Signing never makes your security any worse; at best, it doesn't help you.
In this case, however, it should be the responsibility of Verisign to make sure that certificates they issue don't violate trademarks. So, "Bank One", "BankOne", "Bank0ne", "Bank-One", etc. are confusingly similar, and Verisign should only issue certificates to the actual trademark holder. That's, in part the justification for why certificates cost a significant amount of money: they should involve some background research.
[There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion.]
Of course there is. There is not the slightest evidence that Earth-based life was ever in any way adapted to living at -200C in hydrocarbon lakes.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence to the contrary. There was no evidence that life would exist around hydrothermal vents either, and most biologists would have considered the idea preposterous until it was actually found: after all, people thought they had lots of good reasons to think that enzymes couldn't possibly work at those temperatures. And, in fact, there is evidence that bacteria can live in hydrocarbon lakes and break down long, saturated hydrocarbons into methane.
Lipid cell membranes. Mitochondria. Its all water-based!
Quite to the contrary: biochemistry happens a lot in non-polar environments; water just makes up most of the mass of a cell because there happens to be a lot of it around. A biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is non-polar, with a few polar pockets, seems no more implausible than a biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is polar, with a few non-polar pockets. (It will be interesting to see what the composition of the bacteria living in oil is.)
Exactly! That is why Titan is not going to reveal that much about the Solar System as a whole.
Well, I'm glad you have it all worked out by ESP; NASA should just hire you instead of sending useless probes to moons just because they have the completely mistaken belief that doing so tells them something about the composition about the original solar system.
Seriously: would you care to explain why you think that Titan does not preserve the environment of the early solar system (except for temperature)? For Io, Europa, and all the other moons, we know why. But Titan seems to have enough of an atmosphere, seems to be far enough from the sun and Saturn, to have preserved its original environment, as evidenced by the fact that it still has hydrocarbons on its surface. The only thing it is is cold--not so cold that all the stuff has frozen, but cold enough for it not to escape.
911 service, access for the disabled, etc. are all things that are important to society as a whole. For example, the indirect benefit I derive from having the disabled be able to access the phone system are unrelated to whether I own a telephone myself. So, they should be paid for by society as a whole--through regular taxes.
The likely reason these are surcharges on your telephone bill is because Congress was trying to hide taxes in "user fees" again, knowing full well that most people would end up paying for these anyway, not only as part of their own phone bill (which they could perhaps avoid) but also in higher prices for goods and services.
If these are federally mandated services, then the federal government should pay for it out of federal taxes. If they have to be raised in order to do that, that's OK: you were paying the taxes anyway already, and at least making it part of the regular tax system means that (1) you see who is responsible for the expense (the federal government), (2) a separate bureaucracy for administering those taxes can get eliminated, and (3) phone companies have a harder time hiding phoney "federal" charges among real ones on their bills when such charges don't exist anymore.
This problem would go away quickly if people signed their E-mail. All the infrastructure is there, companies just have to use it and mail user agents have to deal with it a bit more intelligently.
I think that idiotic admin is irrelevent here. I think the problem that the parent mentioned is real, and it ought to be solved.
What's there to be solved? Firefox has a built-in update mechanism, you can get third party automatic package updates for Windows, and you can install Linux, which provides you with fully automatic updates. What more do you want?
It would be truly ironic for African villages to adopt these. Most of the objects produced by such a setup can be manufactured at a higher quality and lower cost by manual processes: woodworking, small manufacturing, etc. Those are local jobs that are supporting local economies.
Gadgetry is, in the end, about bundling up a whole lot of labor (the labor that went into making the gadgets) and transporting it somewhere else. We usually hope that a gadget saves more time than went into manufacturing it, but the reality is that it probably takes, in aggregate, far more hours and resources to create, say, a kitchen blender than the hours it saves. The only reason people end up making the tradeoff is because the labor that created it is much cheaper than the labor that it saves.
But developing nations need jobs and productivity, and the last thing they need is to pay a premium for "labor saving devices": not only don't they have the money, they also desparately need the employment and the experience that making goods for themselves creates.
at least they should give credit. The idea of individual automated object fabrication has been around for several decades at least and was part of a series of influential science fiction stories. The stories even describe the different levels of technology: macroscopic automated manufacturing in the earlier versions, microscopic and atomic in later.
