Hmm...

A nice rendition of the Dread Sigil Odegra there.

I'm a Unix guy and I have nothing against GUIs.

I've nothing against GUIs, as long as they have been well designed, and one day I hope I will see one that is. Honestly, the number of completely crap graphical apps I've been forced to work with makes me wonder whether anyone ever tries to use these things before allowing them to escape from R&D. Among the most common mistakes are:

Hiding the useful information behind several layers of screens.

Being completely fscking useless unless you run them full-screen.

Wasting space on my screen with blank pixels, while squeezing the useful data somewhere in a corner

Menu structures designed while on LSD (I don't know where this goes... Let's shove it under "Advanced" or "Tools" or "Actions"!)

Overly ambitious misfeatures that slow down your machine to a crawl. Usually, using some kind of "Framework" that is bigger than your actual application, consumes half of whatever RAM you have, and takes ages to load. If I have the time to move my hand from the mouse to the keyboard while you start, you're slow. I still remember the PRESS PLAY ON TAPE prompt. I thought computers could load programs into memory faster these days. This is 2012. I don't want to watch applications slowly build up their screens.

Toolbars with stupid pictures When was the last time you looked for something using a pair of binoculars or a magnifying glass?

Tooltips. How many times have you hovered your mouse over something in the hopes that something would pop up explaining what the fsck this random collection of pixels was supposed to represent? And if you're going to tell me what the word is, why not put it on the screen in the first place?

Non-trivial shit happening when all I do is hover the mouse somewhere. Usually obscuring the information I'm interested in.

Modal boxes that prevent you from using some other part of the application.

Trying to be fscking helpful when you are trying to get things done.

Over the years, I've found just a few applications that either work well out of the box, or that I can make work properly by disabling most of the crap. The Linux file manager is one. The Linux document viewer is one - I have illustrated this by using Adobe Acrobat to open a PDF, turning to my Linux laptop to open the same file, and having it on-screen before Acrobat shows itself. All wordprocessors suck, but I now know how to make OpenLibreOffice suck less and keep its filthy mitts off the things I type. Kompozer also falls into this category. Software, whether GUI or CLI, should get on with my jobs, and stay the fsck out of my face.

An ounce of prevention...

This is the European Food Safety Authority (or, yes, "Brussels" to the terminally lazy, even though they have offices all over Europe). One of their jobs is to verify the sometimes completely absurd claims that people make about their wonder food. So someone made a few claims about a bottle of water, most of which got approved, bar one.

Catch: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/2075.htm

That's the claim that got rejected. What the "applicants" claimed was that regular intake of water "prevents" dehydration. Now in legalese and doctorese words have very specific meanings, and "prevents" is used in the context of vaccines or something that prevents you from getting a disease. We're definitely on *this* side of the looking glass here, and words don't mean what you want them to mean.

Now no matter how regularly I drink my 2L of water usually, it won't keep me from getting dehydrated next week if I don't keep up the water habit, where, say, getting a flu shot now will protect me against flu for a long time.

So the lusers here are the water peddlers. They worded their claim wrong.

TL;DR: Whatever source you got that from, got it wrong.

Look folks...

I used to think in terms of "Microsoft tax" and all that, but actually a machine with Windows on it is cheaper than a clean one. This is because the crapware peddlers pay the OEM for the privilege of having their "first one's freeware" installed at birth. So they effectively pay the MS tax for me, and like as not knock a bit off the hardware price as well. I'm writing this from a lovely HP G56 the Windows install of which never saw the light of day. When offered all kinds of antivirus support and software support and extended warranty, I cheerfully, and politely, told them to fuck off, so no money haemorrhage through that route. I really no longer care about whether Dell pays MS or not.

That, by the way, is what all this Trusted/Treacherous computing is all about. They want to force you to use their crapware and keep you from replacing it with something decent.

All you need to do is bring a bootable USB key to the shop, and see if you can find all the devices you care about. (WiFi, Ethernet, webcam and what-have-you), because if something important is missing you're basically out of luck.

