Yes, and there's a similar effort among the scientific faithful to confuse science with religion. Symptoms include believing "myth" and "truth" are opposites and a patronizing tone towards anyone evincing a different point of view on the subject. Since you seem to be able to use Wikipedia, I'd suggest looking up "scientism".

Me, I'm an atheist and I don't see science and religion as being incompatible so much as entirely distinct. They're both tools that we can use, for good or for bad, and if we forget that we're being used by them instead. What many of the more outspoken atheists seem to be doing is imitating the fundamentalism of their would-be opponents, not transcending it — hardly an improvement.

(It's been fun watching my first comment get moderated up, then down, then up, then down again. You'd think something so rational wouldn't be controversial, but what the hey.)

Whoosh! Do you really think that's not what I'm saying? Is there some other Gödel I'm not familiar with?

Seems to me your patronizing tone is mis-aimed. (That's hardly rational, is it?)

Such a person would be quite remarkable, but I doubt any such exists. Even science (yes, *S*C*I*E*N*C*E*) has its myths and belief systems, not all of which are true (or provable).

Rationality is under-appreciated by those who have less of it, but often wildly overvalued by many who think they have more — they tend to have an irrational, pre-Gödel belief that a)they are completely and totally rational, and b)rationality is all that's necessary to live a doubleplusgood life. And maybe they'd get away with it, if it weren't for the other 6.3 billion of us meddling with their perfect world.

Yes, credit card fraud when he was 17 (three months' sentence), thirty-five years ago. Then he went to Cambridge, joined the Footlights, and began a brilliant career. (This was all covered in the BBC's celebration of Fry and Hugh Laurie's work just last Wednesday.)

From Wikipedia: "In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award, was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. [...] BBC Four dedicated two nights of programming to Fry on 17 and 18 August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programs featuring Fry, began with a sixty-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programs selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and a half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures. Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two on 16 and 17 of that September."

So if anything you're implying an early conviction is a good career move. But I'm sure you've never done anything illegal in your famously-productive life. What kind of example does that set for the kids? Go out and get convicted today!

I really doubt you are correct in this. Though the hardware resources available to iDevices are orders of magnitude greater than, say, the original Mac, it's still very easy to bring the CPU to its knees with an ill-chosen line or two of code, and the introduction of even limited multitasking just makes it easier.

I'm not saying there are "absolutely zero" politico-corporate reasons for Apple's decisions in this area, and I can empathize about disliking the tradeoffs in autonomy for iOS developers (the Mac is much less restrictive, and free once you have the hardware), but Apple's had to do a lot of software optimization to assure a reasonable user experience (responsiveness, battery life, etc), and "bare-metal" runtimes that don't work through the public APIs aren't likely to benefit.

You may well be right about Android. Otoh Apple will probably be happy just to skim most of the profits from the smartphone/tablet market as they do now. Both approaches are useful, pick the one that meets your needs.

It' d be interesting to see if there's an analog to the collective behavior of slime molds in Life.

Ah, I see. If people disagree with you they're idiots. That's entirely different, isn't it?

I may be a fucking idiot, but I hope you're not, as it's probably best for all of us if you don't reproduce. (I can explain that for you if we've exceeded your attention span again. Don't hesitate to ask!)

Yeah, it's been, like a couple of days?

Even Masnick is tired of writing "Streisand effect".

I take it you found my questions too difficult to answer, since you ignored them while contradicting yourself -- unless those gun laws were voted in by a minority. Was that it, or are you just up in arms because you're a minority yourself wrt the Second Amendment? Are you in a well-regulated militia?

A pretty poor showing for somebody who thinks other people are too dumb to know what democracy is if they disagree with you. Plus your little disquisition on how the country is actually run by lawyers means you don't think this is really a democracy at all, so your sneering disregard (complete with Wikipedia links) was pointless, too.

Come back when you can assemble your prejudices into a coherent form and actually defend them with logic instead of what appears to be a head full of snot.

