ArbitraryLimits

OT but that felt like a pretty risky click for work...

While I agree, I have to point out that all former congressmen die in obscurity, unless they went on to a cabinet post or the Senate.

> When TDD isn't a good idea (say, when ... you don't yet know how you want to structure the system)

(Apologies in advance as I can't figure out how not to sound snarky here.)

Isn't that called "the design? And is there any meaningful way in which, if "test-driven design" fails if you don't already have the design, it's worth anything at all?

Isn't this case the exact opposite of what's being claimed in the article? I.e. you're saying wages don't really affect total profits one way or another.

F-150's aren't the "trucks" he's talking about. F-150s are cars for people who want to feel like they're in a truck. In fact I think by "truck" he pretty much means "trucks not sold directly to consumers." Like a semi, an actual delivery truck, MAYBE an F-450 in a pinch.

I think a "bullshitting architect" would be someone who concentrates on making the appearance of the building fit fashions, while neglecting lighting, space, circulation, etc. (maybe not code). In other words, it's someone who isn't really an architect at all.

IMO the reason why Americans prefer Farenheit to Celsius is that the 0 and 100 points correspond to roughly the limits of common outdoor temperatures, rather than water's state changes.

Pretty much the same argument for miles per hour vs kilometers per hour - 100 mph is all anyone's ever going to go during a normal day.

That's an interesting point about being able to divide by half more than once for feet/inches, though - I hadn't thought of that before.

(From another American with a physics background)

Your comment is interesting but I'm having a hard time believing that "risk algebra" is a thing.

To remind you to be careful when doing any kind of series expansion. It's more important than it sounds.

Wikipedia would be the very last place I'd go to verify that a made-up-sounding scientific discipline is real. Any crank worth his salt has authored twenty separate Wikipedia entries before he gets press like this.

Nixon wasn't ugly, he was creepy-looking. If he hadn't been creepy, he wouldn't have been creepy-looking - it wasn't a problem with his actual looks.

> Tests tell you what the intended behaviours

Or, you know, the design can also. If you're into having that.

None of them handle all of: being picked early, being shipped, sitting in a supermarket display, and being bagged. That's why there's only one cultivar in US supermarkets in the first place.

Speaking as someone with a physics degree, I like to quote Peter Thiel (for once):

> This is why physics Ph.D’s are notoriously difficult to work with; because they know fundamental things, they think they know all things.

- http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-...

>> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist,

> Yes, but increasingly less so.

IMO opinion the real problem isn't that basic science is becoming less publicly available as much as it's becoming less basic, and really less science also.

If "capitalist science" meaning holding scientists to the same production quotas that Frederick Taylor gave steel workers, then above and beyond the problems seen with steel workers, there's the additional problem that bad science drives out good since it's easier to produce.

LOL that's fine as long as there's actually a _market_ _price_ for the bribe, meaning there are competitive forces keeping it in check, but once someone corners the market it's game over.

I once had to re-implement the pieces of the STL I wanted in a real-time embedded system, for precisely this reason (well, that plus the fact that STL's use of allocators is broken, and I wanted to be able to allocate from fixed-size pools to avoid non-O(1) trips through an allocator at run-time).

Passing information through channels not explicitly intended to carry that information is called a covert channel attack. Lots of links from the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel

It's important to realize that any system of any size will be packed with covert channels; the thing to do is try to identify them all and drive their bandwidth down to an acceptable level.

> Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue.

Don't you think that depends mostly on whether there are professionals available?

Exactly, the problem with stored procedures isn't that they exist but that once a programmer is working in a given environment he won't change to another one until forced, with the result that once someone starts writing stored procedures they tend not to stop until the app is in the database. If there were a clear mechanism to stop app data from going in the SPs they'd have a much better reputation.

None on Intel chips, but on virtual any other chip you'd get SIGBUS by referencing e.g. an N-bit datum not alinged on N/8-byte boundaries.

I thought the cockpit doors were actually sealed until the plane landed, i.e. the pilots couldn't open them even if they wanted to?

Thanks for pointing that out, I was unaware there was much tactical skill in the attacks. Every news piece I'd seen on the hijackers concentrated mostly on their mistakes leading up to the attacks and how even a marginally competent counter-intelligence effort would have caught them...

More to your point though, I don't think the passengers would have to actually overcome the hijackers, just bottle them up. Whatever they're _not_ good at, surprised scared uncoordinated groups of strangers are pretty good at getting in the way. And there's still the fact that the cockpit door is locked.

> The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect.

Right, but the GP's point is that it was only possible to do that _once_, because the success of the 9/11 attacks depended on the passengers cooperating with the hijackers. That was a reasonable assumption because for the previous 30 years, "in the event of a hijacking just cooperate until we can negotiate your release" was the standard advice. Now it isn't.

Even in 9/11, 25% of the passengers figured out on their own that they shouldn't cede the cockpit. Today the figure would be 100%, plus the cockpit is sealed off for the duration of the flight anyway. So I really don't see a scenario where box-cutters would take out the whole plane any more.

If he's such a genius, ask him how to leave the scrollbar on your blog.

Yeah, but the CEO always ends up commandeering the nicest conference room as his de facto office, or else he's always on the road.

> I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1] spend gobs of money on huge office campuses,[2] then inflict open plan or cubicles on said engineers

It's because cubicles can be depreciated as furniture, over 10 (or 7, I've never been clear on the difference) years, whereas internal walls and doors get depreciated as real estate over a 27.5 year schedule. The CFO has to do something.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.318767....

> "Why do Americans always have to act happy? It's so fake."

I always tell my Russian colleagues that it's the natural outcome of not having a 3,000 year history of being pillaged by Cossacks and Mongols, and that they should try it some time.

Too bad, but probably better than a year before 9-11. At least you got to fail fast rather than slow.

So does your stoned roommate who just finished making whirlpools in a half-full bottle. That's about as much of a filter as Wolfram seems to apply to his own ideas these days.