jeffreymcmanus

I'm on the side of the small business owner here, but for some perspective on why restaurant businesses have to go though hell to get set up in SF, search Yelp for "9th avenue burger king". The short version is that people in the neighborhoods go insane if businesses (particularly restaurants, and especially chains) set up in their area.

People still line up to start restaurants in SF.

The writer says that the US university system is awesomer than most people believe and that the awesomeness of our university system is unmeasurable. Then in the next paragraph he says we host "more than half of the world's top 100 universities". By what measure?

no, dumb people just use guessing, actual astrology, etc.

smart people use "pattern matching" because it makes bigotry (which is a form of guessing) seem smart.

"Pattern matching" is like astrology for smart people.

Not so. In fact the opposite is true; as scientists reach consensus about facts, it enables science to progress. Just because facts exist does not mean the process of scientific discovery ceases.

You're confusing the notion of "settled science" with "the end of knowledge".

The changes in our understanding of gravitation that have occurred in our generation do not make it advisable for you to walk off the edge of a building. That's what is meant by settled science.

Not at all. Gravity is settled science. "Fire is hot" is settled science. Etc., etc.

It's not "dogma" to say that gravity exists or that fire is hot. Just because science is a constant process of investigation and discovery, it doesn't mean that we can never arrive at any conclusions or take action based on what we know to be true.

Sure it questions it. As a helpful thought experiment, try this: look at how many phrases are placed in quotation marks in this piece. Each time the writer encloses a phrase like "global warming" or "pollutant" in question marks, he's trying to cast doubt in your mind. It's a very transparent and sophistic technique.

The writer (Claude Allegre) is, in fact, a climate-change denier. He's not merely trying to foster more scientific investigation into climate change or slow the pace at which we adapt to it (although it looks like that's what he wants you to believe here). He doesn't believe that humanity is causing climate change at all (a view that flies in opposition to the long-settled science on this subject), and therefore he's trying to get you to believe that simply slowing down our response to climate change is perfectly OK. But this just isn't the case; it's a recipe for permanently hosing the environment.

At the end of the day, there's an Occam's razor test you can apply to this kind of thing. If this were real science, it'd be published in a peer-reviewed journal, not a conservative mouthpiece of big business like the Wall Street Journal.

it is a common tactic of climate change deniers to line up some number of scientists to convey the sense that there is some question about climate change. but this isn't how science works; it's not the case that because one or 10 or 100 scientists have questions about gravity it means that gravity doesn't exist.

the existence of climate change caused by humans is settled science. no amount of wall street journal editorializing or smears by conservative politicians is going to change that.

"Plenty of us" where plenty equals...how many? Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week.

I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.

The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications.

There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) that don't pretend to have lofty corporate values. Yet we keep buying their products and they keep making assloads of money. That's the way it is.

Not with one class and no accreditation, he won't. UOP is the largest private educator in the US with more than 400,000 paid students. Setting aside the fact that a single online class is nothing close to a "University", he's got a long way to go before he can make a dent in the #1 company in the industry.

Their web site also thinks it's still 2011.

jQuery Mobile adds a lot of other useful stuff -- primarily the ability to create an iPhone-style UI from HTML markup. Unfortunately as other posters have mentioned, it's pretty slow.

What you call "holding a student by the hand" I call "teaching." It's not legitimate to assume that some subject should only be reserved for an elite group just because it is difficult to teach and learn; the failure in this case is in a lack of good teachers.

"discretion" isn't actually called for in the statute.

The only real "discretion" that should come into play here is the due process imposed by a court (which also unfortunately is not called for in the statute).

I remember 2011, wasn't that the year when don't ask don't tell got repealed?

I think that the number of people for whom the extra $10 is an issue will be small, particularly early on.

There are lots of professionally produced albums that are utter crap, just like there are lots of professionally produced books that are utter crap.

To think that an intermediary is necessary to create a long-form work is demonstrably false cargo cult thinking. Books were printed for centuries before publishing companies came along.

Thanks for putting this together, it looks great. I should mention that the word "shit" in the title of this will make it challenging for me to share this with many professional colleagues.

Johannes Gutenberg would beg to differ. A publisher is not a requirement for a book any more than a record company is a requirement for a song.

Because the activities involved in learning stuff and creating stuff are divergent -- even conflicting at times.

As it happens, setting out to learn an app right away is typically not a great way to learn how to code for beginners. It's too easy to get stuck on the implementation details of your application-development objective ("why won't my blogging system display italics?") at the expense of the fundamentals ("what is CSS good for?")

Watch out, this guy is about to write a letter.

Profit vs. growth is a false dichotomy.

Of course a growth investor is going to insist that "98% of startups should be growth focused". In this regard, profit and venture investment are two different (and, essentially, competing) sources of capital with their own upsides and downsides.

It's only a witch-hunt when the accusations aren't true.

shut down the product i started in 2007 because the product i started in 2010 started taking off.

Incorrect. Shielding humans from radiation has been a solved problem for decades. The fact that Skylab didn't need to do it does not mean that traveling to Mars is impossible.

You forget that astronauts were lining up to fly the Space Shuttle even after two of them exploded.

There will be no shortage of qualified volunteers for the first Mars mission, and the idea that people will go insane simply by being in a capsule for 9 months has been pretty much disproven by the recent Mars500 project.