People at MIT didn't come up with the idea. In fact, they didn't come up with the hardware either: they took a bunch of off-the-shelf components (laser cutters, 3D scanner), put them together in the obvious and known way, and apparently are saying "look how smart we are". That is more a testament to the size of their bank account than to their smarts. Most people don't build those kinds of systems yet because they don't make economic sense yet. Once laser cutters and 3D scanners come down in price to the point of printers and digital cameras, then those combinations will be widely deployed.
When that happens, just be sure to give credit where credit is due: the original visionaries, and the people who created the technology that made it work: the engineers developing the laser cutters and the inventors coming up with organic semiconductors used in the ink jet printers used for custom electronics manufacturing.
How could it possibly? Carbon-based life on Earth is very finely tuned to an aqueous environment: every molecule in the cell requires either water or a lipid/water interface. Earth biochemistry simply won't work unless it's wet!
Well, then we obviously have to conclude that life around hydrothermal vents must have evolved independently from other life on earth because the temperature and chemical environment there would kill other life, right?
There may be life on Titan (although I am very doubtful), but one thing is sure - its nothing at all like Earth life, and Earth life was never like Titan life!
There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion. Life may well have formed under those conditions, then traveled to earth, and bombarded earth until, after hundreds of millions of years, finally some lucky combination of circumstances allowed it to find a niche and change in ways that would permit it to survive on such a hot and hostile world as ours.
Despite what popular science articles like to say, Titan is nothing at all like the primitive Earth: it formed in a different region of the Solar system, and in totally different temperature and radiation regime. Titan has always been cold: The primitive Earth was hot.
Titan is cold, the early earth probably was hot. That's why Titan probably preserved the environment of the early earth while earth changed dramatically.
the moons of these planets are extreme and atypical places. If you examined Io, for example you would assume that the Solar system was filled with Sulphur!
We don't treat moons as statistical samples, we treat them as objects with history and individual properties. We know why Io is covered in sulphur (incidentally, we are also learning that the solar system may well be filled with sulphur: it has dominated the planetary evolution on Venus, may have dominated the planetary evolution of Mars, and, in its own quirky way, is dominating the evolution of Io).
But the admin didn't say "please use IE because we have defined patch and update mechanisms in place and we don't have the resources to do that for FF as well", the admin said "please use IE because FF is a security hole because [a bunch of bogus reasons]".
I think this is a false analogy. The reason that supercomputers are cooled is to prevent the chips melting!
Semiconductors generally work better if they are operated at lower temperatures. That is, if you cool your CPU to, say, -196C, you can actually run it faster than if you merely keep it around its nominal operating temperature (say +40C). Some supercomputers were designed around this extra performance boost (like the ETA10).
Chemical reactions are very, very, very much slower at the temperature of Titan.
A given reaction is slower. But there are many reactions that are way too fast at room temperature that become excellent candidates for living organisms at lower temperatures. I find it far more plausible that life evolved originally under Titan-like conditions and temperatures than on an anaerobic, wet earth.
This is not the same as changing our whole view of the solar system, I think. I may be being pedantic though..
Well, I think that depends on how you view the solar system, I suppose. To me, it makes a big difference to know what the original composition of the planets likely was.
I think this is exaggerated. It's only one moon! I don't see how exploring its surface is going to change our view of the solar system.
Because it may tell us a lot about how the solar system evolved and how most of the smaller planets started out as.
As for finding life - Titan IS 'amazingly cool' - probably close to -200C! If there were some kind of life on the ice landscape or in any hydrocarbon seas we would probably not recognise it and it would be very, very slow!
Not necessarily. While enzymatic reactions that our metabolism relies on slow to a standstill at those temperatures, completely different chemistries become possible as the basis of life. As a loose analogy, many supercomputers are cooled way down: cold actually helps information processing.
No, he does not. He just says that doing usability testing is generally a good idea, which I wholeheartedly agree with. But doing usability testing on specific applications doesn't tell you whether Fitt's law is the basis of a useful design principle for real-world user interfaces.
