It could just be an age difference. I'm about your age and graduated high school in Y2K. I too used lots of IM in the late '90s, but I had already completed grammar classes and it had time to set in. If Zencyde was a sophomore in 2003 then he was around 10 or 12 years old in the late '90s when IM started to get big. I have no answers as to how AIMspeak got started, but I can easily believe that being exposed to it often at that impressionable age would (sorry Zencyde!) warp your mind. He knew the right way to do things, but a summer of heavy AIMspeak after the initial exposure could have caused the subconscious relapse.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Don't fall prey to the fallacy of the single cause. A situation as complex as "the low quality of a large nation's public school system" has a lot of factors. I think that parents do play a large role, and teachers' unions might, but there are hundreds or thousands of reasons for the decline in American education.
In my opinion, among the large factors is our obsession with standardization. People are individuals--even if we are in some sense machines then we are not mass-produced; each of us has his particular demeanor, quirks, and aptitude for various things. Teaching every student the same way (not to mention forcing every teacher to teach the same way) results in higher marks for students who are compatible with the sanctioned method. Ideally, teachers would be very insightful people who could observe each student and identify his strengths, then teach him in the manner he is suited for or pass him off to another teacher who could.
Some level of standardization is useful (if not necessary) to determine progress, but where we are now, with legions of educators "teaching to the test," is bound to result in a shallow and often shoddy education.
Emoticons are not a sign of poor grammar. They are a sign of the stagnation of grammar in the hands of its professional custodians, and the corresponding vibrancy of the written word in the hands of an innovative population.
This is the most insightful statement I have read about grammar in a long time.
People forget that the primary purpose of language is to express thought, and that language was around long before it was analyzed and categorized. Doing so is useful since it makes learning languages easier: a systematic approach is more readily learned than one based purely on working experience. Yet there also comes a time when the volume of existing knowledge becomes a burden, the rules so varied and complex that taking care not to violate one often means stepping blindly out-of-bounds with another. It is at this point that people think "fuck it" and express their thoughts without regard to following the rules created for them by a bunch of crusty academics. The unsurprising result is that in the vast majority of cases, their intended meaning is conveyed.
Seriously. Any book whose title neglects the apostrophe to denote possessive case can't be very reliable. And Sam doesn't even have any qualifications!
You've been in Lechuguilla Cave? That's fantastic and I'm jealous!
For those who don't know, a lot of the footage from Planet Earth: Caves was shot there. Here's a clip. It is, I think, the deepest known cave in the US and has some completely unique rock formations. Unlike most limestone caves, this one was carved from the bottom up by sulfuric acid. Due to the delicacy of the cave environment, the Planet Earth crew is probably the last film crew to be allowed access. They did a great job of showing off the variety of formations found there.
I have loved caves since I was a kid, but I've only been to two that aren't show caves--there's not a whole lot of 'em in southeastern PA. The one I frequent, located in Pequea Valley, has a few decent-sized rooms and an unexplored (and tight!) cleft that I've wanted to go further down, but I need to find someone else as skinny as I am to join me.
Science hasn't been done with nothing but our own senses for quite some time. You may think this is pedantic, but for all of us except each specialist doing the work in his field, everything is taken on faith.
Trying to convince people by ridiculing their beliefs, cooking up spaghetti stories, only further polarizes the issue, though I can hardly fault you when that seems to be our society's way of doing things in general.
The effect of this system is the disappearance of a public culture, and with it of the feelings of "belonging," of "community," of "togetherness," whose loss we deplore in these pseudo-technical terms. The very idea of The Public (as opposed to "the population") is growing dim. The laymen no longer entertain a conception of general knowledge which the experts can assume or the children acquire. The logical end is for each man to talk to himself and hope he will understand.
This quote from Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment refers to specialism in science, but applies equally well here.
so Bush was better because he was blatantly and happily in the pockets of special interests?
from
The point is that [Obama]'s a politician with his hands in shady pocket just like most of the others before him.
