It's interesting, because that immediately makes me question the QA behind the product, when I a see the web QA being poor like this. So I poked around the site, and the main picture shows "29 colours to choose from" and several of the cases have chipped paint. I guess it goes back to what my grandma used to say about girls with dirty fingernails.
This is ridiculous. I absolutely want to talk to a person when something has gone wrong. Too many systems are poorly designed, and you can get your account into an invalid state. I'm paying for a service, and part of that service should be to allow me to contact someone when their system breaks. Spending a day researching on forums is wasting my time. It isn't that I don't want to call for support, it's the company that doesn't want to pay qualified individuals to provide that support.
I'll pay for content, but the value has to be there. And in this age of click bait headlines, non researched articles of no susbstance or value, I'm not about to pay for someone's low value opinions. Sure they have value, but it's like $0.02 of value. And it's not scarce. When everyone can create content and publish, and many are willing to do it for free to create their own brand, it creates a market where ideas and words are not monetizable. I don't even mind ads, when done right. A trailer for a movie I want to see is an ad, and I'll seek it out when I want the content. But ad agencies have done this to themselves by becoming a virus on content pages.
Besides, why should I have to pay? I create and consume something far more valuable in the form of OSS. No ads, no price.
To say monetization has to be ads or paywalls is excluding hundreds of other ways to monetize content. It's lazy, and won't succeed in the information era.
I'm german and live approximately 30 miles away from a very big nuclear waste disposal site, which is one of the reasons I prefer solar/wind/etc. energy over nuclear. I don't see why anybody would be against using it for scientific purposes though (especially stuff happening in space).
Because it's fissile material that somehow has to get into space, and the mechanism for that is 200tons of explosives controlled by 2 million movable parts each procured from the lowest bidder :)
Thanks to trade treaties, ESA always has to use the cheapest available hardware that fulfils the requirements – no matter if other hardware is more reliable.
This has been part of many discussions before – and it doesn’t just affect ESA.
From government agencies which have to buy pencils that break after every use and are practically useless, to contractors building Autobahnen where the asphalt melts in the summer sun away.
You're bringing up a non issue. Add reliability constraints into your requirements. Airplane components are also made of the cheapest materials that satisfy the constraints required by the engineers and they don't randomly fall apart.
Perhaps you should use actual statistics for launch and slingshot failures, because those numbers are actually available. Also consider that the design of an RTG probably takes those risks into account.
Stackoverflow has been a real issue for my team. Too many of my junior developers seem to hold the information as gospel. Something I frequently am forced to reiterate is that just because a dozen idiots up vote an incorrect answer doesn't make it the best or proper way to accomplish something.
The second issue is with understanding. I hold a firm rule, never commit code that you do not fully understand. Because when it breaks, you will have no idea how to fix it. Too often I see developers copy/paste directly, and just change variable names. You aren't writing code, you're playing dev Lego.
My final issue is their draconian insistence on what they consider subjective question locking. When I'm making a technological choice, I'm looking for real world usage, and comparisons between frameworks. These questions can be asked and answered in non-subjective ways; yet even when done so, anything with the word "compare" gets locked. This would be the real value to me, as my research time is very limited, and being able to exclude frameworks and tools based on objective comparisons of feature sets or capabilities and limitations would be highly valuable to me.
The worst part about the locked questions is that they often appear in top spots in Google. So you see the question in the search results, exactly what you've been looking for, but then some bureaucrat has locked it.
It would be more honest if they'd delete locked questions from the site, then they at least wouldn't spam Google result pages ... but the way it's currently implemented is infuriating.
Your third point really hits home for me. The most useful questions & answers I've ever found on S.O. tend to be locked more often than not. And even if they are slightly off topic, they're much more useful and informative to me during my research than the more common type (e.g. http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-large.gif). I understand this isn't the point of S.O. but there's really no resource like it for that kind of research.
> Too often I see developers copy/paste directly, and just change variable names.
Yeah, I don't think StackOverflow is your problem. I mean, if they're going to blindly paste code, surely doing that from community-curated examples is better than whatever junk they'd find.
This. SO gets a lot of flack for stuff these days, and it falls into two camps - one camp is 'they hate fun', 'they close my questions', where people want to reduce the quality of the content on SO, and one is the 'the content isn't perfect' camp that complains about stuff like this.
It reminds me of the 'wikipedia can be wrong!' crowd - yes, that's inherant to the format. Yes, you are going to need to check things you read there, yes, your 20 page essay about why you are the best person in the world is going to get deleted.
Every time I see a critisism of SO, I tend to see someone who would make the site worse or is misusing the site. Not saying SO is perfect - more can be done to help those people become good contributors or users, but SO is very well designed, and the quality of the content is really very good.
