Err... Humans can't have aspirin anymore? Granted it's become less popular for pain relief now that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are available, but plenty of people are taking baby aspirin regularly for heart attack and stroke prevention.

In my experience, the most important emotional stance to have with respect to code is to care about the people who will depend upon that code. If you make their success your success, you will make the right decisions by them.

You needn't even legalized *everything*. You could legalize a reasonable cross section of relatively safe recreational drugs so that people could have the kinds of experiences they're seeking without having to become an armchair toxicologist.

Let us assume for the moment that intelligence is a single thing that can be precisely described by a single number.

Now imagine nobody has invented a way of measuring that number yet, so you set out to create an IQ test. You put together a number of tests and tasks, and assign various weights to each question and score. You administer the test to a bunch of people and the results seem reasonable.

Here's the question: how do you know you are actually measuring intelligence, and not something else that approximately correlates with it?

Alfred Binet, when faced with this problem, validated his test by correlating it with school achievement. This, at least, ensured that the test was at least somewhat useful in predicting school achievement. But it should be obvious that different kinds of people thrive in different kinds of schools, so at best tests calibrated this way are imprecise. We've all known underachievers and overachievers in school.

At their very best, IQ tests tell us what we expect to hear. That's actually more useful than it sounds, as long as we remember that we've calibrated the test to do just that. Test results must be *contrived* to correlate with things we're interested in. That mightinclude stuff like algebra and geometry, and arguing as in a legal brief, which are all valuable mental tasks. But it might not correlate to stuff like finding food in a forest during an unseasonable drought, or negotiating with a neighboring group, or evaluating the motives of strangers, all of which are tasks requiring mental acuity, and at which people differ in talent.

Using that argument, you could rip out CSS support altogether and save even more kLoCs. Every feature presents a practical problem to the maintainer; the question is the effect a feature has on the users.

Like I said, if practically nobody needs the feature, that's a strong argument for the old heave-ho. But the beef with regions seems to be that the feature is ugly and awkward, which it undoubtedly is.

It seems to me that a pragmatic willingness to force HTML to do what it's not particularly good at has been the key to its long term success -- not architectural purity.

I can see how regions doesn't fit in with the overarching theme of content/formatting separation of CSS3, but while it's unquestionably ugly philosophically, it's unclear to me how much of a *practical* problem that actually is. If you don't need CSS regions, then you can simply not use it and be every bit as pure as if the feature never existed at all.

On the other hand, if you *do* need the capability of CSS Regions, mixing postscript into your workflow, user experience, and site management seems like a very poor substitute to be able to do everything in HTML and CSS.

I think a reasonable case could be made that the number of people who need this feature is sufficiently small that given the complexity maintaining the feature, it's not worth keeping. However CSS Regions being aesthetically offensive seems a very weak justification for becoming *less* compliant with the standard.

Interesting, but I have no idea what I'm looking at.

By the way, the video above shows the second generation keyboard. The infamous "chiclet" keboard had no labels on the keycaps. The letter labels were on the surface of the keyboard between rows of keys, in order to permit overlays. That was a clever idea, but it wasn't going to fly in an era where mechanical switch keyboards were the norm.

Of course today crummy keyboards are the norm; I bet the second generation PCJr keyboard beats what most people are using these days.

I don't think this is entirely right. You'd see this scavenging behavior in modern hunter gatherer societies.

I think we tend to conflate a lot of things that nature of course does not, e.g. health and longevity with local carrying capacity. Paleolithic humans were evidently a very healthy bunch, judging from the skeletons they left behind. They were slightly taller than humans are today, and had a life expectancy that was unequalled until the 20th Century. This is indicative of a very high quality diet.

The thing you get with agriculture is the ability to support a larger population within a fixed area. With that you get all the stuff that requires scale: specialization in occupations, social stratification, and the power that comes with controlling a fixed population.

Well I *have* read the book and actually Viktor Frankenstein was *not* a doctor. He's an undergraduate *student* of natural philosophy who gets sidetracked into occult studies. He only became a doctor in the movies, which give the whole affair an anti-science spin, probably to cash in on peoples discomfort with anatomical research. The book is much less clear on exactly how Frankenstein constructs his monster, but it implies alchemy or other discredited pseudoscience is involved.

Sure... except we had our shares of total or partial failures in our unmanned space program too. The first *six* lunar probes in the 1960's Ranger program failed. We lost Mariners 3 and 8 and Mars Observer. Oh, and we cocked up Hubble's primary mirror because somebody installed a test jig backward, which shows how big missions depend on countless small things to go right.

Anyhow it's too early to count Jade Rabbit out. Glitches are a fairly regular feature of space missions, if you follow them. It's still quite possible they'll fiddle the thing back into operation.

Weasel words.

Well, the issue seems to be that they don't want to share their visitors with the computing museum next door which has important exhibits relating to the work at Bletchley Park. That seems awfully petty.

Oh, really? Maybe that has to do with the attitude people have towards public services. There are world class public schools in the US, but by in large they aren't in places like Kentucky.

Here's something to think about. Society doesn't educate you for *your* benefit. Not really.

And making schoolwork interesting is important, but as a means, not an end.