Pointing out that it is not quite the same as drunk driving is an argument for what, exactly?

As texting while driving is clearly dangerous, this is irrelevant.

No, it is the act of putting others in grave danger for no good reason that is considered immoral.

Several commentators have said that reviews are better than comments, but this is no argument against commenting, as they are complementary and synergistic activities. I have found in practice that reviews without prior documentation are almost worthless, and generally not cost-effective.

1) Having the author write down an explanation of her code saves the time of half a dozen reviewers trying to figure it out. This, alone, is justification enough for pre-review documenting.

2) The alternative, having the author try to improvise an explanation in a review meeting, and have the reviewers follow along, leads to incorrect assumptions going overlooked or unchallenged, and may degenerate into confusion.

3) As others have pointed out, the author is likely to find some errors as a result of documenting the reasoning behind her work, leading to fewer failed reviews, and consequently, fewer repeats.

4) If the reviewers don't fully understand the whys and what-ifs of the code being reviewed, the exercise degenerates into a search for coding standards violations.

5) Comments, if both relevant and correct, save a lot of time in future whenever that code needs to be understood. While this is not the most important case where this matters, it includes when reviewing changes to that code, and any other work where its correctness is conditional on the prior code. Having the commented code and other documentation being part of reviews helps meet the relevant and correct criteria.

My experience is that when I write out an argument, I quite often notice weaknesses, incompleteness or outright errors that had not occurred to me before, so writing it down is very useful even if no-one else reads it. This is particularly true for nontrivial arguments that have several cases, lemmas etc. Based on what I have seen of other peoples' work, there are quite a few people for who this is so. In short, writing it down forces you to review and allows you to handle complexity.

Apologies if this has been said before, but it's worth repeating: if you value the objectivity and research of the best of the 'old' journalism, consider subscribing to an organization that still practices it.

Trust a theologian to prefer fanciful ideas which conform to his a priori prejudices, over an alternative which better explains the observations in the light of what is already known. Given Haught's actual engagement in the debate, and his prior endorsement of recording it, it strains one's credibility to believe that he is embarrassed to be caught swatting at gnats. A simple common-sense understanding of human nature, and a shave by William of Ockham (there's a rational theologian for you, at least for one brief moment) leaves embarrassment at being outwitted as the most plausible explanation for his stance, by a wide margin. Of course, it is not entirely plausible that you put much weight in the gnat argument, either. Rather, it looks like a contrived excuse for you to make snide remarks about atheists, just as your first suggestion looks like a contrived excuse for making snide remarks about Catholics. You should note that if it wasn't for a host of theologians using deceitful methods in an attempt to suppress real science, there wouldn't be anyone, neither scientists nor atheists, talking about the issue. The creationism/evolution debate, for rational minds, was settled in the nineteenth century.

Apologies if this has already been said, but Rabel's 'Gaines Center for the Humanities' gets funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That's who to complain to, especially if you think Rabel's threat of legal action is way out of line.

Given the ' funny' posts above, this definitely deserves 'witty'.

Just because an example was given, it does not mean that the issue collapses to that one point. Man Eating Duck is correct to say that it depends on what you want to do.