revolvingcur's comments

I don't doubt that your connection is still live, but if you issue a new request, you'll get a 404 page.

Were you able to successfully download it? The link has since become unavailable.

1) Images have been stored and leaked. 2) Individuals' genitals have been ridiculed. 3) Manual patdowns have caused at least one reported instance of an emotionally disturbed reaction.

I'm all for questioning hyperbolic claims on both sides of the issue, but when there are facts in support of one side, and a dearth of support for the other side, we will draw conclusions.

1) There has been no information forthcoming about increased safety due to usage of said devices. 2) There has been no forthcoming information about acceptable levels of exposure to the device. 3) The installation of the devices was motivated by incidents such as "the underwear bomber." Such reactionary measures necessarily do not anticipate the emergence of future threats, while additional resources allocated to intelligence provably does.

It's unfortunately not easy to do with Chrome either (with or without extensions). I wound up downgrading to Firefox 3 from beta 4 to get back to the more mature plug-ins that make this light work.

As has been mentioned, the volume rocker on the iPad already allows "quick muting" - holding the volume decrease button decreases the volume linearly for about a half-second, then jumps immediately to mute.

I have personally always hated this behavior, but the hardware mute switch neither corrects nor exacerbates this problem.

Having said that, I strongly prefer using the toggle for muting and placing the orientation lock in the tray: orientation locking is done while the unit is in use, and getting to the tray is fairly easy (double-press Home and swipe right). Muting on the other hand, should ideally be available while the unit is locked.

To save you the trouble, of the websites listed: Pollground now redirects to SodaHead. Xobni is still alive and kicking. The rest are either parked, dead, or offline.

Ramen noodles, actually.

I didn't get correct answers for any of the "temperature math" problems I gave it. Something's screwy on the back end.

What makes fundamental physics an exception to your rule? How fundamental would a "model" need to be to no longer be a model? It seems to me that the explicit purpose of physics is to create ever more detailed models of what happens next at various degree of detail, but there's no "there" down there to ultimately declare as actual reality, just our empirical descriptions (models).

This isn't a hack. It's vandalism. It requires no creativity or unauthorized access. Just a lack of scruples.

Yeah. I'm cherry-picking here, but if the creator of the language says something like the following, it's probably a bad sign.

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I'll just restart apache every 10 requests."

But because that could sound like either DHH or Rasmus Lerdorf, there's also this:

"I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."

The lack of overall direction and ball-o-mud hackery is exactly what one would expect to underlie PHP in its present state.

I'm not sure your example proves your assertion. This isn't sarcasm, I simply don't follow your reasoning. I will acknowledge, though, that the scriptures certainly do assert (Hebrews 11:1) the distinction between faith and proof.

I was using the word "prove" ironically. My actual contention was that believers lack not just proof, but also reason. They act certain, but cannot explain their certainty except with self-referential argument. It was this inability to maintain coherence that finally undid my faith.

Pascal's Wager is ridiculous. It is rooted in a false dichotomy and attempts to salve the conscience by the acceptance of a contradiction.

From someone raised in the Christian church:

I was taught from a very young age certain things about God and man: that God was all-knowing and all-powerful; that God was the creator of everything; that man was irrevocably prone to sin and therefore needed a savior; that God chose certain people to save; that heaven was the ultimate destination for those who were saved; etc...

As I grew older, I began to realize that other people had substantially different beliefs from the ones with which I had been inculcated. This was a realization only because I had been intentionally isolated from people who thought differently from my parents and educators. I noticed that what these different belief systems had in common was their moral program. All Abrahamic religions, and many others, prescribe how people ought to behave. But this moral program is not much different from common sense under conditions of abundance. The ways in which they differ are more interesting and are mostly tuned to ensure their adherents perpetuate the system.

So, with this in hand, it became readily apparent that the bulk of organized religion was a historical artifact from the time when peoples of old were figuring out how to treat one another (back at the emergence of what we term "civilization"). It is possible (and in my opinion, now necessary) to separate moral education from religious indoctrination since, ironically, much of the unrest in civilization is now caused by the differences in religious prescription rather than differences in morality.

Either that, or religious thought reeks of delusion and lacks any evidence whatsoever for what it claims. Seriously, I don't know any religious person who can demonstrate any reason for their belief other than indoctrination. Prove me wrong.

I hated using the Rosen book in undergrad. Concrete Mathematics would have been fine as the sole text for such a course.

My iPad has never generated much heat at all on its own. I've received temperature warnings when I used it in direct sunlight for 20 minutes, but it never even gets warm to the touch with regular use.

Apparently the error and response time graphs are expressed in dimensionless units of relative suckiness.

It's pretty, but does it have any significant physical interpretation? I.e., what are the actual behaviors of the system that emerge from the given rules?

If you're on a Mac, the demo doesn't work in latest Chrome or Safari, but does work on Firefox 3.6. Just to save you the frustration.

Looks like it got deaded. I won't link it obviously, but in my opinion, the exchange is a matter of public record now and I support it remaining here.