Wifi is so totally secure:

I mean... Where would I find someone who knows how to crack the mighty WPA2-PSK you probably use to secure your whole network?

How could you possibly think any wireless communications are secure anywhere? *especially* blue-tooth and WiFi.

Oh yeah. Bring up phones. Those land-lines have REALLY gotten more reliable and useful in the last 60 years haven't they? I mean, look at the horrible phone track records for emergency service and reliability in 1954 after all.

> It's exactly the same calculation for anything anybody calls a 'natural monopoly'. Absent an interfering government, the money flows to the best service provider.

I suppose that's why municipal water is so expensive, unreliable and horrible in the US, whereas such an "incredibly difficult" service as data transfer works cheaply and flawlessly under the wonderfully popular and incredibly excellent Comcat, Verizon et al. "services". </puke>

oh, so I should sit on the magnet and spin?

Oh, so we're clear... you are an upside-down Science is my God nut. Meta-physics (one little branch of philosophy) is responsible for pretty much every branch of scientific inquiry you're fond of... and that's just the philosophical pinky flexing.

Let me know when your experiments are done growing your own brain in a vat with perfect forward predictability and you're able to "prove" the universe is the never changing holographic crystal you always thought it was in the first place...

You know, as opposed to something a bit more chaotic and interesting that us mere mortals can never quite get a complete handle on...

> For some people it is downright emotionally difficult.

Actually... for everyone it ALWAYS is. That's the nature of world-view.

It's just that, it's often very difficult to understand someone else well enough to know enough about their world-view to put it in any kind of real jeopardy. (ie: discomfort)

In fact. It's actually a personal attack to begin tearing apart someone's understanding of the world when they aren't interested and don't want to participate.

Part of why so many folks get fired up about what should/shouldn't be presented to young students and how it should be offered up.

Seems to me the problem is anyone who:

a) wants to push Secularism out of schools in favor of Christianity
b) wants to push Christianity out of schools in favor of Secularism

Most other folks I don't have a problem with.

Want to be Philosophically Naturalistic? Go ahead, don't push it on me when I don't ask for it.
Want to be Christian? Go ahead, don't push it on me when I don't ask for it.

(pushing things on innocent kids goes double, I can actually handle the shoving better than they can)

And while you're at it, be sure to remove that bit about "science must be based on math" in the same law too. All Good Scientists just KNOW that little unimportant disciplines like math and philosophy can never hold any sway over True Science.

Believe it or not, you can't actually formulate the modern scientific method without a concept of god. (An anti-concept actually, as it is strongly atheistic) Some will argue we've rejected that kind of hard atheistic naturalism in science, but... Look around a bit.

Good science is falsifiable (thanks Karl Popper) and, ideally, predictive. It shouldn't require a mountain of apology to get a handle on it. (a mountain of math? surely... language? not so much)

> I know. I know. They are irresponsible for living there.

I was going to say they are irresponsible for not making it a good part of town by living there.

Trolls who enjoy tormenting others when they might not even realize they are being toyed with? Or know-it-alls who spout off useless nonsense pretending to know and/or care about the subject at hand when neither is true.

Anyone think that perhaps the most recent spates of unemployment have more to do with bad forsight, planning, and some theft rather than the fact that we've made ourselves obsolete? When's the last time you went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant? Just how many of the staff there had been replaced by technology?

(Maybe an accountant, if that)

Exactly! Thanks for saving me from having to write that myself ;-)

> Once you get familiar with the tools to make these kinds of visualizations, it can become very straightforward to develop one for your specific use case.

That's the thing, we need a Visualization for Understanding 101 class in comp-sci or something similar.

I guess I had scientific modeling in physics as part of EE but over half the focus was on how to gather/deal with the physicalities of real-world data, which isn't so important when you're modeling something which lives inside a computer to begin with.

Sure, various senior projects etc require a presentation, but generally that's a "sink or swim" kind of thing rather than help and practice building tools for presenting esoteric information in an illustrative manner.

Note: I thought it was obvious reading digital output as analog (or merely hooking together input to output on two sensitive instruments) is always going to cause a lot of artifacts and distortion. You don't chain 2 microscopes together and expect to get twice the magnification with no problems...

Hmm... Get much performance out of your systems that way? Procedural methods have a time and place, and have given us most of what we have now. Functional methods have given us... A pale, slow, anemic cousin of what procedural has done? (that can't fail in-theory, much like the titanic...)

Honestly, garbage collection did way more for the industry than any other sea-change... Here, was some scut work we could freely let the computer do completely for us. (At least when any kind of hard time-keeping doesn't matter)

I don't see how NOT understanding how computers work is going to make them better. Seriously. (I mean, if you want to skip steps from the design cycle, why not simply use genetic algorithms to implement everything, then you don't need design either and can go strait from requirements to testing and don't need to worry about anything else.)

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm definitely this way. When I get to work in the morning I return to the massive subjective machano-city in my head where the repository lives and plug it in to the objective reality that is Mercurial. Much of bug-fixing is ferreting out the differences between the two. Reading code is removing the fog of the unknown in my head and writing is creating new streets, buildings, and even neighborhoods. (Well... You could hardly call it something so terrestrial, more like cogs of motility and points of inflection or something even more abstract but you already have the idea.)

Actually, after reading the article, I'd call what he's doing extremely good basic engineering and model design/view. It's very cool for the problems he presents, but looks like a ton of work. To be generally useful, it seems he'd have to come up with rules of thumb and generalizations for what it is typically important to see/understand in a given algorithm and a way to identify *what* to model/visualize that isn't completely subjective.

He appears to make some great subjective decisions on what/how to do things, the problem in general is many developers are poor in certain subjective areas. The real gem will be how to reduce some of the less useful subjectivity and turn it into things that are more objective and better subjectively through practice of useful rules and guidelines.

Consuming this stuff is really just letting another engineer do the heavy lifting FOR you. ... like watching a movie and letting Hollywood do the imagining FOR you...

I mean, this is a great movie, don't get me wrong, I'm just glad I read the book first.