As interesting as it is to guess why another waterfall government IT project failed, I'd rather know why we aren't using wheelbarrows with wheels closer to the center. As a guy who has mostly used wheelbarrows for moving concrete, having the wheel support the majority of the load instead of half (or whatever) sounds like a huge advantage.

The Wikipedia article on wheelbarrows suggests "However, the lower carrying surface made the European wheelbarrow clearly more useful for short-haul work." Does that reason really pan out? Can anyone think of any other reasons?

For those that don't want to read it, this is the argument:
"If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well."

The rest just bashes the media, liberalism, and socialism.

Are there any guesses on how fanboyism correlates with atheism?

It would be interesting to learn if atheists were more likely to fill their religious gap with consumer products or if atheists were also less likely to become fanboys.

Disclaimer: I'm an atheist that avoids apple.
Disclaimer: correlation != causation

I wasn't only talking about video games (although Starcraft 1 fits), but don't get caught up on the time frame.

Can you think of *any* competitive multiplayer game that isn't mostly balanced and skill dependent that has a thriving community?

If you look at all the games through history, how many multiplayer games can you name that people have played for more than 10 years that weren't competitive and balanced? I can think of 0.

I feel like this guy's idea of a "fun" unit is one that looks cool but is strictly worse than alternatives, and losing is NOT FUN. If his "fun" unit dominated the others, everyone would build the "fun" unit and the game would NOT BE FUN.

Magic the gathering has plenty of suboptimal cards, and I do enjoy trying to "break" them. However, I only usually try to break it once or twice. Then, it effectively goes in the waste bin.

Adding a lot of cruft units to Starcraft 2 for the sake of "fun" is just going to make the game more difficult to hotkey and more intimidating to new players.

Plenty of us enjoy games that take skill to play and time to master. You don't waste that sort of time on a game that isn't balanced.

is he the best teacher?

Put another way, if a motivated student wanted to become a top-notch programmer and cared only about his knowledge and not the bragging rights of being able to read Knuth's books to completion, would you still recommend this series or is there another resource that you would like to share that you think explains the concepts better?

Personally, whenever I pick up one of these books, I get turned off due to having to learn a trivial programming language just to understand the examples. (Not because I think learning it would be difficult but because it feels inefficient. I wouldn't be interested in computer science if efficiency wasn't a main motivation in my life.)

F.lux really does help with insomnia. I doubt it's the placebo effect since you set it up once and forget about it.

If you haven't heard of it, it's a free simple program that adjusts the colors of your monitor when the sun goes down in your area.
http://stereopsis.com/flux/

I credit F.lux with curing my insomnia.

(I'm in no way related to the project)

Someone mod this guy up.

Strength training with wrist problems will only aggravate your condition. Improving blood flow to the area seems to be the way to go. Although, I'm not sure what the best way is to do that.

(I have RSI's from typing/using the mouse. I haven't figured out how to fix them yet, but strength training did not help me.)

I don't have to manage my playlist or do anything extra to discover new music.
The variety of stations available online means that I never have to listen to music that's stale.
I can listen from any computer in the house.
It costs nothing.
The amount of commercials is tolerable.

The only downside is that I can't find any riaa-free stations. Does anyone know of any?

I don't understand what this accomplishes. What are they going to do? Look for bugs? They already know there are bugs. If it was sabotaged, they're not going to get the code that was used and will only find bugs.

This is like calling the fire department after the barn has already burned to the ground, except that the fire will likely be allowed to continue.

(c) It doesn't matter.

I think you are right to be skeptical of insurance companies because their greed causes a conflict of interest with their customers, but I think this research is good for exactly the same reason.

We live in a society where doctors are actively marketed to and recruited by drug companies.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/08/21/ep.conflicts/index.html

If you can be treated equally well with a cheap generic drug or an expensive newly patented drug, which drug are you going to receive? I'd hope the former, but from my experience with doctors, I really don't think the Hippocratic Oath applies to bank accounts.

This research aims to address that question of which drug is truly better for the public and to hopefully standardize the most effective practices. I think that's a good thing.

The insurance companies will most definitely try to use this research to increase their profit margins by saying things like, "the more expensive drug x is only marginally better than drug y, so we're not paying for it," but they already do that. It's really a separate battle.

I do think that battle deserves to be fought. I just don't think fighting it by knocking this research is the best way.

If anyone is interested:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/health/02scans.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

What do you suggest?

As a consumer, I am expected to vote with my feet.
As an employee or business owner, I am expected to make money by satisfying consumers.

These are apart of the fundamentals that make capitalism work.

Personally, I think IBM is behaving as expected. I would prefer they and every other corporation vote with their feet than hire lobbyists to "work with the system."

I realize that's bad for us Americans in the short-term, but maybe then, we'll stop "voting for cruft."