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I don't understand the legal or ethical rationale that these scooters are different from any other items discarded on the sidewalk.

This is different from leaving your personal scooter for a few minutes while you shop, or from someone accidentally dropping their wallet or phone. If you intentionally strew things around in public and leave them there, why shouldn't anyone do with them as they like? How is this not littering for profit?

The reasoning of, "I left this thing on the sidewalk...I have no plans to come back for it any time soon...I hope someone comes along and wires me money to use it for a bit then drops it somewhere else...but don't you dare touch it unless you pay me!" seems specious.

That is not part of the social contract. No one has a reasonable expectation to use the sidewalk as an unattended warehouse or storefront for as long as they like. At best, this is gaming the question of what is or isn't abandoned property.

> The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho?

I've seen that blog posted here before. I'm pretty sure that in the original, the follow up post mentioned offhandedly, "Sadly, Ofer was killed by a robber..." without any reflection on his self defense philosophy.

"It made him sick to have to turn money over to the guys who stole it. He'd rather whack 'em." -Goodfellas

> I think a lot of boys do aspire the adrenaline rush professions. But if they don't end up being one, do they now resign from their whole lives and just go saying the social persuasions to be such, destroyed their whole lives?

(This is very tangential to the overall discussion, but) I'd say that practicing a team sport a lot around ages 8-15 is an excellent thing for a kid to do. It's good for fitness, for thinking on your feet, for working towards a team goal, and (if you really grok the game) for learning how to outsmart an opponent in a zero-sum situation.

So, when little Billy gets cut from the school team and his NBA dreams are shattered, it still will have been worthwhile. I'd vastly prefer that my kids aspire to be pro athletes than models.

The comment you reference was made in July 2010. The bug report that triggered the banning was made a week ago, and just sounded petulant. It didn't make any personal statements about anyone.

Nursing a grudge against someone for a year, banning him for a grumpy bug report, then spamming discussion threads with hand-wringing about what a toxic abusive bully he was really seems like a waste of time to me. I guess you can "coordinate" your community however you like, though.

> The goal is not to determine what is objective fact. There is no such thing, not even in natural sciences such as physics. Dont forget that.

I'm not sure where you're going with that; follow that line of thought too far and you end up with solipsism.

Practically speaking, sure there are objective facts. The properties of mechanics and electromagnetism are facts, or close enough for everyday purposes. What happens when you throw a ball or turn on a light is not a cultural construct.

re: history, sure, no person has the Pure Truth, and any history reflects the viewpoint of its author(s). It's still useful to distinguish between things that happened and things that didn't happen.

For instance, World War II did not begin when Queen Mab, having been cast out of the Garden of Eden by Shiva, built a clone army in her underground fort in Antarctica then invaded Loompaland. That simply didn't happen.

It seems to me that there are objective facts; we just can't know them perfectly. Still, it's very useful to try to get an approximation.

Sure, technology is great and all, but the historical analysis is simplistic.

> A patrician in ancient Rome might be able to make a name for himself around his neighborhood over the course of his lifetime.

Caesar, Spartacus, Cicero, and Cato are known over 2000 years after they lived. They are among the most famous people ever to have lived.

Our modern day "kings and emperors" retain vastly greater power and influence than we commoners, and they have the best command & control and surveillance systems in history. It is not at all clear whether information technology advances of the last century have contributed more to democratization or consolidation of power, Twitter notwithstanding.

You may be thinking of Cleitus. The Diogenes and Alexander story usually ends with Alexander telling his entourage, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

Every band that's ever gotten popular, every community (online or off) that's ever gotten big. Lamenting that the scene was cooler back in the day seems to be a deep-seated human behavior.

I'm not sure what sexism you mean specifically, but my skepticism has nothing to do with the specifics of the persona. Of course there are 16-year-old girl hackers. My wife once was one.

I doubt that the character is really a 16-year-old girl because she's telling Forbes she's a 16-year-old girl.

If 'k said he were a 16-year-old boy, I'd doubt he were a 16-year-old boy.

If 'k said she were a 33-year-old quant on Wall St., I'd doubt she were a 33-year-old quant. Etc.

I just seriously doubt that this character is giving any real identifiable information to Forbes.

It struck me as good advice for anyone of sound mind. For that fraction of the homeless who are mentally ill, probably there's no advice that would help much until they took care of that.

In fairness, that's a description of what a routine and successful build "should" go like. I bet if IMVU were to post a blow-by-blow account of their hairiest deployment screwup ever, it would be a good bit more colorful than that.

There are some headscratchers in the description of the Fogbugz problem, but kudos to them for explaining how and why things broke.

There are sooo many interesting problems in the world, I never run out of stuff to do for fun.

If you want me to implement your spec that takes more than 15 minutes or so, then a) you are a great non-profit for a cause I care about, or b) you have to pay up.

But it's true, I'm not who they're looking for, and I don't want to work for reddit. I'm sure plenty of 21-year-old reddit fan(boy|girl)s will leap at the chance, and good for them.

Well, it's a good thing that Ciccio Bong, Wholly Subversive, and Guy Fawkes used their real names, then.

More cynically, to the extent that ex-press secretaries' private sector value derives from their access to those in power, they're worth more while their crew is still in office.

Sure there are. The standard rationale is that when hiring, the cost of a false negative is far lower than the cost of a false positive.

I guess it's also true that the cost of a false negative is unknown and not felt. It would be a really extreme case to be forced to say, "Hey, remember that woman we didn't hire two years ago? She went off and founded Company Y that's now eating our lunch." With a false positive, you feel the pain of cleaning up their messes until after they're gone.

Finally, sad to say, the majority of job applicants are not competent to do serious engineering work. A negative bias is right most of the time.

So an industry-funded "skeptic" group went around a UN conference with a prank petition. That's nice, but they're hand-waving about how many people actually signed.

"radical left-wing environmentalists from around the world scrambled eagerly to sign...almost every delegate that collegian students approached signed their petition"

OK. Who? How many people were approached and how many signed? Why not just publish the petitions?

It goes without saying that this was a PR stunt, but the story doesn't really make any solid claims about what happened, despite the overwrought language about radical left-wing environmentalist climate kooks.

Depends on your talents.

It seems like the meat of the course and how you grade it are somewhat orthogonal. Have you ever tried teaching it for real, however you think the semester would best be spent, then just curve/inflate/whatever the grades to get the desired distribution at the end?

Could you name some of the run-down neighborhoods next to campuses? I don't see it, unless there are some Yale campuses in Fields Corner that I don't know about.

In that case, it sounds like you're fucked.

I have to think a startup whose plan requires the head technical person to spend any significant amount of time holding interns' hands is going to have problems, anyway, but if said technical person is more interested in partying than actually making stuff, forget it.

Good luck, though. I hope I'm wrong about that.

That was in the BBC adaptation of "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. Both the book and the miniseries (which is on Youtube in segments) are excellent.

I heard about Christopher Alexander from his renown in programming circles. I wonder how he is viewed in the architectural mainstream?