facepalm; this makes a lot of sense, but I have to say CH does a very poor job explain­ing very com­pli­cated design principles

“The the­saurus might equate “dis­abled” with syn­onyms like “use­less” and “muti­lated,” but ground-​​breaking run­ner Aimee Mullins is out to rede­fine the word. Defy­ing these asso­ci­a­tions, she hows how adver­sity — in her case, being born with­out shin­bones — actu­ally opens the door for human potential.”

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, accord­ing to our abil­i­ties, we have done some­thing to make oth­ers a lit­tle hap­pier, and some­thing to make our­selves a lit­tle hap­pier, that is about the best we can do. To make oth­ers less happy is a crime. To make our­selves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to con­tribute joy to the world. That is true no mat­ter what our prob­lems, our health, our cir­cum­stances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

“Sim­ply put, you will not improve unless you strive to get bet­ter. You will not improve unless you:
look back on what you accom­plished
reflect on what pre­vented you from doing even bet­ter
try to apply lessons learned the next time around
It almost seems so obvi­ous that it’s not worth the 15 min­utes that it takes your team. But, as any­one that has ever prac­ticed reg­u­lar ret­ro­spec­tives knows, they are an invalu­able tool for iden­ti­fy­ing group prob­lems that might have oth­er­wise gone unnoticed.”

“That some­one with such a under­stand­ing of com­plex finan­cial insti­tu­tions high­lights her naiveté, as if things are what they are, not because they are an equi­lib­rium of bor­rower and saver pref­er­ences, but rather, the whims of The Cap­tains of Indus­try in their top hats. To give her power, would merely rein­force what every­one in the indus­try knows, that Wash­ing­ton reg­u­la­tors are out-​​of-​​touch. For her, com­pe­ti­tion is sim­ply a “race to the bot­tom to develop new ways to trick cus­tomers”, and so we should expect her to cre­ate a ‘sta­ble’ indus­try, like in our edu­ca­tion and postal indus­tries, where there is lim­ited com­pe­ti­tion but lots of guar­an­tees, and lit­tle or no pro­duc­tiv­ity growth.”

“Where man­age­ment has a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of its net worth invested along with share­hold­ers, agency costs are likely to be at a min­i­mum. Share­hold­ers can eas­ily deter­mine how invested man­age­ment is in a com­pany by look­ing in the same place that a company’s exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion can be found. Unfor­tu­nately, the use of equity swaps, becom­ing more com­mon in the finan­cial world, can ren­der the infor­ma­tion on management’s stake in the com­pany essen­tially useless.”

“But that isn’t the faux-​​narrative. Instead it boils down to “I hate smar­ty­pants.” And it is there­upon under­stand­able that (being human) the boffins are los­ing patience with the new Know Nothings.”

“Yes, make it part of the nar­ra­tive. But even then, you’re often still explain­ing some­thing which doesn’t really need explain­ing. Does it mat­ter how the hyper­space drive works if all it needs to do is to get the pro­tag­o­nist from A to B? Too much expo­si­tion in sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries has noth­ing to do with the story – it’s the author show­ing off their set­ting. For many read­ers, this is required. It’s immersion.”

“The graph below shows exam­iner expe­ri­ence as grouped by tech­nol­ogy cen­ter as of the end of FY2009.”

“Doc­u­men­ta­tion also fails when peo­ple are so intim­i­dated that they’re afraid to sign any­thing. I can’t tell you — lit­er­ally — how many con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with fac­ulty or staff in which some­one makes seri­ous com­plaints about some­body else’s con­duct, but refuses to write any of it down. They don’t want to get “dragged into any­thing.” From my per­spec­tive, this is worse than use­less. I “know,” but I don’t. I don’t have any­thing that the accused could even rebut. And the one who told me often walks away think­ing that my lack of follow-​​through is a sign of a sin­is­ter agenda, rather than of a basic epis­te­mo­log­i­cal flaw. (“The Admin­is­tra­tion knows about it, but doesn’t do any­thing.”) I can’t take any­one to task based on hearsay.”

“The main body of the view will always ren­der into the unnamed yield. To ren­der con­tent into a named yield, you use the content_​for method.”

“These are provoca­tive ideas. Very anal­o­gous to the ideas found in the ping hub dis­cus­sions and the peer to peer dis­cus­sions. It would be fun to try and build a heuris­tic prefeching/​pushing pri­vacy respect­ing http proxy server swarm along these lines. No doubt some­body already has.”

“That helped a lit­tle, but the fore­cast is for the vacancy rate to stay in the 14% to 15% range through 2012.”

“In Wingnut cir­cles, it’s known as the “Impre­ca­tory Prayer.” Offered not just from select pul­pits, but increas­ingly expressed through tweets and for­warded via email, this decid­edly un-​​Christian Chris­t­ian sub­cul­ture has found its most enthu­si­as­tic advo­cates in a few Obama Derange­ment Syndrome-​​afflicted preachers—notably Orange County’s Wiley Drake and Arizona’s Steven L. Anderson.”

“1. Keep the scope as sim­ple as pos­si­ble.… 2. Prac­tice ‘Good Enough’.… 3. Kill extra fea­tures.… 4. Make it pub­lic, quick.”

