Jkeg

If you're serious, then your idea of rating people according to some measure and denying people who score low is outrageous.

Why would you so blatantly misrepresent what someone said? All CWuestefeld said is that if you don't know that much about politics, don't vote. Or does that somehow equate to denying someone the right to vote in your mind?

I've moved on from Opera. It took them forever to implement basic usability features such as text box spell-check, and inline password remember/find in page. They also removed great features such as one click bookmarking. Their widgets used to be great, one hot-key and they'd all pop-up on screen like on OSX. Now you have to basically manage each one individually with multiple clicks and they clutter your taskbar like crazy. Meanwhile they focus on low value features like Unite. In the default install, it takes several clicks just to get to your list of bookmarks (ignoring hotkeys or custimization, from a business perspective this is bad.)

These aren't just flukes, it seems to be a pattern in their priorities that has shifted in the past few years. Away from low friction usability and innovative features to something a bit more convoluted. Opera used to be top of the pack in usability, even for non-power users. But now for some reason they lost their edge. And aside from this reddit AMA, it seems to be very difficult to have a discussion with them about changes to the browser. They have a suggestions forum but it seems to be mostly ignored, at least in terms of feedback.

How about a UserVoice for Opera?

(just my analysis/opinion)

And the back button doesn't even work.

>The main playback controls apply to the content in the main window.

First of all, that's wrong. You are able to stop a track in the iTunes store, so you can control media items from other areas of the program while browsing. You just can't pause, even though there are no new playlists to start in the iTunes store. So since you can't do anything with the stop/play button other than control the current track in the iTunes store, there remains a lack of explanation as to why I can't just pause a simple track while browsing iTunes.

Again, to simplify, the issue really is just this: "why can't there be pause functionality in iTunes store? What would it prevent? Why would it be better to keep just the 'stop' function?" If you can't answer that then you have no argument.

>Of course not. That's how iTunes already works, and iTunes is already consistent.

What's consistent about arbitrarily removing 'pause' functionality when not necessary? That is not consistent, and it's poor usability.

> However, those things are contrary to your suggestion:

No. Browsing around non-playlist-determining sections of iTunes does not imply I want to change or stop a playlist/track. So why remove the pause function, if the only reason to do that is so you can start a new playlist?

>It's very easy: The playback controls "always" apply to the playlist you are viewing.

Which is of no use to anyone if they aren't viewing a play list at all. Really, this was established in my very first comment. It's the iTunes store. There is no playlist to play other than the one I selected to play in the first place. Why exactly prevent me from pausing, when there's just no reason that would be helpful. You still haven't answered this.

> It's very easy.

Multiple clicks/mouse positionings are never easier than just one. Never.

> Look, it's clear you haven't really thought things through. You just need to learn how iTunes works.

That's sort of pointless to claim. You haven't proven anything, so such grand pronouncements as to someones general comprehension of the issue are useless to everyone. I suggest you prove your point with a specific argument, instead of making unsupported assertions, basically that amounts to "You're just wrong." That's never really a help to a discussion.

>(You also need to learn how to reply to the correct comment)

And no, I already know which comment to reply to, but the link simply wasn't there. I suppose you think, as with the iTunes issue, that software always works perfectly.

>You are forgetting these iTunes use cases:

None of those are contradictory to the idea of control consistency throughout iTunes, why would they be? In fact, deliberately selecting something and choosing specifically what to do with it fits perfectly with the "Have the control buttons control items you select or can only be one other possible item" method.

If the behavior isn't confusing, then why does it stop the track, but not let you restart it, even though there's nothing else to control? That is perfectly described as pointless and confusing.

The way they work is exactly the problem. Considering there's a lot you can do in iTunes, it makes more sense to have the control buttons apply to items independent of where you're browsing, as for example, Windows Media Player. The current behavior is confusing and pointless.

> Right, because there's nothing to play.

There's nothing there to play because "pause" irrationally became "stop" for no apparent reason (remember there's no playlist in sight), and the user accidentally pressed it. There's no reason for it to be this way.

Why shouldn't the play button apply to songs, especially when it was played individually and not as a playlist? Seems like the type of thing a music player should do.

Well yes. Microsoft is often said to have problems with teams competing internally (pointlessly), or just not working together. However, that's a management choice that can come from the top. If there's one thing a "Chief Software Architect" should do, it's make sure all software teams are in the habit of communicating and collaborating whenever possible. It doesn't seam like that happened here.

1. You can't press play again, it's just faded out.

2. What other playlist? I'm in the iTunes store. I haven't given any indication that I want to or even could specify another playlist to play.

2. That's exactly how it should work anyway. If I want to change the playlist, that's a different kind of event altogether from just pausing. Having one UI element try and control both is confusing. In this case, a dedicated stop button would actually be useful, as that could distinguish between pausing the current playlist and stopping it altogether. But removing relevant pause functionality just because you're in a different program section? Pointless.

My favorite iTunes feature insanity: When you listen to a song in the "Music" section of iTunes, you have a "pause" button; when you are listening and browsing iTunes store, the "pause" button inexplicably and detrimentally becomes "stop", so you have to re-navigate to "music" just to pause a song. Never mind that "stop" functionality is essentially pointless in digital music players anyway, if you are unfortunate enough to accidentally stop the song/podcast, you have to re-navigate to the Music section and manually restart the file and navigate to the right portion, only if you happen to know where that is.

