Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief. - <AUTHOR> http://lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org/312472.html <comment><USER2> That experience with acceessibility may be true for many websites, but certainly isn't the case for Microsoft products (and I assume websites but do not know for sure). I was on the Visual Studio Environment team, and we put an incredible amount of effort into making sure everything was accessibile. This meant not only screen readers, but also solid support for high-contrast or large font size OS modes (used by people who are not blind but have extremely limited vision). I spent many hours with my machine configured in super-low resolutions and large font+contrast mode or trying to use the product with only headphones and keyboard (monitor off).

I'm disappointed to hear that this person got such negative feedback from the companies they contacted. It probably sounds cheesy, but I fixed quite a few bugs related to accessibility and to this day I get a happy feeling remembering the feedback we got from the customers for whom this support was critical to their ability to earn a living as a software developer.

<comment><USER3> I just wanted to say thanks. :) As a person with low vision (and a heavy VS user), I'm grateful that there was so much attention to detail in the development of VS with respect to accessibility.

I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but > I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

For Visual Studio 2005, at least, this certainly didn't hurt, but we also had an incredibly dedicated and passionate group of people working on this issue, putting together brown bags educating developer division on MSAA and building accessible software, bringing in the creators of JAWS, logging bugs against every nook and cranny of the product, etc. etc.

I wish I could remember the names of everyone who was involved in this, but Sara Ford was instrumental. I'm glad I got to be a part of the whole thing, even though my contributions were focused on project management-type stuff.

<comment><USER5> Ah, good times! It's always great to hear kind words about the accessibility work with Visual Studio. When i first joined the Accessibility effort back in 2001, I coded in Visual Studio for 3 months without a monitor. I'll never forget the nightmares of hearing VS talk to me in my sleep :)

I'm embarrassed I can't remember their names either. It was a great group of people. (Hey Arron! Hey Lars!) But yes, the accessibility virtual team consisted of about 50 people across the division all using JAWS, Window Eyes, and other programs to open bugs. Really good times.

<comment><USER4> Hi Sara! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get one of these emails every once in a while.

I understand that X Does Not Support Screenreaders is an imposition for folks who have issues with standard browsers, particularly because there are an awful lots of Xes. At the same time, X Does Not Support Screenreaders Because Of Y, and there are an awful lot of Ys, too.

You might think that scanning a menu and formatting a menu in HTML are approximately equally as easy. Not so much, no. There is an actual cost here. For a restaurant menu, that is likely to only be in the couple hundreds of dollars range. (<joke>I will entertain complaints about this from people who don't bill in six minute increments.</joke>)

For more complex applications, this can -- easily -- run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is easy to underestimate how expensive it is because you only see the element from the set of Ys that caused non- compatibility in the present instance, not the entire set of Ys which you have to a) avoid and b) rigorously test against.

Getting down to brass tacks, the population which benefits from _any particular_ engineering effort to address a Y is generally very small and, often, far smaller in marginal value to the business than the cost of addressing that Y. It has occasionally been the public policy of the US that businesses are supposed to subsidize that population (see: Americans with Disabilities Act, etc). Reasonable people can disagree on whether that is a justice-maximizing policy.

<comment><USER7> I see it not as a subsidy but more of an insurance premium. We all put in a little bit of extra effort in exchange for not being royally screwed if it happens to us. The progress of civilization seems to go hand-in-hand with these sorts of arrangements. That's probably because there are so many ways to be royally screwed that, if we didn't look out for each other, _everyone_ would be screwed in one way or another.

But there needs to be economic incentives for this to work (and regulation is an economic incentive). Asking a business to be altruistic is like asking a bear to not eat your trash.

<comment><USER6> _Asking a business to be altruistic is like asking a bear to not eat your trash._

I get kinda annoyed by Capitalism Means Being A Heartless Bastard, because it doesn't. Businesses are routinely altruistic for the same reason that businesses are routinely greedy: like soylent green, they're made out of people.

<comment><USER8> That ignores the fact that some of those people, usually the ones in power, are either heartless bastards or, more often, sufficiently involved in making the company succeed to forego altruism. Making sure your employees keep their jobs often counts for more than being kind to strangers.

However, there is another way in which capitalism makes things better: it does its best to find markets for everything. For instance, Unilever sells very small packages of washing powder in India, which is optimized to be used in rivers. Previously, people in India did not have access to washing powder (the regular large packages were too expensive and the stuff wasn't very useful in the river). Now they have access to washing powder, which improves hygiene.

However, instructions on packages of washing powder are not printed in braille.

<comment><USER9> _Previously, people in India did not have access to washing powder [...] Now they have access to washing powder, which improves hygiene._

What an awful example.

Before washing powder, people used a bar of wash soap: cheaper, more convenient, purpose-designed and doesn't come in single-use packages encouraging you to use more than you need. (Wash soap also does a much better job than any powder I have tried when hand-washing, although YMMV.)

This sounds like a classic case of a large corporation's marketing department convincing people to buy a product that is more expensive and no better (and possibly worse) than what they currently have.

For the definitive example of this, see Nestle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott#The_baby_mi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott#The_baby_milk_issue)

<comment><USER8> I don't think an explanation involving 'YMMV' and 'sounds like' is a sufficient support for your opening statement that it is 'an awful example'.

They have simply entered a market with a competing product. Unless you have evidence that their product is inferior to competing solutions and that they know it, but intend to overcome that problem by outmarketing the competition, then you really don't have any support for your position. Nestle has nothing to do with it until then.

<comment><USER9> You're being ridiculous. I don't have access to Unilever's internal marketing materials, and I doubt that you do either.

<comment><USER8> You're the one accusing them of immoral behavior.

I'm only relaying what I've heard an employee tell and I assume good faith: they changed their product such that it would be suitable for a new market and a nice side effect is that the product becomes available at all (which is nice because it improves matters). I have no stake in this and will readily revise my ideas, but not based on an unsupported accusation.

<comment><USER9> (They're amoral, if anything.)

 _which is nice because it improves matters_

But you haven't actually demonstrated that it improves anything, you simply asserted it without proof.

And this is not something that can just be assumed to be true, because the pre-existing solution really is very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> iPhone developers: Never considered supporting Apple's VoiceOver technology before? Setting aside positive karma, here's an awesome reason to do it: your app needs to be accessible in order to work with the best functional testing framework out there, KIF [1] (<https://github.com/square/kif>)

Write tests with KIF, ensure that blind and low-vision users can use your app, ensure that your app is functional. What's not to love?

[1] i'm totally unaffiliated with Square, its creators. I just happen to be in love with it, that's all.

<comment><USER10> VoiceOver is crazy easy to integrate. If you use UIKit, you're already 95% there. The visually impaired community is very social and you'll be winning yourself some advocates if you do it right.

<comment><USER11> Do you find low vision users to prefer text-to-speech instead of very-large- high-contrast-text? I would be uncomfortable walking around with my phone reading aloud to me and everyone else in earshot.

<comment><USER4> Try asking here: <http://www.afb.org/message_board_subjects2.asp?FolderID=7>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sure does. Also, if you search hard enough any site will breach some accessibility guideline for a deaf, blind, mentally handicapped or epileptic user.

For example [http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Flightgetsin.dreamwidth...](http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Flightgetsin.dreamwidth.org%2F312472.html) shows some possible WebAIM accessibility guidelines breaches.

\- non-valid mark-up.

      4.1.1 Significant HTML/XHTML validation/parsing errors are avoided.

\- mixing of inline styling with external styling.

      4.1.2 Markup is used in a way that facilitates accessibility.
      This includes following the HTML/XHTML specifications and
      using forms, form labels, frame titles, etc. appropriately.

\- Using    and <br> for visual spacing

      See 4.1.2

\- using tables for layout

      See 4.1.2

\- not providing a label, description or fieldset for the searchform

      1.1.1 Form inputs have associated text labels or, if
      labels cannot be used, a descriptive title attribute.

And, not a WebAIM guideline, but still a good accessibility guideline:

\- Use a modern doctype (of the strict variant if not HTML5)

\- Don't use deprecated tags like <b> for article headings.

\- Provide an option to skip large lists.

If you start wielding all these guidelines and specifications like a D&D guide you are sure to bump into hostility here and there. :)

<comment><USER13> I've spent about four years as a medical tech working with epilepsy in a neurology lab. Sorry, but this just gets up my nose.

