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Comment: Finally (Score 1) 63

by laddiebuck (#46425763) Attached to: Samsung Galaxy Glass Patent Plans To Turn Fingers Into a Keyboard

I think this is one of those technologies, like ebooks, or smartphones, that all geeks imagined in their heads growing up (at least, those who grew up before ebooks and virtual reality goggles with keyboards, etc.) - so I'm glad it's finally here! None of the ingredients are revolutionary, it just needs to happen.

Comment: Re:There was a mockup in the late 60s. (Score 1) 353

Except the Germans' problem throughout the war was not technology (they had models more advanced than British planes at different points) but production. The British were able to consistently out-produce them in fighters and trained pilots. There were close runs for the British (nearly a shortage of fighter pilots during the heaviest part of the Battle of Britain) but the German losses in men and materiel in proportion to their production were consistently higher throughout the war, and the difference only kept increasing in Britain's favour.

Comment: Re:tl;dr (Score 2) 712

by laddiebuck (#46363567) Attached to: Are Bankers Paid Too Much? Are Technology CEOs?

I used to think like that until somebody's comment put it into perspective. The average worker's screw-up can cost the company X dollars. The average CEO's screw-up can cost the company a thousand times that, can tank the company. I find it reasonable that people be paid to do their jobs without mistake in proportion with the responsibility they bear - paying for risk rather than achievement. However, I also think that by this standard, military officers and commanders should be much much more highly paid.

Comment: Re:This doesn't mean they're not loners. (Score 1) 158

by laddiebuck (#46253619) Attached to: Computer Geeks As Loners? Data Says Otherwise

IDK, maybe it's just that I work at a mature company, but all but 1-2 of the tech geeks I know are happily married. Just comparing the marriages of my technical vs ops-type coworkers it's clear that the technical ones have an edge. That's data; for the money, my speculative opinion is that geeks select pretty hard on their relationships, and work hard to make them perfect and take joy in every little thing, as with so many other things in life. It fits with their personality. Second, they don't tend to have mid-life crises as their life satisfaction tends to go only upward from about their mid-twenties. And finally, many of them value stability and what's working great over chasing some unrealizable ideal. And you know what else? The extroverted geeks tend to have great single lives before their relationship. The only thing is that the single life for introverted geeks kind of sucks, because they never develop a rich enough social life.

Comment: Re:why (Score 1) 117

by laddiebuck (#44547589) Attached to: Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" Released

My company mandated use of the installed OS on our macbooks, so I've had to run OS X instead of Linux these last 2-3 years. No terminal program I've tried other than xterm seems to be able to support double-click to select, right-click to extend, middle-click to paste. Most support the first and third only. This is so basic if you've used an xterm any amount of time. Focus follows mouse is not supported by most tools either. If you install xterm/xquartz, the fonts are crappy on retina displays, and x didn't play well with spaces. You also can't reserve an area of the screen (I used to reserve the bottom 100-200 pixels on my linux desktop and extend only my xterm there so I could keep an eye on logs and processes while running a browser). Finally, there is no window switching, only app switching, and window switching in between app windows. All told the OS X desktop is a mess, especially if you've ever really productively used an xterm.

These things are daily annoyances, and I hate them so much. Even Windows (well, I haven't used 7) used to be better. For some reason though, only Linux desktops get all of these things right -- effortlessly. The crap they don't get right is bells and whistles I never ever use and just get in my way. Linux on the desktop has been complete and effortless for me since around 2007 - previously I recall wifi problems and such, but since then it's been fine. Everything else has blown massively.

Comment: Re:poor implementation has little to do with AT&am (Score 2) 380

Sure, you're modded as insightful because we love to think of all federal government initiatives as security theatre. But this article cites no actual statistics to the contrary. Its entire premise seems to be that child abduction is rare, and law enforcement often can't get an alert out within three hours, therefore "probably" the system is useless. Seriously, it cites no actual numbers as to the effectiveness of the system, and uses the word "probably" and pure rhetoric (i.e. bullshit) a lot. If the same article was changed around so that the author appeared to be a law enforcement spokesman and the conclusions were just reversed, we'd all be picking it apart as bullshit.

Everyone already knew this system was being rolled out for an extremely rare type of crime. Society decided (yes, it did, that's why the media hype launched this in the first place) that the crime was bad enough that no matter how rare, we wanted a system to help mitigate it. Yes, society can be emotional like that, but that is no reason in itself to condemn the system. I want to see actual numbers, not bullshit opinion pieces.

Comment: Re:Good thread with an Airbus pilot and some exper (Score 1) 449

by laddiebuck (#36274368) Attached to: Flight 447 'Black Box' Decoded

This is probably a very stupid question, but I'd still be grateful if an expert could chime in.

It's not hard to detect big storms, either from land-based radar or aircraft-based radar. If we can do that, then why can't we just fly around them? Sure, it'll mean a long delay, but modern airliners are bound to have enough fuel to cope with it, and being late but safe is probably a good tradeoff for most people. After all, 50 years ago, flights were regularly delayed due to bad weather -- I mean by days -- so why can't we tolerate, say, a 6-hour delay in a transatlantic flight to evade a storm?

Comment: Re:Following Google to Stupidity (Score 1) 591

by laddiebuck (#36242386) Attached to: Mozilla Labs: the URL Bar Has To Go

Just as an anecdote: I'm really touchy about interfaces and them staying exactly the same so I can keep productive (that's mostly why I use GNU screen all the time), and I thought I'd hate the removal of the status bar, but it's actually fine. When I need to check a link URL and hover over it, my eyes automatically pop to the lower left-hand corner of the browser and the URL is there. I never cared about the progress bar, and I just put my addon buttons at the top, to the right of the URL bar. (The first row in my browser is menu items, URL bar, and addon buttons; the next row are bookmark bar icons/folders).