* Yes I know you can right click on the song area and pause there. This is about UI design, not whether or not I can figure out how to pause a song.

Sure, most of those plants can be cheaper to buy than grow, if you treat your garden shop clerk as a used car salesman and let him connive you into buying every unnecessary over marketed garden gadget in the shop. But really, most plants will just require a shovel, trowel, cheap fertilizer, and a bit of time. Wheat and others are obvious exceptions, because their actual value is so low it's easy for any expense to exceed the benefit. Wheat also benefits hugely from mechanization, but the initial costs are high. It's basically an oddball. Potatoes don't fit that pattern, just buy seed potatoes once, then let a few grow "eyes", cut them off, throw them in the ground and weed them a bit. Done.

Because everyone understands Assembly?

This is a motivational article. And a good one with great specific tips on how to optimize your workload. But obviously wrong in that natural talent has little to no effect on skill. But of course you have to say that in a motivational "working hard gets results" gist type article.

The same reason why people use facebook and don't just email their friends/family anymore. Having it all organized and separated from other activities is a huge benefit. I don't think too many people actually worry (or even know it's an issue) about the photos being stored on 3rd party servers being compromised.

In truth I think a service like this is more about not having your family and colleagues being able to easily snoop in on your private life, not about giving you iron clad privacy. Or any level of social separation that you want which Facebook doesn't allow easily. Within that assumption, the fact that for example, photos of you can be posted outside that circle of trust, is just a necessary risk if you want to stay connected with your friends when most probably use social networking like facebook/etc.

So these people think they are better predictors of the future than all the people who failed, even though they probably never made a serious prediction themselves? They believe something is never going to happen just because it hasn't happened yet? Sounds highly irrational to me.

It's definitely intellectually lazy. But dismissing something because it was also made into a bunch of films? Utterly failing to think for yourself and just reacting via knee-jerk because it's past an arbitrary mental line of what's 'acceptable' to consider? Certainly falls under 'crazy' (i.e. high irrationality), just not what most people think of when they hear 'crazy'.

And I certainly wouldn't characterize singularitarians as advocating a human-less future without considering potential dangers. Anyone associated with the Singularity Institute for one will at least claim to consider potential dangers.

The majority of people, who when told of the singularity, automatically dismiss it offhand only because it has that Hollywood "scifi ridiculous" sound to it, seem a lot less sane to me than anyone on that list.

Those are pretty timid explanations for how iTV will 'change everything'. Per network applications, instead of just say, one feature set for all networks? iAds to monetize content, meaning something like ads on Hulu, or, the internet? $99, like Roku? Granted the iPhone as a remote is an excellent convenience and obvious evolution in home entertainment.

It would have to be based on any interaction the receiver has with the email, including viewing the inbox. However, if we're already worried about that level of privacy, even that change would do no good since it would mean the sender would know when the receiver checked their inbox.

Unlimited undo to Gmail users until the E-mail is open would make sense too.

It is a reasonable assumption that the other genomes involved in human development are selected for as well, but don't drastically multiply the overall complexity of humans and especially not for the brain's design. Thus the issue is still how complex extra-genomic data is such as the preexisting cells which actuate DNA, which is what I addressed.

True, but my guess is that the extra-genomic data, the preexisting cell, is a trivial amount, since it's always only interpreting the genome and is itself built on an interpretation of a genome. Selection pressure has no reason to store a huge among of complexity outside of the genome after all. The bare minimum will do. As to how exactly that compares to the known 50MB, I've no answer but I'd guess it's an almost flat-rate amongst all species built by evolution.

Selection pressure creates the complexity. Aside from what is selected for (the ~50MB of genome), where does the extra complexity come from? Why is it there? There's no reason why selection pressure would concentrate any complexity in the extra-genomic data rather than the genome itself. In other words, most of the complexity of the initiator mechanisms is redundant in the genome itself, aside from that crucial bit to translate from genome to vehicle which is simply carried over trivially from one generation to the next. The rest is probably the substrate data, I.E. behavior of molecules in general.

The problem in this case is decision making: over-optimizing flight options even though the gain is outweighed by the time spent doing so. Should we really simplify everything because options might trigger someones OCD to optimize even if those options are really useful to some people? Let there be options but not bloat, and people can use what they need.

The human brain does not need to store all the information in the environment in the genome to develop fully, so why should an AI need to? I expect an AI would include that data in the development of it's brain just as a human does, by being put in an environment to learn from and absorb that data. In other words, design and development are different kinds of data here, and a human's and an AI's initial brain design can be stored in ~50MB of data.

"if you have two different kinds of machines, and you want to program each to compute the same result -- upper bounds on the program size on machine tell you nothing about the the upper bounds on the other machine."

But the complexity of the zygote derives mostly from that 50MB of genome data, so Kurzweil's main point remains the same: the genome gives a rough estimate as to the maximum complexity of the human brain, which in this case includes the mechanism needed to build the brain.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hyper-

It's a prefix, to denote an unusually high amount of something. I'm guessing the reason why he wrote the article in the first place was because he wanted to share start-up tips that had an unusually high practicality. Thus, he's signifying the significance of these tips with that phrase.