The actual speed and the apparent speed are two different things. If Fitt's law increases the apparent speed of the UI then it contributes to the user's comfort even if the actual speed increase is negligible.
Yes, and if you established that that "if" is actually satisfied for an application of Fitt's law, removing all other confounding factors, you would have made a significant contribution to usability research. So far, however, that is just conjecture.
The confirm-on-delete dialogue is an example. Fitt's law will not speed up deleting a file significantly but it can contribute to the user feeling he is clearing the dialogue box expeditiously.
Which is just another example of Fitt's law stupidity: you shouldn't ask the user to confirm the delete at all, you should make the operation reversible.
It's not really any harder than configuring other Apache modules.
However, given the importance of WebDAV, I think mod_dav should become a standard, default part of every Apache install; the only thing users should have to do to enable access is set up passwords for their users.
Frontpage extensions vs. WebDAV
on
WebDAV with a Quota?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, Frontpage has allowed upload of content through HTTP for a long time (it may even have been the first WYSIWYG HTML editor to support this). However, the mechanism it used to use was proprietary, had gaping security holes, and it had very limited functionality. (I don't know what Frontpage uses these days, but Windows has WebDAV client support built-in, although it has some limitations.)
WebDAV attempts to standardize this kind of functionality and make it available to many more programs and across platforms. WebDAV is sufficiently functional, complete, and efficient to serve both as a network file system protocol and as a network-based version control system.
I think OOo is an important piece of software and appreciate all the work that has gone into it.
I'm a bit disappointed with the 2.0 list, though. There were quite a few problems and issues that people have been discussing for OOo 2.0 that don't seem to have made it into 2.0.
Here are two things that come to my mind (because I keep running into them), but there were more:
The text and editing parts of Writer and Impress are rather inconsistent, with people being able to do much less in Impress than in Writer; one thing that drives many academic users up the wall is, for example, that you don't get in-line formulas in Impress text.
People have been about was the configuration and customization of toolbars; the current approach is pretty cumbersome and conterintuitive; the new approach was supposed to be a more Thunderbird/Firefox-like drag-and-drop method.
There are a lot more rough edges, limitations, and problems that I think are pretty well know. For a 2.0 release, the set of changes actually given on that web site seem pretty modest (although I appreciate that better MS Office compatibility is probably a high-priority item and a lot of work).
The Open CD is an excellent choice for giving to Windows users (however, they need to update to Firefox/Thunderbird instead of Mozilla for the next version).
These are good things but his article was aimed at something more fundamental: usability.
So was my response.
In fact, a UI can be unobtrusive, internally consistent, unsurprising and pleasant to look at but still not be especially usable.
If you want to claim that Fitt's law has something to do with usability, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that. That is, even if you take overall speed with which people complete a task to be part of the definition of usability (other parts being correctness and user satisfaction), you have to demonstrate that designing a UI so that the user can hit a particular button a little faster actually increases overall speed and does not decrease any of the other aspects of usability.
Cassini/Hugens is just amazingly cool; we have no idea what we are going to find on the surface. Whatever we find, it's going to change our view of the solar system. And the implications of finding any indication of life in that environment would be staggering.
The thing that's sad to me is that for the amount of money we have sunk into the shuttles and various space stations, we could already have an entire fleet of robotic explorers throughout the solar system. As part of that, we'd have developed better propulsion systems, better navigation, stunning scenery, and a wealth of scientific results. If we were to follow such a course, we'd probably even have manned interplanetary voyages sooner than wasting our money on shipping people back and forth with dead-end technologies.
So, while I agree that exploration is good in its own right, we need to apply financial sense to the effort of exploration itself, and we aren't doing that as much as we should.
Often, when people talk about good GUI design, Fitt's law gets dragged up. Fitt's law is, at best, a footnote to good GUI design. I think UI designers hold on to it so tightly because it's one of the few scientific-seeming "laws" they have and because the improvement is easy to measure.
Fitt's law tells you what you need to do so that people can hit your buttons faster with a mouse (well, it's more general than that, but you get the idea). But most of the time, the time users "save" is so slight that it makes no difference to the overall efficiency with which users can use the application. The few areas where it does matter have already been encapsulated (context menus and pie menus are a good thing because of Fitt's law, but your framework already provides them for you).
