Engineers solve real-world problems: when they make simplifying assumptions, they try to avoid transparent falsehoods like "a market functions with perfect transparency," and "all players in a market behave rationally." Hell, there's no way to even check the latter statement for truth: destroying a major company to build your relatively minor personal fortune may or may not be rational. If any solid engineering had been invested into the mortgage market of the past decade, the ultra-rich would not have cleaned up by throwing the economy into turmoil. Yet somehow, they have been able to do so, and if anybody ever goes to jail for this type of fraud, it will be a pawn like you.

Occasionally, engineers do fuck up [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_%281940%29]], but when you look at major economic events from the eighties [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26L_crisis]], nineties [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron]], and today [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap]], it seems slanderous for you to mention your particular brand of snake-oil in the same sentence as "engineering."

Trust your barber
To plug your holes
Trust him to make more

Are you seriously trying to blame your wife's bad cooking on veganism?

Mod parent and grandparent up! When I saw No Country For Old Men, it quickly became obvious to me that Anton Chigurh had discovered the most humane way to interact with other people. I've followed his lead, and I've had no complaints yet (and no survivors either).

I don't understand why this story has more than 250 comments. If some random huckster's choices make you question whether to eat store bought meat, why not just quit eating meat entirely? That's what I did 20 years ago, and I have no regrets.

So why don't you stuff it then? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muQJwHrCfAo

I don't think it works that way: the top Indian scientists are already here. Can you name any Indian university that's in the same league as MIT, Stanford, and CMU? Do you know of any Wall Street firm that only hires native born quants? Scientists know that they are all in the same boat globally, because they all end up at the same conferences. What's holding back you, Osgeld, from rooting for your peers?

The question isn't whether to reward people who produce knowledge and culture, but how to do so. Are we putting enough resources towards and AIDS vaccine, or do we need more penis pills? Are we putting enough resources towards original storytelling, or do we need more reality TV shows and big budget movies based on 80s cartoons? Do we need to criminalize artistic appropriation and the free exchange of scientific thought? I say no, what we are doing is not working.

Along similar lines, google is a big part of the internet, and the MPAA isn't: if an ISP simply de-peers google, will they suddenly have to pay for all their youtube traffic?

True enough, but only because modern corporate monopolies understand the value of outsourcing.

I wish that I understood what you are saying. In real life, I see used sports cars up for sale with fully adjustable suspension and free flowing exhaust that have supposedly never seen an autocross or track day. Why? What is the appeal in perfectly setting up a car for a drive that you never intend to take?

Absolutely.

No really good API was the result of a single insight. Good APIs have to accrete over decades. Consider how long it took to get from early Lisp's mapcar to Haskel's foldl, foldr, and list comprehensions. The Java API is pretty good, but mostly because it is unoriginal.

This question assumes that it makes sense to copyright an API. I don't think that it does. Or are you saying that Harmony might have directly copied Sun's implementation? If so, I'll have to wait for more details from the trial.