You do realize Sweden used to do forced sterilization of retards and undesireables here up to the late 1950s? It was only formally abolished in 1975[...] All to create a pure society, free from weakness.
Of course, the funny thing about that?
It largely worked - They have one of the happiest, healthiest, most attractive nations on the frickin' planet (the present fallout of US bullying notwithstanding).
When trying to make eugenics look like a monstrosity, you'd do better not to point out its successes.
Nope - Not for at least the two years I've used it (and I don't even have a physical landline connection, much less actual phone service).
That said, good luck trying to do VOIP over a connection with literally half second ping times... If I had any alternatives, I'd drop satellite in a heartbeat. I pay twice as much for a tenth the throughput, with insane latency and a pitifully small daily cap that I could (and have) hit before I even leave for work in the morning.
I have no problem believing that so many students would cheat, if they had half a chance to do so.
I don't quite get (nor does TFA adequately explain) how such a large number had that chance to cheat, however - And on a midterm exam, at that? What, did he hand them out and leave the room?
But almost all the other professions take time to get experienced in. They require learning and years of experience to excel, other than something like astronaut, which can include younger people.
Actually, you have that backward. Astronauts require YEARS of training, which usually doesn't even start until they've had a reasonable distinguished early military career.
Most of the "rock stars" of science made their contributions while still quite young... Einstein published on special Relativity at 24, James Watson (of Watson & Crick) published on the structure of DNA (which he later admitted to "discovering" while trippin' balls) at 25. Alan Turing published his On Computable Numbers... at 24 and built the world's first real computer at 32.
Why don't you try reading it before you make that claim? The article is a few simple benchmark results and mild speculation as to what caused them. The summary may be inflammatory, the article goes out of its way not to be.
1) Microsoft beats everyone else by a factor of 10.
2) Making any of a number of effectively cosmetic changes to the function results in Microsoft taking twice as long as everyone else.
3) Making the inner loop 10x longer makes everyone else take 10x longer, except MS, who takes 180x longer.
Sorry, but if that counts as an optimization "bug", I have a bridge to sell you.
Well, seems like, not only cloning scientists lose their sense for moral after all.
First of all, "one way" doesn't necessarily mean they die. We could send a hell of a lot of unmanned supply dumps for the cost of upgrading from one-way to a round trip ticket.
Second, we would have no shortage of volunteers for such a mission even if it did mean certain death - Hell, I'd jump at the chance in a heartbeat.
Most people, I think, would like to believe their lives have meaning; you, and I, and 99.999% of all humans that ever lived or will live, however, will die in obscurity, having done nothing more significant than add to our overpopulation problem. I see no moral dilemma in letting a person die (voluntarily) for a higher cause.
Obviously, the rational thing is to fatalistically suck it up and try to move on
That depends.
Sometimes, the most rational course of action requires doing what little you can to send a simple, clear, and potentially bloody message of "don't do this again". In particular, when you have almost nothing left to lose, and those who destroyed you have almost no risk of seeing any meaningful penalties.
A handful of BP execs dead at the hands of the fishermen they ruined would do a whole heap more to prevent another such catastrophe, than any monetary penalties ever could. "Companies" behave like complete sociopaths, abusing both convention and law to maximize profits; the humans running companies, however, can experience real fear.
I don't think you do, really. Perhaps the last clause, but essentially, you've repeated what the author said - You don't screw with DLC unless the standalone (presumably on-disc) game itself has sufficient merit.
I don't think any of us have a problem with truly optional content - Either extra maps/levels (and I mean really extra, not 90% of the expected game world even though you can technically "finish" the game with what shipped), or various cosmetic add-ons that have no impact whatsoever on actual game-play. But when you play to the 6th zone and just as you cross the end-of-zone bridge expecting either a boss fight or the next zone, you just get a bland "congrats, you win" screen... Houston, we have a really frickin' big problem.
I think you're not considering microsoft's r&d costs as something that may help $150 for each kinect sale amount to a loss when factored in.
R&D costs approach zero as a factor in the final product cost when volume goes high enough. Selling more units, even without associated game sales, only serves to lower the per-unit fixed cost overhead.
They could also take a much more basic economic approach, rather than waving the legal stick - Bundle the hardware with a must-have game, so actual game-buyers don't see it as costing more, but hardware-only purchasers end up with a game they don't want and can't even give away (because everyone else already has it because of the bundling).
