Unfortunately not, but if you find one, let me know!

I should mention, in case it wasn't clear, that my comment about Planned Parenthood was an example I made up, not something mentioned in the study I linked to.

According to this report (PDF), there are three distinct groups within the Republican party: the Tea Party, evangelicals (the Religious Right), and moderates. There are stark differences between the three groups, but another poster mentioned "the power of cognitive dissonance" - no matter which of the three Republican subgroups you belong to, you're going to have a natural tendency to WANT to agree with the other two, because you're a Republican. For example, Evangelicals think the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because abortion is murder, and the Tea Party thinks the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because it's wasteful government spending, but Evangelicals are going to adopt "smaller government" as part of their argument and Tea Partiers will adopt the moral case as part of their argument.

Well, you can, apparently. They're going to be reelected, you know. Most of them.

I just want to quickly point out that the government did NOT "promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future". After the shutdown was over, they decided to do it, just as most people thought they probably would (based on a similar decision 17 years ago) but during the shutdown there was no such promise.

Just because you have a contract that says you can be screwed, doesn't mean you're not getting screwed.

Sure, but it's a blank check to pay the bills those same politicians have already incurred. The debt limit doesn't stop Congress from spending too much money, because by the time it gets to that point, it's already far too late.

My iPhone 4 seems to handle iOS7 pretty well. I've found that although the UI *looks* slow, the responsiveness is actually not that bad - for example, when entering my PIN on the lock screen, under iOS 5 and 6 sometimes there would be a bit of lag and it wouldn't register all the keypresses if I tapped the numbers faster than the phone was ready for. With iOS 7, there's even more lag in the visual and auditory feedback when pressing the buttons, but it registers all the keypresses correctly despite the lag, so even though it looks worse it works better.

And of course it's not just slow - everything looks worse. The new Windows 8-inspired theme looks stupid anyway, but on the iPhone 4 all the transparency effects are disabled, so it looks even worse, but it functions. There are some nice features and enhancements. I really haven't had any significant problems.

So just like the Patent & Trademark Office then? (They're still open.)

How does the government shutdown affect the FAA's ability to make these sorts of policy changes? I would assume that the people who make these decisions have been furloughed, so all existing regulations stand until Congress gets their heads out of their asses?

Also, is there any danger posed by dozens of Kindles flying around the cabin in the event of a crash landing? I realize the current regulations allow non-electronic items such as books, but is this a concern at all?

It's encouraging to see these kinds of changes coming. I'm glad the FAA is revisiting this issue (or will be once we start paying them again).

And here's an even better article about specifically what makes PHP so awful: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

No it isn't.

It could have been, if the people who created it had known what the hell they were doing. And it has gotten a lot better in recent years (for example register_globals has actually been removed from the language now), but where they started from was so mind-numbingly stupid that I don't see how they could ever make it actually good, without also breaking it in ways that would make everyone stop using it.

Here's a general rant about how stunningly awful PHP is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html

And here's a specific and detailed side-by-side comparison between PHP and Perl: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html

But you're spot-on about the "meta problem": most people who write in PHP have no idea what they're doing, so most PHP code out there is badly written, so if you're learning the language, there's a very good chance that you're learning from someone who didn't know what they were doing.

On 9/11, people were actually communicating with loved ones via Slashdot's comment system, because thanks to the heroic efforts of their admin team, Slashdot was one of the few major sites that managed to keep things running for most of the day (it wasn't entirely smooth, but it mostly worked). Serving a static-HTML version of the home page was one of the tricks they used.

A couple weeks later they posted an article describing what went on behind the scenes that day, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a link to the article - does anyone else remember this?

It sounds like you don't understand what OneClick is. Not only was it not common then, it's not common now. Storing the credit card number is only part of it. Other than Amazon, the only site I'm aware of that does it is Apple's iTunes Store, and Apple licensed the patent from Amazon.

OneClick was something new; my recollection is that nobody had done anything quite like it - but not because it was novel or innovative. Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was a bad idea. Store people's credit card numbers on file, readily accessible later just in case the customer decides to come back and buy something else? Click one button to effect a transaction, with money changing hands and everything? Are consumers really gonna trust you to manage that responsibly?

Amazon's innovation was proving that the answer to that question is yes. That's all. They showed that they could do it without consumers rioting in the streets. If you had asked anyone "skilled in the art" to design a system that could buy stuff online with the click of a button, anyone could have built it. They just probably would have told you it was a bad idea.