dexterchief

I believe IE 6+, are perfect. The are functioning exactly as designed to prevent web apps from competing with Microsoft's bread and butter desktop apps. They do that by forcing developers to choose between writing non-standard stuff that ties them to Microsoft or increasing my development costs by supporting their weirdness + the standards.

To me this article misses the point, things like progressive enhancement is part of the extra cost/complexity that I have to absorb when I don't choose Microsoft. Every time I have to do ANYTHING beyond following the recent standards to the letter, Microsoft has succeeded with their strategy of forcing me to choose them or raising my cost to compete with them.

Yes there are a bunch of techniques that can help once you choose to absorb the cost, but how I am a crappy developer or a whiner for not cheerfully accepting the burden?

I'll absolutely agree that its damn hard to do control what people are eating in experiments, but I disagree that exercise plays the role you say.

You can eat something in a single meal that will take SEVERAL HOURS on a treadmill to burn. It is incredibly easy for the number of calories you need to burn to pass the number of hours possible to exercise.

Being in the midst of a global obesity epidemic brought on by thirty years of following the nutritional advice of scientists really isn't "a wonderful illustration of the self-correcting nature of the scientific method". Especially when the government and most other health authorities are still actively promoting the bad science that caused the problem to begin with.

This was bad science not politics. Dr. Lustig (of Sugar the bitter truth fame: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM) explains the details of it, but to sum up; Ancel Keys authored the Seven Countries Study that linked heart disease with dietary fat that that study formed the foundation of our nutritional knowledge ever since. According to Lustig, Keys preformed the first multivariate regression analysis and messed it up but we have been teaching it and living by it for 30+ years. Its still a challenge to get

Everybody loves to place science on some pedestal and pretend that politics is the source of all our problems. We have found scientific justifications for our racism and other quirks, habits and general prejudices for a very long time:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-life-and-de... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence ...a thousand other links...

Don't think that because <1950s commercial narrator voice>This information was brought to you by Science!</1950s commercial narrator voice> that it is necessarily correct. I spoke to James Flynn (The guy the Flynn effect is named after) and it turned out that he only got into studying IQ to disprove the science of the day showing that blacks were inferior. He has gone on to show that women are also equally intelligent (Imagine!). He is still working on debunking racist, sexist science decades later. The science around nutrition is no more reliable and no less subject to being shaped by our cultural prejudices.

I have been seeing quite a few posts in this vein on HN and they really disturb me. While I think its clear to everyone that there are problems with the education system, I have a real problem with encouraging people to drop out of, or not attend higher education. Questioning the value of your education is one of the many privileges an education affords you.

The experience we have as IT people is really deeply skewed. The IT industry really barely existed ~25 years ago. Saying that education doesn't matter because a handful of high-school/college/university dropouts made it big riding the coattails of an enormous technological change is really misguided. We get away without credentials here and there simply because so much of this stuff is so new. This is a quirk of this particular moment in time. It won't last. Once that change settles down, degrees will be required for just about every IT job. Hell, that's getting to be the case already.

This statistic about 17 million Americans having degrees in jobs that don't require them has appeared a few times in various articles. It's said as though the people went to school _intending_ to be an overqualified waiter. If that were the case, I would agree that is a terrible waste. With years of aggressive outsourcing, the effective destruction of the manufacturing sector behind us, and a recession all around us, can we really accept that statistic just as it is offered to us?

If student loans have just surpassed credit card debt I agree that is a problem. But if education is to expensive then do something about the cost of education. Don't go telling people to drop out and have their world view shaped by something as meagre as a job or a bit of travel. The only way to develop your brain is to have someone push you to think. Hard. Yes there are examples of this happening outside school but not as many as you think.

Really I think uneducated people are social equivalent of infected PC's on a network; they make things bad for everyone. More education, not less is crucial if we are going to make any progress as a society.

Just my two cents.