Please stop using 'flashing images' as a way to co-opt epileptics into defense of the issue-of-the-day (that's the only thing I can think of as to why you included it). Yes, some epileptics do respond to flashing images (~15% have the kind required, less actually respond), but the parameters are pretty tight for the bulk of them. The kind of flashing that can trigger a seizure is also monumentally irritating to regular users, and generally hasn't been used since the 90s.

I spent four years in a full-time job where I sat in the dark flashing lights at epileptic and suspected epileptic patients, 4-6 times a day while recording EEG, so I've got a reasonable subjective feel for the kind of flashing that fires it off. I've spent a lot of time on the web, too, and the only thing that even comes close in general use are the flashing-style 'you are the 999999th visitor' ads, and even then they usually subtend too small an arc of the visual field.

For the record, the usual range for photosensitive epileptics to respond to flashing images or lights is 12-20Hz, with a peak different for each patient and with some rolloff at each end. Above 25Hz epileptic responses are extremely rare - I've not personally seen one, but they do exist.

Yes, there are some epileptics that can have a seizure from a single camera flash, and I've seen them, but they're reasonably rare amongst flash- responsive epileptics (themselves an uncommon group). I've also heard of an epileptic whose trigger was orange circles - not orange other shapes, or other coloured circles ( _anything_ can be a trigger for a seizure). At what point do you set the bar for rarity?

Sorry, but it gets up my nose - almost every time I've seen someone 'defend epileptics' online, they don't actually know much about epilepsy, and seem more to be using common mythology about epilepsy in order to co-opt the illness to strengthen a point being made.

Of course, two other common forms of trigger, depending on the kind of epilepsy, are stress and hyperventilation (strictly speaking, these are less triggers and more threshold-to-event reducers). In this case, one could argue that frustrating site design works against epileptics...

<comment><USER12> I included it to make the following point: Accessibility is more than catering for the deaf or blind. It also includes color blindness, mental handicaps or going by the standard:

[http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photosensitive- epilepsy/web-...](http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photosensitive-epilepsy/web- design)

[http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/assistive-technologies- for-p...](http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/assistive-technologies-for-people- with-epilepsy)

Which have the following guidelines (or myths?):

      - allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker

      - allow users to control blinking, avoid causing content to blink

      - allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages

      While people with epilepsy are browsing web sites, they
      may encounter pages that have blinking texts and
      animation that may trigger seizures. Sudden loud sounds
      and repetitive audio in some web pages can also cause
      epileptic seizures.

I do not know much about epilepsy, so I will believe your experience, but believe me when I say I am not using it as a way to further a point. I believe in above guidelines, regardless if they help for epilepsy, because in this case they help other users with a mental handicap or ADHD and so remain good guidelines. Or do you rather have we don't mention epilepsy all together when making sites accessible and just call them common sense? It is easy to ignore even a common sense guideline when there are so many different ones.

It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose. Like my quotes show, I am not the fringe 'defend epileptics' spreader of myths here, this is part of the accessibility topic.

<comment><USER13> It's fair to say that I overreacted a little, but I did admit it (via 'sorry, gets up my nose'...)

What I was really reacting against was _if you search hard enough any site will breach some accessibility guideline for a ... epileptic user_. The other three, sure. But I just do not come across any kind of website offering a service that violates these principles. You could throw a brick and find any website that violates guidelines for people with blindness or mental illness. You'd have to search for specific audio-based sites to find ones that discriminate against deaf folks (I can't see how HN does so, for example, but I may be missing something). But you'd have to go through a lot of service- offering sites to find a serious one that caused problems for epileptics.

The only kind of violation of these principles I could think of is a bug anyway - the issue where a mouseover changes the shape of a menu, moving it out from under the pointer, reverting the menu back to original shape, repeat ad infinitum.

Apart from that, I just don't see websites that cause problems. Served ads on some low class websites, perhaps (999999!), but not the content that the website itself is providing.

Solutions for epileptics to use poorly designed sites (if they were a real problem like they are for the blind) are here anyway - [Esc] in pretty much every browser cancels image animation. Flashblock kills flash dead, allowing you to throttle it to your needs. If you're really, really susceptible to simple movement as an epileptic (I've never heard of it, but it could happen, I guess - see the orange circle guy), you can install noscript, which breaks a lot of websites, but kills non-image animation dead. But if you're that susceptible, you're extremely rare and the web probably shouldn't be designed around your use case.

 _It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose._

Please read my comment again. It's not 'mentioning them in the same sentence', that's a strawman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The optimal solution is to find or create some tool that lets you bypass these options. This is a bit of a tangent, since that's really not what this post is about, but it's worth mentioning.

If you're stuck in a wheelchair, it's good when people build ramps, but it's far, far better to have a wheelchair that can go up stairs.

The former makes you dependent on the consideration of others, and sometimes that consideration is really not a reasonable thing to ask or expect.

Even in this apparently simple case, as others have pointed out, it is not easy to make everything accessible to screen readers. Also, what about older websites and archives of scans and so forth? It's far better to focus on tools that let one be as independent as possible.

I understand the annoyance. And I really hate it when people respond to requests like this in a hostile manner. But at the end of the day it is better if the person with exceptional needs can take on the responsibility for making these transactions possible themselves. (Also I'm sure there's loads of money to made developing these tools.)

<comment><USER15> Ramps are not just intended for persons in wheelchairs. They improve access for people with less serious mobility issues such as those with knee or hip problems or elderly people who simply lack the upper body strength to confidently support themselves using a handrail. Forcing such people into stair climbing chairs is absurd...and of cost far more costly than a few ramps or proper architectural design.

<comment><USER14> On modern buildings of course you want to build a ramp. But the cost of adding ramps to every already-built place accessible only by stairs is extremely high. At any rate, that isn't to say that it shouldn't be paid, in many cases, just that it's better (when possible and feasible) to develop technologies that let the disabled deal with it themselves. There are buildings with stairs and ramps or elevators. If you're disabled, it's good to be able to access these buildings when you come across them.

Along the same lines, the purpose of accessible digital text isn't only to help the blind, it's also to help the dyslexic and who knows who else, and generally facilitate content extraction software of all types. It's good when to do when it's feasible, but it's better to not have to rely on people doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FWIW, the two places I've inquired about accessibility (just because these things piss me off) have actually responded "we know it's a problem and we're working on a fix," and have since been fixed. These were the City of Worcester (Java menus) and my former employer, a public high school in Rhode Island (entire paragraphs as JPEGs).

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm sorry, but "I was disappointed" and "I wish you would take steps" probably gets you grief. Asking usually doesn't. "Please" also helps (and its absence doesn't).

I mean, come on. I'm sorry company X site was all but useless to you. It would be nice if they made an extra effort to make it more accessible. But they don't have to. They spend their own money, time and effort to build the site, and they get to decide what their priorities are. Asking is okay, but so is refusal.

<comment><USER18> I agree. If I got an email with "lawyer pomposity" in it, I would likely pretend I never got it and deliberately push back any accessibility plans out of spite. You don't have to stick "please" in every sentence, but you have to phrase things correctly. If it's phrased as a request, I would see an opportunity to make people happy and gladly go along. If it's phrased as an order, I would probably perceive it as an affront to my individual sovereignty and would be motivated to fight back rather than capitulate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Aside from the bigger companies, I can see why some of the smaller ones wouldn't want to do this, like the restaurants or his vet. Most of the time they just hired someone to create the website, and be done with it. They don't know how to implement the accessibility functionality themselves and hiring someone to do it may cost several hundred to thousands of dollars.

I was interning in a government related web development job, and it took several weeks to properly remake a site to conform to WCAG AA level standards. Unfortunately, that was just for the templates. The dynamic content generated by the CMS usually breaks the conformance. Making websites accessible is not an easy task, and could cost a heavy amount for small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER20> "# Google (for the search engine) – Google Instant crashes Jaws, and the current "solution" is to have a link to turn Instant off. Except it only works for a single pageview at a time, ARRRRGH)."

How is this Google and not Jaws fault?

<comment><USER21> Most people would consider it Google's fault if their main page crashed Internet Explorer, even though it would technically be IE's fault. The internet is full of compromises.

Also in this case, even if Google Instant wasn't crashing Jaws, Google Instant plays havoc with screen readers (yes, I have experience of this), and as the article says, Google haven't provided a global off option, which would be really useful.

All most screen-readers want is a really basic HTML interface, preferably no AJAX at all. Even if it is slow and needs to re-load a lot, that is still preferable to no access.

<comment><USER22> What's wrong with [gear icon] -> "Search settings", select "Do not use Google Instant"? I accidentally kept Google Instant off for months by selecting that option.