So overall... Stupid on MS's part, but not even remotely surprising.
Not because I consider you functionally wrong - Sadly, far from it. But rather, because a number of people have made the same point, albeit less eloquently than you.
Now, for a bit of irony, I unequivocally support your right to say such things; But I can only pray you meant it as a troll, but fear you did not..
We parted ways with His (now Her) Majesty in part because we believed that all men should have the right to say whatever the hell they want without fear of governmental reprisal. The thought that we might now kowtow to a request by Jolly Ol' to curtail that very right...
What can I say. We have only one real right left, the 2nd amendment. And that willgo away over my, and that of many others, dead body. Until then, we have freedom of speech. Of religion. Of association.
In the end, this all comes down to web services being a stupid idea.
Whatchoo smokin', Willis? Web services absolutely kick serious butt.
Whether using them as a means of enforcing a hard three-tier architecture through a DMZ (do all the "hard" stuff in the web service, and rewriting either your data access or presentation layers becomes trivial, not to mention the security implications), or just as a way of exporting some level of programmatically-accessible (possibly) public functionality (such as the Google or Bing Maps API), I've liked just about everything I've seen so far about web services - With the exception of importing the wsdl of a service you don't control, which IMO counts as the weakest link in the whole concept.
They're implemented not to provide useful data to customers or to the public in general, but rather to be just one more "accomplishment" that said manager or executive can list on his CV.
You could make that same claim about any tool - If you use them just for the sake of using them, you probably won't like the end result.
Put bluntly, if you consider web services a stupid idea, you haven't used them properly.
And, yes, I am aware that 3d viewing requires that one pay attention only to the main element of the scene (trying to look at the background when only the foreground is in focus will always result in blurring even with the best 3d).
Except, you've just described my biggest peeve about 3d movies - I don't consider that a minor nuissance, but an outright show-stopper.
In an action scene (main elements moving around rapidly) or a landscape (panfocal background shot), it doesn't so much matter; Put two people talking in a room for more than five seconds, though, and I start looking at the scenery rather than the talking heads. A little bit of blur in that, I can accept; Making my eyes hurt when I dare to focus on something other than what the director wants me to, total BS.
3d will always remain a cute gimmick until we have a truly immersive environment like a holodeck. Some films can use it well, but the other 99.5% of movies should stick with 2d.
Although the idea of "public comment" may sounds appealing, we DO NOT want this to go into effect as a treaty, for one simple reason...
Treaties supersede the US constitution.
If the Senate ratifies this as a treaty, goodbye (at least) 1st and 5th amendments when it comes to anything to do with copyrights. If, however, Obama tries to push it through by signing without senate approval, it may have the force of an executive order, but our constitutional rights would still apply.
This is a "straw man" argument because it has no real similarity with the argument at hand. You work for a company, and the company benefits; you don't work for 200 million companies.
It only counts as a strawman if you accept "double" billing as just peachy so long as you do it to a million people at a time. I do not.
The point of a CA is to slap the shit out of a business.
We clearly agree on this point, but I think you misread what I wrote - I have a problem with the fact that these settlements don't really slap the shit out of the
company, they merely present one more nuisance to their normal business. If 25 cents saved over two hundred million products will only cost 40 million in expected
lawsuits, a company sees that as a net win. We need to make that 25 cents saved cost them so much they post in the red for a decade, if they survive. And if they don't,
the rest of their industry might get the point.
Allowing such things to happen is an economic disaster. Look at health care, where a single mistake by a human doctor working an imprecise field where prudence leads to deaths can find himself paying $300,000,000 for malpractice suits.
Speaking of strawmen...;)
Yes, the opposite extreme has its own problems. Key difference, we don't fundamentally "need" another widget manufacturer; We do need more doctors.
This is stupid. Why do people bitch that they get $5 out of a CA? [...snip...] Each person gets $4, and the lawyer works for $1/person.
Two reasons.
First, absolute numbers matter - If I save my company $200 million dollars, I don't get a "mere" $40 million, I get my standard hourly rate and perhaps a nice
(but nowhere near eight digit, or even six digit) bonus at the end of the year. Why the hell do lawyers get so much more? And I don't mean that in the sense of
jealousy - I don't think I should get a cut just for doing my damned job. I work for an agreed-upon rate, and consider that enough; Who defines the compensation
for lawyers in class action suits? Oh, right - The lawyers themselves.