People who design GUIs based on Fitt's law may often do the right thing by accident. For example, putting a button with a 1 pixel wide inactive border at the edge of the screen is not a good thing to do. Fitt's law says, in effect, that if the button is not at the edge, you have to slow down and hit it directly, whereas with the button at the edge, you can just slam into the edge with the mouse and hit it. But that's not the main reason it's bad to put buttons one pixel away from the edge; the main reason is that doing so confuses the hell out of users who simply don't see the border and wonder why nothing is happening when they think they "are pushing the button".
At other times, Fitt's law misleads you. Making the "Back" button bigger on Firefox, as the article suggests, probably doesn't save you any significant amount of time (anybody who really cares is using gestures or pie menues anyway), but it does make the UI look ugly to users and they'll like it less.
Erase Fitt's law from your mind. To the degree that it matters, it will be obvious to you anyway. And in subtle cases, it's a treacherous guide.
What you should focus on is making your UIs intuitive, unobtrusive, internally consistent, unsurprising, and pleasant to look at. Fitt's law doesn't help you with any of that.
I have to agree with many other comments: the use of haskell eliminated it as a choice for me.
What should eliminate something as a choice for you is the use of a language with an un-sound and demonstrably error prone type system. You know, a language like C. But perhaps the source you maintain just isn't very important.
You need to "learn Haskell and the theory of patches" to use darcs about as much as you need to learn C programming and diff algorithms in order to use Subversion, namely not at all.
Lots of people know how to program in C or Perl to some degree, but you wouldn't want most of them modifying the version control system you are relying on. The pool of capable C or Perl programmer is actually much smaller. And even inexperienced Haskell programmers can do considerably less damage modifying Haskell code than they could modifying C or Perl code.
Furthermore, darcs doesn't need a "large group of developers", both because it's not a huge system and because it's written in Haskell. Being written in Haskell probably makes it an order of magnitude smaller and easier to maintain.
Jensen said the Giese family credits the power of prayer for providing strength in Jeanna's fight with the rabies virus, and they asked for continuing prayers for her full recovery.
The girl got bitten in church! Do they also "credit the power of prayer" that she got infected with rabies and nearly died?
Slashdot Mirror
Signing never makes your security any worse; at best, it doesn't help you.
In this case, however, it should be the responsibility of Verisign to make sure that certificates they issue don't violate trademarks. So, "Bank One", "BankOne", "Bank0ne", "Bank-One", etc. are confusingly similar, and Verisign should only issue certificates to the actual trademark holder. That's, in part the justification for why certificates cost a significant amount of money: they should involve some background research.
[There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion.]
Of course there is. There is not the slightest evidence that Earth-based life was ever in any way adapted to living at -200C in hydrocarbon lakes.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence to the contrary. There was no evidence that life would exist around hydrothermal vents either, and most biologists would have considered the idea preposterous until it was actually found: after all, people thought they had lots of good reasons to think that enzymes couldn't possibly work at those temperatures. And, in fact, there is evidence that bacteria can live in hydrocarbon lakes and break down long, saturated hydrocarbons into methane.
Lipid cell membranes. Mitochondria. Its all water-based!
Quite to the contrary: biochemistry happens a lot in non-polar environments; water just makes up most of the mass of a cell because there happens to be a lot of it around. A biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is non-polar, with a few polar pockets, seems no more implausible than a biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is polar, with a few non-polar pockets. (It will be interesting to see what the composition of the bacteria living in oil is.)
Exactly! That is why Titan is not going to reveal that much about the Solar System as a whole.
Well, I'm glad you have it all worked out by ESP; NASA should just hire you instead of sending useless probes to moons just because they have the completely mistaken belief that doing so tells them something about the composition about the original solar system.
Seriously: would you care to explain why you think that Titan does not preserve the environment of the early solar system (except for temperature)? For Io, Europa, and all the other moons, we know why. But Titan seems to have enough of an atmosphere, seems to be far enough from the sun and Saturn, to have preserved its original environment, as evidenced by the fact that it still has hydrocarbons on its surface. The only thing it is is cold--not so cold that all the stuff has frozen, but cold enough for it not to escape.