<comment><USER23> Try that one with VoiceOver and your eyes closed. Then, consider that you know it exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find interesting the notion that web apps ought to be written to support screen readers instead of screen readers being written to work with extant web apps.

I also suspect any hostile response would be due in part to the concern that someone is going to swing the big bat of government at them.

<comment><USER25> If you are worried about the government getting involved, then for the love of whatever you hold holy, do not be hostile. That response will be shown in court to add damages and will be plastered on the news reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> More people need to be like this guy and complain when sites are not accessible. It might make my bosses and clients actually care when I want to take time to make a site accessible. I can make noise about an issue, but nothing brings it to the forefront like an angry letter from a user.

</comment><comment><USER18> Philosophical question - why do people with disabilities have the right to higher priority than everyone else? Let's say you've calculated that there are 4000 blind people who might be interested in your website, but 11000 Spanish speakers, 9000 Korean speakers and 7000 Portuguese speakers. If someone comes to complain about accessibility for the blind, won't it be perfectly reasonable to answer (in more polite terms) "no, we won't handle you, we're going to do a Spanish translation first, then implement UTF-8 so we can do a Korean translation, then do the Portuguese translation, and only then maybe get to you"?

<comment><USER27> The Spanish speakers might be only a niche in the case of this one website, but they don't face being a niche practically everywhere they turn. I'm not going to weigh in on how that difference should affect how you deal with accessibility, but it's a real one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I learned one thing from this post - Wow, blind people are pissed off.

In the past I've made a few websites where the owner required images incorporated into the menu. I've spoken to owners about accessibility, countless times, but more often then not I end up having to do some retarded flash intro coupled with a graphic heavy menu. Owners don't care, they want it to match their vision, and of course they don't want to pay extra to have everything made accessible to the blind as they are probably some percentage of a point of their customer base.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. Is this a civil rights issue or a libertarian issue? The libertarian in me says, "let the restaurants that don't comply lose their business". But then I think, would I feel the same about businesses (and government agencies!) that disallowed blacks/jews/gays/etc? I lean to the latter, accepting that changing everyone will take time.

<comment><USER30> The problem with the libertarian view that businesses that purposefully exclude some customers will lose business, and so eventually disappear from the market, is that it only actually works that way if the businesses exclude a large customer base, and there aren't compensating factors to make up for the loss.

That's why economic forces didn't do much to open up things for blacks in the south between the Civil War and the era of Federal civil rights law. If you have a "No Coloreds" policy, and the store down the road does not then yes, they'll get the black business you are giving up--but they are giving up to you the business of people who do not want to shop around black people. The latter is worth more to the bottom line than the former, so you'll actually likely come out ahead economically with a "No Coloreds" sign hanging out in front of your shop.

Then that business down the road decides they'd rather have half of the whites-who-don't-want-to-shop-around-blacks business rather than all of the black business, and out comes the "Whites Only" sign on their store. Yes, they have less total customers after the change, but the white customers are wealthier than the black customers and that makes up for the difference in quantity.

Now it gets interesting. The mathematics of this kind of discrimination turn out to be the same as the mathematics of a boycott of a small country by the rest of the world. (I don't remember where I saw this--it might have been in Posner's "Economic Analysis of Law"). Unless the small country is completely self-sufficient, it loses badly. The net result is the discrimination _keeps_ the blacks poor, and so they don't as a group rise to the point where the stores gain by integrating.

Humans in small groups of approximately equal status and means where everyone knows everyone else simply do not behave the same as humans in very large groups of widely varying status and means where people only know a small part of the group. Libertarianism probably works great in the former case, but not in the latter.

<comment><USER31> Do you think there is a similar explanation as to why Scotland's economic fortunes haven't actually improved over the last 304 years despite being in a union with England which promised and still promises that there is economic benefit for Scotland to be in a union with England. Is it possible that they are deliberately or through their own ignorance/incompetence be keeping Scotland poor.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, but that's simply not true. From <http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/43481/print> :

 _The Treasury data shows that public sector spending in England was 15% lower than that of Scotland last year._

England bends over backwards to do things for the Scots, but they still can't pull their weight.

<comment><USER31> Thats due to the barnett formula which was introduced in part to deal with poverty north of the border. It was meant as a temporary measure and was soooo effective that we still use it. Are you bending over backwards doing the wrong things? Its not a question of simply giving money to Scotland - that doesn't help Scotland. It keeps us poor just like keeping people on benefits isn't actually good for them but helping them get into work and to create their own money is good for them. Its the little and big decisions that may have nothing to do with what money is spent where that keep Scotland where it is. Is the barnett formula continuing so that unionists can say look we're trying to help but your still not pulling your weight, whilst making bad decisions that actually keep Scotland poor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I thought this was a really interesting article and I've been interested in addressing the accessibility of startup sites recently. It's true that certain accessibility modifications can be difficult/costly but the majority of them are very easy to make. There are many "low hanging fruit" fixes that any site should make. The improvements will assist with accessibility, usability, and SEO. If anyone would like a quick review contact me on G+ <https://plus.google.com/111107665026656718495/posts>

</comment><comment><USER34> I've asked for similar help in the past here: <http://ilnodisaarcodu.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/95/>

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it antagonistic on the OP's part to call this response "hostile": "we know it's inaccessible, but we are not fixing it". That's not hostile, it's _honest_. What more could you ask for than honesty?

If they had responded "we know it's inaccessible, but we are not fixing it, because people with disabilities are a drain on society and should be put down", _that_ would be hostile.

Also: _"it would be too hard," (universally incorrect)_ is just not true. Unless his standard is "nothing is too hard for this noble cause."

<comment><USER36> To be fair, a significant number of his complaints could have been solved by turning JPEGs into text or adding labels to a few buttons. In several cases, he gave them the exact fix required and they still refused or ignored him.

> What more could you ask for than honesty?

An attempt to fix the problem or raise the issue with someone that can.

<comment><USER28> Why should they change their design for one person ? Maybe websites should start having one version for people with sight and one all text version for the blind. I think it's kind of dumb to make it so people can't use images embedded with text. What about art or multimedia sites ?

<comment><USER36> There's a lot more than one blind person out there, most of whom would simply never do business with them without letting them know.

And it's not all images that are a problem, just those that are images of large blocks of text, like the restaurant menu that was given as an example. If it's a short bit of text like a logo, that's what ALT tags are for.

When there's the entire menu full of text as an image, that's just plain bad design. It's worse for everyone and it won't even get indexed by search engines. Text should be text. It's just easier that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I read this article with a concern about an app I've worked on, where we intended to go thru an add accessibility support in after the first release, but it (and a bunch of other improvements) got dropped when priorities changed. I was reading to see if I could judge how our app (which should be mostly accessible) might have worked for this person... but they never mentioned what their disability was in their sample letter, and so I had no clue, and couldn't hazard a guess. (Except maybe that they are blind? Though I don't have enough clues to be at all confident in that guess.)

I wonder if part of the non-response they got was because they never explained what their disability was in their letters. I understand it really isn't some pizza restaurant's business to need to know it, but if they left that off, then it is hard for someone to understand their dificulty-- they might even read the email too fast and not even realize there is a disability at all. Thus it just sounds like someone who can't describe why the real problem is, and is instead giving web development advice to a customer service rep who, more likely than not, has no ability to even parse the email into actionable or useful information for the developers simply because the context is dropped by missing this key bit of information. (Even though the advice is useful to someone who is a web developer, even without knowing the disability, the CSR may not realize that.)

That said, I have gone thru a recent terrible experience attempting to deal with a company who is bringing in $150million a month in revenue, and can't be bothered to have CSRs actually read letters. Over the course of a dozen back and for the responses, each form letter I got from them, was written by a different person, and seemingly responded to a random word or two from my previous message, where they clearly didn't' read the whole ticket or even take a few minutes to actually comprehend what I was saying.

There's some really bad customer service out there, even from companies that at least don't have lack of budget as an excuse.

<comment><USER38> > but it (and a bunch of other improvements) got dropped when priorities > changed

More CTO's with disabilities need to be hired.

<comment><USER25> Or go ask the CTO to talk to the lawyers about what happened to Target. That talk will help avoid a very uncomfortable talk later on with the CEO and HR.

<comment><USER38> From my experience working in technology startups, I can say without a doubt that the CEO is focused on getting a product, any product in any state of progress, out the door and that HR thing you speak of is an office held by the beneficiary of nepotism and maintained with loyalty who's sole job is to complete the tasks assigned to them by the CEO, usually in a haphazardly incompetent manner.

