I don't think it's so simple as "refactoring is bad". I think i'ts more that 'stopping the delivery of new value to users is bad". Cleaning up as you go along is not only a healthy practice, actually accomplishing something new is healthy for refactoring. It keeps you focused on achieving flexibility that is actually needed as opposed to that which might be useful.

This is certainly true on paper. In practice California is tied together in ways that aren't easy to undo. Take, for example, disputes over water underlies some of the regional hostility; under the plan region 4 realistically can't gain control of its water resources. It still must supply region 3 and 5 with water lest they dry up and blow away.

A specialized state loses some economic flexibility; in a tech down turn they aren't as buoyed agriculture and vice versa. You lose some economies of scale; wineries in region 2 and farms in region 5 and 6 and biotech companies in region 3 lose access to the life sciences programs at UC Davis. People priced out of region 3 into region 4 will potentially pay income tax in two states.

For better or worse, California is made up of diverse regions that are uncomfortably tied together.

I'm sure if you grew up in San Francisco, you'd be delighted to clear out of your hometown and let the newcomers enjoy it. I remember San Francisco before the dot com boom. It had all the charm, but it was a lot more affordable to live there. Likewise I've seen Key West go from a place where funky people lived to a place where the people who serve you your drink have to commute from an hour further north.

I was once privileged to visit Hawaii on work. I say "privileged", because I got to work with Hawaiian people rather than just have them open my car door for me. One guy took me up to the mountain headwaters of the Lao Stream, where his uncle used to drop him from a footbridge into a deep pool. He used to inner tube from there down to the ocean then hitchhike back up to the state park. Now the lower reaches of the river look like this. Why? Because the pineapple plantations have been converted to condos, and the resulting immigration boom has sucked the river dry. Meanwhile higher housing prices have forced many of his childhood friends to move to California. And you think they're happy about that because their housing dollar stretches further in Fresno than Wailuku?

The reason the free market works so efficiently is that it is, in effect, an unbeatable rationing mechanism. It mercilessly restricts the consumption of goods and encourages the production of goods where demand his high. But what happens when you commoditize a community? When the thing that makes a place special is the people, and they can't afford to live there anymore? You end up with an EPCOT center replica of what the place used to be.

You can see this in a place like Waikiki. Sheraton has mall there which is called (without any intended irony) the "Sheraton Hawaiian Village". But you won't meet any Hawaiians there, unless they're twirling fire baton or cleaning your hotel room. It's really no different from an upscale mall in Palm Springs -- with a little more swimming, a little less golf.

Lesbians, by this logic, are God's chosen, since female-to-female transmission of HIV is extremely rare.

You live in rich country full of gun collectors who drive up the price for nice examples. In Africa, AK-47s can be had for around $300 [reference:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/06/12/looking_for_a_deal_on_ak_47s_go_to_africa#sthash.IpUFO50V.dpbs].

It's also possible that at certain situations (e.g., after a proxy war) markets in very poor countries may be flooded with very cheap weapons, with ak-47s selling for as little as $6 [reference http://archive.is/5gesc%5D. However this is obviously not a sustainable price; it only reflects a glut on the local market. Also, these aren't places you'd want to live, despite the occasional gun purchase bargain.

Same here. Had a T42 sitting on a high lab bench doing a big database update and somebody knocked onto the concrete floor. Aside from a hairline crack in the corner it landed on, it was perfectly fine.

Well, I was agreeing with you, but I took a slightly more skeptical position with respect to science fiction enthusiasts' actual knowledge of science. You suggested that science fiction writers might be in a slightly privileged position in comparison to artists because they have more of an understanding of nature. That may be true of *some* science fiction authors (e.g. David Brin, who is a working scientist), but by in large the science fiction community displays what to my mind is a deceptively superficial knowledge of science.

Take the lithium deuteride example. Yes, I agree a sci-fi writer is more likely to know offhand that it's used in thermonuclear bombs than an average artist. But that is really just a piece of technology trivia. It's not *working* knowledge. What's the difference? Working knowledge allows you to make valid inferences, or at least leads you in the right direction. As far as the author was concerned "lithium deuteride" might as well have been magic pixie dust. He didn't realize that it's usefulness is as a way of packing a lot of hydrogen (or rather deuterium) atoms into a confined space -- the very reason LiH is of interest for storage and transport of hydrogen to be used in fuel cells. If he *had* understood this, he could have done rough scaling calculations on th required mass for his hypothetical warhead. That would be an example of working knowledge; although it wouldn't man he knows anything about economics, or biology (often a weak spot in sci-fi in my opinion).