That is a complete straw man.
Even if the health care bill was the panacea it's being paraded as (hint: it's not; it will continue to enrich insurance companies, it will not control rising healthcare costs, it will be a burden on a significant segment of the population), Obama continues the wars of aggression started by Bush. He continues to stand behind extraordinary rendition, the erosion of privacy by Homeland Security and TSA, he continues to let Wall Street pull its stunts, backs the RIAA, and does a number of other things that Bush did. Let's not forget too that he railed against backroom deals in the Clinton health care bill and repeatedly claimed that his negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN, which they are not.
He has made some good changes, the biggest is in his foreign policy tone, and sanctions against Iran would undermine that completely. He is no worse than Bush, but he has yet to be any better.
Things in Washington are the same now as they have been for the past five decades. If you can't see that you're blinded by partisanship. I am not saying that Obama is identical to Bush, but he is of the same mold: career politician. What happened to the starry-eyed outsider who was going to "shake things up in Washington?" What happened to five days of public comment before signing bills? What happened to tougher rules against the revolving door for lobbyists and former officials (including Wall Street types)? Those were the two most important promises he made, and both of them are broken.
No, Obama is the same old "lesser of two evils" dressed up as a paladin. I would be happy to eat my words if he started making real changes to the Washington cesspool, but so far he hasn't done more than repeat the mantra.
I think "play tricks" might be a better phrase than "play jokes" because jokes imply verbal humor. Anyone who has had a playful cat can provide stories of being startled by its leaping at them from some hidden place--I would be surprised if you haven't encountered it. Certainly the cat gets amusement out of scaring the bejesus out of its human. The line between "play" and "humor" seems fuzzy to me, so I'll leave it to you to decide where you think my example falls, but the latter is certainly an extension of the former. IMO, that sort of trick is a form of slapstick--not a particularly high brand of humor but one that many humans never progress beyond either.
As for laughter: the first segment of this radiolab episode talks about the laughing rats of Dr. Jaak Panksepp. IIRC he saw rats wrestling, nipping, scurrying around after each other and wondered if they were playing or fighting--it looked like play to him, but it was dead silent. One of his grad students had the idea of using a bat detector to listen to high frequencies, and they found that "it sounded like a playground at 30 kHz!" They ended up tickling the rats, which made them reproduce their laughter, and when they stopped tickling the rats would chase after their hands wanting more.
The documents that make up the Bible are written in different styles. Some of them are straight histories, while others are poetry or apocalyptic literature or codes of law. The histories should be read with the same critical eye as all histories--one must keep in mind that no individual can grasp all of the events happening around him; he has biases in both selection and reporting, and a single historical account is not enough to enable one to say "I know what happened then."
When one looks at the beginning of Genesis, it should be pretty obvious even in an English translation that the writing has a lyrical bent--it has much in common with oral tradition and poetry with the repetition of "and there was evening, and there was morning, the n day." Clues like this point toward a creation myth in the best sense of the word: it is intended to affirm that God is the source of all things and to show God's majesty.
It is a fairly recent trend to point to Genesis as a literal historical account. My hypothesis is that it is, among other things, a reaction to the steady erosion of humanity that science tends to bring about: according to many scientifically-minded people, we are nothing more than sloppy chemical machines. Those who believe that we are more than that (myself included) balk at that unfounded assertion, and the more religiously-minded moved from claiming that the Bible is the primary authority of spiritual truth to claiming that the Bible is the primary authority on all things, and anything in contradiction to it is false. In this case, a historical interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 undermines the science that says we slowly arose from noise or nothing, replacing that with an affirmation that our lives and the entire cosmos are a result of planning and purpose.
Simple: develop for XBox Live Arcade first. It's a much more open market. Won't work if your game includes motion control, obviously, but otherwise that seems to be the way to go.