Second, because class action settlements insult everyone actually hurt by the company in question. Take some of the more egregious CC late fee abuses, for
example - People pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars in misleading and borderline fraudulent charges over the years, and get $10-$20 back. Fuck that,
give people back all their charges, plus pay the lawyers $100 an hour for their work, and if the company goes under as a result, good riddance.
If it makes you feel better, you can take this more as an expression of annoyance at the leniency we show corporations over mere humans, more than a rant against greedy
lawyers; But the latter make the former possible in the first place, by actively seeking "woo-hoo, I'm rich!" settlements over anything actually punitive.
On the one hand, I don't even bother participating in the various class actions suits I qualify for, because my dignity costs more than a $5 gift certificate. The lawyers in those
situations should make far, far less.
In this situation, though, that really amounts to a pittance for even a small legal team, perhaps three lawyers plus their supporting staff, working for a solid two months on
the case; Unfortunately, this one had no big corporate pockets to raid, and even in winning, the community (rather than the school administration) suffers. So a
bigger payout that might really have given the kids something to enjoy, wouldn't have counted as a win for anyone.
Personally, I'd much rather have seen the school administration facing child porn charges, and no civil penalties involved. Then, and only then, could we have
seen a "win" here.
How could you use this power for your own benefit without doing anything imoral or illegal?
Assuming you have some (mundane) skills beyond this superpower - Bid obscenely high prices and impossibly short times on time-critical projects in
your field of expertise. For example, let's say company-X loses a million dollars a day due to a major problem in their foo-management software;
If all your potential competitors say they'll take six months to fix it, and you can do it "overnight", you start with a 180 million dollar edge over the
competition.
But that would involve a lot of actual work, and only raise some rather awkward questions when you succeeded. Much better to take a
looser approach at "legal" and stick to, for example, stealing from "real" criminals.
Now me... I'd go for neither superhero nor supervillain. Commit a few high-payoff victimless crimes (your mentioned power, for example, would make various forms of
"insider" trading trivially easy - Walk into the FDA, find out the next underdog drug they have approved but hasn't yet hit the news, and buy buy buy that penny pharm stock
and sell sell sell it the next day when it blips up 9000%). Then retire to a private Mediterranean island and to hell with the rest of humanity. Perhaps save a few hostages that
make the news, if I get bored.
What may seem like a "harmless infection" to you demeans the students
Oh, gimme a frickin' break. The sooner the precious little froshie lardflakes learn not to click every attachment from a seemingly trusted source, the better.
"Demean"? Yeah, doing something stupid makes you feel stupid. Doing it twice proves it. Hopefully most of them won't do it when he pulls the same trick
as part of the final.
Of course, in practice, you speak 100% the truth. God forbid we make someone feel bad as a learning experience, the lawyers would descend like... Well, like lawyers.
It's a picture of a spacesuit.... McCandless happened to be the occupant but it is impossible to tell that from the photo....
Good point - Can McCandless prove that they didn't photoshop an entirely different astronaut, or even a model (so as to get the lighting right) into the same composition?
Sorry, Bruce - I consider your profession as heroes in general, but you just managed to lower yourself to "RIAA exec" level scum.
Oh, BTW, you'd best sue Wikipedia ASAP, since they've set a precedent that you don't really give a damn about your "publicity rights".
Perhaps I should have added the qualifier to my suggestion of "sufficiently complex" reading material - I'll buy that parsing news columns targeted at sub-7th grade readers doesn't requires more than a quick vertical scan of the text to understand it. Know when I last bought a newspaper?
From your own link (which I plan to steal, BTW - Thanks for it!):
"The best available research suggests that users will read fastest if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (e.g., two and a half inch columns), the line length probably will impede rapid reading. Users tend to prefer lines that are relatively short (about four inches)."
Note particularly that "Prefer" does equal "most efficient". Thus you have the newspaper layout so many have pointed out to me - Tripe to appeal to the 7th grade level masses via a medium designed to fill space, rather than convey actual information efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize Sweden used to do forced sterilization of retards and undesireables here up to the late 1950s? It was only formally abolished in 1975[...] All to create a pure society, free from weakness.
Of course, the funny thing about that?
It largely worked - They have one of the happiest, healthiest, most attractive nations on the frickin' planet (the present fallout of US bullying notwithstanding).
When trying to make eugenics look like a monstrosity, you'd do better not to point out its successes.
Satellite still requires a modem
Nope - Not for at least the two years I've used it (and I don't even have a physical landline connection, much less actual phone service).