For example, I once worked at a firm where the HR person was my direct boss' sister-in-law and was living with one of the [shithead] project managers I had to deal with, who's sister-in-law was the receptionist/marketing genius. Do you think any of those four people had any grease to make demands on whether or not a product should include, or even be based upon conventions that would assist those with disabilities if said inclusion were to set back the shipping timetable? I think not.

tl;dr: CEO's focus on sales and revenue, HR is a rubber stamp/sick day tracker, which can be outsourced.

<comment><USER25> I guess my point was the CEO will be concerned by the multi-million $ lawsuit and HR will be going over the CTO's severance package.

<comment><USER38> I know what you point was, and it's clear to many that in a common sense society that would be the case as you've correctly described it, however, my experience has always been one of sales first, people last. Regardless of the company's maturity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> HN could use some attention to accessibility. In Chrome, I have to press CTRL+ four times to make the text easy to read, but then I get the horizontal scroll bar, which makes reading tedious, especially on articles with many comments, such as this one. I have the Readability plugin, but it doesn't work on HN.</comment>


Air Force Spending $60 Million for SpaceX U.S. Launches - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-15/u-s-air-force-busting-butt-to-certify-musk-s-spacex.html?cmpid=yhoo

<comment><USER2> It seems like the $60 million is just to get SpaceX certified so that they can launch military satellites.

Each launch will probably cost far more until their grasshopper system gets used.

"Musk, 42, ranked 133rd on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of $9.2 billion as of May 13." Wow.

"Davis said the Air Force estimates that SpaceX will be certified to receive contracts no later than May 2015."

This Senate hearing explains some of the costs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWVZYKGTenE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWVZYKGTenE)

<comment><USER3> The DoD et alia are very conservative about launches; SpaceX would need at a bare minimum 5 "recycled" launches before they bought any, most likely more, as they don't have any previous experience buying quick turn around launches. Their closest analogous experience would be the space shuttle, but that typically went for a full head to toe check and refurbishment between launches.

5+ certified quick turn around launches would be at least several years away.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but Musk can sell the DoD brand new rockets at full price (i.e. the disposable price), recover the first stage and keep it for himself/sell to more risk-seeking third parties like Orbcomm at a deep discount.

<comment><USER5> That's the amazing thing about the Falcon 9R: they've managed to build a system where they can basically make a profit testing it. Nobody wants to use second-hand stages until they're proven? No big deal, just keep launching stuff as usual, and recover the first stages and test them until people are happy.

At some point, some launch customer will observe that there have been N test launches of reused stages without incident, and thus it's worth buying a launch on one at a lower price. Since SpaceX is making money launching stuff anyway, they can take their time getting to whatever number N turns out to be.

<comment><USER2> I've never thought about that part but you are completely correct, and that is amazing and smart of them to do.

The legs and computers are probably not too much more than a bolt-on kit that adds some weight to the rocket, the rocket will still preform as usual and the test is practically free (verses actually testing a new rocket design like other vertical landing rockets have tried).

<comment><USER5> Exactly. It does lower the maximum payload by something like 30%, so they can't use it for launching really heavy stuff. But if the customer's payload is within the limit, it just means bolting on legs and adding extra fuel. The total fuel cost of a launch is around $200,000 compared to $60 million total cost for the launch, so the cost of extra fuel is negligible.

They've already done it twice (once without the legs and once with) while getting paid to launch payloads. The experimental part doesn't come into play until after the first stage has done its primary job, so there's no additional risk to the customer.

This is why I think ongoing comparisons to the Shuttle and other reusable systems are completely wrong. Previous attempts have all been based on much more complicated and expensive vehicles that were expected to compensate by being reused. SpaceX is taking a system that's already one of the cheapest in the business (if not the cheapest?) and making some minor changes to reuse it and make it even cheaper.

NASA had to reuse the Shuttle on its second flight ever. SpaceX can keep testing Falcon 9R for as long as customers are willing to pay for launches at their current prices, which looks to be quite a long time.

<comment><USER2> Look how much will be recoverable in the Falcon Heavy reusable stages, the monetary savings there look massive: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Falcon_rocket_family.svg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Falcon_rocket_family.svg)

It seems like such a simple solution to the cost problem (with the attachable reusable legs on existing flights) but I'm amazed that no other rocket company has done it until now, congratulations SpaceX.

I guess it was mostly because of the rocket technology (relighting an engine), the new materials (probably carbon fiber legs), and the new/cheap/lightweight computer technologies available today.

Hopefully there will be some great videos/pictures from the next test which will land closer to land: [http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html](http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html) [http://www.orbcomm.com/networks/og2-launch](http://www.orbcomm.com/networks/og2-launch)

<comment><USER5> I think it comes down to how much refurbishment the rocket needs afterwards. The Shuttle reused a lot of expensive hardware, but needed so much work after each flight that it ended up not saving any money.

I'd say the odds are good for SpaceX, as it's a much easier problem (no thermal protection system, the engines are a lot less fragile, nothing is being dunked in salt water), but we'll have to see how it really works out.

As for why it hasn't been tried before, it seems like the space industry is afraid of doing anything that is somehow short of what's seen as optimal. Rockets are optimized for fuel use by pushing engines and weight to the limit, which is odd because the fuel isn't really expensive. If you're going to cut down on that in the service of another goal like reusability, it seems like they want some _huge_ payoff in exchange. Thus the shuttle ended up as a fancy spaceplane that could bring entire satellites back from orbit, and Rotary Rocket, DC-X, and X-33 were all shooting for single-stage-to-orbit. I don't know how much technology SpaceX is bringing in versus just an attitude that it's OK to be suboptimal, that it's OK to lose payload to reusability, that it's OK to work incrementally and keep throwing away some of your hardware, etc.

<comment><USER6> Fuel is not expensive. Unless it has to go up the gravity well, then it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> About time. The only sad thing is that the govt had to wait for someone to bite them in the arse (Russian counter-sanctions that is) to get back to action.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does the US even have any engines for the short term? Sound like both Lockheed and Boeing are/were getting their engines from Russia.

<comment><USER9> ULA's other rocket, the Boeing Delta IV uses engines designed and made in the US - the Rocketdyne RS-68[1]. The Delta IV is more expensive to fly than the Atlas V, for missions both launchers can do. Also, it is not manufactured in large numbers, though it can be, but only if given enough lead time.

1 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-68](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-68)

<comment><USER10> My understanding was also that they had many Russian rockets warehoused for national security launches.

<comment><USER2> 2-3 years worth of Russian engines, but the contracts were for 5+ years, so if Russia banned exports of rockets to the US then we could be screwed without SpaceX or scrambling to produce our own engines at a much greater cost (most likely).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWVZYKGTenE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWVZYKGTenE)

<comment><USER11> Based on the testimony in that video:

The Delta IV and Atlas V have overlapping use cases. The Russian engine (RD-180) is only used in the Atlas V. So it would seem that they could shift to the Delta IV once the stockpile runs out.

They also have the blueprints and specs for the RD-180. It would take a lot of time and money to ramp up production, but not as much as if they were building a new engine from scratch.

That said, I do agree that the US would probably be screwed (in the wallet) without SpaceX.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The rise of the e-books - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21528611

<comment><USER2> Curmudgeon here.

I like ebooks, especially when they're significantly cheaper than the paper version (as they should be), AND they're not limited to a single reader. I like my half-price, DRM-free (as they should be) O'Reilly and Packt pdfs. I highly recommend patronizing those and other DRM-free, device agnostic publishers.

I agree with all the familiar laments on the smell of the paper, the feel in your hands, the visual nature of the memory of locations in books, and I recognize the benefits of ebooks nonetheless.

Two things I'll miss very much are the trip to the bookstore, and my books calling out to me from my bookshelves and tables and floors and under-the- couches.

The article points out that publishers will miss the advertising gained by customers walking by a bookstore window, or browsing through the bookstore. I will miss being on that flip side. Yes of course, you can browse more "efficiently" online, but I don't go to a bookstore for efficiency, I go for the experience and the serendipity. Most of the time I don't know what book I'll come out of the store with; that almost never happens to me online.

I've tried browsing on Amazon, but I always seem to wake up after being put to sleep. There is no serendipity in online book browsing, there is only tracking down and killing something you already know you want. There is certainly no pleasure in it, whether you're browsing or buying.

