“Pot and lame type systems like in C/C++ do not mix.

“Even after the death of Clipper and the launch of PGP, users didn’t want to encrypt their communications. The most effective barrier to the spread of encryption has turned out to be not control but apathy.

..the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. In response to the RIAA’s lawsuits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools that allow them to create encrypted spaces. This broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals..

The obvious parallel here is with Prohibition [which] created a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and millions of citizens engaged in an activity that was illegal but popular. This created several long-term effects in American society: greatly increased skepticism of Government-mandated morality, and broad support for anyone who could arrange for hidden transactions, including organized crime. Reversing the cause did not reverse the effects; both the heightened skepticism and the increased power of organized crime lasted decades after Prohibition itself was reversed.

As with Prohibition, so with file sharing.. the effects of the increased use of encryption, and the subsequent difficulties for law enforcement in decrypting messages and files, will last far longer than the current transition to digital music delivery, and may in fact be the most important legacy of the current legal crackdown [on piracy].

“Jerry Weinberg, “Secrets of Consulting”: You probably won’t be able to make any changes.

Reading this allowed me to let go of the idea that I was going to make any changes. And this ironically allowed me to see what was going on, and so I may have produced some small effect in the end. It may have simply been a change in perspective from “I’m the high-paid consultant who has been brought in to fix everything” to “I’m probably not going to be able to do anything here, so I’m open to anything where I might be able to make a difference.”

“Visual Basic rocks!

“GWT goes against everything we’ve worked towards in web development. Many of their widgets and layouts create endless tables, rows, and columns littered with inline CSS, “center” and “align” tags. It’s a disgrace to the web industry as a whole and a HUGE step backwards. Google uses the web as a thin layer on top of their technologies. The web layer is a very small, unimportant part of their applications.

“Currying is turning a function of type (A,B) -> C into A -> (B -> C).

Partial application is slightly more fuzzy. The intuitive notion is applying a function to less values than arguments of the function, but then you could say all functions take one argument, so…

“I was recently let go from my job of three years for violating my employee agreement for working on a side business and not properly disclosing this to my employer.

“I am amazed how many people in my generation still hold on to old-school ways of thinking, not because they still make sense, but because they carried them from their parents who presumably carried them from their own parents.

“According to Charles Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism [1903], the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character..