In my country we have a thing called the Constitution that we use as a rulebook for the laws we pass. Does a majority passing a law that's unconstitutional (like the CDA) get a free pass because they're a majority, or should the law be struck down?

You'd be in favor of imposing Sharia law (or Halakhah, the Jewish religious law) if a city or county duly voted for it?

Proposition 8 was approved by a (small) majority of voters in California; does that mean you approve of taking away minority civil rights at the ballot box as well?

I take it the vote was unanimous. Or do people who disagree just not count?

You'd have no objections to communities in the US that operate under Sharia, I mean, Jewish law?

You don't know about tap-and-slide for shifting? That gets it down to four moves. On a regular physical keyboard it's five moves because the delimiters are symbols accessed by the shift key, which must also be pressed.

Still, the larger point is valid: the standard keyboard is lousy for HTML. (Why this is proof of some evil twisted conspiracy aimed to neuter you and fill Apple's coffers with fanboi cash has I guess been left as an exercise for the reader.) If you can suggest a better arrangement it can be coded into a custom keyboard layout by any programmer or even added to the SDK by Apple.

I feel your frustrations with what in the case of the iPad is a 1.0 product and in iOS' case 4.x. The file sharing is awkward, iTunes is beginning to look as though one wafer-thin mint would make it explode, iCal apparently sets monthly events by counting from the beginning of the week containing the first of the month (so that "second Monday" is actually the first one unless the month begins on Sunday or Monday), and syncing basically requires a wire. Yeah, it could all be lots better, and weigh half a pound less too.

Still, afaik nobody made you buy it at gunpoint. (Which would be proof of a conspiracy, come to think of it, so feel free to inform us if that was the case.) You can resell it for a decent price if it doesn't meet your needs sufficiently, and at the same time teach Apple a lesson through the miracle of the free market when you spend that money on whatever device it is that does. Apple, suitably chastened when informed of your actions (as they surely will be), will resolve through bitter bitter tears to do better next time, and if they don't they'll no doubt be buried by their more-nimble competition, as they should be.

In the meantime you'll be just another one of us bloodied first-adopters, victimized by the finite resources of Apple. How dare they not be above complaint! We were promised magic!

Hmmm, I can't say that I've read every word (it's a cookbook, who would use every recipe?) but I haven't come across any use of private APIs, nor have I seen any wacky code.

Not saying you're wrong (a cite would be good), but is there any chance you're referring to the first edition? The second edition, covering iOS 3.x, is twice the size for the first (about 830 pages) and perhaps the earlier SDK needed more hackery to work.

Maybe you're right, but I've found the book useful in my own coding and it doesn't seem to have misled me.

Ditto. Though I see it's Winter 2010. They did it last year, too, though a) I don't know that it's available now, and b) the iOS platform itself evolves quickly enough that capabilities and best practices have changed since then.

If you sign up for the developer program ($100/yr, and necessary to put your code on the device instead of the simulator) you can also get access to videos of sessions from the developer's conference for free and get advice straight from the horse's mouth.

I'd also recommend getting a book or two. I'd recommend O'Reilly's C Pocket Reference if you're rusty in C. Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook, Second Edition covers a lot that you'd need, though the way she organizes her code can make it difficult to reuse if you're just starting out. I can dis-recommend the Sam's "24 hour" iPhone programming book, unless it's been revised and corrected -- it's almost as likely to hinder you as help.

You'd also inevitably be using Apple's own SDK documentation, which can be quite overwhelming to begin with, and web searches both at Apple's developer forums and at large on error messages and class/method names are often fruitful once you get a handle on iOS.

I'd estimate it would take one month of spare time to get your bearings, and 2-3 to really know what you're doing. What can blindside you is that a lot of advanced graphics and sound applications -- games, for example -- require some C++ afaik. (So much for my plans for avoiding it.)

Andrew Orlowski really has a nasty attitude about Apple, doesn't he?