Edward Bilodeau refutes the idea of the "live-in developer"...#

This is an old mentality that has to be done away with. If your developers have to live at your office in order for you to succeed, then your company is not managed properly. Sure, there may be the occasional unforseen push that requires overtime, but to build the assumption of overtime into your company's operations is to ensure that the only people who will work for you are people with low self-esteem who don't mind the abuse. If Joel (or anyone else) really does want to hire "from the 99.9 percentile," they are going to have to accept the fact that people have lives, and having a life will keep you energized and make you a better developer.

Jorrit Wiersma has a thought with regards to Noam.#

je_apostrophe reports on a lecture by Noam Chomsky mostly about the US policy regarding Iraq. It's an interesting read. "perhaps the biggest executer of genocide in Iraq is the US itself, with its repressive sanctions and infrastructure destroying attacks". It has often amazed me how easily politicians seem to ignore the impact of sanctions and bombardments on the people (who are innocent after all) of the targeted countries.

Jorrit Wiersma writes about the importance of sharing your research and not existing in a vacuum.#

Having just been to a conference my to-do list is quickly growing. More than ever, it's becoming clear that doing scientific research is not just about the research itself, but that a large part of your time is taken up by presenting your work to the scientific community. The research itself may take somewhere between a few months to half a year between the moment when you have a new idea up to the point where you have some interesting and relevant results. These first results are usually quite rough and need some polishing but the point is that you have found something new.

Blogs are a very quick way to get something out and let it grow with the reader. Daniel Drezner and Ryan Overbey are interested in blogs as related to scholarship.

The Yeti writes about love and sex.#

What's different is how you feel about it. How does that change the mechanics? Isn't that rather arbitrary? Worse yet, if "making love" feels right, and is the ultimate expression of romantic love, how then can you justify having sexual relations on any other basis as just being wrong?

I don't mean right or wrong on a moral axis. We do enough things like drinking too much, eating too much, taking drugs, and smoking that can be termed "wrong" and still consider ourselves good people. But if "making love" feels right, how can you then engage in sex casually?

[...]

The rules have been shattered. Perhaps they were just constructs of guilt minds, but no sex before marriage used to be the societal rule. That's because sex had consequences. What makes us think that simply because we can prevent pregnancy that there will be no consequences?

The Yeti asks this real twister...#

Are you pro-life or pro-choice?

If you're pro-choice, what do you think about a woman who smokes and or drinks heavily when she's pregnant?

Does that answer change at 1 month of pregnancy? 4 months? 8 months?

At what time does the woman have a responsibility to the child in her body? At what point is the child a child, and not just tissue.

Would you condemn a woman who drank heavily while six months pregnant? It would be her choice.

Boing Boing links an amazing Masonic Watch.#

Joey deVilla writes about the ridiculous Big City Buddhists.#

American converts are taking a 2,500-year-old faith and making it over in their own image -- self-absorbed.

As anyone who hasn't spent the last few years meditating in a cave in Asia knows, American Buddhism is booming. The 1990s saw three Buddhist movies and a gaggle of celebrity Buddhist pitchmen, including Beastie Boy Adam Yauch and actor Richard Gere. The United States is now home to at least a million not-so-famous Buddhists as well, most of them new immigrants from Asia. But Buddhism is also popular among hip Americans who have never attended a Zen center or visualized a Tibetan mandala.

[...]

What seems to be lost on the new Buddhists who populate Coleman's book is the possibility that it may be America's destiny not to make Buddhism perfect but to make it banal. It is, of course, far too early to determine what America's effects on Buddhism will be. The religion has been in Asia for two-and-a-half millenniums; it has been a force in the United States for only a century or so. So far, however, things do not look good. Philosopher George Santayana once observed that "American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native goodwill, complacency, thoughtlessness and optimism." Instead of preserving Buddhism, Americans seem intent on co-opting and commercializing it, dissolving a religion deeply suspicious of the self into an engine of self-absorption.

Via Linux Weekly News is something truly horrible, Linux on iPod.#

Richard links to an article in the Christian Science Monitor about Brane Theory.#

We measured the strength of all the forces, and gravity came in last. End of discussion. But that's not enough of an answer for scientists, and the real reason gravity is so weak may break open the next major advance in our perception of the universe. There are some tantalizing suggestions that gravity is, in fact, not weak at all, it's just diluted by having to act over more than our familiar four dimensions (three of space and one of time).

