Exactly. I have relatives who are in law enforcement. I can tell you exactly how they would have handled this: "Move along, buddy, and don't let me catch you doing this again."

We Neils are much further along than any of you carbon-based lifeforms can imagine.

I'm confused. Does this mean we all have one less friend than we thought, or one more?

All this cloud application talk reminds me of my first computer job. I worked on PCs, but most of the rest of the people in the company still used 3270-era terminals. Usually I would sit surrounded in auditory haze of clicky typing. Sometimes, it would gradually slow down, then dwindle off to a few isolated clicks. Finally somebody would yell “Are you on the clock?” (referring to the mainframe busy icon on the terminal's status bar). Then everybody would get up for a while and chat and have coffee until somebody yelled “It's back on!”

Learn to write by studying the writing of people who do it for a living: novelists, journalists, etc. Do this by reading books about writing, and by learning to read with a critical eye. Then read lots of novels, short-stories and essays, favoring those vetted by time and peers.

When I was taking scientific methodology courses in school, we were strongly encouraged to use the "recipe" approach. We were warned that thinking about the detailed meaning of the statistical results might lead to the introduction of bias. I applauded the intent, but even then I saw it as likely to cause problems by forcing a continuous spectrum of results into accept / reject quanta. So I agree that simply moving the thresholds cannot solve the problem. I think Bayesian statistics, while not a panacea, can offer a more nuanced and realistic approach approach. But the real solution, IMHO, is to make sure every researcher has a good foundation in a broad range of statistical techniques and theory.

It's not strictly a question of "easy." I consider the inside of a car engine a realm of dark, arcane mystery that I will never penetrate. However, cars are not "geeky" (at least the way most people approach them). To be a real geek you have to yearn after the abstract over the concrete -- logic that can run without hardware, etc., even if what results is some really cool hardware. A mechanic, on the other hand -- and I do *not* use the term "mechanic" perjoratively -- is enamored of the concrete, the feel of metal on metal. And that's the "geek" difference -- abstract more than concrete -- rather than difficulty.

It's a language from the days of wooden computers and iron programmers.

I'm a geek, I fit most of the "negative" stereotypes, and you know what: I kind of feel sorry for people who don't. Being a geek has rewards all its own that cool people will never know.

I'm a Kentuckian of several generations on both sides; I wrote my first computer program in Kentucky. It makes me happy to see our exchange is doing well. One thing about Kentuckians: we may not always know everything, but we know what we don't know and aren't generally too proud to try to remedy it given the means.

"There is no excuse for a site to launch in this condition." I could not possibly agree more. However, the reality is that, no matter how well planned or well funded an engineering enterprise, management, sales, and other issues almost always push it to release before it is ready. This has been a nearly universal experience for me in several decades of professional software and hardware product design in companies ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small startups. If you work in a shop where where your experience has been otherwise, count yourself blessed.

The web problems are unfortunate, but are to be expected and are managable. Most non-programming people don't realize that, even if they are early adopters, by the time they encounter a web site it is in essentially revision three or four or higher. And there are still problems then. What is needed is good backup on the human resources side (e.g. 800 numbers) until the bugs are worked out.

There are days when you wake up proud to have French ancestry.

One small quote from SICP sums up all one needs to know about programming and the history of computers: "When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun." --Alan J. Perlis

I think the situation is even worse today. Not only would the pencil+eraser patent be upheld, a patent troll would then sue both makers of plain pencils and plain erasers for infringing on parts of the patent.