“Based on key invest­ment cri­te­ria includ­ing val­u­a­tion and man­age­ment qual­ity, we listed a few com­pa­nies in the Cap­i­tal Goods sec­tor that appear to be attrac­tive as well as a few that do not.”

“To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blank­fein meant by “per­for­mance”: Take mas­sive sums of money from the gov­ern­ment, sit on it until the gov­ern­ment starts print­ing tril­lions of dol­lars in a des­per­ate attempt to restart the econ­omy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the gov­ern­ment at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start dri­ving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorse­ment of bub­ble eco­nom­ics. I mean, shit — who wouldn’t deserve bil­lions in bonuses for doing all that?”

“Scrum set the fly­wheel in motion and caused the rest of the IT process life cycle to respond. ITIL’s processes still form the solid core of ser­vice sup­port and we’ve improved the processes’ capa­bil­ity to han­dle intense work veloc­ity. The orga­ni­za­tion adapted by devel­op­ing unprece­dented speed in the abil­ity to deliver pro­duc­tion fixes and to solve root cause prob­lems with agility.”

“The Birchers have tried to rebrand them­selves with­out chang­ing their essen­tial mes­sage, with a slick new Web site fea­tur­ing a mul­ti­cul­tural set of chil­dren embla­zoned with Amer­i­can flags, announc­ing that they are sim­ply “Stand­ing for Fam­ily and Free­dom.” But inside, the forums offer sup­port for the ⁹⁄₁₁ Truth-​​associated Texas guber­na­to­r­ial can­di­date Debra Med­ina and tales that “the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘col­lapse of com­mu­nism’ were not planned and imple­mented by the Soviet Union’s KGB.” DVDs for sale pur­port to tell the truth about alleged con­ser­v­a­tive impos­tor Newt Gin­grich. Even Nel­son Man­dela is described as “noth­ing more than a com­mu­nist, ter­ror­ist thug.””

“Par­sons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Trans­dis­ci­pli­nary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The pro­gram is based in the School of Design Strate­gies at Par­sons, which encom­passes inno­v­a­tive pro­grams that apply design think­ing to study the inter­sec­tion of cities, ser­vices and ecosystems.”

“Fac­ing a $2.8 bil­lion deficit and pend­ing insol­vency, Wash­ing­ton State’s House Bill 3176 pro­poses changes to its B&O Roy­alty tax that would give Microsoft an esti­mated $100 mil­lion tax cut annu­ally and pos­si­ble amnesty for more than a bil­lion dol­lars in past tax evasion.”

“Through­out the years, I’ve seen some clever “money hacks” as a result of just keep­ing myself aware of the lat­est trends and tricks in per­sonal finance. I’ve also had the great plea­sure of read­ing all of your com­ments through the years and I know you guys are a very clever bunch, so I was curi­ous what money hacks you use to get a lit­tle extra.”

“The Blue Cash card’s tier is at $6,500, but by pur­chas­ing these coins you can are really look­ing at a tier of $4,000. As more coins become avail­able and included into this pro­gram, you can drop that “real” tier down lower and lower. Not bad huh?”

“And when it did, well, it was incred­i­ble. What’s below is just about the coolest video I have ever seen. And I mean that seri­ously. Click the “720” but­ton and pay close atten­tion at the 1:50 mark. You won’t miss it, the crowd in the audio will alert you…”

“Two impor­tant men are hav­ing a care­ful con­ver­sa­tion on mil­i­tary train­ing. What do you call the guy who, hav­ing no par­tic­u­lar com­pe­tence or inter­est in the mat­ter at hand, jumps in the con­ver­sa­tion, sys­tem­at­i­cally con­tra­dicts every­one with con­trived argu­ments, ridicules the two com­pe­tent dis­cus­sants, ori­ents the con­ver­sa­tion on a com­pletely dif­fer­ent topic, then leaves the audi­ence baf­fled and walks away, laugh­ing? That Troll is Socrates in Plato’s Laches. True, Plato’s Socrates sel­dom hops in unin­vited, and most of his inter­locu­tors do not con­sider him nox­ious. Indeed one won­ders why the whole city grew so irri­tated that they voted to con­demn him to death. But Plato, like all philoso­phers and sophists, had a stake in defend­ing his col­leagues. In other views of Socrates (like Aristo­phanes’ car­i­ca­ture), he is unmis­tak­ably trollish. ”

“An end to friv­o­lous patents for busi­ness processes will be a bless­ing to online com­merce. Mean­while, the loss of patent pro­tec­tion for soft­ware could make pro­gram­mers realise at last that they have more in com­mon with authors, artists, pub­lish­ers and musi­cians than they ever had with mol­e­c­u­lar archi­tects and chip design­ers. In short, they pro­duce expres­sions of ideas that are emi­nently copyrightable.”

“There are some tech­ni­cal sto­ries, though, which really do deliver some­thing the busi­ness care about. You can find this out by ask­ing, “Who cares if I don’t do this? Who cares if I don’t have an auto­mated build? If I don’t write unit tests? If I don’t write accep­tance tests?”

This is where the fea­ture injec­tion comes in. I’m flex­ing Chris Matts’s tem­plate a bit to do this; here’s how mine reads:

In order to

will need .”

“We’ll learn so much about how much it really costs to bring high speeds to com­mu­ni­ties. We won’t have to rely on the car­ri­ers’ doom­say­ing about these expenses (”Hun­dreds of bil­lions of dollars!”)”