911 service, access for the disabled, etc. are all things that are important to society as a whole. For example, the indirect benefit I derive from having the disabled be able to access the phone system are unrelated to whether I own a telephone myself. So, they should be paid for by society as a whole--through regular taxes.
The likely reason these are surcharges on your telephone bill is because Congress was trying to hide taxes in "user fees" again, knowing full well that most people would end up paying for these anyway, not only as part of their own phone bill (which they could perhaps avoid) but also in higher prices for goods and services.
If these are federally mandated services, then the federal government should pay for it out of federal taxes. If they have to be raised in order to do that, that's OK: you were paying the taxes anyway already, and at least making it part of the regular tax system means that (1) you see who is responsible for the expense (the federal government), (2) a separate bureaucracy for administering those taxes can get eliminated, and (3) phone companies have a harder time hiding phoney "federal" charges among real ones on their bills when such charges don't exist anymore.
This problem would go away quickly if people signed their E-mail. All the infrastructure is there, companies just have to use it and mail user agents have to deal with it a bit more intelligently.
I think that idiotic admin is irrelevent here. I think the problem that the parent mentioned is real, and it ought to be solved.
What's there to be solved? Firefox has a built-in update mechanism, you can get third party automatic package updates for Windows, and you can install Linux, which provides you with fully automatic updates. What more do you want?
It would be truly ironic for African villages to adopt these. Most of the objects produced by such a setup can be manufactured at a higher quality and lower cost by manual processes: woodworking, small manufacturing, etc. Those are local jobs that are supporting local economies.
Gadgetry is, in the end, about bundling up a whole lot of labor (the labor that went into making the gadgets) and transporting it somewhere else. We usually hope that a gadget saves more time than went into manufacturing it, but the reality is that it probably takes, in aggregate, far more hours and resources to create, say, a kitchen blender than the hours it saves. The only reason people end up making the tradeoff is because the labor that created it is much cheaper than the labor that it saves.
But developing nations need jobs and productivity, and the last thing they need is to pay a premium for "labor saving devices": not only don't they have the money, they also desparately need the employment and the experience that making goods for themselves creates.
at least they should give credit. The idea of individual automated object fabrication has been around for several decades at least and was part of a series of influential science fiction stories. The stories even describe the different levels of technology: macroscopic automated manufacturing in the earlier versions, microscopic and atomic in later.
People at MIT didn't come up with the idea. In fact, they didn't come up with the hardware either: they took a bunch of off-the-shelf components (laser cutters, 3D scanner), put them together in the obvious and known way, and apparently are saying "look how smart we are". That is more a testament to the size of their bank account than to their smarts. Most people don't build those kinds of systems yet because they don't make economic sense yet. Once laser cutters and 3D scanners come down in price to the point of printers and digital cameras, then those combinations will be widely deployed.
When that happens, just be sure to give credit where credit is due: the original visionaries, and the people who created the technology that made it work: the engineers developing the laser cutters and the inventors coming up with organic semiconductors used in the ink jet printers used for custom electronics manufacturing.
How could it possibly? Carbon-based life on Earth is very finely tuned to an aqueous environment: every molecule in the cell requires either water or a lipid/water interface. Earth biochemistry simply won't work unless it's wet!
Well, then we obviously have to conclude that life around hydrothermal vents must have evolved independently from other life on earth because the temperature and chemical environment there would kill other life, right?
There may be life on Titan (although I am very doubtful), but one thing is sure - its nothing at all like Earth life, and Earth life was never like Titan life!
There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion. Life may well have formed under those conditions, then traveled to earth, and bombarded earth until, after hundreds of millions of years, finally some lucky combination of circumstances allowed it to find a niche and change in ways that would permit it to survive on such a hot and hostile world as ours.
Despite what popular science articles like to say, Titan is nothing at all like the primitive Earth: it formed in a different region of the Solar system, and in totally different temperature and radiation regime. Titan has always been cold: The primitive Earth was hot.
Titan is cold, the early earth probably was hot. That's why Titan probably preserved the environment of the early earth while earth changed dramatically.
the moons of these planets are extreme and atypical places. If you examined Io, for example you would assume that the Solar system was filled with Sulphur!