That's the only one in that episode I caught, and it was definitely interesting. It's this one, Act Three.
For another, better show focusing often on psychology and science, check out Radiolab. They have a huge backlog by now, and you can listen for free at that site. I spent a month listening to Radiolab instead of music in my car...
The irony is they've dumbed everything down so it becomes "I'm so smart I need my hand held doing the most rudimentary tasks".
I see this repeated ad nauseam. What exactly has been dumbed down, and how exactly does OS X hold the user's hand?
Is it that you install (the vast majority of) software by dragging the app to the Applications folder instead of running shell commands?
Does the categorized layout of the System Preferences panel constitute hand-holding, as opposed to Windows' alphabetically-sorted Control Panel?
Is it that you are prompted by an "are you sure?" dialog every time you delete something? That's definitely hand-holding--but wait! That's Windows, not Mac!
I am a converted fan of OS X (though not a fanboy; it has some flaws and is not the One True OS). I bought it (MBP) because the onboard hardware can actually handle incoming audio and MIDI data with no perceivable latency, as opposed to the previous two PC laptops for which I had to use an external sound card.
After using the OS for about two years now, I can say conclusively that it has provided the best user experience I have had to date. The consistency of app UIs and shortcuts are a godsend--I use keyboard shortcuts more now than I ever did on Windows, and that says a lot. The OS stays out of my way; I spend virtually no time wrestling with it to get it to do what I want. Finder is superior to Explorer for navigating folders. Spotlight means it takes an average of four to five keystrokes (including cmd+space to open Spotlight) to open any application I want.
If by "dumbed down" you mean "simplified needlessly complex processes," then I agree with you. I haven't seen OS X try to hold my hand while doing the most rudimentary tasks, but it does turn more of the traditional domain of geeks into rudimentary tasks. OS X is good if your focus is on productivity. Linux is good if your focus is on tinkering or customizing for commodity/special hardware. Windows is...well, Windows. I haven't used anything newer than XP except for some frustrating tech support for friends.
Interesting...what OS and software are the recording studios using nowadays?
For the bedroom-studio musician, it's hard to beat the MacBook Pro. The processing power is there for software instruments, the latency is negligible, the built-in mic is surprisingly adequate, and the laptop comes with GarageBand, giving you virtual instruments, loops, and multi-track recording out-of-the-box.
I bought my MBP a few years ago after going through several PC laptops and having lots of trouble with latency. When the last one started constantly overheating I realized that I only used my laptop for the Internet, creating music, and occasionally gaming. The software I mainly use, Reason, is cross-platform, and with Boot Camp on a Mac I could theoretically run Windows for games. That's actually the only major thing I dislike about the Mac--I still haven't gotten Thief II to run, and it is inconvenient to reboot for gaming. But I'm rambling.
I can't speak to high-end setups, but the quality of the hardware and the OS make Macs a good buy for independent musicians.
The answer is to make it as abstract as possible while still being clearly recognizable as itself. Aesthetics is not a field that lends itself to being reduced to numbers. I found the answer to be insightful; it helped further my understanding of why I prefer (much of) the OS X interface to Windows and Linux interfaces: it seems to hit the sweet spot of abstraction where the others trend towards realism or flashiness--though this is certainly not universal in the Linux world.
I would hazard that the folks who wrote the owners' manual know what they mean, or did long enough to write it down there anyway. You shouldn't have to pick it up for that reason, but if you're really burning with desire to know... =)
A bad example of the icon interface doesn't invalidate its usefulness. I'm currently using a full-screen app with eight icons: Google Chrome. Back/forward arrows, reload button, home button, a star button to the left of the URL bar, a "go" button to the right, a page options dropdown, and a browser settings dropdown.
The first four of these are immediately obvious, as is the "go" button. The two dropdowns (a page icon and a wrench icon) each have little down arrows to let me know that these lead to menus. The only one that is mysterious is the star button, which turns out to be a bookmark button. I found out by mousing over it and waiting for popup text to tell me what it is, and it's probably a carry-over from the GMail interface.
