So many interesting questions get asked on Stack Overflow and then immediately closed (or worse yet, closed and re-opened for days on end) because they're subjective, argumentative, and fundamentally unanswerable due to our lack of omniscience: without the ability to see into the future and/or know the secret motivations of companies and their developers, we are left to make wildly varying (un)informed guesses.
The obvious solution to this is to add a built-in clairvoyant feature to the Ask a Question page. Similar to the current "Related Questions" feature, this could be used to answer otherwise-unanswerable questions before they're asked, thus saving everyone time and frustration.
I propose a simple system whereby a web cam is aimed at an ordinary Mattel Magic 8-Ball device, long recognized as one of the most accessible and accurate fortune-telling mechanisms available to modern society. A simple vibrating pad could be placed under this rig and triggered in response to the user's typing. Once focus leaves the Title
input field, a short delay will be triggered, followed by a bit of logic to capture the 8-ball's result and feed it through a simple OCR routine to produce the result.
So far as I'm aware, SO would be the first major Q&A site to implement such a feature...
Examples:
- Why was Google’s Chrome browser written almost entirely in C++ and not C# or Java?
- Why did Microsoft choose a RESTful API over WebDAV for BLOB storage?
- Why did Microsoft choose MVC for ASP.NET?
- Why did my wife divorce me?
- Python brighter future than ruby?
- Why isn’t OCaml more popular?
- Why is Github more popular than Gitorious?
- Why isn’t Google Web Toolkit more popular?
...another UV resurrection...