trying to build castles with toothpicks. If I moved the wrong way or wasn't utterly careful, the structure would fall.

If you are not careful when building castles out of rocks and bricks, they fall too. Many large buildings throughout history fell down during construction or shortly thereafter because the designers did not understand the required engineering principles. Software is the same.

If you want to throw together a shed, you can grab some some prefabricated bits and stick them together. If you want to build a castle, you need to understand and utilize the properties of rock, brick, mortar, and wood.

If you want to throw together a simple shell script, you can grab some snippets from stackoverflow and stick them together. If you want to build a more complex site (like /.) you need to understand a lot more. If you just take the latest design elements from the mock-turtleneck-and-crayons guys and shove them together, you end up with something like Beta.

It may encourage sprawl and sub-optimal land use, but the traffic congestion is caused by stupid zoning and heavy subsidation of private car usage. (Also designed to protect the haves and insiders.) Sprawl could still be accomodated by better zoning (interspersed commercial zones instead of alternating commercial strips and huge tracts of residential suburbs) and public transportation (instead of subsidized gas, cars, and roads).

Also a bad thing for people who want to stay in the home they have lived in for years but can no longer afford the increased property taxes.

That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.

They are poor because of their own incompetence, corruption, and lawlessness.

Why aren't we poor because of our own incompetence, corruption, and lawlessness?

Signature tables have far more advanced capabilities than a Wacom tablet or HTML5 canvas. They can record pressure and speed at points on the stroke so the resulting data can be used for analysis to compare signatures in case of a dispute. They can also do encryption in the device to cryptographically tie the signature data to a key fed to the device, typically a representation of the data or document being signed.

In my case, applets for doing signatures with USB signature tablets. Can't do that in JavaScript.

I wonder what the opposite of a 9/11 is to get government to act so swiftly?

Voting out all the incumbents.

New York State.

White does not always help. If you ride at night, use bright headlights and taillaights. I commute by bicycle and have lights on regardless of time of day. Too many drivers just do not pay sufficient attention.

In many places hit and run carries a lighter penalty than DUI, so often drivers have an incentive to flee. Hit and run should be a felony.

Does the other guy have a website? If so, create your own simple page with your CV, and put a note near the top "Looking for K. Ackle of Loudmouthville, TX? Click here."

Text files for configuration are great. I can version control them, copy them from one system to another, see meaningful diffs between them, and invidual applications can choose formats that are sensible for them.

Why on earth would I want to cram everything into a central repository?

It is not that the other people in the car are paying attention, it is that the sound quality is so much worse from your phone that your brain has to devote much more attention to parsing language.

People can get away pretty well navigating a road in light traffic, staying in the lane, and avoiding hitting other cars, which are large and easy to track and avoid without much attention. Which is all well and good until they hit pedestrians and cyclists.

The sound quality coming from other people in the car is great. The sound quality from your phone is compartively terrible. Your brain has to do a lot of extra work to parse language coming from a low-quality source, which impairs your ability to drive. I would be interested in a comparison between talking on the phone and listening to AM talk radio.

Do I get privacy if my mail is stored on a mail server in my house that I own? What if it is a colocated server that I own? What if it is a rented server? What if it is a VPS?