That said, good luck trying to do VOIP over a connection with literally half second ping times... If I had any alternatives, I'd drop satellite in a heartbeat. I pay twice as much for a tenth the throughput, with insane latency and a pitifully small daily cap that I could (and have) hit before I even leave for work in the morning.
You're also talking the much rarer cases, ones that don't come along but every so often.
:D
Fair point, but we don't generally pick the typical Joe Scientist as our heroes...
Name one of these that was considered cool or looked up to by 3rd graders.
Well, I looked up to them as a 3rd grader...
I have no problem believing that so many students would cheat, if they had half a chance to do so.
I don't quite get (nor does TFA adequately explain) how such a large number had that chance to cheat, however - And on a midterm exam, at that? What, did he hand them out and leave the room?
But almost all the other professions take time to get experienced in. They require learning and years of experience to excel, other than something like astronaut, which can include younger people.
Actually, you have that backward. Astronauts require YEARS of training, which usually doesn't even start until they've had a reasonable distinguished early military career.
Most of the "rock stars" of science made their contributions while still quite young... Einstein published on special Relativity at 24, James Watson (of Watson & Crick) published on the structure of DNA (which he later admitted to "discovering" while trippin' balls) at 25. Alan Turing published his On Computable Numbers... at 24 and built the world's first real computer at 32.
I could go on.
Why don't you try reading it before you make that claim? The article is a few simple benchmark results and mild speculation as to what caused them. The summary may be inflammatory, the article goes out of its way not to be.
1) Microsoft beats everyone else by a factor of 10.
2) Making any of a number of effectively cosmetic changes to the function results in Microsoft taking twice as long as everyone else.
3) Making the inner loop 10x longer makes everyone else take 10x longer, except MS, who takes 180x longer.
Sorry, but if that counts as an optimization "bug", I have a bridge to sell you.
Well, seems like, not only cloning scientists lose their sense for moral after all.
First of all, "one way" doesn't necessarily mean they die. We could send a hell of a lot of unmanned supply dumps for the cost of upgrading from one-way to a round trip ticket.
Second, we would have no shortage of volunteers for such a mission even if it did mean certain death - Hell, I'd jump at the chance in a heartbeat.
Most people, I think, would like to believe their lives have meaning; you, and I, and 99.999% of all humans that ever lived or will live, however, will die in obscurity, having done nothing more significant than add to our overpopulation problem. I see no moral dilemma in letting a person die (voluntarily) for a higher cause.
Obviously, the rational thing is to fatalistically suck it up and try to move on
That depends.
Sometimes, the most rational course of action requires doing what little you can to send a simple, clear, and potentially bloody message of "don't do this again". In particular, when you have almost nothing left to lose, and those who destroyed you have almost no risk of seeing any meaningful penalties.
A handful of BP execs dead at the hands of the fishermen they ruined would do a whole heap more to prevent another such catastrophe, than any monetary penalties ever could. "Companies" behave like complete sociopaths, abusing both convention and law to maximize profits; the humans running companies, however, can experience real fear.
I disagree with that broad statement.
I don't think you do, really. Perhaps the last clause, but essentially, you've repeated what the author said - You don't screw with DLC unless the standalone (presumably on-disc) game itself has sufficient merit.
I don't think any of us have a problem with truly optional content - Either extra maps/levels (and I mean really extra, not 90% of the expected game world even though you can technically "finish" the game with what shipped), or various cosmetic add-ons that have no impact whatsoever on actual game-play. But when you play to the 6th zone and just as you cross the end-of-zone bridge expecting either a boss fight or the next zone, you just get a bland "congrats, you win" screen... Houston, we have a really frickin' big problem.
I think you're not considering microsoft's r&d costs as something that may help $150 for each kinect sale amount to a loss when factored in.
R&D costs approach zero as a factor in the final product cost when volume goes high enough. Selling more units, even without associated game sales, only serves to lower the per-unit fixed cost overhead.
They could also take a much more basic economic approach, rather than waving the legal stick - Bundle the hardware with a must-have game, so actual game-buyers don't see it as costing more, but hardware-only purchasers end up with a game they don't want and can't even give away (because everyone else already has it because of the bundling).
So overall... Stupid on MS's part, but not even remotely surprising.
Supporting EPIC.
Y'know... Your post bothers me.
