The US Federal Government has the famous "Checks and Balances" system in play. Rather than strictly partitioning the three branches, each branch has a certain amount of power over the other, usually in the form of stopping the other branch from doing something. Many State and lower governments are also built on this model, to one degree or another. (I would imagine it's most or all state governments, but I don't know enough to say that.

This post is basically a diary entry about being in California and how it's going out here for me. Y'all are free to read it, 'cause it's all bloggy and all, but I'll keep it out of the RSS but for this snippet.

Tomorrow as I am flying across the country, I shall (at least for a bit) be playing Etrian Odyssey.

I find playing an old-school dungeon crawler at 34,000 feet amusingly ironic.

If you filed off the serial numbers and re-worked the graphics and (minimal) story a bit, you could call this the Bard's Tale IV. It's hard, it's tricky, and it Wants You To Die. It doesn't actually cheat, or at least I haven't seen it cheat so far. But be careful opening doors if you're not ready for what's on the other side.

What's almost as intriguing as the game is the reaction it has received online.

You can't have reward without risk. It's almost a law of economics, and it is incorporated into our psychology at a deep level. Witness gambling or extreme sports, and those are just two of the behaviors you might think of where almost the entire joy is in the taking of the risk itself.

(Warning, this rambles.)

IM IN YR LOOP, INCRMENTNG YR VRS (OK, as a bone to my non-programming readers, consider the natural evolution of pet pictures on the web. It actually seems to have a consistent, emergent grammar. It doesn't meet the technical requirements of a Pidgin language, but it bears a certain resemblance; call it a faked pidgin. Gaim (open source IM client) recently renamed itself to Pidgin, and despite using a pigeon as a logo, pidgin is where the name came from.

Dear automotive marketing firms: Please stop "introducing" cars. It's so cliché I'm starting to twitch every time I hear it. (Hooray TiVo!)

As soon as I title this myth, it's obvious what's wrong with it. Yet a good two out of three times on the Internet, when I see someone complain that the US is not a democracy, they're not making the pedantic point that it's actually a Republic. They're actually saying "it's not a democracy", and the proof they hold up is that the US isn't doing something that they happen to want, or is doing something they don't want.

I want to be clear about my purpose here. My point is not to claim that the uniqueness of programming is itself unique. Every interesting field is unique in its own special way. For each field, it is helpful to understand why it is unique if you wish to truly excel, or you may bring inappropriate concepts from other domains in, or export inappropriate programming concepts to other domains. I say that programming has several unique aspects and that these aspects are worth thinking about, but this does not mean that programming is privileged somehow.

Re this ABC News leak that the Administration has not yet denounced: As I was reading the original article yesterday, it immediately occurred to me to wonder if it was even true, or if the leak itself was most of the covert op. Given the paranoia exhibited by the leadership of Iran (the entire world is run by a small cabal of Zionists, etc.), it could be an effective strategy just to claim that we're going to begin large-scale covert ops, and see if they start eating themselves from the inside.

Suppose one day I walk up to you and offer you a single pill that would make it as if you were exercising perfectly every day, without the actual need for exercise. Sit on your butt and play video games all day or go outside and run a mile for the sheer joy of it, no difference; your body in both cases would respond as if you were exercising well.

The most common complaint about software is that it is "too buggy". The question is, "What does too buggy mean?" People making this complaint are often holding software to absurdly high standards, even when making comparisions to other engineering disciplines. In fact, bridges do fall down. Architects fail; often the designs can be seen to fail and corrected or maintained before catastrophic collapse, but it happens. Software is no more likely to be absolutely perfect than any other human endeavor.

Software is an engineering concern, and one of the things that means is that you can't have anything for free. If faced with the choice between a $100 piece of buggy or incomplete software, and a $50,000 piece of production-quality bullet-proof highly-tested quality software, it's unfair to complain that the $100 piece of software is buggy and incomplete.