“Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation. It may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

“Like many other forms of motivated skepticism, motivated continuation can try to disguise itself as virtuous rationality. Who can argue against gathering more evidence? I can. Evidence is often costly, and worse, slow, and there is certainly nothing virtuous about refusing to integrate the evidence you already have. You can always change your mind later.

“hard work == discipline == genius is the illusory conclusion made by those on the outside looking in. When you are truly inspired, in the ‘flow’, doesn’t that feel like the easiest, most natural state you have ever experienced?

“Natural selection probably hit its complexity bound no more than a hundred million generations after multicellular organisms got started. Since then, over the last 600 million years, evolutions have substituted new complexity for lost complexity, rather than accumulating adaptations.

“The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it’s implemented in practice. Why? Easy software projects can be done by almost any random person, so they are.

“We have to get better at helping people learn on the job. The idea that you can decide whether someone is a good or bad fit for your organization at point zero is going to have to be thrown out the window. You’re going to have to create internal structures that will help people grow into positions; that’s where the real opportunity is going to be.

“George Will claims that a Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade would restore “moral federalism,” a system under which each state could adopt its own preferred policy on abortion. Thus, prochoice voters living in states with prochoice majorities have nothing to worry about, at least so far as their own states are concerned.

Under the Supreme Court’s recent federalism jurisprudence that simply isn’t true. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich held that Congress can regulate any activity with even the slightest, extremely tenuous connection to ‘commerce’.

“The move to greater engagement in the blogosphere (Disqus, Intense Debate, SezWho) is a good one. However, each such service is only as good as the blogs they sign up. With each of the services being mutually exclusive, there are only so many strong blog communities to compete over.

“Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another.

“The central idea of the XML family of standards is to separate code from data. The central idea of Lisp is that code and data are the same and should be represented the same. The Lisp community’s idea of “Schema” would likely be “Lisp program”. The Lisp community’s idea of “addressing language” would likely be “Lisp program.” The Lisp community’s idea of “query language” would likely be “Lisp program.” Unfortunately this response ignores the Principle of Least Power.