_-_-_-

What we don't know: shit.

When I hear "toxins", I think of a developer on a project I helped manage. He was having health problems so he had to take a 1-1.5 month sabbatical to India to be cleansed of toxins. If I remember correctly the end result was that he quit.

While I do believe there that the body cleanses itself from toxins, and I can't say for certain whether the developer that left us got his toxins cleansed or not, this article and study smells of B.S.

The second tip off is the quoted doctor's name: Dr. Nedergaard

Scientists with Dutch/Scandinavian names always seem to produce the most crap science on average in my experience. I have no idea why, but I've noticed it. Especially when it comes to the "positive affects" of pot. I know that is an over-generalization, but someone should do a study on that to see if it's true. Preferably one without as many A's in his/her last name.

I taught my teenager days ago to use excel for sorting data to solve a math problem. It was a large set of data given in the problem, and it made no sense to do it by hand.

The problems that they give these days are either poorly thought out or just don't make sense to do without technological assistance. I think it is the former rather than the latter. Today's technology isn't needed to learn most of the concepts that are required to excel later in life, and my daughter is probably not going to be using pivot tables as an adult. I do think that word processing is a hell of a lot faster than having to do corrections with a typewriter, though. But the extra time having to think before you typed, or wrote for that matter, was a good thing. Today kids are being trained to just spit out online or in a text whatever comes into their head. That is going to be a disaster.

You could slippery slope that argument ad infinitum, though. Even the interpretation combined with the data mean nothing if you don't have intent. And even with intent you have to have a computer. And even with intent and computer it has to be reasonable that you could use the computer. Let's imagine I am laying in my bed by the computer completely unable to speak or move. I can only breathe. But, I intended to copy a rights-protected DVD and then fell ill for 10 years while I had everything in place to do it sitting right there beside me? Are you going to charge me as I think there in a semi-comatose state? What if I was copying a copy-protected DVD, but in got stuck in the process, while I laid in my bed in a coma? What if the coma started immediately before the computer started executing the copy, and my pet mouse stepped on the keyboard, starting the copy? What if both the pet mouse and I had the intent to copy the DVD? What if the pet mouse's friend was watching in a nearby corner and had egged the pet mouse to touch the keyboard knowing that the copy-protection would be circumvented, but the pet mouse had no intent to circumvent, but I did, and I fell into a coma prior to the enter key being pressed by the mouse? What if the mouse spontaneously combusted atop the keyboard, pressing that key that the other mouse and I intended to be pressed, and the other mouse was an illegal, but had applied for citizenship of both the U.S. and Britain simultaneously while holding a non-resident visa for Australia while vacationing in the states, and was smoking a cigar in an area clearly marked as non-smoking?

>> When some coder changes the function, it is very easy to forget to update the comments

> It isn't.

Yes, it is. Have done it myself loads of times.

And retroviruses- an RNA virus that reverse transcribes itself into a DNA provirus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcribing_virus

> using Wireshark on the Mac is not a pleasant visual experience.

I personally do not give a flying fart what the "visual experience" is as long as it works and the interface is very usable.

You know who said something similar in the last few years? Jony Ive at Apple. Even though I like the concept of flat design and really wanted to like iOS 7 at first, it is the first time since Jobs left the world that they royally fucked over the UI. And it was in the name of "visual experience". It's hard to believe they even tested it on humans. To tell you how bad I think it is: I used it for days in inverse color mode, because that was better. If you've used that for a while, you know what that means.

I know they tried and they got some things right, but that is the reason you give interface to UE people, NOT designers. Great designers don't make great interfaces. They make great designs.

So, screw the visual bells and whistles. Give me emacs and midnight commander.

Poo.

Qt has been a pain in my ass in OS X. You get the wrong version installed in the wrong place and you're fucked. I think it is something that is kind to developers and a headache to users.

Personally I give a big thumbs down on this decision. It's one thing for some random program or library to use Qt that I don't care about, but I've been using Wireshark since it was Ethereal. It should not be Qt. That's lame.

@g3 this is super-mega awesome. 3 questions:

1. I know it is already available via the page, but would you please open-source it so others could contribute?

2. Thought I appreciate the apps being shown in the canvas in the resolution they are supposed to use, a full-screen option would be incredible. That way I could play space invaders the way it was meant to be played, in FreeDOS, in a JS emulator, in Firefox, on a mac. (That's just so wrong, it's right.)

3. Is that your real hair? (Sorry, just had to throw in a Real Genius quote.)