We are suffocating from a fausse élégance that scorns the honest, clear, four-letter word. And quite aside from the obscene ones, hundreds of splendid four-letter words are waiting to work for us.
— Stringfellow Barr-
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Category Archives: Cross Posted from Club Troppo
I’ve also found this to be true
Based on current feedback, I’d say paying a lawyer to talk about software patents at this point would be like setting money on fire.
– Ryan Gordon
Continue reading
A small taste of development life
Jon Skeet explains that human complexity is one of the causes of software complexity. Everything you might think is simple — numbers, letters and dates — is actually devilishly tricky. Continue reading
The Daily Show on news media
It’s no secret that I don’t think very highly of journalists. Too many of them use lazy shortcuts dressed up as serious journalism. The most common is “two-soundbites-and-that’s-a-wrap” trick, where they just get two different people, who they’ve decided to label as rivals, to provide a soundbite each. Then they write it up and head [...] Continue reading
What a Curious Coincidence
Seen on Slashdot’s front page today:
Seems that for a crime to count, it first has to hit the high and mighty. Continue reading
At long last
International customers can buy Amazon Kindle ebook readers without jumping through tricksy hoops!
I am quite excited about this. I spend a lot on books shipped via Amazon. The Kindle means that I would spend less per book and eliminate shipping costs.
Edit: Though it looks like they’re only going to sell the plain Kindle, not the [...] Continue reading
Posted in Business, Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Media
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The Electoral Reform Dream Paper
The Electoral Reform Greenpaper has mostly received coverage for the two particularly stupid proposals that are raised: lowering the age of franchise and replacing the paper ballot with electronic or — much worse — internet voting.
Robert Merkel points out at LP that there is an almost universal condemnation of the latter idea by IT security [...] Continue reading
On a Hero
As far back as Frederic Bastiat’s Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That which is seen and that which is unseen), economists have been aware of the difficulty of getting people to look past the immediate and highly visible, through to widely distributed, hard to distinguish, long-term effects of decisions and policies.
This [...] Continue reading
Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, History, Life, Science
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The Unforgivable Sin: Ethics
I am ambivalent about recently-axed SIHIP head, Jim Davidson.
His history shows that he can be sweepingly arrogant, convinced of his own intellectual superiority, and able to enjoy the very sourest of grapes. When he lost to my former employer, David Tollner, in the 2004 Federal Election, he remarked that he’d lost because soldiers voted for [...] Continue reading
What Next for Turnbull?
Turnbull’s decision to go all-in over OzCar on the basis of a single email is now clearly recognised as one of the greatest all-time blunders in Australian political history. He was just too eager; he fell for the oldest of all human flaws — wishful thinking.
In fable terms, Turnbull’s character is the Lion — brave, [...] Continue reading
Two links on the topic of medical IT
Some of you might know that I’ve harboured a small enthusiasm for aggressively using IT to drive down costs of health care, as well as improving quality, safety and providing data for researchers. In the future it may even be possible to couple these databases to expert systems that provide secondary diagnoses to help doctors [...] Continue reading