That guy who is trying to convince you that banks really help people? To heck with him. I worked for a major bank for about a year in IT. You know what I did? Built mini-websites to facilitate wealthy people's getting free stuff. Seriously. In order to keep these multi-million-dollar clients, the bank would have to give them freebies -- tickets to sporting events and such -- the new stadiums for the Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets were all built, not because the old facilities were too small or worn out or anything, but simply because the team owners wanted more luxury boxes and suites they could sell tickets for -- and my entire job consisted of supporting the reps and their distribution of the goodies. Looking back, that may have been the most blatant of my worthless IT jobs, but most of them have been pretty much like that. (And don't even get me started on the couple of months I worked for a guy who turned out to be a spammer. Obviously I quit as soon as I figured it out.) So I'm thrilled to hear that someone out there in IT is doing something worthwhile. Huzzah!

If this Brian Boyko were a real geek, he wouldn't misuse the phrase "begs the question".

I can't even read this entire attempt at fisking because, good lord, the chucklehead uses the word "statist" in his second paragraph. Talk about telegraphing your idiot biases right up front. And then his very first well-reasoned argument is to laugh at the use of the word "manifesto". Because, obviously, only statist commie collectivist numbnuts use the word manifesto! Does Correia just start typing in swaths of _The Fountainhead_ partway down? Because I'm not reading any further to find out.

There definitely should've been an choice of nondextrous: Someone who uses their hands, both equally poorly.

Come on, with a spetum you can disarm an opponent with a successful hit against AC 8! Name one other polearm that does that!

Interesting book: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway. Short version of the thesis: Nothing truly technologically innovative was ever rolled out with a rational profit motive in mind, because anything truly innovative cannot rationally be predicted from what came before. Railroads, electricity, telephony, wireless telephony, the American interstate highway system, and the Internet were all built by irrational investments (driven by government) and economic bubbles amid great waste and inefficiency.

We've also heard that consumers in 1910 don't really want electricity. Also, in 1890 they don't want flush toilets, and in 1860 the railroads don't interest them. We checked in 1215 while we were at it, and consumers said they don't need black pepper or the Magna Carta.

I was wondering this myself. Why link to a summary of the article on Wired when you could just link to the original? Is someone at Wired getting paid for the extra eyeballs?

I have three mod points and went looking for a mod option on this for "holy crap this is math". I put a good five minutes into trying to wrap my head around this idea and realized, no, it's been too long since I studied this stuff. That part of my brain is dead.

Oh, but the actual book, on your shelf, is part of what makes reading so wonderful. I love libraries and book stores. Shelf upon shelf of books and albums? That's great! John Waters was right.

I have no points to mod this up, but I would if I could. +1 for browser recursion!

That would be the "astronomical high tides". I don't think that was supposed to be hyperbole; it's a technical term for when the tides are higher due to the orbit of the Moon.

This is a very good point. I wanted to play around with app programming for the iPhone. I'm a fairly knowledgeable programmer with 20 years of experience. I started programming for the Web just about when the Web was invented. I know Perl, VB, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery; have worked in Java, C, Python, and so on. I've had a Linux system of one kind or another since 1996.

I give all that as background to show that I'm not totally incompetent when it comes to computers and making them work. In order to program for iOS you need OS X. The only Mac I had access to was from work where I didn't have root. You can't install the iOS development environment, Xcode, without root. I read about some people who got Xcode up and running under an OS X VM under Windows or Linux. So I got Snow Leopard working in a VM, only to find that the latest Xcode requires Lion. When I was trying this, Lion wasn't runnable in a VM because the modified kernels didn't exist yet.

It took me two or three days, by the way, to reach the point where it was clear I couldn't get Xcode running in any way, shape, or form on any device I own. All that time wasted to learn, no, you can't develop for iOS.

That, to me, is a clear problem with iOS. Never mind the walled garden, you can't even write your own code without jumping through crazy hoops.

I think this is very sweet. It's not anything I would do but nothing I've ever worked on has ever been very artistic. If you feel your code is your art, I think it's very nice and appropriate. Maybe something in the About... dropdown. You say you're a Web developer. Here's the thing about the Web: Some stuff has a surprising lifespan, but a lot of stuff evaporates really quickly. Nothing I've ever done professionally on the Web still exists. That would be a short-lived dedication. However, as a Web developer, you can do something other people might have trouble with: You can put up a site about your grandmother. Even a single page. And make sure it stays up for a long time (I have personal pages that have been basically unchanged since 1994). It may not be a huge memorial, but when someone who knew your grandmother runs a Google search, they'll find something other than a blip of an obituary in some online copy of the local paper -- which may have succumbed to link rot years before. You can put photos, and if you're feeling ambitious -- and your grandmother was very popular -- a section for comments. Maybe family members would like to share memories. (That might be pushing it unless your family is a fixture in your local social scene.)

Removing link underlining was something a lot of Web designers couldn't wait for, and every one I know (designers and programmers) was thrilled when it was finally implemented. Turning off underlining is one of the first things I did with any Web browser the first time I ran it. (I'm not sure if I've had to do it recently.) It's one of the first things I do when designing any site and I check it in IE and see IE still underlines links by default. (Also removing the blue border from around linked images.) Underlines are terrible. Underlined links always remind me of 1996.