By now you may have heard that scientists strongly suspect that there are more than four dimensions in our universe. The big question is why we can't experience those other dimensions directly; why do they seem to be hidden from us? An increasingly popular theory of fundamental physics, call Brane Theory, is being used to explain that, and a whole lot more about how our universe really works.

Mike Lockwood writes a story about the end of the Dylan project at Apple.#

We printed T-shirts (at Apple's expense) that said "The power to cancel your very best" on the front. On the back was a screen shot of the Dylan IDE with all of our names listed in a window. In front of that was a dialog box that said "Are you sure you want to cancel the entire Cambridge lab?", with the mouse pointer hovering over the "Cancel" button.

Lightweight Languages 2003 is a go.#

Via Slashdot is a Wireless GBA Adapter...#

This fusion of Nintendo's leadership in the portable gaming market and Motorola's own wireless communication technology together create wireless gaming history; enabling a revolutionary portable gaming experience for users. The 2.4GHz radio frequency (RF) chipset enables up to five players to play each other wirelessly, allowing for flexible, mobile game playing.

Slashdot links the new Matrix Revolutions trailer.#

RPGamer reports some GREAT Square Enix news...#

Square Enix has revealed information on two new Kingdom Hearts titles, as well as a new Final Fantasy movie that will be set in familiar surroundings.

The first Kingdom Hearts title is none other than Kingdom Hearts 2, which has been reported to be in development for some time now. No release date has been set yet, but no doubt we'll find out more about this sequel when the Tokyo Game Show opens its doors this week. The other Kingdom Hearts title is the big surprise, however; titled Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, it will see release on the Game Boy Advance. Like its PlayStation 2 big brother though, nothing else is known about the title, save for what will be revealed to the press at the Tokyo Game show.

Rumors of a Final Fantasy VII sequel can finally be put to rest, but the outcome is not quite what gamers would have expected. Instead of being a playable title, the sequel, subtitled Advent Children, will be released as a DVD movie. This epilogue will take us back to the world of Final Fantasy VII to find out what has happened to Cloud and his cohorts two years after saving the planet from Sephiroth and Meteor. Needless to say, countless thousands of fan fictions will be rendered obsolete with this movie. A release is scheduled to take place sometime next year.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children media.

Kingdom Hearts II media.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories media.

Kuro5hin reports on a bake sale in Texas.#

The bake sale, organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, offered such items as Rice Krispie Treats, cookies, and race-based discriminatory pricing. The stipulations were enforced by a sign that stated white males had to pay 1 dollar for a cookie, white women would have to pay 75 cents, Hispanics would be charged 50 cents, and blacks would have to only pay 25 cents.

The bakesale was claimed to be a protest of affirmative action, more specifically "the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions." And apparently this has not been the first incident, as "similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February." The protest only lasted for 45 minutes, after which SMU officials halted the event because it "created a potentially unsafe situation."

Razib at Gene Expression links to an article in the Economist about brain size and mental ability...#

They found that a large adult head size was beneficial in preventing cognitive decline, in particular memory. At the other end of the spectrum, though, the news was grim. Those with the smallest heads had up to a fivefold greater risk of cognitive decline over this time than those with the largest. But, when the researchers analysed the data to see if head size at birth was protective, they found it was not, as they explain in the October issue of Brain.

Razib at Gene Expression writes about the show Coupling,#

I saw the NBC version of the comedy Coupling tonight. By a weird coincidence BBC America had the same episode on earlier in the original British version! And yes, about 75% of the script was same, word for word. It was really weird watching Americans behave like they were...British. Perhaps watching the British version totally ruined it, but I kept thinking that the American actors were trying to channel the British characters (down to the ticks and mannerisms). I guess the nearest analogy is the complaint that the kids on Dawson's Creek were bizarro world versions of real teenagers-I just felt like the banter was somehow un-American. I'm sure this is partly (all?) due to the fact that I've seen the British series in multiple episodes, so any photocopy will be a pale imitation.