We don't treat moons as statistical samples, we treat them as objects with history and individual properties. We know why Io is covered in sulphur (incidentally, we are also learning that the solar system may well be filled with sulphur: it has dominated the planetary evolution on Venus, may have dominated the planetary evolution of Mars, and, in its own quirky way, is dominating the evolution of Io).
But the admin didn't say "please use IE because we have defined patch and update mechanisms in place and we don't have the resources to do that for FF as well", the admin said "please use IE because FF is a security hole because [a bunch of bogus reasons]".
I think this is a false analogy. The reason that supercomputers are cooled is to prevent the chips melting!
Semiconductors generally work better if they are operated at lower temperatures. That is, if you cool your CPU to, say, -196C, you can actually run it faster than if you merely keep it around its nominal operating temperature (say +40C). Some supercomputers were designed around this extra performance boost (like the ETA10).
Chemical reactions are very, very, very much slower at the temperature of Titan.
A given reaction is slower. But there are many reactions that are way too fast at room temperature that become excellent candidates for living organisms at lower temperatures. I find it far more plausible that life evolved originally under Titan-like conditions and temperatures than on an anaerobic, wet earth.
This is not the same as changing our whole view of the solar system, I think. I may be being pedantic though..
Well, I think that depends on how you view the solar system, I suppose. To me, it makes a big difference to know what the original composition of the planets likely was.
I think this is exaggerated. It's only one moon! I don't see how exploring its surface is going to change our view of the solar system.
Because it may tell us a lot about how the solar system evolved and how most of the smaller planets started out as.
As for finding life - Titan IS 'amazingly cool' - probably close to -200C! If there were some kind of life on the ice landscape or in any hydrocarbon seas we would probably not recognise it and it would be very, very slow!
Not necessarily. While enzymatic reactions that our metabolism relies on slow to a standstill at those temperatures, completely different chemistries become possible as the basis of life. As a loose analogy, many supercomputers are cooled way down: cold actually helps information processing.
He addresses this objection in the FAQs as well:
No, he does not. He just says that doing usability testing is generally a good idea, which I wholeheartedly agree with. But doing usability testing on specific applications doesn't tell you whether Fitt's law is the basis of a useful design principle for real-world user interfaces.
The actual speed and the apparent speed are two different things. If Fitt's law increases the apparent speed of the UI then it contributes to the user's comfort even if the actual speed increase is negligible.
Yes, and if you established that that "if" is actually satisfied for an application of Fitt's law, removing all other confounding factors, you would have made a significant contribution to usability research. So far, however, that is just conjecture.
The confirm-on-delete dialogue is an example. Fitt's law will not speed up deleting a file significantly but it can contribute to the user feeling he is clearing the dialogue box expeditiously.
Which is just another example of Fitt's law stupidity: you shouldn't ask the user to confirm the delete at all, you should make the operation reversible.
You mean like Wacom and other graphics tablets have been doing for, oh, about 20 years?
It's not really any harder than configuring other Apache modules.
However, given the importance of WebDAV, I think mod_dav should become a standard, default part of every Apache install; the only thing users should have to do to enable access is set up passwords for their users.
Yes, Frontpage has allowed upload of content through HTTP for a long time (it may even have been the first WYSIWYG HTML editor to support this). However, the mechanism it used to use was proprietary, had gaping security holes, and it had very limited functionality. (I don't know what Frontpage uses these days, but Windows has WebDAV client support built-in, although it has some limitations.)
WebDAV attempts to standardize this kind of functionality and make it available to many more programs and across platforms. WebDAV is sufficiently functional, complete, and efficient to serve both as a network file system protocol and as a network-based version control system.
I'm a bit disappointed with the 2.0 list, though. There were quite a few problems and issues that people have been discussing for OOo 2.0 that don't seem to have made it into 2.0.
Here are two things that come to my mind (because I keep running into them), but there were more:
There are a lot more rough edges, limitations, and problems that I think are pretty well know. For a 2.0 release, the set of changes actually given on that web site seem pretty modest (although I appreciate that better MS Office compatibility is probably a high-priority item and a lot of work).
