While this is much, much better than what the (german) media has on this, I still miss the one thing I would really want: To actually know what this means for the people living near the plant, or just somewhere in Japan. Will everyone living under 10km away get cancer and die? Will eastern Japan have to be evacuated? Will nothing change at all, except for a small rise in cancer rates for people who live next to the plant?
"Making iPods is better than giving to charity."
"Making iPods is more important than caring for your children."
"I want to be a pescetarian just because Steve is one."
"He stole from his partner, no problem though. He still is the greatest."
"He became so cool by doing drugs and getting into eastern religions."
Really, this HAS to be satire.
What really helped me understand the way Steve Jobs (probably) is was reading the memories of early Apple employees at http://folklore.org/.
I am really passionate about this topic. I am double majoring in Japanese studies and CompSci and try to mix the two as best as I can. I wrote a web app for collaborative translation of classical Japanese texts for one my courses and it was a complete success (a book partly produced by the program via a TeX template will soon be release). I also wrote several other web apps, for dictionaries and handwriting recognition, for example. One thing I usually hear from teachers and other students is that they love these programs, but have no idea how to get them. They usually don't want to learn programming themselves, but would like to have someone who can program something simple if they tell them to. Maybe this problem is restricted to my case (German University of Tübingen), but there is no one here in the faculty (of the Asian studies department) who could teach simple programming, or even state why it is needed. Instead, I have seen people ignoring technological helpers (morphological parsers, programming languages like Perl, Python or Ruby) because they are "too complicated". These people will still do everything by hand (or sometimes with word macros) that could be done by a simple program, and will waste months of time.
Another aspect I like about introducing programming to the humanities is that it can act as a grounding element to the sometimes lofty ideas that people tend to have. A lot of things in the humanities (like the interpretation of a medieval Japanese texts) seem extremely vague, but are actually only extremely complicated. Quantitative analysis of a text can give you the means to pass qualitative judgments.
As Ruby instance variables are private, you need a getter to read them. Doing it this way (making everything private, but giving you simple methods for creating getters and setters) gives you the best of both worlds: Encapsulation and simple and concise code. attr_accessor simply creates the boilerplate code you would write yourself or use an IDE for in other languages. If you want to change a getter, just write a new method with the name of the variable and do whatever you want. This makes it easy to change your class logic later, but won't fill your classes with generic getter/setter code.
I love OpenID and use it as much as possible. The only problem I have with it is the URL-as-username approach it takes. When a site asks me for the URL, I don't use OpenID as I always forget it. If the site asks me to "log in with Google using OpenID" or something similar I will use it. I don't see how people say that OpenID is a solution in search of a problem: I DO have the problem that I don't want to create a new account for every site I use. The problem is there, and some uses of OpenID really do solve it.
I have Galaxy S I9000 (european version) and installed a custom rom on it a few days ago. It was not that hard, at least not much harder than installing roms on my G1. You just root the device by flashing some special kernel, then put some files on the sdcard, boot into recovery and you're done. If you are still on 2.1 you can even skip the rooting part.
Formatting an ebook for the Kindle is not something automatic. This is real work. If someone does this for me and then charges me 99 cent for "Pride and Prejudice", I have nothing against it.
I don't think this is that much of a problem. If I want to use a modern library, I just type "gem install whatever" and I have the new library. Documentation for the stdlib is not really better or easier to find than that for third party libs, so I tend to use whatever seems nicer after a quick google search and I guess other people do it like that, too.
If you still have the time, it would be great if you could take a look at wadokukogo.heroku.com (for example: http://wadokukogo.heroku.com/search?q=aka). It's a classical japanese - german online dictionary, and I don't really have a good idea how to display the results in a way that's easy to read and still nice to look at.
"Web frameworks are enabling a whole generation who can't even use a scripting language without relying on plenty of magic."
I don't really think people program like this. When I tried using rails 2 years ago, all the magic it was doing behind the scenes actually made it impossible for me to use it, as I had no idea what magic was there and how it related to the underlying system. After some time of writing web apps "by hand", then trying out sinatra and padrino, I just recently looked at Rails again and suddenly understood how to use it.
What I want to say is that I don't think that the magic Rails does leads to stupid programmers. It will only help those that actually know what they want to do and make the repetitive parts easier. Honestly, I don't want to write a login system with hashing etc. ever again. I don't want to think about how to save old versions of the entries in the database. I don't want to write my own form helpers. I am happy that Rails does this for me and I can spend time thinking about the interesting parts of my program.
This is interesting for its definition of "simple". While it is built from only simple building blocks, it is written in a way that I find very hard to read. It's easy to follow with the comments, but without them, would you be able to quickly find out what the code does and whether it is correct?
I think actually using abstractions (like functions, arrays (which are used in v2)) would make this even simpler, or at least easier to understand. Nobody would argue that a Tic Tac Toe game made only from NAND gates would be simple (to make or to understand).
I don't think agnosticism can really be called reasonable anymore. We now know so much about the universe that believing in any specific deity, or even just a general sense of the supernatural, seems akin to believing into Russel's teapot.
Being atheist and being open minded are not mutually exclusive.