Okay, I'm about as liberal as it gets, and I have to say this is a ridiculous statement. He's not even more conservative than his predecessor, to say nothing of serious conservatives like the unholy trinity of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.

Massive layoffs from time to time are useful pour encourager les autres.

Sure, one-off "because it works" coding is one way to get to a disaster. Another way is to spend so much time on "development methodology" as opposed to actual coding that you can't possibly produce a working application before the deadline. My bets are on the latter in this case.

I'd have used the longer version except it wouldn't fit in Slashdot's .sig limit. ;) Either way, I stand by my statement--both "correlation is not causation" and "correlation does not imply causation" are true, but if you use either as an argument, odds are very good you have no idea what you're talking about.

... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.

No. They need more people who know how to do this.

We know a whole lot more about geology now than we knew about ecology when we started burning coal, and then oil, for fuel. Not to say it's not risk-free--no method of power generation is--but you can be reasonably sure that the people running the project have carefully estimated both the costs and benefits.

And yet, the primary industrial source of phosphorous is phosphate rock. Which has to mined. And of which we're running short.

Maybe you should consider that there's a reason for that?

Sponge Bath wins the internet for today.

Er, yes it is. You can't just make this assertion and expect it to be accepted as fact. (Or rather you can, as the authors of TFA have done, but you shouldn't.) As things stand right now, humans can each produce two kidneys, one heart, one liver, and two lungs over their lifetimes. That's it. The supply is inelastic, and will remain so until we can produce artificial organs, at which point the donation argument becomes irrelevant anyway.

IBM and Microsoft in their heydays, sure. Who else? I don't recall serious calls for the breakup of, say, Oracle or Apple, however much people may complain (often quite justifiably) about some of their business practices.

A lot of people seem to have fixed on the notion that the prospect of immediate financial gain is the primary driver of innovation. These people are fools, but they're influential fools.

Then why don't you link to the actual Nature article, instead of Watts' cherry-picked sound bite? For that matter, why doesn't Watts link to it himself? The only real information in the Watts post is a graphic of the masthead showing the volume and issue, so it's reasonably easy to track down the article, which is open-access ... but Watts is probably calculating, correctly, that most of his readers won't bother.

I can't help but wonder how many people with plenty of "curiosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession" we've never heard of. In other words, we don't actually know--and likely can't know--how likely people with these traits are to be remembered by the world as geniuses, and how many will be regarded by their families and friends as obsessive workaholics with lousy personal lives and utterly forgotten outside those circles.

Yes, I think "application logic" would be good. The problem with "business logic" is that it's domain-specific too; an awful lot of interesting algorithm development and implementation is taking place outside the realm of what would normally be considered business applications. Games are one example; scientific programming is another. In both cases, many of the principles that are useful in business programming can be usefully applied, but the purpose of the final application is very different.