Pirate Usability.#

Joi Ito is crazy.#

Don Park would be a great moderator if people would listen to him and stop grasping so tightly to their "pride,"#

As Dave pointed out, refusing or redirecting access to free content based on referring site is an extremely distasteful act. This is the sort of childish technical tricks that geeks often prefer doing instead of communicating like an adult. All Nitwit really had to do was send Fu*kwit an e-mail.

Words are much more powerful than codes.

Don Park writes about Koreans and dreams.#

Koreans take dreams seriously. If my mother-in-law calls out of the blue, it's because she had a bad dream about my wife. When a Korean woman conceives a child, she is expected to have a Birth Dream (Tae-Mong) which differ from mundane dreams in intensity and content. Some dream of birds or fishes jumping into their body. Others see dragons or deers coming into the house.

Do Koreans really believe in these dreams? Wrong question. The right question is Why take unnecessary chances? Aren't these dreams saying something about mental problems? Again wrong question. Why worry about the past when there is the future to worry about?

Werner Vogels writes about lessons learned about Technology Evangelism.#

These difficulties only made our resolve harder to convince the world of that this technology was the right way to build systems. Somewhere along the road quite a few of us changed from evangelists into preachers. I don't know whether this was a natural process or whether some of us got so caught up in it that they couldn't distinguish anymore between their own person and the technology, but the preaching turned against us in a bad way.

With preaching I mean, trying to convince people that there is only one way of doing things right, and that is your way. That you will grab any opportunity to show the world that this is yet another example of how your technology could solve their problems. In the technology world there is nothing more annoying that a self-righteous technology preacher and we managed to put-off a lot of people over time.

Tony Pierce gives advice on how to win with a blog.#

heres how to win when you blog:

blog.

write all the time. i say write every day. i actually say write many times a day, but write. write when youre bored, write when youre inspired, write when youre tired, write after you 69ed a girl for a half hour and then flipped over and banged for a half hour more. write about not getting any, write about getting more that you deserve, write about sports, write about politics, write about your car, your cat, your dog, the shit between your toes, write about the shit between your toes that smells like your dog.

snipers will take their dumb little shots, but thats when you know youve made it.

another way to know is if you see your name on blogger.com as a blog of note, but beware because that will just ring the comeandgetit bell for all the losers to come and get jealous. which can become tiresome.

Tony Pierce knows who he's voting for!#

this debate convinced me that i need to vote, and i need to vote for arnold.

why? because the ship is going down. because the right is dragging us down with them. because reagan bush taught us that you dont have to be qualified to run and win and do terribly and nobody will care. and because clinton gore taught us that you dont have to be qualified to run and win and do wonderfully and nobody will care or defend you. so if i have to have a clown lie to me and fuck up, may as well be one who smoked weed before jumping into an orgy.

Philip Greenspun writes about copyright.#

Consider this scenario. You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend. He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks. You walk across the street. Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets. He says "Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song? It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky's innovative tonality." You haven't? Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up. Any tracks that he had and you didn't you now have. You're using a digital audio recorder; the device won't do anything except record music. You're not paying each other so it is noncommercial. Under Section 1008 what you're doing is perfectly legal in the United States.

[...]

[Now that most of Korea and a handful of Americans are hooked up on broadband it is time to ask why people don't simply email their favorite songs to each other. The last thing that I would want is to be dumped into Napster or its spiritual descendants. I don't know anything about pop music. What I would want is for my friends who know music and my taste to email me a song every day. If I have 10 music expert friends sending out their favorite song of the day, after a year I've accumulated about 200 hours of music. Prediction: RIAA will get a law passed making it illegal to email sound recordings. To enforce the law the RIAA will have the right to read anyone's email at any time. Encryption of email will need to be outlawed so as to thwart terrorists and music thieves.]

Sometimes no matter how many times you say it, sometimes it's still true.#

Every time I see or talk to him, I have to remind myself that I am not allowed to fall for this boy.

This boy in particular out of maybe all the boys in the world, I cannot be with. And it might be a completely sick reason, but I know that he's going to Be Somebody Someday, and I want to be right there, a step behind, always. I don't want anything to keep that from happening or from my being there when it does.

So we cannot be together, because I cannot risk that it would end in drama and any sort of break in our relationship.