There is a similar loss of serendipity while thumbing through an ebook, or I suppose you'd (ironically) call it paging through an ebook. I still, at my age, enjoy thumbing through the physical dictionary. Think about how boring a dictionary is. You already know the plot, you know how it ends, and yet you sit there on the couch delighting in consumer, continuator, dormouse, dornick, FIFO, hinge joint, Hispanolia, Zenobia and zero.

I have never thumbed through an edictionary, nor the online equivalent. I've tried, but come on. ebooks are just not built for pleasure, they're built for tasks, page 1 to page N.

I have collected around 20 ebooks on my laptop, free and paid. Some of them I'm (supposed to be) actively reading, but they still often sit there in their directory, powerless to call out to me and remind me to "read me!" On the other hand I have physical books sitting all around me, and I read them all, the ones not on the shelf (but some of them too), some of them more frequently than others, but they all get a chance to remind me that I have something to read. To get through an ebook not connected with an urgent task, I'd have to keep a ToDo list.

I'll almost certainly buy a dedicated reader one day, and I'll be happy not to have to schlep a dictionary, a novel and The Python Cookbook on to a plane or a bus. But I fear I'll end up reading less, while having access to more.

But that's me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with sixtofour. There's no doubting the fact that ebooks are more "efficient" - from a space, price, and even environmental standpoint. However, as an avid book reader (physical books, I still have not switched over to the ebook readers), there's just something about having a book on my nightstand to read for a few minutes before calling it a night, or on my desk to take me away from my work during my lunch break. On the flip side, I have a million and one things I can be doing if I have my laptop open, and a book just has too much to compete with for my attention.

I'm a huge fan of technology and modernization, but I for one just don't see myself making the switch to ebooks in the near future.</comment>


Is it still ok to have kids in face of climate change? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-climate-change-have-kids-children-1342853 <comment><USER2> My ancestors thought it was okay to have kids during times in which many scholars where certain the apocalypse was due in the next 25 years, during periods in which the plague killed more than half of the population, during the 30 years war and in a time when there was a realistic chance of nuclear annihilation in the next 10 years.

I am glad they did.

<comment><USER3> Did any of those groups they have a scientific basis for believing that _having_ kids would _speed up_ the advent of the apocalypse or worsen its effects?

Let's not draw false parallels.

<comment> f- "The Population Bomb" was a pretty fashionable scientific prediction back in the 1960s which had a significant following in the academic and policymaker circles at the time.

It extrapolated from data about population growth, farmland capacity, etc, to reach the irrefutable conclusion that there is going to be mass starvation and famine in the 1970s. It led to calls for China-style population controls, to articles about whether it's ethical to have children, etc.

What happened instead is that population growth has slowed down quite a bit without government intervention, and that we've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food.

This does not prove anything when it comes to climate change, but is an interesting anecdote.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for bringing this up! An excellent book on this is: The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future by Paul Sabin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always believed that if you're a smart, educated, motivated person (if your reading this than I'm assuming you are one) that probably the best thing you can do for the world is to have kids. Those kids will likely contribute to the world in all sorts of ways that we can't imagine.

<comment><USER6> Are you implying kids of "smart, educated, motivated person" will contribute more than kids of people who don't fall into your arbitrary definition?

<comment><USER7> I think so. There isn't anything controversial being said here.

Children given education, good home lives, and goals are more likely to succeed than those without access to those opportunities. It isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we can't look for other ways to improve outcomes across the board.

<comment><USER6> So the key is giving more kids those opportunities. Not just some kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, let's die out! Let's not even let any kid get born that may invent the key to nuclear fusion. Sure, let's just choose some non-sentient animals and plants over ourselves killing any chance of betterment right here and now. Let's not even try to spread out over the stars, let's make sure that any life on our current planet dies as soon as this planet dies instead of taking it with us across the barren ocean that is the milky way.

If we take this seriously we don't even deserve to exist as a species.

You die out Alexandria, let your bloodline end. I for one want to my genome to explore the galaxy, to have it help preserve earth in the future. To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before! And if you only point at my right to procreate I will defend it with everything I have!

How cynical do you have to be to only see humans as sources of CO2? And to completely neglect their potential. Honestly, if this piece is for real (and I'm not lacking any context) then I think this woman is dangerous.

<comment><USER9> You have no ownership over your descendants. Nothing about you as an individual will be exploring those galaxies.

In the end, it's all an arbitrary sort of stew.

<comment><USER8> It will be a stew with my optimistic DNA in it and none of those anti- procreation basepairs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is /r/im14andthisisdeep material. Life is inherently joyful, especially for children, even under challenging circumstances. The net happiness rating in Bangladesh is +74%-- _i.e._ 74% more people report themselves happy than report themselves unhappy: [https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-polling- which-nations-a...](https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-polling-which- nations-are-happiest-unhappiest/5602001). Decreasing human population decreases the aggregate net happiness experienced by the world.

Also, almost nobody believes it would be better to not exist than to exist in challenging circumstances. That's why cancer patients fight through incredibly painful chemotherapy to get a few extra years of life. If you were offered a painless, consequence free death, would you take up that offer to avoid facing the upcoming uncertainties of climate change? Almost nobody would. Why do you think your potential kids would feel differently?

</comment><comment><USER11> Imagine you were somehow able to choose: 1\. Either never exist at all, or 2\. Exist as a human in the world of 50 years from now

To me, the clear choice is #2. If the moral question is whether human life is worth it to continue in the future, it's obviously worth it.

If the moral question is whether our own domination of the planet harms too many wildlife animals, and is therefore immoral, that feels like a more reasonable tradeoff. However it feels odd to me to that the same people advocating stopping having children continue to eat meat.

I will advocate for continued human growth regardless. I feel like there are few "long, slow" problems we cannot overcome.

<comment><USER12> It's not about whether human life is still worth it, it's about whether we should have fewer children to lighten the cost.

There are plenty of people who are vegetarian who feel this way too. It isn't just meat eaters. Having a child is far more impactful than eating meat or driving electric cars.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want- to-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight- climate-change-have-fewer-children?&ampcf=1)

<comment><USER13> > it's about whether we should have fewer children to lighten the cost.

Most of the West has had sub-replacement-level fertility for several decades, so we _already_ have fewer children.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's pretty hard to predict exactly what's going to happen to society in the face of climate change. We know 100% that society will collapse if we stop having kids.

<comment> your-nanny if we 100% stop having kids, sure. but how about slowly reducing to a total world steady state population of 1 billion. Will that necessarily lead to collapse? maybe with that many people a shift to fossil fuels would t matter so much. maybe we could all have good sized homes and yachts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a 4 month old daughter and looking a the history I'm pretty glad she is born today and not 50 or 100 years ago.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the question is in the context of climate change, not other variables.

<comment><USER17> At first I was afraid, i was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without stable climate by my side But then I spent so many nights thinking how my lifestyle did no wrong, and I grew strong, and I learned how to get along. And so they're back, from outer space -I just walked in to find them here with that nihilistic look upon their face. I should have avoided that foolish thread, I should have made those defeatists leave their key, if I'd known for just one second they'd be back from the eighties to bother me Go on now, go, walk out the door Just turn around now 'Cause you're not welcome anymore Weren't you the one who tried to hedonistically accept the long goodbye Do you think I'd crumble Did you think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive I've got all my life to live And I've got all my love to give and I'll survive I will survive, hey, hey

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the "Zero Population" scare of the 70s...

Zero Population was politically evangelized much like climate change for nearly a decade before the fears were proven to be unfounded and mass starvation just wasn't happening as predicted.

I'm not saying in any way climate change isn't real, but I _am_ saying let's not jump to hasty conclusions. Raising kids is one of the greatest joys life offers, so we better be DARN sure that we aren't making a "premature optimization" here.

</comment><comment><USER19> The people that don't care about Climate Change will still be having kids.

Raising kids and teaching them well is one of the best hopes humanity has.

</comment><comment><USER20> Numbers of kids may also be relevant.

If you're choosing to have kids, it still seems more ecologically responsible to have two or fewer. If two adults have up to two children, that's an overall reduction in population (because not all children reproduce or reach reproductive age).

Fortunately this is already happening[0] which is why several Western countries populations are shrinking[1] often being propped up by immigration.

[0] PDF Warning: [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time- series/demo/families-and-households/hh-6.pdf)

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/02/01/death- spi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/02/01/death-spiral- demographics-the-countries-shrinking-the-fastest/#35118d27b83c)

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing I never understood that if entropy steadily marches on, and the sun's energy is finite, isn't this all going to end bad anyways? What will it matter to if we all voluntarily go extinct and add another millennia or two or three to the Earth? It will either overheat in a global warming or face eternal freezing when the sun burns out. Why not enjoy the ride while it lasts and allow others to as well.