Just because I have lots of screen real-estate doesn't mean I want a program's interface to take up lots of it. Web browsers are the obvious example--most of the screen should be dedicated to page contents. Icons minimize the use of space, and they have the advantage of representing concepts quickly. Text only clutters things, and since all text looks like text, it takes longer to pick out the text that reads "Home" from a bunch of text that reads "Forward | Back | Reload | Home | Bookmark | URL: ____________ Go | Page Options | Browser Options"
Mouse-over text is all that's needed to remove ambiguity from any strange icons, though I certainly agree that icons need to be iconic and not simply thunderbolts or pronged circles or what have you. If you can't come up with a good icon for the function it represents, chances are that it's not something that needs to be available immediately and it should reside in a menu.
Well that's not true, since in the example that follows you checked a box in Vista that had unexpected consequences. In that case, you thought you understood the function of "Don't ask" based on previous experience, only to find out that the Windows team changed the behavior on you, so you definitely clicked on something you didn't understand. Changing functionality is an issue, but not one related to the current discussion.
The GP is advocating that interface designers make things whose presentations are descriptive of their functions--the exact opposite of misleading. For the truly fearful, most icons also have mouse-over text to clarify their purpose. There's no point in bringing up fears of DOM-altering scripts or injection attacks, since they can just as easily insert text as images.
Slashdot Mirror
It could just be an age difference. I'm about your age and graduated high school in Y2K. I too used lots of IM in the late '90s, but I had already completed grammar classes and it had time to set in. If Zencyde was a sophomore in 2003 then he was around 10 or 12 years old in the late '90s when IM started to get big. I have no answers as to how AIMspeak got started, but I can easily believe that being exposed to it often at that impressionable age would (sorry Zencyde!) warp your mind. He knew the right way to do things, but a summer of heavy AIMspeak after the initial exposure could have caused the subconscious relapse.
</idle speculation>
There is plenty of blame to go around. Don't fall prey to the fallacy of the single cause. A situation as complex as "the low quality of a large nation's public school system" has a lot of factors. I think that parents do play a large role, and teachers' unions might, but there are hundreds or thousands of reasons for the decline in American education.
In my opinion, among the large factors is our obsession with standardization. People are individuals--even if we are in some sense machines then we are not mass-produced; each of us has his particular demeanor, quirks, and aptitude for various things. Teaching every student the same way (not to mention forcing every teacher to teach the same way) results in higher marks for students who are compatible with the sanctioned method. Ideally, teachers would be very insightful people who could observe each student and identify his strengths, then teach him in the manner he is suited for or pass him off to another teacher who could.
Some level of standardization is useful (if not necessary) to determine progress, but where we are now, with legions of educators "teaching to the test," is bound to result in a shallow and often shoddy education.
Emoticons are not a sign of poor grammar. They are a sign of the stagnation of grammar in the hands of its professional custodians, and the corresponding vibrancy of the written word in the hands of an innovative population.
This is the most insightful statement I have read about grammar in a long time.
People forget that the primary purpose of language is to express thought, and that language was around long before it was analyzed and categorized. Doing so is useful since it makes learning languages easier: a systematic approach is more readily learned than one based purely on working experience. Yet there also comes a time when the volume of existing knowledge becomes a burden, the rules so varied and complex that taking care not to violate one often means stepping blindly out-of-bounds with another. It is at this point that people think "fuck it" and express their thoughts without regard to following the rules created for them by a bunch of crusty academics. The unsurprising result is that in the vast majority of cases, their intended meaning is conveyed.
*raises hand*
There is more to games than the resolution they are played at. Unless you equate "serious" with "twitch FPS."
Nitpick: VIDEO games are for computers. I don't need a PC to play Kick the Can or Chess =)
Seriously. Any book whose title neglects the apostrophe to denote possessive case can't be very reliable. And Sam doesn't even have any qualifications!