Not because I consider you functionally wrong - Sadly, far from it. But rather, because a number of people have made the same point, albeit less eloquently than you.
Now, for a bit of irony, I unequivocally support your right to say such things; But I can only pray you meant it as a troll, but fear you did not..
We parted ways with His (now Her) Majesty in part because we believed that all men should have the right to say whatever the hell they want without fear of governmental reprisal. The thought that we might now kowtow to a request by Jolly Ol' to curtail that very right...
What can I say. We have only one real right left, the 2nd amendment. And that willgo away over my, and that of many others, dead body. Until then, we have freedom of speech. Of religion. Of association.
But sadly, probably not for long.
In the end, this all comes down to web services being a stupid idea.
Whatchoo smokin', Willis? Web services absolutely kick serious butt.
Whether using them as a means of enforcing a hard three-tier architecture through a DMZ (do all the "hard" stuff in the web service, and rewriting either your data access or presentation layers becomes trivial, not to mention the security implications), or just as a way of exporting some level of programmatically-accessible (possibly) public functionality (such as the Google or Bing Maps API), I've liked just about everything I've seen so far about web services - With the exception of importing the wsdl of a service you don't control, which IMO counts as the weakest link in the whole concept.
They're implemented not to provide useful data to customers or to the public in general, but rather to be just one more "accomplishment" that said manager or executive can list on his CV.
You could make that same claim about any tool - If you use them just for the sake of using them, you probably won't like the end result.
Put bluntly, if you consider web services a stupid idea, you haven't used them properly.
And, yes, I am aware that 3d viewing requires that one pay attention only to the main element of the scene (trying to look at the background when only the foreground is in focus will always result in blurring even with the best 3d).
Except, you've just described my biggest peeve about 3d movies - I don't consider that a minor nuissance, but an outright show-stopper.
In an action scene (main elements moving around rapidly) or a landscape (panfocal background shot), it doesn't so much matter; Put two people talking in a room for more than five seconds, though, and I start looking at the scenery rather than the talking heads. A little bit of blur in that, I can accept; Making my eyes hurt when I dare to focus on something other than what the director wants me to, total BS.
3d will always remain a cute gimmick until we have a truly immersive environment like a holodeck. Some films can use it well, but the other 99.5% of movies should stick with 2d.
Although the idea of "public comment" may sounds appealing, we DO NOT want this to go into effect as a treaty, for one simple reason...
Treaties supersede the US constitution.
If the Senate ratifies this as a treaty, goodbye (at least) 1st and 5th amendments when it comes to anything to do with copyrights. If, however, Obama tries to push it through by signing without senate approval, it may have the force of an executive order, but our constitutional rights would still apply.
This is a "straw man" argument because it has no real similarity with the argument at hand. You work for a company, and the company benefits; you don't work for 200 million companies.
;)
It only counts as a strawman if you accept "double" billing as just peachy so long as you do it to a million people at a time. I do not.
The point of a CA is to slap the shit out of a business.
We clearly agree on this point, but I think you misread what I wrote - I have a problem with the fact that these settlements don't really slap the shit out of the company, they merely present one more nuisance to their normal business. If 25 cents saved over two hundred million products will only cost 40 million in expected lawsuits, a company sees that as a net win. We need to make that 25 cents saved cost them so much they post in the red for a decade, if they survive. And if they don't, the rest of their industry might get the point.
Allowing such things to happen is an economic disaster. Look at health care, where a single mistake by a human doctor working an imprecise field where prudence leads to deaths can find himself paying $300,000,000 for malpractice suits.
Speaking of strawmen...
Yes, the opposite extreme has its own problems. Key difference, we don't fundamentally "need" another widget manufacturer; We do need more doctors.
This is stupid. Why do people bitch that they get $5 out of a CA? [...snip...] Each person gets $4, and the lawyer works for $1/person.
Two reasons.
First, absolute numbers matter - If I save my company $200 million dollars, I don't get a "mere" $40 million, I get my standard hourly rate and perhaps a nice (but nowhere near eight digit, or even six digit) bonus at the end of the year. Why the hell do lawyers get so much more? And I don't mean that in the sense of jealousy - I don't think I should get a cut just for doing my damned job. I work for an agreed-upon rate, and consider that enough; Who defines the compensation for lawyers in class action suits? Oh, right - The lawyers themselves.