We need you to GIVE OUT CDs to friends.
The Open CD is an excellent choice for giving to Windows users (however, they need to update to Firefox/Thunderbird instead of Mozilla for the next version).
These are good things but his article was aimed at something more fundamental: usability.
So was my response.
In fact, a UI can be unobtrusive, internally consistent, unsurprising and pleasant to look at but still not be especially usable.
If you want to claim that Fitt's law has something to do with usability, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that. That is, even if you take overall speed with which people complete a task to be part of the definition of usability (other parts being correctness and user satisfaction), you have to demonstrate that designing a UI so that the user can hit a particular button a little faster actually increases overall speed and does not decrease any of the other aspects of usability.
Cassini/Hugens is just amazingly cool; we have no idea what we are going to find on the surface. Whatever we find, it's going to change our view of the solar system. And the implications of finding any indication of life in that environment would be staggering.
The thing that's sad to me is that for the amount of money we have sunk into the shuttles and various space stations, we could already have an entire fleet of robotic explorers throughout the solar system. As part of that, we'd have developed better propulsion systems, better navigation, stunning scenery, and a wealth of scientific results. If we were to follow such a course, we'd probably even have manned interplanetary voyages sooner than wasting our money on shipping people back and forth with dead-end technologies.
So, while I agree that exploration is good in its own right, we need to apply financial sense to the effort of exploration itself, and we aren't doing that as much as we should.
Often, when people talk about good GUI design, Fitt's law gets dragged up. Fitt's law is, at best, a footnote to good GUI design. I think UI designers hold on to it so tightly because it's one of the few scientific-seeming "laws" they have and because the improvement is easy to measure.
Fitt's law tells you what you need to do so that people can hit your buttons faster with a mouse (well, it's more general than that, but you get the idea). But most of the time, the time users "save" is so slight that it makes no difference to the overall efficiency with which users can use the application. The few areas where it does matter have already been encapsulated (context menus and pie menus are a good thing because of Fitt's law, but your framework already provides them for you).
People who design GUIs based on Fitt's law may often do the right thing by accident. For example, putting a button with a 1 pixel wide inactive border at the edge of the screen is not a good thing to do. Fitt's law says, in effect, that if the button is not at the edge, you have to slow down and hit it directly, whereas with the button at the edge, you can just slam into the edge with the mouse and hit it. But that's not the main reason it's bad to put buttons one pixel away from the edge; the main reason is that doing so confuses the hell out of users who simply don't see the border and wonder why nothing is happening when they think they "are pushing the button".
At other times, Fitt's law misleads you. Making the "Back" button bigger on Firefox, as the article suggests, probably doesn't save you any significant amount of time (anybody who really cares is using gestures or pie menues anyway), but it does make the UI look ugly to users and they'll like it less.
Erase Fitt's law from your mind. To the degree that it matters, it will be obvious to you anyway. And in subtle cases, it's a treacherous guide.
What you should focus on is making your UIs intuitive, unobtrusive, internally consistent, unsurprising, and pleasant to look at. Fitt's law doesn't help you with any of that.
I have to agree with many other comments: the use of haskell eliminated it as a choice for me.
What should eliminate something as a choice for you is the use of a language with an un-sound and demonstrably error prone type system. You know, a language like C. But perhaps the source you maintain just isn't very important.
You need to "learn Haskell and the theory of patches" to use darcs about as much as you need to learn C programming and diff algorithms in order to use Subversion, namely not at all.
Lots of people know how to program in C or Perl to some degree, but you wouldn't want most of them modifying the version control system you are relying on. The pool of capable C or Perl programmer is actually much smaller. And even inexperienced Haskell programmers can do considerably less damage modifying Haskell code than they could modifying C or Perl code.
Furthermore, darcs doesn't need a "large group of developers", both because it's not a huge system and because it's written in Haskell. Being written in Haskell probably makes it an order of magnitude smaller and easier to maintain.
Jensen said the Giese family credits the power of prayer for providing strength in Jeanna's fight with the rabies virus, and they asked for continuing prayers for her full recovery.
The girl got bitten in church! Do they also "credit the power of prayer" that she got infected with rabies and nearly died?