You've been in Lechuguilla Cave? That's fantastic and I'm jealous!
For those who don't know, a lot of the footage from Planet Earth: Caves was shot there. Here's a clip. It is, I think, the deepest known cave in the US and has some completely unique rock formations. Unlike most limestone caves, this one was carved from the bottom up by sulfuric acid. Due to the delicacy of the cave environment, the Planet Earth crew is probably the last film crew to be allowed access. They did a great job of showing off the variety of formations found there.
I have loved caves since I was a kid, but I've only been to two that aren't show caves--there's not a whole lot of 'em in southeastern PA. The one I frequent, located in Pequea Valley, has a few decent-sized rooms and an unexplored (and tight!) cleft that I've wanted to go further down, but I need to find someone else as skinny as I am to join me.
Man, I have no idea. I really just wanted to get the Mix-A-Lot reference out there =)
Science hasn't been done with nothing but our own senses for quite some time. You may think this is pedantic, but for all of us except each specialist doing the work in his field, everything is taken on faith.
Trying to convince people by ridiculing their beliefs, cooking up spaghetti stories, only further polarizes the issue, though I can hardly fault you when that seems to be our society's way of doing things in general.
The effect of this system is the disappearance of a public culture, and with it of the feelings of "belonging," of "community," of "togetherness," whose loss we deplore in these pseudo-technical terms. The very idea of The Public (as opposed to "the population") is growing dim. The laymen no longer entertain a conception of general knowledge which the experts can assume or the children acquire. The logical end is for each man to talk to himself and hope he will understand.
This quote from Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment refers to specialism in science, but applies equally well here.
Where exactly do you get
so Bush was better because he was blatantly and happily in the pockets of special interests?
from
The point is that [Obama]'s a politician with his hands in shady pocket just like most of the others before him.
That is a complete straw man.
Even if the health care bill was the panacea it's being paraded as (hint: it's not; it will continue to enrich insurance companies, it will not control rising healthcare costs, it will be a burden on a significant segment of the population), Obama continues the wars of aggression started by Bush. He continues to stand behind extraordinary rendition, the erosion of privacy by Homeland Security and TSA, he continues to let Wall Street pull its stunts, backs the RIAA, and does a number of other things that Bush did. Let's not forget too that he railed against backroom deals in the Clinton health care bill and repeatedly claimed that his negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN, which they are not.
He has made some good changes, the biggest is in his foreign policy tone, and sanctions against Iran would undermine that completely. He is no worse than Bush, but he has yet to be any better.
Things in Washington are the same now as they have been for the past five decades. If you can't see that you're blinded by partisanship. I am not saying that Obama is identical to Bush, but he is of the same mold: career politician. What happened to the starry-eyed outsider who was going to "shake things up in Washington?" What happened to five days of public comment before signing bills? What happened to tougher rules against the revolving door for lobbyists and former officials (including Wall Street types)? Those were the two most important promises he made, and both of them are broken.
No, Obama is the same old "lesser of two evils" dressed up as a paladin. I would be happy to eat my words if he started making real changes to the Washington cesspool, but so far he hasn't done more than repeat the mantra.
YES WE CAN! indeed.
I think "play tricks" might be a better phrase than "play jokes" because jokes imply verbal humor. Anyone who has had a playful cat can provide stories of being startled by its leaping at them from some hidden place--I would be surprised if you haven't encountered it. Certainly the cat gets amusement out of scaring the bejesus out of its human. The line between "play" and "humor" seems fuzzy to me, so I'll leave it to you to decide where you think my example falls, but the latter is certainly an extension of the former. IMO, that sort of trick is a form of slapstick--not a particularly high brand of humor but one that many humans never progress beyond either.
