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.

Some guy took a crack at answering that question. Or more accurately, he claimed to take a crack at it; he never actually got around to answering it. It occurred to me the questioner does have a point, though.

What is computer science, anyhow?

Ban signs advertising gas prices visible from the roads. Oh, it's not a total solution, but it would certainly turn the volume of kvetching down if people didn't see every twist and tumble of a commodity's price.

It's been a bit quiet here because I've been very busy. My long waiting game is over and I finally have a new job with Barracuda Networks. They are most famous for their effective spam firewall appliance, but I'll be working on the IM Firewall appliance (which may be slightly misnamed; it provides IM server services and ships with a client, it's not just a "filter"). They're opening an office in Ann Arbor, but to interview I had to fly out to California, and I'll be spending some time in Cali before the office opens.

A dream I once described here: I dreamt that somebody came up with a symbol that would cause you to die if you looked at it. I’m not sure exactly what the symbol was, but it was an 8 by 8 grid of single-digit numbers and a few lines. (Matrix mathematicians beware!) The funny thing is this: Nobody believed it when told. They’d demand to see it, snatch it out of the person’s hands, and as they are collapsing to the ground loudly declare, “See, I told you so.

The last five minutes of St Elsewhere is the only television show, ever. Everything else is a daydream. - Dwayne McDuffie

The best argument against the War on Terrorism is that terrorism simply isn't enough of a threat to be worth the resources we're pouring into it. On the balance, in a universe that permits things like nuclear weapons, I'm not quite willing to bet the farm on that argument, but I certainly think it's well within the field of factually-viable opinions on the issue. Bolstering the "terrorists really can't be large-scale threats"

Holy cow. That's not a special one, either, they all look like that. (And the humor's pretty good, too.)

I just saw a Pepsi commercial that claims that "56% of people think that Diet Pepsi has more cola flavor than Diet Coke." Considering that the "null hypothesis" would be "50%", that's one of the least impressive endorsements I have ever seen on television. (Sure, since we don't have access to the full details, that may be a test that had more than two options. But still... as endorsement goes, that is tepid.