I was just thinking the same thing, since I'm in the middle of re-reading it.

Watching what we think of as humanity drowning under a tsunami of progress. Everyone ending up virtualized with the solar system being dismantled for computronium and surrounded by entities too vast and complicated to fathom is very depressing to me.

Damn, I wish I had mod points right now. This is spot on.

Major rewrites should only come when the cost of adding necessary new features exceeds the rewrite by some margin.

If you're lucky, you can build something with an identical interface that lends itself well to automated and manual testing of features to ensure all of the features get implemented. If you're not, you have to dredge up requirements from years of bugfixes and enhancements to ensure that you're covering all your bases.

Stepwise refactoring is usually much easier and safer than rewriting something.

Where's Manfred Macx when you need him?

For a better idea of what could happen if you have total control over sensory overlays, there are much better examples that don't require unspecified, magical leaps in brain manipulation.

Nothing says "Slashdot" like a flamewar over the methodology of a poll.

The closest thing I use to a "website design tool" these days is jsfiddle. Hand-coding but with a tight loop between editing something and seeing how it looks.

At first I laughed because of the juxtaposition, then I was sad because of how true it is.

I wouldn't want anything bigger than my Droid X. It's big enough to use the screen for maps and browsing but small enough to hold for phone purposes.

If I had anything significantly bigger, I'd likely have to rely on a Bluetooth accessories all the time.

Who's vigilant of the free market other than government regulators?

Misdeeds done at the corporate level (c.f. Enron) generally only come to light through governmental regulatory investigations, since companies can tell you to sod off. The government reports to the people and we have a number of tools to ferret out misdeeds within government. Government also investigates itself regularly.

Thanks for the debilitating flashbacks. *twitch*

In my experience, clients do not need this excuse to constantly change requirements.

Sounds a bit like crowdsourcing to me.

Not in Soviet Russia.

Totally agree. Having an open environment with multiple agile teams having sequential daily scrums, the pigs and chickens start yakking post-scrum and make it difficult to hear in the following scrums.

I think the best would probably be a small room per agile team, not a big open area.