As for laughter: the first segment of this radiolab episode talks about the laughing rats of Dr. Jaak Panksepp. IIRC he saw rats wrestling, nipping, scurrying around after each other and wondered if they were playing or fighting--it looked like play to him, but it was dead silent. One of his grad students had the idea of using a bat detector to listen to high frequencies, and they found that "it sounded like a playground at 30 kHz!" They ended up tickling the rats, which made them reproduce their laughter, and when they stopped tickling the rats would chase after their hands wanting more.
The documents that make up the Bible are written in different styles. Some of them are straight histories, while others are poetry or apocalyptic literature or codes of law. The histories should be read with the same critical eye as all histories--one must keep in mind that no individual can grasp all of the events happening around him; he has biases in both selection and reporting, and a single historical account is not enough to enable one to say "I know what happened then."
When one looks at the beginning of Genesis, it should be pretty obvious even in an English translation that the writing has a lyrical bent--it has much in common with oral tradition and poetry with the repetition of "and there was evening, and there was morning, the n day." Clues like this point toward a creation myth in the best sense of the word: it is intended to affirm that God is the source of all things and to show God's majesty.
It is a fairly recent trend to point to Genesis as a literal historical account. My hypothesis is that it is, among other things, a reaction to the steady erosion of humanity that science tends to bring about: according to many scientifically-minded people, we are nothing more than sloppy chemical machines. Those who believe that we are more than that (myself included) balk at that unfounded assertion, and the more religiously-minded moved from claiming that the Bible is the primary authority of spiritual truth to claiming that the Bible is the primary authority on all things, and anything in contradiction to it is false. In this case, a historical interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 undermines the science that says we slowly arose from noise or nothing, replacing that with an affirmation that our lives and the entire cosmos are a result of planning and purpose.
Google Fight!
"Bubble up" is the winner. Plus it reminds me of Sir Mix-A-Lot.
UH! Bubble up! UH! UH!
Clearly superior to "going bubble" in every way.
Simple: develop for XBox Live Arcade first. It's a much more open market. Won't work if your game includes motion control, obviously, but otherwise that seems to be the way to go.
You were modded flamebait because your valid reasoning went against the groupthink. It's always a danger of trying to discuss religion here.
But if you're Christian, you shouldn't be worried about karma anyway ;)
"Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!" cries the well-manicured rabble, berets perched at a jaunty yet sophisticated angle.
That's the only one in that episode I caught, and it was definitely interesting. It's this one, Act Three.
For another, better show focusing often on psychology and science, check out Radiolab. They have a huge backlog by now, and you can listen for free at that site. I spent a month listening to Radiolab instead of music in my car...
The irony is they've dumbed everything down so it becomes "I'm so smart I need my hand held doing the most rudimentary tasks".
I see this repeated ad nauseam. What exactly has been dumbed down, and how exactly does OS X hold the user's hand?
Is it that you install (the vast majority of) software by dragging the app to the Applications folder instead of running shell commands?
Does the categorized layout of the System Preferences panel constitute hand-holding, as opposed to Windows' alphabetically-sorted Control Panel?
Is it that you are prompted by an "are you sure?" dialog every time you delete something? That's definitely hand-holding--but wait! That's Windows, not Mac!
I am a converted fan of OS X (though not a fanboy; it has some flaws and is not the One True OS). I bought it (MBP) because the onboard hardware can actually handle incoming audio and MIDI data with no perceivable latency, as opposed to the previous two PC laptops for which I had to use an external sound card.
After using the OS for about two years now, I can say conclusively that it has provided the best user experience I have had to date. The consistency of app UIs and shortcuts are a godsend--I use keyboard shortcuts more now than I ever did on Windows, and that says a lot. The OS stays out of my way; I spend virtually no time wrestling with it to get it to do what I want. Finder is superior to Explorer for navigating folders. Spotlight means it takes an average of four to five keystrokes (including cmd+space to open Spotlight) to open any application I want.