I don't know what it is about IT

But we do seem to attract all the people who dropped out of other studies. And they do tend to be the kind of people who take "Ye Gods, I never knew you could do it like that," as a *compliment*.

Can't be true.

If it were, we'd see all kind of weird phenomena, like people who comment on articles *before* they've even read it.

That picture looks...

Hauntingly familiar. As if I've seen something like it before. Something portable, with a keyboard... No. Damn, it's gone. It'll come to me. Wait.

Ah! A LAPTOP! Such as you can buy at your local PC Illiterates for half the price of a fondleslab.

Mind you, this doesn't look like it would actually stand up on your lap. Maybe someone can construct something with a hinge or something. Don't you LOVE innovation?

O great.

Creationist: "When you teach your religious belief that the Earth is million years old (and all the mountains would have been ground to dust in that time, so who are YOU calling stupid), then you must also teach the theories of those who believe that God did it just six thousand years ago! You must TEACH the CONTROVERSY!"

Rationalist: "But there is no controversy! We have scientific data! We have sound theories, verified, shot at, amended, bickered over, and finally agreed upon. Young Earth Creationists have the Bible, which is not a work of Geology! There IS NO CONTROVERSY."

Creationist: "Oh. Well, we'll bloody well walk into your labs and MAKE one!"

Yeah, that's going to go down well. Think *you* are being hard on Evolutionary theories, Mr. Creationist? You're nowhere near as vicious as an evolutionary scientist who smells traces of bias in some bit of data.

The Yiddish Word for this is...

Chutzpah!

But people have always eaten people

What else is there to eat? If the ju-ju had meant us not to eat people, he would't have made us of meat! (Flanders & Swann, 'The reluctant cannibal').

For more details than anyone not in the food industry needs about slaughter and the treatment of food animals, Temple Grandin is the go-to woman: http://www.grandin.com/

Perhaps...

"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

It's one step of a Plan.

If you want to implement law against tracking, you need the Public(tm) to speak out against it first. The presence of a Do Not Track header in every request lets you do that. If you don't, then the scum can defend themselves saying: "But how were WE to know that he didn't want us to unzip his fly and rummage around inside?" Which would start a whole long and tedious discussion about opt-in, opt-out, reasonable expectations and what-have-you, during which business continues as usual, and then, oh, the government changes and nothing happens.

This way, when someone is caught tracking people who have enabled the Do Not Track header, they are demonstrably wrong.

Oh come on...

It isn't that bad when you turn down the volume as low as it will go. It's a cute girl imitating a goldfish. I bet you, if Beethoven had been around at the time, it would have cheered him up no end, and convinced him that his ironic condition could be a source of joy as well as sadness. And she got the days of the week in their proper order too, producing a work of chronological excellence. After all, even the Mamas and the Papas didn't dare go beyond monday, the Bangles famously put "Sunday" *behind* "Monday", to universal ridicule. All you haters simply don't understand the deeper meaning of this piece. The passing of time. The reflection upon the fragility of existence. Philistines!

Grrrr...

"App" is short for "Application". "Store" is just short. A hardware store is a store where you buy (or indeed, *store*) hardware. A drug store is where you buy drugs. A general store is where you buy generals. An app store is where you look at apps, then recoil in disgust.

I would mightily prefer it if people with more money than scruples would bloody well stop trying to patent and trademark the use of the BLEEDING OBVIOUS! Yes, I'm looking at YOU, Mr. "You've Got Mail(TM)". Stop snickering in the back, Mr. "IS NOT operator" (patent pending).

For the love of the FSM, can we get this banned under the same kind of treaty that bans the use of landmines? Patents were created to help the truly innovative minds of our age to profit from their brain child, like James Watt and his steam eng... Um. Edison's light bu... ah. Marconi and rad... Oh fuck it.

If this sort of thing is allowed to grow and fester, pretty soon you won't be able to move at all without some bloody patent/trademark troll going "Ah HA!"

Well...

What about a kiss, boy? We don't go galloping for the clitoris!

About that last photo...

What on Earth are they drinking? It looks like some kind of stout, only smaller...