<comment><USER22> One outcome happens in the next hundred years, another in the next few dozen billion years. I know which one I prefer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Former political staffer here to remind HN that this is political attention getting, period, and not intended to be a sincere proposal from AOC.

In politics donations (money) is e v e r y t h i n g and if your policies divert from typical donor interests then you have say things like this to expand and activate your donor base. This kind of signaling occurs across the political spectrum.

<comment><USER24> _This kind of signaling occurs across the political spectrum._

Which doesn't justify her doing it, and thus should be shamed because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well imagine nobody had kids and then we managed to turn climate change around. Now we've got a bunch of old folks being cared for by clean energy powered robots, living a utopian dream but thinking, "wait a minute... Did we just win or lose here?"

</comment><comment><USER26> The admittedly rather silly way I've framed this in my own mind is to ask if it was ok for, say, people living in Rome during the fall of the Roman Empire to have kids, living as they were through the total collapse of their civilization.

In retrospect it seems more silly (to me, anyway) to suggest that they shouldn't have had children because the children and their descendants would have had a hard time living through the collapse and ensuing "Dark Ages."

Their very distant descendants would have gone on to live through the most prosperous period in human history, which certainly wasn't foreseeable to the people living through the bad times.

Before anyone says that it's not comparable because the Roman Empire was just a small part of the world, and that we're destroying the whole world through climate change, I would suggest that for people living in Rome back then, Rome would have felt like the whole world and the vast majority of people were unlikely to uproot and move more than a few tens of miles, nevertheless, the population of Rome declined by, what, 99%?

In addition, most of the worst case scenarios for climate change seem to indicate the displacement of a few billion people at most, which would be terrible, to be sure. But the mere migration of a few billion people will probably be insignificant on the timescale of a thousand years.

More permanent destructive changes to the environment could cause massive human death, but I personally haven't seen predictions on the order of 99% of people dying (or anything remotely near that) and it seems like there's a pretty good chance that a new equilibrium would be reached at some point and the population of the Earth would surge again. Even the worst predictions seem like they could end up being inconsequential on long enough timescales.

And this doesn't even address the whole Idiocracy situation where arguably the best way to combat a dire future could be to raise kind, compassionate, conscientious children that will go on to steward the world onto a better path.

Needless to say at this point, I'm not convinced that it's remotely unethical to bring children into a difficult world. That's been the state of the world for basically all of human history.

</comment><comment><USER16> Scott Adams talked a bit about this on Periscope. Essentially, if you believe the world is truly about to be brought to its knees with climate change, is it immoral to have children?

<comment><USER27> There's two perspectives:

1\. The world will become a place of suffering. The assumption here is either that childhood is a terrible experience, or that suicide is immoral. Your children can decide for themselves if they don't think it's worth being alive in the future

2\. Overpopulation is the cause of this doomsday. In that case, we're asserting that having children today means less children will be born in the future. This implies we need to reduce birthrates to more efficiently invest the planet. Unfortunately this line of thought can quickly devolve into eugenics. There are better ways to stabilize population. Relevant: Does saving kids' lives lead to overpopulation? [https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual- Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual- Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13_2018_02_AnnualLetter2018_Explainer_BG- YT_&WT.tsrc=BGYT#ALChapter5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Natural selection means that primarily those who think having kids is ok will propagate their genetic material. So in the long run, the answer is necessarily yes.

<comment> your-nanny what if there is no longer run, because survival in the short term requires otherwise?

island mamnal populations can take wild periodic swings of explosion and collapse. not necessarily the ideal way of going about it.

in any case we shouldn't confusebindividual fitness with group level fitness

<comment><USER28> In the end, the only people remaining would still be those who thought it was ok to reproduce. Unless a world-wide authoritarian government implemented strict population control and decided who would reproduce or not. Scary thought.

<comment> your-nanny I suspect that reproductive decisions are far less genetically deterministic than your account suggests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Is it still ok to have kids in face of climate change?

Yes

You might want to think hard about how many kids you want to have, though. We know that we need slightly more than 2 kids per couple to keep current population levels.

I think the best approach to answering this question has to do with how many children your siblings and friends have. If everyone you know is childless; have a large family, guilt-free. If everyone has large families, consider having only child. If everyone you know has 2.5 kids, then consider limiting yourself to 1-3 kids.

By the way, having children is awesome. If you really feel guilty about overpopulation, but want kids, please consider limiting yourself to one, or adoption. Raising children is such a wonderful experience that you shouldn't let something like climate change get in the way. Put the extra money towards building a net neutral home and driving an electric car.

</comment><comment><USER30> It is an important speculative question, but also misses the fact right now that worldwide fertility is crashing[1].

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46118103](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46118103)

<comment><USER31> The global fertility rate is 2.4, well above the 2.1 needed to stabilize the population, which is already over the carrying capacity of the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this misses what the question should be. It's not whether to have children. It's HOW MANY children.

FWIW I have two. My wife and I wanted kids. We also did not want to contribute to the population explosion. YMMV.

<comment><USER6> Thank you, it seems like everyone is interpreting it like humanity should stop existing.

The point is to slow down the population growth, by not having kids, and improve a bit the predicted future for those who do end up having kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many countries, especially in the West, are not reproducing at replacement rate.

Also, there may be a scientific consensus about climate change, but that does not carry into economic predictions of collapse. Economic predictions are not the same thing as physical ones.

It's always been the case that the kids are responsible for what they do when it's their turn. Regardless of how hopeless it looked.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER35> Shameless yellow journalism!

The text of the article says the actual quote is "And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?". Which is sympathizing with an audience rather than contemplating decrees. But then it's written up as a strongly polarizing narrative, entirely tangential to the context of the original quote!

I'm not trying to defend Ocasio-Cortez here - in fact, I actually _dislike_ her... but I'm willing to admit that my current opinion has been "informed" _entirely_ by these baseless bullshit headlines! I am obviously not wed to this opinion, and I will have to do my own research some time - the point is that many _won 't_.

It might be interesting if HN completely changed its policy on titles. What if rather than trying to be true to the "original" title (ie optimized to enrage), the goal was to make a passive description of the subject under discussion. Perhaps even one longer-lasting thread per topic. We sit here talking about the sorry state of online discourse, yet even here the clickbaiters get the substance of their bait directly embedded on the front page - and every time it's clicked-through, it validates the strategy.

</comment><comment><USER36> The question was raised by a politician. Her motivation is to generate fear in the public in order for people to support her recently purposed legislation. Regardless of the validity of the question I have serious concerns about the context in which this discussion was created.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yes. I don't think ending the species is a good response to climate change.

</comment><comment><USER38> Define "ok"

Our planet is just one of many... Technology is advancing at an incredible rate. Who knows where we will be in 50 years.

<comment><USER39> The most hostile conditions climate change can throw at us are still a walk in the park compared to those at another planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > "I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what I'm doing."

Results in the last thirty years don't really back that up.

</comment><comment><USER41> We live in incredibly interesting times.

</comment><comment><USER42> Assuming it was ok to have kids before it is still ok now. There may be some world where the chance your offspring will be subjected to suffering is high that it may not be the best idea.

Considering the primary purpose of life is to reproduce and continue existing I'd suggest that even in a world of guaranteed suffering that it is our obligation to continue our existence.

</comment><comment><USER43> Do as you please. Thank you, next.

</comment><comment><USER44> Of course it is, where else are we going to get the brains that will solve climate change?

</comment><comment><USER45> The alternative being what?

<comment><USER21> The three questions: "At what cost? With what hard evidence? And _compared to what?_"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No

</comment><comment><USER46> Consider watching First Reformed. Great movie, and relevant.

</comment><comment><USER47> if it's the reason you are citing for not having kids, you are probably not ready to have kids

</comment><comment><USER48> I really hope she is the one who practices this and doesn't have kids, and the others who think this way.

</comment><comment><USER49> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER50> No.

</comment><comment><USER51> If you and your partner want to have kids then please do so and educate them and for God's sake please vaccinate them. Most importantly, when the time comes move out of their way (unlike the current set of politicians who only want to live in climate change denial.)

</comment><comment><USER52> The environment is in crisis. We have to save the Earth!

Save it for what?

Our kids.

</comment><comment><USER29> > Is it still ok to have kids in face of climate change?

Yes.

</comment><comment><USER53> No.

