A popular satirical article examining the idea of executing virus writers is offending a lot of people in a number of ways... but it's offending a lot of people for the wrong reason.
First and foremost, hello, satire! ("...a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.")
Today, I'm going to answer some of the fan mail I receive for this site that has been backing up. I figure, why write something to one person when you can write it to everyone at once? Cuts some effort out of the repetition. But I get so many fan mails (1,500 in the last ten days!) that I can really only answer a sampling, and to keep things short, I can only really respond to the titles. Here we go:
import random
def accountreplace(s):
account = ''.join([str(random.randint(0,9))
for x in range(random.randint(15,20))])
return s.replace("#%RND_DIGIT[15-20]", account)
I've seen this sort of stupidity from you several times. Don't you think
you should stop embarassing yourself?Frontier will apparently be open source in the near future. I've actually spent a significant time with the product, and I have an interesting perspective on this issue as I have a project started in no small part because of the closed nature of the Frontier code. (A project, I might add, that I really, really, really wish I could get back to, but a guy's gotta eat.)
So I ask myself, as someone who might be interested in developing the product, what does an Open Source Frontier bring to the table?
In response to Amritas post on scientific theories, referenced in this Den Beste post, after thinking about it I realized I would go one step further. Amritas quotes Stanley Starosta:
The easiest way to construct a powerful theory is simply to state that everything is possible, and the result, mirabile dictu, will be a theory which can never be disproved. If I have a theory of gravity which states that a falling object can fall in any direction, who can prove me wrong? Any way it falls will be OK with my theory, and falling down instead of up will just be a special instance of the range of phenomena allowed by my theory.
Google has been increasingly spotty for me the past few days, and now I can't get through to it at all. It's been nearly a week since I could get through to Google Groups (where I'm trying to retreive a post I made to comp.lang.python with some code in it a while back), and the main search engine has been coming and going for a while. Now I can't even get to the home page at all.
A fellow weblogger recently challenged me in a series of emails we were sending to defend my thesis that the news is leftward biased. It was a fair question, and I am still content with the answer I sent him: Yes, I believe the news is left-biased right now, but it is only partially intentional. I thought it would be worth expanding on that point in a 'blog post.
Since "Left" and "Right" need to be defined nearly every time you use them, for this post I am using the broadest and most general definition of "Left" and "Right" that we are used to. Left: Liberal, welfare, no war, etc. Right: Conservative, much less social spending, war in Iraq. A nebulous concept of "Left" to match the nebulous concept of "media".
This is a whimsy post. See this slashdot post for why, and be sure to read the whole story.
Den Beste has a post up I have to point to, because as near as I can tell without somehow reaching into his mind, we share to a high degree the rare form of thinking he refers to.
It is peculiarly well-suited to software engineering (which I believe he has done some of, though I can't find a link quickly). You can never, ever, ever quash all bugs in advance, but this sort of thinking allows you to spot the fundamental architectural failings far enough in advance to be able to do something about it, and those are the hardest bugs to fix after the fact. Many is the time I would appear to be zoning out, or drawing random, barely-labelled squiggles on paper, and then pop out with something very near The Answer.
I didn't see all of the first part, so we confine this to the second part.
5. Oh, the clichés were out in full force today, but I think I'm going to pick the two contradictory clichés thrust together by the same character, no less: First, the President says, in response to an aide saying "Sir, there are some things we just must accept we have no control over.", "I don't accept that!". Later, the President gives us a nice stereotypical "This is Mother Earth and she shall do to us as she pleases" speech, with no indication that this is the result of learning or a new-found respect or anything... he's just preaching. (Hollywood, considering you just fell into the ocean, I don't think you're in a position to be preaching.)