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> The number of dead people whose ashes got a known-to-be small but definite odds at being put into space by Elon Musk? 208.

It's well known that new launch platforms fail a lot initially. Soyuz still fails after 757+ launches, and the fatality rate for humans is still 2%.

So, when you get on launch #3 of a new platform for which launch #1 & #2 failed, you've got no excuse for to complain about failure.

Links:

http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2011.html#rate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1#Launch_history

Also, you may even need 3 subtitles:

- transcription of the spoken language: les jeux sont faits

- literal translation: the games are made/done

- correct/useful translation: the chips are down

Having said that, your example is bad because: - your "simple os option" is hidden in an advanced administrative tool called "Local Group Policy Tool" (or previously Registry) - OS X has the same disable .DS_Store option hidden in a similar administrative interface (Terminal + defaults write ...)

desktop.ini is closer from a functionality point of view, but in practice I see much less of it compared to Thumbs.db.

My small data point supporting this: I have a free utility which gets 20+ downloads/day with no marketing and not enough ratings for stars to show. All of these are people who find the app via app store search.

Downside to the app store: apart from sandboxing, you have to deal with grey areas in review. My app had to be tweaked to satisfy the HIG, even though the popular app I was copying had the same violation.

edit: less words

Last week I got a Samsung Galaxy Y. It's small, sturdy, has swype input and has great battery life. Gmail, reader & facebook over 3G or wifi.

The price: just $140!!!

I used to try high-end phones and then go back to low-end Nokias. Now, I'm not going back to my $40 Nokia and I'm definitely not going to pay $700+ for an iPhone that won't even have Swype.

edit: extra sentence

By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy".

The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.

Left/right is so much easier to both remember and understand the terms.

I suspect that an urban ancient Greek would adjust to a western urban world pretty well.

I'd expect the shift from hunter/gatherer tribes to agriculture-enabled large scale cultures is much harder psychologically.

Meanwhile, at Apple, they would have got it right in version 0.1, and Steve Jobs would treated that as prototype quality and made the team do 10 better variations.

I wanted to keep the app simple in features, but I will definitely look at a UI for non-photoshop people to choose/move layers & save the resulting PNG.

Also, note that the savings/benefits can be in ways other than more battery life e.g. price, fanless & sealed cpu, etc.

For example, chat is mostly fine. I'm either switching between multiple chat windows or mentally switching from chat to another task in which case I have no problem switching out of the whole chat app.

The same setup goes wrong when one chat window is for work, and I'm going back and forth with another non-chat work window.

Whatever the reason, they're wrong for us power users. And possibly for intermediate & beginners users as well.

I get a warning that some apps might not like command-tab being taken by Witch - have you faced any issues?

I'm finding the list style still has high mental overhead compared to the Windows/Linux style of bringing the target window (or it's outline) transiently forward.

Still, looks like it's 80/20 enough that I'll be parting with $14 soon!

The most basic web page development exercise - 1 browser window and 2 editor windows for html and css - is ruined because I can no longer MRU cycle the 3 windows.

I would say this is one of the biggest usability mistakes on the Mac. Sadly, Unity & Gnome 3 have both copied this. Meanwhile, I don't fight the platform but use it the way it was meant to be - keyboard + mouse. But I'll be shifting back to Linux or Windows for all non Mac/iOS development.

Update: thanks to comments pointing me to Witch. However, I still stand by my criticism of the built-in Mac desktop behavior.

(I used to telnet to port 80 for testing, and type GET / HTTP/1.0 <enter> <enter>, and that should be LF on Linux & Mac)

Why risk your money only to have to others take the profits of your labor?