gunderson

wow those questions they have for McCain are awful, they might as well have been asked by Shepard Smith!

I don't disagree. I was not trying to accuse you of being a Christian, just arguing using a bit of hyperbole -- which was intended to be entertaining b/c in particular a lot of Christians don't care for Rand's ideas... :)

hah I must have missed that. Thanks for pointing it out!

Were you forced by your parents to donate your allowance to the homeless amid tears that eventually turned into self-congratulation?

What sort of "good parenting" created such a visceral aversion to Rand's philosophy? Or is it her prose style that you object to?

You've sort of side-stepped the point.

The idea of humans being "imperfect" is not in reference to a Webster's definition, but in comparison to the religious notion of the deity's perfection.

If one believes that Mankind is not some imperfect reflection of a perfect deity whom he must serve, then any notion of perfection must be realizable by humans. So in theory a man or woman could be perfect.

Rand writes about these larger than life types of people. Most of us only see shades of them in ourselves or people we know, but it sure beats the idea of guilt/imperfection as a birthright thanks to original sin!

I bring this up b/c western culture is so heavily influenced by Christianity that it pollutes even people's secular understanding of what perfection means.

As I recall someone got a 10 at the olympics this year.

The point of a novel of ideas is not that you agree with every single idea within, but that the novel presents the ideas in a way that brings out their power in a concrete way.

Ayn Rand didn't want people to form a religion, so please don't feel that you have to apologize for "agreeing" with some aspects of her fiction. Those who try to paint Rand's philosophy that way are looking at it through the timid, dark-ages lens of their religion, in which everything is black and white, the way George W. Bush's "good vs evil" nonsense is.

You have too much taste for Atlas Shrugged because of your illustrious bloodline?

If reading Atlas Shrugged is too much work for your taste, then I think the actual ideas contained in it would surely be quite distasteful to you, but I guess the world will never know.

Or in other words, when did you give up on your childish ideas about the heights of your own human potential?

The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye. I would probably suggest "Drown" by Junot Diaz:

http://www.amazon.com/Drown-Junot-D%C3%ADaz/dp/1573226068

But Catcher in the Rye is a great and captivating story in its own right and doesn't really need to be replaced... though it would be great if schools taught edgier fiction these days.

I wrote a custom system, if you're using rails let me know and you can use it.

Fair enough, but the thing I like about REST is the consistent API and (ideally) proper handle of request types via mime type information in the header.

the simplest explanation of REST:

the URL is part of the UI, both to the user and to api consumers.

If you think of it that way, REST makes a lot of sense. Sure there can be other elegant approaches, but REST is one that has gathered steam b/c it addresses this in a logical, useful way.

not really, the system would only need to keep track of the last updated time of each record and when aggregating them, set the proper etag.

And your point?

Right it may work for you, which is fine.

The point of REST that I thought really stood out in the comments was the one about caching.

If you know that any GET request can be cached subject to whatever is in the expires header or etag, that is hugely useful information when scaling.

REST is not a straight jacket, it's just a simple way of making the /site/url/you/use + the method mean something consistent and logical.

This is a fun question. I don't, but I'm curious what you think are the most persuasive examples of services that don't fit.

One that comes to mind is a service with semantics that require a preview step. Sure you can use create/read/update via the REST verbs, but I think a lot of the confusion on this issue comes from wanting to embed the concept of events, so a read may be for the purpose of previewing an item, but it feels more natural to fire a "confirm" event than to do a post with a field called state=cofirmed.

At least that's my personal opinion. I agree that any service can be mapped given sufficient creativity, but it often seems like extra work in the context I described.

did you read the comments on his blog post? There are some excellent points made.

You could achieve all of those things w/o using the REST standard, but then it's your standard... and there ought to be at least some reason for rolling your own if one already exists.

If you bring some of the close parens down to new lines, then the lisp example is just as "squintable" as the java.

I know that's bad lisp style, so I guess you'd have to argue that lisp devs have bad taste or don't care about program structure, neither of which are true.

I think that's an example an evolutionary "just so story".

There may be some truth to it, but "genius" impacts such a small percentage of the population, that I think calling it genetic is quite a stretch.

Ambition, yes. Few people are ambitious enough to want anything more out of life than a 30+ inch TV.

But to take the leap into the territory of tremendous accomplishment, and to claim that it is a function of sex drive, cheapens it a bit in my opinion.

I think more likely there are just some people whose natural skills are called "genius" by society when they are young, and so they are society's "young geniuses". Who do we have today, Zuckerberg? Some kid who got into MIT?

Most of this is just hype. I think the true genius is someone who adapts over time and creates something tremendous that can't be credited to a social fad or a bubble.

I find a good ajax app to be far more usable than the other two.

Every time I start using Flash or Flex I run into annoying issues. The last one was that Firefox has a bug where it says "transferring data from yoursite.com" forever if your flash object does any network activity. Even after the network activity stops. The status bar doesn't return to normal again until a fresh page w/o flash network activity is loaded.

I have used a few 100% flash/flex apps and they are pretty annoying.

Even websites or blogs that load multiple youtube windows tend to crash Firefox way too frequently.

So I'm rooting for html/ajax.

Bah... Academia heaps prestige upon the person who hits it big early, and from then on they don't get the same kind of feedback.

Imagine at Google: "Of course, Sergey, that's an awesome idea". But if it's not then everyone is wasting a lot of time. Chances are it isn't. Sergey had a lot of bad/mediocre ideas before he came up with PageRank, and has had a lot of bad/mediocre ones since.

The point is that ideas are more a function of being at the right place at the right time and acting on it than they are about some particular genius.

A good analogy is Scrabble. When you hit an awesome word early on it can still result in a loss, b/c you keep trying too hard and over thinking things. Also, in life, like Scrabble, some of it has to do with the letters that happen to be in your tray.

This is part of the myth that genius is a phenomenon of the young. That is luck. True genius involves sweat and perseverance.

I didn't realize it was ordored in the first place.

If they let you be anonymous in a site that requires authentication, then it's a bit more sophisticated. If not then it's probably simple like the other explanations below.

meeeow

Very true. I think some of the "Topic Nazis" have migrated here from Slashdot.

Hey at least it's more stable than Vista.

And hibernation/powersave probably works better than on Ubuntu.

Not quite true. It does use some power, b/c the battery will eventually end up dead, even if you have the wireless connection off, if you forget to turn off the main power switch.

that's true, that is a good point.

"your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors"

Is it just me or is this error message a bit annoying b/c it casts blame on my account, as if it's something I did.

how about "Gmail is having a problem".