with Android (which is really rather complicated compared to iOS IMO) or iPhone. I guess we'll see how it all pans out when Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 hit the market.
I'm pretty sure airplanes were made of aluminum back then, not steel.
A little bit of global warming might give us more arable and habitable land, but on the other hand we have increasing desertification in many areas, which subtracts from that.
Also, we already have tons of people living in low-lying coastal areas, since centuries ago we thought it'd be a great idea to build cities in natural port areas, and back then no one thought much about geography changing over time. Now that we have giant cities in these places, packing them up and moving to other spots isn't exactly an inexpensive or easy proposition.
You're right, it is wrong. Lots of animals will overfeed their habitat if their population grows too large; of course, then they have a famine, their population dwindles, and the problem is corrected. Humans, OTOH, invent new ways to grow crops to increase yields or find some other way of allowing an ever-increasing population.
However, what is true is that humans are the only animal known to destroy their own habitat, while being intelligent enough to understand what they're doing. A herd of overpopulated wild deer eating all the available food probably don't actually understand the long-term effects of what they're doing.
No way, the rising sea levels are because of a rift in the space-time continuum caused by tachyon bursts from aliens who are mad at us for not taking better care of Nessie.
Global warming cannot be real, so any other explanation is plausible, no matter how far-fetched.
Yep, that sounds pretty pricey and inefficient. Just imagine everyone who has a FB account doing that.
The user interface got worse and worse, each time the users accepted the new shitty UI and accepted it but it's getting to the point it's virtually abuse now.
To be fair, it's not just Facebook where the user interface is getting worse and worse, it's EVERYTHING computer-related. I can't think of a single place where the user interface is actually getting better; they're all becoming horrible and dumbed-down and ugly. Windows 8 Metro: ugly, dumbed-down. Gnome 3: dumbed-down. Unity: dumbed-down. Gmail: ugly.
Worsening user interfaces seems to be the big trend these days. I guess everyone's run out of genuinely useful things to do with their time (like actually improve their products), so now they're focusing on UIs to make their shit look "new", and in the process fucking it all up.
Impossible, unless maybe you're going to set up this fictional piece of hardware on an always-on internet connection (which doesn't work too well with most ISPs, where they give out dynamic IP addresses and you're not guaranteed to get the same one, and you certainly can't get a domain name).
The whole point of "social media" is to share all the intimate details of your life with everyone you know (and by extension, everyone they know, etc.). In the old days, socialization was all about physically talking to other people, first in person and later on the phone (which wasn't all that great for multi-party conversations). But with the internet, once you post something up on a website, it's there forever, for everyone to see. If you don't want the whole world knowing something about you, don't post it on the internet.
Hold on a second, are you saying that Customs officials are asking to look at your Facebook account these days? Is this a joke?
It was different back then, because all your friends lived in the same little town as you. Now, with people moving thousands of miles every time they change jobs (which happens every 2-3 years), it's not so easy. Before the internet, we tried to keep in contact with telephones, but that didn't work so well; how do you find someone you lost contact with? If you couldn't contact a mutual friend, or didn't know which city they lived in to look them up in the white pages (or they were unlisted), then you were out of luck. With the internet, a few things got easier, but finding people still wasn't too easy; email replaced telephone calls and snail-mail letters, but again if you didn't already know their email address you were out of luck. Facebook made reconnecting easy since it was basically like a giant internet-wide phone book.
Unfortunately, they've gone from just being a way of allowing people to reconnect and interact, to being a bunch of control freaks that make Apple look like they're not control freaks.
Ok, maybe I should have said President Carter. He's also heavily involved in a lot of charity and international work.
One thing I've wondered - it seems to me that a rowing motion would enlist more of a body's muscular resources - why use hand and foot pedals?
That's pretty easy. Two reasons: 1) they need rotational motion since it's a helicopter, and it's easy to translate hand and foot pedals, which generate rotational motion, to spinning bladed rotors. Using oars would require more complex mechanics, which might increase weight. 2) hand and foot pedals and bicycle chains are readily available and dirt cheap; you can get them at any bike store, or take them off a junked bike. These university research projects are usually on shoestring budgets.