Episodes I through III are only on here so our wise poll overlords can track down anyone who clicks on them, freeze them in carbonite, and ship them off to re-education camps.

Rigorous testing is helpful, but I think it's the wrong approach. The problem here was lack of requirements and/or rigorous design. In the physical engineering disciplines, much effort is done to think about failure modes of designs before they are implemented. In software, for some reason, the lack of pre-implementation design and analysis is endemic. This leads to things like Heartbleed - not language choice, not tools, not lack of static testing.

I would also go as far as saying if you're relying on testing to see if your code is correct (rather than verify your expectations), you're already SOL because testing itself is meaningless if you don't know the things you have to test - which means up-front design and analysis.

That said, tools and such can help mitigate issues associated with lack of design, but the problem is more fundamental than a "coding error."

They are memes in the sense that they are specifically finding words and phrases that are frequently inherited by papers (where "descendant" is determined by citation links), and rarely appear spontaneously (i.e. without appearing in any of the papers cites by a paper). An important feature is that their method used zero linguistic information, didn't bother with pruning out stopwords, or indeed, do any preprocessing other than simple tokenisation by whitespace and punctuation. Managing to come out with nouns and complex phrases under such conditions is actually very impressive. You should try actually reading the paper.

Actually no, they are not. By using citations to create a directed graph of papers they are specifically looking for words or phrases that are highly likely to be inherited by descendant documents and also much less frequently spontaneously appear in documents (i.e. not used in any of the cited documents). They really are interested in the heritability of words and phrases.

I'll stick with my Sirius Cybernetics Happy Vertical People Mover, thank you very much. It may be a bit unhinged, but damnit, it gets me where I need to go (well, when it's not sulking in the basement, anyway).

Wow, I actually didn't notice that until I saw your post. Total deal breaker, which is tragic, I was all about this phone up until the moment of realization. I constantly walk around with at least 2 64GB cards in my wallet, Get a phone with large internal storage, keep all my apps on the internal, have bulk data and media on the cards. Without a slot, my entire mobile storage strategy goes right out the window. This seems like an incredibly foolish design decision, and one that will turn away a large part of the phone's potential market, namely people like me who actually store lots of data (video, mostly, people always trip when you connect your phone to their TV and start playing quality HD movies instead of the trifling low-bitrate shit they're used to from Netflix and the like). The ones most likely to miss this feature are probably the same kind of folks who've been playing with Cyanogenmod for years, too (again, me). And seriously, what would a slot have done to the price of the phone? I'd happily pay the extra to have an SD slot.

Mine is similar - I have a GE AM/FM alarm clock radio with red LED segmented display, but mine is a bit newer - I got I think in 1993. 21 years is pretty good - 100% fully functional (go go pre-ROHS analog radio!) and still keeps accurate time. Only thing wrong with it is the tab on the 9V backup battery compartment broke, so the door falls off if you lift the thing off the nightstand. I refuse to keep my phone by my bedside, so I still use the alarm function.

Contrast to a new one - it was either Emerson or Panasonic, can't remember which - I bought while on an extended work trip where I was put up in an apartment. This was in 2008, and the clock was so inaccurate it would gain 15 minutes a month.

I'd rather choose "Make it easier for people to make their own widgets or form companies to make widgets."

IP laws, some zoning laws, licensing laws, tax laws, accounting laws, and the like all make both making your own stuff or forming companies difficult; limited availability of low-cost machine tools and education makes it difficult to do stuff yourself. These are the things I would reform, not minimum wage or windfall profits tax.

I was trying to avoid being specific about which "things" needed to "cost less" - because any specific list tends to have more problems than a blanket statement like "things"...

I suppose I could have been a bit more precise: when I said we don't need higher incomes but things to cost less, what I should have said was "things to cost less relative to income, regardless of level of income." That said, my original assertion still stands: raising minimum wage will not reduce costs of items relative to wage in the long run (in the immediate short term it does, granted; but prices for most goods change much faster than wages so catch up quickly.)

Incidentally, removal of barriers to market entry is exactly the method to "rein in" corporate profits: profits are a sign of an inefficient market. Huge profits can only exist when it is too hard for competitors to enter a market - no invisible hand necessary. (Note: "too hard" to enter a market doesn't always mean something like a regulatory barrier; if a company out-innovates others, that is also a type of barrier.)

Price floors have never worked in all of history; I don't know why people think a wage price floor is a good idea. At best, with minimum wage, the long term effect is "nothing".

We don't need people to have higher incomes; we need things to cost less.

Somewhere along the way, society went from improving standard of living by creating new efficiencies to improving standard of living by taking as much profit from others as possible. The former is a sustainable non-zero-sum game, where the latter is zero sum and results in massive wealth concentration.

Raising minimum wage won't reduce the cost of rent, won't reduce the price of a new car, won't reduce the price of a gallon of milk, won't reduce the cost of health care. The only thing that will reduce prices is removing barriers to entry for things that don't need barriers - not adding more barriers.

(I wish, for instance, one of the provisions of the ACA was a new medical school in every state for instance and/or reduced requirements for general medical practice - bumps and bruises kind of stuff. That would reduce costs, not simple spreading costs among more people.)

Give it another 10 years and the gap will be getting near the,"let's form an angry mob and kill the rich guy, we can feed the whole city off of what is in his house.

I don't know many rich people that have a food warehouse in their residence. People tend to forget that most of the wealth of rich people is "paper" wealth - it still has to be converted to real goods and services at some point in time.

In the extreme situation you proposed - how are you going to ensure that farmers are still going to be producing food, and food delivery people are still going to be delivering food, so that taking the stuff in a rich person's house can still "feed the whole city"?

If there is a situation as you describe - all that "paper" wealth of the rich vanishes immediately... so are they really wealthy? The wealth of the rich really does depend heavily on the willingness of the masses to participate...

As I said many, many times during OLPC's early years, they should have brought it to market globally as a secondary source of revenue and driver of innovation. Props to focusing on education products for the least-served, but the OLPC created the industry niche for netbooks (and arguably, then, tablets), and then after hyping it up, refused to enter the market. They quickly got lapped by hardware that wasn't as open or as rugged, but was available to anyone for a low price. Once the netbook market got churning with the usual for-profit entities, they rapidly blew the OLPC out of the water in almost every user-experienced feature.

I'm still sad about how that worked out.

"Papert and Negroponte distributed [computers] to school children in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal. The experience confirms one of Papert's central assumptions: children in remote, rural, and poor regions of the world take to computers as easily and naturally as children anywhere. These results will be validated in subsequent deployments in several countries, including Pakistan, Thailand, and Colombia. [...] Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization backed by a socialist government and staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the world. Besides, altruism has a credibility problem in an industry that thrives on intense commercial competition."

Oh, wait, wrong decade. That quote was from the 1992 attempt to do this with Apple II and Logo instead of OLPCs, Sugar, and Scratch.

My bad.