Actually, belay that... Lockhart argues for elegance as aesthetics and even rants against schematic arguments. I'm not sure that anyone cares about the point this guy is trying to make.

I feel Mr. Lockhart's pain here, but this piece has little explanatory value because he goes on for so long without simply stating what the problem is.

There are some fields that are not aesthetic in any way but where where the work is very creative. These are fields that are technical, but where the work is not just a matter of working out obvious consequences of the premises -- fields where you need inventiveness and lateral thinking because you need to be able to come up with solutions that no one has thought of before.

Some education systems basically split students into aesthetic and technical paths, and then, confusing aesthetics with creativity, direct all the students who show signs of creativity down the aesthetic path, train the aesthetic students that math (or anything rigorous) is not worth their trouble to learn, and train the technical students that using unconventional, creative approaches to solving problems is risky and should be avoided. These education systems might accomplish many good things, but one thing they don't accomplish is producing people who are going to publish the next major groundbreaking proof, build revolutionary new algorithms, etc.

It's almost like their only value is... creating value for their shareholders.

I've concluded in the past couple of years that large parts of Microsoft as an organization have stopped being able to coherently sell to the end user market, and whatever people in the management that would have in the past noticed this sort of thing and taken steps to correct it have left or moved on to other roles.

Signs of things slipping I've personally noticed in recent years:
- The faulty Microsoft web-based store (do they expect developers whose first experience with Microsoft is a web site that can't even sell a Windows upgrade are going to turn around and want to build things on ASP.net?)
- Contradictory descriptions of the different Windows SKUs (with respect to use as upgrades, new machine installs, usability by end users vs. system integrators, etc.)
- Software with seriously flakiness in features that worked in previous versions (e.g. Windows 10 Start Menu search and keyboard navigation), with broken help links, without an integrated installer (e.g. Lync, Sharepoint)

By "it" there I meant the credit card industry.

The PCI DSS is a set of basic set of system/network administration goals related to security. It means what it means. It doesn't mean that known vulnerabilities have been patched, or that specific security measures have been taken to secure card data. It does mean that system default passwords have been changed, that users have unique IDs, and that there is some kind of auditing going on.
It's a fair assessment IMO to say it's a "veneer" that is going to continue to allow giant breaches because it doesn't prescribe specific security measures. But it is definitely related to security.

I should also add: In many cases, it's all there is ever going to be in terms of policy. While most sophisticated organizations are in a position to hire staff who know and understand normal security practices and will allow them to be put into place, there are as many transactions going through those as through small businesses where no one knows anything about network security and no one would ever do any reading to learn about anything under any conceivable circumstance. The PCI DSS is as much a security policy as it is a message to the public about how little security it thinks is actually achievable in real businesses.

This case is a journey into barely touched judicial territory of things like civil aiding and abetting and first amendment civil law.

I think Americans' (rightful) pride in the First Amendment has blinded many to the fact that legislators have basically stopped paying attention to the whole area of speech, and so there's a huge amount we'll-know-it-when-we-see-it arbitrary case law around things like free vs. criminal speech, what speech acts are protected from civil liability, etc.

Didn't I read about this already like 2 years ago?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

"when the document is rendered by a Reading System without scripting support or with scripting support disabled, the top-level document content must retain its integrity, remaining consumable by the User without any information loss or other significant deterioration."

- http://www.idpf.org/epub/301/s...

I mean how many grandmothers can one person have?

I suspect that's an industry with exactly the right amount of gigging. It's a buyer's market for employees loaded with excess optimism! Sure, not every employee is naive enough to believe in the future of their fake full-time position, but I think we have to accept that many are, and most people in a management role aren't altruistic enough to tell others hard truths when it is just going to lead them to hire (potentially worse) people sooner.

Is there open source software to use an x86 machine as a 61131 PLC, I wonder? Companies that are going to decide to solve the problem with a computer they can pick up for 400€ at the local FNAC could at least be pointed in the direction of a more maintainable solution.

If astronauts' immune systems suffer ill effects due to microgravity, I wonder: Are they more at risk of infection due to these bacteria while in the space station, or after they are exposed to the Earth environment again just after they get back home?

If stone age people turned up in my steel age country I'd gladly trade them my house for their time machine.

Don't get me wrong... I think Apple's closed platform and ridiculous incremental prices for storage continue to alienate many power users, and that is the gift that keeps on giving for their competition (both in terms of market share and developer support). But when it comes to their business it is not 'a strategic mistake' but rather the opposite -- they've spent the last 8 years doing essentially the same thing on this front, and they can cry all the way to the bank if they want to, but it's hard to change the formula when they have tens billions of dollars every year riding on it.