Every day a little bubble appears telling me my AV definition is up to date.

The fact that you think this is an acceptable user interface experience goes right to the root of the problem: every day you spend a few seconds managing your machine (by reviewing a message which tells you there is no action to take) rather than focusing on your work or your game. It's a small thing--but bad interface experiences is the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of poorly thought out small things.

And thinking through those hundreds or thousands of things of small things--apparently to the geek community at large, this is undecipherable magic.

Of course most of the people here don't get it. To most geeks, who suffer a minor form of stockholm syndrome when it comes to using computers (if you don't suffer, you're not a true power user), a user interface is a handful of UI buttons which postpend the correct command-line switches to the underlying command-line application.

Actually using a usability designer is foreign to most developers. And creating an environment which my mother can grok without a Ph.D. in Computer Science? Magic. Black fsckin' magic.

The sad part is that most developers I know don't have any interest in learning this form of magic, despite direct evidence (in Apple's growing coffers) that connecting to your users (and not calling them 'lusers' behind their backs) causes your users to want to throw gobs of money at you.

"Not hard *today*."

I said "legal regime."

Where'd my links go? (*sigh*) The IRS Section 530 3 point test, and the pre-530 20 point test which currently applies to software developers, drafters and other technical people.

All Section 530 does (which the 1706 amendment exempted programmers, drafter and other similar technical people) is to make it easier for employers who hire independent contractors to protect themselves of the "contractor" fails to pay his taxes. Someone who works for another can easily file a form with the IRS claiming that in fact they were an employee, not a contractor--and that could cause an employer to be subject to an audit and owe employment taxes.

By exempting programers and drafters and other technical people from section 530's 3 point test [irs.gov] to determine if you are a contractor, it simply means programmers must satisfy an older pre-section 530 20 point test [tmc.edu] to determine if a programmer is in fact a contractor.

It's not hard under the current legal regime to become an independent contractor. Hell, I was an independent contractor all through the 1990's. All it requires is that you basically provide your own tools (such as a computer, the compilers, and the like), you set your own hours, and you have a contract with your current employer specifying the work to be provided. You don't even need to satisfy all 20 points--you simply need to show that certain things (such as being paid hourly) is common in the software development industry. (And in my case I also did a few fixed-priced contracts as well, which established a history that I was an actual contractor.)

Most local, state and national political decisions basically boil down to issues over economics: how much money are we going to divert to a public good that can or cannot be handled as a private concern.

Unfortunately most people are completely ill-equipped to understand those political decisions because they don't understand the economics behind those decisions.

My Econ 101 class would have a section on finance, a section on monetary policy, a section on economic philosophy (such as comparing capitalism, socialism, marxism, etc), and a section on basic statistics--so it wouldn't be the traditional "let's all read Das Kapital and talk about how cool Marx's beard is" that tends to be taught.

And I would require it to be taught in High School.

Generally standard of living metrics are based on reports such as the Human Development Index, which in 1990 placed Germany way above the United States, but by 2009 ranked the United States better.

However, one of the biggest problems with these reports are that they are based on measurements which are not measured the same way from country to country--and they fail to use certain metrics which are demonstrably more important to Americans. In the first category are the infant mortality rates--in the United States any sign of life of a premature baby who later dies is counted as an infant death, while in many countries of Europe, live births of babies under 500 grams or under 22 weeks of gestation are not counted. If you're measuring apples and oranges, it's no surprise there is a difference in the results.

Another example in the first category is percentage of population living under US$1 per day. While poverty is terrible, purchasing parity in the HDR from the UN uses exchange rates in order to determine poverty, rather than examining purchasing parity based on hours worked. One metric which would be far more interesting to measure is number of hours of labor to purchase 1,000 calories of food. The problem is that exchange rates have less to do with individual purchasing power locally, and more with international trade factors that only influence profitability trading abroad.

In the second category is square footage per household member: it is clear that development patterns in the United States (and, increasingly in Europe) have revolved around the pressure by Americans (and, increasingly, Europeans) to increase their living space and privacy. "The American Dream" has always been to own a home--and it is clear one of the biggest problems to urban planners and proponents of mass transit has been the desire for a large home and empty land separating your house from your neighbors had caused sprawl which makes mass transit ineffective. I have yet to see a single report on standard of living, however, which has ever attempted to measure square footage per household member across countries. You'd think that if having living space and privacy is so important to humans, we'd measure that--but I haven't seen it measured anywhere. And where I've seen living conditions measured, inevitably they measure "mobility" in a way which scores mass transit very high--essentially measuring the inverse of living space, since mass transit accessibility is inversely related to living space.

Between that, and the fact that different people live in different areas because for them individually, different factors are more important than others--for some people, they'd rather give up some square footage to have better access to a reliable light rail system, for example--I always take the whole relative standard of living measurement thing with a huge chunk of salt.

I wonder if this is an Anglosphere thing, since the exact same fool thing happens in the United States. People buy homes on 20 year flood planes or 100 year flood planes then go nuts when their house floods. Well, you bought your property on a plane that regularly floods: the "100 year" designation only means some geologist somewhere thought "there's about a 1 in 100 chance of this flooding in a given year."

"He notes that 'we know from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content.'"

Really? I'd point to America's failure to stop child pornography (making arrests only after child pornographers have been distributing material for months or years) as well as China's failure to suppress dissent and to suppress the Chinese people from obtaining illegal materials on-line as examples why we cannot track on-line content.