If by "dumbed down" you mean "simplified needlessly complex processes," then I agree with you. I haven't seen OS X try to hold my hand while doing the most rudimentary tasks, but it does turn more of the traditional domain of geeks into rudimentary tasks. OS X is good if your focus is on productivity. Linux is good if your focus is on tinkering or customizing for commodity/special hardware. Windows is...well, Windows. I haven't used anything newer than XP except for some frustrating tech support for friends.
Interesting...what OS and software are the recording studios using nowadays?
For the bedroom-studio musician, it's hard to beat the MacBook Pro. The processing power is there for software instruments, the latency is negligible, the built-in mic is surprisingly adequate, and the laptop comes with GarageBand, giving you virtual instruments, loops, and multi-track recording out-of-the-box.
I bought my MBP a few years ago after going through several PC laptops and having lots of trouble with latency. When the last one started constantly overheating I realized that I only used my laptop for the Internet, creating music, and occasionally gaming. The software I mainly use, Reason, is cross-platform, and with Boot Camp on a Mac I could theoretically run Windows for games. That's actually the only major thing I dislike about the Mac--I still haven't gotten Thief II to run, and it is inconvenient to reboot for gaming. But I'm rambling.
I can't speak to high-end setups, but the quality of the hardware and the OS make Macs a good buy for independent musicians.
The answer is to make it as abstract as possible while still being clearly recognizable as itself. Aesthetics is not a field that lends itself to being reduced to numbers. I found the answer to be insightful; it helped further my understanding of why I prefer (much of) the OS X interface to Windows and Linux interfaces: it seems to hit the sweet spot of abstraction where the others trend towards realism or flashiness--though this is certainly not universal in the Linux world.
What sort of insight were you looking for?
My redundant array of inexpensive disks keeps my information from turning into noise, thank you very much!
I would hazard that the folks who wrote the owners' manual know what they mean, or did long enough to write it down there anyway. You shouldn't have to pick it up for that reason, but if you're really burning with desire to know... =)
A bad example of the icon interface doesn't invalidate its usefulness. I'm currently using a full-screen app with eight icons: Google Chrome. Back/forward arrows, reload button, home button, a star button to the left of the URL bar, a "go" button to the right, a page options dropdown, and a browser settings dropdown.
The first four of these are immediately obvious, as is the "go" button. The two dropdowns (a page icon and a wrench icon) each have little down arrows to let me know that these lead to menus. The only one that is mysterious is the star button, which turns out to be a bookmark button. I found out by mousing over it and waiting for popup text to tell me what it is, and it's probably a carry-over from the GMail interface.
Just because I have lots of screen real-estate doesn't mean I want a program's interface to take up lots of it. Web browsers are the obvious example--most of the screen should be dedicated to page contents. Icons minimize the use of space, and they have the advantage of representing concepts quickly. Text only clutters things, and since all text looks like text, it takes longer to pick out the text that reads "Home" from a bunch of text that reads
"Forward | Back | Reload | Home | Bookmark | URL: ____________ Go | Page Options | Browser Options"
Mouse-over text is all that's needed to remove ambiguity from any strange icons, though I certainly agree that icons need to be iconic and not simply thunderbolts or pronged circles or what have you. If you can't come up with a good icon for the function it represents, chances are that it's not something that needs to be available immediately and it should reside in a menu.
I don't push things I don't understand.
Well that's not true, since in the example that follows you checked a box in Vista that had unexpected consequences. In that case, you thought you understood the function of "Don't ask" based on previous experience, only to find out that the Windows team changed the behavior on you, so you definitely clicked on something you didn't understand. Changing functionality is an issue, but not one related to the current discussion.
The GP is advocating that interface designers make things whose presentations are descriptive of their functions--the exact opposite of misleading. For the truly fearful, most icons also have mouse-over text to clarify their purpose. There's no point in bringing up fears of DOM-altering scripts or injection attacks, since they can just as easily insert text as images.