gills

Are you using any sort of in-memory fragment caching? That seems like it might reduce some render overhead.

Let's just go ahead and coin the term "lol ads".

I think the giant bright line through central Mexico into Arizona is pretty funny.

Experimenting on humans with a system backed by the use of force would be despicable. What happened to basic respect for each other?

<snark> Anyway, if we want to know how a group behaves when lawbreaking goes unpunished, we need look no further than the FIRE industries, Congress, and the current Cabinet. </snark>

Of course the system worked. Chertoff's buddies have sold a shitload of body scanners the past year, haven't they?

Sigh.

While interesting, arguing about the methods used to violate your basic civil rights only distracts from the real discussion about YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS ARE BEING VIOLATED BY THE VERY GOVERNMENT FORMED TO PROTECT THEM.

Keep your eye on the ball people.

It's important to the train the unwashed masses to give up their lunch money to the bullies when they embezzle the entire country's capital structure and need another hit of finance-o-crack.

This reminds me an awful lot of a system presented [1] in lectures on accessibility research a couple years back that was/is an alternative gestural input method for people with motor impairments. It's cool to see similar concepts cross over into the mainstream...well, sort of mainstream, anyway.

[1] http://depts.washington.edu/ewrite/

It read to me as "government performs most tasks inefficiently, and that's ok; but let's have it perform fewer tasks inefficiently so we can perform them more efficiently ourselves and have a little less fiscal drag on our lives.

I think it's more like wearing hammer pants.

I think that formal methods do matter, and can be realistic. We have a culture problem, perhaps inherent to the ease with which programs of unknown correctness may be written and executed, that usually we just don't care. How familiar is this cycle? iterate{think => type => execute => check}? Being rushed into the "protoduction" dev model doesn't help a lot either.

I had a professor who was apparently a student of E.W. Djikstra, and many of the points in this essay were essential to his courses. For example, exam questions weren't just "write code to do X", but "write code to do X and prove it", with failure to prove it resulting in a big fat 0. Of course, we were required to use weakest-precondition verification, from the bottom to the top. Not as tedious as it sounds, once you've gone through it once or twice, and I think the point wasn't to teach something we would use day-to-day, but to teach us that verifying programs by hand was not only possible but tractable. It seems like the TDD movement kind of makes the same point, though perhaps less formally.

Another professor introduced a variant of this technique developed for verifying the critical points of parallel and multi-threaded computation, which while far more tedious has been vastly more useful in my career as a model for thinking about concurrent programs [not bulletproof, of course, because runtimes and hardware sometimes do unexpected but perfectly valid things with our programs].

Most algorithms, at their core, have formal descriptions short enough to prove by hand in a matter of minutes. For those parts, I think it's realistic to use formal methods. All the other cruft we tack on to our programs to make then flexible, perform in a variety of contexts, handle varying data types, error checking, etc.; I think those fall in the realm of what you describe as "realistic programs", and which amounts to a daunting heap of code to verify by hand. Luckily, we can again follow his advice and use computation as an alternative, and verify by hand a program which can verify some or most of our work for us -- that seems to be what a lot of static analysis is all about.

I don't know. Do you ever run into situations day to day where you find yourself verifying your code by hand? That's usually what happens when I get deep into finding an error.

Well, this is as far as I could read.

Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work...

Yes, numbers, those pesky axioms that just won't obey when we legislate away the laws of physics.

Oh. My.

Gold is a speculative device. Humans hold the future value one might hope to trade the gold for.

Maybe because their parents' generation sold all the blue-collar jobs down the river to China, and there's nothing to do but raise your beak to momma government and hope for some worms?

"Tour" and "Pricing" links on the landing page lead to the default Rails 404 page. Consider putting some placeholder here, or something ala "[sign up for the beta], paid plans will be available soon." The tour page could just be a couple screenshots to start, just get rid of the 404.

Don't worry, it's just a setup to make VAT look good by comparison.

Er...[if you have the misfortune of being paid to work in Java] they remove a pile of type-casting cruft and make code more useful to large and/or transient teams.

The author conveniently glosses over the type-casting from pre-generics Java and instead compares to Ruby. Duh...of course Ruby is a cleaner read. But compare learning a new API:

  // pretty evil
  List<Thing> getTheThings();

  // really evil
  List getTheThings();

Or iteration:

  // pretty evil
  for (Thing t: getTheThings()) {...}

  // kill me now
  for (Iterator it = getTheThings().iterator(); it.hasNext()) {
    Thing t = (Thing) it.next();
    ...
  }

Uh...clue check...programmers have to write everything in crystal clear unambiguous form.

So we might need to legislate in code and write a law compiler, but that can be rendered to english pretty easily through a "lawyer-verified" open source transformation. Hell, you could even render a flowchart.

Don't think of this as lifeguard training,but you've basically got to get them over one shoulder or under an arm, then across the torso, while using your hip and a strong kick to basically pin them against your side so they have the least possible leverage to twist around and hug/climb you. Then you have to figure out how to swim them back with one arm. Sometimes it takes a couple tries. While a passive victim is closer to death the situation is usually safer for the rescuer, especially if inexperienced or untrained.

Spot on. I'm sorry to hear about your story but it really nails the point home. I was also a lifeguard and a competitive swimmer in my youth, and realized after some time that the single best training I ever had for escaping an active drowning victim was playing water polo! You really have to think of the victim as an adversary, keep a firm grip, and have practiced being extremely stable in the water to manage it.

Yes. That's partially the point.

Heh. You say "literalist reading" is if that's a bad thing! Surely you jest. In my opinion it's the only way to read that document, and on this point we obviously disagree.

I will be more clear. In my opinion, freedom of the press is intended to perpetuate the ability of private citizens to monitor actions of government. Freedom of speech protects the right to publish those facts discovered by the press. You may twist that to include intrusion on private parties, or a slippery slope where lawlessness and slander rule, but that is not what I am saying.

The foundation of my argument is that proceedings of any court are official actions of government, and therefore information that shall be in the public domain. If you want, you could add the word eventually to the end of that sentence, I don't really care. I'm not talking about beauty contests or "courts of public opinion", I'm only talking about accountability of government. In that context, if the press deems themselves, or their viewers the private citizens, best served by documenting the actions of government with the most sophisticated technologies available, where is the power of the judiciary explicitly enumerated to deny it?

Freedom of the press is specifically intended to protect the ability of private citizens to document the actions of government. Freedom of speech protects the ability to publish those facts. In combination these rights are intended to hold government accountable to the citizens. The proceedings which take place in a courtroom are by definition actions of government, and should therefore be subject to whatever means of documentation members of the private press deem most effective for their ends.

* Article I Section 1.

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. *

Regardless of our respective opinions on the matter, I don't see an [honest] interpretation of the above which gives the court (a) legislative power to (b) abridge the freedom of the press [within it's on courtrooms].

Or playing chicken? :)

Funny...the logo ("Spyder") on the side looks like it was ripped from the company that makes my ski jacket.

This makes me recall an old cliche..."the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Wow. It's like a lesson in wavelet transforms for the layman. But without ever using the word 'wavelet.' Cool.

Disappointing that the gallery doesn't render in the android browser, considering the mentions of droid fonts.

We learned just about the same lesson (maybe not so far as ditching the insurance...) while backpacking the globe a year ago. Amazing the kind of junk we've shed that used to be 'important' or 'valuable.'