</comment><comment><USER54> I thought this was an interesting point from the Gates' annual letter, the specific context is Africa but it's true globally.

> As more children survive to adulthood, women are having fewer kids than ever > before. The result is a global population that's creeping slowly toward > middle age.

So people are _already_ having fewer children. Assuming we want to maintain the human species, _someone_ needs to be having children. For diversity everyone should be having _some_ amount of children.

Then of course, it depends on your climate change mindset.

If you think humanity is doomed and there's no way out of this: Don't have children because you think they'll die suffer through the apocalypse.

If you think humanity needs to continue and we will solve this problem: have children because we can avoid the apocalypse.

If you're unsure? Have children. Someone's bound to survive the apocalypse. Maybe it'll be your genetic material.

Personally I think we'll make it through. Life will be different, but we've got a better chance of surviving than humanity has ever had in the past. I think it's more likely that we'll get wiped out by a cosmic event that we don't even see coming.

<comment><USER55> >If you're unsure? Have children. Someone's bound to survive the apocalypse. Maybe it'll be your genetic material.

Huh? What?

... I don't really understand why I would care if my "genetic material" survives a future apocalypse vs some other rando's "genetic material?" or anyone's "genetic material" for that matter.

This is an especially bizarre reason for having children.

<comment><USER54> >This is an especially bizarre reason for having children.

This is basically why every species on the planet (with sexual reproduction) has children, whether you're aware of it or not. It's the instinctual drive to propagate. It's why sex feels good (for at least one party involved, for most species).

<comment> your-nanny is vs ought is the distinction that needs to be made. the perogatives of natural selection needn't concord with moral behavior.

<comment><USER54> Right, but in this case if the deciding factor is climate change and you're ambivalent about the outcome of climate change and humanity... you might as well just roll the dice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Anyone walking around with the idea that having kids is bad is a moron.

<comment><USER56> And anyone who down voted this comment is clicking the "I am a moron" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> No, because nuclear exchange is going to kill them first.

</comment><comment><USER57> So what does she propose as ideal, everyone in the world just stop reproducing?

Only some countries should stop reproducing?

Who should stop reproducing?

Do we follow the Kyoto protocol and set a date back in time as the target goal? What can we afford, the year 2000, 1980, 1887?

This sound like it would be the perfect type of issue that could be addressed via a 5 year plan.</comment>


Scientists Have Developed an Eye Drop That Can Dissolve Cataracts - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-developed-an-eye-drop-that-can-dissolve-cataracts-from-eyes <comment><USER2> posted yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10522530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10522530)</comment>


Apache Is Still the Best General-Purpose Web Server - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourcerer.io/apache-is-still-the-best-general-purpose-web-server-dacedbd86921 <comment><USER2> I view Apache in the same way that I view OpenSSL. I do not mean that as a bad thing.

I like that, with OpenSSL, there are various obscure—but useful—SSL/TLS- related functionality available. For those who are curious, it was S/MIME encryption and signing (at the time I was playing around with signed/encrypted Apple configuration profiles).

With Apache, you can do remarkable things, and remarkable _combinations_ of things. I've looked at the Apache configuration behind some high-traffic web servers, and I am amazed that Apache can handle it with no problem.

As always, use the right tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title should be corrected to include the words "on Linux". On windows you have additional options, and although Apache on windows is good, it is not "the best"</comment>


The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20case%20of%20the%20500-mi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20case%20of%20the%20500-mile%20email&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


RIM announces US$100M investment to grow BlackBerry developer community - <AUTHOR> http://e27.sg/2012/07/10/research-in-motion-announces-us100m-investment-to-grow-developer-community-for-blackberry-platform/ <comment><USER2> Wow, so you can still bribe people in some ways.

I must say its all very well handing out free tablets etc and offering incentives but maybe getting a few key applications ported and even paying to get them ported would be a better investment.

Reason I say this is having read this part "One of such programs incentivizes developers to build apps for BlackBerry 10 by guaranteeing the developers US$10,000 in revenues from the app. While the official terms and conditions for this program has not yet been released, Alec Saunders, VP of Developer Relations highlighted that apps that qualify for the program must be certified, paid apps built for the BlackBerry 10 and manage to earn at least US$1,000 within the first year."

Well It's hard not to think I could write a application - charge $10 or whatever price and get a few friends to buy that application and from the little time involved to code a "HELLO WORLD" application and get upon the blackberry market and the $1,000 friend investment of which I get a return on. Well I'd then qualify for $10,000.

So in effect the way they are doing this they are opening themself up to being scammed! Sorry but that is how alot will see this approach sadly. Also given the return then why not.

So I hope RIM rethinks this approach and does something more creative. Maybe pick a university and go in with a couple of people who know the RIM platform for developers - give a intro - hand out tablets for the student use for a few months so they can write an application and then those worthy they help promote and get onto the market offering support.

If they also used some of this money to have a developer help line ( no no not samaratins before you joke) but one were a developer can chat online and get questions answeared so they can speed up there application development then again they will gain.

Also If I was RIM CEO I'd look at large consumer markets like military and the like who are starting to embrace tablets and the like and with that at least gain some steady staple income to at least garantee some future.

But as this approach goes as they outlined I feel it will do them no favours.

<comment><USER3> Your comment is somewhat hyperbolic and misinformed.

Firstly the Blackberry program outlined is not a bribe. They are clearly digging in and offering large incentives, but lets not throw "bribery" around.

Secondly the $10k program is not going to be a free for all, it will be offered to "... apps that qualify for the program must be certified, paid apps built for the BlackBerry 10 and manage to earn at least US$1,000 within the first year". If anything it sounds like Blackberry will make it difficult to get the $10k, since they define the certification process.

What this situation does show is how important having a group of developers working on apps is for mobile platforms these days. It seems that in future it will be much harder for other entrants to enter the market as no matter how great your device and platform, if you don't have any apps for it, people will not buy it.

<comment><USER4> > If anything it sounds like Blackberry will make it difficult to get the > $10k, since they define the certification process.

Yeah. And it's certainly a strange way to put it: "if you can make money on BB, we'll give you more money"... ?

<comment><USER3> Reading between the lines it sounds like they are saying: "If you are a serious developer who can make a quality app for BB, then here is a low risk way of testing the market".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With earlier versions of the emulator the process was: 1\. edit/compile in the awful RIM IDE 2\. __REBOOT THE EMULATOR__ / push new code to the device.

Rebooting the emulator and pushing the new code for a test took over a minute.

I couldn't take it. I dropped support for BB and never looked back.

Have they fixed this?

<comment><USER6> Yep. They now have 2 options basically: you can use 'Cascades' which is their modified Qt framework (modified by The Astonishing Tribe who RIM bought - awesome designers/developers) with the eclipse-based IDE, or you can write a 'webworks' app which uses web technologies (html5, js, css) and write it in whatever editor you want. The emulators are fine, but I prefer to push straight to a device

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't recommend developing for Blackberry. They don't care about software copyright. For example, my app has been copied and submitted to App World illegally by some guy in Dubai. So far my DMCA requests have been promptly ignored (and it's been over a year).

<comment><USER8> Aren't they in Canada, and thus, aren't you invoking the wrong law?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the comments for the "python for iOS" link yesterday I saw BB lets you write native python. Sounds kind of fun and easy to get started. I might give this a go (although buying a BB might set me back more than I would like).

</comment><comment><USER10> Half of the RIM appworld is just useless crap, and that's on the BlackBerry and the PlayBook. They should invest in developers — but in house. Come on, there isn't a single beautiful and stable Twitter client for the PlayBook (and the OS isn't, either). It's awkward to use a PlayBook.

Shameless plug: <http://adrian.re/why-suits-are-killing-rim> (I still believe that if it's just the big guys writing checks instead of working towards a change, money will never come back)

</comment><comment><USER11> RIM still has $100M in the bank?

<comment><USER12> They have over a billion in the bank and are still profitable. People LOVE stories about RIM going down the drain for whatever reason, so these stats are conveniently not mentioned. I am not saying there are no problems, but really this is one bandwagon that needs to sloooooow doooown.

<comment><USER13> They had another massive decline in quarterly revenue YoY (-42.7% from Q1 2012 which was itself -30% from Q1 2011) and then they announced a delay on the BB10 phones until 2013, I'd say that bandwagon is right on this one.</comment></comment></comment>


Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber-mobileye/mobileye-says-its-software-would-have-seen-pedestrian-in-uber-fatality-idUSKBN1H22LM <comment><USER2> Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers.

But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed?