So in my opinion a science fiction author is not in a *privileged* position relative to an artist to have an opinion about things like economics; nor is he even in a privileged position relative to an artist to have an opinion about science. Not necessarily. For one thing I think you're selling short the intellectual abilities of artists. But the sci-fi writer certainly has a right to have and express opinions; they just aren't any more credible *because* he's a sci-fi writer.

Well, if you outlawed every form of argument a simpleton can misconstrue, you might as well cut your own tongue out.

Literature is great way of raising questions. It's a lousy way of *answering* them. You should never walk away from a book convinced of anything, whether it is science fiction, historical drama, or a Harlequin romance. That's because an author controls the domain of discourse in fiction. He creates the fiction world and as much of its history, natural science, and society as suits his purpose. He can produce a socialist utopia or a Galt's Gulch, whichever serves his story -- or his biases.

As for the science fiction fan's supposed knowledge of nature, I'd be suspicious of it. While it's true that sci-fi fans often have familiarity with physical science and technology that exceeds the general public, that's hardly a ringing endorsement. In my writing group, I recently critiqued a manuscript in which Shiite terrorists, working under a Wahhabist imam, build a lithium deuteride super-warhead and launch it on an ICBM into equatorial orbit to cause world-wide destruction of electronic equipment via EMP. Now virtually *every* aspect of this scenario is demonstrably *wrong*. When I pointed this out, the author's reaction was "It doesn't matter." Now there's something to be said for this. All he really needs is the set-up for his post-apocalyptic adventure, and it could just as well be magic and pixie dust as EMP and lithium deuteride. But I feel that as far as you explain anything, that explanation ought to hold water.

The thing about scientific literacy is that it isn't knowledge of a bunch of random, disconnected facts (e.g. lithium deuteride is used in thermonuclear warheads) as it is a capacity to figure things out, like whether it is remotely feasible to take out the entire world with EMP from a single warhead. Basic fact-finding and simple computation.

Exactly my thoughts. What need does this serve? Will it only be targeted at remote equipment (satellites, undersea rovers) which don't really need a phone or SIM card in the first place? Will accessible equipment still come with the write-once-read-mostly kind?

Well, that's enough information to confirm that DNA is not involved. While the methodology may be intrusive and problematic from an informed consent point of view, it's not as alarming as the police randomly stopping motorists to add their DNA to a surveillance database.

You know, there are other detectable substances in saliva and serum besides DNA.

If this is in linux, this might have something to do with ACPI. The firmware has a table called the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) which basically tells the operating system how to turn integrated peripherals like network cards off and on when going to sleep or waking up.

One peculiarity of the DSDT is that the ACPI specification allows it to include different instructions to different operating systems, and this is a common source of problems in linux installs. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) deliberately sabotage non-Windows operating systems in their DSDTs. Others simply deliver DSDTs that are untested and potentially buggy in non-windows operating systems.

Anyhow, an OS can switch devices off an on itself using ACPI, so I think ACPI may trump BIOS settings. One way to test this is to boot with ACPI turned off. If this fixes the problem of the mic being available even when disabled in BIOS, then you have and ACPI/DSDT problem. If not, then it is a design flaw in the machine's design (e.g. turning the mic off in BIOS simply turns the gain to 0) and you wasted your time reading this post.

How many people here (a) have read the Divine Comedy and (b) worked as a programmer? I'm sure I'm not the only one, but we've got to be a pretty small audience.

Who do you think is the analog of Beatrice? Or Francesca da Rimini from Canto V?

Awesome! I didn't know that the Science Patrol made music videos.

Twenty or thirty years ago there used to be people called "journalists" whose job it was to (a) collect enough data so you could figure out what happened, and (b) write it up in an intelligible story.

Look at the linked story *critically*. How does the "reporter" know DNA was being taken? What is his source for this, or is he just guessing?

This story is basically rumor -- passing along what's on the grapevine. There's no actual reporting here. If there were, that would answer the questions a reasonable person might have. For example: are the researchers collecting DNA or not? And who *are* these researchers? Can we get a name please? Or an institution?

Back in the day a reporter would have identified the researchers and called them up for an interview, or at least a statement from the research institution's public affairs office. He'd look up the grant in the federal records and find out whether or not the researchers had been granted money to collect DNA and what they are being paid to do with it (yes, you can do that!). He'd may even have interviewed people on the institutional review board (required by US law) that approved the project.

But the "reporter" in this case did none of this. She appears not to have done *any* verification or independent research. A story like this would take a real reporter two or three days to nail down, not two or three phone calls.

I'm not saying some horrendous violation of civil liberties could not have taken place, I'm saying the writer of the article didn't do enough work for anyone to decide what did or did not happen. This is not reporting, it's *blogging* under a byline.