Second, because class action settlements insult everyone actually hurt by the company in question. Take some of the more egregious CC late fee abuses, for example - People pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars in misleading and borderline fraudulent charges over the years, and get $10-$20 back. Fuck that, give people back all their charges, plus pay the lawyers $100 an hour for their work, and if the company goes under as a result, good riddance.
If it makes you feel better, you can take this more as an expression of annoyance at the leniency we show corporations over mere humans, more than a rant against greedy lawyers; But the latter make the former possible in the first place, by actively seeking "woo-hoo, I'm rich!" settlements over anything actually punitive.
Tough call for me, on this one.
On the one hand, I don't even bother participating in the various class actions suits I qualify for, because my dignity costs more than a $5 gift certificate. The lawyers in those situations should make far, far less.
In this situation, though, that really amounts to a pittance for even a small legal team, perhaps three lawyers plus their supporting staff, working for a solid two months on the case; Unfortunately, this one had no big corporate pockets to raid, and even in winning, the community (rather than the school administration) suffers. So a bigger payout that might really have given the kids something to enjoy, wouldn't have counted as a win for anyone.
Personally, I'd much rather have seen the school administration facing child porn charges, and no civil penalties involved. Then, and only then, could we have seen a "win" here.
How could you use this power for your own benefit without doing anything imoral or illegal?
Assuming you have some (mundane) skills beyond this superpower - Bid obscenely high prices and impossibly short times on time-critical projects in your field of expertise. For example, let's say company-X loses a million dollars a day due to a major problem in their foo-management software; If all your potential competitors say they'll take six months to fix it, and you can do it "overnight", you start with a 180 million dollar edge over the competition.
But that would involve a lot of actual work, and only raise some rather awkward questions when you succeeded. Much better to take a looser approach at "legal" and stick to, for example, stealing from "real" criminals.
Now me... I'd go for neither superhero nor supervillain. Commit a few high-payoff victimless crimes (your mentioned power, for example, would make various forms of "insider" trading trivially easy - Walk into the FDA, find out the next underdog drug they have approved but hasn't yet hit the news, and buy buy buy that penny pharm stock and sell sell sell it the next day when it blips up 9000%). Then retire to a private Mediterranean island and to hell with the rest of humanity. Perhaps save a few hostages that make the news, if I get bored.
What may seem like a "harmless infection" to you demeans the students
Oh, gimme a frickin' break. The sooner the precious little froshie lardflakes learn not to click every attachment from a seemingly trusted source, the better.
"Demean"? Yeah, doing something stupid makes you feel stupid. Doing it twice proves it. Hopefully most of them won't do it when he pulls the same trick as part of the final.
Of course, in practice, you speak 100% the truth. God forbid we make someone feel bad as a learning experience, the lawyers would descend like... Well, like lawyers.
It's a picture of a spacesuit .... McCandless happened to be the occupant but it is impossible to tell that from the photo ....
Good point - Can McCandless prove that they didn't photoshop an entirely different astronaut, or even a model (so as to get the lighting right) into the same composition?
Sorry, Bruce - I consider your profession as heroes in general, but you just managed to lower yourself to "RIAA exec" level scum.
Oh, BTW, you'd best sue Wikipedia ASAP, since they've set a precedent that you don't really give a damn about your "publicity rights".
In a word: bullshit.
Thanks to another poster for this link, but: The best available research suggests that users will read fastest if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (e.g., two and a half inch columns), the line length probably will impede rapid reading. Users tend to prefer lines that are relatively short (about four inches).
Perhaps I should have added the qualifier to my suggestion of "sufficiently complex" reading material - I'll buy that parsing news columns targeted at sub-7th grade readers doesn't requires more than a quick vertical scan of the text to understand it. Know when I last bought a newspaper?
more than 5 lines of text with little spacing between them get confusing very fast.
Can you point out where I said to minimize the space between lines?
From your own link (which I plan to steal, BTW - Thanks for it!): "The best available research suggests that users will read fastest if the line lengths are longer (up to 10 inches). If the line lengths are too short (e.g., two and a half inch columns), the line length probably will impede rapid reading. Users tend to prefer lines that are relatively short (about four inches)." Note particularly that "Prefer" does equal "most efficient". Thus you have the newspaper layout so many have pointed out to me - Tripe to appeal to the 7th grade level masses via a medium designed to fill space, rather than convey actual information efficiently.
Hopefully I've made my point.
"Additionally, I'm self employed and work from my home office most days."
Yep, you have - Namely, that your situation doesn't apply to the vast majority of people.