It doesn't matter how much money you spend here, by staying only here you are committing the species to a single point of failure. Fault tolerant design requires the elimination of single point failure architecture, particularly if the detection and correction of the failing element is difficult or impossible prior to failure.

We are pretty bad at detecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces. Said dangerously large rocks have the potential to kill every one of us in one event. There is no safe mitigation, there is no localized preparation that can eliminate the risk. Parallelism is the only idea that provides the proper redundancy. Extra-solar would be better, but we can't reasonably achieve that yet. We also might not be capable of colonizing Mars yet, but we should all get behind the fact that we really need to.

I wish to live in a world where this is funny, because right now it's a little too on point.

I switched to a Note 2 from my old iPhone 3GS, because I wanted more screen real estate, and it was a huge adjustment. Took me about a month to get used to the size (mow the 3GS seems laughable). After almost two years I'm still not OK with Android, but it was worth the annoyance for the larger size. I'd give it a little time...particularly give it long enough to determine if you actually need your tablet any more. I certainly didn't.

Well, software development is about many stakeholders. You, as the developer, are one of those stakeholders. Yes, the customer has a set of requirements, but you have a set of requirements as well. You make technical decisions every day based on those requirements whether you have explicitly enumerated them or not.

My read on this is that it's a set of governing principles for making implementation decisions about how you write code. As such any one of these guiding principles can be set aside to accomplish specific requirements they might conflict with, but where they don't conflict they should guide decision making.

From that perspective I guess they are helpful, if kind of obvious, guidelines. They seem kind of asymmetric though..."use message passing" is a pretty specific choice, where "elastic" is vague to the point of uselessness. On the whole I guess this seems like someone who really likes message passing and is tired of trying to justify the extra overhead every single time it comes up.

Yeah, hacking. You know, that thing you do to underbrush with a machete. And about that subtle from the sounds of it.

Scott Adams predicted this many years ago, and I still agree with his analysis.

I believe the action is question is more proximal than the medial influence you infer.

Pshhh! That's what *they* want you to believe.

I got through about 2.5 years of college before I was too poor to continue. I lucked out, got a job doing exactly the type of programming I wanted to do (custom automation control systems) but making next to nothing doing it (about $15k/year). Eventually being poor got old and I took a job with a "real" company making $60k. Six months in they bumped me to $68k and took me on as a full time employee.

Eventually I went back and finished my degree (BS in Comp Sci). I lost my job at almost the same time I finished the degree (I wasn't willing to move then the company did). That's why I know that the degree gave me a 10-15% bump in pay.

I learned almost nothing in college about programming. To this day I am of the belief that it is a certificate attesting that when told to do something silly you have the fortitude to actually get it done. Oh, and maybe you have the ability to learn new things...maybe. In the end I'm glad I got it, but only because of what it means to other people. Directly to me it means almost nothing.

So, you want Google to provide a service where you can pay them not to do something to hurts you? That must be a totally new concept. No, wait...

This is why I asked about his opinion on the Money vs. Speech question. If he honestly believes money isn't speech then it's now a constitutional issue, since the Supreme Court has essentially decided Money == Speech. If he believes money is speech then legislating a restriction on money won't (now) pass constitutional muster. In either case legislation appears to be a losing proposition (long term at least).

I'd love to hear your opinion on the debate over Money as a form of Speech. Should expenditure of money be protected as a form of expression or restricted as a form of coercion (just like some forms of speech are)? How are speech and money similar and how are they fundamentally distinct?

So the ability for one app to provide extensions that other apps can use to render specialized content?

Flash support in 3..2..1...

This, right here, is the point. I can type in text in just about any editor ever created. But navigating through a pile of code I don't know, to find how it's structured, its call chains, what data belongs to which subsections? That's where a good IDE provides true value to me.

I use SlickEdit because it has the most functional code navigation I've found. Ctrl-/ and a sub-windows shows me every reference to a symbol, in a tagged list showing each reference, by file, and information about where it was referenced (in what scope) and how (defined, declared, called, assigned, read, other). Click on one of them and I'm taken to that reference. Ctrl-. and I'm taken to the definition of the symbol my cursor's on; Ctrl-, and I'm back where I came from (to an arbitrary depth). I use this to navigate through unfamiliar code following through call chains and data structures. 20 years ago I used grep, a text editor and a whiteboard (foo.c:782, foo.h:94, foo.c:122, bar.h:15, qux.s:343), but never again.

I don't get it...are you trying for a revenge kill via saccharine overdose? If so: impressive work. I think I'm diabetic now.