The real problem, in my opinion, is the idea (under development for decades) that the correct way to govern is to ask the experts in their field what we should do. So we turn to the climate scientists and ask not just "is the Earth warming?" but "what should we do to stop it?" We turn to social scientists and ask not just "does television affect test scores" but "what sort of television should we regulate?" We turn to other scientists and ask not just "what is going on" but "how should we fix it?"

When we hand any group of people that sort of power, of course people who are attracted to power are drawn to that field. Not only do we get cranks who claim to be scientists attempting to drive the conversation (such as those so-called "researchers" who periodically pop up and tell us pornography leads to rape), but we also subvert the real Ph.D.s.

Science should be in the realm of explaining what is going on. But deciding what we should do about it belongs strictly to the realm of politicians. Scientists may be asked for their input ("will policy A or policy B be better?"), but they should not be creating, driving, or steering policy.

In the case of Global Warming, the real problem (in my mind) was that these guys were also neck-deep in the UN's IPCC process, which is drafting treaty proposals on the economic changes that the world should make to fight global warming. By being neck deep in the politics, and by believing truly that we must act now to combat global warming, the incentive became about the power and honor of belonging to the IPCC and to help drive policy--not to get the best data possible from multiple disciplines and share that data with other scientists who were experts in those disciplines. The incentives, in other words, was to prove certainty about Global Warming to help drive IPCC policy, not to distribute data and allow uncertainty to creep into the proxy climate studies--such as tree ring studies, which are inherently messy and uncertain.

I suspect that trust in science has been eroding for as long as we've been asking scientists to play politics. This isn't the start of the avalanche; it's just a major slide in a problem going on for a very long time. And it will continue to get worse so long as the airwaves are populated by charlatans pretending to be scientists attempting to drive policy (like the anti-porn, anti-second-hand-smoking, pro-organic farming, anti-pesticides guys who, after affecting change, are proven after the fact to be fakes), and so long as politicians, attempting to keep votes without having to put his neck on the line, continues to subcontract his job out to untouchable "experts" which he can blame for any failures. (Well, I was told...--don't blame me.)

Absolutely spot-on. I would say, however, there is one exception: if you have code that is implementing a complicated algorithm, such as implementing insert or delete from a B-Tree using an algorithm pulled from a book like Knuth, or performing an algorithm found on Wikipedia, I'd document the original source of the algorithm. Thus while the code tells you "how", the comment tells you where you can find out more about "how".

Heros is not science fiction; it's a superhero comic brought to life.

The comic book conventions and the comic book font used for the opening title sequence should have been a dead give-away, as well as the fact that in the first season, a comic series played an important element in the plot.

To suggest Heros is sci-fi is to suggest the Green Lantern or Superman are sci-fi.

Perhaps the problem is not manly role models in general, but the current set of (sorry, pathetic) role models that are present on TV? I mean, the number of people who have posted here about the stereotypical male as a fat slob laying about on the couch watching sports in a stained wife-beater while yelling at their spouse to bring them more beer seems to outnumber those who talk about heroic and selfless masculine figures by a long stretch.

The ideal of a military hero as a masculine role model is not the angry guy who kills people, but the selfless act of a man who seeks to protect the tribe through doing grisly but necessary duty without thinking of himself. Baseball players and football players are role models only in so far as we can see ourselves in them: the local hero who came from nothing and made good. Captains of (local) industry used to fill that role as well: the guy who came from the backwaters of Arkansas and with an idea went from abject poverty to build an international corporation--but our society is always suspicious of the damage such captains do. It's why we turn to sports instead.

Sports itself is also supposed to be a model of society--which is why sports is so highly valued. You are supposed to learn to play by well established rules, compete graciously, win by striving to improve yourself, and lose with dignity.

Unfortunately today we have dismantled the idea of the protector who selflessly gives himself or even his life to protect the tribe--instead, the protector is the problem. We've also dismantled sports as an ideal of society: everyone wins, no-one loses, it's only showing up that counts--and so we change the rules to destroy competition rather than use losing and competing as teachable moments.

So no wonder you hate manly role models. They've been spit upon and destroyed: there is nothing left to honor. It strikes me that at this rate, we're one generation away from the majority of people celebrating Memorial Day by going to a military cemetery and throwing rotten vegetables at the grave markers.

The exact same observation is made with highway construction--but it has led transportation authorities to the opposite conclusion: if the more you build, the more people use the resource--then clearly the answer is to not build any because you'll never fix the congestion, and you'll just encourage more people to use the resource.

If the piracy rate was 80% then between myself, my mother, my father, my brother and my wife, only one of us would not have a jail-broken phone. And despite how easy it is to jail-break a phone, only one of us (myself) would have the warewithall to do it.

Now it could very well be that this particular game is popular with high school students or some other audience who may have a much higher rate of piracy than the overall audience of people. But I have to wonder how that piracy flag was determined in the first place: was it determined by seeing if it is running on a jail broken phone? Was it determined through some sort of licensing handshake made with their servers using some personally identifying piece of information? Something else?

I wonder, in large part because if you own two or more devices and sync it with the same computer, you can install the same purchased software on all of your devices--by Apple's design. In other words, if we own a family computer, and my wife and I own an iPhone and an iPod Touch, all of which sync with the same iTunes installation--then I can buy one piece of software and install it on all four devices.

If I can legally do this--since Apple's App Store contract essentially says you will allow Apple to distribute your software according to their terms--then I pay for a piece of software and install it on all four devices I'm legally allowed to install it on--then it is not piracy, despite protests from the iPhone developers.

So what percentage really is piracy, which are false flags, and which are installations on shared devices on the same account? Hmmmm?