You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under controlled circumstances and reacted appropriately.

This is publicly patting yourself on the back for a competitor killing someone. To say it's in bad taste is an understatement.

<comment><USER3> Except their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of the story -

Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.

<comment><USER4> The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.

<comment><USER5> Mobileye isn't a "self-driving" system, it's a collision prevention/mitigation system, like airbags or ABS. Leaving it on while a human controls the car hasn't been seen as a disaster.

<comment><USER6> first of all Mobileye does have a self driving system (their EyeQ4 chips is for Level 3-4 self driving). However Amon was referring to their EyeQ3 chip from 2014 which is installed in 24 million cars and have billions of miles

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i get the feeling of some people here calling for bad taste, but mobileye ceo has been a long time proponent of playing it safe, underpromise, warning against the theoretical limits of modern technics, and has claimed for a very long time that fully autonomous driving wasn't doable in a near future ( proof of that in the numerous videos you can find on youtube).

i guess it's only fair for him to speak up one more time now that his fears has materialized.

<comment><USER8> Speaking up is understandable: Mobileye supplies its technology to Aptiv who supplies the system to Volvo for the XC90. The reports are that their system was disabled by Uber at the time of the accident. It is understandable that Mobileye does not want to share the blame in this case.

Ref: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber- disa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled- volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality)

 _"We don't want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the technology that we supply for Volvo, because that's not the case," Zach Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90's standard advanced driver-assistance system "has nothing to do" with the Uber test vehicle's autonomous driving system, he said._

[...]

 _Intel Corp.'s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision- avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv._

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We really won't know what happened until the NTSB report comes out, but I'm not convinced this was an object detection failure. It seems really possible to me that the sensors detected the bike-walking person as a bicyclist, and a bicyclist in a different lane is not a reason to slam on the brakes. They might have just forgotten to add a rule that a bicyclist in a parallel lane _is_ a reason to brake if it's perpendicular to you.

<comment><USER10> Any sane self-driving system needs to be a lot smarter than this. It needs to do motion tracking and estimation of future position. Otherwise it's going to run into lots of cyclists and pedestrians, and continue to fail for objects it can't identify (imagine a cyclist carrying something big and bulky). The software needs to be smart enough to not hit anything, and in order to do so it needs to extrapolate future positions of objects based on their current velocity.

<comment><USER9> Obviously it needs to be smarter. As for motion tracking, it might have gotten confused as the victim stopped moving. But I'm just not sure that the issue was the sensors or object detection.

<comment><USER10> The victim stopped moving ... right in the path of the car, which never braked. It needs to be a lot smarter if it doesn't even understand that it should break when there's a large unidentified object, the size of a person plus something else, right in the lane it's traveling in.

We won't know yet exactly what happened, though hopefully the NTSB is getting full access to all sensor data from the car. It could be a huge combination failure of multiple different things. It sounds like it's nowhere safe enough to be driving autonomously on public roads though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm struggling with the question: Who's fault is this?

The pedestrian for walking across the street, wearing dark colors, being oblivious to traffic?

The human in the drivers seat for not paying attention?

Uber kind of gets the laundry list: For reducing the number of "safety drivers" from 2 to 1, for not using eye tracking to ensure the safety driver was paying attention, for faulty software or hardware that didn't detect the pedestrian, or for software that after getting the sensor input made a decision to not adjust speed or change lanes, for having some of the worst "intervention" numbers in the industry yet plowing ahead with removing a safety driver from the car...

Who gets the blame?

I'm mostly a "get rid of idiotic safety tags and let natural selection sort it out" sort of person, but on the other hand I feel that piloting a multi-ton killing machine needs to be treated as a huge responsibility.

<comment><USER12> I wondered the same thing on the following thread, posted about a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295)

I believe some manufacturers will take entire responsibility while in some cases it's the person that "starts" the self-driving vehicle. Legislation seems to be on a state-by-state basis at the moment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good for these people. If Uber really had lidar+radar [1] and disabled Volvo safety features [2] (such as radar) there is no excuse for this. Uber should have clarified the video released may not be representative of the information they have.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self- drivi...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self-driving-cars- are-supposed-to-detect-pedestrians/) [2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber- disa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled- volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality)

</comment><comment><USER14> Good for these people. Uber has lidar+radar that should have seen this and did not make an effort to publicly respond to the police video that was released. Everyone who works on these problems knows camera exposure is very tricky... And in this case deceptive.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ok, Mobileye would have seen the pedestrian 1 second before impact. That's not important though...

The important thing is would it have saved her life? Would it have taken action and if so when and how?

It's not clear that Uber's platform didn't see the pedestrian. In fact, I find it unlikely that it didn't see her, between radar and the bike, lidar, and optical (and sonar).

I think the situation here is that there were many failures and decisions that led to this death. Some of it is Uber being too cowboy, but there are a lot of other factors too.

<comment><USER15> > The important thing is would it have saved her life?

It probably would have. Slamming on the brake for 1 second would have reduced the car's speed enough to change things from fatal to seriously injured.

According to: [http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kin...](http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kinematics/BrakingDistData.html)

In one second you can shed 20 miles/hour of speed. That would take the car from 38mph to 18mph. (Those numbers are overly precise, but gives you an idea of the reduction that can be accomplished.)

<comment><USER16> Not only that, she was crossing from left to right and was hit by the edge of the right side of the car. She could have been missed entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Using Tensorflow : [https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=2...](https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER18> Was Mobileye actually part of the implementation of Uber's self-driving technology and was somehow disabled or not used properly? Or is this just a piece of not-so-submarine PR? If the latter, I don't understand the point of this article.

<comment><USER19> Uber disabled Mobileye's detection system in the car, from what I can understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> With all respect to Sha'ashua, this is empty PR. mobileye is a decision support system for human drivers, they can't make any claim regarding this accident.

</comment><comment><USER21> All these people and companies trying to profit from this accident is really poor taste.

<comment><USER22> This is not profiting, this is self preservation.

<comment><USER23> If the purpose of a company is profit, is there really a distinction?

<comment><USER22> Definitely. One PR approach would be to capitalize off of this tragedy for sales. That doesn't appear to be the approach they're taking though ("Please don't regulate us into oblivion" or "Self driving can be done safely, don't judge the industry by the failures of one participant").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me, does anybody know what's up with Geohotz's comma.ai?

<comment><USER25> The project was canceled and geohotz posted the code on GitHub:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit_cancelled/)

[https://github.com/commaai](https://github.com/commaai)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which services are built using MITM (e.g. LinkedIn Intro)? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen a couple of services recently which achieve their goals by intercepting communication between a browser/app and a third party server, and altering/inserting content.  For example:<p>- LinkedIn Intro sits between your IMAP4 client (mail app) and your provider's mail server<p>- amberExpess sits between your web browser and the web server of one of the supported stores<p>Which other interesting services are built using a similar technique? <comment><USER2> Onavo's product worked via a similar method.</comment>


The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6468136 <comment><USER2> Quoting the link: In 1975, in an introduction to a book of Tiptree's short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote of his friend, "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."

That is from "Warm World and Otherwise". I have the second printing, from 1979, which is after SF learned that Tiptree is a woman.

One of the ways I learned about how views on "masculinity" and "femininity" have changed was to read Silverberg's commentary about the apparently widespread question of "is Tiptree a man or women?", and concluding there is "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing".

Then because I have the _second_ printing, I also saw Silverberg's followup:

> "She ... called into question the entire notion of what is "masculine" or > "feminine" in fiction. I am still wrestling with that. What I have learned > is that there are some women who can write about traditionally male topics > more knowledgeably than most men...."

This was one of my first steps in learning that 'the entire notion of what is "masculine" or "feminine"' is not the clear binary distinction that I had been brought up with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another scifi author with a "secret life" used the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith. He was actually Paul Linebarger, a military expert in psychological warfare, close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, CIA agent, and advisor to JFK.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith)

<comment><USER4> ...and he wrote astonishing stories about the remaking of man, after thousands of years of technology and emotional reworking. And never failed to put in fan service remarks about ancient heroes and villains that were characters in previous books. His entire works are collected in 'Rediscovery of Man'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tiptree's selected letters to various intellectuals of her time, including Le Guin, were published in 2015, it's great. It's a pity that she's not known more widely, especially in these times.

Her story [http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/love-is-the- plan-t...](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/love-is-the-plan-the- plan-is-death/) is one of the most moving stories I've read, SF or otherwise. "The Women Men Don't See" could have been written last year.</comment>